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. Go back to the main document ... 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/ Go back to the main document ... |