And When They Meet, It's Happy Land

So I’ve just returned from Providence, RI, where an IHS conference on social change was held at Brown University. Stars of the show included the ever-lucid Will Wilkinson (recently in the news himself) and Claremont Professor Paul Zak, who received during the conference a Drudge Report link heralding a “childbirth wonder drug that can ‘cure’ shyness.” The crux:

Paul Zak, a professor of neuroscience at California’s Claremont Graduate University said: ‘Tests have shown that oxytocin reduces anxiety levels in users. It is a hormone that facilitates social contact between people.

What’s more, it is a very safe product that does not have any side effects and is not addictive.’

Professor Zak has tested the hormone on hundreds of patients. Its main effect is to curb the instincts of wariness and suspicion that cause anxiety.

Right around the midpoint of the article we are ushered into crazy town:

Professor Zak said: ‘Oxytocin does not cure autism, but it does reduce the symptoms.’
Studies on rats at Emory University in Atlanta also suggested the hormone made the rodents more faithful to their partners.

The potential uses of oxytocin offer commercial possibilities well beyond individual patients too. Restaurants, for instance, could spray a thin mist over customers to put them at ease.

It could be used as a benign form of tear gas, quelling any violent feelings among groups of demonstrators, or, building on the Atlanta research, even to prevent extramarital affairs.

Fortunately, Prof. Zak explained to us that, during the interview, he had to fight strenuously to insist he was not, in fact, trying to cure autism. And oxytocin, at least so far, is an extremely inefficient way of chilling out: subjects’ behavior was modified slightly after about 40 sprays of ‘tocin up the nose. Unfortunately, however, it’s simply not convincing to imagine that this isn’t the beginning of yet another attempt to turn our coping mechanisms for anxiety into cures. I’ve argued elsewhere that the key to therapeutic culture is the notion that all cures are impossible and everything must only be coped with — in large part because a cure betokens true health versus true illness, whereas coping refuses to peg us to unmovable goalposts in favor of contingent ameliorations.

But it’s undeniable that this irrational kind of science is in tension with the rationalist science that seeks cures for everything — not just psychological but physical, too. Merely coping with anxiety seems inadequate from the rationalist perspective. So does merely coping with death.

‘There must be a cure for everything,’ said my humble friend. This ambition must end, if successful, in a cure for death.

That’s from Philip Rieff’s Crisis of the Officer Class (15-16). If that seems a little over the top to you, start instead perhaps with this:

Precisely the politeness of the fiction [of the unity of the self] is breaking down in [our] culture as people grow more and more willing to accept, not only their own instability, but the instability of the entire order, social and physical, in which they live (25).

Any ideology of cure seems to me set in a final and very unresolved tension with ideologies of therapy. To deny that one must die is to insist in the most uber-Lockean way that my property right to myself is inalienable forever. The therapeutic, by contrast, can hardly maintain self-ownership without a self. I can hardly offer up a resolution here. What does need a new emphasis, for anyone concerned about ideologies of coping and curing running amok, is the antagonism between them. Usually it’s glossed over in blanket condemnations of our cultures of consumerism (Barber), helping (Sommers/Satel), and other entwined horrors. I appreciate these sweeping critiques, but we need to deepen them. Teasing out the inner contradictions — separating the heads of the hydra and seeing if we can’t set them against one another — seems like an important step in that direction.