Reevaluating Brand’s Optimism

After reading through Brand’s chapters on genetic engineering, I have to admit that his argument is convincing to the reader. However, it is difficult for me to immediately embrace Brand’s viewpoint because it seems like he is guilty of the very thing that he admonishes others for in later chapters: romanticizing. By focusing only on the cases and research data that highlight the positive aspects and potential of this technological science, Brand’s words seem to direct a glittering beam of light on the idea of genetic engineering to the point where I half-expect to hear chimes and cherubic harmonies mingling in the background. Moreover, last week in my "English Novel" course, we read Aravind Adiga's 2008 text The White Tiger, which offers a culturally accurate narrative perspective of a villager who ends up working in the city, and this novel confirmed my suspicion that Brand also falsely deifies the presence of cellphones in ‘squatter’ cities in developing countries. While I can accept and acknowledge Brand’s argument that cellphone capacities have increased literacy and access to banking, trading, and other opportunities, I am beginning to think that cellphones have simply been added to the mix in the struggle for survival rather than having elevated the people above it.

The White Tiger, which is based on the author’s first-hand experience of the injustices in contemporary Indian society, has opened my eyes to the wrinkled, dirty faces and crushed souls of the people behind the optimistic statistics. The reality is that even though over half of the Indian population possesses a cellphone, there are still children swimming in sewer water due to a lack of proper sanitation systems and construction workers squatting and defecating in rows out in the open next to construction sites due to lack of public restrooms. In other words, statistics can claim that cellphones have permitted certain impoverished individuals to earn some extra income, but is this additional money enough to improve the quality of life and the preservation of human dignity to the extent the Brand suggests? Not when the government and the social elite depend on the degrading servitude and financial exploitation of over half of the population to sustain India’s economy—not when those who have the power to initiate change are corrupted by greed and the discrimination of the caste system. As both Balram Halwai, the novel’s narrator, and Borgmann would doubtlessly claim, national values and ethics need to be addressed and perhaps redefined before technology can hope to be utilized to benefit the public in dramatic ways.