Being a bit behind the curve, I had only just heard of the digital
revolution last February when Louis Rossetto, cofounder of Wired magazine,
wearing a shirt with no collar and his hair as long as Felix Mendelssohn's,
looking every inch the young California visionary, gave a speech before
the Cato Institute announcing the dawn of the twenty-first century's
digital civilization. As his text, he chose the maverick Jesuit scientist
and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who fifty years ago prophesied
that radio, television, and computers would create a "noösphere",
an electronic membrane covering the earth and wiring all humanity
together in a single nervous system. Geographic locations, national
boundaries, the old notions of markets and political processes--all
would become irrelevant. With the Internet spreading over the globe
at an astonishing pace, said Rossetto, that marvelous modem-driven
moment is almost at hand.
Could be. But
something tells me that within ten years, by 2006, the entire digital
universe is going to seem like pretty mundane stuff compared to a
new technology that right now is but a mere glow radiating from a
tiny number of American and Cuban (yes, Cuban) hospitals and laboratories.
It is called brain imaging, and anyone who cares to get up early and
catch a truly blinding twenty-first-century dawn will want to keep
an eye on it.
Brain imaging
refers to techniques for watching the human brain as it functions,
in real time. The most advanced forms currently are three-dimensional
electroencephalography using mathematical models; the more familiar
PET scan (positron-emission tomography); the new fMRI (functional
magnetic resonance imaging), which shows brain blood-flow patterns,
and MRS (magnetic resonance spectroscopy), which measures biochemical
changes in the brain; and the even newer PET reporter gene/PET reporter
probe, which is, in fact, so new that it still has that length of
heavy lumber for a name. Used so far only in animals and a few desperately
sick children, the PET reporter gene/PET reporter probe pinpoints
and follows the activity of specific genes. On a scanner screen you
can actually see the genes light up inside the brain.
By 1996 standards,
these are sophisticated devices. Ten years from now, however, they
may seem primitive compared to the stunning new windows into the brain
that will have been developed.
Brain imaging
was invented for medical diagnosis. But its far greater importance
is that it may very well confirm, in ways too precise to be disputed,
certain theories about "the mind," "the self,"
"the soul," and "free will" that are already devoutly
believed in by scholars in what is now the hottest field in the academic
world, neuroscience. Granted, all those skeptical quotation marks
are enough to put anybody on the qui vive right away, but Ultimate
Skepticism is part of the brilliance of the dawn I have promised.
Neuroscience,
the science of the brain and the central nervous system, is on the
threshold of a unified theory that will have an impact as powerful
as that of Darwinism a hundred years ago. Already there is a new Darwin,
or perhaps I should say an updated Darwin, since no one ever believed
more religiously in Darwin I than he does. His name is Edward O. Wilson.
He teaches zoology at Harvard, and he is the author of two books of
extraordinary influence, The Insect Societies and Sociobiology: The
New Synthesis. Not A new synthesis but The new synthesis; in terms
of his stature in neuroscience, it is not a mere boast.
Wilson has created
and named the new field of sociobiology, and he has compressed its
underlying premise into a single sentence. Every human brain, he says,
is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled
in by experience but as "an exposed negative waiting to be slipped
into developer fluid." You can develop the negative well or you
can develop it poorly, but either way you are going to get precious
little that is not already imprinted on the film. The print is the
individual's genetic history, over thousands of years of evolution,
and there is not much anybody can do about it. Furthermore, says Wilson,
genetics determine not only things such as temperament, role preferences,
emotional responses, and levels of aggression, but also many of our
most revered moral choices, which are not choices at all in any free-will
sense but tendencies imprinted in the hypothalamus and limbic regions
of the brain, a concept expanded upon in 1993 in a much-talked-about
book, The Moral Sense , by James Q. Wilson (no kin to Edward O.).
The
Neuroscientific view of life
This, the neuroscientific view of life, has become the strategic high
ground in the academic world, and the battle for it has already spread
well beyond the scientific disciplines and, for that matter, out into
the general public. Both liberals and conservatives without a scientific
bone in their bodies are busy trying to seize the terrain. The gay
rights movement, for example, has fastened onto a study published
in July of 1993 by the highly respected Dean Hamer of the National
Institutes of Health, announcing the discovery of "the gay gene."
