Life Circumstances or Anti-Science
"What is ultimately absent throughout this play is government—public governance. If the play truly reflects any profound problem, it is the problem of anarchy."
During the May Day holiday I saw the musical Flowers for Algernon in Jiading, and while enjoying the singing I found myself itching to criticize the scriptwriters’ adaptation.
The original novel emphasizes the inescapability of fate, while the musical turns it wholesale into the live experiments of an evil scientist—yet there is actually nothing wrong with it from the standpoint of academic ethics review. Dr. Strauss’s judgment is correct: this treatment approach would be highly positive for the advancement of human intelligence overall. Ethically, obtaining the guardian’s consent and performing a procedure beneficial to the test subject is acceptable even with immature technology, as long as there is no subjective malice in the details. The fact that mice have enormous physiological differences from humans is beside the point.
Medical progress has always challenged the ethical views of the majority, but it is also the process by which all humanity benefits. Simply put, the reason we protect the rights of the intellectually disabled is the chilling effect; in contemporary society this can also be compensated economically.
The musical’s biggest logical error: if academia has already acknowledged the success of the treatment, it necessarily acknowledges Charlie’s high intelligence and high rationality. In other words, it would accept Charlie as a member of the scientific community. As the person who directly participated in the experiment, Charlie has the greatest authority to speak on this matter—a handful of people unrelated to the project cannot override him, not even luminaries in the field. The choice of academic representatives also reveals basic factual errors: the figures parodied—Freud, Jobs, Einstein—would earn only contempt from academia if Jobs appeared as an engineer, and Einstein’s opinion would carry zero weight in psychology. Academic communities are extremely specialized and high-threshold.
What is ultimately absent throughout this play is government—public governance. From the very start, social workers should have prevented Charlie’s parents from abandoning him; if they genuinely could not raise him, he should never have been handed to a bakery owner but placed in a social welfare institution, where his life would have been properly cared for from cradle to grave. Government should also have corrected social discrimination against the intellectually disabled, and the official academic ethics review body should have kept the academic community in check. If the play truly reflects any profound problem, it is the problem of anarchy. And I can’t help but snark: didn’t Charlie’s family have insurance? Getting caught in a fire and everyone suffers—serves them right.
Yet if there is anything that moved me, it is the romance between Teacher Alice and Charlie. From a learning machine reshaped from an intellectually disabled person to a full human being—there is no doubt that it was Alice who taught Charlie the social nature of being human, that is, taught him to love and to hate. No book can hold the true answers; only mutual love between people is the truth of life. A gentleman is not a utensil. The Gospel of John says God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Better said: every person has their own messiah, and love is the key to obtaining salvation.