Genocidal Organ (23 page)

How many of the cerebral cortex modules that determined a person’s personality and consciousness needed to remain intact for you to refer to them as the same person? What “she” would have wanted? We had no way of vicariously experiencing my mother’s current mental state. So the question “Is she in pain?” was inadequate on so many levels. Did “she” still remain “she” in a meaningful sense? Could the nerve receptors that remained alive in her brain receive pain stimulus? Did “she” experience that stimulus in the form of pain as we know it?

The doctor was up front with me: he didn’t have the answers to any of these questions.

“Isn’t there someone who can decide for me?” I asked. I’m sure I was sobbing.

I was afraid. I had no idea what this doctor was trying to do. How could I make such an important decision when it was such a gray area?

It wasn’t the doctor’s fault, of course. We were now in the realm of philosophy, not medicine. And yet, frustratingly, modern technological developments were all useless when it came to the realm of philosophy. Technology could analyze and dissect human beings so well, but philosophy just didn’t want to know.

And I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to decide. I realized this might have seemed selfish—hypocritical, even—given the number of people I’d sent to their deaths. But when it comes to someone close, someone you love, you lose your mind. No one tells you of the huge, ambiguous gulf between the lands of the living and the dead. I longed for the days when we had that simple, black-and-white phrase: “brain dead.”

I returned to the motel, where I cried some more. I cried for the world that had gone past the point of no return in creating this awful ambiguity between life and death. I cried in terror. I cried at the prospect of having to decide, on the sheer harshness and cruelty of my position. I cried so much I felt nauseated. I fell prostrate on the bed, crying until I needed to run to the bathroom to dry-heave my guts out, and all that emerged was saliva and more tears.

At the end of the night I had decided what to do.

However difficult the question, when it came down to it there were only two alternatives, and I had to pick one of them.

I barely even skimmed over the letter of consent to terminate treatment.

I gave my consent where consent was needed, and my mother’s life support was switched off. The doctor asked me how I felt and offered the services of a recommended counselor. Yep, sure enough, it was the counselors again. Marriage on the rocks? About to head into battle? Relative just died? Counseling was the panacea, it seemed.

“No thanks. But I appreciate the offer.”

Basically, I was worn out.

I realized this at the funeral service. I’d worn myself out thinking about all the details, and that was why I’d been able to make my decision. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I might have still been at the hospital, sitting with Mom and her life-support systems, still turning over the options in my head.

At the time I had convinced myself that I was thinking of Mom’s best interests when I pulled the plug. When I pressed my fingerprint down on the device to give my consent, I believed that Mom wouldn’t have wanted a grim half-existence, that she would have wanted to be either alive or dead, one way or another, and that if she had been alive she would have been in terrible pain.

But, as the doctor had said, there was no way for me to know whether she was in pain. After all, she was no more than a thin remnant of her former self, and it wasn’t even clear whether the new “she” could feel pain.

Then there was that atmosphere. The oppressive feeling of my mother’s gaze that was reignited inside me when I visited the house.

Had I really arrived at my decision by considering my mother’s best interests? I searched deep inside myself, and by the time the funeral service was over I could no longer convince myself that I had.

From that moment onward I’d been plagued by the subconscious belief that I killed my own mother.

5

During the entire time it took for me to tell my story—minus the direct references to the army and my work, of course—I think I must have taken four sips of my beer. I don’t think Lucia’s glass touched her lips the entire time.

“Well, for what it’s worth I think you did the right thing. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. You’re not a sinner, unlike me,” she finally said.

I was ready to explode. It was a mistake to have sought partial release by confiding a watered-down version of my story to a civilian. There was a huge part of me that wanted to spit it all out—the deaths I had caused in the line of duty, my own “sins” as Lucia would have said—but I had to remain professional to the end. And it was killing me.

Because I had killed Mom.

Because I had killed the brigadier general.

Because I had killed the troops on patrol.

Because I had left the people in the village to their certain deaths.

Don’t forgive me, Lucia. The burden of guilt I carry with me is larger than you can even imagine. I’ve killed so many people, and soon I’m going to kill your former lover. So don’t grant me your pardon. If you were to pardon me … I don’t know what I’d do.

“That’s good of you to say. It makes me feel a little better,” I replied, subduing my bursting heart, turning it to stone. See? I could still give any answer I needed to give, any answer I wanted. After all, that’s how I dealt with the hundreds of innocents I left to their fate; that’s how I could kill children when they had their guns pointed at me; that’s how I could cope with seeing the girl with the glistening brains sprouting from the back of her head and the youth with the slippery guts spilling from his lifeless body.