Obviously, if homosexuality is a genetically determined trait, like
left-handedness or hazel eyes, then laws and sanctions against it
are attempts to legislate against Nature. Conservatives, meantime,
have fastened upon studies indicating that men's and women's brains
are wired so differently, thanks to the long haul of evolution, that
feminist attempts to open up traditionally male roles to women are
the same thing: a doomed violation of Nature.
Wilson himself
has wound up in deep water on this score; or cold water, if one need
edit. In his personal life Wilson is a conventional liberal, PC, as
the saying goes--he is , after all, a member of the Harvard faculty--concerned
about environmental issues and all the usual things. But he has said
that "forcing similar role identities" on both men and women
"flies in the face of thousands of years in which mammals demonstrated
a strong tendency for sexual division of labor. Since this division
of labor is persistent from hunter-gatherer through agricultural and
industrial societies, it suggests a genetic origin. We do not know
when this trait evolved in human evolution or how resistant it is
to the continuing and justified pressures for human rights."
"Resistant"
was Darwin II, the neuroscientist, speaking. "Justified"
was the PC Harvard liberal. He was not PC or liberal enough. Feminist
protesters invaded a conference where Wilson was appearing, dumped
a pitcher of ice water, cubes and all, over his head, and began chanting,
"You're all wet! You're all wet!" The most prominent feminist
in America, Gloria Steinem, went on television and, in an interview
with John Stossel of ABC, insisted that studies of genetic differences
between male and female nervous systems should cease forthwith.
But that turned
out to be mild stuff in the current political panic over neuroscience.
In February of 1992, Frederick K. Goodwin, a renowned psychiatrist,
head of the federal Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration,
and a certified yokel in the field of public relations, made the mistake
of describing, at a public meeting in Washington, the National Institute
of Mental Health's ten-year-old Violence Initiative. This was an experimental
program whose hypothesis was that, as among monkeys in the jungle--Goodwin
was noted for his monkey studies--much of the criminal mayhem in the
United States was caused by a relatively few young males who were
genetically predisposed to it; who were hardwired for violent crime,
in short. Out in the jungle, among mankind's closest animal relatives,
the chimpanzees, it seemed that a handful of genetically twisted young
males were the ones who committed practically all of the wanton murders
of other males and the physical abuse of females. What if the same
were true among human beings? What if, in any given community, it
turned out to be a handful of young males with toxic DNA who were
pushing statistics for violent crime up to such high levels? The Violence
Initiative envisioned identifying these individuals in childhood,
somehow, some way, someday, and treating them therapeutically with
drugs. The notion that crime-ridden urban America was a "jungle,"
said Goodwin, was perhaps more than just a tired old metaphor.
That did it.
That may have been the stupidest single word uttered by an American
public official in the year 1992. The outcry was immediate. Senator
Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative John Dingell of
Michigan (who, it became obvious later, suffered from hydrophobia
when it came to science projects) not only condemned Goodwin's remarks
as racist but also delivered their scientific verdict: Research among
primates "is a preposterous basis" for analyzing anything
as complex as "the crime and violence that plagues our country
today." (This came as surprising news to NASA scientists who
had first trained and sent a chimpanzee called Ham up on top of a
Redstone rocket into suborbital space flight and then trained and
sent another one, called Enos, which is Greek for "man,"
up on an Atlas rocket and around the earth in orbital space flight
and had thereby accurately and completely predicted the physical,
psychological, and task-motor responses of the human astronauts, Alan
Shepard and John Glenn, who repeated the chimpanzees' flights and
tasks months later.) The Violence Initiative was compared to Nazi
eugenic proposals for the extermination of undesirables. Dingell's
Michigan colleague, Representative John Conyers, then chairman of
the Government Operations Committee and senior member of the Congressional
Black Caucus, demanded Goodwin's resignation--and got it two days
later, whereupon the government, with the Department of Health and
Human Services now doing the talking, denied that the Violence Initiative
had ever existed. It disappeared down the memory hole, to use Orwell's
term.
