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 In a lighter moment the other day, the present writer
penned a
short tale about a society at war which agreed for humane reasons to
exempt all couples in love from military service, an infallible test
for love being available in the form of an MRI scan of the
hypothalamus.What followed was the black-market proliferation of
Cupidol, a drug to make people fall in love with anyone. This story, as
may be surmised, was
intended as futuristic comedy.
As if to prove that fiction can always be trumped by fact, what
came through the door a week later, in the May 17 issue of New
Scientist, was the story of how MRI scans of the hypothalamus, part of
the limbic system of the brain which governs emotions, are being used to
track the neurotransmitter oxytocin, known as the ‘love hormone’. This
hormone is now the subject of intense research as a possible new wonder
therapy for so-called people-problem mental disorders, as well as its
offshoot commercial potential as a recreational love drug that
would beat Ecstasy - pants down, presumably.
Oxytocin seems to be released in varying degrees and pulses
during social interactions, and in strong doses during romantic and
sexual encounters, it reduces stress, aids relaxation and assists in
bonding. Studies suggest that blocking receptors of this
neurotransmitter results
in the turning-off of bonding patterns in prairie voles, and rats and
mice stop nurturing their young or even recognising their own
familiars. Its function appears to be to associate social interaction
with pleasure, and it works in tandem with the ‘reward’ transmitters
dopamine and
opioids to create a feel-good effect.
The implications, according to the article, could be enormous for
human psychological disorders that arise from relationships with other
humans, among them depression, personality disorders, psychosis, social
phobias and autism. But before one gets too excited, one must bear in
mind the cogent point Ed Blewitt makes in this issue (page 9), that
biology is no quick fix for endemic social problems which are rooted in
the way society is organised, a point doubtless conceded yet scarcely
emphasised by science-based writers. If there was a drug for socialism,
for example, it wouldn’t work anyway.
Still, the general trend in that perennially polarised debate
between the environmental and the biological determinists seems to be
settling on a
middle ground where cause and effect are bound up together in a still
little understood feedback mechanism. Somehow, our relationships with
other people affect our body chemistry, and in turn our body chemistry
affects our relationships with other people. What is significant about
such a recursive causeand- effect loop is that you can intervene at any
point, and even at all points, to disturb or transform it.
Imagine, for example, that somebody wrote a self-help book that
actually worked, as proposed in Will Ferguson’s 2002 novel Happiness.
Would the social institutions of capitalist coercion and wage-slavery
begin to crumble and break under the weight of joyful anti-capitalist
non-cooperation, as Ferguson gleefully suggests? Presumably not, or not
right away. If self-help books could cause revolutions, Marx’s Capital
would have been the last self-help book in history.
But it is tempting to speculate just how close the artificial
bond of identification between system and psyche, referred to by Peter
Rigg (page 11), would continue to be if people, either through drugs or
DIY therapy, weren’t quite so devastatingly messed up by the social
order they help maintain.
In reality, the biggest problems with any pharmaceutical road to
earthly paradise are first, that the effects would wear off and you’d
have to keep re-dosing and second, and more to the point, that even if
citizen worker got herself loved up and liberated, the bosses still
have the loot and the law. That, and a cold and distinctly unloving
gleam in their eye. Like it or not, conscious political action will not
come out of a 30 milligram dose of delight to the limbic system. For
that you have to rely on the more prosaic technologies of reason,
democracy and
organisation.
Research into such frontier territory as neurobiology, while not
offering any magic bullet for social or psychological disorders under
capitalism, certainly should be explored and would be pursued in
socialism too, because of its potential for insight into how our minds
work, what happens chemically when we relate to other people, and when
we don’t. And this in turn may offer us further insights into how best
to organise our social and democratic structures, given that in
socialism we will be at liberty, for the first time, to debate such
things as a matter of conscious collective design.
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