By Jonathan Yardley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 4, 1998; Page D02

Picture Modern Man. On his belt is the pager that connects him with his boss and his wife and his lover and whoever else may demand his attention. On his lap sits the computer through which he has immediate access to stock prices, compact discs and pornographic pictures. In his medicine cabinet are a bottle of Propecia and one of Viagra: the former for what ails him upstairs, the latter for his woes below.

"Brave new world" indeed. Science and technology, the great forces of contemporary life, have produced a Modern Man far beyond the imaginative prowess of Darwin or Freud or Orwell. Doggedly, earnestly and with an utter absence of either humor or moral reflection, we are busily altering not merely the world we inhabit but ourselves. Medicine, once the science of saving human life, has metamorphosed into what an article in this newspaper last week called "the new frontier of drug development, quality-of-life pharmacology." This is meant to warm the heart, when in fact it should chill the blood.

"There was a time when drugs to make you thin or drugs to make your hair grow again were kind of looked down upon," according to a "biotechnology analyst" on the West Coast. "Now," he says, "these things are starting to be looked at as real medicine." Only in California, one is tempted to say, and let it go at that, but redemptive pharmacology has swept the entire nation and soon, no doubt, as all else beloved in America always is, will be exported to a waiting world.

Take Propecia, the quacks advise us, and in good time that middle-aged golden dome will blossom once again in hirsute glory. Take Retin-A and your skin will shed those unsightly wrinkles and be as smooth as the baby's bottom in which you once gloried. Take Viagra and what Fanny Hill rejoiced in as your "mighty engine" will rise and roar with the passion of your long-lost prime.

The Fountain of Youth, that chimera sought by explorers and fools throughout the centuries, has been found at last, in the laboratories of Pfizer Inc., which after an investment of $500 million in research managed to come up with Viagra, the $10-a-pop elixir that turns elderly gropers into rejuvenated stallions. Precisely how Pfizer came up with its vulgar name for the thing is a mystery -- "via" as in "life," perhaps, but "gra"?: "growth"? "agriculture"? "grace"? -- but there's no doubt about what it's given Wall Street: the biggest erection since the World Trade Center.

It is hugely amusing. The spectacle of Homo sapiens in its ceaseless quest to beat back nature is pathetic and ridiculous in more or less equal measure. The certainty of death and taxes has not altered and never will. In his own good time, that ancient gent with his Propecia hairdo and his Viagra toy will drift into sleep, never again to wake; he, and the various chickadees to whom his artificially induced splendor brought such ecstasy, will join one other in that fine and private place, the grave: or, perhaps, the crematorium. The Reaper gets us all in the end, and Doktor Feelgood is impotent before him.

So the temptation to laugh at the gaudy show -- Mencken, America hath need of thee! -- is extreme, and perhaps should not be resisted. Yet if human vanity provides the raw material for sport, as Thackeray so brilliantly reminded us, it also is the stuff of sober reflection. It is not called "vanity" for nothing, because it is in every sense of the word vain: conceited and foolhardy.

Aging, which is to say decline and decay, is natural. It is not, as all these Hefner clones lining up for their jolts of Viagra would have us believe, an ailment, but an unavoidable process that has far more to it than loss and regret. As one who has not all that far to go before closing out the sixth decade of life, I am walking -- tottering! -- proof that nothing is forever, but the losses that age entails seem to me of vastly less import than the riches and pleasures it provides, most connected in one way or another with the lessons that experience teaches.

Do I wish that youth and all its powers could be restored to me? At times, of course; so do all of us. But given a choice between the 58 that I am now and the 28 that I was once, not for a moment would I pick the latter. If age teaches anything, it should be to give thanks for what one still has, not to shed tears for what one has lost. "Glad to be alive" is what I say, a considerably more likely prescription for happiness in what American euphemists call "The Golden Years" than Viagra or Propecia or any other of Dr. Frankenstein's inventions.

It should further be noted that many of the conditions for which we so blithely seek pharmacological remedy are the fault not of our age or our stars but of ourselves. The layers of lard in which millions of Americans are encrusted have not been inflicted on them by an unjust God. They have been earned honestly and vigorously, through overeating and bad diet. They could be corrected -- save for those unfortunate few afflicted with involuntary obesity -- by self-control and self-discipline rather than by diet pills or liposuction.

But in a culture that favors undeferred gratification and the quick fix, self-discipline gets no respect. If you can't or -- more likely -- won't do it yourself, let the quacks do it for you. This will make the quacks rich, but at no benefit to you save eternal self-delusion.

Jonathan Yardley's Internet address is yardleyj@clark.net.