A conference
of criminologists and other academics interested in the neuroscientific
studies done so far for the Violence Initiative--a conference underwritten
in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health--had been
scheduled for May of 1993 at the University of Maryland. Down went
the conference, too; the NIH drowned it like a kitten. Last year,
a University of Maryland legal scholar named David Wasserman tried
to reassemble the troops on the QT, as it were, in a hall all but
hidden from human purview in a hamlet called Queenstown in the foggy,
boggy boondocks of Queen Annes County on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
The NIH, proving it was a hard learner, quietly provided $133,000
for the event but only after Wasserman promised to fireproof the proceedings
by also inviting scholars who rejected the notion of a possible genetic
genesis of crime and scheduling a cold-shower session dwelling on
the evils of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century.
No use, boys! An army of protesters found the poor cringing devils
anyway and stormed into the auditorium chanting, "Maryland conference,
you can't hide--we know you're pushing genocide!" It took two
hours for them to get bored enough to leave, and the conference ended
in a complete muddle with the specially recruited fireproofing PC
faction issuing a statement that said: "Scientists as well as
historians and sociologists must not allow themselves to provide academic
respectability for racist pseudoscience." Today, at the NIH,
the term Violence Initiative is a synonym for taboo . The present
moment resembles that moment in the Middle Ages when the Catholic
Church forbade the dissection of human bodies, for fear that what
was discovered inside might cast doubt on the Christian doctrine that
God created man in his own image.
Even more radio-active
is the matter of intelligence, as measured by IQ tests. Privately--not
many care to speak out--the vast majority of neuroscientists believe
the genetic component of an individual's intelligence is remarkably
high. Your intelligence can be improved upon, by skilled and devoted
mentors, or it can be held back by a poor upbringing--i.e., the negative
can be well developed or poorly developed--but your genes are what
really make the difference. The recent ruckus over Charles Murray
and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve is probably just the beginning
of the bitterness the subject is going to create.
Not long ago,
according to two neuroscientists I interviewed, a firm called Neurometrics
sought out investors and tried to market an amazing but simple invention
known as the IQ Cap. The idea was to provide a way of testing intelligence
that would be free of "cultural bias," one that would not
force anyone to deal with words or concepts that might be familiar
to people from one culture but not to people from another. The IQ
Cap recorded only brain waves; and a computer, not a potentially biased
human test-giver, analyzed the results. It was based on the work of
neuroscientists such as E. Roy John 1 , who is now one of the major
pioneers of electroencephalographic brain imaging; Duilio Giannitrapani,
author of The Electrophysiology of Intellectual Functions ; and David
Robinson, author of The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Personality
Assessment: Toward a Biologically Based Theory of Intelligence and
Cognition and many other monographs famous among neuroscientists.
I spoke to one researcher who had devised an IQ Cap himself by replicating
an experiment described by Giannitrapani in The Electrophysiology
of Intellectual Functions. It was not a complicated process. You attached
sixteen electrodes to the scalp of the person you wanted to test.
You had to muss up his hair a little, but you didn't have to cut it,
much less shave it. Then you had him stare at a marker on a blank
wall. This particular researcher used a raspberry- red thumbtack.
Then you pushed a toggle switch. In sixteen seconds the Cap's computer
box gave you an accurate prediction (within one-half of a standard
deviation) of what the subject would score on all eleven subtests
of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or, in the case of children,
the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--all from sixteen seconds'
worth of brain waves. There was nothing culturally biased about the
test whatsoever. What could be cultural about staring at a thumbtack
on a wall? The savings in time and money were breathtaking. The conventional
IQ test took two hours to complete; and the overhead, in terms of
paying test-givers, test-scorers, test-preparers, and the rent, was
$100 an hour at the very least. The IQ Cap required about fifteen
minutes and sixteen seconds--it took about fifteen minutes to put
the electrodes on the scalp--and about a tenth of a penny's worth
of electricity. Neurometrics's investors were rubbing their hands
and licking their chops. They were about to make a killing.
In fact-- nobody
wanted their damnable IQ Cap!
It wasn't simply
that no one believed you could derive IQ scores from brainwaves--it
was that nobody wanted to believe it could be done. Nobody wanted
to believe that human brainpower is... that hardwired . Nobody wanted
to learn in a flash that... the genetic fix is in . Nobody wanted
to learn that he was... a hardwired genetic mediocrity ...and that
the best he could hope for in this Trough of Mortal Error was to live
out his mediocre life as a stress-free dim bulb. Barry Sterman of
UCLA, chief scientist for a firm called Cognitive Neurometrics, who
has devised his own brain-wave technology for market research and
focus groups, regards brain-wave IQ testing as possible--but in the
current atmosphere you "wouldn't have a Chinaman's chance of
getting a grant" to develop it.
