Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood

Chapter 6: I Love Humanity, but I Don’t Like You. Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome and the Soul of Scientism

131 C H A P T E R 6 I Love Humanity, but I Don’t Like You Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome and the Soul of Scientism We ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors. —John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion There may be no more reliable way to begin to understand the complicated motives behind the biotechnological revolution than to study drugs. Psychopharmaceuticals is a fast-growth industry; the use of antidepressants alone increased by 48 percent between the years 1995 and 2002.1 Hundreds of thousands of people who have struggled with depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, and other mental health problems have had their lives changed for the better, many of them moving from suicidal incapacity to full functionality. Rarely has a drug been developed for therapy that does not, in some way, at some point, cross over into being used for enhancement. Not 132 Posthuman Language everyone who takes Viagra has erectile dysfunction, not everyone who takes Prozac is clinically depressed, and not everyone who takes Ritalin has ADHD.2 Even without trying to draw a firm line between therapeutic and enhancement uses, the trends reveal something vital about American culture, the way Americans define themselves, the way we define illness. Before long, it is possible to trace an evolution in attitudes of which the psychopharmaceutical industry is symptomatically illustrative ; when drugs are relied on as primary solutions to psychological problems, something has changed in the way a culture identifies its problems and its solutions. As Carl Elliott explains in his book Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, people expect much more from medical technology than a cure from disease. Many are turning to it to try to become better or “more authentic” versions of themselves, and quickly discover a consumer culture more than willing to accommodate their wishes by defining a disease to suit. Elliott examines multiple examples of how technological enhancements are marketed with the language of illness and pathology: in each case a “problem ” is named, and a “treatment” is prescribed.3 This narrative is the one that convinced the twenty-nine-year old Walker Percy, an agnostic Southern doctor, to convert to Catholicism, leave medicine, and become a novelist. The man who desperately wanted the solutions of science soon found that they were not enough; fixing the body did not get at the core issues of the soul. Raised under the specter of suicide, and ill for many years with tuberculosis, he struggled to find meaning for his own life. His illness gave him time to read Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Sartre.4 His reading led him not only to convert to Catholicism but also to think more generally about why contemporary Americans feel so alienated from themselves. He eventually concluded that the more Americans put their trust in science to solve problems, the more alienated from their true predicament they became. The problem of feeling “lost in the cosmos” was an existential one, not a medical one.5 So, like Atwood and Huxley, he put his hand to writing about what happens when scientific solutions are writ large—when pill popping becomes the way to solve problems rather than a way to help. Through the character of Bob Comeaux, Percy warns that the problem is not in totalitarianism or in psychopharmaceuticals per se but in I Love Humanity, but I Don’t Like you 133 having an abstract and thin “Love for Humanity” that leads someone with power to embrace and promote quick fixes and easy enhancements . The problem, which is shared by social engineers and biotechnological libertarians alike, is in being led by scientism to think of individuals as patients who need their problems to be solved, rather than as persons who need to be loved and cared for.6 Unlike Atwood or Huxley, however, Percy offers an alternative as well as a critique. Through Tom More and Father Smith, Percy suggests that the path to social and personal health must start with love for particular people. Love for particular people, like language, is rich and imperfect, developing along the way and never arriving. To...