Chapter 1 began with scientist Bill Joy’s warning about the hazards of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics. These new technologies, Joy proffered, represent a profound new threat to humanity. Similar warnings are not hard to find: rampant industrialization is destroying the environment; fossil fuels are dangerously warming the planet; genetically modified plants will lead to a catastrophic agricultural collapse; and so forth. While these threats are serious, they do not represent fundamental threats. In the past, the same sorts of concerns were raised about the printing press, the electric light, the radio, and of course the incredible risk posed by trains.1
Rather than fundamental threats, these technologies represent transitory threats. The continuing threat of pollution from car exhaust, for example, has been mitigated with the introduction of new technologies such as catalytic converters, higher-grade unleaded gasoline, and hybrid engines, all of which have reduced the toxins spewed into the air by individual motor vehicles. We have also been told by government and scientists that the introductions of electric engines and hydrogen fuel cells will further reduce if not eventually eliminate this particular threat. Consequently, we might conclude that air pollution and even global warming are big and worrisome but nonetheless transitory threats. Likewise, the grave problems related to the technologies that keep Joy up at night will likely be overcome through similar technical refinements or, simply put, the development of better technology. Joy’s worries about misapplications, ineptitude, poor planning, and programming can all be addressed through the same process that has allowed for the cut in pollution emitted from individual cars. Of course, if we choose to do nothing, the accumulated effect of our inaction might well be disastrous, as Joy predicted.
But the fundamental threat of technology is not so easily solved. Instead of focusing on the inefficiencies or side-effects of particular technologies, the fundamental threat of technology is linked to our inability to think and act outside of its bounds. Heidegger argued that this inability is the result of the inexorable unconcealment of technology as it conceals all other things including human beings. However, the idea of the Great Reversal as it has been presented in the preceding pages attempts to demonstrate that this inability is not merely a consequence of a larger playing out of technology but the result of a set of choices. That is to say, the subordination of good judgment and the domination of technical knowledge is the outcome of a history of such choices.
To summarize, Augustine’s early Christian rejection of good judgment stemmed from a distrust of worldly things, leading him to separate everyday decisions from the development of virtue and the good life. The introduction of a distinct “prudence of the flesh” and “prudence of the spirit” broke the vital connection between the lower goods associated with the body and the higher goods associated with spiritual satisfaction. Aquinas then turned our attention back to the everyday with a concept of natural law that proposed human society be reordered to match a divine plan hidden within nature. Reflecting Augustine’s distrust of the lower goods, Aquinas argued that God had imbued humans with synderesis, or the rational capacity to recognize this divine plan and, with this knowledge, restructure human institutions to conform to it. This “top-down” approach is later echoed in Machiavelli’s advice that all of nature is mere matter into which we can introduce whatever form we choose. Freed of the moderating influence of divine limitations, Machiavelli turned to the task of eliminating the influence of chance or fortuna by imposing human ends upon the world limited only by a lack of technical know-how. Hobbes subsequently argued that even this technical limitation could be overcome through time and industry, allowing for a total domination of the natural world and human nature. The remaining barrier to the achievement of this goal was the tenacious hold that fallible human judgments still had on social and political institutions. The Enlightenment thinkers next endeavoured to purge the influence of judgment and experiential knowledge once and for all from these institutions and empowered humanity to exploit nature towards true happiness and everlasting peace. This effort included the development of a social science that sought first to remake human society and then to remake the body and mind to rid them of any weakness, feeble-mindedness, and fallibility. In the twentieth century, there follows an infiltration of technology into all aspect of human life and society that brings with it both tremendous benefits and horrible destruction. From this point on there has been growing criticism of the invasive, dehumanizing character of contemporary technology and an earnest exploration of ways to limit or knock back the further envelopment of humanity into its fold.
And yet we still seem unable to stop its advance. Perhaps Heidegger’s analysis of technology is so compelling because he provided an explanation of why we seem so impotent. He argued that, rather than being a tool of our own creation, technology is an autonomous being that actually uses humanity as a tool for its own expansion. Conversely, the argument here is that we are impotent not because technology is independent of our influence, but because somewhere along the line we began to relinquish the deeply rooted intellectual and practical capacities that allow us to understand and regulate the role of technology in our lives. In the modern world, we have consented to this constriction of human thought and action into the narrow confines of technical thinking in exchange for the satisfaction of our appetites and alleviation of our aversions. And, despite our growing reservations, we are still willing to make this exchange because we have lost our connection to a higher sense of purpose that once animated our search for the good life and happiness. Because technology seems to deliver everything that we need and want, we are unable to argue against its progress and helpless to prevent its further infiltration into the innermost recesses of our bodies and minds.
