Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

Designer Humans

January 5, 2007

I visited the criminally insane weekly for four years in college. This was back before the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill, back when people were warehoused in the most awful conditions. There was a locked ward where they kept men (there was a woman’s ward, too) who had committed violent crimes but who suffered from severe mental illness and so could either not stand trial or be incarcerated in a regular prison. There was one man, let’s call him, Sam, who had murdered someone. He had a terrible scar on the front of his head and they told me that they had performed a lobotomy on him to prevent him from getting angry or aggressive (they also said he could not be sad or cry).

When I went to graduate school, Sam stayed locked away and I went to Belgium and didn’t return to Little Rhody for a year and a half when I came home for three weeks. During that vacation, I was driving around and heard on the car radio that a patient from the criminally insane unit of the RI State Hospital had escaped and had been arrested in Florida after he tried to kill someone. His name was Sam. Yes, it was the same guy, the patient whose anger and aggression had been removed. I remember thinking, in an odd and pretty much inappropriate way, “Way to go, Sam!”

Changing a person into someone more desirable doesn’t get too much more drastic than performing lobotomies to alter behavior and mood. There is a comparable story in the news these days, however, which reports radical medical interventions done to a little girl named Ashley. Ashley, age 9, suffers from a rare brain disorder, static encephalopathy. She cannot speak, walk, swallow, or even raise her head. Three years ago, doctors removed her uterus and breast buds and began an ongoing regimen of estrogen to arrest her development. The intent is that she will remain a little girl so that she can avoid the stresses of puberty and more easily stay free of pneumonia and bed sores. Her smaller size will also facilitate her physical care.

I will not comment on all the moral issues surrounding this case nor will I address fully the parents’ judgment. It is possible to make bad choices even with feelings of love. What intrigues me about this situation is that in a most primitive way it caricatures what many of us do to each other all the time: we often struggle mightily to mold the people in our lives into what may suit or satisfy us, to lobotomize reality into the most desirable, to help our loved ones avoid pain and suffering, to correct what are, in our estimation, faults and imperfections, to customize our world and the people in it.

A lot of this activity is normal and healthy. Think of character formation, of training in any craft or skill, or of most any learning experience. Think of the give and take between two people who love each other and who help each other grow into better people. We do cause change in other people; we do seek out guidance and instruction; we mold and are molded and, most of the time, it is all for the good.

There is a boundary that should not be crossed, however. Good will can become selfishness. Vision can become myopic. Influence becomes manipulation. Encouragement becomes force. Discipline becomes abuse. For every model coach who gives his or her charges the tools they need to become the best athlete possible, there is the coach who crams his own expectations and unfulfilled dreams onto his team. For every supportive spouse who pushes and prods the other to reach her goal, there is the mate whose demands become cruel and oppressive.

Tailoring our world to meet our preferences is pretty much the way things are nowadays. Particularly in the digital world, we can freely edit reality to suit our tastes and interests. Reality becomes the virtual reality we create; the expectations of the virtual world can creep into our relationships pretty easily and we think we can re-fashion our loved ones or re-shape the challenges and circumstances life throws our way. There was a news article alongside the Ashley article that reported poll results of a survey of 3,000 women. More than half the women said they were not sure they would marry their husbands again; more than a third said they would definitely not.

I’m sure a survey of men would produce similar results. One gets the feeling that as the years pass and people change and become tiresome or too familiar or less attractive, that as life doesn’t work out the way people thought it might because sickness or tragedy or misfortune strike, many of us would like to hit “delete” or do a “save as” or a quick “cut and paste” and alter the person or circumstance. Maybe that’s advisable, but maybe, again, there’s a boundary we should not cross.

Our compunction to improve ourselves, our loved ones and the world, to overcome obstacles, to strive for ideals, or even to build a world that suits us best always has to be passed through a few principles that can act as correctives or tonics to this desire to design a custom world. First of all, we need to cultivate a sense that we are not the center of the universe, that we are part of something bigger than ourselves: a family, a country, natural and supernatural realities that call on us to go beyond our individual selves to form communities and to love. As much as there is a value to shaping reality, there is an equal value to being shaped by it.

Secondly, each person has a value in and of himself or herself. People have worth that precedes and goes beyond what they can do, what they can produce, what they own, or how they might be useful to us or to society. Our first impulse must be to respect that person’s value and dignity instead of trying to change that person into someone we think would be more valuable.

Lastly, there is a matter of freedom and recognizing the people and things we cannot control or ought not to control.

Maybe people will still choose to keep the Ashleys small, to neutralize the Sams, and to dispose of the disappointing spouses, but they should think on these things.