Francis Fukuyama predicted the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Now the American political philosopher warns about the dangers of misusing gene technology - but not everyone agrees. He talks to Penelope Dening
Humans are very good at proclaiming "the end is nigh" when some technological advance enters their lives (electricity, cars, telephones, flight, the Internet). However, such Luddites are usually regulated to the footnotes of history, as humans are also past masters at recognising a good thing when they see it and adapting - once they've got over the shock.
Francis Fukuyama is more used to being cast as a seer than a Luddite, yet that is what some now fear he has become. A political philosopher who worked for the US state department in the Reagan and first Bush presidencies, Fukuyama captured the public imagination in 1989 with the publication of an essay, The End of History, in which he postulated the view that, as all alternatives to liberal democracy had failed, history itself had come to an end. Twelve years on, the man who was then described as "the court philosopher of globally-triumphant capitalism" has turned his prophetic vision to the brave new world of bio-technology.
In fact, it's been around longer than we think. Louise Brown, the first baby to be conceived by IVF, was born in 1978. Twenty-five years on, thousands of women use this procedure every year in safety, with the "test-tube baby" epithet and its Frankenstein connotations, long since buried.
Yet with the completion of the human genome project several years ahead of time, the stage is now set for an exponential rise in genetic engineering. Identification of genes responsible for inherited disease through stem cell research is well underway. The first breakthrough was Huntingdon's disease, a horrific degenerative disease of the nervous system, and the pipeline is rapidly filling up. So why has the issue of stem-cell research become such a hot potato? Because stem cells are harvested from cloned foetuses.
In The Posthuman Future - Consequences of the Bio-technological Revolution, Fukuyama surveys the whole bio-technological package, from neuro-pharmacology (Ritalin, Prozac) to therapeutic genetic engineering and his ultimate no-go area: reproductive cloning. What makes his work of more than just academic interest is that, although no longer part of the Republican administration (he is Professor of International Political Economy at John Hopkins University), he's a member of the President's Bio-Ethics Committee. In short, what Fukuyama thinks matters.
We meet for lunch in London, a brief pit-stop on a tiring promotional tour he knows will not be an easy ride. Reviews of The Posthuman Future are already polarised between the positive (Bryan Appleyard in the Times Literary Supplement) and the dismissive (Peter Conrad in the Observer: "trite and dull".) There remains something of the government propagandist in his writing and although the words come out less pat when we meet I find I still have no idea what he really thinks - talking to him is like playing tennis with a sponge ball.
As his name would suggest, Fukuyama is of Japanese parentage, although he was born in Chicago (in 1952) and considers himself entirely American. When the conversation turns to the ultra-restrictive approach of Germany, still haunted by its eugenic past, he refutes any suggestion that his own stance is linked to his Japanese roots. "I have never thought of myself as culturally Japanese. Everything I know about Japan is the result of what I learnt as an adult." However, the history of the 20th century was the starting point to Fukuyama's involvement in a subject of which, as he is the first to admit, he had no prior experience.
"You had this whole series of political movements which tried to carry out unbelievably ambitious social engineering of a kind that today we would think scarcely imaginable. The Cambodian regime decided they were going to de-urbanise society, which meant driving out everyone who lived in the city, getting rid of all the intellectuals - so everyone who wore glasses would be killed. Can you imagine anyone doing anything as insane as this? In the Soviet Union, anyone who had slightly more income than another peasant would be denounced as a class traitor and taken off to a concentration camp and killed. Or a regime that decided that they would get rid of an entire ethnic group that was living within their society [Germany, Serbia].
"Maoism: you unleash this Red Guard movement that essentially says anyone in authority is an enemy of the state and deserves to be humiliated or jailed or killed. In a way, it's a testament to how well the century ended up that we can look back on this thing and think, 'How could anyone have contemplated doing that?' " Fukuyama's litany of horrors extends to the US itself where, in the 1920s and 1930s, sterilisation programmes on those whom society decided it didn't particularly want were commonplace. "You also had respectable doctrines of scientific racism in which it was argued that non-white people were genetically inferior and deserved politically to have a different set of rights from white people."
His point is that although the current usage of these new technologies appears perfectly benign, its potential for misuse is incalculable.
"At least historically, these big technological changes have led to much grander visions and ideas of how to make use of them." Although Fukuyama accepts the impossibility of turning back the clock, the idea that we can leave its future trajectory unfettered is, he says, "a failure of our current imagination". The history of nuclear containment, he says, proves his point.
In Our Posthuman Future, Fukuyama postulates a world polarised between the rich, who buy enhanced intelligence for their offspring and the poor, who can't. He raises the spectre of an Asia with a population distorted by the selection of male foetuses over female. And he's not scaremongering, he says. With low-cost ultrasound scanning it's already happening with the ratio already skewed by up to 20 percent, which he believes will have a major impact on crime.
"Socially, you could prove pretty clearly that it's unattached young men that cause the lion's share of crime and social revolution and they're going to have a lot of young men who can't settle down because there aren't enough women to go round. There was a time when countries could get rid of them by exporting them as labourers, but that's no longer an option. Part of the reason the wild west was so wild was they were all men without women, out there in rooming houses by themselves and nothing better to do than play with guns - it's not a good social mix." Even therapeutic intervention is not all good news; an ageing, unproductive population would drain economies and destroy the equilibrium between generations that has existed until now.
"There is a libertarian line of argument that says that governments basically should have nothing to do with the adaptation process, that individuals can be trusted and markets can be trusted to make all these decisions wisely - and therefore de-regulation is the answer to everything. "That I do not agree with."
