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Human Nature and the Future of Science

Human Nature and the Future of Science

Prof. Patrick Hutton – Author, Professor of history Emeritus at the University of Vermont, where he taught European intellectual history and historiography.

Can modern science continue its existence in the same form, or does it need fundamental changes?

In looking over my notes in preparation for our conference session, I happened upon the forecast of Robert Heilbroner, an American economic historian who wrote an Inquiry into the Human Prospect in 1972. (fifty years ago).  The Club of Rome had just published an assessment of the need for limits to economic growth.   Heilbroner followed up with some predictions about where unbridled growth might lead.  His forecast is in many ways dated.  He wrote his book before the long and profound revolution in technologies of communication.  But his predictions about the kind of problems that we would face in the twenty-first century were remarkably accurate.

Basically Heilbroner envisioned a long range historical move from the societies of affluence of the post World War II era toward those of scarcity by the turn of the twenty-first century, with all of its attendant problems:

  • Climate change and extreme weather events;
  • Mass migrations of people from poor to rich nations;
  • Competition among nations for scarce resources;
  • Random terrorism and perpetual war;
  • The temptation to turn to authoritarian politics to deal with complex economic and social problems.

Addressing such problems, he argued, will require long-range planning and a great deal of personal sacrifice, and so a reorientation of the priorities of science.

Heilbroner addressed the question of the adaptability of human nature to meet that challenge. Do we as a species have the resolve for the social discipline and self-sacrifice demanded by long range planning?  We are motivated by self-interest, but we also have a humanitarian sense of responsibility for others.  Still, he emphasizes the human propensity to prioritize immediate needs over long-tern responsibility for the wellbeing of humankind. He posed the issue with a telling quip:  “What has posterity ever done for me?”  Put more concretely, we might be willing to make sacrifices for our children and grandchildren.  But beyond these descendants, connection with our future progeny becomes abstract and remote.  Planning for their needs and security is easily postponed.

Looking back on Heilbroner’s forecast from our vantage point, we might argue that scientists have become committed to the challenge of long-range planning in the use of natural resources.  The public has been more resistant.  Accordingly, the politics of environmental policy has taken center stage.

I would mention briefly the politics of climate change in light of the forecasting of the Vermont environmental activist Bill McKibben.  His The End of Nature (1990) was a landmark study in calling the American public’s attention to the consequences of the relentless historical trend toward the global contamination of our natural environment and the overconsumption of precious natural resources.  Most of his predictions then about environmental deterioration have since played out as he expected.  As dire as our current predicament may be, he presents a sober assessment of environmental destruction to stimulate public thinking about ways to slow the process and to reconcile ourselves to a natural order that is no longer anywhere pristine, but rather everywhere subject to human intrusion. No longer in awe of nature as a realm apart, we must reckon with the “nature” that we have refashioned to serve our needs.

In his use of this provocative concept of the “end of nature”, McKibben means that we live at the end of the time in which nature is a force of its own, wild and autonomous.  For him, nature is at an end because we have despoiled it so thoroughly — not here and there, as in oil spills, but everywhere in the expansion of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The end of nature phenomenon, therefore, is an aspect of the process of economic globalization.  There is no place on earth so remote that it is still pristine, no wilderness unseen by humankind. Everywhere, humans have put their imprint on nature. Nature, therefore, has taken on a post-natural identity.  McKibben stresses a temporal threshold in the late twentieth century when the idea of nature as an autonomous force gave way to one of nature as a realm for human management.

For McKibben, the problem of the future of the biosphere can no longer be postponed.  He contends that we have difficulty acknowledging this urgency because since time immemorial we have thought of nature as a stable reference against which to measure changes in the human world that we have fashioned.  Predictable nature has been a bulwark against the quickening pace of change wrought by the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. By comparison with human time, environmental time seemed practically immobile. Certainly the public had come to understand that over the eons there had been major climate changes on earth. But the pace of such change was barely perceptible within human time. Today, by contrast, we see climate change proceeding at an alarming rate, dramatized by random catastrophic weather events, such as hurricanes of unprecedented magnitude and droughts of prolonged duration. Nature’s course, once one of life’s comforting certainties, has become perilously unpredictable.

