After the “end of history” comes the “posthuman” stage, says Francis Fukuyama. In 1992, he argued famously in The End of History and the Last Man that the collapse of communism proved the inevitability of liberal democracy.
Now, in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins University modifies that claim by arguing that biotechnology threatens to “alter human nature.”
Q. Do you mean it literally when you say that people risk becoming something other than human?
A. The posthuman future is a possibility because, if we had better technology for manipulating behavior, for changing some basic human characteristics, we might not be able to take liberal democracy for granted as the only modern workable solution. You might get a very different kind of politics if you had different kinds of human beings.
Q. Genetic engineering also troubles you because it threatens to be a form of eugenics. But wouldn’t it simply intensify our already class-determined world of health care?
A. Yes, that’s really a big problem, but genetic engineering will not only allow elites to embed their social inequality genetically in their children, it will also undermine the principle of equality, because a relatively homogeneous nature is the basis of our system of political rights.
Q. But do you really think it’s feasible for societies to restrict the development of such biotechnologies as human cloning, germ-line engineering, and new psychotropic drugs?
A. That’s something we don’t know at this point. We do regulate biomedicine quite heavily now. We do things like slow down the pace of human research to protect human subjects, and limit drugs like Ritalin, which could be used as a form of entertainment or enhancement drug. The regulation isn’t perfect, but it’s something that society has agreed on and has been able to implement fairly well.
Given that there are fairly big stakes and risks involved in doing something like germ-line enhancement, I don’t think it would be impossible to use regulatory policy to make it a lot harder to do that sort of thing, as opposed to proceeding with more clearly therapeutic uses of medicine.
Q. Is it possible for policy makers to predict, though, what technology will wreak?
A. No, I don’t think it is. Some people have said, Well, that shows you don’t need to regulate -- that if things don’t work out, then you can do something about it. But in the process of social adjustment, sometimes society as a whole has to make decisions on priorities. I think that regulation has to be part of the mix.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A12