This opposing position is cogently served by Gregory Stock, author of Redesigning Humans (published simultaneously with The Posthuman Future).
Dr Stock writes from the perspective of a scientist - he's director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA - rather than that of a philosopher. In addition to providing a clear and concise guide to this complex subject, he offers a robust rebuttal to Fukuyama's distopian future. In what should prove a riveting debate, these two are meeting head-to-head on at 7.30 p.m. on May 30th at Logan Hall, 20 Bedford Way, LondonWC1.
For all his proscriptive take on bio-technology (and his similarly hardline look at crime in The Great Destruction) Fukuyama is by no means a typical spokesperson for the American right. He is not, for example, anti-abortionist. And far from being anti-gay, he fears that once a gay gene was identified, genetic selection would result in a gay-free world within a generation, something he views as abhorrent. He celebrates diversity.
As for capital punishment, he says: "it's something that various large democratic majorities are in favour of. But if it were up to me, I would probably vote to abolish it, though I don't have any particular moral outrage at the fact that it's done."
Until going to college, says Fukuyama, he was "a very conventional American liberal". His father (a bright, second-generation immigrant who avoided detention after Pearl Harbor by getting a scholarship to the University of Nebraska) was a sociologist and minister in the Congregational ("Mainline Protestant New England") church which had a long history of left-wing activism.
Though still a churchgoer, Fukuyama insists he is more of an agnostic than a believer and says religion plays no part in his stance on the bio-technology debate. However, his starting point is very much the Christian one of the existence of a human soul which lifts Homo Sapiens above other life forms, crucially different, he contends, from the Asian perspective where humans are considered simply part of a broader continuum. The writing is a kind of curious mix between government propaganda and religious zeal: the man himself remains inscrutable.
FUKUYAMA'S rightward shift began when he was 18. "I arrived as an undergraduate at Cornell in 1970. It had been shut down the entire spring because the black students had taken over the university and they were on the cover of Time magazine with bandoleers of ammunition. In my view, it was terrible. The adults of the university, the administrators and a lot of the senior faculty who were supposed to be the defenders of academic freedom, completely capitulated. It was the same at Harvard and Berkeley and UCLA. "All these defenders of Western values, of academic freedom and freedom of thought, were willing to throw all that over the side when they were under this kind of political pressure."
At Cornell, where he read classics, he studied under Prof Allan Bloom, who would become his intellectual guru. "Bloom was a political theorist who had been in turn a student of Leo Strauss. It was a very serious philosophical school but it didn't have any simple political message or implication, other than that modern relativism had left Western civilisation without any ability to defend itself intellectually against fascism or communism." It was Bloom who, 20 years later, would invite Fukuyama to deliver his End of History lecture.
By 1989, Fukuyama was already a seasoned political operator working in the state department as deputy director of policy planning under secretary of state James Baker. His advice on Germany was to pave the way for renunciation. Despite all the rumblings coming from Eastern Europe, this view was not shared by his colleagues. "The German experts in the US government believed that communism would be there for at least another generation." At a NATO meeting in October in West Berlin, he remembers someone in the German foreign ministry saying that communism might collapse "but it won't happen in my lifetime". Ten days later, the wall came down.
Reagan was one of the few, he believes, to see it coming. "He made some statement in the early 1980s that he thought that communism was headed for the dustbin of history - and he used that Trotskyite saying and turned it against them - and he was roundly ridiculed by everybody, the cognoscenti saying this just shows how simple-minded he was."
With the publication of The End of History, Fukuyama's reputation as a seer seemed sealed. But then came the Gulf War, shortly followed by Bosnia and then Rwanda. The direction of history might have staggered a little, but it was still alive and kicking. The Republicans were out and Clinton was in.
Fukuyama returned to full-time academia.
Now that a member of the Bush family is once again ensconced in the White House, doesn't he hanker for the kind of power he once had? His experience of the Middle East from the Bush senior years would surely make him invaluable to the current administration. Doesn't he want to get back into the real world? The answer is "No".
"I have a lot of friends who are involved very heavily in this. I am a long time friend of Connie [security advisor Condoleezza] Rice, I know Paul Wolfowitz [deputy secretary of defence] very well. I know a lot of people in the state department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council. This is my generation and it's now of the age to have the responsibility for handing things. And every day when I read the paper I end up feeling really glad that I don't have to make these decisions.
"The trouble with intellectuals is they don't have the responsibility. What they say isn't going to cost lives. They have the luxury of being completely irresponsible in the kinds of policy that they advocate. Sometimes you even become aware that you are arguing solely to make a point. Ever since September 11th, I keep asking myself, 'Well, what would I do at this point?' And I feel sufficiently uncertain that I'm glad I'm not in a position where I have to make that decision. So no, I don't regret that I'm not there now."
As for getting it right, sometimes people do and sometimes they don't, he says. Since 1989, Fukuyama has monitored his own rate of prophesy as honestly as he can and admits he's been wrong more often than right. He didn't think the Gulf War "would go as easy as it did". He remembers a group of state department officials taking bets on how long Saddam Hussein would survive. "The most optimistic said another week and the most pessimistic said by the end of the month. We all got it wrong." So what about the end-of-communism prophecy? How did he get that so right? A rare smile crosses Fukuyama's face.
"I just got lucky."
The Posthuman Future - Consequences of the Bio-technological Revolution by Francis Fukuyama (Profile Books, £17.99 sterling)