Ethics, Science and Meaning: Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go"

Last night, as I lay awake thinking about a few issues in contemporary culture where it appears that science is becoming ethically unmoored, my thoughts drifted to Kazuo Ishiguro's haunting novel Never Let Me Go.

What makes Ishiguro’s storytelling so gripping? Is it the patient unfolding of his narrative, each layer revealing vivid, achingly human characters? Or the elusive gravity that pulls you deeper, a force you sense but can’t name? Perhaps it’s the way his narrator, Kath, weaves interconnected stories, grasping for truths she's only half-understood as they unfolded, leaving us to piece together the shadows alongside her.

Ishiguro’s craft recalls John Gardner’s exercise in On Becoming a Novelist in which the writer is asked to describe a pond. There is a dead body hidden from view, so it is a serious scene, but the writer has to create the feeling of dread through describing only what is seen.

Ishiguro clearly has become masterful at conveying this kind of undertone without ever explicitly stating it. "Show, don't tell" is one of the first dictum's fiction writers hear at writer's conferences, and this author does it ever so well.

His stories stir painful self-revelations, unearthing moments from my own past—times I spoke too soon, stayed silent too long, or watched relationships pivot on choices I didn’t know were pivotal. Through Kath’s reflections, Never Let Me Go explores friendship, loss, memory, and meaning, inviting us to confront the fragile threads of our own lives.

 

Perhaps its the manner in which these situations that he creates unearth painful revelations within ourselves is another aspect of his writing that makes it so potent. I think that is a big part of it. Or at least for me. As our narrator Kath tells the story, which consists of strings of interconnected narratives about various people, it seems as if she is striving to resolve what was really going on, things she'd not fully grasped as she experienced them.

SPOILER ALERT

There's something special about the students living at Hailsham, a boarding school in England. At first we don't know what's so special about this school, and neither do the children who grow up there. Eventually a little light streams in and we learn that these children are here for a purpose.

The three main characters in Never Let Me Go are Kath, Tommy and Ruth. These characters are drawn with such detail that you can almost hear them breathing and recognize their fingerprints. Ruth's manipulations are ever so annoying, and Tommy's struggles create such empathy that you lose yourself in Kathy's meandering reflections on the key moments they have shared both at Hailsham and afterwards.

Any number of thoughts come to mind here, one of them being the manner in which a family secret comes to light after it has been suppressed for many years. I'm thinking of a child born of incest, who never realizes why he has no father but eventually senses, then learns, that it's his grandfather.

In this story, the children of Hailsham were part of a program to clone humans who would grow up to become organ donors. As young adults they give until they do not survive. It can be two, three or four, but eventually you give your body parts till you are "complete," which is a euphemism for death.

It's no wonder that a pall hangs over everyone's tale of self-discovery. How the characters respond to these revelations, often nothing more than rumors because the teachers of Hailsham are limited in what they can openly disclose, is the heart of this story.

Eventually the students leave Hailsham and move to the Cottages. From here they become Carers, and then Donors. Some lucky ones will have a chance to get deferrals for a couple years before entering that Donor stage. This is another undercurrent in the story of this threesome.

* * * *

The title of the novel, "Never Let Me Go," is taken from a late 1950's song by Judy Bridgewater, recorded on her album Songs After Dark. Judy Bridgewater and this song recur several times as events unfold involving Tommy, Ruth and Kath.

I love Ishiguro's writing. There's a beauty in the way he digs into the nuances of relationships. Here's a sentence that illustrates this. Kath is reflecting on an incident which seemed insignificant at the time, but was not.

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.

Hailsham seem's like an interesting choice for the name of the school. The student clones are shams, not real humans in a sense. This particular school, though, is an elite version of this system of cloning humans to become organ donors, so it is "hailed" by clones who went to other schools. Some time after Kathy, Ruth and Tommy have graduated, however, the school gets closed, no doubt for a sea change in public opinion about the ethics of this business.

Lots of food for thought throughout, and an engaging read as well. 5 stars out of 5.

* * * *

Related Links
Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled Is an Achievement of the First Order
In Awe of Ishiguro's The Buried Giant
Throwback Thursday: Ishiguro On Dylan
  For what it's worth, here's a link to the Judy Bridgewater song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UX6tzE7P44

Creating Embryos in the Lab: "Oh Brave New World"

IN June, a month packed with "big stories" (Trump indictments, Hunter Biden revelations, Titanic exploration gone awry, new twists and turns in the Ukraine/Russia misadventure), it would have been easy to miss this story about a human embryo created without an egg or sperm. It's only the latest episode in genetic engineering since Dolly the cloned ewe was unveiled more than 25 years ago.

Here are the two stories that caught my eye:

Creating embryos in the lab: How, why, and what the future holds
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/creating-embryos-in-the-lab-how-why-and-what-the-future-holds

Human embryos created without egg or sperm in controversial breakthrough

https://nypost.com/2023/06/15/human-embryos-created-without-egg-or-sperm-in-controversial-breakthrough/

No one knows if these embryonic structures — created from stem cells — could develop into a viable living organism, or what that organism might be like. But the breakthrough is sure to ignite a firestorm of ethical, legal and scientific debate.

In Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World," the concept of human cloning raised a number of issues. 

Those familiar with the story will recall how this dystopian future society was divided into different classes of cloned individuals, each with specific roles and functions. Alphas were the highest class in the social hierarchy, intellectually and physically superior, occupying leadership and managerial positions in society. Betas were slightly lower in the hierarchy compared to Alphas. Though intelligent and skilled, they were not as dominant or authoritative. Gammas were the next level below Betas and Alphas, typically employed in administrative or technical roles. Deltas, lower still, performed tasks requiring less skill and intelligence such as manual labor and routine jobs. Epsilons filled the lowest place in this future society, designed and conditioned to perform menial and labor-intensive tasks.

