Forbidden Knowledge : Prometheus to Pornography by Roger Shattuck — A Short Commentary
“Are there things we should not know? Can anyone or any institution, in this culture of unfettered enterprise and growth, seriously propose limits on knowledge? Have we lost the capacity to perceive and honor the moral dimensions of such questions?”
So opens Roger Shattuck’s literary and philosophical tour de force of the historical and cultural development of man’s relationship to knowledge, both pure and applied, esoteric and mundane. Starting with the historical and literary analysis of the foundational stories of the Western canon, Shattuck opens with the archetypal narratives of Prometheus and Pandora, Adam and Eve, Daedalus and Icarus, Cupid and Psyche. Each of these stories caution the same fundamental truth, there ought to be a recognition of the appropriate limits of knowledge. However, even in their cautionary tone there is an encouragement toward genuine humility, though certainly not outright prohibition.
This first section, enumerating the various warnings and omens of knowledge that ought not be pursued carelessly, lays the foundation for our understanding of forbidden knowledge as such, and the second section explores the relevant modern implications, and perhaps the arguable value, of treating certain forms of knowledge as forbidden. Section 1 reaches its natural peak defined by the conflict between Pascal’s portee, our “reach, or natural limit”, and pleonexia, that insatiable desire for that which we cannot have. According to the literary record, we are finite beings with finite reach, yet gifted and cursed with an insatiable curiosity that drives us irrevocably past our limits. By defining the human condition as inherently in tension Shattuck reveals from our literary ancestors something better than a solution; the left and right limits through which we can frame our considerations. In this, I think the Taoists would knowingly nod in assent.
Moving forward into the more modern problems, Shattuck observes the distinct conflict between “Pure” and “Applied” science. Is knowledge of atomic theory good in and of itself? Perhaps. Is the applied knowledge of atomic weapons good in and of itself? Oppenheimer himself seemed to think his role in the history of applied science constituted as close an approximation to sin as a materialist rationalist could muster. Shattuck quotes him in Part 2, Chapter 6, Section 1. From a lecture given by Oppenheimer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1947,
“Despite the vision and far-seeing wisdom of our war-time heads of state, the physicists felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” — Shattuck, Pg. 261
The reality of this precarious balance, of investigative endeavor for the love of knowledge itself, and the disastrous implications of how that knowledge could be applied, met its head in the atomic debate. Now well settled as perhaps a momentary, if necessary, evil, we make moral claims toward disarmament and lasting peace without the typical bounds of metaphysically derived morality transcending the cultural context. Transcendent morality borders on the religious, and in 2022 the only thing more deplorable than religious zealotry is apparently religious bigotry. We hear vague appeals to a common humanity (foundationally rooted in a religious claim of a transcendent principle of the divine spark common to all men), or worse yet unfounded appeals to ideals strung out of context in strange amalgams of postmodern superficiality. Perhaps, much to our detriment, having lost the heart of the natural sciences to rationalism and technology, we have fallen the farthest from God to date. Shattuck defines this conflict between pure and applied sciences analogously through Odysseus and Oedipus, comparing the Siren’s Song and the Sphinx’s machinations as that which we are better off leaving unheard or unapproached. Odysseus risks death to hear the song that invokes the will to suicide in men, and Oedipus, if only had he left his ego aside, could have escaped the fulfillment of a tragic prophecy which would never have befallen him. His final conclusion? In agreement with Oppenheimer, if we have sinned, we must assume the Manhattan Project very well may represent our most grievous infraction.
Moving forward Shattuck displays astounding literary talent and research ability, taking on a highly technical outline, explanation, and critique of The Human Genome Project. Within the naivety of pure scientific endeavor, where the applied science of atomic theory represents a tangible act of sin against humanity, the attempt to sequence the human genome for the purpose of restorative, preventative, and anti-aging medicines represents a potential Holy Grail. Perhaps we could find the moral grounds for the application of technology in its ability to better the human condition? To grapple with the question sufficiently, he outlines the problematic moral questions the research itself presents, beginning with the hubris of early eugenics theories and their application in sterilization programs, along with the legal implications of mandating or legislating the supposed good of preventing, controlling, or otherwise manipulating reproductive freedom. Though written and published through the tail end of the 20th century there is great wisdom in Shattuck’s questioning whether the legislative authority of a nation should govern the individual reproductive choices of a person for the contemporary reader. (Ironic as it is that the modern conversation has been inverted, as to whether the control of reproductive freedom is a right as opposed to a privilege, the conversation today persists on explicitly moral grounds). Within this section he outlines the insufficient understanding of human genetics we currently face, given the reactive nature of genetic development, and how the uncorrelated structure of genetic design with specific traits complicates the project’s potential.
