I have a teenage daughter who is a voracious reader. As a parent I had hoped to keep up with her so that I could get a sense of the appropriateness of the stories and find the opportunities to chat about the complex issues that appear in teen novels. It became apparent very quickly that this would not happen. I couldn't keep up to the 300 pages every 48 hours - well, not if I planned to eat, sleep or work. I am fortunate that she likes to talk and so I know most of the plot lines and character development and, yes, even the moral dilemmas that shape the stories.
I am not totally out-of-the-loop however and I have kept up with some of the stories because of long car rides or long quiet evenings when we listen to audio books as a family. I am struck by how many of the teen stories are dystopian tales in which young people struggle against authoritarian regimes. Most of the authority figures in the stories claim to have created a new and better world but stories like the Hunger Games demonstrate man's inhumanity to man and the lengths to which societies can go to control and quiet certain populations.
I know that we also grew up with those types of books. I remember Brave New World and 1984 and Animal Farm and those dystopias were created from the fear of rise of communism and state control. These old stories and the new stories are built upon the tradition of the great philosophical question of the will. They put front and centre the question of choice and who should make choices for us. This is one way to make connections for our students to the importance of understanding moral and political philosophy as part of the study of political science.
Recently, I was particularly struck by the story Matched by Ally Condie. I won't write a spoiler so don't worry but I do want to focus on an aspect of the plot that links to a news story that I read. Matched tells the story of a society in which marriages are arranged by the state. In the state's veiled attempt to justify this public good the state officials make the claim that matches are carefully engineered to ensure the perfect connection between the matches. They are matched in every way including a screening that will ensure that there are no genetic mismatches. The process is ritualized and orchestrated so that match day is like a teenage, high school prom with a surprise ending. "Who will he / she be?" "Who is my perfect match?" The story is suspenseful and well-constructed and opens up a lot of moral and ethical questions to explore with your children.
So, as I said, while listening to Matched, I was reminded of a news item out of Britain about the three-parent baby. U.K politicians are considering allowing scientists to experiment with a new procedure. Scientists would remove the nucleus of a fertilized egg and insert it into a healthy donor egg with the nucleus removed. This would allow them to replace the faulty mitochondrial DNA of the mother. There is excitement about this technique because it has the potential to eliminate genetic diseases caused by defective mitochondria. Reports remind us that the child is, in fact, not really a three-parent baby because the nucleus has more than 99 per cent of the characteristics that shape the child.
Obviously this procedure is a long way away from the state sorting and matching people into perfect pairs. And I only raise this as analogous in order to highlight the kind of ethical questions that arise when we begin to choose how people are born into the world. The imagined dystopian communities created by great fiction writing helps us to challenge our thinking about what science can do and about what science ought to do and who should be in control of those decisions. The questions that arise here go beyond the obvious questions of faith. They have implications for the way we confront the challenges of disease and human health and human dignity in terms of our individual needs and the construction of human life.
