Nature is clearly rebelling. Natural disasters and
cataclysms have been more and more frequent and their brutality has increased
in recent years. We ourselves have certainly had a taste of frightening
scenarios noticing either too hot
weather or rather stormy winds which inevitably have been haunting our lives.
The only certainty we have is that this impressive upheaval
is due to an enormous industrial activity on the planet. Our world is
characterised by a frenzy to make more and more money: at the same time,
mankind has been increasingly producing rubbish, which has the worrying feature
of being indestructible.
Therefore, everyone can draw a precise conclusion and
recognize capitalism as the reason of today’s issues: the majority of
well-to-do people owns more than what they really need.
Most of us have bumped into Greta Thunberg's protest surfing
the Net or watching the news. She's a 16-year-old environmental activist
who, despite her tender age, decided to commit herself to this massive issue. As
she said in a recent speech, "On climate change, we have to
acknowledge that we have failed”, since we have never treated the climate
crisis as a real crisis. Unfortunately, these troubles exist and are
endangering our lives.
If the economic system is responsible for our dangerous reality, we ought to start using our wealth and our advancemments in science and technology in order to find strategies to preserve life on Earth.
These present-day issues recall the reflections on the
ethical aspects of scientific progress we ran into while reading Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Though
usually considered cults of the Gothic genre, these two 19th century
novels propose bioethical reflections which can be linked to today’s
circumstances.
The protagonists of both novels are overreachers, rebels who
go beyond the limits imposed to Mankind by God or Nature and are eventually
punished with death. From this point of view, our current society gets the
features of the modern Prometheus, since, led by the only purpose of
creating richness (for a few individuals), it is challenging Mother
Nature. However, we had better keep in mind that our punishment will be
definitive if we continue this way.
It is through the commitment of activists like Greta
Thunberg that we are given a chance to reflect and start acting on our
mistakes. Unfortunately, at the same time, the world powers seem to be rather
detached from these matters. Their lack of interest has been proved by
concrete gestures, like the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on
climate change mitigation, which was justified by President Donald Trump as a
move to rehabilitate American economy. This is the evidence that young Greta
has a point.
I’d say that today’s society’s behaviour is close to Dr Frankenstein's and Dr Jekyll's: all of them create "monsters" they aren't capable of controlling. The climate crisis and its catastrophes can be
compared to Frankenstein's creature, who is willing to kill after being
rejected, or to Dr Jekyll’s inability to go back to his previous state of
existence when evil Mr Hyde takes control of his body. What Stevenson aimed at
using the theme of the double was criticizing the hypocritical attitude which
characterised the Victorian society, the so-called Victorian compromise. But the
same is happening nowadays: nobody is taking the responsibility for the
monstrous consequences of the unproper usage of experiments and discoveries which were meant to make our lives easier and more comfortable but that are now destroying our planet.
What we could learn from these two 19th century classics is the importance of avoiding an immoral use of any type of
discovery which may endanger its users and of employing them, instead, for the
good purposes they are meant to fulfil. Dr Jekyll and Dr Frankenstein aren’t model
scientists, but we can certainly learn from them. Their tragic
stories highlight the necessity of always carefully pondering what human
beings may achieve while researching and experimenting, they warn us of the
deadly risks.
We have actually created irreversible problems to our home,
planet Earth, and they are just like huge, uncontrollable monsters. We
must try stop them now, before it is too late, as young-but-wise Greta has been recently telling us.
Eugenio Refrigeri
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