From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 20:54:44 MDT
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Fukuyama: The Fall of the Libertarians
Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 17:19:40 -0400
From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>
To: Digital Bearer Settlement List <dbs@philodox.com>
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,4287,SB1020295939549459480,00.html
May 2, 2002
COMMENTARY
The Fall of the Libertarians
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
The great free-market revolution that began with the coming to power of
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at the close of the 1970s has finally
reached its Thermidor, or point of reversal. Like the French Revolution, it
derived its energy from a simple idea of liberty, to wit, that the modern
welfare state had grown too large, and that individuals were excessively
regulated. The truth of this idea was vindicated by the sudden and
unexpected collapse of Communism in 1989, as well as by the performance of
the American and British economies in the 1990s.
Yet the revolution entered a Jacobin phase with the election of Newt
Gingrich's Congress in 1994, even as the Clinton-Blair left shifted gears
and scrambled to occupy the old center. For many on the right, Mr. Reagan's
classical liberalism began to evolve into libertarianism, an ideological
hostility to the state in all its manifestations. While the dividing line
between the two is not always straightforward, libertarianism is a far more
radical dogma whose limitations are becoming increasingly clear. The
libertarian wing of the revolution overreached itself, and is now fighting
rearguard actions on two fronts: foreign policy and biotechnology.
Too expensive
The hostility of libertarians to big government extended to U.S.
involvement in the world. The Cato Institute propounded isolationism in the
'90s, on the ground that global leadership was too expensive. At the time
of the Gulf War, Cato produced an analysis that argued it would be cheaper
to let Saddam keep Kuwait than to pay for a military intervention to expel
him -- a fine cost-benefit analysis, if you only abstracted from the
problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a megalomaniac.
Contrary to Mr. Reagan's vision of the U.S. as a "shining city on a hill,"
libertarians saw no larger meaning in America's global role, no reason to
promote democracy and freedom abroad.
Sept. 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder to Americans of why
government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to
promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the
market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into
buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports. The
terrorists were not attacking Americans as individuals, but symbols of
American power like the World Trade Center and Pentagon. So it is not
surprising that Americans met this challenge collectively with flags and
patriotism, rather than the yellow ribbons of individual victimization.
The second area in which libertarians have overreached themselves is in
biotechnology. Here they join hands with the New York Times and important
parts of the American left in opposing restrictions on human cloning
currently under debate in the U.S. Senate. Many libertarians oppose not
just a ban on research cloning of human embryos, but on reproductive
cloning as well (that is, the production of cloned children).
Libertarians argue that the freedom to design one's own children
genetically -- not just to clone them, but to give them more intelligence
or better looks -- should be seen as no more than a technological extension
of the personal autonomy we already enjoy. By this view, the problem with
the eugenics practiced by Nazi Germany was not its effort to select genetic
qualities per se, but rather the fact that it was done by the state and
enforced coercively. There is no cause for worry if eugenics is practiced
by individuals. The latter could be counted on to make sound judgments
about what is in their own and their children's best interests.
Even if one does not share the view of religious conservatives that embryos
have the moral status of infants, and are therefore entitled to the same
legal rights, there are reasons to be skeptical of arguments that say that
genetic engineering is just another choice. To begin with, the community of
interest that is presumed to exist between parents and children cannot be
taken for granted, which is after all why we have laws against child abuse,
incest etc. A deaf lesbian couple recently sought to implant an embryo to
produce a child who they hoped would also be deaf. Children do not ask to
be born, of course, but it is a stretch to assume the informed consent of a
child to be born deaf, or a clone, or genetically redesigned in a risky
experiment.
The fact that parents' interests may not coincide with a child's
constitutes a "negative externality," that is, a harm inflicted on a third
party to a transaction, of a sort that is usually considered legitimate
grounds for government intervention. But it is just one of a broader class
of potential externalities where an individually rational decision may harm
society. We already have a clear example of this in China and India, where
cheap sonograms and abortion have allowed parents to produce a fifth more
boys than girls -- a recipe for social instability when these boys come of
age and find no mates.
Libertarian advocates of genetic choice want the freedom to improve their
children. But do we really know what it means to improve a child? It is
hard to object to therapeutic aims, such as the elimination of genetic
tendencies toward diseases. But would a child be "improved" if parents were
able to eliminate genetic propensity toward gayness? Would the child of an
African-American couple be "improved" if she could be born with white skin?
Would boys be better human beings if they were born with less of a
propensity for aggression? The possibilities for politically correct, or
incorrect, parental choices are endless. Parents, of course, try to improve
their children in all sorts of ways today, through education, resources and
upbringing. But the genetic stamp is indelible, and would be handed down
not just to one's children but to all of one's subsequent descendants.
It is in this respect that the cloning bills before the Senate take on
significance. Cloning itself may not be a large issue, since there are few
who would want to clone children at present. But it is the first step in a
series of technologies that may lead to genetic engineering of humans.
Research cloning of embryos to extract stem cells may show great medical
promise, but it too involves the deliberate creation of something
unquestionably human, even if that something doesn't have the moral status
of an infant. It is a line that we should cross only with trepidation.
During the stem cell debate, proponents of stem cell research promised that
it would not be crossed at all, and have already managed to slide down that
particular slippery slope.
Political Rights
The liberalism of the Founding Fathers was built on natural rights.
Political rights were seen as a means of protecting those rights which
inhered in us as members of a human species that sought certain common
natural ends. Thomas Jefferson, toward the end of his life, observed that
political rights should be enjoyed equally because nature had not contrived
to have some men born with saddles on their backs and others born "booted
and spurred" to ride them.
We are at the beginning of a new phase of history where technology will
give us power to create people born booted and spurred, and where animals
that are today born with saddles on their backs could be given human
characteristics. To say, with the libertarians, that individual freedom
should encompass the freedom to redesign those natures on which our very
system of rights is based, is not to appeal to anything in the American
political tradition. So it is perhaps appropriate that the liberal
revolution of the 1980s and '90s, having morphed from classical liberalism
to libertarianism, should today have crested and now be on the defensive.
Mr. Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International studies, is the author, most
recently, of "Our Posthuman Future" (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002).
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1020295939549459480.djm,00.html
Updated May 2, 2002
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