In this article, Steady Relationships Reduce Amphetamine’s Rewarding Effects, Animal Study Suggests, we learn:
Long-term relationships make the commonly abused drug amphetamine less appealing, according to a new animal study in the June 1 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings suggest that social bonds formed during adulthood lead to changes in the brain that may protect against drug abuse.
Prairie voles are rodents that form lifelong bonds with mating partners. In the new study, researchers directed by Zuoxin Wang, PhD, of Florida State University, found that male voles in established relationships displayed less interest in amphetamine compared with their single counterparts. Amphetamine exposure led to changes in the nucleus accumbens — a part of the brain’s reward system — that differed depending on the relationship status of the voles.
Better living through our body’s own chemistry. Let’s form good human communities, including lifelong marriages, and get that dopamine flowing. We’ll be much better people for it.
I recently reread Fahrenheit 451, a novel nominally in the sci-fi genre but actually a more substantial work of moral and social and political commentary. Ray Bradbury was writing about a country malformed at all levels of human communities and even in the souls and moral characters of nearly all citizens. That is, he was writing about the United States at a time when too many imagine there was moral order and even goodness. At best, Americans in 1950 were conformists in a country where there was a decaying but still substantial moral order inherited from past centuries of Christian civilization — in Europe. Our seeming goodness was no more than skin-deep niceness. Bradbury saw that this conformity, lawns were well-kept and violent crime was rare, was itself a sign of a horrible type of totalitarianism in a nearly mature form — a totalitarianism which had formed bottom-up. Our true enemy wasn’t Hitler or Stalin but rather that moral coward in the mirror. And, so, our communities had become no more than ways of comforting ourselves as we built forms of human relationships which are strange and shallow and good only to shape and unite into gangs the sorts of human moral trash my Grannie from Montrose would have dismissed without so much as a word and barely a raising of the eyes.
We Americans hadn’t yet reduced ourselves to moral trash but, by at least 1950 when Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, we had become a people very good at brainwashing ourselves in the interests of the mainstream views of the world. We needed only a full schedule of television programs — and the scientists’ brilliantly conceived communications network converted into the pornographied and facebooked Web — to finish the job of isolating us from healthy communities, the job of turning us into so many globs of moral trash.
I’ll note quickly that Alexis Tocqueville had seen this tendency to brainwash ourselves in the interests of the herd view back in the 1830s and had written of it, though he speaks indirectly at times because he had stumbled on the modern concepts of ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘brainwashing’ without having the words to speak clearly.
There is a bit of blackish good-news that comes out of Fahrenheit 451 and it ties in to this news of the resistance to at least amphetamines of creatures with good social lives, that is, creatures who produce good flows of the brain chemical dopamine — to usefully simplify. In Bradbury’s novel, those who had seemed to be deadening themselves in pursuit of safety and comfort found that this life wasn’t so good as they might have thought. The main character couldn’t even remember much of his life, not even how he’d met his wife or where she came from. And his wife was a drug-abusing mess — prone to overdoses which might have been accidents and might have been attempts of suicide. In fact, there is a strong implication that citizens of this nightmare world so similar to ours were killing themselves at a pretty good rate. Then the book ends with the effort to kill a lot of other men — a nuclear war.
Bradbury is a little clumsy as a writer but he’s a man of profound insight and seems to have nailed the case. The main point of the book seems to be: Americans prefer to be dumb, perhaps because they’re lazy and perhaps because they really don’t see the need for all those books and all that knowledge about ancient history, like that of the American Revolutionary War. Of course, Americans also despise the oral histories of their own families. This is a matter of great importance to me but I’m more interested, in this context, in Bradbury’s portrayal of a society where social bonds have become so tenuous that an intelligent man doesn’t remember meeting his wife, doesn’t have a clue why they got married, and really doesn’t know more about her than her name. That society is also awash in violence. Bored people of all ages jump into cars and head out to the main streets, hoping to find a nut, that is — a pedestrian, to run down. Men sometimes head off to fight in wars without their wives being concerned enough to ask where the war is being fought. People jump from buildings without their widows or widowers bothering to mourn. They simply remarry because… Well, actually, they don’t really know why they ever marry because spouses get in the way of their friends on those interactive television programs. Drug overdoses are so common that technicians of a sort respond by going to the bedside with a device that sends a mechanical snake down the throat to clean everything out. No one is concerned. It’s a routine matter, a world where drains clog up regularly with poisonous stuff and a serviceman comes to roto-root the stomach and intestines.
