Weekly Blog Post #8

Monday, September 30th, 2013

"Flowers for Algernon": The Right to Know

I began reading "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes this evening. It is such a good book! Moving and sweet, yet heartrending as well. I am only at the first third of the book, but I can still give a brief synopsis of what I read. 

Charlie Gordon is a man with a very low IQ. He lives a peaceful and happy life, unaware of half of the things going on around him. However, after he was chosen to receive an experimental surgery that will increase his intellectual capacities, Charlie's life begins to change. Charlie becomes aware of the things, people, emotions, the world, and himself. As he comes out of his ignorant bliss, his unaware blindness, he begins to understand the complexity of life. He realizes that the people he had thought of as his friends actually made fun of him the whole time, that the reason they always kept him around was to fool him and laugh at him, to ridicule him. Charlie begins to see the bad in people. Prior to the operation, he had thought of the world deprived of evil, yet he witnessed theft and jealousy as he worked in the bakery. Most of all, Charlie began understanding the depths of his emotions, discovering himself.

This book is an amazing book that places many key questions on the development of humans. Though an adult, Charlie is only recently and suddenly opening his eyes to the world. Is he ready to face all the issues, the complexities, the difficulties around him? Technically, Charlie is expected to "grow up" all of a sudden, to adapt to all the changes that he is undergoing in the immediate moment. Charlie gets surprised by all the events, overwhelmed by all the new things he experiences. Charlie did not even know what he was going to be going through. How ethical is to include an unaware participant? Most of all, how ready is Charlie to receive this vast amount of information, to be exposed to this whole knowledge?
A quote in the book that I found key was:

                    "'If you'd read your Bible, Charlie, you'd know that it's not meant for man to know more than was given to him to know by the Lord in the first place. The fruit of that tree was forbidden to man.' "

In ToK, we had talked about how humans are constantly, and probably eternally, searching for truth. We are probably driven by this curiosity, this quest for knowledge. I have not heard of a pill, surgery, or other kind of scientific development, that would boost human's intellectual capacities overboard. So the scenario depicted in the novel is not applicable word for word. Yet I can connect this with times a particular time in human development: the maturation process. Psychologists have warned many times that there is a right time for everything. Even an infant should not take his/her first steps before he/she is physically ready. Parents always try to shelter their children from knowledge they believe inappropriate for that certain age.

"Flowers for Algernon" raised many thoughts in my mind, especially about human development and knowledge. Is it wrong to know too much, to know more than we should know? One case that really struck me was thinking of this. Imagine being able to read other people's thoughts. How would we be affected? We would not have hope, fantasies, because there is no gap in our knowledge for our mind to fill in. Maybe we do know enough. Maybe we do know the amount and things we should and need to know. Maybe ignorance is truly bliss. At least in some way.