Stopping the Future

...But they did nothing to slow modernity down...

...What will happen to jobs, positions, honors, and wealth...

...Examined closely, each disembarking group proves to have been seeking not to undo modernity but to freeze it at a particular moment—a moment when certain vestigial elements left over from the premodern world kept at bay the worst effects of modern times...

...Unless we embrace as a culture some coherent unmodernism, there is no preventing the biotech future...

...In the future, virtually everything that the popular imagination envisions genetic engineering accomplishing is much more likely to be accomplished sooner through neuro-pharmacology...

...But the question is how we are to prevent that—for it is the internal motor of modernity itself that has driven us here, and Fukuyama accepts vast seas of modern development...

...Since then, he's produced two other books: Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity and The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order...

...But against those bad things, human nature has at last begun to reassert itself...

...Over the last few decades, for example, political scientists, sociologists, and scholars of the American Founding have all pointed out that a smidgen of religious belief seems necessary to prevent modern liberalism from devouring its own political and economic gains...

...We have, he admits, gone through a very bad stretch: "With all of the blessings that flow from a more complex, information-based economy, certain bad things also happened to our social and moral life...

...Fukuyama, however, mistrusts thick accounts...

...A Christian vision of man as made in the image of God comes very quickly to positive ethical laws...

...The political pressure from activist groups will be too great...

...the fall of Soviet communism was merely the final proof of liberalism's implacable triumph...

...But, for all of them, a point is reached where they decide, "This is where I say, 'Enough.' This is a good place to stop...

...He has an analysis that shows stopping it to be necessary...

...And there are two pieces of modern evidence that suggest this human nature actually exists: the fact that a return to common sense has caused the cultural chaos to level off in recent years, and the fact that the trendiest science—in the guise of evolutionary biology—has been increasingly prone to the rediscovery of human nature...

...The economic and political battles against communism, by returning liberalism to its original course, certainly changed the direction of modernity...

...Politically speaking, modernity is liberalism, and liberalism is modernity...

...The problem Fukuyama faces is how to prevent this biotech future from coming to pass...

...Along the way, as he worked his way through this thicket of issues, Fukuyama emerged as one of the most thoughtful and important commentators on cloning and biotechnology...

...For a century and a half after the French Revolution, Catholicism stood as the only major force opposed to modernity, and even after the great rush of Vatican II aggiornamento, Catholics essentially froze the modernity they were willing to accept at 1964...

...He's right about nearly everything—except his reason for being right...

...We must get off...

...But it's also finally unper-suasive—even for those who begin with the desire to halt eugenic biotechnology before it destroys us...

...But in other ways, the Reagan revolution was unsuccessful—as the continued rise of out-of-wedlock births and the apparent ineradicability of abortion and our lockstep march toward biotechnology's Brave New World all demonstrate...

...Think, for that matter, of what will happen when anti-depressants and mood-changers reach perfection...

...it was called "postmodernism," and apart from encouraging a residual suspicion of all science, it did nothing to solve our problem and a great deal to exacerbate it...

...We did manage to find an anti-Communist liberalism, after all—how-ever much the Communists insisted that the future was theirs and that they were merely liberals in a hurry...

...A variety of factors drew off the neoconservatives around 1972...

...A political scientist at Johns Hopkins, Fukuyama first came to fame with his 1989 essay "The End of History" (published in book form in 1992 as The End of History and the Last Man), in which he argued that liberal democracy no longer faced any challengers in world history...

...History, as the clash of genuine alternatives, had actually ended right where Hegel said it had—in 1806, when Napoleon's victory at the Battle of Jena ensured that there no longer existed any real political possibilities besides liberalism...

...The book's second section, "Being Human," takes up the question of human nature's vulnerability to scientific attack, and the final section, "What To Do," makes an impassioned call for the government to respond to this threat with significant regulation and watchdog organizations...

...His answer relies on the claim, put at length in his last book, The Great Disruption, that a "reconstitution of the social order" has been taking place in recent years...

...And he found himself least able to dismiss J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...For others it was an inability to stomach abortion...

...What we need instead is someone of Fukuyama's intelligence and skill to gather up the premodern elements necessary to maintain the political advances of modernity—and to build them into a new and coherent philosophical vehicle to take us out of these dangerous waters...

...Our Posthuman Future is consistently fascinating and thought-provoking...

...And, hard as it is to remember, there was a moment around 1969 when several liberal writers were insisting that care for the poor and the weak demanded the rejection of abortion...

...You can see this in the support he claims from evolutionary biology, for one branch of science is unlikely to give sufficient ammunition to fight the horrors brought about by another branch...

...And the end of history cannot have been reached until the end of science, for science always holds out the possibility that some technological advance will undo the gains of political and economic liberalism...

...And when these have changed as completely as biotechnology wants to change them, what will remain of rights, dignity, and equality...

...By nature," he writes, humans "organize themselves into not just families and tribes, but higher-level groups, and are capable of the moral virtues necessary to sustain such communities...

...Fukuyama has been almost alone in insisting that our huge cultural investment in such drugs is of a piece with biotechnology, but his argument in Our Posthuman Future is convincing...

...Science has pushed along modernity as well...

...And now, at last, modernity has brought us the biotech revolution, and Francis Fukuyama has reached his point of saying, "Enough...

...the one which pointed out that the rise of liberal democracy is not the only defining feature of modern times...

...But without some such support present generally in the culture, the government regulations for which he calls are doomed...

...All of these are eugenic in purpose...

...And germ-line engineering, in which genetic changes will be handed on to future generations, is coming soon...

...But, he writes in the preface to Our Posthuman Future, he continued to think about the various critiques his "end of history" thesis received...

...And he has, in the last third of his book, a device of massive and immediate government regulation that he thinks will work...

...Who still believes in the superior efficiency of a centrally planned economy...

...Fukuyama's difficulty is that he has bought too much else in modernity to reject biotechnology easily...

...Analysis of the science moves as easily on the page as political theory, while he ranges through intellectual history, congressional debate, and popular culture...

...The first third of his book is utterly convincing proof that we are heading straight onto reefs that will destroy us...

...And yet, lacking a coherent unmodern philosophy, we can offer no compelling reasons for modernity to stop where we wish it to...

...Fukuyama, however, is reluctant to give a precise definition of what human nature might be...

...There was a revealing moment last June, during testimony on the House of Representatives' bill to ban human cloning, when Congressman Ted Strickland of Ohio complained, "We should not allow theology, philosophy, or politics to interfere with the decision we make" on what ought to be a purely scientific matter...

...What will happen when First World nations have a median age of sixty, while Third World nations have a median age of twenty...

...Like so much that has been said in the cloning debate, it was both profoundly silly and profoundly true...

...And that is because, in a certain way, there was never any chance of success...

...Our Posthuman Future praises Pope John Paul Il's treatment of evolution in this context...

...God knows, he's right...

...Man [is threatened] with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth...

...Recently appointed a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, he's grown increasingly worried about the damage being done by science to human nature itself—a nature that is necessary, he believes, to claim and maintain the natural rights and human dignity that are at the heart of liberal democracy...

...He demands that we convince ourselves we need to defend human nature...

...Human nature" is a distinctly premodern notion: a philosophical essence (to its proponents) or invention (to its rejecters) that overcomes the apparent divide between metaphysics and ethics...

...We are no longer sailing deeper into the chaos that the great cultural disruption of the 1960s brought us...

...Human-animal hybrids are rapidly becoming a reality...

...Science has its own imperative force, and we cannot resist it without ceasing to be modern...

...He's right about the probable causes...

...But this human nature proves, at last, to be merely the same kind of premodern vestige that all the previous passengers disembarking from the modern boat tried to claim: something needed by modernity in order to preserve its liberal political gains, but nonetheless incompatible with modernity...

...Indeed, what will remain of humanity itself...

...Meanwhile, since its Enlightenment beginning, modernity has conceived of religion as its great enemy, and the antireligious impulse of the modern world is still steaming on and on—unchecked by our recognition that it ought not to, that it ought to have stopped somewhere before this...

...In vitro fertilization already routinely screens embryos for birth defects before implantation...

...And, most of all, the internal motor of science will be too powerful...

...And if we could only reach down to why the book is unpersuasive, we'd have some insight into the philosophical dilemma we face at this dangerous moment...

...For others it was crime rates...

...His analysis here is brilliant...

...For some in America, for instance, the impetus was the disaster of socialist economics...

...He's right about the inability of patients to stop themselves from demanding new scientific cures...

...What he lacks is a coherent means to connect the two...

