Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution - Hardcover

Fukuyama, Francis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374236437 ISBN 13: 9780374236434

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama made his now-famous pronouncement that because "the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves," history as we knew it had reached its end. Ten years later, he revised his argument: we hadn't reached the end of history, he wrote, because we hadn't yet reached the end of science. Arguing that our greatest advances still to come will be in the life sciences, Fukuyama now asks how the ability to modify human behavior will affect liberal democracy.

To re-orient contemporary debate, Fukuyama underlines man's changing understanding of human nature through history: from Plato and Aristotle's belief that man had "natural ends," to the ideals of utopians and dictators of the modern age who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama persuasively argues that the ultimate prize of the biotechnology revolution-intervention in the "germ-line," the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendents-will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken by ordinary parents seeking to "improve" their children.

In Our Posthuman Future, our greatest social philosopher begins to describe the potential effects of exploration on the foundation of liberal democracy: the belief that human beings are equal by nature.

Francis Fukuyama is Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. In 2002, he was appointed to the President's Council on Bioethics. He is the author of The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, and The End of History and the Last Man, among other works. He lives in McLean, Virginia.

A New York Times Notable Book
A Los Angeles Times Best Book
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title

In Our Posthuman Future, Fukuyama describes the potential effects of the biotechnology revolution on the foundation of liberal democracy: the belief that human beings are equal by nature. In 1989, he made his now-famous pronouncement that because the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves, history as we knew it had reached its end. Ten years later, he revised his argument: we hadn't reached the end of history, he wrote, because we hadn't yet reached the end of science. Arguing that our greatest advances still to come will be in the life sciences, Fukuyama now asks how the ability to modify human behavior will affect liberal democracy.

To reorient contemporary debate, Fukuyama underlines man's changing understanding of human nature through history: from Plato and Aristotle's belief that man had "natural ends" to the ideals of utopians and dictators of the modern age who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama persuasively argues that the ultimate prize of the biotechnology revolution—intervention in the "germ-line," the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendents—will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken by ordinary parents seeking to "improve" their children.

"Fukuyama has written an invaluable prescription for government regulation. Rarely has someone entering the policy arena so eloquently and precisely laid out the case for political control of emerging technology."—Robert Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Fukuyama has written an invaluable prescription for government regulation. Rarely has someone entering the policy arena so eloquently and precisely laid out the case for political control of emerging technology."—Robert Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Fukuyama gives a fascinating tour of the post-human sciences and their implications, free of the dogma from both sides of the political spectrum that has accumulated around these breakthroughs. Fukuyama accepts the premise that life-prolonging technologies will push many citizens of industrialized countries into their second century of life. But because the developing world will still be feeling the effects of its recent population explosion, the result will be a planet divided along heretofore unimaginable demographic lines, 'with Europe, Japan, and parts of North America having a median age of nearly 60 and their less-developed neighbors having median ages somewhere in their early 20s.' Fukuyama also displays a refreshing skepticism about the prospects for genetic engineering, arguing persuasively that scientists still know too little about the ways in which genes control phenotypic expression to manipulate our genetic heritage in the near future, at least where complex attributes such as intelligence or memory are concerned."—Steven Johnson, The Washington Post

"Fukuyama has taken a stunning step forward with this exploration not only of the ins and outs of a designer-baby future, but also of the politics and the political philosophy of a world in which advances in biotechnology fundamentally shape who we are as human beings. If this all sounds a little rarefied for some tastes, the genius of Our Posthuman Future is that it brings home just how important it will be in our immediate future for ordinary people to explore such questions."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Fukuyama seeks to develop a principled middle way between the extremes of scientific libertarianism and an unrealistic idealism . . . Whether or not one accepts Fukuyama's overall argument, his practical recommendations may well hold out the best prospect for promoting a reasonable balance between a rapidly evolving field of science and the moral views of the American people."—William A. Galston, The Public Interest

"In this groundbreaking inquiry, Fukuyama warns that advances in drugs and genetic engineering will allow society to control human behavior and manipulate physical characteristics—and this power could alter our understanding of what it means to be human . . . In a contentious and fast-moving policy area, Fukuyama provides a remarkably sensible and human vision of what is at stake and what needs to be done."—Foreign Affairs

"A well-written and accessible discussion of advances in biotechnology and their social, ethical, legal and regulatory implications."—Dan W. Brock, Clinical Bioethics, Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, American Scientist

"A cogent and important argument against the technocrats and 'casual academic Darwinians' who have so enthusiastically attempted to reduce our humanity to an increasingly implausible and culturally neutral calculus."—Bryan Appleyard, Times Literary Supplement (London)

"A provocative argument that raises the nature-versus-nurture debate and questions about the role biology plays in human nature."—Rebecca Skloot, The Chicago Tribune

“In Our Posthuman Future, he has looked past the end of history and described the end of mankind . . . [It is] an informative survey of contemporary bioscience and its political implications [and] an effort to lay ethical foundations for policy judgments.”—The American Prospect

"Our Posthuman Future is a profound and important book that warns how today's Ritalin for boisterous boys could be tomorrow's 'abolition' of human nature as we know it. Tinkering with biology threatens to diminish

About this title

About the Author

Francis Fukuyama is Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. In 2002, he was appointed to the President's Council on Bioethics. He is the author of The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, and The End of History and the Last Man, among other works. He lives in McLean, Virginia.

