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in defence of human agency
(page 2)

The relationship between humans as physically determined beings, and humans as conscious agents - between humans as objects and humans as subjects - is one of the most difficult problems for scientists and philosophers. While analytically we can talk of humans either as subjects or as objects, in reality humans are simultaneously both subject and object. We have at present no real conceptual framework within which to consider such an ontological peculiarity. Denying one or other aspects of our humanness, however, is not a way of solving the conundrum. By insisting that humans can be understood in purely naturalistic terms, mechanistic thinkers are in practice forced to give up on the attempt to understand humans as subjective beings, and compelled to view us simply as objects.

Someone might say, 'Hold on, does not a materialist, scientific view of the world require a naturalistic philosophy? In questioning naturalism, are we not in danger of invoking supernatural or divine explanations of how the world operates, opening the way to, say, Creationism and the like?'

The answer to this depends upon the definition of naturalism, or rather upon the redefinition that has taken place in recent decades. Originally, as the concept developed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 'naturalism' meant the ability to explain all events and phenomena without recourse to the supernatural and the divine. In this sense I consider myself a naturalist.

But in recent decades there has been redefinition of naturalism which is now widely taken to mean not simply the rejection of supernatural explanations but the acceptance of the idea that the explanations of natural science suffice to explain all phenomena, not simply the phenomena of nature; in other words that mental and social phenomena can be reduced to the physical. In contemporary naturalism, as Frederick Olafson put it, 'The world and nature are one and the same, and everything in them is of the same ontological type.'¹²

Thus EO Wilson suggests 'that sociology and other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology'. And Richard Dawkins believes that 'Science is the only way to understand the real world'.¹³

It's a view, I believe, that confuses the physical world with the 'real' world. For, as Mary Midgley has pointed out, 'Toothache is as real as teeth' and 'debt is as real as the house that was bought with it.'¹⁴ The social and the mental are as real as the natural. But the social and the mental cannot be understood as if they were simply natural.

The distinction I'm trying to draw is between a materialist and a mechanistic view of humanness. A materialist view understands human beings without resort to mystical explanations. But it also sees humans as exceptional because humans, unlike any other beings, possess consciousness and agency. And understanding human consciousness and agency requires us to understand humans as not just natural, but also historical and social beings.

A mechanistic view, on the other hand, sees the human beings largely as an object through which nature acts. Few scientists, even those with a mechanistic worldview, would dispute that human beings possess consciousness or free will. Yet their desire for a purely naturalistic explanation of the world denies them the resources that allow them to understand humans as subjects.

Why have mechanistic views of humanness become fashionable? In part for a variety of scientific and philosophical reasons too complex to explore here. But in part, also, the shift has taken place for political and social reasons. As I have already suggested, not just in science but in politics and culture too we have moved away from viewing humans as subjects, away from a faith in human-directed change.

As we have become more pessimistic about the human condition, as the exceptional status of human beings has seemed a mere self-delusion, so the idea that humans are just animals or machines has appeared both scientifically plausible and culturally acceptable. The pessimism of contemporary culture has cleared a space for a more mechanistic vision of humanity, a vision that seeks to deny the special, exceptional qualities of being human. Such pessimism also underlies much of the fear of biotechnology. Given the disillusionment with human capacities, there is a growing tendency today to make humans more natural and nature more human, imbuing it with sense and purpose, a fount of wisdom and knowledge.

'The human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable', suggests the microbiologist and co-founder of the Gaia hypothesis Lynn Margulis. 'Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal our sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves.' In almost every aspect of life, today - from health to food to energy sources - the 'natural' is regarded as morally superior to the artificial, or human, as the 'virtuous opposite of the degraded manifestations of humanity's fallen state', as Norman Levitt has put it. 'Natural', he points out, 'has become a code word for the way things are meant to be rather than the way they are.'¹⁵

Against this background, it is perhaps inevitable that biological technology that threatens to transform humanity's relationship with nature is seen as problematic. 'Have we the right', the molecular biologist Ervin Chargaff asks, 'to counteract, irreversibly, the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years?' Or as the writer Brian Appleyard has put it, 'it is a struggle with the givens of human nature that defines humanity, not the progressive effort to transform that nature.'¹⁶

