The Other

The Western Civilization where we live today--through which our history has been written, and our understanding of who we are--possesses a paradoxical definition of what is to be human. This definition involves a very ambivalent and visceral relation to time. This conflicting relation to time often times praises the present as modern and innovative, whereas the past is defined as backwards; a place to never return; a time before history, that is, before written language; a place that belongs to the Other, the uncivilized, whose condition places him closer to the natural world, where he is ruled by his irrational emotions and instincts. The other source of anxiety, to which we project our definition of human, is the future. For us the future creates a lot of anxiety; we fear that our actions and inventions might lead to catastrophes, to the destruction of the species and the natural world. Under this fear, we have constructed narratives about dystopian futures in which our own knowledge and technology have turned evil and oppress us. Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelly and the film The Matrix (1999) by the Wachowski brothers, are two great examples that expose the contradiction surrounding the definition of what is human.
The historical context of Frankenstein is a world of Imperialism within and outside of Europe. When read as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s cult of reason and rationality, Frankenstein’s main character Victor Frankenstein is meant to symbolize the educated gentlemen of the Enlightenment, whose scientific ambitions lead him to his own destruction. The monster created by Dr. Frankenstein relates to the Matrix as both are stories in which human inventions turn against us. But who chose to antagonize who?
The ambition for the power that “absolute” knowledge can provide, obsessed Victor Frankenstein, who, as he studies the natural decay and decomposition of the human body, feels the irresistible urge to discover the means to reverse the corruption of death, and bring life back to a dead body. Dr. Frankenstein believed himself to have achieved what others had tried to do but failed; having power over mortality—the ultimate Other. This ambition, later he acknowledges, was very dangerous and self-destructive. As he states:
If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affection, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.
And then he acknowledges how this ambition and obsession for power had created some of the worse injustices and oppression in history.
If no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affection, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country: America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empire of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.

Thus, we could argue that the creator is as bad as his creation, or even worse. His ambition led to the murder of his family and loved ones. The monster in revenge for his miserable existence kills Victor’s family, lover Elizabeth, and best friend Clerval. The monster asked his creator for a companion with whom he could cure his wretchedness and alienation, but Victor refuses his plead, fearing that they could reproduce and populate the earth with hideous and appalling creatures. But besides his hideous and disproportionate physical appearance, what made the monster nonhuman or inhuman? As we can learn, it was not his aggression and violent acts, because as he confesses, evil was not innately in him.
As yet I looked upon crime as a distant evil; benevolence and generosity were ever present before me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor in the busy scene where so many admirable qualities were called forth and displayed.

The monster’s only ambition was to join humanity, and share the happiness and love displayed by the cottage dwellers he had been observing.
The more I saw of them, the greater became my desire to claim their protection and kindness; my heart yearned to be known and loved by these amiable creatures to see their sweet looks turned towards me with affection, was the utmost limit of my ambition.

What made the monster inhuman was not his hideous appearance, it was the absolute alienation and extreme disgust people displayed towards him; he felt unable to relate to others even though he could reason like humans and learn to speak their language faster than any human can learn, but more importantly he was able to feel human emotions such as anguish, loneliness, and love. He was perhaps more human than the civilized men of the Enlightenment and their merciless imperialism and exploitation of those labeled as the Other.
In the Matrix, machines have become self-conscious and independent of humans and have replaced us. Humans have been transformed into living batteries plugged into a massive computer. They are bred and raised like farm animals. The machines have been able to replicate our world and provide humans with a virtual reality, like a mental playground, in which humans can exercise their psychic energy and imagination. Thus, the machines have the power to look like humans within the virtual reality, and guarantee the functionality of their system against the free humans who hack into the system.
Even though we as a civilization take huge pride in our technological advancement and might, yet we cannot avoid having nightmares about a distant future in which humans are under the power of automated machines. Similar to Frankenstein’s monster, machines and computers are the creation of human scientific knowledge, which we fear, not because they are not like us, but because they seem to have better physical strength and higher mental capabilities that threatens our superiority in the natural order. The film never makes clear what sparked the epic conflict between machines and humankind, it merely states through the character of Morpheus that machines never felt satisfied with the equality and the rights given to them by humans. Very much in tune with our Western Civilization, the humans fighting the Matrix are looking for a messiah who can liberate them. This savior is awakened from the virtual reality, in which he works as a software engineer, known as Thomas Anderson.
In the scene when Morpheus, the leader of the humans, is trapped by the Matrix security agents, the main agent, Smith, explains the rational behind the destruction of the human civilization. In a room overlooking the city below, agent Smith exposes his arguments to Morpheus:
AGENT SMITH
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural
equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do
not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every
natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to
spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same
pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.
Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a
plague. And we are... the cure.

Agent Smith is pointing out our biggest fear; the fact that the West has created a civilization, that unlike the others that have been labeled as primitive, lacks equilibrium with nature; it has been exploiting the planet in a systematic way without pursuing self-sustainability. In that sense we are the true monsters, we have divorced ourselves from the natural environment, and failed with all our human qualities to create a more reasonable civilization. We assume the machines are evil because they are incapable of feeling and expressing emotion as seen with the agents whose expressions and speech are quite regulated, with very little variations. Even in the fighting scenes, they agents look almost intact.
In this battle against machines humans ironically come to rely in faith as the ultimate source of power. Neo, the real life version of Mr. Anderson, finds faith in himself as the savior of mankind and is able to overcome the powerful machines, defeating the agents, including agent Smith. It is ironic that faith becomes the key to defeat the machines, after all we live in a society in which despite the assumed infallibility of scientific reasoning, faith continues to be a resilience force that many seek as the only solution when everything else fails. In the last fight, which starts in the subway EL Station and later continues in a nearby building, Neo, motivated by the love that develops between him and Trinity, is able to reach that faith needed to defeat the machines.
These two fictional narratives allow us to see our construction of the Other, who cannot be equal to us, he must be different, therefore, deserves of exclusion and antagonism. The definition given by the West of what is human is a very conflicting one. Frankenstein’s monster is not considered human, even though he has been created with human parts, because he looks frightening and threatening, or simply because he just looks bizarre, but despite that he can feel and reason like a human. Through Frankenstein we can learn that what makes us human is our ability to coexist with one another, be part of each other’s existence and the environment. It is the alienation and utter loneliness that transforms Frankenstein’s creation into an abominable monster and murderer. The Matrix is not clear as to the reasons machines rise against humans and enslave them. Perhaps stories of this sort are projections of our fear of being the victims of what we have done to each other such as racial exclusion, apartheid, conquest, exploitation and extermination, all justified on superficial and imaginary fixed categories. As a way to legitimize our present civilization, the past is despised, and the future, as the result of a guilty conscience, is a place of uncertainty and dread.