I took my son to school this morning. And I’m wondering if that was evil.
Proponents of human cognitive enhancement are fond of saying that there is nothing very novel about their suggestions. There is no difference in principle, they say, between improving someone’s neural processing power by (for example) manipulation of the genome, and improving that power by education. It is a potent argument. Brains are very plastic things. Education increases the number of neuronal connections. You can see the effect of education with an electron microscope. Education produces change every bit as physical as the bruises produced by a violently abusive parent.
Yet we all try to mould our children’s brains. We try to forge the neural connections that will make them adherents of our religious faith or our scepticism. We move house to get them into ‘better’ schools. We teach them the seven times table. We read them Beatrix Potter and deny them junk TV.
That being the case, say the enhancers, you’re hypocritical if you object to other forms of enhancement.
There are many possible responses to that argument. One of the best is the observation that while you can’t stop neural connections being forged by environmental exposure (every child has an environment, and there’s plainly no such thing as a value-free upbringing), you don’t have to twiddle with the genome, or give someone Ritalin. It’s a ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ type riposte. But it only really works if you acknowledge that education is a wrong.
That possibility should be taken more seriously than it ever is. Of course the child, as long as it’s conscious, and possibly even if it isn’t, can’t help being educated to some degree. But if we think it’s offensive (and it is) to bruise its buttocks to urge it along the path we think it should be travelling, isn’t it even more unforgiveable to meddle directly and lastingly with its brain by teaching it in a classroom, or by suggesting that it adopts our own ethical, political or intellectual ways of looking at the world?
A few things need to be taught. But those are the things that will allow the child to survive biologically in order to be able to exercise its own autonomy – to stretch its own wings.
We don’t know what would happen to a child who was allowed to be as free as possible. Yes, complete freedom is impossible. If you’re free of people, you are oppressed by loneliness, and we know that humans aren’t meant to be alone. If you have people around you, you inevitably have brain-moulding influences, however non-directive your companions try to be. But is happy anarchy really so unthinkable? Are the dystopians right? Would your local primary school become the set of Lord of the Flies if it said to the children: ‘Right, be yourselves’? I wonder. The thought of what humans might be if they were allowed to be themselves is an awesome one. It’s much more awesome than the most lurid transhumanist dream.
My own romantic dream of my children as even potentially noble savages is unlikely to survive the school pick-up. But still I know very well that they know a lot more than I do about how to live, and I’m going to do my best not to ablate that knowledge by weaving my own ignorance abusively into their neurones.