McKibben blames consumerism, understood as our insatiable need to use nature to our material advantage. We demand for creature comforts and stimulating entertainment. Over the long run, our expectations have become an inveterate mindset. The market has become our god; the marketplace the venue of our worship.  Until well into the twentieth century, we believed that the toxins we generated as industrial waste could be localized, removed, or controlled — for example, oil spills, even the release of fluorocarbons.  Not anymore. Our accumulated industrial production has generated the emission of carbon dioxide in ever expanding amounts. CO2, moreover, cannot be contained like other contaminants. It is everywhere, and so serves as the driving force of global warming.

The search for remedies is a study in complexities, for it is impossible to anticipate the consequences of well-intentioned projects for saving the environment. For McKibben, the most challenging problem is psychological. How do we alter a mindset that centers exclusively on human need — what he characterizes as humankind’s “Promethean defiance,” its belief that nature is always there to serve our wants and desires.  Despite the best intentions of environmentalists to broadcast alarm about our deteriorating environment, the message runs against the grain of our deeply held belief in nature’s resilience in the face of policies that promote economic growth.   But the old notion of Mother Nature fighting back, McKibben asserts, is as obsolete as it is naïve. We have vanquished Mother Nature. Nature as god is dead. As a species, humankind is now a lonely god that must reckon with its own fate.  The best we may hope for is that the process of climate change may be slowed, and its effects chastened. If we have created a problem that we cannot completely solve, we must learn to adapt to the changing environment that is its consequence. The pertinent question is: how shall we live in a warming climate?

In light of the power of the prevailing historical trend toward climate change, McKibben finds the proposed solutions timid and inadequate. He notes two general strategies:

1) Conservation. Caps on the use of resources and recycling of used products fits in with liberal reform. Conservationists call for self-conscious efforts to use less and to recycle more. But such a stance demands individual sacrifices difficult to make in the affluent suburban culture that we have created in contemporary society. Having spread out the daily activities of our lives over wider spaces, we have become entirely dependent upon the automobile. Who, McKibben asks, is willing to give this up? He admits that he is no more likely to give up our consumerist lifestyle than anyone else. He labels this the “inertia of affluence.” And how can we expect those who live in the developing world who want only to approach our standard of living to make corresponding sacrifices?

2) Technology. Technologists affirm that we are a clever species. Their expectation that future technologies will remedy global warming is based on a quasi-religious faith in humankind’s capacity to master its environment. They anticipate that we will figure out how to adapt to climate change without sacrificing too many of our comforts or certainly our consumerist way of life. They propose two methods. The first involves macro-management. We shall tend to nature on a grander scale than ever before. We shall prune the forests; plan reforestation. We shall preserve endangered species in their natural environment by more careful regulation, and those we cannot in zoos. (It is interesting to note that the origin of the zoo in the eighteenth century is currently a hot historiographical topic.)  The second calls for the development of new technologies of genetic engineering. We shall figure out ways to alter plants and animals genetically to resist climate change. There may even be some money in such an enterprise, making this method consumer compatible.

McKibben’s faith is that fatalism about our future will not prevail in the face of the public’s rising awareness of our worsening environmental crisis. Humans will out of practical necessity abandon the hubris of egotistical indifference for the modesty of social responsibility.  He envisions a mindset in which humans no longer place themselves at the center of the world, but rather acknowledge their place in the complex interdependence of the biosphere. He urges us to live with less, and to care for the world more by taking seriously the story in Genesis in which God entrusted Adam and Eve with stewardship of the natural world, even as He cast them out of the Garden of Eden.

McKibben recognizes that his call for even modest reform in our environmental policies is in fact an immodest proposition because it entails a major shift in our collective psychology. The truth he would convey to his readers is that we as a species have entered unknown territory because never before has nature been so completely at our mercy. As a minimum, we need wise and unselfish political leadership, currently in short supply.

What new phenomena are we not yet ready for, but will have to face in a new global setting?

One of the great scientific accomplishments of the early twenty-first century has been the decoding of the human genome.  For historians like myself, it is one of the most important new sources of historical evidence, permitting us too trace our ancestry back into deep time.

But with such knowledge has come new dilemmas and responsibilities.  I would mention a book by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future (2002).  He is interested in the consequences of innovations in biotechnology for the future of humankind, and he directs our attention to some imposing problems that are looming on the horizon. He focuses on the implications of biotechnology for our understanding of human nature, and asks the speculative question of whether we face a “posthuman” future. Ultimately, his is a plea for human responsibility in dealing with this fast-changing technology.  Such responsibility will of necessity involve public planning, and the building of an international consensus on ethical policies concerning genetic engineering.  Biotechnology, therefore, plays into the larger problem of globalization.

