Last week, Barry Bonds hit his 756th* career home run, passing Hank Aaron as the all time leader. The asterisk, of course, represents the fact that this record is somewhat tainted, due to Bonds’s use of performance enhancing drugs.
I don’t particularly like Bonds. He is a very arrogant player. This is especially evident when he hits a home run. He - like many others - stands at the plate, nonchalantly admiring his work as if to say, “Of course I hit a home run. What did you expect?”, before beginning to trot down to first base. This does not mean I don’t respect him as a player, though. No matter how many drugs you take, you still have to manage to put the bat on the ball. In this regard, Bonds is like Ty Cobb. Cobb was one of the meanest SOBs to ever play the game, but he was still a great player.
Bonds’s milestone got me thinking about performance enhancing drugs, especially because I spent ten years taking such drugs. I never took anything like steroids or human growth hormones, but I never needed to. I am not an athlete. But I did take antidepressants, and these certainly enhanced my performance as a scholar.
One of the primary symptoms that finally got me to go to a psychologist was the loss of short term memory, something that is often associated with depression. While I was a student, I would be translating some Hebrew or hieroglyphics the night before a class. I would look at the word I needed to translate and then turn to my lexicon. By the time I had turned two or three pages in the lexicon, the letters of the word had rearranged themselves in my head and I no longer had any idea what word I was trying to find. It would take several attempts before I retained the word long enough to find the definition.
For a philologist, such a problem is fairly severe, but it would create difficulty for any scholar. When things are not retained in short-term memory, they never get transferred to long-term memory and therefore do not become a part of our working knowledge. Since knowledge is our stock in trade as scholars, depression makes scholarship difficult.
Once I was prescribed antidepressants, however, the problem went away. This means I am able to do my job better because of antidepressants. That would seem to me to be the very definition of performance enhancing drugs.
It could be argued, of course, that the drugs Bonds took were banned by baseball, while scholarship has never banned antidepressants. (And given the number of scholars I know who take them, this is probably a good thing.) But this points to the fact that rules in baseball and scholarship must be based on something. If merely making you perform better makes a drug illegal, then surely antidepressants would be banned.
Another difference between steroids and antidepressants is that steroids are supposed to make you perform at levels above that of a normal human, while antidepressants simply make your body functional normally. The unstated assumption in this, however, is that we know how a body functions normally, that there is some sort of baseline human against which we can measure ourselves. Such a human is supposedly perfectly healthy, with no physical or psychological problems.
I have never met such a person. This is not surprising, since this person exists only as an abstraction. Everyone has problems of some sort. Theologically we call this our fallen nature. One thing that the Calvinists have right is that sin corrupts everything. It does not remove all goodness, but it does infect every aspect of our being, including our bodies and our minds.
And so, I freely admit that any success I have had as a scholar is due in part to performance enhancing drugs. Antidepressants may not have given me the ability to function as a Hall-of-Fame scholar, but they have allowed me to play the game. Without them, I would never have even made it into the minor leagues.
