Snowfalls and designer children

Do humans sometimes need an inability to control a thing?

It just so happens that yesterday I was watching the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode True Q. If you don’t know, in the show, the “Q” are a species of people with basically godlike powers (a throwback to a common trope in the original series)… and many of their individual members also just go by “Q”. In this episode, Amanda Rogers, a new intern on the ship, is gradually revealed to have the powers of the Q herself. It turns out her parents were Q (though she did not know this), and now “Q” (played by the inimitable John de Lancie) has dropped in to examine her, teach her about the Q, and hopefully take her back to the Q Continuum, where they all live.

And one point, Amanda asks him what it is like to be Q, and we get this dialogue:

Q: “We’re omnipotent. There’s nothing, nothing we can’t do.”

Amanda: “And what do you do with this power?”

Q: “Anything we want.”

Would you be happy if that was your situation? You’re thinking, “for the first day I’d be absolutely ecstatic!” Well maybe so, but after a month, after a year, would you feel the same? Or, for humans, is there something valuable about being a limited being?

Snowfalls and designer children

We’re getting into winter now. I like snowfalls, and I especially like snowfalls that cover the street and make the human infrastructure all disappear. For a few hours, the road and the sidewalk and the yards are all the same thing, and you can easily imagine another world. And, I have often thought, one thing that is pleasurable about snowfalls is that it shows we aren’t in control. They just happen. We can’t make them happen. We can’t prevent them from happening. They disrupt our communal lives. We react after the fact, but there is a pleasure that this glorious thing happens, and we had not a thing to do with it.

I have also thought - isn’t that odd, though? We spend a whole lot of our personal lives, and our society too, trying to remain always in control. We get nervous when we lose control. We want to be in control of everything. Why should it be a pleasure to not be in control? And you might well reply here - well buddy, you were *safely* out of control. If you were in danger of starving, you’d feel differently about the snow. And that is surely true. But as it is, we enjoy it, and I think the lack-of-control is one reason we enjoy it.

I’ve also seen the topic of designer children come up several times recently. Perhaps in the not too distant future it will be possible to program-in the eye color, hair color, skin tone, likely height and body build, maybe to some extent even the personality and IQ, of a future child. Would it change your relationship with a child if they were pre-built like that? No one has ever done it, so perhaps we don’t really know, but I wonder. Sure you have some control today - you pick who you’re going to marry, mainly, but that doesn’t actually carry you that far. Children are still a surprise to a large degree (that’s part of the pleasure). Is it valuable to preserve that surprise?

Rod Dreher and Hartmut Rosa on the same

I’m still poking my way through Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder, and he has just a couple of paragraphs, leaning on the work of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, suggesting that only when we encounter the uncontrollable do we really experience the world. The most resonant paragraph for me was the following.

“My argument is that, if I could make it snow at will, then I could never experience being called by the falling snow,” writes Rosa. “If my cat were a programmable robot that always purred and wanted to be cuddled, she would become nothing to me but a dead thing.”

Is this not true? We get the pleasure from a snowfall because we had nothing to do with it. If they were dialed up at will, they would be a different thing. Or, we value our pets in part because they surprise us. We may train them (although with cats, ha), but we also do not want a perfectly predictable, perfectly programmed, robot cat. Even if I like the purring and cuddling, I do not want a cat programmed to give me that whenever I want it, cats are more pleasure for their independence. And you can see how the designer children thinking would connect here.

For Rosa, the most important cultural force in the modern world is “the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable.” Indeed, modern thinkers have linked the cause of human freedom to the world’s controllability - which entails the ability to prevent bad things from happening. Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World presents a technocratic dystopia in which no one ever has to worry about boredom, discomfort, or unpredictability. Yet the price for achieving this state is one’s own humanity.

Your comments especially welcome on this post.

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