Remember Me when I Have Gone

Human beings have inhabited the surface of the spinning blue orb in the vastness of space that we call "Earth" for countless millennia, and yet only for a celestial moment. We have existed for long enough so that we can only conjecture at when the first hominids crossed the great divide into personhood, and still we are only images on a few frames of the feature-film of the universe. Not only is the Earth humanity's present home, but this planet will someday be our tomb, or prove to be a place we inhabit briefly on our long developmental journey driven by quantum mechanics and genetic evolution. Either way, our species will only exist for a relatively short time on this planet. Therefore, we must not be so vain as to assume that the Earth will exist as a cosmic memorial to human achievement for eternity. The Earth does not exist for us, just as we do not exist for it. The Earth will continue to exist long after our lives end; it will probably continue rotating about its polar axis long after the memory of Homo sapiens passes into unrecorded, unstudied, and therefore irrelevant cosmic time. The universe itself will neither celebrate nor mourn our passing.

Ridley Scott presents a startling prediction of an upcoming chapter of cosmic time in Blade Runner. In the film, Scott presents an interpretation of Phillip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? set in futuristic Los Angeles. In Scott's world, humans have created a race of physically superior humanoid beings, called Replicants, as a source of slave labor. Humans have infused their genetic procreations with memories and increasingly sophisticated synaptic models of humanesque emotions. Through genetic engineering, the people of the Blade Runner universe have endeavored to create beings of such sophistication as to only differ from Homo sapiens in certain prescribed ways. For example, the creators of the Replicants give their slaves only a four-year life span, a caution meant to ensure that humans would remain atop the power hierarchy in a world in which Replicants are faster and stronger than they.

The society depicted in Blade Runner is similar to every slave society; it is upheld by a class structure that does not reflect the distribution of labor. As in every society that has attempted to subvert one group's labor to benefit another group, the social structure in Blade Runner hinges upon the dehumanization of the Replicants. Members of the species Homo sapiens monopolize culture in Blade Runner, as can be seen in the use of surnames to address humans and personal names to address Replicants. Thus, the Replicants have no family heritage, and no identity beyond themselves. The seemingly innocuous naming convention in Scott's world actually alludes to the sinister process by which any artificially dominant master race must take and maintain power. The dominant group must claim exclusive rights to the privileges of writing history, building memorials and shaping the environment in its image-ensuring that the world will remember its passing.

In an excerpt from Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino describes an albino gorilla gazing at his surroundings, becoming increasingly self-aware and slowly developing the set of cognitive and social tendencies that we define as human: "From [his tire, the albino gorilla] can have a glimpse of what for man is the search for an escape from the dismay of living-investing oneself in things, recognizing oneself in signs, transforming the world into a collection of symbols-a first daybreak of culture in the long biological night."

Calvino describes the ape's symbolization of his environment and projection of himself onto the things he sees. He describes the gorilla as experiencing "A first daybreak of culture in the long biological night." The gorilla's existence straddles the border between the barbarous "state of nature" described by Hobbes and the complex social contracts theorized by Rousseau and Locke that facilitate the development of culture. Calvino's quote forces the reader to rethink the definition of humanity, presenting a being that is simultaneously inhuman and yet somehow human. In the excerpt, Calvino forges an unorthodox definition of "culture," a word usually reserved exclusively for use in a human context. Calvino applies culture to the albino gorilla, demanding that the reader rethink the distinction between human and animal; and between civilization and nature.

Indeed, the modern post-Darwinist tendency is to view life as a struggle for subsistence: as a simple contest in which participants aim to maximize survival and ensure reproduction. "Culture" is the set of practices and norms that do not directly apply to our struggle for existence, but transcend it. Thus, culture can only exist in a species with hegemony over its environment and over all other species. Calvino's quote upsets the long-held human monopoly on culture. The gorilla's need to shape his environment and to cognitively link himself to his surroundings is a blurring of the boundary between animal and human. Calvino endows the gorilla with self-knowledge, which conventional wisdom assigns only to humans. His statement implies that the albino gorilla may possess the mental faculties and the consequential obligation to contemplate many of the fundamental questions of humanity: questions of existence and questions of death.

Mortality has always been and always will be an enigma that every human being must face and rectify to himself. In the state of nature, death is the outcome that each organism must reflexively avoid in order to maximize its reproductive success. The Replicants in Blade Runner and the albino gorilla in Mr. Palomar upset the long-held paradigm that humanity is unique in its fascination with understanding. Each case presents a non-human being with the potential to philosophize about life and death. Humans have always asked these questions: we shape our environment in the interest of science and in the name of God-with laboratories and churches, gravestones and crematoriums-to understand our mortality. Most of all, though, we shape our environment in order to remember loved ones and to gesture that we, too, should be similarly memorialized when we die. We file lawsuits and wage wars to impose our vision of death, and its corresponding implications for life, upon others. But despite our disagreements, we find solace in the fact that our mutual fascination with death makes us human. We take comfort in the fact that our collective longing for a higher power binds us and we take pride in our humanity above all else.

As Calvino's gorilla makes its first few strides into the uncharted territory of humanity, an evolutionary version of the Blade Runner Replicant conundrum plays itself out. Like the biologically engineered humanoid creatures in Blade Runner, the gorilla in Mr. Palomar sits poised to trespass into the exclusive realm of humanity. This situation demands a startling reexamination of human nature. In our lives, we bind ourselves with chains of association with our environment-the chains Calvino's gorilla has discovered-to hold us secure and keep us from self-destruction. So many chains accumulate over a lifetime that once a person, gorilla, or Replicant reaches adulthood, he has pre-established boundaries that minimize the potential for destruction that his free will would otherwise mandate. In order to feel alive and escape from what Calvino calls the "dismay of living," he finds himself tugging at the chains of life that bind and keep him safe. Calvino's albino gorilla and the Replicant laborers in Blade Runner are able to transcend the dictates of mere survival and connect to their environment as humans do: they find culture. Both examples evoke the motto of the Tyrell Company in Blade Runner: They force us to wonder if beings can really be "More human than human."