Building better humans
“America, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. It appears to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress, your mentality outdistances your morality, and your civilization outshines your culture. How much of your modern life can be summarized in the words of your poet Thoreau: ‘Improved means to an unimproved end.’ Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but you have failed to employ your moral and spiritual genius to make of it a brotherhood. So, America, the atomic bomb you have to fear today is not merely that deadly weapon which can be dropped from an airplane on the heads of millions of people, but that atomic bomb which lies in the hearts of men, capable of exploding into the most staggering hate and the most devastating selfishness. Therefore I would urge you to keep your moral advances abreast of your scientific advances.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. (speaking as the apostle Paul in Paul's Letter to American Christians)
Upon reading a collection of sermons by MLK, I found that he often pondered the same issue that I considered in one of my previous posts; namely, what are the consequences of our technology and scientific progress so massively outstripping our morality and spiritual progress? King concurs with the assessment that, despite humanity’s enormous progress in transforming and controlling the external world, we have achieved next to nothing in terms of transforming and controlling our internal world. He notes, “Selfishness and hatred have not vanished with an enlargement of our educational system and an extension of our legislative policies.”
Much of King’s sermon The Answer to a Perplexing Question outlines his critique of humanism, the philosophy that humans are fundamentally good and our problems can be solved rationally and without divine aid. (As King summarizes humanism: “Give people a fair chance and a decent education, and they will save themselves.”) Of course, King rejects this idea, insisting that “man by his own power can never cast evil from the world.” He realizes, just as biologist E. O. Wilson did, that despite humanity’s improvements in institutions and technologies, we still maintain our “paleolithic emotions” that burden us with fear and hate, shortsightedness and selfishness.
To be fair, King’s solution to the problem is not submissive quietism or helpless reliance on God to do all things for us. He does insist on the responsibility of humans to take action against sin and injustice, but with the qualification that success will only come “when men so open their lives to God that he may fill them with love, mutual respect, understanding, and good will.” Humans cannot overcome their own sins, much less the sins of others, without opening a door (i.e., faith) that allows God to work through them, lending his strength to theirs. King, like me, thinks often in terms of synthesis—a merging of the best of both worlds.
But in this case, despite King’s accurate diagnosis of humanity’s disease, I’m not sold on the cure he espouses. To me, it smacks of the assessment that Socrates makes in Plato’s Meno, that being good or doing good are qualities that are hard to learn and even harder to teach, and they usually come to people, when they do, by gift of god. Now, this reliance on divine assistance poses a major problem for me for the simple reason that I don’t believe there is a God. And if there is no deity who can imbue us with the strength we need to transcend our inherent moral flaws, then where shall we turn for salvation?
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To reiterate: one of the core ideas of humanism, as understood by King and others, is that we can save ourselves without the need for divine intervention. But history has shown that while rationality and better education can indeed improve our lives materially and socially, they are much less capable of improving us emotionally and morally. But what if there is another avenue humans can pursue—one less focused on using our existing brains more effectively and instead more focused on changing them entirely? If we can’t teach ourselves to be better humans, can we instead engineer ourselves to be?
As our technology continues to improve by leaps and bounds, particularly in the fields of genetics, pharmacology, neuroscience, and nanorobotics, it may become possible for humans to improve themselves morally and emotionally by going to the very roots of our biology. There is every reason to think that with each subsequent decade, we will be increasingly able to determine what kinds of people we want to be—not just in terms of how we think and act, but in how we are fundamentally wired. Indeed, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, in their book Unfit for the Future (which I referenced in my earlier post), suggest several biological avenues for improving human morality, including drug treatments and genetic engineering.
One provocative idea they float is to further “feminize” the human population. In many species, including primates, females tend to have a greater capacity for empathy and altruism compared to males, and those qualities act as a brake on violent behavior. It is well documented that almost all violent crime is committed by men, and that testosterone—a hormone that does many wonderful things but can also increase aggression—is present in much higher quantities in men. So might one solution be to increase female hormones and make men more effeminate? Although some contemporary social critics (almost all of them male) have lamented the “feminizing” of modern society, it is hard to deny that our current era—in which women have played increasing roles in politics, business, and culture—is more peaceful and prosperous than any other era in human history.
