Identity Crisis. - "Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution" - book review

National Review, June 3, 2002 by Brian C. Anderson

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama (Farrar Straus, 272 pp., $25)

'We should not allow theology, philosophy, or politics to interfere with the decision we make on this issue," pronounced Ohio Democratic congressman Ted Strickland during the 2001 congressional debate on human cloning. Science alone, he believed, should guide our policy. But as social theorist (and member of the President's Council on Bioethics) Francis Fukuyama responds in this lucid overview of the biotechnology revolution and its discontents, "It is only 'theology, philosophy, or politics' that can establish the ends of science and the technology that science produces." Science cannot, by itself, determine what mankind does with it. It can both find miracle cures for diseases and create super-bugs resistant to any cure. It can both palliate and destroy.

Fukuyama is most famous as the author of the 1989 essay (later a book) "The End of History?" -- in which he argued that the era of utopian political experiments had come to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that liberal democratic capitalism had proven to be the final stage of mankind's political development, since it satisfied the permanent demands of human nature better than any other form of government. Now, taking the measure of biotechnology, he's not so sure that history is over. Scientific advances raise the possibility that man will someday be able to modify his genetic nature, and so open a "posthuman" future that will include dangerous new political experiments. Given that human nature "shapes and constrains the possible kinds of political regimes," says Fukuyama, "a technology powerful enough to reshape what we are will have possibly malign consequences for liberal democracy and the nature of politics itself."

The malign consequences are unlikely to be jackboot totalitarianisms like those that made the 20th century so bloody. Instead, they will arrive as presumptive enhancements of freedom and health -- seeming liberations that could ultimately rob us of our souls. The danger is not brute force, but fatal seduction: Huxley's Brave New World, not Orwell's 1984, is the relevant dystopia for the 21st century.

Consider what's already happened as a result of our growing knowledge of the brain and its chemistry; it offers a troubling sign of what full-fledged modification of human nature via genetic engineering could look like. Serotonin-reuptake drugs -- such as Prozac and Zoloft -- have undoubtedly helped many people with clinical depression lead better lives. But, as Fukuyama notes, low levels of serotonin don't mark out a clearly pathological condition. Many people (I know a few) take these drugs as a kind of cosmetic pharmacology, buying self-esteem in a bottle rather than struggling to achieve it. And if Prozac and its relatives sometimes seem like happiness pills, Fukuyama adds, the stimulant Ritalin -- prescribed to millions of children ostensibly suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a condition without any proven biological basis -- "has come to play the role of an overt instrument of social control."

Today's mood-altering drugs are relatively crude, and often have disturbing side effects that their makers spend lots of money to downplay. Eventually, though, we will probably have drugs tailor-made for one's genetic profile, with minimal or no side effects. This will be a questionable gain, thinks Fukuyama: Many will feel that it is senseless ever to be unhappy or angry or ashamed again, once simply popping a pill can safely get rid of unpleasant emotions. But a world without these kinds of emotions would no longer be fully human. Wouldn't the wellsprings of art, striving, and greatness dry up? After all, don't such emotions often tell us something true about our lives?

Another disturbing development on the biotech horizon is what ethicist Leon Kass, head of the council on bioethics, calls the "immortality project." Conquering death may forever remain beyond man's reach, Fukuyama observes, but through discoveries in the biology of aging and advances in tissue regeneration made possible by stem-cell research, biotech may soon be able to prolong life expectancies far beyond where they are today (roughly 75 years for men and 80 for women). Living to 125 or 150 may sound great. Yet profound demographic and social changes will ensue if such extended life spans become typical. If there are a lot more extremely old people around, who pays for their retirement? What if people want to keep working until they're 90 or even 100? Should society force them to give way to younger workers?

And Fukuyama points out that even these serious problems are kid stuff compared with those posed by genetic engineering. It is already increasingly possible to "design" babies according to parents' whims through the pre-implantation genetic screening of embryos. While we don't yet have the ability to modify human nature in any significant way, what happens if we gain the power to alter the human germ line -- through DNA modifications that affect not only the engineered individual but also his descendants? True, we might be able to eliminate genetically inherited scourges, which would be a wondrous boon. But it's true, too, that in a world where designing children has been perfected, the very foundations of democracy could crumble. The posthuman individual would likely be stronger, smarter, and more attractive. If genetic enhancements of intelligence or strength remain prohibitively expensive to all but the wealthy, however, does government then step in and, practicing a beneficent eugenics, guarantee improvements to all? Or do we face a world in which, to recall Jefferson, some arrive in the world with saddles on their backs and others with boots and spurs?