Identity Crisis

‘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.”

About the Author

Brian C. Anderson

Mr. Anderson is editor of City Journal and author of Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents, South Park Conservatives, and other books.

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‘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.”