Norton - Back to Human Nature (to Fukuyama).pdf - Filozofia - ccc84

interview

Back to Human

Nature?

Andrew Norton talks to Francis Fukuyama

n 1989 Francis Fukuyama joined the small world

of intellectual celebrities well known outside

academic circles with ‘The End of History?’, his

essay for The National Interest, later followed up with

a book of the same name. Since then, he has published

a series of books in the social sciences, like The End of

History drawing on academic research but aimed at a

general audience. In 1995 came Trust: The Social

Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity , about how

differing levels and cultures of trust affect economic

performance. In 1999 Fukuyama published The Great

Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of

Social Order , an analysis of the rise of social disorder

in the 1960s, but drawing on research about social

capital and human nature to present a hopeful view of

the future. In his latest book, Our Posthuman Future:

Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution ,

Fukuyama warns of the potential dangers from genetic

engineering and new mind-altering drugs.

In August 2002 he attended The Centre for

Independent Studies’ annual public policy conference ,

Consilium, and gave the Centre’s annual John

Bonython Lecture. Andrew Norton spoke to him about

themes from his work in the social sciences.

without human nature. The only reason that I feel you

can raise the human nature argument again is that over

the last 30 years in the life sciences there has been a lot

of empirical work that has made the concept respectable

to scientists again. I think social scientists and certainly

people in cultural studies haven’t gotten that message

yet. They are committed to the idea that all human

behaviour is completely plastic and socially constructed.

They are very resistant to the notion of human nature.

AN: Do you believe that over time those theories will

be discredited because they are not consistent with

human nature?

FF: It’s not that they are not consistent; they deny that

human nature exists. One of the consequences of the

whole genetic revolution is that you are going to be

able to tell empirically what is natural, what is

genetically determined, and what is environmentally

determined in a much more precise way. Right now if

you look at something like intelligence, the only way

they come up with estimates of what degree of variance

in intelligence is due to genes rather than environment

is through behavioural genetics, which is the study of

monozygotic twins. In the future, you are going to have

actual molecular pathways between particular genes

Andrew Norton: You are unusual amongst contemporary

political theorists in that an explicit theory of human

nature is central to your thought. Do you think political

theories can do without a view of human nature?

Pleholder for short article summary at top of first page. To be filled in later

during proofing stage.

Andrew Norton is a Research Fellow at The Centre for

Independent Studies, and former Editor of Policy. He has

published widely on higher education reform and social capital.

FukuyamaÊs John Bonython Lecture is now available as a limited

edition Occasional Paper from the Centre, www.cis.org.au

Francis Fukuyama: I think most social scientists and a

lot of post-Kantian philosophers have tried to do

2 26

Policy vol. 18, no. 3

B ACK TO H UMAN N ATURE ?

through certain proteins which will then affect certain

higher order behaviours. They’ll do this first in animals

and gradually figure this out for human beings. At that

point I think you’ll still have these stupid arguments

that say, well, human beings are cultural animals and

how can you say there is a human nature. But what

cognitive scientists are showing is that while there is a

cultural and social component to behaviour, human

beings also learn, understand and modify their

behaviour in certain determined ways.

There are limits on plasticity, and

certain typically human ways of seeing

things relate to other human beings.

The most important

element of human

behaviour that the

classical economic

paradigm had

a hard time

accounting for

was norms.

like when you try to abolish the family, or something

like that, run up against a clear limit. In other respects

a lot of behaviours and norms are in fact historically

conditioned within the limits human nature provides,

and I would say that modern consumerism, for example,

is not a natural behaviour. Human beings evolved as

hunter gatherers, in conditions of total scarcity. On

the other hand, it does seem that when you are faced

with an opportunity to enter a consumer society, to

improve the standard of living of your

family, to engage in what Adam Smith

called ‘gain’, doing so is a fairly

universal characteristic.

It was quite revealing in

Afghanistan after the Taliban were

defeated that the first thing the people

in Kabul did was to do dig up their

VCRs and television sets and watch

these corny Indian soap operas. Like

virtually every other human being on

the planet, they like that sort of thing.

