Deepening to Darkness:
 Stupid Actors Cry "Onward Ho"
 Onward to Eat The Young
 
Julian Lee, October 26, 2004

Californians voted in favor last night of Proposition 66, an initiative to fund stem cell research.

With stem cell research we move from discarding inconvenient offspring into eating the young for the gain of the old.

Presumptuous actors like Brad Pitt lined up to boost this outrage as if it were self-evident "progress." He got press visiting a stem cell research facility, like a regular politician -- or even our fearless moral leader.

Being liberal today means you are staunch in the Technology Faith, i.e. technology as Saviour and final solution to life's problems. The Pitster, who starred in a movie that fawned over the Dalai Lama, says that if we can just harvest young human lives, we can "eradicate disease." (Why didn't Buddha think of that?)

Pitt sounds like a familiar figure from my childhood.

In "The Cat in the Hat" Dr. Seuss gives us a stealth commentary on the "delusion-of-technological progress." The cat brings out "Thing 1, Thing 2, Thing 3" to solve an original problem (a stain on a carpet). In the personae of car salesman/carnival barker/Ad man, the Cat  trumpets an endless succession of "things" as the solution. Watch television for a few hours and you can hear The Cat in the Hat talking. Not connected with anybody? Get online email with a computer. Now you're getting porn spam? Get this spam filter. Getting viruses and hackers? Pay for this firewall, etc. etc.


 
Endless things never make a dent in the basic problems of duality and samsara. The solution to material problems is in the spiritual life.
 The original problem is, well, problems. Any good Hollywood Buddhist could have tipped off Brad to concepts like dukha (sorrow), duality, and samsara -- the inherently unsatisfactory nature of material life. This samsara comes in a package of problems that includes not only sickness, but also old age and death. He should have noted, too, that Buddha's solution was not: "Invent some new technology" or "Check out stem cell research." Christ in a similar way acknowledged the dualistic nature of material life when he said: "The poor you have with you always."

In the Seuss story each new "thing" makes the original stain a bit larger. With each new technological fix, duality and problems never cease, they just take more complex and insidious forms.  (Like the cell phone you need because your town is so alien now, and it's cooking your brain, ruining your restaurant moment, and creating more social distance in the public realm.)
Forget for the moment about the inevitable "oops factor" that always attends science; leave aside the possibility that nature might not take kindly to the shenanigans of the mad stem cellers -- as in the case of organ transplants. If we harvest the bodies of human beings for our own gain, we will derange society further and grow holes in our souls.

Brad didn't think about that stuff. I guess he's not very smart. After all, he's an just an actor. It is our sages and philosophers who are worthy to opine on such subjects; not grody actors. (Polluters of the mass mind.)

It has long been known that the bodies of human babies are full of resources for exploitation. In wild and wooly Brazil children sometimes come out of the hospital missing eyes or other organs. Cosmetic companies have used the collagen from aborted children for the finest in  skin emollients. There has been a dark pressing mass outside the window for a long time, pressing to make an industry out of exploiting the unborn, or the already aborted. Ethicists and good men have resisted their press for a long time. What the Hollywood people did in California was to push the ignorant masses over the edge with Proposition 66.

Whether to play "hip, enlightened one," or to light fires at the altar of The Religion of Technological Progress, the stem cell barkers beckon us across an ethical and metaphysical gorge. The science is speculative. The one thing they can guarantee is the cheapening of human life. It's easy to see the next step. So the nascent human form yields goodies? Well hey lookey: at three months it has some other special goodies we could harvest. (Write a new law.) At six months it might have different good stuff -- goodies that can only be mined from a 6-month old human being. How can they refuse their unfortunate elders! They have pensions and sad stories to tell. And Christopher Reeves and Michael J. Fox were so cute. Next it's nine months, and...

If embryos turn out to be a gold mine, we'll of course need more and more of them. In a twist on Aesop a poet once said: "Invention is the mother of need." Thus an industry is born. And it requires lots of clueless parents. How is it, anyway, that a mother ends up misplacing an egg? It doesn't just fall on the ground as she's walking down the street, does it? How is it that a father misplaces his human seed? One needs the mad scientist and old fashioned sin. Such an industry, at its foundation, requires an ignorant mother to cut loose the family in the form of eggs; and a fool father to masturbate into a plastic bag. With the development of such an industry we'll need a steady supply of people of this sort.

Each one of these embryos will have a mother and father who ought to be tending them well. Each will have a soul seeking to incarnate through that body, with a desire to live a human life. But with the onset of stem cell research, will any of us be living human lives?

Let actors be our moral leaders and they'll push us into a world as sick as their movies --  a nightmarish world where more able elders -- who won't face their personal karma squarely -- feed off the innocent young.

No matter what benefits a course may apparently offer, good men reject it when it's wrong.
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