And yet, even in the wake of the Great Reversal, we may still be able to find and enforce limits on technology. Despite Heidegger’s earlier rejection, this last chapter attempts to realize the third objective of this book by exploring the effort to revive the practice of phronesis and virtue in general as a response to the challenge of technology. This “phronesis revival” has become an increasingly important idea in contemporary scholarship and philosophy. Notably, the two leading advocates of the phronesis revival were among Heidegger’s best students: Hannah Arendt and Hans-Georg Gadamer. They basically agreed with their teacher that technological domination represented the greatest threat to human life and society. But, rather than completely accepting his enframing argument, both argued that technology had come to this point of domination, not because of some playing out of Platonic metaphysics, but because we had given ourselves and our institutions over to it. In turn, they thought it still might be possible to extricate ourselves, our institutions, ethics, and politics from the cage of technology. However, this effort faces two major challenges.
First, the traditional foundation upon which the practice of phronesis used to be built has been considerably weakened. In turn, even if we somehow managed to get out from under the heavy weight of technology, we would have no clear idea how to act or think in a non-technological manner. So, even though Arendt and Gadamer argued that the ancient virtue should be returned to its rightful place of priority above techne, they offered no obvious starting place for humanity to relearn its practice. Nonetheless, both thinkers, who studied at Marburg with Heidegger in the 1920s, proposed that there were still opportunities for action and thought that stood outside of the demands of technical thinking. They offered phronesis as an alternative because it is based on the central unpredictability of opinions, people, conditions, and circumstances. It allows for the introduction of individual experience and a community-based ethics and politics thought to stand outside of the rigidity of techne. Yet, they also agreed with Heidegger that in the twentieth century our society had been inculcated by technology, with very few areas left untrodden. Our world differs radically from Aristotle’s because human thought and action are clouded by scientific and technical expertise. This is a significant difference because, if we are truly suffering under the hegemonic influence of science and technology, as Arendt and Gadamer have described, we cannot be expected to have enough unfettered judgment, good habits, and virtue left to make right and proper choices once the tyranny of technological domination has been dismissed or removed. Simply dethroning technology from its dominant role will not mean that the individual citizen will all of a sudden become a good and responsible decision maker. Remember, in Aristotle’s description, that phronesis was the fount of establishment thinking and the phronimos required a large support network of good parents, friends, teachers, and political leaders. But according to both of these twentieth-century thinkers, this foundation of education and role models is the very thing missing in contemporary society. Arguably, in a world dominated by science and technology such as ours, there are no persons to pass down the lessons and practical experience required for the practice of the virtue. Gadamer, for instance, vigorously argued that technology defines the thoughts and actions of the average citizen, sets new terms for human existence, manipulates our minds, and even denies our identities.2 This suggests that in a society dominated by technology there is no ground upon which the phronimos can stand. Technology has supplanted the very conditions through which practice, experience, understanding, and interpretation can inform good judgment.
This is the first basic challenge to be faced with any effort to revive phronesis in a technological age. We have handed over our decision-making procedures to a range of technical experts, specialists, and managers and have thus left few if any sources for relearning the practice of the virtue. Our politics, our laws, our educational institutions, and even our communities are planned and managed by technical experts. Very few areas of life and society remain unaffected by or immune to their influence. This observation might lead us to find common purpose in the response of the neo-Luddites discussed in the previous chapter. By purging technology from our society or by withdrawing to the remaining non-technological corners of the planet, we might hope that the practice of virtue might one day re-emerge. However, the goal of the phronesis revival is to learn to live with technology, to find and enforce limits upon it, rather than to escape from it.
This leads to the second challenge of any phronesis revival as well as the second objective of the book: how in a technically run polis human beings become ever more worked upon as mere material and how this kind of treatment may actually bar the practice of phronesis. Remember Aristotle’s straightforward warning about the products of techne from the Politics: “It is for the sake of the soul that these other things [external goods] are desirable, and should accordingly be desired by every man of good sense – not the soul for the sake of them.”3 This means that technical innovation must be directed by the higher virtues such as those associated with family, community, education, politics, and philosophy. It needs to be pointed out again that there is no disagreement from Aristotle that human beings need the products of techne. Not only is it senseless to suffer from cold, hunger, and pain, but these basic deprivations bar us from attaining deeper happiness. The virtue of techne is that it clears the way of these sorts of distractions and, therefore, participates in the achievement of higher human goods – the alleviation of basic bodily needs is “for the sake of” the higher things of the soul – good, beautiful, and noble things.
