'The Heart of My Mystery': Fear not, and hope not: The new eugenics will leave us unchanged.

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent by Claudius to discover what ails Hamlet, the prince guesses at once what they are up to:

You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.

But Hamlet will have none of it:

Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

Hamlet does not want to be understood in this instrumental fashion by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or by anybody else for that matter: as which of us would?

Nevertheless, it is received wisdom that modern man is on the verge of, if he has not already achieved, a new and unprecedented level of understanding of himself. It is not only the heart of Hamlet's mystery that has been plucked out, but that of humanity itself. Henceforth, we shall all be playable upon like a pipe.

This new, complete understanding of humanity has come from advances in genetics and the neurosciences, and from Darwinian theory. The astonishing technical progress of the last three decades has given us, so it is alleged, a better understanding of ourselves than we have ever had before. We have reached the last frontier, and have now definitively crossed it.

Oddly enough, in a world in which knowledge is supposed to be power, life proceeds in the same old messy way. Our wonderful increase in knowledge about human beings has not yet translated itself into an ability to predict, let alone control or improve, the course of human affairs. People still shoot up heroin, commit crimes, gamble away their substance, argue with one another over trifles, drive too fast, buy things they don't need, grow passionate over matters that don't affect them in the least, ignore their own interests, sleep around, eat too much, and generally conduct themselves in the appalling fashion that gives point to literature.

In fact, the vast majority of people (myself included) have no idea of what the understanding of human behavior would actually be like, beyond the most elementary explanations such as, "He ate the sandwich because he was hungry." My patients often ask me to explain their conduct to them: Why, they ask, do I do X (the X in question being, of course, something undesirable, for no one ever asks for an explanation of his virtues or successes)? I ask the patients to give me an example of what would count as a satisfactory explanation, and not a single one, out of hundreds or thousands, has ever been able to do so. Is a man's destructive drinking explained by a genetic preference for alcohol? By his rapid metabolism of the dangerous chemical? By the fact that his mother did not love him enough when he was three years old? By the fact that the price of a bottle of whisky has effectively halved since 1950, and that therefore more people drink heavily? By any combination of the above?

The dream of the alcoholic who asks for an explanation of his behavior is that, once he has it, his drinking will automatically cease, without any further effort or determination to abstain on his part. Likewise, a complete scientific explanation of human nature and behavior, such as we are told we now have or nearly have, will (we hope) relieve us not only of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, but of all our existential angst as well. To which I can only reply: Ha!

The alleged new understanding has been greeted by one of two responses: alarm or euphoria. Either Huxley's dystopian Brave New World is upon us, or we are on the verge of abolishing death and old age. The fact that complete understandings of human history and human nature have been claimed before-notably by followers of Marx and Freud-and have proved illusory gives no one a moment's pause. This time, we are told, it's true; this time, claims to complete understanding are based upon real science, unlike the pseudoscience of the past. All that remains, perhaps, are a few little gaps that, in the course of the next decade or two, will be filled in. And when they have been-well then, we shall be able to throw our Shakespeares and our Dostoevskys out of the window. They'll be as redundant as Marx and Freud.

It is true, of course, that the new genetics and the new neurosciences are genuinely scientific, in a way that Freudianism, for example, was not. But claims to understanding of ourselves have often run ahead of the genuine science of their times. No sooner, for example, had Broca discovered, in the middle of the 19th century, the area of the brain that appeared to control speech and that now bears Broca's name, than the materialist philosopher, Moleschott, said that the brain excreted thought as the liver excreted bile. This, too, was supposed at the time to represent a genuine increase in human self-understanding; but subsequent history demonstrated how deeply hollow was this claim. I suspect that we are now not so much making history as repeating it.

The optimists and the pessimists are agreed, however, that we are about to enter a completely new era of human existence. We have seen nothing like it before, and it will change the most fundamental aspects of our lives, in every particular. We shall be able, for example, to banish disease and to determine in advance the kind of children we have. We will perfect the children by a dual process: culling defectives before birth and inserting desirable genes into fetuses to ensure that every child is a Mozart or a Michael Jordan (for some reason, it is impermissible these days to mention Mozart in connection with genius without also mentioning Michael Jordan). In the view of the optimists, everyone will thenceforth be endlessly healthy and clever, and therefore happy; in the view of the pessimists, there will be a return to eugenic barbarism. Neither the optimists nor the pessimists doubt, however, that the new eugenics is possible.

But it isn't. It is true, of course, that many human diseases are more or less straightforwardly genetic in origin. More than 4,000 inborn errors of metabolism are known, which is a lot of diseases-but for the great mass of us, these diseases are not the important ones, the ones that affect the course of our lives. If they were eliminated from the human race by selective abortion or in some other way, most people would not notice the difference.

Again, it is true that there is a genetic component to many of the diseases that we are most likely to die from; everyone knows, for example, that maladies like heart attacks or mature-onset diabetes run in families. But the mode of inheritance is complex and as yet sketchily known. Moreover, many other factors are involved in the production of these diseases, so that even when the genetic basis of inheritance is known, it will never be possible to predict the medical future of an individual fetus with certainty. Those inclined to abort fetuses that they consider less than perfect will be faced with the dilemma of whether a 40 percent above-average chance of having a heart attack before the age of 60 constitutes adequate grounds for "getting rid of" (as one of my patients so elegantly put it) the baby.