Reviews

Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man; Trust) is no stranger to controversial theses, and here he advances two: that there are sound nonreligious reasons to put limits on biotechnology, and that such limits can be enforced. Fukuyama argues that "the most significant threat" from biotechnology is "the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a `posthuman' stage of history." The most obvious way that might happen is through the achievement of genetically engineered "designer babies," but he presents other, imminent routes as well: research on the genetic basis of behavior; neuropharmacology, which has already begun to reshape human behavior through drugs like Prozac and Ritalin; and the prolongation of life, to the extent that society might come "to resemble a giant nursing home." Fukuyama then draws on Aristotle and the concept of "natural right" to argue against unfettered development of biotechnology. His claim is that a substantive human nature exists, that basic ethical principles and political rights such as equality are based on judgments about that nature, and therefore that human dignity itself could be lost if human nature is altered. Finally, he argues that state power, possibly in the form of new regulatory institutions, should be used to regulate biotechnology, and that pessimism about the ability of the global community to do this is unwarranted. Throughout, Fukuyama avoids ideological straitjackets and articulates a position that is neither Luddite nor laissez-faire. The result is a well-written, carefully reasoned assessment of the perils and promise of biotechnology, and of the possible safeguards against its misuse. (Apr.) Forecast: As the FSG publicity material notes, Fukuyama famously declared in the wake of communism's collapse that "the major alternatives to liberal democracy" had "exhausted themselves." This less dramatic assessment should still win a hearing, if not among scientists then among a public concerned about science's growing power.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that history was over because the world was converging toward societies of democratic capitalism. The book's thesis, much disputed when it was first published as an article in 1989, seems all the more dubious in the wake of September 11. Now, in Our Posthuman Future, a volume likely to be similarly contested, he claims that biotechnology has brought about "the recommencement of history." By that he means that the biotechnological manipulation of human beings may well "move us into a 'posthuman' stage of history"--change human nature in ways that erode the foundations of the putative convergent political order. Fukuyama brings to this exploration considerable philosophical knowledge, including a manifest respect for Nietzsche, a quotation from whom heads many of the book's chapters. He has also done a lot of homework on biotechnology, absorbing the debates about it, especially its application to human beings. Our Posthuman Future is repetitious, salted with questionable judgments and made somewhat confusing by several contradictory claims. It nonetheless sweeps the reader along by the provocativeness of its arguments and the originality of its linkages between the biotechnological and political futures. Fukuyama's thesis is premised on the contention that there is a recognizable human nature. He takes that to be "the sum of the behavior and characteristics that are typical of the human species, arising from genetic rather than environmental factors." The reification of human nature has long been out of fashion among biologists, who recognize the significant contribution of environment to the shaping of human characteristics, and most philosophers, who point to, among other things, the wide variance in values and behaviors across cultures. Fukuyama responds to such objections partly by deploying some recent claims in neuroscience and behavioral biology: Thus, the brain is not a Lockean blank slate but "a modular organ full of highly adapted cognitive structures, most of them unique to the human species." Thus, cross-cultural universals have been "programmed" into us by evolution, notably our propensity to "parse language for evidence of deceit, avoid certain dangers, engage in reciprocity, pursue revenge, feel embarrassment, care for our children and parents, feel repulsion for incest and cannibalism, attribute causality to events." Fukuyama fears that, even without changing human nature as such, human genetic engineering could adversely affect our mutually interactive, and hence our political, lives. In one bizarre extrapolation, he delineates the consequences should genetic engineers manage to double the human life span: elderly women would make up a disproportionately large fraction of society, and, being disinclined to support the use of force in international affairs, they would undermine the ability of democracies to defend their interests militarily. Worse, our society would be burdened with a huge cadre of people beyond reproduction or work, retarding social change while they live out an additional three score and 10 years in nursing homes. But the quotidian consequences of human genetic engineering worry Fukuyama less than its potential threat to human nature, because human nature is fundamental to our notions of justice, morality and any "meaningful definition" of human rights. He contends, for example, that human rights based on our inclination to protect kin rather than strangers provide "a more solid foundation for political order" than those that--so he seems to imply--obligate us to care for, say, welfare mothers or the impoverished peoples in the Third World. A stable, democratic order also requires respect for an inviolable human dignity, what Fukuyama dubs an essential "Factor X" that distinguishes us from all other animals. Here he seems to contradict himself. On the one hand, he extrapolates from evolutionary studies of animal behavior to argue for the existence of a human nature. On the other, he insists, drawing on Nietzsche, whom he finds a far better guide than today's legions of bioethicists, that we must not admit "a continuum of gradations between human and nonhuman." Such an admission would imply a comparable continuum within the human species and would constitute a justification of undemocratic social ordering, a "liberation of the strong from the constraints that a belief in either God or Nature had placed on them." Fukuyama is comparably concerned with the potential impact of biotechnology on ineffable human qualities such as individuality, ambition and genius. He finds disturbing harbingers of the direction human genetic modification might take in the uses now being made of the neuropharmacological drugs Prozac and Ritalin. He says, in a seeming caricature of these uses, that the former is often prescribed for depressed women lacking in self-esteem; the latter, largely for young boys who don't want to sit still in class. In his view, the two drugs together are nudging the two sexes "toward that androgynous median personality, self-satisfied and socially compliant, that is the current politically correct outcome in American society." More such drugs are sure to come, he warns, all of them with profound political implications, because they will make deviant behavior into a pathology meriting chemical restoration to a conformist norm. Fukuyama's biotechnological prognostications are, to say the least, selective, tailored to his alarmism. To play his speculative game for a moment, one can imagine that if genetic engineers can double life span, they could also figure out how to eliminate the differential in longevity between men and women and endow us with full vigor throughout our six score and 20 years. He chooses sociobiological characteristics as constitutive of human nature that are consistent with democratic capitalism, ignoring those--for example, tribalism, submissiveness to authority, and the subordination of women to reproduction--that seem to make large parts of the world decidedly resistant to the freedoms and political structures of the West. Despite his selectivity, Fukuyama concedes that human biotechnology holds "undisputed promise" and does not want to get rid of it. Yet he is unwilling to leave the biotechnological enterprise to its own devices, fearing, with good sense, that it is too driven by commerce and ambition to exercise self-restraint. In the closing section of his book, he calls for a departure from free-market capitalism in biotechnology--national and international regulation. For starters, the U.S. should follow other countries in banning reproductive human cloning, not primarily because it might be unsafe for the fetus but mainly because if we don't, we will legitimize far more wide-ranging biotechnological manipulations of human beings. "It is important to lay down a political marker at an early point to demonstrate that the development of these technologies is not inevitable," that societies can control the pace of technological advance. Fukuyama contends that we need institutions with enforcement powers "that will discriminate between those technological advances that promote human flourishing, and those that pose a threat to human dignity and well-being." Apart from cloning, regulation is required for preimplantation diagnosis and screening, germ-line engineering, the creation of human chimeras and the production of new psychotropic drugs. A former member of the State Department (he now teaches international studies at Johns Hopkins University), Fukuyama lays out plausible arguments for how and why such regulation would be practically achievable not only nationally but internationally. His heresy from the religion of free-market capitalism may attract many adherents. They may not be convinced that a posthuman world is really on the horizon, but they are no less disturbed than he by the exercise of untrammeled freedom in human biotechnology.