Aristotle’s discussion of virtue asserts that technical production has to be preceded by the ethical mastery or self-discipline of the passions. As he says, only a man of “good sense” should desire “these other things.” In other words, if the bodily needs and appetites that inspire technical production remain without virtue, undisciplined, defective, or excessive, then the products of techne will not be in proportion with the right and proper needs of the citizenry. In fact, a man of “bad sense” will necessarily desire products detrimental to himself and his community. Fortunately, even in such an instance, if his community has “good sense” on the whole, then good laws and other regulations will limit the vicious desire of this man. That is to say, he will not be given the opportunity to articulate his bad sense into harmful products. Society will not allow Dr Frankenstein to animate his monster.
Only when our judgments about higher things subordinate techne do we need not worry about quarantining areas of our lives off from technology or have to run to the hills, as is the advice of the neo-Luddites. That which is most essential to being human will remain unencumbered, undetermined, or unbound by mere products because those products will be determined by those essential things. Research and development in medicine, for example, will be determined by our want for happiness rather than our happiness being determined by medicine. When this order is upset and the lower takes precedence over the higher, technical production comes to dominate our lives and our thinking.
And, at present, this order has indeed been upset. Rather than learning the classical lesson on developing an internal ethical mastery of the passions, we have largely accepted the idea that we require an external efficient cause to both regulate and fulfil our desires. The “Artificiall Chains” that restricted an “excess of passions” described by Hobbes in the Leviathan now take the form of remedies and cures for what are viewed as a set of various chemical, metabolic, and biological imbalances and deficiencies. While there is little doubt that these treatments alleviate pain and suffering of all kinds, their effectiveness and ubiquity make it all the more unlikely that we will be able or willing to choose Aristotle’s path to virtue.
With the “bad sense” we have derived from our narrow technical outlook, we have been compelled to create a set of “virtutropic” (virtue + trope) technologies, to coin a phrase, designed as substitutes for the traditional ethical virtues. The Greek word trope means turn, bend, or change and is used as a suffix in words such heliotropic, referring to the way plants turn or bend towards the sun, and psychotropic, a class of drugs designed to change thought, mood, or behaviour. So, a virtutropic technology refers to a technology that turns, redirects, or changes the practice of virtue or excellence.
To be clear, the four examples of virtutropics listed below have already been subject to broad criticism: antidepressants have been reproached for being overhyped in their effectiveness in fighting depression; steroids for the array of negative physical ailments resulting from their overuse; elective cosmetic plastic surgery as a drain on limited medical resources; and gastric bypass surgery as unnecessarily risking the health of patients. However, the problem with these types of criticisms is that they focus on the transitory threat posed by these interventions. If their benefits could be boosted and side-effects ameliorated, if the technology could be improved, would critics then become advocates for the wider prescription of these drugs and performance of these surgeries? At the very least, they would be left with no evidence to support their concerns. The idea behind the list below is to explore the fundamental threat posed by virtutropics, not to list their technical deficiencies. Really, it is the fact these technologies are so global in their effect and so discreet, becoming less and less conspicuous to both the user and those around them, that makes them so hazardous.
The use of psychopharmaceuticals to treat mental disease has become more and more common since the first generation of antidepressants was introduced in the 1950s. But in 1987 there was an unprecedented acceleration in their use when fluoxetine, commercially available as Prozac and marketed as one of the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), was approved for prescription in the United States. Not long thereafter, the drug became as much a cultural phenomenon as a medical breakthrough, ringing in a new era of “cosmetic pharmacology” that saw its widespread use not just for psychiatric treatment but also for self-improvement. Peter Kramer, who introduced the term “cosmetic pharmacology” in his 1993 book Listening to Prozac, was an early critic. He worried that, because it had such a tremendous influence on its users, Prozac might instigate a wider societal embrace of the drug for everyday emotional and intellectual augmentation. He writes: “It is all very well for drugs to do small things: to induce sleep, to allay anxiety, to ameliorate a well-recognized syndrome. But for a drug’s effect to be so global – to extend to social popularity, business acumen, self-image, energy, flexibility, sexual appeal – touches too closely on fantasies about medication for the mind.”4
According to Kramer, in contrast to the overprescription of tranquillizers such as Valium (the most prescribed drug in the United States from 1969 to 1982) a generation ago, Prozac was seen not simply as a temporary respite from everyday drudgery, a source of relief, or means of treatment but also as a personality enhancer. People began taking it to “get ahead” not just to “get by.” After all, the drug seemed an easy alternative to traditional avenues to personal success. Rather than relying on a healthy family life or good education to nurture positive character traits, individuals could now turn to an enthusiastically prescribed pill. Unlike other drugs, Prozac’s “global” effectiveness presaged a time when we could replace or circumvent the antiquated and time-consuming teaching of the virtues to our children and students with a custom-made chemical infusion.
