Working in Movement

If Aldous Huxley had lived long enough to read weblogs, he might be saying "Oh, Shit" right about now. Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World pictured a utopian society that had developed technology to, among other things, keep all it's citizens singing from the same hymnal, as they say. The FuturePundit blog comments on an Emory University brain scan study that reminded me of Huxley's book, and might have gotten Huxley's attention.

The study focused on looking at the reward centers of the brain as participants received rewards while playing a computer game. The images showed some of the most prominent reward centers lit up more when participants had to actually perform some action to get the reward than when they just got the reward for doing nothing.

Comments that follow the link to the study ties the salient reward ideas in with Marx, making the point that Marx's theory went against the grain of basic human nature and so was bound to fail. He goes on to say that science is starting to understand the precise mechanisms of human nature. Then he talks about how science can have the capacity to manipulate neurons and develop a technolotgy for changing human nature. Here's a quote from the blog:

However, science will not only play a conservative role in opposition to proposed changes. Some proposals will be found to be compatible with human nature. Also, and more worringly, eventually scientific advances in the understanding of the brain and in ways to manipulate neurons will serve as the foundation for the development of technologies for changing human nature. Any future radicals who manage to seize power will be able to use biotechnologies to rework the brains of their subjects to be compatible with their imagined utopias. We will no longer be able to count on human nature to serve as a source of resistance to radical utopians because human nature will become more malleable.

Twenty six years after he'd published BNW, Huxley looked at actual developments of the stuff he'd written about earlier in Brave New World Revivited. So on second thought, maybe Huxley would be saying "I told you so!"