“The Luminous Fish Effect”

A 2007 episode of The Big Bang Theory ends with Sheldon demonstrating his eccentric brilliance by developing a glowing goldfish. In addition to the improbability for a physicist who doesn’t even know how to wash out a beaker properly to have the expertise and equipment for genetic manipulation, there is a further problem with this breakthrough. Beginning in 2004 throughout the U.S. (with the exception of California), luminous fish went on sale by the company FishGlo. Sheldon was at least 3 years late.

I found the information about FishGlo in the book Frankenstein’s Cat, which I was perusing because of a live production of the musical Young Frankenstein my wife and I saw this Sunday. Consequently, I recalled how the original Frankenstein was inspired by a demonstration of Galvinism that Mary Shelley saw in London: when electrified, a severed frog’s leg kicked. Mary guessed that meant science would eventually bring dead matter to life. Two hundred years later, we still seem almost–but not quite able to create life, e.g., the recreation of a worm’s brain in a body made of legos.  In other words, Mary was significantly ahead of her time, not 3 years behind it.

Indeed, she anticipated much of the Graves/Jung theory that I showcase on this site. The monster recalls his pre-linguistic (Surviver/Personifier) existence, when he began to learn how to imitate sounds from birds he was personifying. He gains some of the skills of L2 (Truster/Trickster) by observing cottagers he longs to have as his family but cannot: “What chiefly struck me was the gentle manners of these people; and I longed to join them, but dared not” (186). Consequently, he secretly plays well-meaning tricks on them that at first frighten them. When he reveals himself and they reject him, he enters L3 (Competitor/Hero), fighting with the cottagers but heroically trying to save the life of a girl at the risk of his own. Shot for his attempts at heroics, he settles into L3 competition with his maker Victor Frankenstein. Finding this unsatisfying, he uses the model of God’s covenants with humanity from Paradise Lost as an L4 (Orderer/Shadow) paradigm for his making an agreement with Victor: the monster will leave if he is given a mate. When Victor reneges, the monster becomes the Shadow, revenging himself on Victor, but remarking that he was in the grips of an unconscious malevolence about which he felt guilty (the Shadow being guilt). Kept from higher education, the monster needs the medical student Victor to act for the monster in L5 (Scientific Materialist/Re-Appreciator of Life). After periods of engrossing research, Victor does manage to appreciate life again, bemoaning his having let his work get in the way of this.

As for L6 (Empathizer with the Abject/Wise Person), some of the characters, particularly Walton, show signs of this Level, but the novel’s movement toward tragedy requires that no one attain timely wisdom. That L6 position is thus left to the readers, who are learning to empathize with an extreme example of what in Mary’s time appeared abject, a penniless, kinless, hideous construct. In her version, he is though extraordinarily articulate and brilliant, which popular renditions of him did not manage again until Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, when the monster acquires an IQ of 196.

When Mary could see so far ahead, why are other writers so slow? Perhaps the inhibiting factor is writing for audiences who want to feel superior to characters and thus this inspires a restraining conservatism in depiction, while Mary was so young and so accustomed to geniuses that she did not realize she should dumb her work down as far as professional writing usually is.

Atheists Don’t Have No Sacrifices

The paradoxical double negative of the title I owe to Steve Martin’s “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs,” about atheists both having and not having music (in that his song itself contradicts their lack). In a previous post, I said that atheists deny anything so “openly religious” as a sacrifice, but that lack of openness opens the door for covertly religious imitations of sacrifice. Breaking something to make it sacred (the meaning of sacrifice) could only be credited by a materialist science (L5), if sacredness were an attribute that could be measured physically such as weight or height. Yet an idea as flattering as being made sacred (or as appealing as breaking other people for the public good) is not renounced just for lack of credibility.

The inspiration for the above picture of Madame Curie glowing in the dark, I owe to The Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon tries to encourage young women to become scientists so that they can die of radiation poisoning like her. His notion that such a fate would be desirable is obviously modeled on martyrdom, considered at one time the crown of a true Christian life.

As I had to split sacrifice at L4 (moralism) into two posts to do it justice–and moralism certainly deserves justice–so here I am following suit for equally deserving L5. Consequently, this post is a general introduction to ways sacrifice is sneaked in.

Ayn Rand was particularly adept at this, as in The Fountainhead, where an architect invites public condemnation and possible imprisonment for dynamiting a building he designed but which strayed from his plan. Despite this evocation of martyrdom, the book’s best known quote is about saints being “dangerous” because she believes virtue is selfishness.

Although agnosticism and atheism fit most neatly with scientific materialism, they are not the only expression of that level. Another expression, not necessarily atheistic and today largely associated with libertarianism, esteems the freedom from traditional restraints that L5 brings and makes it into the core value for which one should be willing to kill or die. The Cold-War version of this was “Better Dead than Red” and the Vietnam War’s “We must destroy the village in order to save it.”

In addition, there are various versions of sacrifice, really from lower Levels, but adopting L5 masks, most famously the German medical experiments. Even though there was a veneer of science to these, their motivation and methodology was an extreme form of L3 bullying. One group of experiments tortured Jewish and Roma subjects to show their inferiority, a standard practice in bullying. The other experiments served the war effort (a traditional L3 enterprise) by assessing how much harm a human body could survive under various circumstances. The latter might have yielded actual knowledge of value, but instead of hearing of that happening, all I have run across are reports of methodological errors and of Nazi scientists destroying their records for fear of prosecution. They were only willing to sacrifice other people’s lives for science, not their own. So those sacrificed were wasted. But then, what good have all the millions of other human sacrifices done throughout world history?