www.frenchpdf.com www.frenchpdf.com www.frenchpdf.com xii / CO NTENTS CHAPTER V / GUILT, JUSTICE, AND EMPATHY IN MELVILLE AND CAMUS 1. Billy Budd: Realist Allegory 138 2. The Stranger: An Inside Narrative 141 3. Comparing Two Specimens 144 4. Understanding, Blaming, Forgiving, Pardoning 151 5. Knowledge as Interference 159 INTERLUDE: TAKING STOCK 1. Forbidden Knowledge and Open Knowledge 165 2. The Consequences of Open Knowledge 167 PART Two: CASE HISTORIES CHAPTER VI / KNOWLEDGE EXPLODING: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 1. The Bomb and the Genome 173 2. The Siren Song: Pure and Applied Science 178 3. Limits on Scientific Inquiry: Five Cases 183 Practical Considerations: Archimedes 185 Prudential Considerations: Recombinant DNA 186 Legal Considerations: Buck v. Bell and Justice Holmes 195 Moral Considerations: Himmler's Lebensborn 203 Mixed Considerations: The Human Genome Project 210 4. The Condition of Ambivalence 217 CHAPTER VII / THE DIVINE MARQUIS 1. The Sade Case 229 2. Rehabilitating a Prophet 236 3. The Moors Murders Case 256 4. Ted Bundy's Sermon 259 5. A Closer Walk with Sade 268 6. "Must We Burn Sade?" 283 7. Truth in Labeling 290 CHAPTER VIII / THE SPHINX AND THE UNICORN 1. What We Ought Not to Know: The Institutions of Science and Art 302 www.frenchpdf.com CONTENTS I Xiii 2. The Veil of Ignorance and the Flame of Experience 313 3. Last Tales 321 APPENDIX I: SIX CATEGORIES OF FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE 327 APPENDIX II: THE OCCULT 339 APPENDIX III: " THE SPHINX " BY FRANCIS BACON 343 A CKNOWLEDGMENTS 347 BIBLI OGRAPHY 349 INDEX 359 www.frenchpdf.com www.frenchpdf.com www.frenchpdf.com FOREWORD ■ 1. re there things we should not know? Can anyone or any institution, in this culture of unfettered enterprise and A growth, seriously propose limits on knowledge? Have we lost the capacity to perceive and honor the moral dimensions of such questions? Our increasingly bold discoveries of the secrets of nature may have reached the point where that knowledge is bringing us more problems than solutions. Contrasting threats like overpopulation and AIDS appear to be traceable to the effects of "progress." One powerful reading of history points out that the most advanced nations on Earth have produced unthinkable weapons of destruc- tion at the same time as they have developed a media culture that revels in images of destructive violence. Can such a combination fail to propel us toward barbarism and self-annihilation? In contrast, our most truly miraculous accomplishments as hu- man beings take place unwittingly and privately, far removed from laboratories and studios and electronic screens, almost in another universe. For we learn to do certain things before we know what we are doing and in ways that no one can adequately explain. In twenty-four months, an infant learns to recognize and discriminate the elements of the world around it, learns to pull itself erect and to walk, learns to hear language and to talk. Is it possible that we accomplish these feats better for our lack of knowledge about how we do them? Can we know anything unwittingly? To ask the ques- tions does not demonstrate that one has become a know-nothing and a Luddite. Proverbs in every language tell us that it is possible to know too much for our own good. Many great myths and legends explore the perils of knowledge. Fortunately, infants continue to learn to walk and talk. But many of us feel apprehensive about the future of our booming culture. These exploratory remarks provide one path into my subject. I www.frenchpdf.com 2 / FOR BIDDEN KNOWLEDGE do not believe they exaggerate the picture. We have finally waked up to the dangers to our physical environment brought about by the depredations of human beings. But we have taken less notice of potential threats to our intellectual, artistic, and moral environ- ments. It is to those three areas that I shall be referring constantly. Another path into my subject leads more tranquilly through stories of people, ordinary and extraordinary, as they have responded to the world around them. This path leads to challenging tales of men and women whose lives still affect our own. Before going further back into the past, let me begin in the mid-nineteenth century. One Victorian matron, a bishop's wife, became famous for the remark she made about evolution. She made it not so much about Darwin's circumspect The Origin of Species (1859) as about T. H. Huxley's belligerent Man's Place in Nature (1863). Darwin's young champion sang right out that man is "separated by no greater struc- tural barrier from the brutes than they are from one another." When she heard the news, the matron displayed perfect cultural pitch: "Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but that if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known" (Milner, 