The End of Nature and the Next Man

Wised-up critics lampoon this obsession with the 1960s as facile, of course. But Fukuyama shows that, as a statistical matter, the 1960s really were The Sixties. What’s more, they aren’t over yet, although it is the optimistic theme of his book that they might at last be drawing to a close.

Fukuyama’s explication of the Great Disruption is more thorough than that of the garden-variety op-ed columnist. The weakening of common values and behavioral norms — the depletion of what social scientists call “social capital” — was not an exclusively American phenomenon. Something similar happened at roughly the same time throughout the industrialized world. And it was not, as the polemicists sometimes seem to think, a consequence of Watergate, Vietnam, Woodstock, or any of the other cultural markers so dear to the solipsistic Baby Boomer. It had to do with processes that run deeper in history and are, luckily, less ideologically fraught.

“Was it just an accident,” Fukuyama writes, “that these negative social trends, which together reflected weakening social bonds and common values holding people together in Western societies, occurred just as economies in those societies were making the transition from the industrial to the information era?”

The emphasis on mental, as opposed to physical, labor in the new economy lessened the value of brawn, downgrading men’s traditional role as breadwinners and clearing the way for women to enter the workforce in unprecedented numbers. The invention of the Pill sexually “liberated” women and men (but especially men) and undermined one of the grounds for forming families. The marketplace intensified the culture of individualism and subverted the authority of communal institutions. In Fukuyama’s rendering, the Great Disruption and the development of the postindustrial economy, with its breath taking technological advances, are impossible to separate. “The two were in fact intimately connected,” he writes, “and with all of the blessings that flow from a more complex, information-based economy, certain bad things also happened to our social and moral life.”

Fukuyama doesn’t shrink from the judgment that these “bad things” — the breakdown in the family, the loss of trust in authority — were indeed bad. He is not, or does not want to be, a cultural relativist, and the polemicists will be greatly reassured by his painstaking demonstration that many of the old virtues, so badly damaged in the Great Disruption, are necessary for the stable social order upon which democratic capitalism depends.

And he wants to go farther even than this. Those old virtues — he lists, more than once, honesty, reciprocity (doing unto others), and reliability — are not only necessary but in some way inevitable: “Human beings are by nature social creatures, whose most basic drives and instincts lead them to create moral rules that bind themselves together into communities. They are also by nature rational, and their rationality allows them to create ways of cooperating with one another spontaneously.” (The italics, importantly, are his.)

According to Fukuyama, this natural tendency of human beings to right themselves after a period of social upheaval explains why we are seeing, in the 1990s, a reversal of many of the Great Disruption’s disastrous trends, with crime plummeting, divorce rates falling, and illegitimacy leveling off. “There is, moreover, plenty of anecdotal evidence that more conservative social norms have made a comeback, and that the more extreme forms of individualism have fallen out of favor.”

The society that emerges from this process of “renorming” will likely not resemble the Ozzie and Harriet day-dream that traditionalists are alleged to fancy, but neither will it be the amoral chaos they fear. Kinship ties will be weaker, sexual mores looser, the labor market more fluid than the Nelson family would remember from the 1950s. But it will still be a place where social behavior is rewarded and anti-social behavior discouraged — because that’s the way societies are:

Modern postindustrial capitalist economies will generate a continuing demand for social capital. In the long run, they should also be able to supply sufficient quantities of social capital to keep up with the demand as well. We can be reasonably confident about this because we know that private agents seeking their own selfish ends will tend to produce social capital and the virtues associated with it.

The Great Disruption is thus, on its own terms, an optimistic book, and it is pleasing to encounter a conservative social critic who does not believe that America is, in fact, going to hell on a rollercoaster. Fukuyama’s argument is subtle and lucid and wide ranging. It will doubtless serve as a model for many future discussions of the way we live now, and how it is that we go about undoing the damage done in the Great Disruption — “reconstituting the social order,” to use Fukuyama’s grander phrase. That’s why it’s an important book, and why it may give you the creeps.

As a social critic, Fukuyama wants to draw large conclusions about the nature of human beings — about how they behave with one another, and why they behave the way they do. A task so grand as reconstituting the social order demands nothing less.

Where earlier theorists might have turned to reason or revelation, however, Fukuyama turns to science. Specifically, he fortifies his thesis with “a tremendous amount of recent research coming out of the life sciences, in fields as diverse as neurophysiology, behavior genetics, evolutionary biology, and ethology, as well as biologically informed approaches to psychology and anthropology.” This research is, as he writes, “one of the most interesting and important intellectual developments of our time.”

