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Enhancement Technologies
Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, by Carl Elliott, New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
VARIOUS ENHANCEMENT TECHNOLOGIES now promise to make us "better than well." Not only is American medicine responsible for the healthiest society in history, but sophisticated and prosperous Americans are employing and will continue to employ medical enhancement technologies not merely to perfect but to improve upon their natures. Until now, the modern conquest of nature was limited by the intractability of human nature. The most radical program for historical human transformation we have hitherto known-communism-was easily defeated by the limits we have been given by nature. To a growing extent we will now be able to give orders to our nature, to add willfully to what we have been given biologically. The dream of communism for a "New Man" may now be fulfilled by biotechnology. How will our use of biotechnology, Carl Elliott asks, be conditioned by and perhaps transform "the American dream?"
The American dream, from this point of view, is the imagined outcome of our "pursuit of happiness." Our hope has been that the progress of good government, economic prosperity, and technology will lead to happiness. But as Gregg Easterbrook recently noticed in The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better When People Feel Worse (2003), the progress that has produced the longest, most secure, and freest lives in history has, if anything, made us somewhat more unhappy. Serious students of Rousseau, or of Tocqueville, or especially of Locke should be not nearly as surprised as Easterbrook was by the results of his study.
In Locke's understanding, to be human-to transcend the world of the animals-is to pursue happiness, but not actually to enjoy happiness. Insofar as we human beings uneasily organize our lives around that pursuit we are free. Insofar as we enjoy happiness, however, we are either deluded by our imaginations or we are as unfree as the other animals. Locke reached this conclusion because he understood the human being as a sovereign individual who organizes his whole life warily around calculation and consent. We can say that one reason modern human beings are not so happy is that we are now more Lockean than ever; we view more and more of...