Content area
Full Text
THE AIM OF CONSERVATIVES for some time now has been to resist what C.S. Lewis called "the abolition of man." One effort at that abolition was communist ideology, another is the therapeutic pragmatism of Richard Rorty and others.1 But the most dangerous threat today comes from the science of biology. Denial of human distinctiveness is increasingly rooted in the homogenous materialism of evolutionary biology. And advances in biotechnology are providing the means to destroy what is qualitatively different about our species.2 Especially troubling is the uncritical acceptance of biological reductionism by writers often called conservative. Here I use Walker Percy's defense of the goodness and mystery of the human being to expose the misanthropic implications of this reductionism in the influential writing of the "neoconservative" Francis Fukuyama. I present this effort as an example of what conservatives should be doing as the twenty-first century begins.
The philosopher-novelist Walker Percy says, contrary to modern thought, that the human being is by nature an alien.3 People, he adds, feel more like aliens than ever. Modern science has made great progress explaining everything but the human self and soul. Scientific experts tell people that they are fundamentally no different from the other animals, and so they should be happy in a world where lives are more free, prosperous, and secure than ever before. Their feelings of homelessness are either basically irrational or merely physiological. They can be cured through a change in environment, soothing therapeutic or ideological platitudes, or the right mix of chemicals.
The experts are evil, Percy contends, because they want to deprive human beings of their distinctive humanity, of their longings that point them beyond the satisfactions of this world and toward each other, the truth, and God. Their efforts may never completely succeed, but allegedly wise experts-from communist tyrants to therapeutic psychotherapists-have destroyed or needlessly diminished a huge number of human beings. The experts claim, in part, to be motivated by compassion. They want to provide the freedom from misery that the Christian God promised but could not produce in this world. The compassion they claim to feel for others they really feel for themselves. They, too, are aliens, and they want to free themselves from their trouble. They think that by reducing others...