Science is Not Enough...
I started teaching Frankenstein many years ago. It is nothing short of amazing how prescient the novel has become--not politically, but about science, destruction and human nature.
In January, 2021, my mom was hospitalized with pneumonia. She’d tested positive for Covid-19 and began an achingly-slow downhill slide. By February, it was apparent that after being intubated and given the drug Remdesivir, mom was dying. My two older brothers were allowed into her hospital room briefly before she passed, but she was unresponsive and they weren’t allowed to stay long. On Valentine’s Day, 2021, mom breathed her last—alone in a sterile and fluorescent lit room. Like so many families, the loss of our mother has been a deep well of wounds and emotions that continue to stir our families, change us—and even haunt us.
I was in my 30th and final year of teaching and in the absurdity of that time, I was doing so remotely. I’d begun the unit on the Romantic poets, a unit that always closes with Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. It was both cathartic and heart-wrenching for me to delve into Shelley’s emotionally-charged language as Victor Frankenstein’s mother dies from contracting scarlet fever:
“I need not describe the feelings that are rent by that most irreparable evil; the void that presents itself to the soul; and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she…can have departed forever…”—Mary Shelley
From the beginning of the book’s tragedies to the very end, Shelley encompasses the intimate, close and personal feelings of the book’s main character and narrator, Victor Frankenstein, a man whose warmth, kindness, generosity and decency are overcome by his ambition to make sure that all can avoid the evils of illness, diseases and death. Worthy goals, to be sure. And so very sorely misguided as Shelley makes clear.
As I’ve read in other recent comparisons of the novel to our time, if what you’re looking for is the Boris Karloff rendition in the 1931 film, you will surely miss the mark. In perhaps its overall theme, the movie has some similarities—sympathy for the creature being the most obvious, but in its plot, the film is so far deviant from the novel that it’s hardly even the same story—and if you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to do so. That, however, is not going to stop me from this spoiler alert that I will discuss the end of the novel.
The novel’s origins are now sort of legend: 18-year old Mary Shelley, grieving the loss of an infant she had with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, was having nightmares about reanimating corpses, the use of electricity as an engine for the same—and was sheltering with Percy, Lord Byron and others at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva during the “year without a summer,” 1816. In 1815, Mt. Tambora in the Dutch East Indies had erupted and over the next year, caused global climate temperatures to decrease by about one degree. Summer of 1816 was unseasonably cold, dark and stormy—and these anomalies inspired Shelley to write about their combined influence on her. The result is undoubtedly the first Gothic novel of its kind, which had profound influences on many authors including Edgar Allan Poe and, of course, Michael Crichton and his ode to Shelley’s singular story, Jurassic Park.
Shelley’s use of Romantic language, her creation of Victor, his family, Henry Clerval, Elizabeth—and, of course, the creature—are now a literary classic. And with all due respect to the great Boris Karloff, the creature is nothing like him. Victor’s studies lead him to assemble a hideous collection of graveyard-gotten body parts and he builds and then reanimates a creature who becomes eloquent, intelligent, patient, kind (at least at first) and loving, as well as mighty, fast, agile and capable of superhuman feats.
The creature longs for community and society—but because of his hideous and ugly nature, he is shunned by all who meet him. He lays this at the feet of his creator, Victor, who—after he finished his creation, literally ran away from it in fear, refusing to talk, teach, listen or learn anything. Victor had unleashed a giant, deformed, creature who was not born of woman, nor created by God—and his response is to refuse all responsibility for it. This is the essence of the tragedy, and sets the stage for a future in which science becomes a new god, its revelation to a changing world constant and forever in-flux, all while convincing those who study it that its pre-eminence will save mankind. Shelley’s point was the opposite.
The scientist, in this case—Victor Frankenstein, bows to the god of science as a means to an end—of illness, of hard death, of sadness and despair. If he can bring the dead back to life, then none need fear the grave. But Victor lacks humility before creation and he lacks understanding. In a paraphrase of Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, Victor was so preoccupied with whether he could, that he didn’t stop to think about whether he should.
The creature is loosed on a community that fears him, and whom he fears at first. But when he realizes that his strength and his intelligence seem to exceed others even as they run away from him and refuse his company, he uses it to create chaos, destruction and death—and he begins with Victor’s family, ultimately appealing to Victor to create another like him. If he does this, the creature assures Victor he will run away with the new creature, a female, who will share in his sympathies and heartache-and will quit the society of mankind forever.
The creation of something we cannot control is at the heart of the novel, and becomes a metaphor—at first for the scientific age, and then for the nuclear age writ large upon the world. Frankenstein was often cited in the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s and beyond as a template for mankind having created a weapon beyond its own ability to control it.
