The New York Times, long a purveyor of very favorable or at best bemused, shoulder-shrugging reports about the putative materialization of all human experience, provides two new reports. The makers of botox have developed a new technique to stimulate the growth of long eyelashes. Yesterday, the Times reported that oxytocin and vasopressin are responsible for love and monogamy among prairie voles, and thus people (e.g., voles deprived of oxytocin and vasopressin ceased to be monogamous).
Growing artificial eyelashes permits human beings’ undying vanity a tiny advance in a new direction, but that is all. Expanding the scope of vanity is not a good thing, and it may be that a certain opening for relating to others without regard for self will be just a single micron smaller because our vanity has come the smallest bit closer to encircling our moral and spiritual sight. But in truth even that is uncertain, since a certain modest pleasure in our appearance sometimes brings us out of ourselves. Besides, a daily tendency to turn personal conversations to ourselves or complain about the pettiest of grievances makes an almost infinitely greater contribution to our narrowness of vision than our eyelashes, purchased from purveyors of botox or no.
The leap from monogamy among prairie voles to people is more consequential and more telling. The article naturally discounts the role of reason, will, moral responsibility and other notions that at once refine, constrain and extend our stubbornly and elusively human nature past that of prairie voles, with one crucial exception. The author uges us to anticipate a time when we can prudentially manipulate these chemical balances to deepen, extend or end our attachments to others.
But the scope of our reason, will and morality goes further than this kind of interested chemical manipulation, you say; that is obvious. Indeed it is; but the Times rarely scruples about giving the shortest of shrifts to precisely these points. Is it because these differences are so obvious that the paper of record need not mention them to its educated readers? Probably not; the Times is hardly above pointing out or even belaboring the obvious when the obvious comports with its aspirations. But the Times very much wants to present our experience in terms reducible to (penultimately) social science and (ultimately) natural science. So the differences between a human being and a prairie vole are either tersely acknowledged or altogether ignored, and their alleged similarities lingered upon with a solicitude at once relentless and faintly creepy.
Let us, for the sake of argument, stipulate that were we to ingest oxytocin and vasopressin, we too would become more monogamous, or perhaps fall in love with new people who elicited our interest when the chemical effect of our doses crested in our brains. Would that be love? It might be in a sense, since it would differ from a satiable, transient lust or from indifference. But is love merely the absence of indifference and the duration of lust with nuturing feelings? Or would love be this reaction unbidden by chemical intervention? And whatever its origin, would the decisions and actions prompted by this biochemical circumstance, and the reciprocal decisions and action by a beloved, creating still new relations and possibilities and hardships and hopes, beyond any anticipated by the glow of anticipatory fantasy induced by chemicals? Is love what we feel, or is it an existential expression of who we are? Or what we commit to become and to live by? And if we abjure the work involved in maintaining this ongoing contrapuntal reciprocity in order to “feel” the intial prompt with which it began, is that love? Or just a lazy parody of love?
These questions imply my own answer, of course. But even if you disagree, by that very disagreement you participate in a reflection about the meanings, reasons, and responsibilities of love that articulates how and why you love– none of which has ever occurred to the estimable prairie vole.
