Slippery Vocabulary

The discussion in class today was somewhat unsettling today. It was the use of the word "clone" that made me have a somewhat sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. While reading the book "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro, the word "student" left no jarring after thought, and no feeling of unknown. Even when the clones are experiencing something completely unknown to you, you do not feel that they are horrible or unnatural, but simply someone living differently than you do. The use of the word clone in our discussions today produced a completely different result.

"Clone" is used twice in the whole book and never refers to a student directly. By calling them students, Ishiguro normalizes them and makes it easier for us as readers to process. He makes it a less jarring read, but perhaps this is the intent. By normalizing the clones, he makes it easier for us to accept them, and believe that they are real and this is what is happening to them. He does so in such a way however that we do not realize what is really happening to them until it is too late and we feel that neither they nor we have done a proper job in fighting off this terrible and heart-wrenching ending.

Perhaps this is what the world does to us as a society. Slipping morals are made to seem normal and we never look deeper to see what the real or far reaching consequences of our actions are. Scientific advances are made to look like only that: an advance that will help society. If you stand in the way of this march you are in the way of human betterment and elimination of suffering. If you oppose any forward movement in science, even if only for some time to think, you become a monster, alienated and persecuted by humanity. On the surface this, like the advances may seem true. However, what will our society look like in only a few decades if someone does not stem the flow temporarily to consider and provided for the ethical consequences of these advances? Who will be given the authority to say "this is too far"? Is this even a possibility in a world who's ethical laws lag behind in an ever increasing gap?

Ishiguro's novel introduces all these an innumerable other questions so subtly and yet so glaringly that it is impossible for it to be an accidental conincidence. Authors such as these provide us a glimpse of what our world would look like if we let our world and society progress into a world with no morals or considerations that run any deeper than self.