In a recent discussion of the Nature Editorial I mentioned in my last post, one of its authors came under serious criticism for several flaws in its reasoning. Thomas Murray of the Hastings Center characterized calls for "responsible use" of cognition-enhancing drugs in the healthy as utterly naive, especially given the editorial authors' reluctance to specify much in the way of strong legal rules to guarantee the "responsibility" qualifier. Nora Volkow also argued that it's unrealistic to expect any given drug to just make people "smarter" overall--there are trade-offs between focus and creativity, among other mental traits.
Faced with this onslaught, Martha Farah fell back on the old reliable defense of complacent continuumism (which I describe more fully in this paper). This is just like cosmetic surgery, she claimed--people were at first really disturbed about that, but they got used to it.
I think Farah's comparison is more revealing than she would like it to be. Like cosmetic surgery, a market for brain-enhancing drugs may draw drug companies away from real human needs and into more intense service of an already privileged elite. Such drugs also promise to spur positional competition, at younger and younger ages. (One can imagine an unenhanced high school student sullenly blaming her parents for her failure to get into college if the parents refused to ply her with the best mind enhancers at an early age.) I foresee something even more insidious with the mind-enhancing drugs--a fetishization of qualities that can be enhanced by technology over those which cannot. Rather than simply letting, say, academics perform old duties better, they will slowly change our conception of those activities.
Consider the role of steroids in policing. The Village Voice has a long story on some possibly inappropriate steroid/HGH use in the NYPD. I say "possibly" for two reasons: 1) the slippery "therapy/enhancement" distinction here and 2) the threat posed by bulked up criminals. The Voice reports that "the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office knows of 29 cops and at least 10 NYPD civilian employees—all well under the age of 60—who have received prescriptions for [steroids for] hypogonadism." Doctors quoted in the story find it implausible that so many officers would have this disorder--but there are probably other physicians who have a much broader concept of disease. And if suspects are bulking up on illegal substances, who can blame the cops for trying to catch up?
Now consider the spread of concentration-enhancing drugs from students (an old problem) to professors. Andrew Sullivan asks, "So if a prof wants to do a little Provigil, it's no worry for me. Why should it be a worry for anyone but the prof himself?" I think there are several reasons, not least the potential for medicalized competition to invade spheres of life we now deem constitutive of our identity. But for now let me just focus on how the police and profs examples intersect.
Think about the balance of scholarship produced in a regime where some labor under the supercharging influence of Provigil, and others forbear. The former will presumably generate more work than the latter. That may be fine in relatively technical fields (who wants to slow down the sequencing of a genome?). But in areas where ideology matters, the potential power of the pill-poppers can be a problem. We need to ask: what are the reasons people are not taking the drugs? A (wise) risk-aversion? A fear of disadvantaging others who can't afford them? A religious concern about "playing God"? And finally, are the people who have all these concerns really the ones we want to be drowned out by super-stimulated, super-productive others?
My basic point here is that Sullivan (and many other libertarians) make an erroneous presumption that the decision to use the drug is wholly distinct from whatever ideology a particular person has. To them, the technology is neutral in itself, and can be freely used (or not used) by anyone. In fact, the drugs fit in very well with certain ideologies and not at all with others. This is an old theme in the philosophy of technology, but is hard to encapsulate in a soundbite (itself a technology far more amenable to some ideologies than others).
At risk of stretching an analogy to the breaking point, I think professors and police face a similarly competitive landscape. The former battle for "mind share," the latter for order. The more we understand the true lesson of Darwin/Dawkins--the pervasiveness of competitive struggle in daily life--the better we can see the need for "arms control agreements" regarding enhancement technologies. (Hopefully they will be more effective than the failed policies of the past.) The question is whether we will permit ourselves to direct evolution or to be the mere products of blind technological forces. Those opting for the latter route make Benjamin's words on the "angel of history" all too prophetic:
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
--Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History", cited here.
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