Erik
Parens, Creativity, gratitude, and the enhancement debate (Chapter 6 in
Illes. Neuroethics)
You
may recall or heard mention of the passage in Genesis, when Jacob’s
wife Rachel, who was unable to bear children, enjoins him: ‘Give me
children, or I shall die’ (Gen. 30: 1). Famously, Jacob responded to
Rachel’s injunction with a question: ‘Am I in the place of God?’(Gen.
30: 2).With his question Jacob expresses one of the book’s central and
best-known ideas: that human beings are not the creators of life; that
they are creatures, whose job is to remember that life is a gift. It is
our responsibility to express our gratitude for the mysterious whole,
which we have not made. Moreover, it is our job to be wary of efforts
to transform that gift. We need to learn to let things be. ... However,
this very same Jacob, who exhibits this gratitude that many today
associate with religion, also exhibits a radically different stance,
which the book also celebrates. After all, as has been remarked more
than once, Jacob, the very one whose name would become Israel, was the
first genetic engineer. He was the one with the creativity to fashion a
device [‘rods of poplar and almond, into which he peeled white streaks’
(Gen. 30: 37)] to transform the generations of his uncle’s sheep and
goats. According to Genesis, and it seems to me much of Judaism, it is
not only our responsibility to be grateful, to remember that we are not
the creators of the whole. It is also our responsibility to be
creative, to use our creativity to mend and transform ourselves and
theworld. As far as I can tell, Genesis, and at least one of the
traditions it helped to create, does not exhort us to choose between
gratitude and creativity. Rather, or so it seems to this pagan, it is
our job to figure out how to maintain that fertile tension, working to
insure that neither pole exerts too great or too small a force.