The problem with this circumvention is that it skips over a traditional and critical step of personal development. Considering the observations of one social worker, Kramer contends: “The medication had done what she would have wished to accomplish with psychotherapy: it had facilitated an improvement in the family dynamics. The problem, for the social worker, was that this change came about without any increased self-knowledge on Julia’s part … She believed that medication-induced change, unaccompanied by growth in self-understanding, was inferior to what psychotherapy has to offer.”5
While it would be unwise to draw general conclusions from one case, it is fair to say that the drug treatment is successful in changing the behaviour of most patients, including “Julia.” But, instead of her good behaviour coming from Julia herself, Prozac is the real source. Her actions do not reflect her upbringing, community, individual character, or “self-knowledge,” but the design of the drug. Thus, she has not actually learned what it takes to act properly, and yet she nonetheless appears to act in a proper way.
Before continuing, it needs to be asked, if a drug works so well and provides such a positive result, what does it matter? Indeed, someone who is suffering from pain will likely care little about the source of their relief or whether they have missed out on an ethical education as described by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. And, in all likelihood, it is true that individual or isolated cases do not in and of themselves represent any kind of threat to humanity. However, the widespread use of these drugs suggests something far more disturbing.
The problem of circumvention, the skipping over the ethical mastery of the passions, could trigger a larger societal effect that goes well beyond immediate users. Following the logic of Aristotle, virtuous action is first learned through imitation of a phronimos or person of good judgment. As it was put at the start of chapter 3, the phronimos is not simply lucky or blessed to live a good life, but has deliberately, knowingly, and meritoriously chosen a path that leads to happiness. The phronimos appear to be happy because he or she has successfully ordered their lives based on experience and a general knowledge of the way the world works. In turn, their fellow citizens can easily identify them as a good role model and be confident that in imitating their actions they will follow a similar path to happiness.
But, in the case of someone on Prozac there is an appearance of happiness that is not backed up with the aforementioned prerequisites of experience and knowledge. The change in Julia, as noted above, came without the hard work associated with rethinking and reordering the way she lived. Consequently, her social worker worried that if she was taken off the drug the very same patterns and problems that led her into depression would simply resurface. It follows that, even though she may be happy and thus appear to be a good role model, imitating her actions will not lead anyone down a path to happiness.
With anywhere between 5 and 10 per cent of the general population of the United States on these kinds of medications and trends suggesting a further substantial increase year by year,6 this scenario will become more common and problematic. As the application of these drugs broadens, we may no longer be able look to the most happy, courageous, or intelligent among us as role models for living a good life. Next-generation antidepressants (e.g., new triple reuptake inhibitors or TRIs) will even more successfully produce happiness; new anti-anxiety drugs will kindle a chemically induced bravery; and newly developed nootropic (taken from the intellectual virtue nous + trope) drugs will soon provide an easily accessible external enhancement for learning acquisition.7
Rather than passing down an ethos for the practice of the good life, we will leave the next generation with little alternative but to take these drugs as well. This has already started with the prescription of behaviour-modifying drugs to children. Ritalin and other stimulants such as Adderall are designed to influence a child’s biochemistry, allowing them to concentrate in the classroom.8 Compared to the virtually instantaneous results achieved by these drugs, traditional methods of education seem inefficient. But for a child to take these drugs at an early age means that they will have less opportunity to learn to master their emotions or gain self-discipline and self-understanding. Yet, is not the point of education to teach children things such as concentration, patience, and moderation? To simply impose these attributes on a child in pill form is, to say the least, contradictory to these ends.
