The Price of Perfection: Individualism and Society in the Era of Biomedical Enhancement

4. The Hegemony of Meritocracy

u Chapter 4 The Hegemony of Meritocracy The concerns raised by the use of biomedical enhancement for social reward have to be understood in their social and historical context. So far the discussion of these concerns has been confined to sports. But the rewards made possible by biomedical enhancements would extend far beyond sports: to better houses, health care, vacations , toys, education, careers, and mates. Enhancement even could be a key to political power. It is against this expanded role for enhancement that its transformative potential must be assessed. Critics of enhancement do not limit their objections to sports, although it suits them to play on the nostalgia that sports evokes. Society as a whole would be imperiled, in their view, if people were permitted to benefit from enhanced performance. Instead, they say, societal benefit should be distributed according to the same rules that enhancement opponents insist on for sports: as a reward for effort, natural talent, and good luck. In previous sections, I have questioned whether this formula was appropriate for sports. We observed that neither natural talent nor good luck is deserved. We saw that the point of enhancements is not necessarily to enable athletes to excel without hard work and that allowing all athletes to use enhancements could be fair and not necessarily contrary 80 the price of perfection to the spirit of sport. Ethically, there does not seem to be any compelling reason to prevent reasonably competent adults from using relatively safe enhancements. But once we step outside of sports, the critics’ formula does not merely have ethical implications. It has social impact. It seeks to preserve a particular social hierarchy, in much the same way as did the glorification of the amateur gentleman athlete. The critics’ distaste for biomedical enhancement is an attempt to maintain a certain power structure. This power structure rests first on the principle of work. The idea that hard work is good came from our Puritan forefathers and their Calvinist forebears. As numerous scholars have pointed out, including Sharon Beder in Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR, the ancient Greeks did not think much of work.1 Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all felt that work interfered with more virtuous pursuits like philosophy and government. This view persisted until the Reformation , when, in part as a rebellion against the profligacy of the Catholic Church, religious thinkers began to associate work with virtue. The Puritans elevated work to the status of a fundamental religious tenet in a particularly clever fashion. Only the elect, they believed, went to heaven. Hard work would not make you one of the elect, because whether or not you were one of the elect was preordained. But working hard was a sign that you had been chosen. Work therefore became a means of demonstrating to yourself, and to those around you, that you had been pre-selected for eternal bliss. The harder you worked, the easier it was to believe that you were destined for heaven. Work therefore reinforced your faith, which in turn strengthened your belief in the value of work. In effect, the Puritans invented true “faith-based initiative.” When the Puritans made it to America, they brought their work ethic with them. The United States came into being with a notable repudiation of lineage as the arbiter of social standing. From its cradle, the infant nation trumpeted its founding principle to the world, that all men are equally entitled to the happiness derived from a good life. How was one to achieve the good life other than by being born to it? The ostensible American answer was: through work. Thus arose the American Dream. Horatio Alger, a Unitarian clergyman forced to leave the pulpit following allegations of pedophilia, wrote books with titles such as Strive and Succeed, Risen from the Ranks, and Bound to Rise, in which the hero invariably pulled himself up the social ladder through honest effort. As Professor Beder writes, “America’s reputation as a land of opportunity rested on its claim that the destruction of hereditary obstacles to advancement had created conditions in which social mobility depended on individual initiative alone.” The dream was made real time and again by the rags-to-riches odysseys of men like the butcher’s son, John Jacob Astor; Andrew Carnegie, son of a weaver; Cornelius Vanderbilt , who quit school when he was 11 to work on ferry boats; Henry...