Back to Human Nature?
Andrew Norton talks to Francis Fukuyama
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In 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. 

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?

Francis Fukuyama: I think most social scientists and a lot of post-Kantian philosophers have tried to do 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 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.

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: 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 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: 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 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.

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 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.

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?

AN: In Our Posthuman Future you argue against science meddling too much with human nature. Is this because of considerations like this?

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 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: 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: 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.

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?

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: 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.

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?

FF: A theory of what's valuable has to refer to what is in our natures. I accept his point that what's valuable 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.

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: 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 ration that kind of technology and just make it so expensive it was almost never used. A lot of European health systems try to do that now with certain expensive medical technologies.

AN: How do you feel about euthanasia movements? Are they a self-corrective to this trend?

FF: I think they are driven by the fact that medical technology has created these horrible situations where you can live to a point where life is really not worth living. I feel very ambivalent, however, about endorsing anything like euthanasia, because I do think it is capable of being misused. But it is driven by this dilemma which has been created by past success in biomedicine.  

AN: In your debate with Gregory Stock in Reason you disagree about sex selection, citing Asian cultures with a preference for sons. As this is a culture-specific problem, is there any difficulty in Western societies allowing it?

FF: I cite that as an illustration when people say what's wrong with individual parents making choices for their children in a market, a decentralised decision-making system? It's another example of a negative externality, of things that are individually rational but collectively impose costs on societies. That comes about in Asian societies, though it probably wouldn't be that bad in a Western society. On the other hand, there are probably other kinds of this effect that would occur in Western societies, and I think it is just simpler to say that the therapeutic uses of this stuff are fine, but let’s back off these other things.

AN: In concluding 'The End of History' you remark 'I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilisation that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots.' What did you mean by that remark?

FF: I think that refers to the fact that there are some unresolved issues in liberal societies, because there is a certain side of the human personality that is not completely satisfied by a society that simply maximises individual choice. There are pent up desires for spirituality, for certain forms of community that are not satisfied in
a highly diverse, pluralistic liberal society, even though it is terrific in providing individual freedom and prosperity. Furthermore, if part of what it means to be human is this process of struggle, then in a post-historical world this is abolished in favour of just economic activity. You actually saw that after September 11. People, myself included, were quite uncomfortable with the whole 1990s and the prosperity that came with it. It didn't provide very ennobling models of behaviour. After September 11, it reminded people that there are other things to aspire to, to look up to. Those firefighters in the World Trade Center that made $40,000 a year compared to Gates’ billions demonstrated that there are other human virtues that are important. The patriotism that was provoked by the whole attack reminded people that there is this communal side, where you have shared vulnerabilities and responsibilities as well as individual freedom. 

AN: Did the response highlight some latent strengths in American society?

FF: Yes, I think that's right. That responsible side never went away, and one of the problems of peace and prosperity is that you don't get to express it. There was such an overwhelming desire to help the victims of the attacks, and to contribute publicly, and I think one of the problems is that in the 1990s there weren't many outlets for that kind of altruistic behaviour. It was interesting that it hadn't gone away.

AN: Thank you for your time.

 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. Fukuyama's John Bonython Lecture is now available as a limited edition Occasional Paper from the Centre.

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