History Begins Again

__"Second Thoughts" by Francis Fukuyama, and "Responses to Fukuyama" by Harvey Mansfield et al., in The National Interest (Summer 1999), 1112 16th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.__

Ten years ago, in a new journal called the National Interest, an obscure researcher from the RAND Corporation ventured to suggest that with the West’s victory in the Cold War, the end of History was in sight. Not history, in the ordinary sense of the unfolding story of man’s sad stumble through the centuries, but capital-H History, in the Hegelian-Marxist sense of the progressive evolution of human political and economic institutions. And the "end" that Francis Fukuyama discerned was not socialism, as Marxists had supposed, but bourgeois liberal democracy and capitalism. There would be no more grand world conflicts over ideas and ideologies. His bold thesis still stirs controversy.

Now, Fukuyama says that he was wrong—but not for reasons his critics suggested.

Neither the stalling of reform in Russia nor the economic crisis in Asia, says Fukuyama, now a professor of public policy at George Mason University, invalidate his conclusion "that liberal democracy and a market-oriented economic order are the only viable options for modern societies." Instead, he writes, the "true weakness" in his argument was this: "History cannot come to an end as long as modern natural science has no end; and we are on the brink of new developments in science that will, in essence, abolish what [philosopher] Alexandre Kojève called ‘mankind as such’ " —human nature itself.

Within the next few generations, Fukuyama believes, genetic engineering made possible by the biotechnology revolution will allow "what the radical ideologies of the past . . . were unable to accomplish": the creation of "a new type of human being." It may well be possible, for example, "to breed less violent people, or people cured of their propensity for criminal behavior." Already, he says, there is a foretaste of the Brave New World in the widespread use of behavior-altering drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac.

"For today, any understanding we may have of just political arrangements or a universal moral order is ultimately based on an understanding of human nature," writes Fukuyama. "To the extent that that nature is something given to us not by God or by our evolutionary inheritance, but by human artifice, then we enter into God’s own realm with all of the frightening powers for good and evil that such an entry implies." Humans will then be able to "change once and for all the set of genetically controlled behaviors that have characterized the human race since... human beings lived in hunter-gatherer societies." At that point, human capital-H History will be over, he says, and "a new, posthuman history will begin."

E. O. Wilson, author of Consilience (1998) and On Human Nature (1978), and one of a half-dozen commentators on Fukuyama’s reappraisal, doubts that things will reach that pass. "By the time the treacherous waters of possible genomic intervention and replacement are charted, I suspect a moral argument will keep Homo sapiens from traveling there except for gene therapy and minor enhancement."

But the weakness that Fukuyama now sees in his original argument is not the only one, in the view of Robin Fox, a professor of social theory at Rutgers University. It is a theory that, like the Hegelian one on which it is based, applies to only a few thousand years of human development, arbitrarily isolated from the millions of years of human history. For all the grand talk, what Fukuyama (and others) call "history," Fox says, is really a mere blip on the radar screen.