Our Posthuman Future
by Francis Fukuyama
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Francis Fukuyama is not one to avoid intellectual controversy. His 1991 book, "The End of History and the Last Man," declares that, with the worldwide success of market democracy, history as we knew it — the struggle between deeply divergent social orders — was over. Fukuyama, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies, became an instant iconoclast, lambasted by some as a gross oversimplifier and praised by others as America's most forward-looking thinker.

His new book, "Our Posthuman Future," bills itself as a follow-up to his 1991 barnburner in both theme and weight. Fukuyama says in the preface that the book grew out of the most trenchant critique of "The End of History," namely that history will keep going as long as science continues to progress. This point he seems to have conceded, for "Our Posthuman Future" revolves around imminent changes in the building blocks of society. Predicated on the thesis that developments in biotechnology will change the very core of what being human means, the book is part philosophical tract and part policy paper, an attempt to resuscitate natural law doctrine and at the same time outline an international biotech control regime.

But while there are more than a few clever insights tucked into these 300 pages, the book is too slim by half; Fukuyama hasn't bitten off too much, he's just lazy about chewing it all. He proposes discussions on biotechnology and politics, but while both get a thorough treatment there is hardly any of the hardcore political theorizing one might expect. What emerges is far from the groundbreaking "politics for a new era" that the thesis portends — and that, frankly, Fukuyama is more than capable of. Instead, we're left with a limp critique of cultural relativism packaged with an unoriginal proposal for a biotech control regime that Fukuyama spends more time defending than outlining.

The crux of Fukuyama's argument is that coming advances in biotech — the next wave in neuropharmacology, human cloning and genetic engineering — will, by extending life spans and boosting intelligence, remake the very essence of human nature. In turn, such changes will alter the way we think about society and politics — radical extensions of productive life will force us to rethink political theories based on generational change, just as the potential for the wealthy to buy designer babies will create a new breed of class conflict.

But in order to oppose such developments philosophically, Fukuyama argues, we must return to a universal notion of natural rights. In the post-Kantian era, rights (at least as conceived by the West) have moved away from being universal givens to being cultural contingencies, extremely fungible and unable to oppose the threat of biotechnology (if rights derive from something other than human nature, then it shouldn't matter if human nature changes). What is needed, he writes, is a reinvigorated understanding of human rights, grounded in the uniqueness and constancy of human nature. If human nature as we know it is something worth defending, and it is the basis for all of our claims to freedom and liberty, then we have both a reason and a tool to oppose biotechnology.

Fukuyama spends a lot of ink evaluating the different sides of "nature versus nurture," arguing that to be human is not only to share a common, hard-wired set of traits, but that recent advances in neuropsychology have effectively beaten back the armies of sociologists, cultural theorists and behavioral scientists who see culture, not biology, as the defining aspect of the human condition. But if humans share a set of universal, self-conscious desires and fears, then it is possible to construct an understanding of human dignity, and with it a doctrine of rights. For Fukuyama, human dignity, grounded in human nature, is the answer to Camus' dilemma — in a world where even culture and religion are shams, what is the fountain from which morality springs?

All of this is very compelling, but if the human world is about to change irrevocably, one has to wonder about the logic of basing human rights in something so unstable. Fukuyama's response, of course, is his policy proposal: to create an international control regime to prevent the emergence of those unnatural forces. But rather than explain what such a regime would be like — though he invokes the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for a model — Fukuyama spends his time justifying the idea against those who might say that biotechnology is inevitable. He states at the beginning of the book that many changes — mood-altering drugs, prenatal scans, animal cloning — are already here, and that even bigger changes are right around the corner. Even more, the incentives to be the first to develop a technology like therapeutic human cloning are enough to encourage any number of concerns to enter the race, making the new era of biotech almost inevitable, with or without controls. But, he argues, that is no reason not to try. "The fact that there are some individuals who violate the rules … is no excuse for not making the rules in the first place. People get away with robbery and murder, after all, which is not a reason to legalize theft and homicide."

One would think that such a well-respected theorist as Fukuyama could come up with a better reason. After all, advances in biotech are nothing like murder. Beyond the fact that biotech is not per se evil, it is not cyclical, either. The nth murder is, in the aggregate, the same as the first, while each advancement in biotech brings us one step closer to the feared "posthuman future." Given the intimidating picture of the biotech juggernaut which Fukuyama paints (private corporations and international consortiums all vying to bring the next advancement to market), it seems a ban on research, even certain kinds of research, is doomed to fail — much like the NPT has not prevented nuclear proliferation, just slowed it.

Nevertheless, while despite the NPT a number of nations have achieved or are on the road to nuclear status, atomic weapons have not been used since 1945. But this is no thanks to control regimes — rather, we live in relative nuclear bliss because of a hodgepodge of military doctrines that have placed an enormous price on use and created a powerful stigma against those who would even propose nuclear warfare.

In the same way, why would controlling biotech not be a better option than throwing all our weight against it in a futile fight against the future? Even if the technologies Fukuyama fears are only a few years away, why will they necessarily be deployed in the ways he imagines? Even if designer babies are possible, would people want them if, like nuclear weapons use, they carried with them a heavy stigma? What if the sort of radical genetic engineering he foresees ends up being the next cosmetic surgery, with people looking down on enhanced athletes and preternaturally attractive women as "not real"?

But the central flaw of Fukuyama's thesis is less its final argument than its natural- law premise. If the world is about to change so dramatically, what is the point of defending a notion that, in a few years, will possibly be completely outdated? That is to say, if the definition of human nature will soon be up for grabs, is it really the best basis for freedom and liberty? If we start producing clones, won't we have to rethink what being human means anyway? It seems, rather than using all our intellectual thumbs to plug up the dam, we should instead be bracing ourselves for the new era.

The abortion debate sets an interesting precedent. It too deals with biotechnology of a sort, and its morality revolves largely around whether or not a quasi-living being (in this case a fetus) is fully human. But society has so far resisted the possibility of a new conception of rights because it has settled into two entrenched camps, with one side defending the fetus' right to a potential life and the other arguing that fetal rights claims are trumped by the mother's actual rights. As a result, the policy level is frozen in an uneasy balance between a woman's right to choose and the constant threat of state infringement on that right, and there is neither the intellectual will or resources to move beyond it. In the same way, the day may come when biotech advances outside the purview of US policy to the point where it challenges the very foundations of that policy; if we take Fukuyama's recommendation, we will be unprepared for that day.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)