261: see the bibliography for complete references). The matron wished to oppose the march of science and, if nec- essary, to quash an unsavory truth. We mock her squeamishness because we feel confident that nothing should stand in the way of the pursuit and communication of knowledge. But the lessons of history and the nature of contemporary events do not always sup- port that confidence. The matron's naïve response reveals an anx- iety we cannot simply dismiss as baseless prejudice. She articulated a rudimentary understanding of forbidden knowledge. In every age, news of wars and disasters and crimes has been appalling. Without overcoming those ancient woes, we now have new ones to lament. In the late twentieth century, we reckon with reports of marvels, which are also afflictions, brought about not by backwardness and ignorance but by advancing knowledge and its applications. Not only the most barbarous nations but also the most civilized expend vast resources to develop nuclear and biological weapons of unthinkable destructive force. Genetic research raises the remote prospect of choosing our children's physical and mental endowment like wallpaper patterns. The invasive presence of au- diovisual media in our lives from earliest infancy threatens to shape www.frenchpdf.com FOREWORD / 3 our character and behavior as forcefully as genetic manipulation. In our quest for energy sources, we may be reducing the life span of our planet. Scientific research, freedom of speech, the autonomy of art, and academic freedom combine forces, as I shall argue in Part Two, to carry us beyond our capacities as human agents to control our fate. Our greatest blessings confound us. This great wrestling match with the best-endowed and most ad- vanced parts of ourselves was dramatized in deeply opposing ways by two modern works whose importance has increased with time, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Both belong to the era of British tech- nological and commercial leadership in the world and of a Western i mperialism that mixed exploitation with philanthropy. In the mid- dle of the Victorian era, Lewis Carroll peered into the dreamworld of an adolescent girl and found it peopled with grotesque creatures making strange demands of her good intentions. Nothing goes quite right, and nothing goes irretrievably wrong. Alice suffers no harm and wakes up having learned that the creatures within us are essentially benign under their fearsome eccentricities. And beneath Carroll/Dodgson, the friend and photographer of prepubescent girls, one finds not a child molester but a chaste poet of nature's riddles and paradoxes. Alice masters her fears and returns home to a secure existence. Robert Louis Stevenson offers us a totally different vision of the world. Friends of Dr. Jekyll, a respected London physician with a penchant for unorthodox medical research, discover that he is lodg- ing a suspicious scoundrel in an apartment connected to the rear of his own house. This mysterious Mr. Hyde commits a horrible mur- der and disappears. Several months later, Hyde is found in his apart- ment, dead by his own hand. Jekyll has disappeared. Jekyll's full confession in writing finally solves the mystery in the last chapter. Jekyll and Hyde are two elements, two contrasting outward forms of one person. The doctor has discovered a drug that proves the duality of human life. The drug transforms Dr. Jekyll into his purely evil self, Mr. Hyde, in whose person he can pursue "undig- nified pleasures" into undescribed excesses. Another potion is needed to suppress Hyde and to restore the doctor to his usual human existence. Finally, the monstrous persona of Hyde gains the upper hand. Drugs can no longer suppress Hyde and reaffirm Jekyll www.frenchpdf.com 4 / FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE for more than a short time. And even those medicines are running out. In his last written words before surrendering to his evil self, Jekyll attempts to disclaim responsibility for the monster he has produced out of himself and to deny that the evil of Hyde has besmirched the soul of Jekyll. Beginning as a fairly sedate mystery story, Stevensons fifty-page novella soon turns into a full-fledged horror tale with suggestions of vampirism and superhuman powers intervening with the help of secret substances to transform the balance of life itself. Stevensons moral fable, based both on a vivid nightmare and on newspaper accounts of an Edinburgh businessman-thief, seizes our imagina- tion from two sides. First, we respond with some sympathy to the figure of the double, the respectable citizen fettered to a depraved alter ego. In this era of growing anonymity and nomadism and of hypnotic media images feeding an alluring fantasy life within, we are constantly encouraged to develop a covert life of violent ex- cesses.