Please note: because Fukuyama’s perspective switches between a universal 
rosiness and a universal black and white, the extracted text below, 
downloaded from The Guardian on-line, is presented in red,
black and white. 

Red sections indicate hyperbole, unhelpful generalisation 
(if concern is with human heterogeneity), and a dehistoricized, 
hence universal human subject.

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Sorry, but your soul just died.

A decade ago Francis Fukuyama shook the world of
ideas with his assertion that we had reached the end
of history. Now he has looked into the future and
doesn't like what he sees. In these exclusive extracts
from his eagerly anticipated new book he argues that
science runs the risk of destroying humanity as we
know it.

Francis Fukuyama
The Guardian

Monday May 13, 2002

I was born in 1952, right in the middle of the American baby
boom. For any person growing up as I did in the middle decades
of the 20th century, the future and its terrifying possibilities were
defined by two books, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
(first published in 1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
(published in 1932).

The two books were far more prescient than anyone realised at
the time, because they were centred on two different
technologies that would in fact emerge and shape the world over
the next two generations. Nineteen Eighty-Four was about what
we now call information technology: central to the success of
the vast, totalitarian empire that had been set up over Oceania
was a device called the telescreen, a wall-sized flat-panel
display that could simultaneously send and receive images from
each individual household to a hovering Big Brother. The
telescreen was what permitted the vast centralisation of social
life under the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love, for it
allowed the government to banish privacy by monitoring every
word and deed over a massive network of wires.

Brave New World, by contrast, was about the other big
technological revolution about to take place, that of
biotechnology. Bokanovskification, the hatching of people not in
wombs but, as we now say, in vitro; the drug soma, which gave
people instant happiness; the Feelies, in which sensation was
simulated by implanted electrodes; and the modification of
behavior through constant subliminal repetition and, when that
didn't work, through the administration of various artificial
hormones were what gave this book its particularly creepy
ambience.

With at least a half century separating us from the publication of
these books, we can see that while the technological
predictions they made were startlingly accurate, the political
predictions of Nineteen Eighty-Four were entirely wrong. The
year 1984 came and went, with the US still locked in a cold war
struggle with the Soviet Union. That year saw the introduction of
a new model of the IBM personal computer and the beginning of
what became the PC revolution. As Peter Huber has argued [in
his Orwell's Revenge], the personal computer, linked to the
internet, was in fact the realisation of Orwell's telescreen. But
instead of becoming an instrument of centralisation and tyranny,
it led to just the opposite: the democratisation of access to
information and the decentralisation of politics. Instead of Big
Brother watching everyone, people could use the PC and
internet to watch Big Brother, as governments everywhere were
driven to publish more information on their own activities.

Just five years after 1984, in a series of dramatic events that
would earlier have seemed like political science fiction, the
Soviet Union and its empire collapsed, and the totalitarian threat
that Orwell had so vividly evoked vanished. People were again
quick to point out that these two events - the collapse of
totalitarian empires and the emergence of the personal
computer, as well as other forms of inexpensive information
technology, from TVs and radios to faxes and email - were not
unrelated. Totalitarian rule depended on a regime's ability to
maintain a monopoly over information, and once modern
information technology made that impossible, the regime's
power was undermined.

The political prescience of the other great dystopia, Brave New
World, remains to be seen. Many of the technologies that
Huxley envisioned, such as in vitro fertilisation, surrogate
motherhood, psychotropic drugs, and genetic engineering for the
manufacture of children, are already here or just over the
horizon. But this revolution has only just begun; the daily
avalanche of announcements of new breakthroughs in
biomedical technology and achievements such as the
completion of the human genome project in the year 2000
portend much more serious changes to come.

Of the nightmares evoked by these two books, Brave New
World's always struck me as more subtle and more challenging.
It is easy to see what's wrong with the world of Nineteen
Eighty-Four: the protagonist, Winston Smith, is known to hate
rats above all things, so Big Brother devises a cage in which
rats can bite at Smith's face in order to get him to betray his
lover. This is the world of classical tyranny, technologically
empowered but not so different from what we have tragically
seen and known in human history.

In Brave New World, by contrast, the evil is not so obvious
because no one is hurt; indeed, this is a world in which everyone
gets what they want. As one of the characters notes, "The
Controllers realised that force was no good," and that people
would have to be seduced rather than compelled to live in an
orderly society. In this world, disease and social conflict have
been abolished, there is no depression, madness, loneliness, or
emotional distress, sex is good and readily available. There is
even a government ministry to ensure that the length of time
between the appearance of a desire and its satisfaction is kept
to a minimum. No one takes religion seriously any longer, no
one is introspective or has unrequited longings, the biological
family has been abolished, no one reads Shakespeare. But no
one (save John the Savage, the book's protagonist) misses
these things, either, since they are happy and healthy.

The aim of this book is to argue that Huxley was right, that the
most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is
the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move
us into a "posthuman" stage of history. This is important
because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has
provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species. It is,
conjointly with religion, what defines our most basic values.
Human nature shapes and constrains the possible kinds of
political regimes, so a technology powerful enough to reshape
what we are will have possibly malign consequences for liberal
democracy and the nature of politics itself.

It may be that, as in the case of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we will
eventually find that biotechnology's consequences are
completely and surprisingly benign, and that we were wrong to
lose sleep over it. It may be that the technology will in the end
prove much less powerful than it seems today, or that people
will be moderate and careful in their application of it. But one of
the reasons I am not quite so sanguine is that biotechnology, in
contrast to many other scientific advances, mixes obvious
benefits with subtle harms in one seamless package.

A full text is available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/

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