From the authors of the forthcoming Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: Biology for the Bookish
via Arts & Letters Daily

The prospect of staying alive through time via future generations is the motivation underlying sex, love, and indeed everything in the organic world. ….

In justifying [the society of Orwell's 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien, like the Director in Brave New World, is wrong. People are immensely malleable, more so, in all likelihood, than any other species. But infinitely? Absolutely not.

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Denial of love, of genuine sex (which is to say, difficult, but also gratifying), of reproductive opportunity, of individuality are all denials of our organic humanness.

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Despite the inherently depressing plot lines of most dystopias, they persist in their fundamental popularity. The Handmaid’s Tale, a modern feminist classic by Margaret Atwood, warns of a future in which “love is not the point.” And neither, of course, is motherhood or child rearing. Ironically, the novel was intended as a criticism of evolutionary thinking, which Atwood interprets as oppressing women by enshrining reproduction as their sole biological and cultural “role.” Notwithstanding her distrust of sociobiology, it is Atwood’s paradoxically acute grasp of evolutionary realities — especially the centrality of reproduction — that makes The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as her most recent work, Oryx and Crake, such a powerful dystopian story.

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Just as Fahrenheit 451 depicts a world in which cheap, artificial entertainment substitutes for the “real thing,” the phenomenally popular movie The Matrix describes a vision that is even more nightmarish: a computer-generated cyberworld in which human beings, deceived as to their true situation, believe that they are living genuine lives. But they aren’t. Most are victimized by a vast network of machines, their bodies preyed upon while their minds wander, misled, in a virtual “matrix” in which strings of code give the illusion that protein gruel is really champagne and steak. By contrast, DNA, our own, genuinely biological code, gives us actual champagne and steak — pleasuring our taste buds while fueling our organic metabolism. The Matrix, a prime example of a life-denying, biology-perverting dystopia, envisions a world that is literally drained of its physicality.

Perhaps one reason The Matrix (at least, the first episode) is so resonant is that organic genuineness has become less accessible to us all. “The ordinary city-dweller,” wrote philosopher Susanne Langer, “knows nothing of the earth’s productivity. He does not know the sunrise and rarely notices when the sun sets … His realities are the motors that run elevators, subway trains, and cars. … Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more.”

Posted by jeet at 08:15 PM