While this description of psychopharmaceuticals as a virtutropic technology may seem unfamiliar, the same basic scenario has already been demonstrated in the case of anabolic-androgenic steroid use. From the Greek words anabole (building up) and andro- (of a man) plus -genic (producing), this class of steroids has been taken as a performance enhancer by athletes, such as weightlifters and bodybuilders, since the 1950s to build bigger muscles and to assist in quicker recovery from training stress and injury. Later, the use of anabolic steroids became common among Olympians before the drugs were banned from competition in the mid-1970s. In the early 1980s, steroid use increased among professional athletes and also infiltrated college and high-school sports.9 Prohibited more broadly with tougher legislation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the non-medical use of anabolic steroids is now restricted across much of the world.
These bans are largely based on the array of negative health effects caused by prolonged use of these drugs. However, the first “International Olympic Charter Against Doping in Sport” also listed other reasons: “The use of doping agents in sports is both unhealthy and contrary to the ethics of sport, and that it is necessary to protect the physical and spiritual health of athletes, the values of fair play and of competition, the integrity and unity of sport, and the rights of those who take part in it at whatever level.”
Along with the health of athletes, there is also concern for the ethics of sport, fair play, integrity, teamwork, and the rights of participants. In other words, because doping provides an unfair advantage to its users, it amounts to cheating. Nonetheless, because they provide such a tremendous competitive edge, many athletes continue to take these banned substances. Well after the prohibitions were put into place, scores of high-profile sprinters, cyclists, professional football and baseball players, and so on were either caught with the drugs in their system or admitted to using them. Despite ever more rigorous and sophisticated testing methods, it is generally accepted among the members of the sporting community that the chemists who design new steroids seem able to stay one step ahead of the anti-doping agencies.10
In the aftermath of the Major League Baseball doping scandal of the last decade, many people expressed concern about the effect it would have upon younger athletes. One journalist explained the obvious logic in his article “Young players need a few good role models”:
Major league trends have always trickled down through the minors, colleges, high schools and even into the little leagues. Until they saw it on TV, how did Little League World Series champs know to run out of the dugout and pile on top of each other? When did college pitchers start headhunting? How did high school batters learn to charge the mound?
Their heroes did it …
The pros need to know the public has no tolerance for cheaters.
Youngsters need to know that it’s not worth risking their health just to imitate the guys on TV.
A tough and airtight steroid policy can be a watershed moment in the game’s history. If the players listen and follow, the rest of the nation will be right behind them.11
The worry is that no matter how naturally gifted a promising athlete may be, he will simply be unable to achieve the same results as his role model unless he also take steroids or some other performance-enhancing drug (PED). Trying to emulate their chemically enhanced heroes, children will skip over the critical step of learning the discipline and work ethic traditionally associated with high-performance athleticism.
Parents and coaches worry about the tremendous health risks. But even more problematic is the possibility of next-generation drugs offering performance enhancement with a far smaller chance of negative side-effects. Newly developed non-steroidal selective androgen receptor modulators, or SARMs, for example, promise to provide the same results as anabolic steroids but with notably less danger of organ damage.12 With further advancements, it seems likely that athletes will be able to take performance-enhancing drugs without any risk to their health, undercutting the original reason for the ban. In turn, it is not difficult to envision a time when the prohibition on PEDs could be lifted, allowing athletes to employ them as just another one of their many training aids. That is to say, they would be part of the same spirit of fair play that already allows well-funded athletes access to better equipment, superior coaching, and other advanced training techniques not available to their equally talented opponents. In turn, this practice will “trickle down” to the next generation of competitors.
The problem again is that the criticisms of steroids and PEDs have focused on the transitory threat they pose. Once technical deficiencies are reduced or eliminated, these arguments will have little sway. With the health risk gone, young athletes will have little reason or incentive not to take them. Rather than passing down an ethic of good sportsmanship and hard work, we will leave the next generation with little alternative but to take these drugs if they ever hope to compete against their enhanced opponents. As a result, even if we wanted to return to the practice of traditional sport, we will have no exemplars to lead the way.
Another familiar example of a virtutropic technology is plastic surgery. The practice of body modification has a long and diverse history. Almost every body area, from foot binding in ancient China to cranial deformation in seventeenth-century France, has been subject to some form of artificial manipulation. Practices such as tattooing and piercing remain common examples of body modification today. While often painful and sometimes cruel, these practices are steeped in the customs and traditions of particular cultures. By contrast, plastic surgery permits an almost indefinite and continual modification of physical features.
