Cloning Myths
Revulsion is deeper than reason.

By David Walsh, professor of politics at The Catholic University of America, is author of Guarded By Mystery: Meaning in a Postmodern Age
August 21, 2001 8:15 a.m.

he current debate over embryonic-stem-cell research has had one remarkable effect. It has confirmed the primal shudder evoked by the prospect of human cloning. Even supporters of embryo development for research felt compelled to draw the line at cloning. They could not stomach the prospect of endless cloned embryos, however much the logic of science might suggest such a course. In other words, even when human embryos are destined only for research purposes and their destruction is a certainty we still cannot shake their connection with humanity. We cannot conceive of ourselves extending in an infinite series of clones.

Strictly speaking the reservation is irrational. The embryos are not going to survive anyway, so why worry about them? Revulsion however is deeper than reason. It arises from a level of our existence that is more fundamental, a level most directly expressed through myth. So while we seem to be dealing with science we are in fact touching the boundary of what is knowable and permissible for science. What lies beyond science cannot properly be assessed through science. If the question is, "should science venture down this path?" the answer can only be had by stepping outside of the limits of science. Nowhere is myth a more powerful boundary for science than when it concerns the intervention in human nature. Should we clone ourselves?

The question may be new to us but it has been contemplated by human beings before. Two myths in particular address its ramifications. The first is the dream of creating a homunculus or golem, a little man. What could be more useful than to have a miniaturized version of ourselves to perform the menial tasks of daily existence? Now it turns out that the manufacture of human embryos may contain the magic of stem cells capable of curing some of our worst ailments. The prospect has recurrently fascinated human beings. But the consequence, as the stories about the golem indicate, is that we have thereby ceased to be men ourselves. When man can create a man he becomes the same as God. The dream becomes a nightmare once the meaning of this extremity of human arrogance is recognized. By stepping into the role of God, man preempts the source on which his own power depends. When we no longer work with the order of reality but seek to replace it, we thereby deprive ourselves of the crucial support our operations need. Anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The other applicable myth also deals with human overreaching. Cloning is very close to the project of procreation without sex. Not only does the event occur without sexual union, but it takes place without the sexual differentiation of father and mother. We gain some sense of the novelty of the enterprise when we contemplate how fundamental such notions are to human beings. All of us are the result of the coming together of parents who each contribute half of the genetic material through which we are constituted. Up to now no member of the human species has been sufficient to generate offspring alone. To aspire to reproduce oneself in total has always involved the overstepping of the boundary of our humanity. Only God contains both male and female. We are not androgynous and the aspiration toward it, like all overreaching, rebounds on our own heads in the disaster of disorientation. Without a mother and father we must look back at our progenitor who is simultaneously parent and sibling, yet strictly speaking neither. The order of generation through sexual union turns out to be more than a convenience. Like all boundaries, it saves us from the abyss into which sorcerer and apprentice are tempted to fall.

Science, it will be said, has left such mad dreams of self-aggrandizement in the past. But has it? Perhaps contemporary biotechnology only represents a shift of instruments and tactics, made all the more dangerous by the degree of success they have so far enjoyed. When we examine the motives behind the drive to limitlessly expand our power we find a strange affinity with the Promethean class of myths. Listen to the reasons given for the relentless overleaping of boundaries. The mere existence of a limit to human possibility is sufficient justification for the compulsion to overcome them. Without thought for the meaning or the consequence we rush to test our newfound powers. We forget the deepest wisdom on which science itself depends. That is, that human beings do not create the world in which they find themselves. We can participate in the process of ordering and improving the reality, but our very power is itself a part of that ordering reality. Science, when it forgets its own source not only ceases to be science, it falls into the darkness of irrationality. The balance of reason can only be sustained through acknowledgment of the mysterious limits that guard our very existence as human beings.