Do you know the anecdote? Having carefully listened to the report on the state of health and attitude of the cloned sheep Dolly, the women's council of the flock decided: "Let's return to our sheep." Religion, morality and public opinion are sent to them (read: to distrust new technologies), having barely heard about "human-making". Maybe in vain? What are the causes of clonophobia and is the clone as terrible as it is painted?
The well-known Petersburg psychotherapist-psychoanalyst Dmitry Olshansky argues: - Cloning poses two main human questions before society. The question of identity: who I am and how I differ from another (from an experimental animal without a soul, for example). And the question of boundaries: where does that "human" begin and end, which I value in myself above all else and what distinguishes me from other forms of intelligent life. The answer to these questions is what makes us human.
Of course, cloning in a certain way crosses these boundaries and invades the most true realm, so to speak, the realm of the imaginary. Cloning claims, first of all, for my own uniqueness, it makes it possible to create my counterparts. It makes no sense to enumerate all the anxieties and phobias of mankind associated with doubles, especially since from Dostoevsky to The Matrix, all these fears are described more than clearly.
- First of all, people are afraid of cloning, because it can deprive a person of his personality, stamp out mirror doubles that will steal the unique soul of each of us. If a creature completely repeats the structure of my DNA - is it me? Or do I still have something left? Something non-reproducible, non-calculable, and non-transcribable? Whether it is memory, or experience, or soul …
Ultimately, this is an existential question: is my mortal human life a finite and calculated set of chromosomes, or is there something in it that is not subject to machine calculation and reproduction on the technology conveyor?
Secondly, cloning raises the question of the boundaries of life itself, death and immortality. If the limitation of life was the most sacred to any civilization and provided a source for the creative and transcendental breakthroughs of humanity, then what will happen if the cloning of cells and organs can make us immortal?
Paradoxical as it may seem, but if you look deeply, then for any person death is the most dear, the most “his” event, in relation to which he builds a reflection of his being. Only in the horizon of death are the deepest human questions possible about the meaning of life, about the mission of mankind, about spirituality, etc. (remember the principles of any religion).
And if we, like unicellular ones, can maintain the immortality of protein bodies, can we call such a creature a human or not? The question is not only psychological, but also anthropological. Finally, cloning addresses the issue of sexuality, which is central to our civilization. As soon as the separation of the sexes is not necessary for the production of people like themselves, the birth of children is not necessary, then the whole love culture will die out (is there any other culture?).
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Relationships between men and women, children and parents, man and God, life and death will become a thing of the past. And together with them, the "man" himself will cease to exist, having ceded territory to new self-reproducing cyborgs. This is what people fear about cloning.
- As a physician, it is difficult for me even to overestimate the help that will be provided to billions of people in the case of cloning body parts, that is, growing their own organs from one cell taken from them. This is fantastic medicine - the medicine of the future. I'm talking about organ cloning. At one time, transplantation was banned in Russia due to prejudice, as a result, it stalled for many years, when the United States and Europe went far ahead in this matter. And now the Russians are forced, if something happened to them, to go to the West for great money.
For me, this is consonant with the suspension of experiments on cloning individual organs. But as a psychologist, I certainly cannot approve of the cloning of a “whole,” an individual person. After all, if you think about it, what will happen to the cloned children? Who will be their mom, who will be their dad?
The program of the future is laid by the parents. In addition, a child even at the stage of conception, at the stage of the womb, has a history of its own. In order for a personality to form normally, it needs to grow up in a family. What about a clone that has no parents? Something like an orphanage child.
Look at the statistics: these children almost always have a very unhappy fate. From my point of view, this is a crime against a cloned person. Well, who is a cloned person is, in my opinion, a potential client of a psychiatric clinic. After all, this is what a strong psyche must be to rely only on yourself.
I am not even talking about mutations, which will most likely be very serious. After all, the system, to put it mildly, is imperfect. Imagine how many experiments of such a plan need to be carried out on people to get a full-fledged individual.
And all the stories about the fact that you can take the cage of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin and make him a clone, of course, is complete nonsense. In the psyche, a predisposition is possible, but it will naturally have a completely different history of development. And she just determines the lion's share of personality characteristics, and not genes, heredity and something else.
- My unequivocal attitude towards human cloning is negative. In my opinion, this is interference with Nature. There is a huge difference between the level of consciousness of the One who created man and the man himself. I understand this is a deeply esoteric view, and nevertheless. The reasons for the negative attitude of society towards cloning, in my opinion, are that people, in principle, are afraid of the unknown.
There is also a version that one of the purposes of cloning is to "grow" human organs for sale. I think that in this case, explanations why the society of mentally healthy people does not want this is unnecessary.
