Mary Shelley couldn't possibly have imagined how relevant Frankenstein would be 100 years after its creation. Only one character in her novel wanted to talk about the frightening consequences of Victor Frankenstein's experiment - the creature he created.
Throughout the book, the monster tries to get Dr. Frankenstein to own up to what he's done. The scientist responds by labeling him a fiend and demanding that he go away. In the whole novel, Frankenstein never utters a single reasoned thought about technology or the implications of his actions. All the eloquence and introspection belongs to the creature. He's more than reasonable, this monster. He never seeks vengeance, just admission of responsibility. Not only has he thought about technology a great deal, but he gives Frankenstein one chance after another to reconsider and do the right thing. A significant chunk of the book is taken up with the monster's pleading.
"I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part, that which though owest me," the monster declares at one point.
"You propose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends."
Theodore Kaczynski was neither as eloquent nor as precise in his actions. He killed and maimed not only people who had, like Frankenstein, charged into the realm of technology and morality, but random bystanders as well.
Yet he raised questions that are as timely for us as they were for Mary Shelley's characters. Just like that other monster, the Unabomber finds that people celebrate the act of creating new inventions, but aren't particularly concerned about what happens next.
Our contemporary monster, too, has been sent away. He can't ever come back to haunt us.
Yet the modern world routinely goes about reshaping and intefering with the natural order of things in ways that pale Victor Frankenstein's efforts in comparison.
The birth of the McCaughey septuplets, for instance, provided one of the more dramatic opportunities in years for Americans to pause and consider the moral complexities of technological advances.
The births in Iowa, made possible by dramatic improvements in fertility treatment, were cause for national celebration, hailed as a triumph of human pluck and a miracle of medical technology.
There was only sporadic, muted discussion about how these children will live, how much risk was involved in carrying them, or who, precisely, will shoulder the great costs of caring for them. Instead, People magazine trumpeted an "exclusive." "Seven's Heaven," read the headline on the story inside.
Like the rest of the media, People glossed over the realities of the McCaughey drama. Kenny McCaughey, 27, a billing clerk, and his wife Bobbi, 29, a former seamstress, have become as dependent as any welfare family. Despite donations of a new home, food and clothing; despite the income from book deals, endorsements and a made-for-TV movie, the McCaugheys rely on a platoon of 60 volunteers working four shifts around the clock to feed the infants, change 150 diapers each week and help out with household chores, according to People.
Few readers grasped the implications of Bobbi leaving the hospital with all seven of her new children still on ventilators. The real "miracle" of the McCaughey septuplets, according to doctors, was that they had survived at all.
As The New York Times reported in November, in one of the few sober appraisals of the births (printed deep inside the paper), a woman who tries to carry more than three fetuses is playing Russian roulette with her babies' lives. The McCaugheys, said Dr. Richard Berkowitz, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai Medical Center, could easily have wound up with between two and seven children suffering severe deformities or chronic illnesses.
The healthy birth of septuplets, said another gynecologist, is not a triumph of medical technology, but more akin to winning a lottery - a case of extremely uncommon good luck.
Apart from these medical concerns, there are ethical, class and social worries. Will the country be so joyous when the inevitable moment arrives: a poor mother in Newark has seven or eight children at once, and religious objections to abortion? Will the President call her, will the CEOs of giant corporations fly into town bearing gifts? Will publishers and producers bid for rights of children who are chronically ill or severely deformed?
Were the McCaugheys really heroes for bringing into the world seven children they can't afford to raise? Given this debate, the birth of septuplets might have occasioned a graver, more reflective moment.
Here is where the legacies of the Unabomber and the ghost of Victor Frankenstein creepily converge. Like Frankenstein, we don't want to take responsibility for our technological innovations, we just want to celebrate our ingenuity in achieving them.
Unthinkingly conceived and implemented technology is dangerous technology, the kind Frankenstein's monster railed about, the kind the demented Unabomber saw as justifying murder. But often it seems that unthinking technology is the kind that surrounds us.
Next: The technological future: utopia or armageddon?
Related links:
Part I of this series
David Gelernter interviewed on HotSeat
HotWired's Unabomber Special Report
Katz's Netizen column after Kaczynski's capture
This article originally appeared in HotWired.