You can’t say that watching cheesy

Indian movies is a universal

characteristic of human beings, but

beneath that there are certain

tendencies that are given by nature, and if you try to

restrict them too much you are going to run up against

some real political problems.

AN: So do you believe that when some

ideologies are put into practice they

run into these limits of human nature?

FF: That was certainly true of the

attempt by communism to abolish

private property and the family. But

even more recently, in the feminist

revolution, you had certain feminists

who argued on ideological grounds that

if there is any observed difference in

the behaviour of boys and girls it is simply the result of

socialisation, so that, for example, if girls were more

selective in choosing sexual partners than boys, that

had to be because of Victorian norms. There’s a whole

long history of trying to construct a story about this

which begins with Margaret Mead saying that being

sexually selective was just a Western cultural norm. I

think that partly as a result of people like Derek

Freeman debunking Margaret Mead, but also as a result

of studies of animals, the idea that sex roles are in part

genetically determined has come back in a fairly

important way. In fact, it is a sign of the times that

with a little maturing of the feminist revolution,

younger women especially are getting relaxed to the

point that they can admit that, as everybody intuitively

knows, that men and women are biologically different.

AN: In your 1995 book Trust you say that neo-classical

economics does use fundamental truths about human

nature, but it has its limits. Could you expand on this?

FF: It’s complicated because neoclassical economics has

evolved over time to some extent. The most important

AN: Communism clearly ran against human nature.

Do you think there are elements of Islamic culture

which run against it, and this is one of the reasons

Islamic societies are struggling in the modern world?

FF: You’d have to construct a very complex argument

to say that. The way I would say it is as follows. Human

nature does not, except in certain extreme circumstances

Spring 2002

227

B ACK TO H UMAN N ATURE ?

element of human behaviour that the classical economic

paradigm had a hard time accounting for was norms.

In the last generation there has been a lot of work in

economics on norms. Now there is a whole branch of

institutional economics devoted to elaborating on a

theory of norms. That’s a big improvement. Douglas

North was really onto something important, and he

opened everyone else’s eyes to this whole realm of

economic behaviour that neo-classical economics before

him had pretty much ignored.

I would say that there is still something limited in

economists’ approach to understanding how norms are

generated because they still depend on this rational

utility maximiser model, and then use

game theory to understand how norms

develop. That explains how some

norms come to be, but in other cases

they come from religion, or inherited

tradition, or some other source that

does not have a rational utility

maximising explanation. That’s the

weakness in the neo-classical

paradigm—not that it ignores norms

but it doesn’t really have, and I would

argue can’t really have, a theory of norm

generation that’s adequate.

The other really big problem that’s commonly

recognised by economists is that microeconomic theory,

something like price theory, is well established and has

good predictive power, but there are really big problems

in macroeconomics when you scale things up to the

level of entire societies. I think that’s reflected in the

failure to predict the Asian crisis, and just to foresee a

lot of events at the macroeconomy level. I think there’s

a simple reason for this—economies are just too

complicated. When you scale things up to that level,

you have all these political and cultural factors that

operate to affect economic decision-making. There’s this

heroic attempt to use game theory to model politics

and behaviours at that level, but I predict they’ll beat

their heads against that wall for maybe another

generation until these rational choice economists who

now have tenure have retired.

I think a great

deal of politics is

actually not over

resource allocation,

it’s over recognition

struggles.

notion that people seek utility, which for most

economists has to do with the satisfaction of various

desires or money income. I think Smith understood

that there’s actually a more complex psychology involved.

In some cases we do want resources, but in many

other cases what we want is the intersubjective esteem

of another human being that recognises your dignity.

Smith has this phrase where he says that when the rich

man glories in his richness it is not that he lives to

enjoy in private the money that he has, it is more that

he is seen by other people as having achieved wealth

and status. The reason Smith says poverty is humiliating

is that the poor man is invisible to his fellow man and

is not recognised as another human

being. That’s really what happens at

the deeper core of poverty. What’s

understood typically as economic

motivation can actually be broken

down into what I would call strictly

economic motivation, the desire for

resources, and a struggle for

recognition, which is this inter-

subjective desire to have your status

recognised by other human beings. I

think a great deal of politics is actually

not over resource allocation, it’s over

recognition struggles—gay rights, feminism, civil rights,

all of these things are essentially demands that other

people recognise you as an individual, or your group of

people, as having a certain kind of moral status.

