The Importance of Being Human

Robin Downie, the retired Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, once told me that the key to fame in philosophy is not to get things right. The key is to get things wrong in a way that is simple or outrageous enough to guarantee that you will be repeatedly attacked. Then you can at least be assured of a distinguished career as a professional straw man. Francis Fukuyama is anything but a straw man, but when he became famous ten years ago with The End of History and the Last Man, it was for a book that practically begged, cap in hand, to be attacked. History was over, Fukuyama argued. We have had no real political progress since the principles of the French Revolution, and the last ideological alternative to liberal democracy collapsed with the Soviet Union. From here on out, History--spelled with a capital H, as in Hegel--will be little more than a series of ideological footnotes to the Enlightenment. Fukuyama's grand claim sounded outrageous enough to guarantee him a moment or two in the spotlight, where he sparred with the predictable intellectual adversaries. Now Fukuyama is back with another grand book, this one about biotechnology, and I can't resist the bait. Never mind about the end of history, says Fukuyama. History is not finished, because science is not yet finished. Through biotechnology and psychopharmacology, scientists are learning how to manipulate the very fundamentals of our nature as human beings. Personality and behavior can be manipulated through psychoactive drugs and our genetic constitution can be manipulated with biotechnology. These manipulations may well undermine the basic biological conditions that sustain liberal democracy. History might continue, but only as a Posthuman History. Fukuyama is a lucid, elegant writer with a knack for distilling complex ideas into readable prose. He is also a serious thinker. In a literary market dominated by diet manuals, self-help books, and celebrity biographies, anybody who can write a book about Hegel and turn it into an international bestseller deserves a standing ovation. Yet it is hard to read Our Posthuman Future without wondering whether Fukuyama has given his topic its rightful due. The difficulty of writing almost any book with the word "future" in the title is making a reasonable guess about what the future holds. If you get it wrong, you run the risk of addressing issues that never arise, speculating about technologies that never pan out, and fighting adversaries who never appear. This is why, for a book like this one, it is so important to think carefully and knowledgeably about the actual science in question. Yet Fukuyama seems less interested in the science itself, or even the ethical issues it raises, than in its implications for the political theories he has explored in other books. Psychopharmacology and biotechnology are the means by which he explores his larger ideas about history, human nature, and natural rights. This makes for a slightly odd book. Sometimes Fukuyama comes across like a guy who listens to jokes only because of what they might contribute to his theory of humor. All human beings, claims Fukuyama, desire recognition by other people, because humans are "by nature, status-conscious animals" (p. 64). Not only does the demand for recognition lie at me root of our sense of self-esteem; it has fueled all of human history. The entire historical process can be explained as a struggle for recognition. This is why psychoactive drugs such as Prozac are so important. Prozac is a self-esteem drug. It makes people more self-confident and artificially fulfills their desire for status and respect. As evidence, Fukuyama cites the case of Tess in Peter Kramer's book, Listening to Prozac, who became happier and more outgoing when Kramer prescribed Prozac for her. Thus the important lesson to be learned from the past decade's experience with psychopharmacology is that "the desire for recognition has a biological basis and that that basis is related to levels of serotonin in the brain" (p. …