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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