In his In Praise of Bio-Happiness, Mark Walker argues “that there is a moral imperative to develop bio-happiness,” and champions the use of “pharmacological agents as the technical means to pursue bio-happiness.” He stresses that “when we are speaking about bio-happiness, we are thinking about using it not simply for treating the profoundly depressed, but also cases where there is no indication of clinical depression.... ‘normally happy’ persons should be able to use bio-happiness to be ‘better than well.’”
Walker deals with various objections to bio-happiness and “happy pills.” In a section headed “Loss of emotional appropriateness,” he refers to the President’s Council on Bioethics report Beyond Therapy, and seems to agree that feelings of “shame, remorse, horror and disgust are appropriate in certain circumstances.” But he goes on to critique the assumption that “pharmacological agents will necessarily produce a one-dimensional emotional response.” He also cites a study which indicates that “chronic positive affect...can cause increased achievement...it is not simply that achievement causes happiness, but happiness may also cause achievement...In a slogan: to be successful, be happy.”
On the other hand we have the President’s Council’s view: “A central concern with mood-brightening drugs is that they will estrange us emotionally from life as it really is, preventing us from responding to events and experiences, whether good or bad, in a fitting way...[W]e do not want to remove the capacity to suffer when suffering is called for...never to be dissatisfied with ourselves may mean that we aspire to too little...In sum, a mood-brightening drug that always made us pleased with ourselves no matter what we did—a drug that guaranteed our self-esteem, even when such esteem is not warranted—might shrink our capacity for true human flourishing.”
And also our capacity for human survival—but more on that later.
“To be successful, be happy.” I once knew a woman whom Walker would describe as “hyperthymic”—a person with a sunny disposition. I once asked her why she seemed always happy, and she replied: “The secret to being happy is to have absolutely no ambition.”
We are all familiar with the artist “destroyed by success.” Tennessee Williams is one example. He wrote his best plays while struggling for recognition and success. He seems not to have been particularly happy during this period. Night of the Iguana is considered his last great play. After writing it, he entered a period of heavy drinking and heavy use of psychoactive drugs. He deteriorated to such a point that a family intervention was effected and he was committed. During this period he continued to write—one-act plays that are considered vastly inferior to his earlier works and which no one reads. He died choking to death on a bottle cap that contained his nightly dose of pills.
Dissatisfied people want to “do something with their lives”; they want to “make something of themselves.” One young man plays the guitar, associates with other musicians; he forms a band with some friends; they start to perform in bars; eventually, if they have enough drive and luck, they come to the attention of a producer who enables them to make an album. They might achieve some small success; they might become world famous.
Another young man plays the guitar, but under the influence of dope or happy pills has no desire to venture out into the world. He plays for himself and is content.
Who cares whether he is successful or not, if he himself doesn’t care? Were he not under the influence of drugs, his happiness would depend on his achieving recognition and success. Now his happiness depends on a vial of pills, and he is satisfied.
One still survives, even if one is not successful in one’s field. But there is something more insidious about bio-happiness. It can interfere with evolutionary strategies that enable one to live. According to evolutionary psychology, we have unpleasant emotions in order to react defensively to threatening situations, much like the body has the ability to experience pain. Drugs already exist—indeed, have existed for some time—that dull our perception of the pain response. This can lead to unpleasant consequences. William Faulkner once fell asleep in a drunken stupor. He awoke to find that he had severely burned his back on a hot water pipe. Of course, one doesn’t have to be a famous writer to have had such experiences.
Emotions of fear, disgust, shame—they are unpleasant to experience, to be sure: but that’s the whole point. We need to be afraid in a threatening situation. We need to climb a tree out of fear when a she-bear charges at us because we have inadvertently come between her and her cubs. A woman needs to be afraid of two men coming towards her in a dark, deserted street—at least if she wants to make her own reproductive decisions. A feeling of shame after a series of brief sexual encounters with various men will also enable her to make better decisions about the quality of her mate, thus giving any eventual offspring a better chance of survival.
And this is just at an individual level. An entire people under the influence of happy pills risks domination and possible annihilation by another people whose perceptions and reactions are not in such a way modified. In the words of Glubb Pasha: “Nation after nation has sung, danced, and trifled itself into chaos and slavery.”
In and age and nation such as ours, in which obesity is considered a sign of poverty, which boasts “massive welfare-state programs covering virtually every conceivable problem—or claim of a problem” (as Thomas Sowell puts it), it is easy to become complacent. Never having had to struggle to survive—at least if belong to the middle or upper classes—we view the struggle for existence as a romantic aspect of our stone-age past: something to watch on a dvd while sipping wine and nibbling on pizza. “Survival of the fittest” has yielded to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Such an attitude is glorified in Hollywood films—Academy Award winning films, at that—like American Beauty, in which the hero is a pot-smoking layabout whose heroic daughter runs off with a dope-dealer.
It is not a philosophical question of whether happiness has “moral value” or not; of whether “bio-happiness is based on a principle of fundamental justice” or not. It is a question of survival. Human beings cannot survive if they are rendered incapable of experiencing intensely unpleasant emotions—if they are rendered incapable of being unhappy, in short.
It must be pointed out that transhumanists have in general very little regard for evolutionary science.They do get exercised when intelligent design is taught in schools. But they feel we have “gone beyond” evolution, that they are in control now, that their intelligence is superior to the evolutionary wisdom of the ages. They forget that if the human race has survived wars, natural disasters, even its own vanity, it is entirely due to the evolutionary strategies developed over extremely long periods of time. In certain circumstances, certain responses can be problematic: the capacity for violence is not always used in self-defense. But that’s life: it’s a trade off, and for some problems there are no solutions, only compromise and tolerance.
A happy pill that gives us a chronic feeling of happiness without at the same time robbing us of our ability to experience unpleasant, life-preserving emotions is an impossibility. You can’t have your cake and eat it to. Or as the Italians say in their earthy way, You can’t have your wine barrel full and your wife drunk.
In his De Profundis, Oscar Wilde describes how in prison, he realized the importance of suffering:
“I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned sorrow and suffering of any kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible, to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe’s lines...:
Who never at his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,
He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.
...[T]hey were lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her later life: I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn. I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates had in store for me; that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do little else....Clergymen, and people who use phrases without wisdom, sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things that one never discerned before....
Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask....There are times when Sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of Sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.”
After having lived almost his whole life “entirely for pleasure,” Wilde was unable to reinvent himself after being in prison, and died three years after his release at the age of 46.
In Praise of Bio-Happiness: http://ieet.org/archive/IEET-02-BioHappiness.pdf