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new culture war is emerging. This one pits "minders" against "brainers,"
and cuts across the usual political lines. Brainers build their
cultural castles on the rock of cutting-edge science: genetics,
brain biology, and evolutionary psychology. Minders craft a worldview
the old-fashioned way, by drawing on religion, philosophy, and classic
social science.
Recent breakthroughs in bioengineering, neurobiology, and DNA research
have had powerful and disturbing cultural effects (disturbing to
a minder like me, that is). With the popularization of sociobiology
(also called "evolutionary psychology"), and the rise of brain-based
theories meant to justify the mass consumption of drugs like Ritalin
and Prozac, the brainers are on the march. But the minders have
awakened to the threat and are striking back.
Of course life is complicated. There are lots of important exceptions
to these broad categorizations. A brilliant brainer like Frances
Fukuyama draws deeply on the European philosophical tradition. The
unclassifiable Christina Hoff Sommers grounds gender differences
in a hard-wired brain, while also fighting against the over-prescription
of Ritalin. But broadly considered, there is a party of minders,
and they have been speaking out of late against the theory and practice
of the brainers.
These thoughts are brought to mind (or is it brain?) by a wise and
important article, "The Medicalization of Unhappiness," by Ronald
W. Dworkin (not the liberal legal philosopher) in the latest issue
of The
Public Interest. Dworkin points with concern to the massive
surge (40 percent in the last decade) in the use of psychotropic
medications like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil to treat depression.
He argues that much of what is now being diagnosed and medicated
as clinical depression is actually ordinary human unhappiness —
the sort of thing that in the past would have been dealt with by
religious, spiritual, or other cultural guides. Agreeing that the
rushed and impersonal character of managed care has pressured physicians
to go for the quick fix, Dworkin nonetheless points to an additional
factor — a theory increasingly widespread among medical professionals
and patients (the biogenicamine theory), that attempts to explain
all mental states in terms of their biochemical origins.
Since, according to the biogenic amine theory, happiness is ultimately
just a matter of brain biochemistry, there can be nothing troubling
about the use of psychotropic drugs to treat even ordinary human
sadness. If happiness itself is nothing but an excess or deficiency
of certain chemicals in the brain, then simply by changing the chemical
balance, authentic happiness is achieved.
Dworkin effectively explodes this view. The discovery of drugs with
the ability to affect our mood has erroneously led many to conclude
that mood — indeed the human mind itself — can be reduced
to biochemistry. But the truth is, drugs like Prozac are just very
sophisticated versions of alcohol. They don't really create "happiness."
Instead they alter our mood indirectly, by blocking mental access
to our real-world problems. So the inner peace we gain from Prozac
comes at the cost of a subtle but powerful detachment from both
our authentic inner life and our place in the world around us. The
biogenic amine theory is a way of distracting ourselves from that
uncomfortable truth — a way of allowing doctors and patients
to deny that by prescribing and taking drugs, we are running away
from our troubles (and ourselves), or encouraging others to do so.
So, although Dworkin himself doesn't quite put it this way, the
theory of chemically based happiness is a sort of religion —
a central myth in a "scientifically" based world-view that explains
and treats unhappiness in religion's stead.
Dworkin's piece may be the most recent salvo in the war of the minders
against the brainers, but it is by no means the only one. Back in
April of 1999, Mary Eberstadt published an important and controversial
piece called, "Why
Ritalin Rules," in Policy Review.As with the use of Prozac
and related drugs to treat depression, the use of Ritalin to treat
Attention Deficit Disorder has increased dramatically in recent
years, with Ritalin prescription more than doubling in the first
half of the nineties, and production up 700% over the entire decade.
So how comes it, asks Eberstadt, that while any schoolchild can
recite the anti-drug catechism, we are medicating up to four million
youngsters with a drug virtually indistinguishable from cocaine?
(The two drugs are very difficult to differentiate chemically, and
animals given the opportunity to self-medicate either show no preference
for Ritalin over cocaine, or actually prefer Ritalin.) The Ritalin
boom, like the Prozac boom, began in the early nineties with Peter
Kramer's Listening
To Prozac. And in parallel to Dworkin's claim that with
Prozac, we are medicalizing ordinary human unhappiness, Eberstadt
asks whether, with Ritalin, we are pathologizing childhood itself.
The interesting thing is that Ritalin's undoubted ability to increase
compliance and concentration has spawned the search (paralleling
the case of Prozac) for a brain-based theory of mental functioning.
But to no avail.
Organizations that advocate for those diagnosed with Attention Deficit
Disorder are convinced that ADD is neurobiologically based, but
all attempts to develop a positive, brain-based medical or scientific
test for this "disease" have proved futile. Instead, as Eberstadt
shows, supposedly scientific tests for ADD are based on behavioral
criteria so loose that just about anyone can be said to have the
disease. And in parallel to Dworkin's point about Prozac, Eberstadt
shows that Ritalin seems to work through a kind of "numbing" of
ordinary reality — a numbing that many of the drug's users
find deeply disturbing.
The parallels between Dworkin's critique of Prozac and Eberstadt's
fusillade against the Ritalin movement are obvious and striking.
