The following is a courtroom drama inspired by Garth Zietsman’s diagnosis of the civilizational problem of “genetic load”.
Dramatis Personae (With a nod of acknowledgment to Joel Mervis’s long gone but incomparable satire, The Passing Show)
Judge President: Q C Tarradiddle (an unusually wise judge)
Prosecuting Counsel: E D Pippleparrot (a rationally confused man)
Counsel for the Defence: Ebenezer Boneash (an irrationally confused man)
Accused: Charlie Klopjag (an unusually good criminal)
Judge Tarradiddle: Mr Klopjag you understand, I take it, that you are accused of stealing a pair of ladies’ tights from A P Jones, the well-known Fish Hoek outfitters that have been doing business for the past 90 years. How do you plead?
Charlie Klopjag: I’m not sure I understand the question your honour.
Judge: What! What is there to understand? You are a man of reasonable intelligence, I take it. The question is a simple one. Did you steal the tights or did you not? Answer the question, guilty or not guilty?
Charlie: I am much obliged to your honour for regarding me as a man of reasonable intelligence. But, you see, that’s the whole problem. Is it me that’s intelligent or my genome? And that’s not the only question. Who is it that’s on trial for this misdemeanor, me or my genome?
Judge: I have been presiding in criminal courts for the past 45 years, and I am an expert in the criminal law from Hammurabi to Lord Denning, but I have never come across the word ‘genome’ in the myriads of legal precedents I have studied. Could counsel for the defence possible elucidate?”
Boneash: Certainly your honour. With respect, you are not keeping up with new understandings of the human being that must affect our understanding of jurisprudence, and which make the principles of justice we inherit from Hammurabi and Lord Denning otiose …
Judge: Otiose?!
Boneash: Ok, ‘redundant’, may it please your honour. Charlie Klopjag, a refrigerator mechanic who tries to uplift himself by reading an online journal whose mission is to make us all on a daily basis friends of the truth, recently read in a two-part series that human beings are no more than the genes that constitute their physical being. According to this theory, there is no human characteristic that exists independent of a person’s genes. My client is quite within his rights to be confused as to whether he is Charlie Klopjag, or the Charlie Klopjag genome, and therefore to be uncertain whether it is he himself who is responsible for his actions, or his genome. Scientists at the forefront of genetic research are now in a position to tell us with confidence that creativity, thought, emotion and the unreasonability of hope are all products of the material world of the genome
Judge: Well I never. And I thought I knew everything there was to know about human beings and the law they are subject to.
Pippleparrot: Oh … have no doubt about it, your honour, you do. That is, you do know all that there is to know. My learned friend is lost in a world of confusion between correlation and causation. Human characteristics leading to human action may exist in an exact correlation with human genes, but that no more proves that human characteristics are caused by genes than it proves that genes are caused by human characteristics. There is an exact correlation between the time of day and the rising of the sun, but that does not mean that it is the time of the day that causes the sun to rise.”
Judge: Hmmm, this is all very perplexing. Mr Klopjag, can you help us by explaining your position.
Charlie: Your honour, I used to be a very happy man until I read these articles. Now I am lost, and as a consequence very unhappy. It’s not so much that it is the burden of being unintelligent that I must now carry that makes me unhappy. I always thought I had just the right amount of intelligence to allow me to do the things I need to do in life, like fixing fridges, or chairing the darts club at the Railway Sidings Pub. In fact, I was agreeably surprised to discover that I actually have more intelligence than I need to just fix fridges, a job I am trained for, because last night I saved my family three thousand rand by working out how to fix the broken washing machine, and I was never trained to do that, somehow I was able to work it all out as I went along …
Boneash: Exactly, your honour, he was guided by his genome to do the job. It had nothing to do with him.
Judge: I have to say Mr Boneash, that I am not that all sure whether the defence you are mounting for your client elevates or diminishes his position in the eyes of this court.
Charlie: May I speak your honour, because I don’t understand what’s going on here. After I had read the articles I became unhappy because it seemed to me it made no difference to try and be, you know, a good person. To strive to be good, like Rudyard Kipling teaches us to be in his poem If.
Judge: You are a fridge mechanic, and you read poetry?
Charlie: Well, some of it, especially the poetry my father taught me to read. I even write poetry. For instance, I started a poem that goes like this:
Once in a world of bloodshot eyes
There lived a gnome called Green …”
Pippleparrot: Stop! This matter will no more be decided by the accused’s ability to fix washing machines than it is by his putative ability to write poetry.
Charlie: Just one more thing on the poem, your honour. See, I struggled like crazy to get those first two lines written, and when I got them I thought it was my creativity like that did it. But then I thought I would just sit back and let my genome take over, and I got no further. My genome gave me nothing.
Judge: The court is getting nowhere on this matter. Mr Klopjag are you guilty? After all, you have confessed to have taken the tights without paying for them.