It is certainly the most unavoidable. The new science is the reasoning of first resort these days for philosophers, sociologists, journalists, television medical doctors, newspaper advice columnists, and all other deep thinkers who would seek to explain the mysteries of human behavior. As recently as two years ago, in Commentary magazine, Fukuyama was writing that “in most academic treatments of society and politics, today’s biological advances are considered virtually out of bounds for discussion.” This is no longer true, in either academia or the popular press. Example fall in the lap almost every day. If you opened up Newsweek after the Columbine shootings, you were treated to brain scans of a typical sixteen-year-old — this by way of locating the killers’ motivation in their Cingulate Gyrus and Prefrontal Cortex. I recently came across the book Luxury Fever, by the Cornell economist Robert H. Frank, linking a person’s political views to the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain.

For the most part, these treatments of the new science are superficial and silly. Fukuyama’s is of a higher order. But he too, in drafting his argument, wants to draw on the new science when it suits his purposes, and abandon it when its consequences are inconvenient. The new science is rigidly deterministic; Fukuyama does not want to be thought a determinist. It is materialistic to its core; Fukuyama shys from materialism. But his maneuvering is not sustainable on the terms that the new science demands.

It’s worth taking a moment to examine the worldview of the new science — for it is a worldview — more thoroughly than Fukuyama does in The Great Disruption. The attractions of the new science are undeniable. Much of it has shown enormous utility, as in, for example, the treatment of aberrant behavior through drugs targeted to specific regions and chemicals of the brain. These demonstrable successes have been mostly limited to specific physiological outcomes, such as the control of schizophrenia. But the theorists of the new science, and indeed many of its practitioners, are far more ambitious. They see in it the means for explaining human behavior in all its aspects, finding a genetic basis for everything from a mother’s love to our capacity to enjoy music. There is no human experience, by the light of the new science, that cannot be reduced to a physiological process.

With its ubiquitous popularity, the new science has become the reigning myth at the century’s end. I use the term myth in the academic sense, without reference necessarily to its truth or falsehood, but merely to denote a comprehensive story that can account for simply everything. At the heart of the new scientific myth is the “selfish gene,” a coinage of the British writer Richard Dawkins in his vastly influential 1976 book of that name. Dawkins’s belief was that “the genes created us, body and mind,” and that, further, it was the goal of genes to replicate and disperse themselves as widely as possible. To this end, they have adapted themselves over the eons to various conditions of life, through a process of natural selection. The human organism, in this now-popular view, is thus the means whereby one set of genes interacts to pass itself on to another generation.

Dawkins’s theory has great explanatory power. It explains why human beings are self-interested, yet capable of love: A mother adores her child because it contains her genes. The theory of the selfish gene is finally untestable, but among the new scientists it is now accepted as fact, an essential premise for their speculations.

This is the way a myth works: It accounts for everything while simultaneously denying whatever it cannot account for. All myths are question-begging in this sense; they contain their conclusions in their premises. I mentioned that the new science is fiercely, uncompromisingly materialistic. There’s nothing new in that, of course: Science investigates material processes, and explains them in material terms. The enthusiasts for the new, comprehensive materialist myth, however, don’t stop there. They want to make a quasi-metaphysical claim. Because the new science uncovers only materialistic processes, materialistic processes are all that there is: What materialism cannot explain, cannot exist. QED.

This leads the enthusiasts to conclusions that are, to put it kindly, counterintuitive. Perhaps the most startling assertion has to do with the very nature of the human being. Each of us, it’s safe to say, has an experience of himself as an autonomous entity, reliant on, maybe even dependent upon, his body, but nevertheless having an existence somehow detached from it. It’s what we mean when we use the pronoun “I.”

But it is the premise, and conclusion, of the new science that the self, experienced in this way, doesn’t exist. Any intuition to the contrary is merely an illusion — a trick played by our genes as a survival strategy: An organism with a sense of self is more likely to preserve and pass on its genes. The more philosophically rigorous of the enthusiasts can be quite pitiless on the point. The biochemist Francis Crick, who with James D. Watson discovered the structure of DNA, recently published a manifesto of the new science called “The Astonishing Hypothesis.”

As it happens, he does not consider his hypothesis to be at all hypothetical: “‘The Astonishing Hypothesis’ is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” And again: “We need to state the idea in stronger terms. The scientific belief is that our minds — the behavior of our brains — can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them. This is to most people a really surprising concept.”

It is indeed. For starters, “the scientific belief” runs counter to the most elemental belief every person has about himself — not to mention about his wife, his children, even his worst enemy. (Is it unfair to ask whether Crick really believes his own children are nothing more than “a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”?) Beyond this, however, the “scientific belief” would also appear to be corrosive of any notion of free will, personal responsibility, or universal morality.