Beyond hormones, there are other biological avenues we could pursue. For instance, could brain implants (like the empathy enhancer discussed in another of my previous posts) amplify our ability to feel what others are feeling, so that we may experience the pain, joy, and sorrow of others more viscerally? Such a device could help negate some of our inherent selfishness and increase our compassion for others (and most importantly, for those not like us). Or can we use CRISPR to selectively turn off certain genes that predispose us towards aggression or selfishness, thereby shaping and taming our brains as a master gardener would his hedgerows? Such precision pruning would allow us to selectively channel our behavior into more peaceful and pro-social avenues.
Of course, there are plenty of concerns surrounding any significant modifications of our biology, including how we decide as a society which treatments to pursue and how mandatory such treatments would be. But I feel it is important to address one particular concern that many readers might have—i.e., is such biological enhancement moral? By making these changes, are we taking away people’s right to choose? I think the flaw in that argument is the assumption that we are free to choose in our current state.
For instance, do you or I have any real control over the hormones in our body and their effects on our emotions? If another man provokes me or tries to pick a fight, do I have a choice as to how my body responds? When faced with a potential aggressor, my body will react the way human bodies have done for millions of years—with a flood of adrenaline, cortisol, and other hormones that are intended to influence my behavior. I have no choice with regards to whether these hormones activate or not. Perhaps, if I have practiced meditation for many years or been trained in conflict resolution, I can keep my hormones in check enough to allow me to de-escalate the situation and avoid a violent outcome. But it will still take every bit of self control to suppress my hormonally-driven instincts. In no such situation can I simply decide that I don’t want all that adrenaline or cortisol and just turn it off like a switch; it will be there, coursing through my body and doing its best to dictate my behavior, whether I want it or not. So how free am I, really, in such a situation?
Similarly, consider a woman’s decision to have or refrain from having children. I’ve had many female friends who for years insisted—quite truthfully, I’m convinced—that they did not want to have children. They had other goals and dreams they wanted to pursue, and did not want to succumb to any societal pressures to “settle down” and have kids. I fully supported and encouraged such decisions. Yet in so many cases, as these friends entered their early 30s, their attitude towards children began to change. Suddenly, the idea of children became much more appealing, and many of these women did indeed have a child or two and settle happily into motherhood. And they seem truly content with their decision.
Yet I can’t help but wonder…who made that decision to have kids? The women I knew who insisted that they would not become mothers were intelligent, ambitious, self-sufficient individuals—not the kind of persons you would accuse of indecision or flightiness. And yet between their late 20s and early 30s, they completely changed their minds about the issue of motherhood. Did they all happen to acquire some new wisdom or clear-sightedness? Or conversely, did some force arise and exert its will within them?
The so-called “biological clock” is a powerful phenomenon. After all, the primary imperative of natural selection is reproduction; it is the driving force behind all of evolution, and we have hundreds of millions of years of pro-breeding behavior hardwired into us. And while men can successfully reproduce for almost all of their lifespan, women have a more limited window. By the time she hits her 30s, a woman who has not yet had children can usually count on her hormones trying to take matters into their own hands. So the question here is—how free are women, really, when it comes to deciding on motherhood? Just as a man confronted with violence is unconsciously flooded with certain hormones, is a woman confronted with her biological clock (and all the hormones at its disposal) really free to make a rational disinterested decision about her future?
To me, the bottom line is that if we are not in control of our biology, something else (i.e., nature and its evolutionary imperatives) will be. And although we often speak glowingly of “Mother Nature” as some kind of beneficent force, it is in fact nothing of the sort. While nature can be beautiful, it can also be terrible. For every adorable baby animal nuzzling its mother, there is another being torn apart by hungry predators. For every majestic old growth forest, there is a charred wasteland left behind by wildfires. Nature is not loving or hateful, it simply is. Evolution is not moral or immoral, it is amoral. Evolution functions coldly, indifferently—it is an algorithm for selecting the strong and destroying the weak. So if we want to make moral decisions about our individual lives and our fate as a species, we cannot look to nature for guidance—nature does not recognize right or wrong.
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Not long ago, I came across a short story by Ted Chiang that beautifully illustrates this idea of freedom from biology. His story Liking What You See: A Documentary takes the form of a series of interviews and transcripts about a controversial new medical procedure nicknamed “calli.” This is a reference to calliagnosia, a neurological condition in which—to put it simply—someone cannot recognize faces as “beautiful” or “ugly.” As one character explains, “A calliagnosic perceives faces perfectly well; he or she can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and blemished skin. He or she simply doesn’t experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences.” In the story, a simple neural implant can open or close the brain pathway that allows us to perceive the attractiveness of faces.
