>[in the next 25 years], =91[n]o aspect of the human being, whether physi=
cal,
>mental, intellectual, social, psychological or physiological, will be
>beyond practical manipulation and change, all of which will be made
>possible and practical through technology=92 (Coates 1998: 41). Coates
>assumes that at this point, [b]rain technologies will go well beyond
>disease, offering relief for the person who is short-tempered the person
>who has no sense of humour, the person who is overly emotional. And reli=
ef
>from these conditions will find a substantial market. Beyond that will b=
e
>the possibility and later the practice of enhancing people's cognitive
>processes, enabling them to think more clearly, to have a better command=
of
>arithmetic, to have a better memory for faces, to be more generous and
>loving, or to be less prideful or slothful. (1998: 42)=20
=20
chemical or surgical salvation from five (atleast) of the seven deadly
sins-- anger, greed, pride, sloth, and envy, all eradicable by appeals t=
o
technical-logical science...i dont doubt that when it becomes possible (a=
s
it already is with SSRIs for depression) to medicate all human frailty ou=
t
of existence, it will become a moral crusade to do so...it is not
impossible to see the beginnings of this movement in the pharmacolonizati=
on
of depression and other "aberant" medico-psychiatric
maladies...(personally, i self-medicate with scotch, but both the other
adult males in my family are thriving on SSRI-like substances)
Nietzsche anyone: the uber-mensch pill...
>Conflating religious fundamentalism, technocracy, normativity ... eugeni=
cs
>is about to make a _big_ comeback. =20
>
>Phil - gloomily
it never went far away...oh the argument about the Jukes and the Kallikac=
ks
faded, Terman was exposed as a fraud, but what were Herrnstein and Murray
on about in the Bell Curve except a kind of intellectual, de facto
eugenics, and the plea to let it continue unrestrained by any claims of
social justice...libertarianism as a political philosophy exudes a eugeni=
c
potential---it was never far from the view of Ayn Rand the
quasi-philosopher and (in poet Kenneth Patchen's felicitous term) pious
pornographer whose "work" forms at least part of the basis for popular
libertarian thought...
orwell and huxley were never writing about different universes...they wer=
e,
rather, i think, both always talking about two different outcomes of the
same system--tho i dont think either of them saw it that way...well maybe
huxley, but not orwell after the war...
Stalinist USSR, ostensibly Orwell's target, was rationalized, explicitly,
according to the dicta laid down by Henry Ford in designing his corporate
empire. The critique of eugenics, which underlies huxley, depends on
knowing that eugenics was, at least in its inception, a 'progressive"
idea...the coupling of a eugenics (but any predictive "socio-biological
science") capability with a dictatorial corporate state rationalized alon=
g
a capitalist telos is, imho, what Foucault was alarmed about in the Birt=
h
of the Clinic, and certainly in the late books on sexuality and the
confessional state...
equally gloomily
konopak