It is at this point that some enthusiasts for the new science get skittish and exercise a rhetorical sleight of hand. The neurologist Antonio Damasio, for example, is typical in this regard. Fukuyama draws substantially on parts of Damasio’s much-praised 1994 book, Descartes’ Error. Descartes’s error, of course, was his belief in an independent self, and Damasio shows that in the new science there is no need and no room for it. Strangely, however, Damasio goes on to lament “the inherent tragedy of conscious existence,” but never addresses the unavoidable question: If there is no self to suffer and die, whence the tragedy? Others, like the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, are more straightforward, or more candid. In his 1997 bestseller, How the Mind Works, he proposes than in our everyday lives we should play an elaborate game of “as if,” behaving as if we were beings possessing free will, even though the smarter among us know we aren’t.

“Ethical theory,” Pinker writes, “requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events. . . . A human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentiment free agent, depending on the purpose of the discussion.”

Which is to say that, in the view of the new science, morality is based on a pretense — on believing, provisionally, something science tells us is untrue: namely that human beings are autonomous selves, with an independent existence, rather than a collection of fired-up nerve cells. How long a morality based on such delusions can endure, or how many adherents it can draw, is unclear.

It is important to note that Fukuyama, in The Great Disruption, leaves these quasi-metaphysical issues untouched. Like many popularizers of the new science, he declines to explore its premises or follow it to its conclusions. He is attracted to it, as many conservatives are, because it posits something akin to a universal and intractable human nature.

Thinkers on the left, beginning at least with Rousseau and continuing through to Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, have denied that human nature so defined actually exists, of course. This makes it all the more gratifying for conservatives when science shows that the human organism is fashioned by natural selection and genetics to behave in certain ways. Conservatives have always had an intellectual inferiority complex in these matters. In asserting that human nature was fixed, that human beings were not perfectible nor even particularly elastic, they have traditionally relied on a myth of their own: the elaborate architecture of natural law, with all its attendant embarrassments — God, the metaphysical soul, and so on. But now scientists — the fellows in lab coats, not the clerics in the funny turned-around collars — are confirming that human nature is real.

Yet it’s hard to see, from the philistine perspective of a layman, what all the fuss is about. The human nature that the new science ascribes to the human organism seems rather banal, or in any case self-evident. Men, the new science tells us, are different from women. They are less sexually selective, more preoccupied with status. Human beings are at once social and self-interested; they will form groups, in other words, when it is in their interest to do so, and it nearly always is. Some people will be more sociable than others, some more self-interested. All human beings are predisposed to using reason, language, and other symbols. The family is formed as an efficient means of protecting and nurturing children. The bond between mother and child is uniquely strong. Etcetera.

As Fukuyama notes, there is little here that Aristotle didn’t tell us — nothing, indeed, that the average person can’t glean from everyday experience. Only an intellectual, to paraphrase Orwell, would be silly enough to deny these human predispositions. Yet deny them our intellectuals have, in the social sciences and elsewhere, for much of this century, and their denial has formed an intellectual justification for the Great Disruption. Fukuyama is right: The rediscovery of human nature is the great intellectual development of our era, and it is particularly crucial as we undertake the “reconstitution of the social order.” Just as crucial, however, is the question of under what set of assumptions — under what myth — the reconstitution takes place.

In his book, Fukuyama demonstrates often, and inadvertently, that much of the new science is indeed a myth — a speculative theory, conjured up to explain certain phenomena, which is finally untestable and hence unscientific. He makes much use of evolutionary psychology, for example, which operates on the outer frontiers of the new science.

Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain psychological behavior by means of Darwinian natural selection. Its inherent problems are obvious. The theory of evolution rests in large part on the fossil record, against which portions of the theory can be tested. But there can be no fossil record of psychological phenomena. So the evolutionary psychologists extrapolate instead from the research of neurophysicologists, who track the physical operation of the brain, from the findings of ethnographers, who study primitive tribes that might resemble our evolutionary ancestors, and from data collected by primatologists, who study chimps as a window into human behavior.

Though wobbly as a scientific discipline, evolutionary psychology is essential to the materialistic myth of the new science. For human beings often behave irrationally. They will do things that evolutionary theory tells us are contrary to the best interests of their selfish genes. Altruism is an instance of this; the urgings of conscience are another. Evolutionary psychology enables the new scientists to account for such aberrations without recourse to non-material processes — say, to an independently operating self. It does this by assuming that natural selection has designed the brain as a series of modules, which function according to conflicting evolutionary purposes. The modules war with each other, and the outcome of their calculations may be a behavior that is, as the evolutionists say, non-optimal.

