FFA Reflection

An essay

Chapter One: No

Are you developmentally delayed and wanting to get smart? What is there was an operation you could have that would do this? You would have it done, right? I'm sure you would. But, in the light of the short story “Flowers for Algernon”, by Daniel Keyes, this may not be the best idea. This is my first reason, in the light of the question “should Charlie have had the operation?”, that Charlie should not have had the operation; it didn’t work:

Charlie Gordon, the main character, is a developmentally delayed adult who had the chance to be the first person to have this operation done on them. Charlie was very motivated and learned very fast; his increasing intelligence made him the most intelligent person on earth. But this did not last for long; eventually he saw that many other animals that they had tested this on, including the smart mouse Algernon, had begun to deteriorate in intelligence. Algernon would not solve his puzzles for food anymore, and he eventually died. Charlie looked into this and discovered that this intelligence would not last on him either. He submitted his findings to the creators of the operation, Dr. Strauss and Dr. Nemur, and then his intelligence started to deteriorate as quickly as it had increased. Eventually his intelligence was back to his usual level and he left to go live in New York, where nobody knew what a “Charlie Gordon” was.

And now that you know the plot, what about the underlying connotations? Of course we see what is on the surface, like how one would want to have this operation, but it may not turn out great in the end, but let’s look a little deeper than that.

Charlie is a very motivated person. He has a very low IQ (68). He had an experimental operation done on him that fails. He saw what it was like to be smart. He saw what he couldn’t be. And all of this leads to the despair of many around him. Can that feel good? Is he going to keep trying? Are the people around him going to keep trying? All of these are question that we don’t have the answers to. But we can see, in our own lives, some instances of that that relate to this story. That relate to Charlie. I know that I, for one, have failed at something, I’ve made mistakes. Sometimes I didn’t keep trying. We can think about what physically happened in this story, but also we can look at what happens after, and what happened before.

So my second argument is, is this field of science, intellectual enhancement, actually something we want to invest time and money and energy in? As Shay said in the Socratic Seminar; “he’s not broken. It isn’t like he needs to be fixed.” Note the words broken and fixed. Those words we use to describe when a printer breaks down, or something of the like. Our society is based largely on intelligence, a society in which people like Charlie have no place. So we reject them as if they are not people. As if they are some machine that is malfunctioning. I love Shay’s wording here. It unearths one of the most significant aspects of this story. This shows a depth of thinking far greater than seeing words on a page. Charlie isn’t a machine, so why would he need to be fixed? There are places for him in the world; he is motivated, something I think that we can all amend, is something of a superpower. Additionally, in the TED Talk “The World Needs All Kinds of Minds”, Temple Grandin talks about people with autism, a developmental delay that is very common, and how they can change the world. She talks about how some of the greatest minds of the world; Albert Einstein, Mozart, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, and more, were autistic. Sure, many people with autism are not as delayed as Charlie; he can only do so much. But he can change something, even if he’s just the world’s best janitor.

And, coming slightly out of the hypothetical and philosophical realm, Charlie friends end up feeling bad for him, Dr. Strauss and Dr. Nemur end up feeling bad for themselves, and Miss Kinnian is devastated. Charlie himself perhaps feels slightly enlightened, but also I can imagine a great feeling of loss; like something had left him. And of course something had. He was the most intelligent person on the planet, and he got a chance to see what it was like being smart. But then he lost that, and he lost a lot of the memories of that, and he couldn’t even understand what he had been writing in his progress reports when he was smart. This actually did happen to him in the story, “I was looking at some of my old progress reports and it’s very funny but I can’t read what I wrote. I can make out some of the words but they don’t make sense. Miss Kinnian came to the door but I said go away I don’t want to see you. She cried and I cried too but I wouldn’t let her in because I didn’t want her to laugh at me.”  Imagine that, when digging through boxes in your attic, you came across some essays you wrote in fourth grade. You are overjoyed to have found those essays, but when you go downstairs to read them, you can’t understand a word of it. Not because it is badly written, but because you don’t know the words. Maybe you think that you used to be super smart, so you show them to your friend, who reads them carefully and hands them back to you and say, “that’s about average”. You would feel dumb I’m sure. You would feel like Charlie did. You would feel like you were broken and you didn’t want to see normal people.

But he did feel kind of good. As seen in his last progress report; “Anyway I bet Im the frist dumb persen in the world who found out something inportent for sience,” he definitely didn’t regret having the operation. But that doesn’t mean he should have done it. As I said before, it was not all about him. It’s selfish to assume that he should have done it just because he liked it. Certainly that is part of it, but it is not all. 

Think about all that our society values today; beauty, power, money, and intelligence. Now some of those are bad. “Bad”.  Take money, for example: the symbol of life in America! But it can house such bad things if we let it control us. It can take over our minds. It can make us crave more and more of it. In the fictional Star Trek film “Nth Degree”, we see how Lieutenant Barclay starts to become super smart after he was knocked out by a mysterious probe, but then that intelligence consumes him. He starts going to the holodeck more and more. He exchanges physics knowledge with Albert Einstein, he creates a supercomputer that lets him control the ship. So the same thing that happens with money also happens with intelligence and power. So I think if people went around having this operation done on them today, we would have many intelligence maddened demons running around wreaking havoc on life as we know it! Of course I’m exaggerating, but you can imagine the things that might happen at schools, where the people that have this done on them would look down upon the people who weren’t rich enough or their parents didn’t let them like they were developmentally delayed; like Charlie. So it would make those kids want to do it behind their parent’s backs. Like kids hearing about how their heroes in pro sports are taking illegal drugs to boost performance. Basically, bottom line, intelligence enhancement is unfair. That is another reason that Charlie should not have had the operation. 

Chapter Two: Yes

Yes! I mean, why not? This procedure was in the name of science. Everyone learned something. Why should we forgo science and just strive to be right all the time? Science is about learning and making mistakes, and that is my first argument. 

The argument that scientists should never exhibit human weaknesses is not just fallacious, it’s dangerous. It promotes the idea that science depends on perfect people to carry it out, when in fact the opposite is the case. Science is a process that compensates for the human failings of the people who engage in it, by continually questioning evidence, re-testing ideas, replicating results, collecting more data, and so on. Dr. Strauss and Dr. Nemur both got a lot of data. They now know that that wouldn't have worked. Mistakes are made all the time. Individual scientists screw up. If they don’t make mistakes, they’re not doing worthwhile science. It’s vitally important that we get across to the public that this is how science works, and that errors are an important part of the process. It's the process that matters, not any individual scientist’s work. The results of this process are more trustworthy than any other way of producing knowledge, precisely because the process is robust in the face of error.

Secondly, it's preposterous to say that we should not divest in this branch of science. With smarter minds, we can learn so many more things, make more connections, be able to think even faster. If we had this in the Middle Ages, we wouldn't be figuring out electric cars, we would be pondering in a lab on the Red Planet! To be fair, I can't predict alternate dimensions, but that is my prediction. Without doubt we would be farther ahead than we are now.

Author's Note

Please please please have a debate. I would love it so much.