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Part I
Getting to grips with the thought styles
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ONE
Biology and the drive for human improvement
In this chapter, we begin with a brief introduction to the recent developments in the biological sciences. We go on to examine how these are joining with older projects to improve the human condition. We review the origins of these projects in the natural yearning for a utopia, free from misery, disorder and disease. We then trace the ascendency of developmental psychology and ‘infant determinism’ which has always been a key part of the project of human improvement.
The application of molecular biology and neuroscience to the treatment of diseases such as cancer or Parkinson’s disease may be relatively morally uncontroversial, but we are seeing a shift in the range of matters to which biological understandings are being applied. This is why the exploration of their translation into policy and practice is so pressing. The ‘neuro’ prefix, for example, is now applied to disciplines as disparate as economics, the law, aesthetics, pedagogy, theology and organisational behaviour. The term ‘neuromania’ has been coined (Legrenzi and Umilta, 2011; Tallis, 2011) to refer to this proliferation.
Although some critics have lampooned this ebullience, speaking flippantly of parts of the brain ‘lighting up’ in overly simplistic laboratory experiments, there are many, very real implications in seeing the human condition in this way. Social policy is making increasingly significant use of neuroscientific evidence to warrant particular claims about both the potentialities and vulnerabilities of early childhood, and the proper responses of the State to these. Neuroscience is also making its mark in the area of criminal justice, where it often appears to offer ‘liberalising’ benefits: developmental neuroscience has been used, for example, to make the case for raising the age of criminal responsibility. However, alongside these apparently progressive trends, there lies the seductive (and somewhat sinister) idea that violent crime can be attributed to a small group of intrinsically aggressive individuals, and that neuroimaging (or genetics) can yield ‘biomarkers’ which may be used to identify risky people and to ‘target’ interventions at them. This potentially prefigures a future in which new biological technologies play an increasing role in pre-emptively isolating risky subgroups and identifying how to prevent their predicted deviance.
The last decades have thus seen a profound shift in our understanding of biological processes and life itself. At the heart of neurobiology’s ascendancy is a paradox, described by Rose and Rose thus: ‘[Biological] discourses are at once essentialist and Promethean; they see human nature as fixed, while at the same time offering to transform human life through the real and imagined power of the biotechnosciences’ (Rose and Rose, 2012: 24).
Whereas genetics has conventionally focused on examining the DNA sequence (the genotype), epigenetics examines additional mechanisms for modifying gene expression in manifest behaviours, traits, physical features, health status and so on (the phenotype). It provides a conduit mediating the interaction of the environment and an otherwise immutable DNA blueprint, and invites a natural interest in the impact of adverse conditions, such as deprivation or normatively deficient parenting. The implications for social policy of this new ‘biology of social adversity’ (Boyce et al, 2012) are far reaching. ‘Hard’ heredity, in which genes were seen as inherited and fixed for life (insulated from environmental influences, life chances and choices) drove the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In its extreme form, the ‘barbarous utopia’ of the Nazis (Meloni, 2016: 28) banished biology from the acceptable face of politics and social reform, but epigenetics shows every sign of rehabilitating biology, making it politically acceptable again. As Meloni notes, freeing us from the determinacy of our genetic inheritance might help make the case for more resources to ‘fix’ or prevent damage to the epigenome of disadvantaged groups, but it may also have less pretty effects:
This all sounds desirable, but how likely is it in a society where class, race, and gender inequalities remain so vast? What is our society going to make of the notion that … the socially disadvantaged are also (epi)genetically damaged? … And what will oppressed groups do with this flurry of epigenetic studies concerning their own condition? (Meloni, 2016: 221)
Political positions are already emerging. The slavery reparations movement in the United States is using epigenetic arguments to support its case for compensation for the privations of enslavement in previous generations.1 There are also claims that the offspring of Holocaust survivors show enduring epigenetic changes (Yehuda et al, 2015). Legal scholars and ethicists are further commenting on the implications for litigation in relation to the effects of a range of environmental and workplace toxins: ‘Insurance policy claims and tort liability may have a ‘long tail’ if the toxic effects from agents acting via an epigenetic mechanism are not manifested until one or more generations into the future’ (Rothstein et al, 2009: 11).