Modern reconstructive plastic surgery finds its origins in experimental operations to correct major facial injuries suffered by soldiers in the First World War and birth defects in children such as cleft palates. Like cosmetic pharmacology, the field of cosmetic plastic surgery has developed as these procedures are applied to non-therapeutic, elective enhancements. Most often, patients seek to enhance the appearance of youth, fitness, or some other idea of attractiveness. But in changing their physical appearance, cosmetic surgery patients also seek some sort of psychological or inner change. Plenitas, a successful plastic surgery clinic in Argentina, posted this typical description of a patient’s motivation for the surgery on their website:
“I want to gain self-esteem and feel comfortable with myself.” – Michelle
Michelle is 35 years old, she’s a gym trainer and lives in Panama City, Florida, U.S.A. Being a mother of four children, she combines her family life with her work as a fitness instructor.
As a consequence of her two pregnancies, Michelle’s body changed completely, which led her to consider the possibility of having plastic surgery abroad. Seeing herself young and going back to her size would allow her to encourage her students to train harder, a necessary step to meet her own goals.
Michelle chose us because she believed that Plenitas would contribute to both improving her physical appearance and changing her inner self.13
Of course, the kind of confidence that Michelle seeks is usually realized through a sense of accomplishment after exercise and training. Certainly, a fitness instructor with a lean and strong body gains the respect of her students and colleagues because it is an obvious indication that she is good at what she does. As with the example of PEDs, undergoing a liposuction procedure merely gives the appearance of accomplishment and knowledge.
Obviously, cosmetic surgery is in good part an attempt to fool or trick others into thinking that there is a real connection between one’s post-operation appearance and a healthy lifestyle or background. We are misled to believe that because these individuals have the good insight, confidence, and moderation to properly satisfy the lower goods associated with the body, they also are examples and role models for everyone. But, as the saying goes, appearances can be deceiving. As is the case with Julia, any effort to imitate Michelle’s lifestyle under the belief that it would deliver us similar results would be futile.
Where liposuction is cosmetic, the gastric bypass is designed to permanently bend the will towards restraint. Stomach stapling, basically decreasing the size of the stomach and thus allowing only a small intake of food at one time, has become a far more common and safer procedure in the last few years. Doctors are recommending the surgery to help patients control diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, degrading joints, and other ailments associated with morbid obesity.14 And, because rates of obesity have skyrocketed across the world, this surgery is in very high demand.
The problem of circumvention associated with this surgery applies in a slightly different way than with the virtutropic technologies presented above. A person who has undergone this procedure will lose weight because they are forced to starve themselves. Because this may lead to malnutrition and related illnesses such as osteoporosis and even beriberi,15 patients must commit to a regime of vitamin and nutritional supplements to maintain their health. All told, there seems to be a swing from a vicious excess to a vicious deficiency, leaving out the virtue of moderation altogether. But, for the morbidly obese, it may be that some sort of psychological or physiological trait does not allow them to regulate their food intake and practise the virtue of moderation by themselves. By literally bypassing or circumventing the physical source of their immoderation (i.e., their stomachs), these individuals hope they can live longer, better, happier lives.
Yet again, the problem is that the individuals who undergo this surgery have not learned to be moderate or gained an ethical mastery of their passions, yet it appears to others by their weight loss or skinny physique that they have. As with the other examples presented above, rather than being an exhibition of self-control and a healthy lifestyle, the will of gastric-bypass recipients is bent by some external cause. In turn, they appear to exercise moderation, are mistakenly recognized as virtuous, and might be considered role models when in truth and despite all appearances they are not.
Admittedly, this short list represents just a preliminary sketch of the new problem of virtutropic technologies. Amazing innovations in prosthetic limbs, ears, eyes, and other mechanical enhancements to the human body and senses; the imminent arrival of discreet human/computer interfaces; and the potentially endless alterations that will be made possible by genetic intervention and transgenerational modification suggests this problem will become more common and acute. At least as they have been presented above, these technologies offer clear alternatives to traditional routes to achieving a self-mastery of the passions or developing an internal efficient cause towards virtue. Rather than learning the virtues of good judgment, fortitude, strength, and moderation, we instead turn to technologies that provide us with the appearance of these virtues. With outmost sincerity and sympathy, the idea here is not to cantankerously scold individuals who use these technologies or to point out some weakness in their individual character. As noted earlier, no one can really be expected to turn down the promise of a therapy or cure for chronic pain, whether it is physiological, emotional, or psychological. The real concern has little to do with individual cases. Instead, the idea is to highlight a larger ethical and political impact of virtutropics that goes well beyond the individual user. As these technologies become more ubiquitous in use and discreet in function, future generations will be faced with a remarkable and novel dilemma. Lacking a strong foundation for the learning of virtue and seeing no dependable role models for its practice, citizens of the future will have little choice but to accept virtutropics as their one and only route to health and happiness. Thus, it seems prudent to regulate or prohibit virtutropic technologies because of the fundamental risk they pose. For similar reasons that reproductive cloning was banned despite the tremendous curative benefits it offers, the use of virtutropics should be limited.