AN: In Our Posthuman Future you warn against

recognition in a bottle—Prozac and similar drugs which

give people a sense of self-esteem. What is the danger

in these drugs?

FF: I think that the danger is that they undermine this

very basic notion of moral agency. First of all, I should

explain that there are therapeutic uses for all these

drugs. Some people are genuinely so depressed that

they can’t function, or so hyperactive that they can’t

have any normal life. However, there is a very squishy

middle ground in which the drugs can be used to create

feelings of self-worth, or in the case of Ritalin a greater

sense of concentration and focus. This can undermine

traditional notions of what character is, for example

that self-esteem is something that has to be earned

through a painful process of self-discipline, of struggling

to achieve a particular goal. It’s not an entitlement that

you can get by taking a drug.

AN: The desire for ‘recognition’ is a theme in all your

books. Can you explain what you mean by that?

FF: It’s probably easiest to go back to Adam Smith and

The Theory of Moral Sentiments because I think he

understood this perfectly well. Economists have this

Policy vol. 18, no. 3

228

B ACK TO H UMAN N ATURE ?

Similarly, with Ritalin we had a traditional notion

of moral agency that built character through an

accumulation of habits of putting off immediate

gratification in favour of longer term goals. What both

of these drugs do is medicalise, or extend the domain

of the therapeutic into areas that were

not traditionally considered medical

conditions, but were considered areas

of personal responsibility. It’s a subtle

thing, and it is hard to get people to

see this is a problem, because people

say what’s wrong with people feeling

good or happy?

Technology

that is powerful

enough to alter our

understanding of

humanness is

inevitably going to

have consequences

for things like

rights.

human being, and who therefore deserves human

rights. The American Civil War was fought between

two groups of Americans, one of whom thought blacks

did not have adequate human characteristics to qualify

as having been admitted to this charmed circle of

people protected under the US

Constitution. Technology that is

powerful enough to alter our

understanding of humanness is

inevitably going to have consequences

for things like rights. It is something

we should at least go into with our

eyes open, as it could have far-

reaching ethical consequences.

AN : In Our Posthuman Future you argue

against science meddling too much

with human nature. Is this because of

considerations like this?

AN: Do you think there is an

argument that the evolution of

human nature has either stalled

completely or is moving very slowly,

and that we have characteristics that

were designed for quite different

societies than we have today? To use one of your

examples, little boys weren’t designed to stay still. Is

there a case for creating little boys who will sit still,

given that is the reality of what little boys living today

must do?

FF : Well it is because of several things.

One simple thing has to do with social

control. We have tried all sorts of schemes for utopian

social engineering in the 20th century, and they’ve all

failed because human nature stood as a bulwark. We’ve

had utopian regimes that tried to abolish private

property, and I think that failed because the human

desire for property is embedded in

human nature. It is hard to specify

scenarios by which this may

happen, but I just think that if you

have a better cognitive neuro-

science, you have array of

neuropharmicological agents that

can modify behaviour. Similarly, if

you have certain kinds of genetic

technologies, then we’re going to

have a second go at this. That’s why

I think the use of Ritalin and

Prozac is so revealing and

troubling, not so much in

themselves but as a harbinger of

things to come. Ritalin is used

today as a means of conrolling the

behaviour of young children, and I

think some of that is legitimate, but

can also be misused.

The other issue has to do with human nature, and

its relationship with human rights. Most of the big

moral struggles over the last 200 years in liberal

democracies have been over the question of who was a

FF: That may be the reality, but I

think people are much too ready

to assert that they understand

what human defects are and what

would make people better. This

goes back to a lot of earlier

attempts at social engineering.

Take something like aggression.

