The revenge of the good fairy - Reality Club lecture on human fallibility and technology

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1987 by Mary Catherine Bateson

The Revenge of the Good Fairy

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a man, quite a good-natured sort of a man. One day he performed one of those kind acts that people sometimes do in fairy tales--in fact, he removed a thorn from the paw of a passing retriever. Suddenly music filled the air and, with a flutter of wings, the Good Fairy appeared before him. "Sir,' she said, "your kindness has brought you great good fortune. You are now to be granted a single wish, so ponder carefully what your wish will be.'

"I don't need to think about it even for a minute,' he said. "I've always known what I would ask for if this moment ever came. I want my cock to reach the floor.'

The Good Fairy shuffled her wings uneasily. "Are you absolutely sure?'

"You better believe it,' he said.

Thunder rolled, trumpets blasted, rainbows flickered through the air . . . and there he was, with NO LEGS.

This is a joke rather than a fairy tale, but those whogrew up on folk tales and mythology have met the story before, in hundreds of forms. They range from the story of King Midas, who asked for the golden touch and found himself unable to eat or to touch those he loved without turning them into golden bric-a-brac, to W. W. Jacobs' ghoulish tale of the "Monkey's Paw,' in which a couple wishes for two hundred dollars and then receives it as compensation for the death of their son in an accident. Later, they wish him back to life only to realize that he is so horribly mangled that they quickly wish him the peace of death. Besides these, there are more comical stories, like the story, used by Freud in his discussion of wish fulfillment, of the quarrelsome couple granted three wishes: the greedy wife wishes for sausages; the husband, outraged, wishes them attached to her nose; and the last wish must then be used to get back where they started. More? There were the peasants who wished for beardless grain, and found it eaten by birds. There was the frog that wished to be big as an ox and burst, and then there were some other frogs that wanted a king and were eaten up. Most people can think of further examples.

Tolly Holt said years ago [in Our Own Metaphor],"It's the idea of the conceivable existence of anything which is independent of process. It's the confusion that what I strive for is what I strive for, which is nonsense . . . The illusion that if strawberry short-cake is a good thing, then more strawberry short-cake is a better thing.' In fact, what you wish is not what you wish.

We are dealing here with a matter that evades apparenttautology, and one that has been a focus for continuing preoccupation and admonition, for these are cautionary tales. When you want to find out whether there is a reservoir of folk wisdom on some matter, the tool to use is a Motif Index, which will allow you to look up a subject such as "wishes' and discover that the danger of getting what you wish for has been perceived from Native America to China, from Classical Greece to Australia. There seems to be an ancient folk wisdom that asserts that what you want is not what you want and what you get is not what you want either.

There is a familiar Freudian explanation for thisphenomenon. Infants experience strong and often destructive desires for things that would be dangerous or undesirable--the death of parents, for instance--and must outgrow or repress much of that wishing. The experience of ambivalence is so universal in human life that we must be grateful not to be omnipotent (the problem of an omnipotent being--god or parent or child--suffering from ambivalence is like that of the chameleon on the tartan). Furthermore, children must over time bring their wishes for various kinds of pleasures under the control of the developing ego, the "reality principle,' and learn such skills as deferring gratification. The familiar stories are the vehicles of socialization in these areas.

This essential piece of folk wisdom has apparentlyeluded our culture. We can easily point to cases in which technology has gone awry and use this joke as a parable of the dangers of technology. After the engineers and technicians have taken some age-old human desire and made it come true, we find ourselves with something that doesn't correspond at all to the remembered vivid longing. The longing for immortality is not satisfied by the possibility of artificially sustained vegetative life or by cryogenics, and even the dream of flight is a far cry from the transport we experience in a sealed container, breathing stale air as we go, after endless delays, from one identical airport to another. The Good Fairy must laugh at our inept wishing.

An even more striking example is provided by Reagan'sStrategic Defense Initiative, "Star Wars.' The desire for a perfect protective shield has a suspiciously mythic quality, balancing the desire for the perfect offensive weapon that got us into trouble in the first place. Mythic heroes, if they are lucky, are often simultaneously given a magic weapon (say, a sword or lance) and a magic defense (a special shield, or a protective ointment, or the gift of invisibility). Anyone who doubts that the underlying themes of Star Wars are mythological has only to look at some of the early descriptions of a possible system. In the fall of '85, for instance, designers were talking about a defense in seven layers. The concepts were simply not developed enough at that stage to provide a rationale for that exact number; rather, some scientist somewhere knew, probably at an unconscious level, that it was all magical thinking anyhow, all hocus pocus. Star Wars, if it is deployed, will match perfectly with the revenge of the Good Fairy: it won't work and will at best partially match the desire; it will have horrendous and unanticipated costs; and it will increase the danger of nuclear war from which it was intended magically to protect us. Star Wars matches the joke in yet another way, because it reminds us of the phallic quality of so much fantasy, where "defense,' like "security' and, of course, "intelligence,' is a euphemism for aggression.