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From requests for childfree restaurants to a preference for
childfree worship, it seems that American society has a strange relationship
toward the young. Innovative human relations experts recommend bowls of
candy, Nerf basketball, and company birthday parties so that employees can
recreate with other adults during the ever-expanding workday. Thus enjoying
their productivity, adults may avoid contact with the next generation, while
perpetuating their own youth. A post-modern church “experience” offers some
congregants a similarly comfortable setting. After dropping offspring at the
well-appointed nursery, parents may enjoy the “show” of contemporary worship
without interruption. Non-parents and parents alike may thus fully
appreciate a baptism without unwanted noise from the baptized. Those with
sufficient means may dine, fly, work, worship, and play without the cries
and demands of dependent life. Adults may remain productive, preoccupied,
focused and, in a dubious way, irresponsible.
A generation of adults in North America faces now the strange combination of
purposeful neglect and systematic use. Complaints about ill-behaved,
interrupting, unproductive children are gaining force at the same time that
we propose the use of embryos, fetuses and children for medical research.
While a medical industry becomes increasingly interested in the usability of
incipient life, a generation coming of age declares its perpetual youth and
independence from dependent life. A new generation of grown-ups tends toward
unapologetic neglect. I fear that we are also becoming predatory.
While I was a doctoral student at Yale, a strange French film called “The
City of Lost Children” became a cult classic among the twenty-somethings
there. Yale students saw their own lives reflected in the plight of the
abandoned and stolen children in the film. I suspect that the kind of
privileged young adults who attend Yale should indeed see ourselves in the
film, but not merely by identifying with the abandoned toddlers. In the
surreal dystopia by Jeunet and Caro (1995), my own generation of privilege
may gain important clues to our predicament, our vice, and what is required
of us. For the villain who preys on children is, himself, a lost child, who
justifies his vampirism by means of his own abandonment. And, by the end, we
discover that the children only escape harm when the heroine of the film
chooses to grow up.
The movie opens with a sequence that builds, slowly, toward terror. A young
child watches, wide-eyed, from his crib as Santa Claus emerges from the
chimney and then, carefully, pulls out and winds up a small toy. After
smiling with delight at the toy, the child turns again toward the chimney
and watches, with confusion and then fear, as another Santa squeezes out of
the chimney, and another, and another, until the room is teeming with Santas,
toys, and a distorted, defecating reindeer. The scene ends as the child
grabs his plush bear and runs, crying desperately, for the door. His screams
become the screams of a wizened, angry man as the scene shifts to a complex
laboratory. We there discover that the crying child is connected to the
screaming man, each one’s skull hooked up to a metal clamp and system of
wires. The man attempts in this way to extract the dreams of the child. But,
it seems, the child’s dreams all morph into nightmares, leaving the child
afraid and the man enraged. This two-part segment ends with the man whacking
the plush bear against the contraption and then throwing the bear out to
sea.
This menacing film consistently teeters right on the edge of infanticide.
Moving out from the laboratory, we discover that it is surrounded by a
larger setting of danger. While the angry old man (named Krank) quite
literally abducts children, this is a place, which, in many ways, loses its
young. We discover that all of the adults are either predatory or
preoccupied in this ominous, dark city. Nocturnal cyclops track and capture
toddlers to trade for technology and a pair of conjoined women command a
band of pickpocket children whose names—like Newt and Miette (crumb)
—indicate their vulnerability, all while sailors, dance girls, harried
housewives and shopkeepers willfully keep about their own work and play. We
also find the scientist who genetically engineered Krank (“a masterpiece
genius with no soul”) cowering below the sea, unwilling to go up and face
the “dangerous” world he helped to construct. What Miette says of one stolen
toddler sums up the fate of each child in this place: they are all “too
little to bother.” The film ends only as Miette herself risks growing up in
order to save the other lost children.
Consider these “advances” in medical research with, as a sort of imaginative
backdrop, Jeunet and Caro’s negligent and predatory city:
Working diligently, scientists have discovered several “promising” uses for
brain tissue extracted from aborted fetuses, as well as for the “totipotent”
cells of human embryos leftover at fertility clinics. Both sources for
medical advance are “too little to bother,” save the fact that they are
worth our taking the time and effort to remove that which can cure disease.