People are willing to say that

human nature is defective because

people are violent and aggressive,

and if you could somehow

engineer this out of people the

human race would be better. Even

in the life of an individual, it

could be that the same

psychological impulses that cause

you to be aggressive may be at the

root of creativity or innovation or

the willingness to buck authority, all things that have

been regarded as positive. I have almost no confidence

in our ability to sort these things out without making

a lot of mistakes.

Spring 2002

229

B ACK TO H UMAN N ATURE ?

AN: Do you think there is any possibility that the state

might seek to control its citizens this way, rather than

by traditional coercive methods? Or would it be

stopped well before then?

isn’t simply what’s natural. What’s valuable is

constructed over time in societies and is not given simply

by nature. The problem is that once you remove nature

as a standard, and in the absence of religious precepts

of right and wrong, it is extremely difficult to come up

with an appropriate set of norms that isn’t subject to

attack from various forms of cultural relativism.

FF: I think the likelihood of the state getting back

into eugenics is very low, given the past history of

Nazism and eugenics laws in the 20th century.

Nobody wants to go back to that. But it’s possible that

if you had genetic engineering that allowed parents to

embed genetic advantages in their children that might

in fact be an excuse for the state getting back into the

eugenics game in order to raise the bottom.

AN: Many people would like to lengthen their lives;

though the presence of euthanasia movements suggests

that this is not universal. What are the political

implications of an ageing population?

FF: I think there are huge implications. Life extension

is the perfect example of a potential negative externality,

where you can get a medical

technology that is individually rational

but socially disastrous. There’s hardly

anyone who would not welcome having

another ten years to live, but the trade-

off is very frequently another ten years

of reduced mental capacity. In fact,

that’s the trade-off we’ve experienced

with Alzheimer’s disease. We’ve had an

explosion of Alzheimer’s in the West,

which is the result of biomedicine

keeping people alive long enough that

they can get this age-linked disease.

Even past life extension has had an

ambiguous effect on the happiness and well-being it

was meant to serve. I think in the case of life extension

there are all sorts of negative externalities. I mention

some in Our Posthuman Future . Natural generational

succession is actually very functional in promoting

innovation, change and adaptation to different

environments. For one reason or another, people develop

a certain worldview by the time they are about 25 or

30, and they almost never change it after that. Until

they die off you are not going to get much movement.

That whole process is going to be slowed down. It’s

like giving everybody tenure.

AN: Is there any practical way of drawing the line

between therapy and enhancement?

FF: Actually I think there is a practical

way but not a theoretical way. You

could say that giving a 65 year old

patient a heart transplant is not

therapeutic, it is enhancement, because

you are unnaturally extending the

human life span. I recognise that this

is a hard line. On the other hand, there

are certain things that are clearly

therapeutic, and others that are clearly

enhancement, so you shouldn’t

overestimate how much of a grey area

there is between them. A regulatory agency can make a

discrimination like that more effectively than a

philosopher. Regulatory agencies have to draw lines at

certain points, and people argue about whether it is

too high or too low, and you finally end up with some

compromise. It’s not theoretically justifiable, but it

works in practice. That’s the case in drug policy now,

where we permit certain drugs for therapeutic purposes

and prohibit the same drug for enhancement uses. It’s

hard to justify precisely where to draw the line, but it

still matters to draw that line.

Medical technology

has created these

horrible situations

where you can live

to a point where

life is not worth

living.

AN: In his New York Times review of Our Posthuman

Future , Colin McGinn argues that we don’t need a

theory of human nature to be concerned about

biotechnology—what we need is a set of theories about

what is valuable in human life. Do you agree with

this?

AN: Are there any practical ways you could try to stop

this?

FF: While you can limit a lot of the reproductive

technology, life extension is one of those things that

will be almost impossible to stop, except that some of

the life extension strategies would involve genetic

engineering. The only conceivable way would be to

FF: A theory of what’s valuable has to refer to what is

in our natures. I accept his point that what’s valuable

Policy vol. 18, no. 3

330

Norton - Back to Human Nature (to Fukuyama).pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: