Love in the Age of Neuroscience

Late last year, over a period of several months, America and Britain were awash in reviews of I Am Charlotte Simmons, the latest novel by Tom Wolfe. Most reviews criticized the novel’s cheap and tiresome devices (excessive repetition, capitalized words, overly dramatic punctuation), stock characters (the ingénue, country bumpkins, frat boys, salacious sorority sisters, dumb jocks, politically correct professors), and, most egregiously, its preoccupation with student sex. Several reviewers were disturbed by the reference to “loamy, loamy loins” by an author in his mid-seventies — a man thoroughly out of touch with his young subjects, perhaps even jealous of their vivacious sex lives. But these critics, with rare exception, entirely overlooked the central themes of the novel. As John Derbyshire wrote in National Review, I Am Charlotte Simmons is a reminder of the “darker side” of recent discoveries in the human sciences, especially in neuroscience and genetics. At stake is the “metaphysic” which provides sense and direction to our lives, including the complicated encounter between men and women. The novel invites us to ask: Is love possible in the age of neuroscience? Or have we unmasked human beings only to discover that love is an illusion?

The university, like American and Western society as a whole, was transformed by the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Grounded in an uncompromising individualism of personal choice, the sexual revolution established the legitimacy of casual, pleasure-seeking sex, independent of procreation, family, and even affection. The story of Charlotte Simmons explores the consequences of this momentous change in human behavior and association. Wolfe helps us see that there is no free lunch: In giving full rein to our biological impulses, there is a toll to pay in human longing and human happiness. As Peter Berkowitz reflects in a superb review essay in Policy Review:

[W]hat if men and women are different in ways that go beyond the structure of their sex organs, and so experience sexual relationships differently? And what if the exercise of the new freedom imparts lessons to both men and women about life, and develops habits of heart and mind, that interfere with the capacity to give oneself to and care for another…? What if relationships teach how to withhold one’s heart, to embrace another with one eye always fixed on the exit…? And what if such lessons, habits, and teachings are more easily acquired than discarded?