Reagan and Prozac

Posted on February 17, 2004 in Crosstalk Culture Thinking

Second in a series inspired by this article by Yule Heibel.

Only the lowest of partisans insists that Nancy Reagan does not have it hard these days. Even with hired help to clean the diapers, dispense tablets, and guide Ronnie through the routines of the twenty-five-hour-day, she still suffers the loss of the mind of the man who she loves. She loves him. She wants what was there until 1986 or so back.

But can she have that Ronald Reagan back?

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Yule Heibel often writes of a future — and a present — where human beings have become assembly line products:

I had a churlish thought on the way home, that there will be many secretly happy men when cloning finally gets rid of mothers and their unfocussed thinking altogether. Or maybe genetic engineering will fix our brains so that doing 15 things at once becomes a piece of cake.

In more recent article about the orthodontic practice of breaking jaws, she sarcastically submits:

I’m completely convinced that….we will see massive genetic engineering very soon to “fix” things that we previously accepted. The pressure is on. Everyone is supposed to have a smile like Julia Roberts, and very soon we’ll be looking back on our benighted age with its surgical breaking of the jaws as a primitive time. Because genetic engineering will eliminate the need for such barbarism….

Submit, submit, submit. Resistance is useless… It’s not just science, it’s the pressure to conform.

It seems to me that Yule is crediting genetic therapy with more than it can actually accomplish. There’s a certain poetic rather than scientific rebellion going on here: I call it poetic because it does not reflect what stem cell therapy, Prozac, and other therapies for the brain can do. In my day, I have often heard the claim that Prozac is a kind of addiction, a mood-impounder which the drug companies use to keep us cattle under control. I’ve been a first hand observer of the effects of Prozac on the mind — I took it from 1993 until 2002; I observed no change in my politics except perhaps a tad farther to the left and experienced no sea change where I transmogrified from a lover of the word and the image into a dull, unthinking corporate clone as Yule implies happens when she speaks of

in this our grim Prozac-ridden age where you take anti-depressants to get over the fact that you’re depressed because You Can’t Do It All and still Smile, Smile, Smile.

Behind this attitude and the one that drives her posts about genetic engineering is a misapprehension of the power of genetic therapy. This, I think, poses a great danger in that people will come to expect too much of it and, perhaps, deny themselves relief on the grounds that they will lose control over their lives. Further behind this is an overzealous subliminal or unconscious manifestation of the claims made in Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, namely that when you make human beings genetically or chemically equal, they will behave exactly alike.

Yule appears to believe that physical damage and irregularity is what makes us individuals. There’s some truth in this, but the case is overstated. Consider the example with which I began: Nancy Reagan undoubtably expects the return of her husband if he survives long enough for stem cell therapy of Alzheimer’s to be implemented. I think we will learn a great deal that is both expected and unexpected when we start repairing the damaged brain. For one thing, we will see that what was lost may not be recoverable: Nancy may end up mothering Ronald from a new infancy. Gene therapy may not be so neatly controllable as it seems or it may have to be used hesitantly, like antibiotics which have through overuse bred resistant germs.

Here’s my own brief list of possible implications of gene therapy:

• Given the limited resources, who will receive the therapy? Will we focus on old men with Alzheimer’s Disease or young people whose brains have been damaged by physical abuse? In terms of the greatest good for the greatest number, I would argue that it is more important to treat the violent than the elderly. The invisible hand of the market, however, which runs on demand rather than utility, may dictate that it be used for those who have only a few years left in their lives. If, as I suspect, a period of re-education is required, the benefits of gene therapy for Alzheimer’s will be limited. And without a profit motive, corporations will not want to invest in developing this further.
• Suppose the hearts of people change and governments direct research towards fixing the kind of damage which makes people violent: will victims be able to forgive? We put down brain damaged criminals like we put down rabid dogs. I suspect that treating these people so that the disease of violence is curtailed or eliminated will suffer the same objections as repealing the death penalty: why should they be cared for over people who have given something to society? They made choices (albeit ones distorted by organic dysfunction), the argument goes: the therapy should not be “wasted” on them. This is an old problem stemming from human reasoning that has plagued crime reform for the last two centuries if not longer: the memory of the violent act is so strong that people blame the person rather than social causes or clefts between the neurons. They cannot or simply do not want to see the potential for redemption.
• Another problem: will people believe that once the gene therapy has been done that there is nothing more that the person needs to do? Many people who take Prozac never seek further therapy. Yet they have been trained to be as they are under the influence of depression. The survival skills that were necessary for life within depression are no longer relevant; the mind must adapt to the new environment. The act of replacing brain cells will not be enough for most people: change must be holistic.
• A last point: will people use gene therapy cosmetically? I am thinking of an age predicted by the futurist biological Dougal Dixon in his Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future: imagine people adding growths, organs, and limbs in increasingly bizarre combinations to their bodies. Will doctors have the courage to tell these Michael Jackson’s “No, this is not an appropriate use of medical resources?” Or will that idiot, the invisible hand of the marketplace, dictate that the cure goes to those who can afford it, regardless of what purposes they turn it to?

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I hate arriving at the end of an article and starting the conclusion with the words “in summary”: I think worrying about gene therapy turning us into the glass bottles that Ruskin hated as the emblems of industrial age Philistinism, conformity, and murder of artistry. Perhaps Ruskin influences Yule — who is an art historian — when he writes:

Variety is essential to beauty, and is so inseparable from it, that there can be no beauty where there is no variety. . . . As variety is indispensable to beauty, so perfect beauty requires that variety to be infinite. It is this infinite variety which constitutes the perfection of Nature, and the want of it which occasions every work of Art to be imperfect.

In this sentiment, I believe, we may find the source for Yule’s fear of Prozac, gene therapy, and other attempts to ease the suffering of the human body and mind: if we all become as perfect as the glassware coming off corporate production lines, designed to fit the needs of profit, what will become of the chips and the scratches that make for distinctiveness? What will happen to wabi, the warped pot or sloppy glob of paint, the sense of the beautifully ugly?

I believe that diversity will survive gene therapy: control over thoughts is not that easy by merely altering hormonal levels and neurons. We will not lose our identity as long as we continue to have unique histories. Even if we manage to smooth the lumps out of the mythical blank slate, there will still be room for individual expression and the creation of the excruciatingly deformed, personal work of art.