As we shall see, whether the current science supports some of the bolder claims is contestable. Even within medicine, where epigenetically based drug treatments have promise and are beginning to appear, and where the moral arguments for their use are less contentious, the science is as yet unsettled. In fixing one thing we may very easily finish up breaking another. Epigenetics, for example, is starting to challenge the wisdom of previous public health interventions. A case in point is the use of folic acid fortification in cereal to prevent neural tube defects such as spina bifida. This has been called into question by the apparent effect of these substances on unrelated parts of the epigenome: if folic acid switches off undesirable effects, might it also switch off some desirable ones, thus causing iatrogenic disease in the population?
Epigenetic arguments potentially engender newly racialised and stigmatised identities consequent on ‘damage’ to the epigenome, and the related moral imperative to ‘optimise’ the uterine environment in particular (Mansfield and Guthman, 2014). These may be resisted by those very disadvantaged groups who have come under the epigenetic gaze. The following online comment from a Glaswegian citizen, responding to the publication in the press of the results of a study about the inhabitants of his city, is an illustration of how the stories may be received:
“I am just flabbergasted by this latest research – I am 81 years old and was born into what I would describe as extreme poverty … but with caring parents who were not into accepting ‘charity’ but gave me and my siblings the best they could in spite of a lot of unemployment. I have led a useful life, was pretty intelligent at school, and held responsible jobs, have married successfully, had children … and feel I was anything but deprived or damaged. Just grateful that these statistics weren’t available in my past!” (Cited in Meloni, 2016: 221)
Epigenetics, like neuroscience, also promises to identify biomarkers of vulnerability and risk, thus creating the potential for State intervention to prevent ‘suboptimal’ human flourishing and to correct intergenerational social injustices. The new genre of explanations for health inequalities, associated in particular with the research programme on the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD), gives a flavour of the moral arguments at play:
It might be possible to design environmental or pharmacological interventions for reverting the potential adult consequences of a particular mothering style at the molecular, cellular and physiological level. One implication … is that there is a prima face duty of justice to intervene: the possibility of reverting programmed traits, when epigenetic information is a reliable biosensor, might efficiently prevent a process of life-time accumulation of disadvantage that ends up in disease. (Loi et al, 2013: 149)
Significantly absent from many of these sophisticated analyses is the proper response of the State to those who refuse to comply with actions deemed to be in their own best interests, or in the interests of their future offspring. Yet, these are thorny matters indeed, as Rothstein et al note:
Epigenetics raises difficult questions about the obligations of society to preserve the soundness of the human genome and epigenome for the benefit of future generations. In developing a principle of intergenerational equity for the human genome and epigenome, optimum social policy lies between indifference to the health burdens of future generations and eugenic notions of manipulating heredity to improve the human condition. (Rothstein et al, 2009: 27)
The ascendancy of technobiology, in the form of neuroscience and epigenetics, seems to usher in new imperatives for the State to act. But such actions will inevitably have unintended as well as intended consequences, particularly in fields where knowledge is unsettled and claims to predictive power outstrip current understanding. There are serious implications for the State and its mandates to act in ‘our best interests’ (Kahn, 2010; Rothstein et al, 2009), but these nuances are unlikely to dampen the enthusiasm of politicians for robust and urgent action on a range of matters perceived to be within the State’s ambit of concern.
These enthusiasms go back a long way and have a chequered history. Current developments in biotechnology are not historically unique; arguably they form part of an enduring project to ‘fix’ people which has, in its various guises, both liberal and conservative valences, but tends to drive policy and professional reasoning in particular directions. Prevention and targeting are prominent motifs in an increasingly residual and conditional welfare settlement, providing a natural slot for technologies which can claim to tease out individual susceptibilities. As we shall see, rather than challenging orthodoxies, both neuroscience and epigenetics are presently being co-opted to support old moral arguments, regardless of what the scientists might anticipate and debate among themselves.
The utopian legacy, policy and practice
Utopias are mythological, imaginary places, good or bad, which are expressions of desires, or fears (Carey, 1999). Perhaps, most usually, they are a little of both. Usually mistranslated from the Greek as a ‘good’ place (creating a need for its antonym, dystopia) utopia actually means ‘no-place’. The origins of utopian aspirations in our emotions naturally invite public sympathies: we want the world to be a better place; we seek the elimination of suffering, unrewarding toil, inequality, crime and madness. Utopias, in all their fictional and political forms, are granted a special place in our imagination because they embody contradictions. The most important of these relates to the human race itself.
