Opening Saint Exupery’s Box
Caleb Stegall on Cloning & the Knowledge of Man
Antoine de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince is one of the twentieth century’s best-loved stories. It is a fable about the secret of happiness. The Little Prince begins when a fictional Saint Exupery crashes his airplane into the Sahara Desert and encounters a most unlikely interplanetary visitor—a boy, the Little Prince. The boy is a traveler from a tiny planet no bigger than a house where he has lived alone with his fabulous possessions. But pride in those possessions has driven the Little Prince on his stellar journey and landed him in the middle of the Sahara.
The boy immediately, but politely, demands of Saint Exupery, “If you please, draw me a sheep.” Saint Exupery, taken a bit aback, begins to draw—to great cries of disapproval from the Little Prince. Saint Exupery’s sheep simply does not capture the essence of sheepness. Finally, in frustration, Saint Exupery draws a square box and explains to the Little Prince that the sheep lives inside the box.
Delighted, the boy is satisfied, content with the sheep he cannot see that meets all of the sheep qualities of his imagination. In this opening sequence of the story, Saint Exupery hints at the “very simple secret” the Little Prince will later learn more explicitly from another character: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
In early 1997, the sensational story of Dr. Ian Wilmut and his scientific team’s achievement of cloning a sheep awed the world. Saint Exupery would have relished the irony. For here, Wilmut demonstrated skill in the representational arts far surpassing that of the fictional Saint Exupery—with a sheep nonetheless! One wonders if the Little Prince would have been more satisfied with Wilmut’s sheep than he had been with Saint Exupery’s drawings.
Picking up on the theme, the French Paper Courrier International soon ran a story with the ominous headline “Draw Me a Man.” The Courrier recapitulated the demand of the Little Prince—only upping the ante from sheep to man—and wondered implicitly which course we would take: Would we choose the new man science could “draw” for us, or, like the Little Prince, would our heart’s eye choose to know imaginatively the man housed in Saint Exupery’s box?
Unanswered Question
This question remains, as yet, unanswered. But it looms near, as fundamental as any with regard to the ultimate direction and character of the nascent century.
As I write this in late November, the New York Times reports that “a small, privately financed biotechnology company said yesterday that it had created the first human embryos ever produced by cloning.” President Bush says that he is “unequivocally . . . opposed to the cloning of human beings either for reproduction or for research.” The House of Representatives last summer passed a bill (H.R. 2505) that would ban the cloning of all human beings, including human embryos. Currently pending in the Senate is Kansas Senator Sam Brownback’s version of the House anti-cloning bill.
Meanwhile, proponents of the potential benefits of cloning technologies to human health and happiness are carrying big rhetorical sticks. Representative Jim McDermott argued on the floor of the House this summer that opponents of cloning are like the pope who “told Galileo to quit making those marks in his notebook. The Earth is the center of the universe, he said. We all know that. . . . Now, here we are making a decision like we were the house of cardinals on a religious issue when, in fact, scientists are struggling to find out how human beings actually work.” Thus the passage of H.R. 2505 would be a “papal event,” he said.
Similarly, in 1997, a seemingly outraged Senator Tom Harkin declared that there could be no “appropriate limits to human knowledge.” To those “who are saying ‘Stop, we can’t play God,’ I say ‘Fine. Take your ranks alongside Pope Paul V, who in 1616 tried to stop Galileo.’”
Caleb Stegall is a lawyer and writer in Perry, Kansas. His forthcoming book on the history of prairie populism and the future of American regionalism is due out from ISI Books in 2009. He and his wife Ann have five boys and attend Grace Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Lawrence, Kansas, where Stegall serves as a ruling elder.
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