I woke up late this morning and glanced at the dozens of entries on Dale Carrico’s blog I have been too busy to read. I then discovered this gem from last month, in which Dale pondered a “neuroethical analogue to the eugenics movement”, which he inventively calls, “euneurics”.
In one variation it might involve pathologizing the perfectly reasonable responses (including anxiety, mild depression, shyness, and so on) of people to the undue and unprecedented stresses of an ever more demanding and precarious privatized and neoliberal social order and then prescribing medicines rather than social reforms to cope with these stresses — that is to say, using medicine and technique to assimilate people more seamlessly into an irrational and unjust order that demands subservience from most to increase profits for a few.
I read this, sat paralyzed for about a minute, and then took off for a long pedestrian sunshine adventure through the urban forest of Rock Creek. I spent half the day, gazing into the creek, running through mud, trying to internalize this simple, obvious, and disturbing idea: Medical therapies can act as a substitute for social reforms. It is so easy for some of us to be mesmerized by the instruments and forget the politics they serve. Some people, like Dale, are able to first notice these mysterious ties between the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific advancements and then give shape to those ties in such few words. One reason why the idea itself is so disturbing is because, despite its obviousness, it never occurred to me.
Dale has a habit of doing that — pushing exactly the right buttons on his keyboard to turn the world upside down and enable me to see it more clearly.