It makes good sense for the Council to turn its attention to the prospect of happy souls right after considering the prospect of ageless bodies. After all, we want ageless bodies not for their own sake but to be happy; not to live forever as the restless selves we are now but to live long enough to become fully satisfied or fully whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to John Locke, the key philosopher for understanding America, what distinguishes human beings from chimps and dolphins is not happiness itself but our pursuit of happiness. We might even say that Locke makes the strange suggestion that the happy soul is an oxymoron.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ageless or fairly ageless bodies will not make us happy because biotechnology will never be able to eradicate the possibility of accidental death. Those blown up in an explosion or flattened by an asteroid will be gone forever. Seemingly liberated from the necessity of natural death, but still having to face the prospect of accidental death, we will perceive our lives as being more accidental and contingent than ever. Anxiety will continue to grow even as our bodies become more \u201cageless.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, we already see that as high technology increasingly makes our lives longer and more secure we become in many ways more anxious and risk-averse than ever. We live in a time when well-educated and prosperous Americans are nonjudgmental about everything but health and safety \u2014 about these we are increasingly paranoid, prohibitionist, and puritanical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If perfect or more perfect bodies will not make us happy, we might as well try to perfect our souls. According to Aristotle, we do that through the practice of moral virtue. But one of the downsides of living in an increasingly high-tech society is that both virtue and opportunities to act virtuously seem to be in short supply. So, for us, perfecting our soul has come to mean employing psychotherapy of various kinds to feel good without having to be good. We can now hope to use biotechnology to bring our memories and moods under our conscious control. And mood control is more fundamental than memory control: we need not fear our memories if we can keep them from making us feel bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The main fear of Beyond Therapy<\/em>\u2019s chapter on \u201chappy souls\u201d is that some kind of super-Prozac might rob us of our distinctive humanity, that we might end up living relatively content in the present \u2014 unmoved by past and future, love and shame, grief and death. Such solitary contentment is far inferior to the social flourishing rightly called human happiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But this report also shows that intense human happiness is inseparable from intense human misery. We human beings seem to lack the equanimity that the other animals naturally enjoy. So we can\u2019t help but ask why we shouldn\u2019t use biotechnology to make ourselves as at home in the world as our fellow animals naturally are. This report, in fact, makes the case for biotechnological mood control seem pretty powerful. Let me make that case as strongly as I can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We human beings will be better off using biotechnology to change the perverse features of our natures to achieve a shallower, but more pure, form of happiness. The cost in soaring greatness will be worth the gain in ordinary happiness. We won\u2019t need to be as great \u2014 because we won\u2019t need to be as miserable \u2014 anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thinkers such as Walker Percy say that we have good reasons to be anxious and depressed. We really do live in a crazy society and we really are mysteriously displaced or lost in the cosmos. But today such social and existential accounts of anxiety and depression are called into question by the possibility of their chemical cure. Moods, we are now told, are really nothing more than the result of certain chemical reactions. And who\u2019s to say which mix of chemicals tells us the truth about ourselves? We seem to have no reason not to prefer comfort and productivity to the truth, no reason not to follow Richard Rorty\u2019s pragmatic advice and call true whatever mood makes us comfortable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But if our moods got too good, our demand for biotechnological advances that really would improve our bodies would wither away. Without the fear of death, the urgency of medical progress would decline. And because we would be too self-satisfied to worry about terrorism, the terrorists would surely win. We would lose both the motivation and the courage to face our enemies. So the soundest judgment is that our anxious, obsessive, self-conscious individualism needs to be curbed somewhat but not eliminated altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fortunately, our drugs seem ready to deliver exactly this result. Those who take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac or Paxil remain moved to some extent by anxiety, melancholy, and so forth, but not to the point of brooding over them or being overwhelmed by crippling social inhibitions. For readers of deep books, the result can be a more cerebral and less emotional appreciation of writers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This sort of \u201cdesigner\u201d mood-brightening or mood-balancing will certainly become more precise and effective. It will assist the \u201cbourgeois bohemian\u201d project of sophisticated Americans, who seek to reconcile a meritocratic work ethic with a life of easygoing enjoyment. To be too bourgeois or too bohemian \u2014 to be all work or all play \u2014 is self-destructive. So what we need to flourish in our time \u2014 and SSRIs might deliver \u2014 is a moderate or fairly calm form of uneasiness or restlessness. We need just the right mixture of the pursuit of happiness and the enjoyment of happiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Upon closer examination, however, the case for conscious, biotechnological mood control only makes sense to those who really believe that we do or will be able to completely understand human consciousness or the human soul. So it doesn\u2019t make much sense to me. And I think this penetrating report would be even more powerful if it were more consistently confident that the mood control project is finally mission impossible \u2014 in fact, finally nuts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n