“I’m not just saying that to comfort you, Mr. Bishop. You knew how much it was going to hurt you when you made your decision. You knew, even as you gave your order to terminate treatment, that you were never going to be able to forgive yourself. You knew, and still you went ahead with it, because you knew it was best for your mother that way. That’s not a sin. You were doing it for your mother’s sake.”

“Was I really?” I asked.

“Humans aren’t so bad, really. We’re not designed to go to hell. People like us—we’re predisposed to be basically good, not evil.”

“Lucia, I thought you were an atheist.” The conversation had suddenly taken a turn for the pious, and I blurted this out almost without thinking.

“I’m not talking about religion, though. I’m talking about the evolution of species.”

“Evolution?”

“Yes. The evolutionary default setting for humans isn’t to go to hell. And that’s not just true of humans. There are all sorts of animals who are naturally programmed to perform all sorts of acts of altruism.”

“Oh, so you’re not actually talking about Darwin’s theory of evolution as such, then, about adaptation and natural selection. The survival of the fittest. Because he’d disagree with you and argue that the highest aim of all life is to survive and protect itself,” I said.

“No, I am talking about Darwin. Think about a swarm of insects, for example. It’s only when they give themselves over to the host that they’re able to achieve their full potential as a species. Or take honeybees. They’ll sting an intruder to protect their hive even if doing so rips out their own guts in the process. They act altruistically in order to benefit their species as a whole.”

“But that’s just genetic programming at an instinctual level,” I countered. After all, how are bees acting any differently from robots? Whereas
I
wasn’t a robot.
I
didn’t robotically decide to kill my mother. That was something I decided with my own will.

“Well, what’s to say that man’s conscience isn’t also a product of programming at a genetic level?” Lucia fired back.

“If that’s the case, how do you explain criminals and villains who just don’t care about other people? And morality and conscience are completely subjective notions at the best of times—see how much they vary between rich and poor countries. No, conscience is a social construct.”

“The details of what makes up an individual’s conscience, maybe. But conscience per se
—
including its offshoot, religion—is a product of evolutionary processes.”

“Don’t tell me you’re seriously trying to suggest that altruism can coexist with social Darwinism?”

“You’ve heard of game theory, right? Well, there’s this simulation that takes the model several iterations down the line. It’s true that at first people tend to act purely in their own short-term self-interest and have no qualms about trampling over other people to get what they want. The prisoner in the prisoner’s dilemma is usually happy to rat out his companion if it means shaving a few years off his own sentence. But when you allow the simulation to develop, and you introduce new factors—you make the model closer to being like real life, in other words—then you start to see an interesting change. The long-term equilibrium position is almost always one of cooperation rather than competition. People become prepared to give up a short-term benefit, even when it’s dangling there right in front of their eyes, in order to act in a way that benefits the group as a whole.”

“I find that hard to believe,” I said.

“It might seem counterintuitive at first, but it makes perfect logical sense when you start to think about it. Individuals may gain some benefit in betraying others in the early stages, but sooner or later some of them realize that cooperation within a community results in a better outcome all around. If an individual still persists in being a betrayer, the cooperators refuse to deal with him, so his only option left is to try and form a community with other betrayers, and these communities are never stable, as the betrayers are, by definition, always stabbing each other in the back.”

“So you’re saying that conscience stems from when living things first started grouping together into communities?” I asked.

“Think about it. Most animals are weak, at least as individuals. In order to adapt to their harsh surroundings they needed to adapt to working together as a community. These communities of cooperators become more successful evolutionarily, so they effectively outbreed the betrayers and pass on their genes to their offspring. As a species, then, the genes that are most likely to get passed down to the next generation are those of the cooperators, rather than the betrayers. Is it that far-fetched to imagine that in time cooperation becomes embedded into the species’ genetic structure and that altruism effectively becomes an instinct?”

“So you’re saying that my decision to kill my own mother had nothing to do with my soul and everything to do with my genetics? That it was the default decision for my brain, as you put it?”

“Not exactly.” Lucia shook her head. “Although I do understand why some people like the idea of being able to reduce all human decisions to genetics or biological determinism. Anyway, I thought you said you didn’t subscribe to any religious beliefs.”

“That’s true, yes—”

“Riddle me this, then. Why do you have to fall back on metaphysical ideas such as the soul in order to explain your actions?”

That stopped me short. What did it mean, exactly, to say that you had a soul? What were the implications of saying that humanity had some sort of fundamental essence existing in lofty seclusion, untouched by the harsh and dirty realities of this world? Could it be that the idea of the spirit was just some fiction I bought into so that I could lighten the burden I carried, of all the dictators and villains that I had killed and all the innocent victims that I had abandoned to their fates? So that their deaths would somehow be tempered by the thought that at least a part of them would continue existing in an alternative universe—one that we called heaven, or hell, or whatever?