41 pages • 1 hour read
Transcendent Kingdom
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Themes
Drugs, Addiction, and Risk Taking
Gifty voices one of the central questions of Transcendent Kingdom: “Plenty of people drink without becoming alcoholics, but some people take a single sip and a switch trips and who knows why?” (335). One possible answer presented relates to the brain. This is connected to Gifty’s research and suggests that we understand “addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes” (313). In this view, the roots of addiction are neurobiological. Like the mouse that becomes addicted to Ensure, some people’s brains are just wired or constituted in such a way that makes them prone to addictive behavior.
However, this explanation seems insufficient. While there may be elements of truth to it, it also ignores the lived experience of addiction. It ignores the way the sufferer both participates in and fights against their addiction, in a way disanalogous to someone with a physical disease. For example, one can choose to go into rehab, develop or not develop certain habits. We can also influence the way we value certain things, such as family, or a sense of self, above the pleasure of the drug. In contrast, a purely physical ailment, such as heart disease, for the most part just happens to our body. Its continuation, or cure, does not necessarily involve struggling with our whole mind and world. Further, questioning the idea that addiction is simply a disease of the brain may legitimize some people’s desire to “write of all addicts as bad and weak-willed people” (314).
One need not accept this dichotomy, however. As such, a different answer is needed to address the question of why people become and stay addicts. What this might be is intimated by Gifty in her discussion of risk. She talks about this in the context of the original migrant pioneers who traveled to California. They endured potential starvation, disease, and death to make the trek. As she says, “They knew that there was risk involved, but the potential for triumph, for pleasure, for something just a little better, was enough to outweigh the cost” (336). It is this human desire for something more and different that underscores addiction. Greater in some individuals, this proclivity towards risk taking for exciting new experiences may explain why some people are more prone to addiction than others. Further, it may suggest something problematic about Gifty’s research. If this curiosity for the new, which leads to addiction, also makes us human, then “curing” it risks neutering a part of our humanity.
Religion, Redemption, and Consolation
When Gifty’s classmates criticize Christianity in a science group-work assignment at Harvard, Gifty jumps to defend it. Though at that stage no longer believing herself, she is thinking about her mother and “was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever way she saw fit” (129). Amidst the trauma her mother has suffered, religion and God are one of the few things she could rely on. With the loss of her husband and son and Gifty moving away, religion serves as an important bulwark, as it does for many people, against loneliness and despair. Further, this might be something that certain privileged students at Harvard might find difficult to understand. It is easy to be dismissive of religious consolations when one has never particularly needed consoling.
However, such consolations are also problematic. A key reason for this is that they rest upon a redemptory logic. What this means is that religion consoles individuals by suggesting that only they, the faithful, will be saved, their salvation marking them as special. The psychology of this belief is exposed at several points during Transcendent Kingdom. After Gifty has her religious experience, and feels “saved,” she is upset to discover that an allegedly promiscuous girl in her class had been saved as well. Then there is the incident with Pastor Tom and Nana: When the latter asks what would happen to an African village that had never been shown the gospel, the former responds, somewhat gleefully, “they’re going to hell” (143).
Moreover, to be redeemed and saved often means, or is associated with, submitting to restrictive rules about sex. As Gifty finds out, when the girls at her church are taken to an all-day course on the virtues of abstinence, “God wants you to wait” (195). To be saved, in this context, means to accept that sex outside of heterosexual marriage, and the goal of procreation, is sinful. This teaching, unsurprisingly, has negative side effects. Gifty grows up sexually repressed, unable to properly explore or express her sexuality. She struggles to enjoy sex or dissociate it from feelings of guilt and anxiety. Meanwhile, for those who give into temptation, or are found to have done so, opprobrium and ostracization usually follow. In light of her experiences, Gifty gives up on the consolations of religion for a time and finds new consolation in her work. However, at the end of the novel, her connection to religion is far from severed. While she does not technically believe it God, she continues to visit church, taking comfort in the “blessed silence.”
The Power and Limitations of Neuroscience
Near the end of Transcendent Kingdom, Gifty successfully completes the experiment that forms the basis of her PhD. As she describes it, “There was that mouse, that limp. I delivered the light and, like that, like that, he stopped pressing the lever” (377). Having addicted a mouse to the supplement Ensure, she is able to stop it from pressing a lever that randomly dispenses this and electric shocks by injecting a virus into its brain. She had thereby shown that she can get an animal “to restrain itself from seeking reward by altering its brain activity” (376). This achievement is, in one sense, astonishing. That the brain of a living animal can be modified in this way, altering its relationship to risk and reward, shows the power of neuroscience. It shows how far this discipline has come in understanding the brain. It also indicates its great potential with regards to human problems. If a mouse can be made to abandon addictive behaviors because of a neurological intervention, then a similar treatment could perhaps be applied to help human addicts.
However, there are numerous issues with the idea of any imagined “cure” for addiction. One concerns applicability. Gifty says that “if only I could inject this virus-packaged opsin directly into human patients, I could […] see what this research can really do” (320). It is not clear, though, as she also notes, what the side effects of this would be. Since the human brain is greatly more complex than that of a mouse, it is not obvious, from simply looking at mice, what would occur. Indeed, since any such procedure would interfere with the way we relate to potential pleasure and pain, it could have unforeseen consequences for our relationship to other pleasurable experiences and to whether we choose to seek out or embrace such experiences in our everyday lives.
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