In July, researchers at Oxford University and Harvard Medical School co-published a study that lauded the cognitive enhancing abilities of a narcolepsy drug called Modafinil, suggesting it may be “the first well-validated pharmaceutical ‘nootropic’ agent.”
Despite the scientific credibility of nootropics, these drugs operate within an inhuman paradigm.
“Enhancement” has become the micromanagement of every second in an 80 hour work week. With the discovery of Modafinil as the first “safe” nootropic, our culture threatens to chemically validate a conception of a man who lives to work.
Unlike Adderall and Ritalin, prescribed ADHD drugs commonly exploited by college students and Silicon Valley executives, Modafinil promises the cognitive enhancement without the physical and psychological side-effects — an irresistible temptation for many.
With 7 in 10 undergraduates saying that it is somewhat or very easy to obtain stimulants without a prescription, the rising illegal use of cognitive enhancers on college campuses exposes a damaging societal understanding: that “human enhancement” equals productivity.
Stimulants increase the brain’s capacity for concentration, sometimes to the point where friends and food — human necessities — are forgotten until your midnight paper deadline.
Last month, Bobby Azarian of the Daily Beast wrote favorably of Modafinil, imagining the nation’s unparalleled productivity if the drug was normalized into society.
In an article on the rise of study drugs by the British newspaper, The Guardian, a British student said, “It’s all coming from the international students. It was the American students that we discovered it from. They’re all medicated and they’ve got prescriptions and they sell them on.”
The drugs that chemically enriched us for the societal machine, however, leave us spiritually starved, says the 20th century German philosopher Josef Pieper. In his small book “Leisure: the Basis of Culture” Pieper defends an understanding of true human “enhancement” for body and soul, and it doesn’t require drugs.
Pieper grasps what a student on stimulants looks like: “The ‘worker’…is characterized by three principal traits: an extreme tension of the powers of action, a readiness to suffer in vacuo unrelated to anything, and complete absorption in the social organism, itself rationally planned to utilitarian ends,” he writes.
Even if Modafinil promises to give the energy and clarity of caffeine without the jitters, the “complete absorption” of a person into the societal machine is an ethical problem.
To the workaholic, Pieper delivers the hard truth — lasting human fulfillment dwells outside the sphere of work.
Imagine yourself on Thanksgiving break and after eating the turkey and pumpkin pie, it’s time to round up the cousins and play football in the backyard. However, if you’re a “good” student, your Nov. 24 will be spent confined to a desk writing a Smith paper. Pieper calls the first scenario “leisure,” where man is truly affirming his dignity as a human person. The latter is our enslavement to the almighty GPA.
“Leisure is… the capacity of the spirit to soar in festive celebration, the power to know leisure is the power to overstep the boundaries of the workaday world and reach out to superhuman, life-giving existential forces that refresh and renew us before we turn back to our daily work,” Pieper writes.
In contrast to Pieper’s effortless image of authentic human enrichment, the 21st century’s understanding of human fulfillment makes Modafinil a vitamin, keeping us healthy for the new normal.
To prove that our culture desires soulless men, look no further than the employees of online retail mecca Amazon. In a lengthy New York Times article on the exclusively work-oriented life of an Amazon employee, Dina Vaccari was one of many currently or former employees interviewed by journalists Jodi Kantor and David Streitfield.
“I was so addicted to wanting to be successful there,” said Vaccari, who was at the company from 2008 – 2014.
“For those of us who went to work there, it was like a drug that we could get self-worth from. One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight.”
Another employee, Liz Pearce, said “I would see people practically combust.”
It is not hard to understand the attraction of Modafinil when society tethers an individual’s self-worth to his career.
Today’s brewing debate surrounding cognitive enhancers displays a recurrent theme in human history — the instrumentalization of man as a cog in a machine.
As college students, we have a dominant voice on this social issue and must consider Pieper’s critical question, “Can a full human existence be contained with an exclusively workaday existence?