Charlie: I know I’m quite stupid, your honour, but I feel I have to ask you a question before I can answer your question. Do I feel guilty? Oh yes, horribly guilty. I hate what I did. I wrote a letter of apology to Mr. Jones, and returned to his shop and made payment. So yes, I feel terribly guilty. But if I feel guilty does that mean I am guilty? And is my sense of guilt caused by my genome?
Pippleparrot: Oh the court has surely had enough of this miasma of epistemological badinage …
Judge: Epistemological what…?
Charlie: I don’t know much about epistemolo-logico-something but when I went into that shop I wanted to test who was in charge of my life, me or my genome. Speaking for myself, I didn’t want to steal the tights. But it seems to me the scientists are right. My genome took over. So that’s it. In spite of my conscience my genome has its own way with my life. And it must be the same for all of us. But I still don’t understand why my genome would make me feel guilty if it made me steal the tights in the first place.
Boneash: Your honour, the accused does not do his cause justice. His genome is the genome of an unintelligent man. It is his lack of intelligence – a lack he inherited from his parents – that has caused and will continue to cause these acts of social disruption. He can’t be blamed. He didn’t choose his genome, it was conferred on him.
Charlie: I am not sure if I want my counsel to continue defending me if those are the grounds of his defence.
Judge: You are right to be concerned Mr Klopjag. Mr Bonash, if it is Mr Klopjag’s genome that is to blame, and not him – the person we see before us known as Charlie Klopjag, then who do I punish? I can hardly send his genome to prison, but let him go home to his family and his repair job.
Charlie: It’s really funny how all of a sudden my lack of intelligence is undoing me. I used to be a very happy man although being quite stupid. I mixed with lots of other people – m friends – who I guess must also be regarded as stupid. None of us have ever before committed a criminal act. Nor did our mums and dads – as far as I know, anyway. And funnier still, even though I am stupid, I do a lot of reading in my spare time. I love reading. And I’ve read all about these really intelligent men – Churchill, Verwoerd, Stalin – oh so many of them – who did really stupid things, and I personally know stupid people who do really clever things, and I read about people like Elon Musk, who could barely get a matric, yet who personally designs space rockets better than the space rockets the intelligent people at Nasa can design, and invents software that allows blind people to see. The writer of the articles I read wants humanity to be more intelligent, because then he thinks we will all be happier. I think we would be better off if we were saved from being more intelligent, and just left the way we are.
Silence reigns in the court. Then …
Judge: For the first time in my judicial life I don’t feel I have the competence to make a judgement.
Boneash: I believe I have a solution, your honour.
Judge: Then out with it Mr Bonash. Although I hope it will be more visible to the rational mind than all your previous propositions have been.
Boneash: To uplift the human gene pool your honour, we need to discourage the less intelligent among us from reproducing. We don’t need to punish either Mr Klopjag or his genome. All we need to do to achieve a just outcome is to pay him a substantial incentive not to have any children, and thus prevent his inferior genome from spreading through the population.
Charlie: What! Who appointed Mr Bonash to take my case? I certainly didn’t. He has been appointed by the state on my behalf. Please fire him judge! There is no sum of money that will persuade me and my beloved Dawn, a beautiful gym mistress, from having children. Rather send me to prison. Having children with my wife is part of life’s contract. My mother and my father had me so I could enjoy the gift of life. Now we want to pass that blessing on to our children – to have and enjoy the blessing of life. And even if they are to be unintelligent like their father is – but not their mother – they still have a good chance of being happy. Or even maybe of doing something great, like inventing a fridge that doesn’t run on electricity. I am beginning to wish I had never read about something called the gene overload.
Judge: A neat suggestion, counsel, but I am not sure I want to see any moral elevation of humanity. You see my job depends on a ready supply of the criminally inclined. My livelihood depends on the proliferation of the criminal classes.
Pippleparrot: In any case, your honour, my learned friend is overlooking something with his neat little solution. Where will the money come from to encourage Charlie to refrain from reproduction?
Boneash: Oh I am sure we will find a charity that will cough up the funds that will help bring the common run of humanity out of the darkness and into the light. Isn’t that the commonly shared mission of all charities?
Judge: OK, I have heard enough! Stand up Mr Klopjag. I am not interested in your genome. I am interested in you. I have yet to encounter a better-disposed criminal in my court, the kind of criminal we need more of in the world. You have compensated Mr Jones for his loss, and your case should never have been brought to this court. According to your misguided counsel this leniency I am showing is going to increase on the global population what he calls a “genetic load” which, apparently, is a bad thing for all of us. But you, Charlie, have demonstrated to this court that irrespective of the cavalier liberties your genome took with you on the occasion of your visit to A P Jones, you are imbued with moral agency which served you well enough until that visit, and will I believe serve you in your work, your marriage and your life. The world, I am pleased to say, is as we have always known it to be, and that is enough for me. Case dismissed.
[Image: Conny Schneider on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend