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G. Pascal Zachary used some of the New York Times' ink (and bandwidth) this past weekend to toss together a whole bunch of ideas about enhancing human capacity for creativity. The piece is kind of all over the place, but he essentially sorts the many efforts into two general categories of assistance: computational and pharmaceutical. So far, the computer geeks have made the most explicit progress. They keep getting tripped up, though. Said one Intel researcher to Zachary, "We don't have a link structure for your personal stuff. We’re not getting at the content." Or to look at the challenge a bit differently, computer scientists don't have much experience hacking the human body (if only we came with an Ethernet jack and an API). But you know who does? That's right. Drug companies. Which prompts Zachary to ask, "Might we be heading, however fitfully, toward a new industrial age when Microsoft buys Merck to better compete with Google?"

Just think for a moment about that potential family of brands. Introducing extended-release, extra-strength Creativity XP -- from the people who brought you Windows ME and Vioxx!
-Greg Dahlmann

Perfect People: the Grudge Match

Perfect people: is it a good aim? Art Caplan and Carl Elliott debate in Public Library of Science. It is fun to read but the argument is pretty much what you expect. Caplan discharges the debate as somewhat silly:

Beating up on the pursuit of perfection is silly. As Salvadore Dali famously pointed out, “Have no fear of perfection—you'll never reach it.” Critics of those who allegedly seek to perfect human beings know this. While often couching their critiques in language that assails the pursuit of perfection, what they really are attacking is the far more oft-expressed—albeit far less lofty—desire to improve or enhance a particular behavior or trait by the application of emerging biomedical knowledge in genetics, neuroscience, pharmacology, and physiology.

And Elliott responds that it isn't a conservative defense of human nature that motivates him, rather he is concerned about misplaced energies devoted to enhancement instead of more important aims; in particular Elliott is as always primarily fighting against big pharma's promotion of enhancement:

Caplan does not defend medical enhancement so much as attack its critics. Or rather, he attacks a small group of conservative critics who want to preserve “human nature.” He dispatches those critics with admirable precision, but I am not sure why he believes that group of critics includes me. My worry about enhancement technologies has little to do with human nature. My worry is that we will ignore important human needs at the expense of frivolous human desires; that dominant social norms will crowd out those of the minority; that the self-improvement agenda will be set not by individuals, but by powerful corporate interests; and that in the pursuit of betterment, we will actually make ourselves worse off.

Still, it is a fun read. And maybe it will get a few more copies of Better than Well and The Perfect Baby into circulation. Come to think of it, maybe we could stage a series of these wrestling matches ... yeah ... that's the ticket ...

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.