No Brainer
A new culture war.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
June 25, 2001 12:15 p.m.

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.