The main narrative centers on Pembleton University as it debates whether to follow the path blazed by other institutions such as the private Saybrook School, where all enrolled students are required to have the calli procedure. The argument made by students and parents in support of the requirement is that removing the bias towards attractiveness allows for greater individual flourishing and increased social acceptance for all students. One parent describes how, when visiting the Saybrook School while considering enrolling her child there, she saw students with all kinds of facial abnormalities being treated as if they were no different from the “normal”-looking kids. In fact, the class president was a girl with large burn scars on her face, and the parent notes that she “was wonderfully at ease with herself…[and] popular among kids who probably would have ostracized her in any other school.”
In the story, some Pembleton students opposed to calli make the argument that the procedure takes away a person’s freedom because it limits their perception of other people, and that the answer to “lookism” (i.e., discriminating against people based on their attractiveness) is simply better education and greater maturity. But one student, in defense of the pro-calli position, has this rebuttal: “Calli doesn’t decide for you; it doesn’t prevent you from doing anything. And as for maturity, you demonstrate maturity by choosing calli in the first place. Everyone knows physical beauty has nothing to do with merit; that’s what education’s accomplished. But even with the best intentions in the world, people haven’t stopped practicing lookism. We try to be impartial, we try not to let a person’s appearance affect us, but we can’t suppress our autonomic responses, and anyone who claims they can is engaged in wishful thinking. Ask yourself: don’t you react differently when you meet an attractive person and when you meet an unattractive one? Every study on this issue turns up the same results: looks help people get ahead. We can’t help but think of good-looking people as more competent, more honest, more deserving than others. None of it’s true, but their looks still give us that impression. Calli doesn’t blind you to anything; beauty is what blinds you. Calli lets you see.”
There is a lot of validity to that student’s argument. After all, we have numerous studies showing how strong our unconscious bias can be in reaction to a person’s physical appearance. Research has shown that people make snap judgments about politicians or job candidates after seeing their faces for less than one second. In fact, some psychologists have been able to accurately predict the outcomes of elections by showing people pictures of the candidates’ faces—without providing their names or any information on their background—and asking them to rate their competence. Of course, it is nearly impossible to know someone’s competence based solely on the way they look, but people instinctively assume that better-looking people are “more competent, more honest, more deserving than others.” There is also evidence that defendants in court may experience greater lenience or harshness from a judge or jury based on their appearance. This is troubling news for any society that claims to value fairness or equality, since people have little control over the structure or appearance of their faces, and yet facial attractiveness is clearly a very strong advantage in life.
So might a procedure like calli actually free us from the tyranny of our inherent bias? By turning off our aesthetic perception of faces, might we not be better able to judge politicians or job candidates based on their merits, and choose the people we date and marry more because of their personalities? We like to claim that we already do this, but the research shows that we are—at least partly—lying to ourselves. A big problem with unconscious bias is that it is unconscious. We are rarely aware of it, and even when we do call it to our attention (via training or some kind of mindfulness), we remain unable to truly eliminate its influence. As both Socrates and Martin Luther King, Jr. realized, we are incapable of educating ourselves out of our irrationality. So if we are ever to be free from our evolutionarily-driven biases, we might have to go right to the source code and reprogram ourselves in a more enlightened way.
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In the end, I can’t say for sure that biological enhancement is the best path forward for humanity. There are certainly plenty of dangers involved in such an endeavor. A nation with the ability to manipulate its people’s genetic traits or install in them cybernetic enhancements could just as easily use that technology to augment aggressive behaviors for use in warfare. And there is always the risk of unintended consequences—by manipulating a particular gene or changing a certain hormone, we may trigger unexpected downstream effects. Our biology is quite complex, and so a great deal of modeling and testing will be required before we feel safe doing any of these aforementioned alterations.
But given the sorry track record of humans improving themselves via religion or culture, and given the increasingly drastic stakes at hand (nuclear annihilation, manmade pandemics, runaway climate change), it seems as if we have to take some sort of daring step to ensure that humanity survives into the 22nd century. Enhancing ourselves biologically could help us prevent catastrophe and live in greater harmony with each other and the natural world. And these moral enhancements wouldn’t necessarily rob us of choice because in many ways our biology—shaped by the amoral processes of evolution—already does that. Ultimately, I think we should choose our own path instead of being slaves to our biological legacy.
