Our Posthuman Future, by Francis Fukuyama
"Posthuman," the newest buzz word, is beginning to eclipse "postmodern." Postmodernism consists of a philosophical reexamination of foundational suppositions of the Enlightenment: objectivity, realism, universal truths, rationalism, the blank slate, essences and metanarratives (socialism, liberalism, etc.). But "posthuman" refers to biology, as thinkers grapple with the fact that we have entered a period of monumental advance in the life sciences. Just as splitting the atom in 1945 set the stage for the cold war, so the discovery of DNA in 1953 launched us into a new era of biotechnology. While postmodernism deconstructed the idealism of the Enlightenment, posthumanism is about constructing a new human. Ironically, it remains to be seen whether that reconstruction can happen without the ideals of the Enlightenment.
Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future is a retrospective of his bold declaration that we have reached the end of history; that is, the major alternatives to liberal democracy have exhausted themselves (The End of History and the Last Man, 1992). Fukuyama does not easily fit into a niche. He is sometimes a philosopher, sociologist, social psychologist, anthropologist or economist. But preeminently he is a social scientist interested in what makes us tick as social beings and in what political consequences our actions bring.
Fukuyama recognizes that history is reinventing itself--not politically or philosophically, but technologically. He spares us the obligatory purview of the latest genetic engineering promises. What he does, and does very well, is to examine the early stages of biotechnology: greater knowledge about genetic causation (the heritability of intelligence or homosexuality), neuropharmacology (Prozac and Ritalin), and the prolongation of life.
