Poppin' pills pulls plug on possibilities

Author: Ben Gore '05

I am outraged by what's going on at Harvard and on the Op-Ed pages of the major national newspapers right now. The president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, meant to suggest a seemingly benign idea last month - maybe men and women's brains are different. He bumbled it and ended up seeming as if he believed this were fact. He also seemed to be justifying Harvard's dismal record of hiring women in mathematics and physics because of this. Here's the thing that makes me steamed though - even if he had said this clearly he would have gotten the same nausea and threats of swoons from female professors (looking for an anti-feminist stereotype?) there and the hot lead in the rectum from the ostrich-head pundits in the media. This is not about political correctness, academic freedom or feminism. This is an environmental issue. And if you can't understand how this relates to organic gardening, well, dive down the rabbit hole with me.

The reigning myth of our time, one of the fundamental truths of the anti-intellectual black hole that is postmodernism, is that the human mind is a product of society's imagination. The prevailing view is that socialization and self-determination construct what you are. This is perhaps one of the most dangerous things we could believe. If the human being is governed entirely by society and not by biology, we are no longer animals and our connection with the rest of the world that is not us, is dead.

Furthermore, this position is a cop out. Our society is built on manipulating our minds into wanting things that are not only unnecessary but contrary to our nature, like women with eight perecent body fat. Our so-called communities are built in a way so that all interaction is between two individuals or between an individual and the masses. The conventional wisdom of our day is that we can construct a healthy personality in response to this or any environment.

Just look at the sales of legal, not to mention illegal, drugs for a refutation of that. Anti-depressants are where the money is at these days along with the anti-impotence drugs. At this point one in five people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with a serious mental illness in their lifetime. Hordes of small children are given amphetamines. And let's not kid here - this is stuff that is one step away from crystal meth. Someone moving from a less developed area of a less developed country, say a rural Salvadoran immigrant to suburban D.C., increases their risk of mental illness, including schizophrenia, six times. Oh and in those same suburbs there were just two huge riots over a basketball game our team won. We are talking tear gas and broken legs and burning buildings kinds of riots. And 6 kids from a dead end suburb just burned down 30 houses for no reason. Something is clearly wrong here.

For us to correct this problem, we would have to acknowledge it. But acknowledging it means acknowledging that there are proper and improper ways of relating to each other and to the world. That reality is a set of constraints that cannot be superceded. This is what theologians mean when they say that real freedom lies in accepting God's laws. When a tree hugger like me advocates organic gardening, it is because the food makes our bodies function better, the process creates human happiness and the alternative is both alienating and carcinogenic. That is to say that though our current lifestyle is convenient, it does not and cannot work because it denies nature. And by nature I don't mean bunny rabbits and such, I mean the laws of reality.

Part of this dilemma is that if we are still animals, which we are, then obviously there are evolutionary limits to what we can do and differences between the male and the female of the species. Does this mean we need to explicitly draw the boundaries? No. We don't know where the lines are. But we need to be actively seeking them out because crossing them brings mental and physical disease.

The problem with this approach and why our liberating liberal society has abolished it, is that it has been used in the past for pernicious and oppressive purposes. It's quite clear that the assumption that women couldn't seriously do math, which is certainly completely false, is the main reason there are less women in that discipline. But why are there fewer girls who, at age 10, have rediscovered differential equations and multivariable calculus even though they can barely speak to other people?

More importantly, why is clinical depression such a major cause of lost productivity? Could it be that our minds don't want to produce something that has no meaning and no value?

The upshot of this whole situation is that Larry Summers is a jerk and so his idea, however poorly phrased, is getting stuck down with his poor people skills. The uproar is not so much about him being sexist, though, as much as it is about him suggesting that perhaps the conventional wisdom by which we justify our sick society is actually an illusion. And that, for even the casual environmentalists out there, is serious cause for concern.