Of course, this whole discussion on the great importance of virtue may still seem quite foreign if not unconvincing. After all, is not life just bodily needs, appetites, and desires? Are not humans made up of nothing more than the waxing and waning of various pleasures and pains? More and more, neuroscientists tell us that we are composed of a complex network of electrical impulses, transmitters, and receptors awash in a sea of rising and falling brain chemicals. By providing convincing and concrete physical explanations for what were formerly thought to be mysterious vagaries of human action and thought, neuroscience seems to verify that we are nothing but “matter in motion,” just as Hobbes theorized centuries ago. And, if this is the case, the technical knowledge associated with “lower goods” is, in fact, the only kind of knowledge we can have. By this account, all we really know is self-preservation. Our bodies and our minds are nothing more than “human material” to be manipulated towards desired ends. If all we are is matter or material, then it is our most basic right to have access to any technology that contributes to our further survival, however perceived. It really does not matter if it is by internal or external mastery, through self-control or technological intervention. We simply need not worry about “higher goods” at all.
It is from this perhaps more familiar perspective that the contemporary transhumanist movement argues that we should use and develop ever newer technology to improve our intellectual and physical capabilities and purposefully evolve or transcend the human mind and body in their traditional forms. George Dvorsky, a leading transhumanist and member of the board of directors of Humanity+, the new moniker of the World Transhumanist Association, notes that “Transhumanists recognize that their bodies are a kind of machine,” and sees that
a growing number of people are turning to transhumanism, which aims to promote and encourage human enhancement through the application of science and technology. With roots in humanist and Enlightenment thinking, transhumanism is an emerging broadly based philosophy, bioethics, cultural phenomenon and lifestyle choice whose proponents believe that technology can and should be applied to improve the human condition. Transhumanists believe that humanity ought to enter into a post-Darwinian phase of existence where intelligences, rather than the blind forces of natural selection, are in control of their own evolution.16
And so, guided by the very same values as modernity to extend, improve, and affirm human life, the transhumanists seek to upgrade the human machine through whatever mechanical, computer, chemical, or genetic intervention is necessary. The modern term “transhumanism” is thought to have been used for the first time in a 1927 book by Julian Huxley, the noted evolutionary biologist, past president of the British Eugenics Society, and brother of Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell author Aldous Huxley.17 Later, Huxley reflected further on the great progress humanity has made over the last one hundred years, observing that “up till now human life has generally been, as Hobbes described it, ‘nasty, brutish and short’; the great majority of human beings (if they have not already died young) have been afflicted with misery in one form or another – poverty, disease, ill-health, over-work, cruelty, or oppression.”
Huxley argued that science and technology should be put in service to lighten our misery:
It is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution – appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What is more, he can’t refuse the job. Whether he wants to or not, whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth. That is his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned.
He concluded that “the exploration of human nature and its possibilities has scarcely begun. A vast New World of uncharted possibilities awaits its Columbus.”18 The remarkable thing about Dvorsky, Huxley, and other advocates of transhumanism is their embrace of an astoundingly lucid technological vision of the future that seems almost completely unencumbered by older sentiments that may still persist long after the Great Reversal. And while they share the same basic goals of Francis Galton and the earlier eugenicist movement, their means are clearly different and open to individual “lifestyle choice.” For them, we can all become our own craftsman-king, able to quantify and control our bodies and minds in any which way we choose.