The aim of utopias … is to eliminate real people. Even if it is not a conscious aim, it is an inevitable result of their good intentions. … to aim to eliminate real people might not be as bad as it sounds … visitors to utopias are often informed that criminals of every description have been made obsolete. That has undeniable attractions, however keen we may be on preserving the rich and varied tapestry of human life. (Carey, 1999: xii)
The durability of the utopian project would seem to belie its status as a myth. By myth we do not refer to a false belief, but rather, after Barthes (1973), to the linguistic trick of presenting as wholly natural a particular cultural set of values or concepts. Myth is a system of ‘signs’, linguistic or visual, which have a meaning beyond their literal significance, conveying fundamental ‘truths’ about the nature of the world, its origins, composition, ordering. A pertinent example from Mythologies (Barthes, 1973) is the Myth of Einstein’s Brain. Although we may allude metaphorically to his ‘massive brain’, it is not Einstein’s brain which is prodigious, but his intellect. Mythically, the trope reduces the mystery of genius to the properties of a material object:
Einstein’s brain is a mythical object: paradoxically, the greatest intelligence of all provides an image of the most up-to-date machine … a photograph shows him lying down, his head bristling with electric wires: the waves of his brain are being recorded. … Thought itself is thus represented as an energetic material, the measureable product of a complex (quasi-electrical) apparatus which transforms cerebral substance into power. (Barthes, 1973: 68)
In fact, Einstein’s brain was bequeathed for medical examination and no remarkable features have been found, but that is not the point: the myth ‘says’ that his mind, and therefore all minds, are but powerful cognitive machines. This provides our first encounter, of many to come, with what is known as the ‘mereological fallacy’. In general, the fallacy consists of localising properties to a part or aspect of something, which makes sense only when applied to the whole. In the present context, it amounts to ascribing psychological phenomena to the brain, which only make sense as properties of living conscious human beings. The fallacy, as we shall see in due course, is particularly rife in neuroscience (Bennett and Hacker, 2003).
As with brains, utopia is not a myth in the literal sense that it does not exist, but in the normative sense that it prescribes how things ought to be, depicting this (crucially) as the natural condition of humanity, rather than a cultural product reflecting a particular moral orientation. The ‘perfect family’ is arguably a core motif of contemporary utopian mythology: this provides a superficial identity (all perfect families are the same): ‘difference’ is thus seen, not as injustice or simply otherness, but as defect. While there are socialist utopian2 projects, where social structures and political economy are the focus of revolutionary effort, at present the dominant aspiration, in ‘western’ civilisation especially, is to fix individuals, with the State assuming the moral imperative to do so. Potent symbols gather around the utopian myth (of technological progress, images of ‘damaged’ brains, the prestige of laboratory science) holding in place a prospectus about what should be done to, and for, whom.
The method of producing ideal citizens found in utopian thinking from Plato onwards is through attempts to control human reproduction and child rearing. How to beget excellent offspring has always been a prime utopian concern, and it offers, supposing it could be made to work, an absolutely foolproof way of replacing real people with utopians. (Carey, 1999: xvii)
As we shall see, many of the policy and practice applications of the technosciences are focused on the early part of the life course and on the female reproductive years. They are resolutely and classically utopian both in their contradictions and in their moral certainties. For the first half of the 20th century, the ambition to ensure the excellence of the next generation was manifested in the science of eugenics. In 1896, the socialist Sidney Webb urged the Fabians to ‘take property from idle rich and children from the unfit poor’ (Perry, 2000: 7). Eugenics was popular and respectable up until the Second World War when, sullied by fascism under National Socialism in Germany, it hung its head for a while. It is arguably back in new clothes, fuelled on the one hand by environmental concerns with population control, and on the other by those seeking to eliminate social disadvantage and its associated suffering and unhappiness.
The social engineering of human reproduction, and the process of parenting and child rearing, enjoy support from both left and right of the political spectrum, as the entitlements of the very young are not tainted by any moral stain that their parents may carry. It has proved popular with the World Bank, for example, as an apolitical aspiration, apparently transcending ideology: ‘The idea of giving people equal opportunity early in life, whatever their socioeconomic background, is embraced across the political spectrum – as a matter of fairness for the left and as a matter of personal effort for the right’ (Paes de Barros et al, 2009: 18).
The focus on early childhood has a long history in developmental psychology. Ways of thinking about parents and children in this discipline will b...