Some in the industry insist that such uses will not lead to abortion for
money, and that we will never create embryos for the sole purpose of taking
their stem cells. But we may find “compelling” reasons to justify these
changes in our current regulations. There is no reason why we will not
redouble these efforts to eliminate dependence and suffering. Note also that
some reputable scientists anticipate our using embryonic life to “cure” the
aging process itself. Nascent life thus becomes the fount for perpetual
youth.
Some scientists are working toward the creation of human clones that could
serve multiple medicinal purposes: as donors for ailing siblings, to
alleviate the depression of grieving parents, to solve infertility
predicaments unsolvable through presently available procedures. This goes on
with apparent disregard that 1) in pursuit of the usable clone we will
create many unviable clones who will suffer pain and then die or be put to
death, and 2) that we will be creating incipient life simply for its use
value. That many scientists are morally offended by this research is small
consolation. Consider the reaction of researchers mere decades ago to the in
vitro creation of human embryos. Many researchers and bioethicists now
acknowledge that it is merely a matter of time before the procedure is
perfected to become an accepted means for producing donors and replacements
for lost children.
The pediatric pharmaceutical business is exploding, advancing by way of
research on children who stand to gain no medical benefit. For a monetary
reward and a nifty certificate of participation, children endure prolonged
IV’s, physical examinations, and MRI’s. Bioethicists justify this violation
of the Nuremberg Code with the claim that we are learning much to help
children as a population. But critics now rightly charge that much in
pediatric research will benefit primarily the pharmaceutical companies who
sponsor the protocols, producing “me too” drugs to expand a lucrative market
of pediatric technologies for a growing number of newly diagnosable
psychiatric disorders.
In their film, Jeunet and Caro create a setting worthy of Dickens’ London,
and the effect on adults who consider it should be similar. Exposing the
precarious fate of children in his time, Dickens inspired one generation
actually to come of age in order to care for and protect its children. If
Dickens’ generation had seen themselves only as poor little Oliver, they
would not have enacted laws to prohibit the use of children to further the
aims of industrialization. They realized rightly that they must identify
with the adults in the novel.
“The City of Lost Children” is a cinematic dystopia for our own time,
writing with bold brushstrokes the map of our own trajectory. While we
assiduously avoid contact with and responsibility toward those who are “too
little to bother,” research scientists frighteningly insist that the
littlest among us are in fact worth our attention, and our perilously
vampiric use. Scientists are using nascent and vulnerable life in order that
we might realize our dreams. Still thinking ourselves as victims and/or the
rightful recipients of a technological utopia, we may champion the use of
vulnerable life as a way to accomplish the safe life that our society
encourages us to expect. But Krank’s effort to steal from children their
youthful dreams turns into a nightmare, and his nightmare may become our
own. Contrary to the message of our therapeutic culture, it is time to
discover “the adult within.” Oliver Twist and “The City of Lost Children”
end as a vulnerable heroine risks herself to save a child. Both Dickens’
Nancy and Jeunet’s Miette are, in some sense, lost. But neither one uses her
plight as a reason to turn in on herself and avoid her responsibility to
protect someone even younger and more vulnerable than herself.
Nancy and Miette both have the courage to grow up. Will we? CBHD
Dr. Hall is but one of dozens of speakers, instructors, and
session leaders who will participate in the 12th Annual Conference on
Bioethics, Genetic and Reproductive Ethics: The Scientific Cutting Edge &
the Everyday Healthcare Challenges, July 14-16, 2005, on the campus of
Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. For more
information and to register, visit our
Conference section.
Call for Papers
Those planning to attend CBHD's 12th annual international summer conference
are encouraged to consider presenting a paper or workshop during this event.
Accepted presenters will receive a $50 discount on conference registration.
Those interested should submit an abstract and biographical profile of
approximately 150-250 words each by April 22, 2005, to:
Jim Moscato
The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity
2065 Half Day Road
Bannockburn, IL 60015
USA
jmoscato@cbhd.org
Amy Laura Hall, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of
Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C.
Copyright 2005 by The Center for Bioethics and Human
Dignity
The contents of this article do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
CBHD, its staff, board or supporters. Permission to reprint granted as
long as The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity and the web address
for this article is referenced.
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