Critics call the transhumanists everything from hubristic to genetic elitists. Francis Fukuyama even worries that enhanced individuals may eventually abandon their democratic tone and claim that their intellectual and physical superiority also affords them more rights and privileges than unenhanced citizens.19 But the real danger of transhumanism is its potential for technological relativism and, in turn, technological nihilism. The point here is that, even though the transhumanists may seem on the fringes or to have read too much science fiction as children, their idea is a logical consequence of the narrowing of human thought and action to a singular technological vision of the future of human life and society. And, rather than science fiction, we already have the basic technological infrastructure in place to empower this vision. Without enforceable limits on the transhuman project and under the pretext of therapy, individuals will evolve/enhance themselves in an indefinite variety of ways depending upon their individual needs and desires. In stages, the unlimited enhancement of the human body and mind may eventually splinter or fragment humanity into a wide array of new technologically evolved species. As conceptions of happiness and the requirements of health diverge, as the senses are recalibrated, what might have begun as a common goal to increase pleasure and reduce pain ends up creating wholly new and tremendously diverse transhuman ambitions. If these alterations become widespread and intergenerational, spinning off into the invention of new bodily forms and new ways of thinking delinked from anything recognizable, the traditional idea of humanity will fade away.
And while it is fair to say that the vast majority of people do not adhere to the transhumanist idea, the hard task remains to articulate the reason for our hesitancy. One response to both the claims of neuroscience and transhumanism is that we cannot fully understand nor should we radically alter what is human because it was created as part of a divine plan. However, the “sacred boundaries” argument has little sway over non-believers. In fact, there has been a strong counter-response by the scientific establishment contending that belief, religion, and God are all consequences of biology and brain chemistry. Titles such as Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth; Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief; and The “God” Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God assert that advanced brain scanning techniques can prove once and for all that religious belief is simply all in our minds. These scientists argue that they can easily replicate the “religious experience” by injecting patients with dopamine or by having them ingest hallucinogenic drugs such as psilocybin. In one experiment, scans of these drugged patients were placed side by side scans of Buddhist monks meditating. This comparison showed that both drugs and prayer affect the same part of the brain (i.e., the medial temporal lobe) and induce the same overall state of being. Rather than being closer to God or at one with the cosmos, these monks have simply learned how to trigger certain neural receptors.
This same group of scientists understands that happiness is really a similar trick of the mind. And yet, while the brain of a person on a psychopharmaceutical or some other enhancement may light up in the same way as a happy person not on the drug, these scans cannot show whether this state was induced by internal or external mastery of the passions. The critical difference between these two roads is that someone travelling down the road to internal mastery has learned through practice and experience how to live in harmony with their everyday circumstances and is able to guide those around them to a similar harmony. Of course, to ask everyone to simply master their passions with no assistance from “external goods” is not only cruel but also unrealistic. Just like the citizens of the “first city” mentioned at the start of this book, we cannot expect nor do we want to sustain ourselves without technology.
But the road to external mastery is more problematic. This road leads us to a strange and troubling dissonance between personal happiness and the well-being of our communities. Rather than a harmony attained between community and self, the destination at the end of this road is where the transhumanists are heading: to develop better drugs and other enhancements, to advance the technological infrastructure, to better quantify and control the functions of both the body and the mind. This road brings us to the “second city” where human beings are treated as mere material to be manipulated and formed in any which way. Critically, the real threat of living in the techno-polis is not the manipulation of the human form as such but the inability to find and enforce limits on that manipulation. Without an ethical compass to guide it and the political will to rule it, technology will in time replace the internal efficient cause of human beings with an external efficient cause. In turn, all of nature, both human and non-human, will rely on technology for its birth and growth. We see this already in the development of genetically modified crops and organisms.
A more fruitful response to the challenge posed by transhumanism and the problem of technology in general is to refound the older, unified lost city, re-establishing the earlier hierarchy between techne and phronesis. Rather than the technites, this city is led by the phronimos, who puts a priority on family, education, community, and law. These things are not put in a place of priority out of some sanctimonious moral duty or conservative ideology, but because they provide us with a foundation to make decisions about how to live a good life. The dynamic relationship or complex interplay between parents and children, teachers and students, friends and citizens, and among human beings in general is the basis upon which we gain a rational understanding of what we need and learn the habit of good judgment to deliver it. This city gives us an irreplaceable “bottom-up” insight into the needs of our bodies and minds, emotions, and psyches that, if satisfied, leads us to a sense of fulfilment and happiness. It also reinforces the need to put technology in the service of these ends rather than putting these ends in the service of technology.
To strengthen the considerably weakened foundations upon which we might relearn the lost virtue of phronesis will require a significant rethinking of the way we build and run our educational, social, and political institutions. Thus, this work of theory ends with an already quoted passage from Hobbes: “I recover some hope, that one time or other, this writing of mine, may fall into the hands of a Soveraign, who will … convert this Truth of Speculation, into the Utility of Practice.”20