Enhancement Comes from Insecurity

University of Minnesota's Carl Elliott wins the "best title" award hands down for "This is Your Country on Drugs" in Yesterday's New York Times. The platform is steroids, but his article is about the evils of enhancement technology more generally. He writes:

Jacques Barzun famously said that to understand America, one must first understand baseball. Never has his remark been more accurate. Professional baseball players may be the most vilified Americans using performance-enhancing drugs, but they are by no means alone. Performance-enhancing drugs have become a part of ordinary American life.

Sounds interesting, right? But this prominent op-ed about the dangers of enhancement is full of fear and trembling, in the key of 'repugnance', toting the line that enhancement is self-denial. Elliott uses the clever anti-enhancement language he has popularized, and that is now trumpeted by Leon Kass (e.g., to attempt to deal with a faltering memory is to try to be "better than well"), and commits all Kass' fallacies, most importantly failing to define what "well" means.

The upshot of Elliott's argument is thus pretty puritanical, substituting luddite condemnation of an enhancement 'industry' for an appraisal of changing ideas about the meaning of disease. It is easy to describe steroid use by baseball players as non-medical, and clearly the physicians who prescribe those medications using libido as a diagnosis are not acting responsibly. But steroids for baseball players are a far cry from Viagra for help with sex. Elliott does not bother to argue for the incredibly implausible link he draws from such behavior to performance enhancements that more properly fit within a medical sphere. So it is no surprise that he is able to conclude that enhancement is a pitiful band aid for the soul: "America's appetite for stimulants, antidepressants and Botox injections looks less like enthusiasm and more like fear." But the connection between baseball and make up doesn't really lead where Carl thinks it does.

People improve themselves all the time, and there is no more human struggle than that to improve one's own, and others', quality of life. That struggle defines much of parenthood, for example, as I argued in a book called The Perfect Baby.

You have to ignore a lot of human experience to demonize all enhancement technologies as a "desire to avoid shame and humiliation," rather than a desire to succeed. Exercise is based on a desire to succeed but a facelift is based on shame? Not always. Plenty of people exercise out of shame, to the point even that they reduce their lives to a thin gruel. Many people take showers, put on powder, and buy clothes because they want to look 'better', but not because they are ashamed and miserable and humiliated.

When you shake out Elliott's (and Kass') arguments about enhancement, they boil down to repugnance, not as much at technology as at habits that offend Kass' and Elliott's sensibilities. This will come as no surprise to those who have read Kass' incredibly conservative writing about food and sex. The danger is that this kind of argument will be viewed as nothing more than patronizing claptrap by most of those who want to use enhancement technology, and thus does nothing whatever to help institutions and individuals put enhancement in context. Abject loathing of any "weird new technologies" for the desire to improve ourselves actually hurts the effort to discern between enhancements that should be slowed, or banned, and those that make a lot of sense. - GM [link]. Updated 12/27.