Better Than Well by Carl Elliott, W.W. Norton, $26.95, ISBN 039305201X
AT first glance, Better than Well is a critical account of how we seek to fix the human condition with 鈥渆nhancement technologies鈥�. It is about Ritalin and distractibility, Prozac and shyness, skin bleaches and botox, sex-reassignment surgery and voluntary amputation. It is about the marketing of novel diseases such as 鈥渟ocial anxiety disorder鈥� around oddball pharmaceuticals and about the $20 million a year that the American Medical Association makes from selling doctors鈥� biographies to drug companies.
However, behind the laid-back journalistic charm of author Carl Elliott, a professor of bioethics and philosophy at the University of Minnesota, lurks a thinker of considerable slyness and force. For Elliott鈥檚 proper subject is not technology per se; it is goodness.
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Deep down, like Jack Nicholson鈥檚 character in the movie As Good As It Gets, we all want to be a better person. The question is, how good can we get? How hard should we try? When should we stop? One of the great comforts of the Catholic doctrine of original sin must be that it sets an upper limit to how good an ordinary person can expect to be. Elliott, no great proponent of religious doctrine, believes nevertheless that Western culture has loosened the reins on our religious impulses. Unharnessed, our hunger for grace now runs amok inside our individual selves; and it is driving us mad.
Elliott argues that people who sign up for any one technological fix 鈥� be it breast enlargement or HRT, voice coaching or a leg amputation 鈥� are as virtuous, as self-critical and as ethically aware as the rest of us. They are not cheating; they are not looking for an easy way out. The worst you can say of them is that their pursuit of perfection has led them down strange paths. This is because our idea of virtue is no longer anchored to a public standard. The obligation we feel is therefore 鈥渘ot an obligation to God, country or family, but an obligation to the self鈥�. So every day becomes judgement day, with the individual acting both as plaintiff and as judge. Time and again, we fall short of our fictitious better selves.
Elliott鈥檚 story of the perfectionist self 鈥� 鈥渁 story of flop, sweat, sleepless nights, and the sting of casual insults鈥� 鈥� is not altogether new. Our relentless and inconclusive struggle to become better than we are, with only the opinions of others and our own uneasy dreams to guide us, is a staple subject of post-war American literature. Elliott makes particular reference to the writers Richard Ford, Richard Yates and Walter Percy. He might, in a dystopic mood, have added Elvissey, the science-fiction novel by Jack Womack, in which everybody hankers after virtue even though no one can quite remember what it is.
Neither is Elliott鈥檚 central thesis altogether original. He argues that we have become obsessed with ends rather than means, sensitively extrapolating the ideas of another contemporary philosopher, Albert Borgmann.
Nor does he really explore how this self-torturing approach to life came about. For that, we would do better to turn to historian David Noble and his book The Religion of Technology. The chief contribution of Better Than Well is more subtle, but very important. Elliott does not panic. He is not shrill. He refuses to revile the present. Behind the vain absurdities of self-improvement, Elliott catches sight of our genuine desire to be as good as we can be. In the perverse surgical self-realisation of a Michael Jackson or a Pamela Anderson, Elliott measures 鈥渢he fragility of selves that depend so intimately on the good opinions of others for their survival鈥�.
So imbued are we with the rhetoric of self-improvement, it is almost impossible to read this incisive, medically and culturally literate work as anything other than a self-help manual. Elliott cannot be unaware of this, when he gently reminds us of our limitations. Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder forever, is not a mental patient. 鈥淭o see him as a patient with a mental health problem is to ignore certain larger aspects of his predicament connected to boulders, mountains and eternity.鈥