This theory of evolved modularity is untestable. But it has the virtue of preserving the closed system of the materialist myth. Here is where Fukuyama cites Damasio’s Descartes’ Error. His discussion is worth quoting at length, for it gives a flavor of how the reasoning works:

Damasio argues that the brain creates numerous somatic markers — feelings of emotional attraction or repulsion that help the brain do its calculating by short-circuiting many of the possible choices that lie before it. When a thought process reaches a somatic marker, it stops calculating and makes a decision. He gives the example of a business owner who is trying to decide whether to do business with the arch-enemy of his best friend. A purely rational-choice approach to the problem will necessitate an extremely complex calculation of what economists call “expected value” of the business he thinks he will do with the client but also the costs to his friendship. There are also a large number of possible strategies he can follow, for example, trying to hide the new relationship from his friend or getting the friend’s approval in advance. Somatic markers make the decision significantly easier by attaching emotional responses to certain outcomes and foreclosing further rational consideration of the alternative, for example, when the businessman imagines the look on his best friend’s face when told about the new client.

Thus does the new science account for an act of altruism and conscience. The theory of the somatic marker is elaborate, elegant, and absolutely unverifiable. We are far from science here, as science is commonly understood; far from the business of testable hypothesis and provable fact. We are in the realm of story-telling and myth-making.

Of course, there is another way to account for the proddings of conscience, an older myth of free will. The average fellow might be excused for preferring the older myth, if only because it does not, like the myth of the new science, entail the austere premises of materialism or require the denial of a non-material self, acting according to conscience.

Fukuyama, however, wants it both ways: to enjoy the extravagant, intellectually amusing theories of the new science and yet to avoid its materialist and deterministic conclusions. He tries mightily to allow room for the old idea of free will — of human beings acting in ways beyond those programmed by our genes. “No respectable biologist,” he writes, “would deny that culture is important and often exercises an influence that can overwhelm natural instincts and drives. . . . What the new biology suggests to sensible observers is not biological determinism, but rather a more balanced view of the interplay of nature and nurture in the shaping of human behavior.”

You can understand why Fukuyama wants to make this claim. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. By the logic of the new science, culture is merely a genetic artifact; scientists will someday be able to explain it in genetic terms, just as they now believe they can explain a mother’s love in genetic terms.

With sufficient knowledge of the unimaginably complex but ultimately finite set of inputs offered by natural selection and genetics over many millions of years, one could account for all culture as a purely materialistic process — genes scheming to replicate themselves. When we pretend otherwise, we are merely playing another game of “as if.” To call culture an interplay between nature and nurture is only another reflection of our imperfect understanding. Like “self” or “free will,” “nurture” is a provisional word: something pasted over a materialistic process whose intricacies are not yet apparent but will be, as science progresses.

At every step of Fukuyama’s analysis, similar problems arise, none of them acknowledged by him. I’ll close with one last example, about Aristotle’s claim that man is an inherently political animal: “By nature,” Fukuyama writes, human beings “organize themselves into not just families and tribes, but higher-level groups, and are capable of the moral virtues necessary to sustain such communities. To this, contemporary evolutionary biology would wholeheartedly agree.”

Not so, alas. By using the term “moral virtues” Fukuyama smuggles the lexicon of the old, non-materialist myth into the materialistic scheme of evolutionary biology, which has no place for it. The evolutionary biologist would put the proposition more bloodlessly: “Men are conditioned by genes and natural selection to behave in ways that sustain communities.” Whether that behavior is moral, whether it signifies virtue, is a judgment that the new science, and materialism in general, cannot make.

How then are we to make such judgments, as we go about the business of reconstituting the social order? It would be nice to have a morality based on something more enduring than “as if.” But the understanding that Fukuyama and his fellow enthusiasts urge upon us is uniquely impoverished for the essential task.

This alone is enough to make us question the extravagant claims made on behalf of the new science — claims about the essence of man — which go far beyond the traditional uses to which science has been put. The old myth of natural law had a means for making moral judgments, of course. But it took as fundamental the very concepts that the new science wants to render meaningless — that human beings are endowed with souls, for example. We might, as we pick our way through the wreckage of the Great Disruption, want to begin at the beginning, by asserting another of those propositions that the new science denies, even though everyone else knows it to be true: “I think, therefore I am.”

Where do you suppose that would lead us?

Andrew Ferguson is senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.