Science
is a Court from which there is no Appeal
Here we begin to sense the chill that emanates from the hottest field
in the academic world. The unspoken and largely unconscious premise
of the wrangling over neuroscience's strategic high ground is: We
now live in an age in which science is a court from which there is
no appeal. And the issue this time around, at the end of the twentieth
century, is not the evolution of the species, which can seem a remote
business, but the nature of our own precious inner selves.
The elders of
the field, such as Wilson, are well aware of all this and are cautious,
or cautious compared to the new generation. Wilson still holds out
the possibility--I think he doubts it, but he still holds out the
possibility--that at some point in evolutionary history, culture began
to influence the development of the human brain in ways that cannot
be explained by strict Darwinian theory. But the new generation of
neuroscientists are not cautious for a second. In private conversations,
the bull sessions, as it were, that create the mental atmosphere of
any hot new science--and I love talking to these people--they express
an uncompromising determinism.
They start with
the most famous statement in all of modern philosophy, Descartes's
"Cogito ergo sum," "I think, therefore I am,"
which they regard as the essence of "dualism," the old-fashioned
notion that the mind is something distinct from its mechanism, the
brain and the body. (I will get to the second most famous statement
in a moment.) This is also known as the "ghost in the machine"
fallacy, the quaint belief that there is a ghostly "self"
somewhere inside the brain that interprets and directs its operations.
Neuroscientists involved in three-dimensional electroencephalography
will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where
consciousness or self-consciousness ( Cogito ergo sum ) is located.
This is merely an illusion created by a medley of neurological systems
acting in concert. The young generation takes this yet one step further.
Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of
your brain and nervous system--and since your brain arrived fully
imprinted at birth--what makes you think you have free will? Where
is it going to come from? What "ghost," what "mind,"
what "self," what "soul," what anything that will
not be immediately grabbed by those scornful quotation marks, is going
to bubble up your brain stem to give it to you? I have heard neuroscientists
theorize that, given computers of sufficient power and sophistication,
it would be possible to predict the course of any human being's life
moment by moment, including the fact that the poor devil was about
to shake his head over the very idea. I doubt that any Calvinist of
the sixteenth century ever believed so completely in predestination
as these, the hottest and most intensely rational young scientists
in the United States at the end of the twentieth.
Since the late
1970s, in the Age of Wilson, college students have been heading into
neuroscience in job lots. The Society for Neuroscience was founded
in 1970 with 1,100 members. Today, one generation later, its membership
exceeds 26,000. The Society's latest convention, in San Diego, drew
23,052 souls, making it one of the biggest professional conventions
in the country. In the venerable field of academic philosophy, young
faculty members are jumping ship in embarrassing numbers and shifting
into neuroscience. They are heading for the laboratories. Why wrestle
with Kant's God, Freedom, and Immortality when it is only a matter
of time before neuroscience, probably through brain imaging, reveals
the actual physical mechanism that sends these mental constructs,
these illusions, synapsing up into the Broca's and Wernicke's areas
of the brain?
Which brings
us to the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy:
Nietzsche's "God is dead." The year was 1882. (The book
was Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft [ The Gay Science ].) Nietzsche
said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact
an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of
God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history.
The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a
result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including
Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run
up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The
story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history
of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that
the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have
never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining.
And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to,
to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by
guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are
very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe
not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith
they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they
would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods:
"If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between
man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says
in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled
into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised
when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of
the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."
Nietzsche's view
of guilt, incidentally, is also that of neuro-scientists a century
later. They regard guilt as one of those tendencies imprinted in the
brain at birth. In some people the genetic work is not complete, and
they engage in criminal behavior without a twinge of remorse--thereby
intriguing criminologists, who then want to create Violence Initiatives
and hold conferences on the subject.
Nietzsche said
that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century "on
the mere pittance" of the old decaying God-based moral codes.
But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than
the great wars, a time of "the total eclipse of all values"
(in The Will to Power ). This would also be a frantic period of "revaluation,"
in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace
the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned,
because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing
in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou
shalt" or "Thou shalt not."
Why should we
bother ourselves with a dire prediction that seems so far-fetched
as "the total eclipse of all values"? Because of man's track
record, I should think. After all, in Europe, in the peaceful decade
of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far-fetched to predict
the world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods
of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet!
How much more proof can one demand of a man's powers of prediction?
A hundred years
ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another
with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their
own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science
to chart the way. But what if, as seems likely, the greatest marvel
of modern science turns out to be brain imaging? And what if, ten
years from now, brain imaging has proved, beyond any doubt, that not
only Edward O. Wilson but also the young generation are, in fact,
correct?
The elders, such
as Wilson himself and Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Darwin's Dangerous
Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life , and Richard Dawkins, author
of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker , insist that there is
nothing to fear from the truth, from the ultimate extension of Darwin's
dangerous idea. They present elegant arguments as to why neuroscience
should in no way diminish the richness of life, the magic of art,
or the righteousness of political causes, including, if one need edit,
political correctness at Harvard or Tufts, where Dennett is Director
of the Center for Cognitive Studies, or Oxford, where Dawkins is something
called Professor of Public Understanding of Science. (Dennett and
Dawkins, every bit as much as Wilson, are earnestly, feverishly, politically
correct.) Despite their best efforts, however, neuroscience is not
rippling out into the public on waves of scholarly reassurance. But
rippling out it is, rapidly. The conclusion people out beyond the
laboratory walls are drawing is: The fix is in! We're all hardwired!
That, and: Don't blame me! I'm wired wrong!
From
Nurture to Nature
This sudden switch from a belief in Nurture, in the form of social
conditioning, to Nature, in the form of genetics and brain physiology,
is the great intellectual event, to borrow Nietzsche's term, of the
late twentieth century. Up to now the two most influential ideas of
the century have been Marxism and Freudianism. Both were founded upon
the premise that human beings and their "ideals"--Marx and
Freud knew about quotation marks, too--are completely molded by their
environment. To Marx, the crucial environment was one's social class;
"ideals" and "faiths" were notions foisted by
the upper orders upon the lower as instruments of social control.
To Freud, the crucial environment was the Oedipal drama, the unconscious
sexual plot that was played out in the family early in a child's existence.
The "ideals" and "faiths" you prize so much are
merely the parlor furniture you feature for receiving your guests,
said Freud; I will show you the cellar, the furnace, the pipes, the
sexual steam that actually runs the house. By the mid-1950s even anti-Marxists
and anti-Freudians had come to assume the centrality of class domination
and Oedipally conditioned sexual drives. On top of this came Pavlov,
with his "stimulus-response bonds," and B. F. Skinner, with
his "operant conditioning," turning the supremacy of conditioning
into something approaching a precise form of engineering.
So how did this
brilliant intellectual fashion come to so screeching and ignominious
an end?
The demise of
Freudianism can be summed up in a single word: lithium. In 1949 an
Australian psychiatrist, John Cade, gave five days of lithium therapy--for
entirely the wrong reasons--to a fifty-one-year-old mental patient
who was so manic-depressive, so hyperactive, unintelligible, and uncontrollable,
he had been kept locked up in asylums for twenty years. By the sixth
day, thanks to the lithium buildup in his blood, he was a normal human
being. Three months later he was released and lived happily ever after
in his own home. This was a man who had been locked up and subjected
to two decades of Freudian logorrhea to no avail whatsoever. Over
the next twenty years antidepressant and tranquilizing drugs completely
replaced Freudian talk-talk as treatment for serious mental disturbances.
By the mid-1980s, neuroscientists looked upon Freudian psychiatry
as a quaint relic based largely upon superstition (such as dream analysis
-- dream analysis!), like phrenology or mesmerism. In fact, among
neuroscientists, phrenology now has a higher reputation than Freudian
psychiatry, since phrenology was in a certain crude way a precursor
of electroencephalography. Freudian psychiatrists are now regarded
as old crocks with sham medical degrees, as ears with wire hairs sprouting
out of them that people with more money than sense can hire to talk
into.
Marxism was finished
off even more suddenly--in a single year, 1973--with the smuggling
out of the Soviet Union and the publication in France of the first
of the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago
. Other writers, notably the British historian Robert Conquest, had
already exposed the Soviet Union's vast network of concentration camps,
but their work was based largely on the testimony of refugees, and
refugees were routinely discounted as biased and bitter observers.
Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, was a Soviet citizen, still living
on Soviet soil, a zek himself for eleven years, zek being Russian
slang for concentration camp prisoner. His credibility had been vouched
for by none other than Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1962 had permitted
the publication of Solzhenitsyn's novella of the gulag, One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich , as a means of cutting down to size the
daunting shadow of his predecessor Stalin. "Yes," Khrushchev
had said in effect, "what this man Solzhenitsyn has to say is
true. Such were Stalin's crimes." Solzhenitsyn's brief fictional
description of the Soviet slave labor system was damaging enough.
But The Gulag Archipelago , a two-thousand-page, densely detailed,
nonfiction account of the Soviet Communist Party's systematic extermination
of its enemies, real and imagined, of its own countrymen, by the tens
of millions through an enormous, methodical, bureaucratically controlled
"human sewage disposal system," as Solzhenitsyn called it--
The Gulag Archipelago was devastating. After all, this was a century
in which there was no longer any possible ideological detour around
the concentration camp. Among European intellectuals, even French
intellectuals, Marxism collapsed as a spiritual force immediately.
Ironically, it survived longer in the United States before suffering
a final, merciful coup de gr ce on November 9, 1989, with the breaching
of the Berlin Wall, which signaled in an unmistakable fashion what
a debacle the Soviets' seventy-two-year field experiment in socialism
had been. (Marxism still hangs on, barely, acrobatically, in American
universities in a Mannerist form known as Deconstruction, a literary
doctrine that depicts language itself as an insidious tool used by
The Powers That Be to deceive the proles and peasants.)
Freudianism and
Marxism--and with them, the entire belief in social conditioning--were
demolished so swiftly, so suddenly, that neuroscience has surged in,
as if into an intellectual vacuum. Nor do you have to be a scientist
to detect the rush.
Anyone with a
child in school knows the signs all too well. I have children in school,
and I am intrigued by the faith parents now invest--the craze began
about 1990--in psychologists who diagnose their children as suffering
from a defect known as attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Of course,
I have no way of knowing whether this "disorder" is an actual,
physical, neurological condition or not, but neither does anybody
else in this early stage of neuroscience. The symptoms of this supposed
malady are always the same. The child, or, rather, the boy--forty-nine
out of fifty cases are boys--fidgets around in school, slides off
his chair, doesn't pay attention, distracts his classmates during
class, and performs poorly. In an earlier era he would have been pressured
to pay attention, work harder, show some self-discipline. To parents
caught up in the new intellectual climate of the 1990s, that approach
seems cruel, because my little boy's problem is... he's wired wrong!
The poor little tyke --the fix has been in since birth! Invariably
the parents complain, "All he wants to do is sit in front of
the television set and watch cartoons and play Sega Genesis."
For how long? "How long? For hours at a time." Hours at
a time; as even any young neuroscientist will tell you, that boy may
have a problem, but it is not an attention deficit.
Nevertheless,
all across America we have the spectacle of an entire generation of
little boys, by the tens of thousands, being dosed up on ADD's magic
bullet of choice, Ritalin, the CIBA-Geneva Corporation's brand name
for the stimulant methylphenidate. I first encountered Ritalin in
1966 when I was in San Francisco doing research for a book on the
psychedelic or hippie movement. A certain species of the genus hippie
was known as the Speed Freak, and a certain strain of Speed Freak
was known as the Ritalin Head. The Ritalin Heads loved Ritalin. You'd
see them in the throes of absolute Ritalin raptures...Not a wiggle,
not a peep...They would sit engrossed in anything at all...a manhole
cover, their own palm wrinkles...indefinitely...through shoulda-been
mealtime after mealtime...through raging insomnias...Pure methyl-phenidate
nirvana...From 1990 to 1995, CIBA-Geneva's sales of Ritalin rose 600
percent; and not because of the appetites of subsets of the species
Speed Freak in San Francisco, either. It was because an entire generation
of American boys, from the best private schools of the Northeast to
the worst sludge-trap public schools of Los Angeles and San Diego,
was now strung out on methylphenidate, diligently doled out to them
every day by their connection, the school nurse. America is a wonderful
country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement!
The human comedy never runs out of material! It never lets you down!
