INSTANT FUKUYAMA'S GONNA GET YOU :

Brains: Good, Bad, and Modified (Glenn Harlan Reynolds, 06/05/2002, Tech Central Station)

You can control the brain chemistry of large, unconsenting populations with less sophisticated technologies if you get enough government involved. In fact, we're already doing that at the behest of many in public schools, for what else is it when children, usually boys, who in a prior age were simply regarded as unruly are now given Ritalin and other medications intended to change their classroom behavior by changing their brain chemistry? While professional doomsayers and White House committees study the ethics of cloning, millions of American children are--and this is not alarmism, but literal truth--having their minds controlled by the government, with surprisingly little debate. Why the disparity in attention?

Mark this day down in your calendar, for today a pig flew, a cat slept with a dog, and hell froze over--or at any rate, Instapundit put aside his vendetta and became a Fukuyamist for at least a day. You see, while the good Professor and his fellow clonophiles have seized on the fairly minimal discussion of cloning in Mr. Fukuyama's book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of The Biotechnology Revolution, it is far more concerned with precisely what Mr. Reynolds is getting at here : the way in which biotechnology generally is being used to alter human nature and the political consequences that may have for liberal democracy and for the species. Mr. Fukuyama even discusses the example of Ritalin, at some length, in making his argument that such technologies are dangerous exactly because we are using them to control essential features of mankind. In the case of Ritalin, as both Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Fukuyama suggest, drugs are being employed to quiet down naturally rambunctious children, mostly boys.

Actually, Mr. Reynold's libertarian distrust of government leads him astray in one important respect and it is perhaps an indicator of why he underestimates the dangers of cloning and genetic engineering. He treats the overprescription of Ritalin as some kind of attempt by government to control minds. In reality, it is not government, but we who are doing this. It is first of all parents, second of all pediatricians, and only third of all government--in its most benign form, that of teachers and principals--who
are engaged in this genuinely frightening process. These are, of course, the three groups in society that we would expect to be most protective of the young, but they are instead drugging them into submission. Mr. Reynolds' mistake here is the classic libertarian one of assuming Man to be basically good until his essential goodness is corrupted by government. (Similarly, the Left assumes Man to be basically good until corrupted by acquisitive urges and capitalist economic systems). But as Judeo-Christianity has been teaching us for thousands of years, we are born sinners and are perfectly capable of so treating even our own children. We should hardly be surprised that having aborted some 30 million kids over the past three decades, parents are also showing themselves willing to exercise neuropharmacological control over the ones they decide to raise.

Mr. Fukuyama also makes the point that this is a form of control that we seem all too eager to exercise over ourselves. He cites Prozac in particular, as a drug that people increasingly use to take the rough edges off of their own personalities and cope with the challenges of life. Some of the folks being prescribed drugs like prozac may be incompetent at the time, but many more are consciously and rationally choosing to have their brain chemistry altered. This is certainly no government action.

Cloning and genetic engineering and other non-drug related biotechnologies enter into this equation because it seems inevitable that what folks are trying to do with drugs they will try to do with genes and because these changes, unlike those induced by drugs, will be permanent. It's bad enough that adults are turning young boys into pliable zombies--imagine a future where males never snap out of this state. Mr. Reynolds is worried about the notion that people may not be consenting to these kinds of controls, but what of an age when consent is taken away from you before you're even born. You can stop taking Ritalin eventually, but where do you go when you are bred for a certain level of lassitude?

The most important thing to realize here is that there's something attractive about such a future. If much of the violence that surrounds humankind is a function of the way the male brain works and we can reduce that violence by changing those brains, many will find this an acceptable trade off. Similarly, advocates of genetic manipulation like to present a beneficent image of a mankind stripped of horrible genetic defects, but, given such power, aren't we also likely to engineer away other troublesome aspects of the human condition--first excess energy, violence, depression, stupidity and the like, but then homosexuality, laziness, fatness, and other traits that parents may simply not want in their children. After all, even Rosie O'Donell when it came time to select a sperm donor did not accept the first available tube; she selected that of a healthy, intelligent, blonde, athletic, white guy. For all the cant about accepting everyone the way they are, we all want our kids to be "perfect"--and perfect isn't likely to be like you and it sure as heck isn't me. Perfect may ultimately prove to be a kind of being that is so different from us that it won't even be recognizably human. And in that post-human future what happens to our social arrangements--especially our system of government?

Mightn't it be the case that we'll eventually succeed in creating that basically "good" being, one with no propensity to sin and violence, but in the process we'll have robbed him of the drives and desires that make freedom so precious to us? These post-humans could be free in ways that we can't, because they'll be far too docile to be a threat to each other. Theirs will be the freedom of the sheep--bland, boring, unproductive, meaningless. Government, which is fundamentally instituted to protect us from ourselves, will no longer be necessary. The libertarian utopia will be arrived. But the price we'll have paid will be too horrible to contemplate.

This is just one of the warnings that Mr. Fukuyama sounds in his book. Thankfully, Mr. Reynolds seems to have finally gotten past his own focus on cloning and he's apparently turning his attention to the broader threat being heralded by bioethicists--that we may destroy human freedom, and maybe even humanity, as we apply biotechnology to ourselves. Here is ground that conservatives and libertarians can defend together. Are we all Fukuyamists now?

UPDATE :
Professor Reynolds responds, but appears not to comprehend the import of his own essay. On the one hand, he decries the use of Ritalin on school age boys (which he still seems to think is some kind of government plot--the kids must all be orphans) and suggests that such neuroscientific controls might easily be used to "make us love Big Brother", but on the other hand, in this response, he claims that "Neuroscience abuses, despite the lack of Ethics Establishment scrutiny, are largely nonexistent". What is the dosing of millions of non-consenting boys with a mind-altering drug if it's not an abuse of neuroscience? And what is Mr. Reynolds doing in sounding the alarm about this abuse if not joining Mr. Fukuyama in nattering nabobbery? He may find the company he's now keeping to be disconcerting, but he's still singing from the same Ethical Establishment hymnal as Mr. Fukuyama.

Unfortunately, Mr. Reynolds is correct that thus far the exclusively conservative nattering has been "useless". It's all to easy for libertarians and the Left to dismiss such ethical concerns as religious dogma, Luddism, and fear of science. As the Professor's column reflects, folks aren't either reading Mr. Fukuyama closely or listening to what he has to say. They've pigeon-holed him as the guy who's afraid of cloning and wants to stop science, which saves them having to actually address the political points he raises. But, perhaps, now that we see some common ground emerging, conservatives and libertarians can achieve together what conservatives have failed to accomplish on our own, sensible limitations on the use of science to affect fundamental changes in human nature, changes which pose a threat to the political freedoms that both camps treasure, whatever our differences on other issues.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2002 7:57 PM