Daniel J. Kevles's works include In the Name of Eugenics and The Baltimore Case. He is a professor in the department of history at Yale University.

In 1989, Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history. So what happened? Here he explains that we haven't yet reached the end of science.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* The man who vaulted into the headlines in 1989 with his announcement of "the end of history" has discovered that history is not only still going on but is now tracing a distinctly ominous trajectory. In particular, Fukuyama warns that the new biotechnology threatens to weaken and perhaps even destroy the basis for liberal democracy, the very type of governance he previously hailed as history's terminus. Some of the dangers that lie ahead derive from new drugs for controlling mood and new therapies for prolonging life. (What kind of leaders get elected by an electorate heavily dependent upon Prozac? What happens to intergenerational equity in a society dominated by septuagenarians?) But the real peril for Fukuyama lies in eugenics and genetic engineering, for the spread of these technologies threatens to undermine the principle of human equality by creating a powerful new genetic overclass. Seeing no other way to avert this threat, Fukuyama calls for aggressive new government regulation both in the U.S and the international community. Such regulation appears unlikely to come out of current deliberations as long as participants are deadlocked over the applicability of the religious principles invoked by many of the new technologies' critics. So Fukuyama's most valuable contribution may be his recasting of the key issues in terms of a strictly secular yet still moral and ethical understanding of human nature. Incisive and disturbing, an urgent summons to a critically important public debate. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374236437
• ISBN 13: 9780374236434
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272