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Does Human Nature Have a Future?
The end of history, Bobos, and biotechnology.
"The end of history would seem to have arrived, in particular, because the principle of liberal democracy has triumphed: All human beings are now recognized as free and equal beings by those in the know everywhere in the world. ... most sophisticated Americans are no longer moved by love and death. ... Americans now prefer comfort to truth. Feel-good therapy has replaced the genuine desire to know oneself. ... the view that it is more important to feel good than to be good ... the new model Americans--the bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos--even claim to have reconciled the modern conflict between bohemian self-expression and bourgeois productivity. They manage to work hard and to have countercultural tastes without being in any way alienated from their social or political world, without yearning for a life better than the one they now have."
" ... The sociobiological return to nature consists in the recognition of what is required for us to live comfortably and productively as a certain kind of social animal. The family can in this way be rescued from the assault of the liberationists. Families ... do a better job of raising kids than the alternatives ... Religion is also back; it's a great source of comfort and socialization for social beings. According to the sociobiologists, though, love and faith are just illusions--useful ones, to be sure, helpful in dealing with the experiences of anxiety and homelessness that come with self-consciousness or individuality."
"Bobos claim to be laid-back bohemian nonjudgmentalists on everything. Or almost everything: When it comes to the soul, they reject as repressive the morality of traditional religion, but when it comes to the body, they are far from being laissez faire. They are pro-choice on abortion. But when it comes to seatbelts and smoking, there ought to be a law. Being chaste, they say, is unrealistically hard for our young people. But they can and should just say no to drunkenness and obesity. Sex of all kinds can be safe, but being fat is genuinely risky business. In their puritanical disdain for cigarettes, drunkenness, and rich food, the Bobos show themselves to be far more bourgeois than bohemian. Comparatively speaking, their predecessors--the martini-drinking, chain-smoking, dessert-eating, and war-fighting WASP establishment--laughed in the face of death. ... Bobos restlessly over-organize their own and their children's lives to keep themselves from having time to think about how empty their lives are. They constantly plan for their children's future because they can't figure out how to be in love with them in the present. ... They do not really experience themselves as being fully at home in this world. ... Bobos don't have the virtues associated with war, and they can't imagine their own lives without easily acquired wealth and liberty."
" ... Many experts say that advances in biotechnology could soon add at least a couple of decades to the average human life, with the not-so-remote possibility of doubling the average human lifespan. ... Would human life be worth living if it were completely freed from the hard and joyous responsibilities of birth, parenting, and aging? ... an indefinitely long life, without virtue, might immeasurably heighten the fear of sickness and of death? ... Ritalin is now given to boys who used to be regarded merely as spirited or aggressive. And Prozac calms women who used to be regarded merely as nervous or anxious. Drugs are taking the edge off being either a man or a woman, and they perhaps are leading us to the sort of androgyny that Marx, for example, thought we would have at the end of history."
"The political objection to depriving human beings of the pains, problems, and perversities that naturally arise from self-consciousness is that we will have succumbed to a form of tyranny. And yet we may well not be able to recognize that we are enslaved. In the Brave New World the tyrants will be the experts who exempt themselves from the consciousness-negating treatment. We have a hard time seeing experts as tyrants, because they don't claim to rule through personal authority but on the basis of the impersonal results of scientific studies. After all ... most Americans have no idea of the extent to which they have already surrendered their sovereignty--their personal judgments concerning their personal experiences--to such experts.
... [more]
3:42:20 PM 
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