Meantime, the
notion of a self--a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones
gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression
and criminal behavior--a self who can become more intelligent and
lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through
study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face
of great odds--this old-fashioned notion (what's a boot strap, for
God's sake?) of success through enterprise and true grit is already
slipping away, slipping away...slipping away...The peculiarly American
faith in the power of the individual to transform himself from a helpless
cypher into a giant among men, a faith that ran from Emerson ("Self-Reliance")
to Horatio Alger's Luck and Pluck stories to Dale Carnegie's How to
Win Friends and Influence People to Norman Vincent Peale's The Power
of Positive Thinking to Og Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the
World --that faith is now as moribund as the god for whom Nietzsche
wrote an obituary in 1882. It lives on today only in the decrepit
form of the "motivational talk," as lecture agents refer
to it, given by retired football stars such as Fran Tarkenton to audiences
of businessmen, most of them woulda-been athletes (like the author
of this article), about how life is like a football game. "It's
late in the fourth period and you're down by thirteen points and the
Cowboys got you hemmed in on your own one-yard line and it's third
and twenty-three. Whaddaya do?..."
Sorry, Fran,
but it's third and twenty-three and the genetic fix is in, and the
new message is now being pumped out into the popular press and onto
television at a stupefying rate. Who are the pumps? They are a new
breed who call themselves "evolutionary psychologists."
You can be sure that twenty years ago the same people would have been
calling themselves Freudian; but today they are genetic determinists,
and the press has a voracious appetite for whatever they come up with.
The most popular
study currently--it is still being featured on television news shows,
months later--is David Lykken and Auke Tellegen's study at the University
of Minnesota of two thousand twins that shows, according to these
two evolutionary psychologists, that an individual's happiness is
largely genetic. Some people are hardwired to be happy and some are
not. Success (or failure) in matters of love, money, reputation, or
power is transient stuff; you soon settle back down (or up) to the
level of happiness you were born with genetically. Three months ago
Fortune devoted a long takeout, elaborately illustrated, of a study
by evolutionary psychologists at Britain's University of Saint Andrews
showing that you judge the facial beauty or handsomeness of people
you meet not by any social standards of the age you live in but by
criteria hardwired in your brain from the moment you were born. Or,
to put it another way, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but
embedded in his genes. In fact, today, in the year 1996, barely three
years before the end of the millennium, if your appetite for newspapers,
magazines, and television is big enough, you will quickly get the
impression that there is nothing in your life, including the fat content
of your body, that is not genetically predetermined. If I may mention
just a few things the evolutionary psychologists have illuminated
for me over the past two months:
The male of the
human species is genetically hardwired to be polygamous, i.e., unfaithful
to his legal mate. Any magazine-reading male gets the picture soon
enough. (Three million years of evolution made me do it!) Women lust
after male celebrities, because they are genetically hardwired to
sense that alpha males will take better care of their offspring. (I'm
just a lifeguard in the gene pool, honey.) Teenage girls are genetically
hardwired to be promiscuous and are as helpless to stop themselves
as dogs in the park. (The school provides the condoms.) Most murders
are the result of genetically hardwired compulsions. (Convicts can
read, too, and they report to the prison psychiatrist: "Something
came over me...and then the knife went in." 2 )
Where does that
leave self-control? Where, indeed, if people believe this ghostly
self does not even exist, and brain imaging proves it, once and for
all?
So far, neuroscientific
theory is based largely on indirect evidence, from studies of animals
or of how a normal brain changes when it is invaded (by accidents,
disease, radical surgery, or experimental needles). Darwin II himself,
Edward O. Wilson, has only limited direct knowledge of the human brain.
He is a zoologist, not a neurologist, and his theories are extrapolations
from the exhaustive work he has done in his specialty, the study of
insects. The French surgeon Paul Broca discovered Broca's area, one
of the two speech centers of the left hemisphere of the brain, only
after one of his patients suffered a stroke. Even the PET scan and
the PET reporter gene/PET reporter probe are technically medical invasions,
since they require the injection of chemicals or viruses into the
body. But they offer glimpses of what the noninvasive imaging of the
future will probably look like. A neuroradiologist can read a list
of topics out loud to a person being given a PET scan, topics pertaining
to sports, music, business, history, whatever, and when he finally
hits one the person is interested in, a particular area of the cerebral
cortex actually lights up on the screen. Eventually, as brain imaging
is refined, the picture may become as clear and complete as those
see-through exhibitions, at auto shows, of the inner workings of the
internal combustion engine. At that point it may become obvious to
everyone that all we are looking at is a piece of machinery, an analog
chemical computer, that processes information from the environment.
