From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jun 09 2002 - 20:13:15 MDT
My review of Fukuyama's book, just published in the *Weekend Australian*
newspaper. It's simplified in the extreme, of course, for a mass audience.
The always helpful editor changed the words `that certain species-typical
characteristics are shared by all humans' to its near-opposite: `that
certain species' typical characteristics are shared by all humans'. Sigh.
Damien Broderick
======================
Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
By Francis Fukuyama, Profile Books, 261pp
Everyone has mixed feelings about the future, especially the many powerful
technologies changing our world--and us as well. Trash TV excites us with
visions of bionic limbs for the helpless, robot puppies craving attention
but never messing the carpet, painless laser dentistry, clones and weird
genetic hybrids.
Up pops the weary cliché now 70 years old: Brave New World! If few have
read the book (it's rather dull), everyone knows what's meant: a future of
sedated, giggly hedonists cloned like sheep then decanted from bottles. In
1932, when Aldous Huxley's book caused its first sensation, we had no
cloned sheep. Now we await cloned babies any day. We rush to watch George
Lucas's Attack of the Clones. Anxiety rife on the silver screen! Meanwhile,
mad children and terrorists like Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber) murder
with homemade bombs to express their distaste for this relentless and
unprecedented future that has, well, exploded into reality.
It's refreshing, then, to find a public intellectual of Dr Fukuyama's
standing take on the intensely real, serious topic of accelerating
biotechnology. Instant fame embraced Fukuyama a decade back when his
conservative The End of History seemed to explain the Soviet Union's abrupt
collapse. Liberal humanism--democratic, realistic and market-driven rather
than authoritarian--had won the cold war against its authoritarian and
deludedly utopian foes. Why? Because it worked in harmony with human
nature. Hardly a new thesis, nor a watertight one, but pundits embraced it
with relish and a sigh of relief.
In subsequent books, he looked at the pivotal need in a liberal order for
civil trust, and claimed that human dignity and accurate recognition of
each citizen's value was crucial to civic health. Dignity's source,
interestingly, was not some God-given special status of humankind; he
claimed in The Great Disruption (1999) that "a great deal of social
behaviour is not learned but part of the genetic inheritance of man and his
great ape forbears." It is our species nature, our evolved essence as
humans rather than sheep or wolves, that grants us those general rights
which flourish best under global capitalism.
Now Fukuyama extends that analysis into the future, toward the
recommencement of a history he had claimed was effectively at an end.
Rather belatedly, he has realised the obvious: "there can be no end of
history without an end of modern natural science and technology", and
that's not likely. Indeed, "we appear to be poised at the cusp of one of
the most momentous periods of technological advance in history."
I have an interest to declare here. In 1997, I published The Spike, one of
the first studies of these thunderously converging technologies, showing
that they'll comprise an ever-steepening escalator of radical change. From
early `transhuman' adoption of patches and revamps for our luckless fatal
condition, we might shift to a genuinely posthuman state where augmented
people meet or perhaps blend with AI minds now in the early stages of lab
development. It was a speculation widely scorned as far-fetched and
psychologically insupportable. How remarkable, then, to find a thinker of
Dr Fukuyama's conservative credentials adopting just this view--while
warning us, inevitably, of the urgent need to stop it before we go blind.
Libertarians, greedy corporations and scientists hungry for their cut will
baulk at restriction and regulation, Fukuyama argues, but that's what we
must put in place, and the sooner the better. Only government can perform
this service. Ideally all the world's regimes must combine to outlaw
radical transformations of the human genome, or less drastic options such
as pre-implantation embryo selection that lets parents choose their
healthiest possible children.
Many people will agree without hesitation, drawing upon the ancient wisdom
of the `Yuck factor': "How disgusting!" Yet the same yuck factor that
allegedly deters decent folks from cloning ourselves once propped up racist
discrimination and prejudice against the disabled. Years hence, it might
seem as incredibly offensive to title a big box-office movie Attack of the
Clones as to imagine one (perhaps filmed in 1932) called Attack of the
Negroes, or Attack of the Jews. Cloned humans will be human, even those who
are posthuman.
So, too, will the ageless be human--people with extra genes, say, designed
to keep their cellular DNA ship-shape--although Fukuyama has his doubts.
Just as Prozac and Ritalin smooth out human passions, he worries that
science will corrode our sacred nature. The detailed core of his small book
is an argument, unfashionable in the humanities but increasingly accepted
in the life sciences, that certain species-typical characteristics are
shared by all humans. This inviolable human nature provides the basis for
our dignity. Citing the Pope approvingly, Fukuyama seems ready to affirm
that a non-material soul gets inserted into our rude flesh, but he pulls
back into metaphor: all that matters is that "some very important... leap"
occurred during evolutionary history, and recurs during gestation. No
doubt, but why would this make more-than-ordinary-human beings somehow
less-than-human?
"Much of our political world rests on the existence of a stable human
`essence'... We may be about to enter into a posthuman future, in which
technology will give us the capacity gradually to alter that essence over
time." Images of Star Trek's emotionless Mr Spock recur, with no indication
why enhanced and perhaps superintelligent people should be less, rather
than more richly, emotional and benevolent. Really, though, Fukuyama just
feels in his bones that such technological progress "does not serve human
ends", that it must create ever more terrible rifts between rival genetic
haves and have-nots.
That's clearly one possibility, but reminds me of Marx's theory of the
inevitable immiseration of capitalism's poor. As a child of working stiffs,
gazing at my big computer screen and drinking my microwaved coffee, I
rather doubt it. Wealth derived from knowledge, especially the kind that
improves health and lifespan, tends to spread ever more widely--as it is
doing even in the Third World. Fukuyama ignores, or dismisses, the prospect
of widespread abundance via nanotechnology and AI, yet these are no more
unlikely than advanced biotech. Yes, "a person who has not confronted
suffering and death has no depth", but we do not welcome anthrax for its
existential spritzig. His summary of the state of play in biotechnology and
the laws constraining it is excellent, but he forgets that "the freedom of
political communities to protect the values they hold most dear" often has
been a charter for ignorance and fearful bigotry.
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