You see: we Americans not only prefer to be dumb, we also prefer human relationships which make no moral demands, perhaps because of a slightly different sort of laziness and perhaps because we would be gods of our own dreamworlds. True human communities disturb us as much as honest politicians do.
Not knowing much history and not being inclined to look for any answers in the past, not even the barely remembered tales of long-dead Grandpa, we Americans have weakened our social bonds to a point where they are barely such. We can no longer see that even the neighborhood bar was a healthier community than those which form on Internet social sites. Weak social bonds leave us vulnerable to a host of problems, drug addiction being one of them. Addiction to violence, at least as a spectator and possibly as a participant, is another.
Let me switch gears a little by noting that amphetamines are sometimes used by bikers, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and others to prepare themselves for violence. It can magnify rage and eliminate healthy fear or prudence. My father was a Navy Hospital Corpsman sent to Korea with the Marines and served in a battlefield hospital unit. He said that corrupt doctors sold amphetamines to corrupt Marine officers who wanted to juice their men up for action — good way to win medals and promotions I would guess.
The study discussed in the first paragraphs of this essay indicates: “Long-term relationships make the commonly abused drug amphetamine less appealing…” With that reminder, I’m going to ask a highly speculative question:
Is it possible that American support of murderous wars against civilian populations, punctuated by “shock and awe” displays against poorly armed and poorly trained armies of a sort, is made possible — not caused but made possible — by our deteriorating social relationships, by our loss of community life, by our lack of desire for healthy and morally demanding communities?
Is it even possible that our weak social relationships convince American young men that it’s easy to kill? Is it possible that they find out it isn’t so easy to kill or even watch killing? Is it possible that this latter speculation would help us to understand the extremely high rates of suicides and of serious psychiatric disorders amongst veterans of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan? In a very powerful book, On Killing, Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman tells us that there is a small percentage of men who are morally well-ordered and yet capable of killing in a detached manner if they think the killing to be morally justified. Most men will pay a big price for killing, even under circumstances where they think the killing is morally justified. Colonel Grossman did his studies for an advanced degree in psychology by studying men not made for killing, men who had killed in World War II and succeeding ‘police actions’ and those men were suffering nightmares, seeing the faces of the men they had killed, for decades afterward.
Maybe, just maybe, if Americans were a people with morally well-ordered communities, maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t be cheering as our troops nailed more gooks or rag-heads? Maybe, we would mourn our war-dead and those enemies we killed even if we felt forced to wage war to truly defend ourselves?
Maybe.
After reading Colonel Grossman’s book a good ten years ago, I stopped going out to watch the Memorial Day Parade pass by. He said those true war-heroes, those men who had killed face-to-face with an enemy soldier aiming a weapon in their direction, refused to march in or even watch Memorial Day Parades. They considered them to be celebrations of killing enemies and didn’t think that was something they could be part of. So far as I can tell, we even celebrate the deaths of our own soldiers rather than mourning them. “Let’s party in the cemetery. We can rest our beer-cans on the tombstones of all those brave men who died so we can be free and good and all those things we Americans are. What a country!!”
As for me, I mourn, not just for the American war-dead, and not just for the dead of all nationalities in these needless and stupid wars our leaders start and we support. I mourn also for the human communities which have died of neglect while we Americans were pursuing a life not so much different from that depicted in Fahrenheit 451. Certainly, Bradbury got it right when he thought we’d desert the front-porches and the parks to dive into what is now called virtual life, on the television screen and on the Internet. He was right we’d throw books away, if we’re not quite ready to turn fire departments into book-burning operations. Books are one way to enter that ultimate community — of the living, the dead, and those not yet born. Books are a racial memory of sorts. Do it right and you can begin to tap into the memory of the pilgrim Body of Christ. You can begin to see the world as God sees it. You can begin to see what an ugly and evil mess we Americans have made of our country and of all parts of the world we invade.
For all our American pretenses to being Christians, we’ve become not just sinners who murder large numbers of Iraqis and Afghans and others without justification, we’ve also become a nation of the Anti-Christ, a nation which wages war against not only ancient Christian churches in other lands but also against our own human communities. Like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, we hate all that constrains us, including our families and the traditions of Christianity. We hate our own not quite dead desires to enter the Body of Christ. Not so brave as our brother Ahab, We would purge our memories of God Himself that we could be free… Free to join virtual communities and to take drugs to make up for our stunted minds and deformed moral characters, free to engage more fully in killing and partying afterward. What a country!!