Fukuyama poses our dilemma this way: In the course of unlocking the genetic code of the human body, we are for the first time in a position to alter our own genetic condition. This has profound implications for our human nature, which is more rooted in our genes that many scholars and scientists would like to admit. He worries that those who place their faith in the social reconstruction of human nature will prevail in the formulation of public policies that will lead us into Aldous Huxley’s dystopian “brave new world” of genetic engineering in the name of conformist social goals. Fukuyama worries that the new technologies of biology could easily alter human nature to conform to ideological expectations, a dangerous prospect. The biotechnical revolution, therefore, has the potential to advance the project of social control.  It could prepare the way for a kind of biological policing of human behavior, encoding the traits politicians find most desirable.

Fukuyama builds his discussion around innovative practices that have played into the development of biotechnology:

1) Brain research. Recent scientific research reveals the degree to which the human personality is genetically conditioned. Genetics plays a major role in fashioning intelligence and sexual identity. On criminal behavior, Fukuyama evinces more ambivalence.  But generally he wants to show that genetic coding has a determining power over essential elements of our humanity.

2) Neuropharmacology.  In the late twentieth century, pharmacology has to a large extent displaced talk therapy in the practice of psychiatry.  Drugs now provide quick and effective remedies for certain mental disorders, notably bi-polar illness.  For Fukuyama, the issue about pharmacology is distinguishing therapy from enhancement.  He targets what he refers to as “cosmetic pharmacology,” by which he means the use of drugs as a method of social management.  Put differently, he worries about the medicalization of social behavior. The new pharmacology serves the goal of reining in its extremes.

3) The prolongation of life. A new emphasis on diet and exercise, together with advances in geriatric medicine, has over the course of the late twentieth century increased the average human life span in developed nations by one-third.  This is one of the great advances promoted by science in our times. Fukuyama nonetheless expresses some concerns about the social and political effects.  Longevity has led toward an aging overall population in the developed world.  A graying population will be a more conservative one, set in its ways, rigid in its thinking. Each generation, he contends, tends to think as a cohort in light of its shared youthful experience and perception of the course of events and so is resistant to innovation as it ages.  Moreover, there will be a breakdown in opportunities for upward mobility for the young, as the aged hold onto their jobs longer. The hierarchy of social merit, once a pyramid, will become a trapezoid. If twentieth-century experience is any guide, Fukuyama contends, gerontocracy is not a good thing for government.   Then too, the old will become more of a burden to society. The problem is that we are likely to extend longevity without preserving the quality of life.

4) Genetic engineering. Eugenics, after sixty years in disrepute, is once again offering its possibilities for public discussion. Of particular interest is the issue of breeding a “better” child.  Genetic engineering will soon make it possible for humans to intervene biologically to alter the human condition, enhancing particular features. The designer baby might be bred for: intelligence, physical prowess, height, hair color, or sexual identity.  As a species we appear to be on the threshold of a transition from genetic chance toward genetic choice.  In crossing it we enter Huxley’s “brave new world.”

Genetic choice will introduce the politics of breeding, for it poses the question of who will make these choices.  Will it be done by the rich and famous through private enterprise, creating genetic overlords? Or will governments intervene to promote genetic egalitarianism, a state-sponsored eugenics that breeds the population from the bottom up toward some social ideal of a proper distribution of traits and abilities?

Genetic engineering as therapy promises to improve the human condition. But there will be powerful temptations to cross over from gene therapy to gene enhancement. Fukuyama argues that in making such a crossing we may leave behind the range of human emotions that are the source of our greatness as well as our suffering. The human condition, he explains, has always been a “tragic” condition, in the way the ancient Greeks understood the term.  Pain, suffering, and death, have been our lot, but these realities have generated our desires, stimulated our ambitions, drawn forth our resourcefulness, and defined our goals. “Without these evils,” Fukuyama maintains, “there would be no sympathy, compassion, courage, heroism, solidarity, or strength of character.”  Our complex human nature is the source of our genius, ambition, and diversity.  In seeking to take control of the biological foundations of our human condition through genetic intervention, we may unwittingly move into a narrower and more homogeneous posthuman future.

Fukuyama’s analysis of the problem is better than his proposed remedies. But he is correct in asserting that the moral issues raised by biotechnology will have to be addressed by public agencies, and there will be a need for formulating policies not merely for single nations, but for the whole world.