"All," since you can look and look and you will not find
any ghostly self inside, or any mind, or any soul.
Thereupon, in
the year 2006 or 2026, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce:
"The self is dead"--except that being prone to the poetic,
like Nietzsche I, he will probably say: "The soul is dead."
He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest
event of the millennium: "The soul, that last refuge of values,
is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists."
Unless the assurances of the Wilsons and the Dennetts and the Dawkinses
also start rippling out, the lurid carnival that will ensue may make
the phrase "the total eclipse of all values" seem tame.
The
two most fascinating riddles of the 21st century
If I were a college student today, I don't think I could resist going
into neuroscience. Here we have the two most fascinating riddles of
the twenty-first century: the riddle of the human mind and the riddle
of what happens to the human mind when it comes to know itself absolutely.
In any case, we live in an age in which it is impossible and pointless
to avert your eyes from the truth.
Ironically, said
Nietzsche, this unflinching eye for truth, this zest for skepticism,
is the legacy of Christianity (for complicated reasons that needn't
detain us here). Then he added one final and perhaps ultimate piece
of irony in a fragmentary passage in a notebook shortly before he
lost his mind (to the late-nineteenth-century's great venereal scourge,
syphilis). He predicted that eventually modern science would turn
its juggernaut of skepticism upon itself, question the validity of
its own foundations, tear them apart, and self-destruct. I thought
about that in the summer of 1994 when a group of mathematicians and
computer scientists held a conference at the Santa Fe Institute on
"Limits to Scientific Knowledge." The consensus was that
since the human mind is, after all, an entirely physical apparatus,
a form of computer, the product of a particular genetic history, it
is finite in its capabilities. Being finite, hardwired, it will probably
never have the power to comprehend human existence in any complete
way. It would be as if a group of dogs were to call a conference to
try to understand The Dog. They could try as hard as they wanted,
but they wouldn't get very far. Dogs can communicate only about forty
notions, all of them primitive, and they can't record anything. The
project would be doomed from the start. The human brain is far superior
to the dog's, but it is limited nonetheless. So any hope of human
beings arriving at some final, complete, self-enclosed theory of human
existence is doomed, too.
This, science's
Ultimate Skepticism, has been spreading ever since then. Over the
past two years even Darwinism, a sacred tenet among American scientists
for the past seventy years, has been beset by...doubts. Scientists--not
religiosi--notably the mathematician David Berlinski ("The Deniable
Darwin," Commentary , June 1996) and the biochemist Michael Behe
(Darwin's Black Box , 1996), have begun attacking Darwinism as a mere
theory, not a scientific discovery, a theory woefully unsupported
by fossil evidence and featuring, at the core of its logic, sheer
mush. (Dennett and Dawkins, for whom Darwin is the Only Begotten,
the Messiah, are already screaming. They're beside themselves, utterly
apoplectic. Wilson, the giant, keeping his cool, has remained above
the battle.) By 1990 the physicist Petr Beckmann of the University
of Colorado had already begun going after Einstein. He greatly admired
Einstein for his famous equation of matter and energy, E=mc2 , but
called his theory of relativity mostly absurd and grotesquely untestable.
Beckmann died in 1993. His Fool Killer's cudgel has been taken up
by Howard Hayden of the University of Connecticut, who has many admirers
among the upcoming generation of Ultimately Skeptical young physicists.
The scorn the new breed heaps upon quantum mechanics ("has no
real-world applications"..."depends entirely on fairies
sprinkling goofball equations in your eyes"), Unified Field Theory
("Nobel worm bait"), and the Big Bang Theory ("creationism
for nerds") has become withering. If only Nietzsche were alive!
He would have relished every minute of it!
Recently I happened
to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me:
"When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science
you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful
investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer
of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous
scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out
to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again
with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers
aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles,
on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst
today, one after the other."
I suddenly had
a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern
man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He's floundering,
sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he
feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up,
like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed.
He names it God.