In his very fine film for BBC, The Romantics (in three parts), Peter Ackroyd discusses the importance of Shelley’s novel and its signal of the last arc of the Romantic poets, who after seeing the explosion of Mt. Tambora and its terrible impact on the world, were convinced that “science is not enough.” They moved from extolling the beauties and healing powers of nature, to the admonition of nature’s supreme eminence, that it has the power to destroy—and it is not to be toyed with. Byron’s poem, Darkness encompasses similar ideas, and is a direct reference to Mt. Tambora and its after-effects on the people of a world with very little understanding of it:
“…Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.” —Lord Byron
Shelley’s themes are that there will never be clarity—never be a reign made by mankind that can control nature-and indeed, the more mankind attempts to, the more complete will be the disaster.
And so today, for the medical science age— after more than two years of the most bizarre pandemic ever visited on the world, science is not enough. The advent of the Covid-19 virus, and the almost certain genesis of it in a lab where scientists were attempting to create deadly viruses, and then create vaccines that could stop them—is simply another warning from Mary Shelley.
The scientists of today whom we were supposed to trust appear to have lied to us about everything from the virus’s origin to the efficacy of the vaccine made to stop it, to the proper epidemiological response for a pandemic or an epidemic. They appear to have been inspired by Victor Frankenstein himself who believed originally that science is the answer to all of our problems, and that anything they did in pursuit of the god Science was worthy of pursuit. Dr. Anthony Fauci even referred to himself as “the science,” when discussing why he thought people disagreed with his approach. His very obvious lack of knowledge about all of the topics Covid brought up—made him look uniquely ignorant in the face of a frightened world, which acquiesced to the strange lockdown orders only to find the lockdowns caused many more problems than they solved and he spurred cheers and support from the left, and scorn and derision from the right. But whether or not he and other public health officials knew better is a fair debate and it is now clear that if they did not know better, then their ignorance caused more tragedy-and if they did know better? What then can be their excuse?
Victor, in defeat, finally admits his hubris, realizes his mistake and begs a ship’s captain not to follow in his footsteps with an admonition so heartbreaking that he is in need of a long rest after he says it:
“Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me—let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!”-Mary Shelley
When other eminent epidemiologists tried very hard to push back against what they saw as obvious mistakes by public health agencies world wide, they too were shunned by the likes of Fauci, Dr. Robert Redfield, then of the CDC, Dr. Francis Collins of the National Institutes for Health and Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House Covid Reponse team. Indeed, the CDC, the WHO, the NIH—all told physicians that if they deviated from the course of treatment they had prescribed—which was literally aspirin or Tylenol, and bed rest until breathing became too difficult—and only then should a patient go to the hospital where they would be intubated, and given Remdesivir, a drug known to cause kidney failure in a majority of its patients, they would have their licenses taken away—so that’s what the doctors did for my mom, and it appears to have played a big role in her death. This was the opposite of science, the antithesis of allowing thousands of practicing physicians to try anything—and some did. Many doctors were having success using anitvirals like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, breathing treatments with nebulizers and heavy doses of vitamins C and D, the public health establishment refused to allow those treatments to become widespread and continued a tissue of lies about masks, social distancing and lockdowns.
None of those scientists has apologized, or expressed regret. None of them came to the light, even after it was too late and the destruction they caused manifest itself on an unsuspecting world, as Victor Frankenstein’s eventually did. Suicides rose categorically as did depression and anxiety. Eating disorders, pernicious in their stubbornness, rose by 30 percent in the U.S. alone. These are all to say nothing of the number of cancer screenings that went undone, physical and mental health wellness checkups and so many other things. Communities began to shred and families drifted apart desperately trying to maintain closeness and communication. College students, in the prime of their lives, were sent home and forced to be away from their unique once-in-a-lifetime communities, and the evidence of learning loss both academic and social across all age groups K-12, is a stain on an enduring free country—all in the name of “the science.”
Victor dies essentially of a broken heart at the end of his story—and one eventually has sympathy for him because he realizes that, in Ackroyd’s words, “science is not enough.” Victor knows that his attempts to circumvent creation itself led him to ruin, his family to desolation and that he alone was the author of it all. Compare and contrast his sad end to public health agencies worldwide who continue to prevaricate, ignore and recommend a vaccine that has only been tested on mice, shouting like Chaucer’s Chanticleer atop the dung heap of destruction beneath them.
My mother’s death, our family’s losses and continued struggles, including some very serious mental health issues that have worked their way into the younger members of our family, are all the result of people who said, “science is enough.” To be clear, they are not the result of the virus itself—which did what viruses do and that is infect until they are done, and then mutate to continue surviving and allowing their hosts to survive. They are the result of hubris and perverse incentives—medical decisions that went against the very grain of what public health personnel have known for many years—that physicians need to try what works, report on it—and find out where success lies, debate the data, discuss outcomes and help people. Instead, our public health establishment had no answers other than: “wait for the vaccine.”
My mom’s suffering, and the world’s with few exceptions, are the result of other influences and inspirations far too distant from the basic calibration of “doing no harm” and “try what works”-and they are proof indeed—that science is not enough.
Awesome read, Mark. I'm sorry for the loss of your mother, but we've had long chats on the phone to this same effect...never with the magic of literature entwined, but hey!