In each case, technological innovation in the form of a psychotropic
drug has spawned an overambitious, simplistic, and not particularly
scientific attempt to reduce the mind to the brain. But the grandest
such venture of all may be the "science" of sociobiology, which
has captured the popular imagination — very often the conservative
imagination — in the wake of recent advances in genetic science
and engineering.
A third (and brilliant) broadside from the camp of the minders,
was fired off by Andrew Ferguson this past March in the pages of
The Weekly Standard this time against evolutionary psychology
(a.k.a. "sociobiology"). Ferguson's piece, "Evolutionary
Psychology and Its True Believers," makes the point that this
apparently scientific system of thought is not in fact scientific,
but depends at its core upon question-begging, circular reasoning,
and unsubstantiated speculation about an evolutionary past which
is permanently inaccessible to empirical research. Evolutionary
psychology, Feguson concludes, is a modern religion, a religion
that exchanges human complexity for the illusion of understanding.
To be fair, there is no worldview or explanatory scheme — be
it classic philosophy, Marxism, Weberian sociology, psychoanalysis,
or indeed traditional religion — that can both grapple with
human complexity and satisfy the cannons of verifiability that rule
the natural sciences. Not everything that is real or important can
be measured with scientific accuracy. In fact most of what's important
in life cannot be so measured. But evolutionary psychologists understand
themselves to be empirical natural scientists, and in that, as Ferguson
shows, they are much mistaken.
The trouble with evolutionary psychology, as Ferguson points out,
is that its reduction of the mind to a simple series of genetically
precooked instructions takes the humanity out of Man and brings
him to the level of the beast — quite literally, as we see
from the enthusiastic embrace of sociobiology by Peter Singer, the
(leftist) ethicist who believes that some animals have more right
to live than some humans.
Singer is a utilitarian leveler of consciousness. What's important
to him is that animals and people are conscious, and that each feels
pleasure and pain. All that matters to Singer is that both animals
and men should increase their pleasure and reduce their pain. But
Singer's notion of happiness is flattened out in precisely the way
that happiness has been flattened out by believers in the "biogenic
amine theory." Neither Singer nor the party of chemical happiness
understands that mere upsurges of pleasure, whether experienced
in limited animal consciousness, or through a human being's drug-induced
distraction from the reality and complexity of his own inner life,
are not the same as true human happiness.
From the point of view of a confirmed minder like myself, evolutionary
psychology is a poisoned pill for the many conservatives who have
ingested it. Not only is it mistaken, it is mistaken in a way that
diminishes our humanity, and thereby encourages the manipulation
of Man by technology and the state. Conservatives have bought into
sociobiology as a way of fighting the Left-utopian claim that everything
important in humanity and society is cultural — and therefore infinitely
malleable. But culture
is filled with contradiction and constraint; conservatives should
not concede this critical realm of human life to the Left. Culture,
properly understood, reveals the folly of utopian schemes. Of course
human nature exists, and does indeed put constraints upon social
engineering, but there is no need to understand human nature in
the speculative and simplistic terms of evolutionary psychology.
It is only the apparent imprimatur of scientific certainty that
lends the claims of evolutionary psychology their luster. But as
Ferguson shows, the scientific standing of evolutionary psychology
is an illusion — and a religious illusion at that.
Human beings need religion — comprehensive answers to life's
fundamental questions, and ways of relieving suffering that flow
from those answers. Those who no longer place their faith in religion,
as traditionally conceived, must make a religion out of such beliefs
as remain credible to them. Given his commitment to democracy and
science, modern Man is prone to make a religion out of each.
Yet, as noted in my earlier piece, "The
Church of Liberalism," transforming liberal democratic ideals
into a religion turns out to be a way of corrupting those ideals,
and rendering them illiberal. So, too, does the elevation of science
into a religion render science unscientific. Yet our religious needs
must be served. And given encroaching secularism, the very real
scientific and technological breakthroughs of our era are too exciting
not to be seized upon as fantastic keys to the riddle of life. Psychotropic
drugs may not do what their advocates think they do, but they do
indeed have powerful effects. (And by the way, as both Dworkin and
Eberstadt acknowledge, for those who are legitimately diagnosed
with clinical depression or severe hyperactivity, drugs such as
Prozac and Ritalin can be both beneficial and important.)
The church of liberalism and the church of science are not the same.
On the contrary, as the pieces by Dworkin, Eberstadt, and Ferguson
show, there are conservative minders as well as conservative brainers.
And the Left is divided too. Some homosexuals, for example, point
to an alleged gay gene, while others harp on the social construction
of sexuality. As Eberstadt has noted, advocacy groups are rapidly
parleying claims of brain-based ADD into affirmative action for
affluent white people. Yet Left postmodernists remain suspicious
of neurobiology's claims, and suspicious of science in general.
Scientifically questionable fantasies about man's early evolution,
and simplistic brain-based theories of mind, will continue to be
put to use by forces on both the Left and the Right. The lines in
this new culture war may not always be clear, but the outcome will
nonetheless reveal much about the degree of humanity we shall be
able to retain in the face of technology's inexorable advance.
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