Aristotle Rediscovered.

The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, by Francis Fukuyama (Free Press, 336 pp., $26)

In his brilliant but misguided book The Selfish Gene, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins began by quoting (with resounding approval) George Gaylord Simpson's remark that all attempts to explain human nature before Charles Darwin's Origin of Species "are worthless, and we will be better off if we ignore them completely." Hardly. Whatever one thinks about Darwinism as an explanation for the origin of plants and animals, attempts to extend the theory to human behavior have a dismal history. Darwinists are as embarrassed by social Darwinism as Catholics are by the Spanish Inquisition. Offshoots like Marxism and behaviorism have fared no better. Still, it is very difficult for a Darwinist to discard the premise that natural selection simply must hold the key to understanding all aspects of human nature. So periodically social Darwinism is cleaned up and revived under a new name like "sociobiology" or "evolutionary psychology."

Sometimes this project involves giving a Darwinian spin to some ancient wisdom. This is the case with the new book by Francis Fukuyama, an author made famous by his first book, 1992's End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama manages to find in evolutionary psychology support for the natural-law teaching of Aristotle, the philosopher of common sense and (via Thomas Aquinas) of the Roman Catholic Church. Fukuyama reports that "while [scientific] research in a certain sense does not tell us anything that Aristotle didn't know, it allows us to be much more precise about the nature of human sociability, and what is and is not rooted in the human genome."

In fact very little is known about how genes influence complex social behavior, but never mind. You can throw the facile evolutionary theorizing overboard and take Fukuyama's updating of Aristotle straight. When Fukuyama says that some characteristic is rooted in the genome he simply means that it seems to be innate rather than learned. For example, "It takes a great deal of effort to separate a mother from her newborn infant; by contrast, it usually takes a fair amount of effort to get a father to be involved with his." Aristotle didn't need to know about genes to know that.

Fukuyama is a social scientist, not a geneticist, and his methods are not all that different from Aristotle's: He observes and interprets the social world. The Great Disruption of his title is the breakdown of moral and social restraints that occurred from the 1960s to the early 1990s, as measured by such standard indicators of social pathology as rising rates of crime, divorce, and out-of-wedlock births. Fukuyama attributes the disruption to the side effects of America's transition from an industrial economy to an informational economy, as symbolized by the ubiquitous personal computer. This transformation greatly increased human freedom, but by the same token increased moral individualism, which tends to destroy social capital. "Social capital" means the relationships of trust that make it possible to have honest business dealings with strangers, or to move around one's city without getting robbed, or to build stable families that can give children a proper start in life. That social capital is gradually being rebuilt as we enter the period Fukuyama calls The Great Reconstruction.

His message is that social disruption is self-healing, provided that people are given a chance to follow their innate desires for norm- setting and for building communities. The children of Hamelin, who followed the Pied Piper to a new land, will construct new social norms not very different from the ones they left behind. They will create private property, markets, kinship systems, and status hierarchies. They will value honesty, trustworthiness, and reciprocity. They will experience dishonesty and crime, and will employ community mechanisms for controlling such deviance-for instance, pervasive gossip to spread the word about who can be trusted. They "will spontaneously create all of these rules without the benefit of a prophet who will bring the word of God to them and without the benefit of a lawgiver to establish government" (emphasis in original). Government is necessary to mediate relationships among voluntary groups, and to encourage the circle of trust to grow wider rather than narrower; but human nature is the primary norm-setter.

That's an encouraging message, and one many religious people will appreciate despite Fukuyama's patronizing view of theology and his belief in nature as a substitute for Revelation. (He refers to the prospect of large-scale religious revival as "a Western version of Ayatollah Khomeini returning to Iran on a jetliner.") His personal beliefs aside, Fukuyama's direction is inherently friendly to religion because he places a high value on voluntary associations that build social capital. What he is against is the notion that we need top-down social engineering from either political or religious leaders to build communities of trust and mutual respect. He's certainly right about that. We can get along very well without a state church, or a public monopoly in education, or utopian "Great Society" programs that produce only unintended consequences. What a democracy can't get along without is citizens who have common sense, and who are given the opportunity to use it.

Mr. Johnson is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Darwin on Trial.