The New York Times op-ed page has two intriguing articles about (perhaps indirectly) competition and society. Judith Warner, presumably without any unnatural brain enhancements (no, I'm not above cheap jokes), is not convinced that cognitive enhancements will improve the world, though she gives a fair summary of the arguments in favor. I tend to agree with her. If we need drugs to achieve something through the frenzied haze of our lives, perhaps we need less frenzy, less haze. A few months ago, however, the Economist was already in favor.
Sonja Lyubomirsky explains why, in spite of our current recession, people are generally happy. Evidently, we are less aware of our objective status than our status compared to others. If everyone is in trouble economically, we tend to be happier than if we are moderately prosperous compared to the exuberant prosperity of our neighbors. Envy runs deep.
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That's a tough question. I definitely agree with you that we need less frenzy and less haze in our lives. For better or worse, there are so many changes in our society right now that it's mind boggling, from mind-enhancing drugs, to technology and the ways we interact to our social fabric. Is it all truly bringing us together or pulling us more and more apart? It's like when you jump into something (such as facebook for a perhaps benign example) you're immediately whisked away with the current. It's hard to know what to hold on to and what to let go of. Sometimes I wish I could just defer my decisions on everything for ten or twenty or a hundred years and see where these things lead. Will there be long-term negative side effects to these drugs that nobody knows about yet? Will their use result in more and more inequality? Could these things outweigh the immediate benefits? I certainly don't know
Thanks for reading! I don't know either. Wendell Berry has a lot of good mediations on technology. He disagrees with using an automobile (because of pollution), for example, but he admits that he has not figured out how to live without them. So, he limits his use, but he must live with this tension. Would that be the same with brain enhancement, or for that matter, any other suspicious technology that would be swept up by the competitive masses? I am principally against brain enhancers, but I cannot say that if, in 10 years time, everyone else is using them to get by, that I would allow that disadvantage for myself or my children.
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