...But now, Fukuyama points out, biotechnology wants either to redefine or to abolish human nature...

...The actual threat has always afflicted man in his essence...

...Aristotle's account of human beings as aimed at happiness through friendship and contemplation issues almost as quickly in precise demands...

...In the first section of the book, "Pathways to the Future," he points out the extent of the changes looming...

...a way to connect the structure of reality with the moral life...

...He is too modern to think he can persuade us with the pope's religious claim, too current to imagine he can restore us to Aristotle's philosophical view, and too scientific to rely on Aldous Huxley's literary understanding...

...Having bought a ticket this far, what means—what right, for that matter—did they have to stop the boat from going further...

...But this insight hasn't brought us much, for a culture's religious belief doesn't derive from the desire that the culture have a religious belief...

...He's right about the incapacity of researchers to prevent themselves from pursuing new scientific discoveries...

...You and I—and Francis Fukuyama—may get off the boat, but the boat is going on...

...And all of them weaken the natural basis of rights and dignity...

...Or, for another example, consider the question of whether we could have had a liberalism that was against abortion...

...It was Fukuyama himself who pointed this out in The End of History and the Last Man...

...If we are built in a certain fashion, then there are generally right and generally wrong ways to try to live...

...But as modernity careened bloodily from side to side while liberalism's triumph worked itself out over the last two centuries, certain people have felt the desire to get off the boat...

...For a few recent converts it is biotechnology and cloning...

...Prozac and Ritalin are only the first generation of psychotropic drugs," he notes...

...But, whatever human nature is, its reality is not necessarily incompatible with a modern outlook on things...

...For others it was euthanasia...

...And so abortion came, despite opposition from those who wanted a modernity without it...

...The moral confusion of politicians will be too massive...

...We've had one attempt to cobble an anti-modern philosophy solely from the resources of modernity itself...

...Strickland was merely exasperated and vulgar enough to say out loud what we all perfectly well understand...

...Think for a moment, he demands, of what the world will look like when masses of people survive beyond their hundredth birthday...

...History hadn't come to an end in 1989, he insisted...

...All of them portend the end of a distinction between medicine and enhancement...

...Fukuyama has a gift for a certain kind of nonpolemical prose that invites agreement without overpowering the reader...

...All of this, of course, provides reasons to stay on board modernity's boat...

...It's never easy to figure out what Heidegger's stray gerunds and knotted participles mean, but the claim here seems to be exactly what worries Fukuyama: that we can actually close off to ourselves, by changing human nature, the truth of reality itself...

...He's right about the likely effects...

...The immortality project, the perfect-baby project, and the universal-happiness project are all aimed at the same end: the amelioration and consequent elimination of the human condition...

...And though the reconstituted society may not be all that conservatives desire, we have, as it were, reached a natural harbor and stopping point...

...So, in Our Posthuman Future, he sets out to define the dangers posed by biotechnology and to propose a solution...

...Essentially, Francis Fukuyama is caught in what we might call the great modern conservative dilemma...

...In Our Posthuman Future, he offers one loose account based on statistical norms—and a second by arguing backwards from the politically accepted truth of natural rights to the existence of at least as much human nature as is necessary to support those rights...

...Who now defends big government...

...But the libera-tionist impulse was simply too strong, and the sexual revolution too much fun...

...With a thick account of human nature, it might be possible to accept good science and reject bad...

...Stopping the Future Francis Fukuyama defends humanity BY J. BOTTUM Francis Fukuyama is right, of course, when he says in his new book, Our Posthuman Future, that we should be frightened by the Brave New World that eugenic biotechnology has opened up for us...

...Fukuyama presents all this with his usual seriousness and learning...

...Thus the economic libertarians wish to hold their position in the 1890s, the Evangelicals in the 1920s, the Southern agrarians in the 1940s, and the National Review conservatives in the 1950s...

...Fukuyama opens with a curious quotation from Martin Heidegger: "The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology...

...Our notions of natural rights, our claims of human dignity and equality, are all based on the complex interplay of birth, health, aging, and death...

...Reagan's great conservative coalition of the 1980s was essentially a uniting of all these dissenters from the liberal project under one big Republican tent, and it was enormously successful in closing off certain economic lines that advanced thought had once assumed were identical with modern liberalism...

...Indeed, before the Great Disruption, most enlightened thought assumed its truth...