Shattuck’s final anecdote for the considerations of knowledge and its potential pitfall concludes by spending a considerable amount of time investigating the Marquis de Sade, from whose namesake we receive the term “Sadism”. Revolutionary, Aristocrat, Author, Playwright, Moral Philosopher, Pervert, and Libertine; these adjectives and more define the life of the Marquis de Sade. An undeniable influence of modern literary tradition, and yet a name scarcely invoked outside of post-structuralist interpretation, French literary history, and literary criticism more generally, Sade was an aristocrat of means and wrote a plethora of sexually deviant works all from his prison cell where he mentally entertained nearly every explicable potential of the interrelationships of sexual imagination, violence, abuse, and malediction. Where Sade’s paramount impact is felt is in the resulting French Enlightenment, in the works of Foucoult and Derrida, the former a staunch subjectivist and literary post-structuralist of the Marxist stripe and the latter a well-documented pervert and pedophile, also resolutely post-structuralist. It is in much part thanks to the simplistic post-structuralist interpretations of Sade we see the peak of moralizing claims to obscure the corrupting nature of his bibliography. Shattuck explores two cases in which Sade’s writing is explicitly referenced as inspirational: The Moors Murders of Manchester, England in 1966 and what Shattuck refers to as “Ted Bundy’s Sermon”, the interview that left a lasting impression on America, conducted by Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family. In framing the moral problems of sexual knowledge, these two cases provide anecdotal evidence of the corrupting nature of Sade’s work, and the danger of knowledge acquired while lacking certain moral or spiritual fortitude with which to grapple with said knowledge. It is with these real world scenarios in mind that Shattuck closes his investigation and turns to final remarks.
In Conclusion
Human nature is itself a given for Shattuck, and the witness of life and works of the Marquis de Sade seems to represent the greatest argument for the potential for corruption of that nature. In the end, Shattuck makes no clear argument for or against the restraint or propagation of forbidden knowledge. Herein lies the fundamental telos of his assessment; he lays out the literature, he explores the moral and philosophical implications of their competing conclusions, and then, he astutely outlines the domains in which the moral dimensions of forbidden knowledge have been relegated; namely art and science. Despite the deeply religious nature of the questions and the literary history itself, Shattuck left out religion as the third leg of what could be clearly considered a sufficient “tripod” of interpretation. In contrast, I found this quote from A. W. Tozer appropriate:
“How different are we who have grown used to it, who have become jaded with the satiety of wonder. ‘It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty,’ says Carlyle, “it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our WANT of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it… We call that fire of the black thundercloud ‘electricity’, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? Whence it comes? Whither it goes? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will THINK of it.”
These penetrating, almost prophetic, words were written more than a century ago, but not all the breath-taking advances of science and technology since that time have invalidated one word or rendered obsolete as much as one period or comma. Still we do not know. We save face by repeating frivolously the popular jargon of science. We harness the mighty energy that rushes through our world; we subject it to fingertip control in our cars and our kitchens; we make it work for us like Aladdin’s jinn, but still we do not know what it is. Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of THINGS have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies. We cover our deep ignorance with words, but are ashamed to wonder, we are afraid to whisper ‘mystery’.”
-A. W. Tozer, Knowledge of the Holy
Shattuck makes mythological allusions to science and art as the Sphinx and the Unicorn to frame the question as a sort of transcendent balancing act more or less mediated by the cultural demands of utility in application and aesthetic taste, firmly avoiding the religious nature of the question. Ironically however, it would seem to this layman, this approach in many ways affirms that rationalism as it stands is not the god we once thought it to be. Left only with utilitarianism and a vague sense of the aesthetic zeitgeist with which to make moral claims, we seem no closer to the answer of what we ought to do about what is, in this case knowledge which is verifiably detrimental to us at multiple levels of analysis. I return to what I find to be the most reasonable conclusion given the historical development of western philosophy. Modern philosophy is beyond astute in its diagnoses of human nature; what to do with the results of that diagnosis however remains firmly out of its reach.
