Saturday, November 16, 2013
Claim for a bizarre form of prejudice in Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
In Phillip K. Dick's novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", the main character is a bounty hunter that hunts androids, humanoid creatures that are not fully human, because they do not possess concepts of rational thought. This, according to the purely organic humans, makes them inferior, and "subhuman." However, how is it that we define "human?" Can an android, something that is not fully human in our definition, really ever be one of us? Phillp K. Dick is not only saying that an android is a human in same way as anyone else is human, but he is also writing in the context of the Civil Rights Movement, which was hitting a fever pitch at the time the book was written. Therefore, it can be said that Dick is allegorizing the Civil Rights Movement with a bizarre form of racism, where typical humans are prejudice against android humans.
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I don't really agree with that because Androids aren't being denied their rights as humans because they're not humans because they were designed and built by humans and programmed to act like and appear human. The clear defining aspect of being human here is empathy. If you are empathetic to cruelty and suffering, you're human, if you're not, you're not. Dick is pointing out here that empathy is an exclusively human trait and not particularly useful from an evolutionary standpoint. Animals and androids alike "feel" only for themselves in the interest of self-preservation, whereas humans feel for others because of a heightened sense of awareness in which we perceive others as more than just a threat to our sustenance. I don't think it can really be called racism that the humans are bounty hunting rogue androids, primarily because they are a treat to humans, but also because they lack important human elements and frankly, humans built them and it's the job of humans to clean up their mess.
ReplyDelete*threat to humans
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