Further, if there is one lesson that medical history teaches, it is that one predominant category of diseases is replaced by another; that is to say, when you conquer an infectious disease, man does not become immortal, he merely becomes longer-lived. He soon adjusts mentally to the new situation, takes past progress for granted, and starts to worry about the diseases from which he is now going to die instead of about the earlier ones. The person who aborts a fetus with an increased chance of having a heart attack before the age of 60, in the hope that his next child will not carry the same risk, is hoping only for a child that will be susceptible to different diseases at a different and, he hopes, a later time. Immortality is not of this world and never will be; the condition of mortality, human life's bottom line, as it were, will never change.

But what of behavioral traits-such as homosexuality, aggressiveness, criminality, and so forth-and biological processes such as aging? Will they not eventually yield to the investigations and procedures of the genetic engineers? (I am sure that when people think of aging, they are thinking mainly of wrinkles in the skin, just as when they think of multiculturalism, they are thinking of restaurants.)

After all, claims appear in our newspapers from time to time to the effect that the gene for this or that trait or process has now been found. Everyone knows the stories of identical twins, separated at birth and raised thousands of miles apart, who are both found, when reunited after many years, to have a taste for pink ice cream, to wear woolly hats even in summer, to have married women called Griselda, and to have named a daughter Hortensia; from which it follows that there is a pink-ice-cream gene, etc., indeed a gene for every last human propensity or act. The fact that the stories are apocryphal, or that there are identical twins who develop very differently from each another, gives us no pause: Science has established beyond doubt that genes are destiny, and that therefore genetic engineering-for better or worse-holds the key to changing our destiny.

In fact, such claims about genes have been considerably oversold to the public. In not a single case has subsequent research confirmed the claim that the gene for a given complex human behavior has been found, nor, in my opinion, is such a gene ever likely to be found. The reason for this is simple and obvious: Human behavior is simply not like that.

In a sense, therefore, fears of human cloning are exaggerated. A clone of me would not be me, even in such relatively simple physical characteristics as height. A clone of me would be likely to be taller than I, because each successive generation has, for a long time in Western society, increased in height. As for his experiences, they would be so different from mine that it is inconceivable that his tastes would be mine (there is no socialization these days-or perhaps I should say antisocialization-without pop music).

One source of the excessive fear of human cloning is, of course, Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World. In that novel, cloning does not proceed by ones and twos, but through something called the Bokanovsky Process, by which up to 96 clones of the fertilized ovum are produced at the same time. The clones are then subjected after birth to intense conditioning, and the resultant adults fall into predetermined categories. But the Bokanovsky Process, to say nothing of the conditioning, remains well within the realm of science fiction. Huxley's Brave New World is not upon us.

Human cloning is to be feared, but not for the reasons usually adumbrated. What is wrong with it is the desire, in the first place, to clone oneself or another, say a deceased child; for such a desire bespeaks a shallow and narcissistic attitude to life, as well as a very rudimentary idea of what human life consists of. For the fact is that, even when we have controlled for heredity and environment, human life is incalculable. The wisest sage knows no more than the greatest fool.

If genetics has so far added nothing much to human self-understanding, neither has even the most sophisticated Darwinian theorizing, beguiling as it might occasionally have appeared. The argument boils down to the proposition that the birds and the bees do it, and the introduction of consciousness adds nothing much to the biological brew. Thus the stepfather's brutal treatment of his stepchildren is likened to the conduct of the head lion of a pride, that kills the cubs by other males, the better to preserve his own cubs in times of scarcity and thus pass on his genes. Darwinism does not invite us to ponder why most stepfathers are not brutal; or why there should have been a vast increase in stepfatherhood itself in the past few decades.

As for the neurosciences, their hubris knows no bounds; but what their nemesis will be, I am uncertain (perhaps the loss of funding when the vast benefits fail to materialize). Let us take one example: neuropharmacology. In a best-selling book of stunning silliness, a professor of psychiatry from Brown University, Peter D. Kramer, suggested that we were entering the age of designer neuropharmacology. Kramer's stalking horse was the drug fluoxetine, otherwise known as Prozac. This drug was proclaimed a tremendous breakthrough for human self-understanding and for future possibilities of adjusting our personalities according to taste, desire, and will. Need a little more self-confidence? Take a bit of Drug A. Need a slightly less explosive temper? Take a bit of Drug B. And so on, ad infinitum. We would soon be able to tune our personalities like a piano or a car engine. Then it would be away dull care, with a vengeance.

The development of fluoxetine was indeed a breakthrough, but principally for the shareholders of Eli Lilly & Co.-and good luck to them. In cold reality, fluoxetine was no more effective, possibly less, against real depression than drugs that had been known for many years. True, its side-effect profile was different, and many people, though by no means all, found it preferable to the side-effect profiles of the older drugs. But this is not a stunning breakthrough in human understanding; it is a minor technical advance magnified out of all proportion by advertising and publicity. The mere fact that a fantastic proportion of the population of the U.S., to say nothing of that of Europe, is swallowing this class of drugs-several similar ones have been developed-would suggest that life has not become, in the words of Vershinin in The Three Sisters (he was looking forward to the distant future, to the age that is now upon us), "wonderful," when "people will look at our present manner of life with horror and derision, and everything of today will seem awkward and heavy, and very strange and uncomfortable." A more appropriate description of life is to be found in the immortal lines of the then poet laureate, Alfred Austin, on the appendicitis of Edward VII that, in 1902, caused a postponement of his coronation:

Across the wires the electric message came

'He is no better, he is much the same.'

In the existential sense (I am not talking about cures for particular diseases), we have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear from neuroscience or from genetics. And if you want to understand yourself, read Shakespeare, read La Rochefoucauld; but even then, you will not pluck out the heart of your mystery.