It’s a post-Covid waiting room with all the magazines gone, the television and radio playing simultaneously. I have an ear cocked to the radio and an eye to the television while passively consuming these media like a decent citizen. On the television: “Eggs are not a dairy product.” Is that why they call them chicken fruit? Over the radio comes the zinger I have not been able to shake.
Scientists say DNA testing may be able to tell you whether or not your marriage will be successful.
I snort, and my wife grabs my arm. People scraping away on their mobile phones peer at the man who snorted like a horse. Please tell me someone else heard that and thought it ridiculous?
I have no desire to oversimplify these scientists’ hard work, and I know DNA testing can tell us things about ourselves we would never have guessed. But this is precisely how the factoid was dumped onto the unwitting public, sandwiched between an advertisement for O’Reilly’s Auto Parts and the score for the local high school basketball team. The broadcaster never named the scientists studying it, the laboratory where the research had been done, or in which medical journal these results had been published. Nothing. Just that one line. I kept waiting for the rest of the story, some disclaimer, some nuance, something. But I got nothing.
If the radiomen will take the privilege of heaping, wholesale, such unqualified nonsense onto the unsuspecting public, I will take the privilege of stretching such claims into absurdity. Suspend disbelief with me for a minute.
We could take our DNA tests at birth and affix them to plastic ID cards on lanyards strung around our neck. We could see from little up which humans would make a prospective spouse, could see at a glance which ones were determined at birth to be moody, extroverts, introverts, inventive, doers, sleepers. We could surround ourselves with precisely the people we like so much and wouldn’t even have to ask their name to make a decision about their friendship. This biological information could work as grounds for a new eugenics movement, as data exploitable by internet companies, or just as one way for individuals to shop for friends.
Theoretically, there is always a better spouse to marry, if a man could flip through girls the same way he flips through files in a file drawer. (Supposing, of course, he was not the type given to analysis paralysis.) Maybe we could keep a file cabinet at a central place, and young males could sneak in at night and go through the prospects, perhaps under the supervision of a counselor. We could keep a letter holder off to the side with three slots: First choice, second choice, last resort. Better yet, feed all the data into a computer—hopes, dreams, DNA, genealogy, etc.—and let an algorithm generate the closest match and voila! a match made in cyberspace. You can’t argue with that.
As for the freedom science gives us…
What worries me about this sentence is not that they were studying it, but that some people might actually hear such a simple statement, believe it, and repeat it. Aside from reducing the dynamic of marriage to an arbitrary collision of atoms and molecules, this little statement tells us almost nothing. What is their version of “successful?” What do they mean by “compatible?” Does the invocation of “Science” demand a fly-over judgement of us as media consumers? Even the one question it proposes to answer—Can we predict how two individuals will coexist?—is not forthcoming.
Pairing compatible DNA does not answer whether that person is desirable, or whether someone, who loves another person, will forego a marriage on the basis of capital-S Science. Will marital love and fidelity be checked by a laboratory result? What of commitment, long-suffering, forgiveness, joy, acceptance, and forbearance? Would these virtues be precluded by some DNA determinism? Neither does it answer the question of whether a completely compatible marriage would be desirable. And it does not tell us if whether a couple who has been married, suddenly discovering they are “scientifically incompatible,” would not find the thread of their own undoing in this scapegoat.
I am not arguing for the end of science, the end of DNA testing, or even for the end of the radio and television. The pursuit of knowledge is honorable, and I suppose radio and television might have been used to honorable ends once. What I am arguing for here is a society who cares enough about information use and abuse to take seriously what we hear in the conversation marketplace.
As a grade-schooler, my friends and I had an idea we kicked around, “If you are smart, you have to be more responsible. So just stay ignorant.” This is good sense only standing on its head. It shows that even grade-schoolers are aware of knowledge and its corresponding demands.
The engine in that statement, however, is the idea that we can control our mind to know or to not know, that we can withhold knowing something and not be held accountable for it, that we can fall into an intellectual laziness and not suffer the repercussions. As a teacher, I am a mandated reporter (in some states) of sexual abuse, and here I find a most obvious example of what I am talking about: I could be held legally responsible for something I see and ignore. I could stay dumb and let my inaction make me a criminal.
When we take the narrative of the world and tailor it to suit what we want to know and nothing more, when we ignore undesirable things, we are committing an offense against truth and goodness. It is a matter of ethics and truthfulness that we respond to what we have learned with as much fidelity and justice as possible. That is one of the problems with aging: we know too much to be blissful. We become victims of the things we hear, and we are not in control of our fates as we like to think we are. You cannot remain ignorant unless you have a talent for naïveté. You can only remain silent.
But we hear things all the time, and some things are bogus. And to act on or believe ridiculous things is also an offense against truth. Rumors trickle through the grapevine, dubious claims are salvoed upon us by marketeers, and Science reveals the mysteries of the world. (I am for science, but it is incomplete even in its finest form.)
I hang my hat on criticism. To the degree a source of information is hostile to intelligent criticism, to that degree is it suspect. And a culture who expels their critics is a fundamentalist culture who is already surrendered, given up, incapable or unwilling to reexamine what they have accepted as reality. The trouble with information is that it changes lives. Critics are the instructors, the ones who can show us better how to think, and they are often the free ones. We must at least hear them out.
A lady told me once, with a straight face, that Elvis Presley was still alive and serving in Alabama as a Baptist minister. Alright. Also, John F. Kennedy Jr. did not go down in the sea in his small airplane enroute to Martha’s Vineyard, but is still alive and sequestered away by Deep State lords. Okay.
You can’t argue with that. It is too outrageous; it accepts no criticism. Cut your losses and run.