Each class was predetermined by means of the cloning and conditioning processes, ensuring each class had specific attributes and abilities predesigned for their assigned roles within this "Brave New World." The strict caste system perpetuates social stability and conformity but comes at the cost of individuality and freedom.

Huxley clearly intended to shine a light on the ethical concerns he believed were potentially in our future. Here are several of these.

--Loss of Individuality and Personal Identity

In Brave New World, individuals were mass-produced much like any other consumer goods, resulting in the loss of uniqueness and individuality. We saw a glimpse of this in Pixar's Toy Story series when Woody and Buzz Lightyear discovered (in the toy store) that they were not unique. Huxley showed how clones were created to conform, denying them the opportunity to develop their own identities and pursue personal fulfillment. Feel free to comment on this or any of the following points.

--Lack of Autonomy and Freedom of Choice
Cloning in Brave New World was a process controlled by the state, where individuals had no say in their creation or destiny within the hierarchical society. This raised ethical concerns about the suppression of personal autonomy and the denial of freedom to shape one's own life.

--Exploitation and Dehumanization 
Cloning in the novel served as a means of producing a subservient workforce and a compliant population. Clones were treated as commodities rather than as fully human individuals. They are conditioned and manipulated to be content with their assigned roles, stripping them of their humanity and dignity. Do we see echoes of this in our current culture?

--Psychological and Emotional Consequences
The clones in Brave New World" were subjected to extensive conditioning, which suppressed their emotions, desires, and critical thinking abilities, raising ethical concerns about the psychological and emotional well-being of cloned individuals, as they are denied the full range of human experiences and emotions. The drug Soma would serve to keep the masses happily compliant. What we see is a merger between the State, Big Tech and Big Pharma. Huxley anticipated this 80 years ago.

The novel makes a statement on the importance of individuality, autonomy, freedom, and the potential consequences of manipulating human life through cloning. It's a cautionary tale about the potential risks and ethical dilemmas associated with the pursuit of scientific advancements without careful consideration of their broader implications. 

In short, these trends are an assault on the very essence of what it means to be human. 

Related Links

"Oh, Brave New World!" -- Revisited

Human Cloning: Why the Ethicists Are Concerned

Human Cloning: Why the Ethicists Are Concerned

What a world we live in today. The kinds of ethical questions being raised were unthinkably remote in years gone by. When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932, his setting was 600 years A.F. (After Ford.) One wonders what he’d be thinking were he alive today to see the fruit of the Human Genome Project or Dolly the cloned ewe.

Huxley’s book was not really about a future utopia. He was lifting the veil to see what an inhuman place the world can become when we permit an anything goes future with regard to ethics and morality.

While reading Michael Crichton’s last novel Next in November I wanted to comment more on a major current issue in ethics: Should cloning humans be allowed?

The issue raises so many unresolved questions.
Is it human? Would it be ethical to create clones to harvest organs for rich people who can afford it? Is it ethical to try to clone humans when scientists know that 98-99% die to make one? What about the future when we can’t tell who is human and who is clone? Would cloning open the doors to the creation of an army of psychopathic terror agents who live to kill without a second thought?

The trigger event for me was lunch with a friend last week who, when I raised the issue, said, “I think there should be no restrictions on science. We have to find out what we can do.”

This kind of amoral approach to knowledge is the basis for Mary Shelley’s exploration of the theme in Frankenstein. Should we be permitted to make monsters before we’ve evaluated the consequences?

There are plenty of places where decisions need to be made in the realm of genetic science. In fact, unless one is a serious student of the issues, my guess is that most of us are incapable of understanding any of the subtler, more complex issues bio-science is grappling with today.

One major problem in this arena is that not everyone cares about ethics. The U.S. can step in and outlaw certain kinds of research, and global international pharmaceutical firms can move their research to Singapore or Beijing. In point of fact, the leading institutes in this arena already have connections with research facilities overseas. And when ethical lines are drawn, only the ethical follow the rules. This is why prohibition did not work in the 20's, or the banning of handguns in England today. The bad guys will still get their guns.

Of Crichton’s book, LibraryThing.com writes that Next “is the latest in a series of Crichton works which are structured on the same premise: Take a current scientific/medical topic, explore it, explain it and then illustrate the dangers presented if the science is not properly regulated and/or controlled. This has been a constantly recurring theme with Crichton since his first novel, Andromeda Strain and its subject of killer viruses.”

Inklingmagazine.com summarizes Crichton’s conclusions as follows:

1. Stop patenting genes.

2. Establish clear guidelines for the use of human tissues.

3. Pass laws to ensure that data about gene testing is made public.

4. Avoid bans on research

5. Rescind the Bayh-Dole Act (which allows universities to patent and make money from their research).

Essentially, Crichton has pulled a fire alarm to waken us to the issues which have been raised by Human Genome research. Of course at the heart of it all, with regard to human cloning, is the issue, “What does it mean to be human?” If the abortion debate has failed to produce a conclusive answer to “When does life begin?” you can be sure debates on human cloning won't produce answers where there is universal agreement. Ultimately, decisions will be made by those who have the power to make the decisions.

From all I’ve read thus far, my gut tells me human cloning is wrong. I recommend you begin to read and think about these things because they're certain to be part of tomorrow’s discussions in the news and in our lives, possibly sooner than you think.