The idea that nature embodies certain verities, and these verities define the boundaries that we transgress at our peril, is at the heart of contemporary fear of the new biology. Jonathan Porritt, former director of Friends of the Earth and advisor to Prince Charles, and current advisor to Tony Blair, worries that 'the "hard lines" between different organisms and species are beginning to melt away.' We can, he writes, 'now pick and choose individual genes from one organisms to introduce into a totally different and unrelated organism, crossing all biological boundaries, in combinations that nature never could and never would bring together.'¹⁷

There is something unnatural, Porritt seems to believe, about the way that genetic engineering dissolves the old boundaries of nature. And in an age in which social and moral boundaries appear so fluid, it has never seemed more important to view natural boundaries as solid and permanent. 'Living things are no longer perceived as birds and bees, foxes and hens', the American writer Jeremy Rifkin observes in The Biotech Century, 'but as bundles of genetic information. All living things are drained of their substance and turned into abstract messages.'¹⁸

In this new science there is no sense of 'sacredness or specialness’. How could there be, Rifkin asks, 'when there are no longer any special boundaries to respect?' In this new way of thinking about evolution, 'structure is abandoned': 'Nothing exists in the moment.' There is more than an echo here of John Donne’s response to the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. 'New Philosophy calls all in doubt', he wrote, leaving '...all in pieces, all coherence gone; / All just supply, all Relation.' The demand by thinkers like Jeremy Rifkin and Prince Charles that we rediscover a sense of the sacred in our relationship with nature is really a plea to restore a degree of structure and order to our lives. A strong God makes for firm boundaries.

There is a widespread sense that human nature is fixed and unchanging and that we have to bow to the wisdom of nature. As Francis Fukuyama puts it, 'There are good prudential reasons to defer to the natural order of things and not to think that human beings can easily improve upon it through casual intervention.'¹⁹ But why should the 'natural order of things' be better than human creation? After all, we only need medicine - and hence biotechnology - because nature has left us with badly-designed bodies that tend constantly to break down with headaches and backaches, cancers and coronaries, schizophrenia and depression. And as John Stuart Mill once asked, 'If the artificial is not better than that natural to what end are all the arts of life?' It's precisely because we have lost faith in the arts of life - in human creation, in human agency - that we feel compelled to accept the givens of nature.

Francis Fukuyama's argument illustrates this well. Human values, he believes, are rooted in human nature. Human nature is rooted in our biological being. Messing around with human biology could alter human nature, transform our values and undermine society. We therefore need regulation to obstruct any technological advance that might 'disrupt either the unity or the continuity of human nature'.

In reality, though, human values are not fixed in our nature, but emerge from our capacity to transcend that nature, from our capacity to act as conscious agents. Fukuyama himself recognises this. For instance, he suggests that violence 'may be natural to human beings'. But so, too, is 'the propensity to control and channel violence'. Humans are capable of 'reasoning about their situation' and of 'understanding the need to create rules and institutions that constrain violence'.²⁰ Humans, therefore, by virtue of being subjects, not just objects, possess the capacity to rise above their natural inclinations and, through the use of reason, to shape their values.

But, as I have argued, it is just this capacity for transcendence that many question today. What is fragile is not human nature, as Fukuyama and others suggest, but the contemporary sense of human possibilities and of the capacity of humans to create ethically meaningful lives. So such critics attempt to bolster our moral values by rooting them not in the contingencies of human action, but the seeming certainties of nature's wisdom.

But such a move can only weaken our capacity for political, social and moral progress. Whatever calamities human beings have brought upon ourselves and our world, it is not because we have tried to bring reason to bear on a problem, or tried to impose greater control upon the world. It is rather because we have acted irrationally, or ignorantly, or have had an insufficient means of control. The barbarism of the past century, and the catastrophes of today, are the products not of the quest for progress, but of the lack of it. It is when we stop thinking of ourselves as conscious agents, with the capacity rationally to change the world, and begin to believe that the answers to human problems lie beyond the human sphere, in God or in Nature, that we unleash the monsters. That is why the retreat from human exceptionalism makes for both bad science and bad politics.