A review of Our Posthuman Future, by Francis Fukuyama (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)

Americans, it is sometimes said, have had a love-affair with science and technology for well over 200 years. Already back in the revolutionary period, the American national identity came to be associated with technical progress: Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity and was an enterprising craftsman as well as a “founding father”, and Thomas Jefferson was an architect and scientist, as well as the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Later on, as the natives were defeated and the vast open plains were cultivated, it was machinery that paved the way: the mass-produced guns used by the cavalry in the Indian wars, the railroads that made it possible to move the population across the frontier, and then, in the 20th century, it was the automobile, electrification and the computer industry that, more than anything else, have come to define Americanism. In the United States, human development came to be seen in technological terms, and, as Ronald Reagan used to say back in the 1950s when he was a television salesman for the General Electric company, “progress is our most important product.” But then, of course the sixties happened, and for a brief moment the love-affair with technology turned sour. It became socially acceptable to criticize technology, and, as in Sweden, nuclear power plants and a few other symbols of progress were challenged by the emerging environmental movement, and, in some cases, technological development was actually curtailed. A group of activists even buried a car on the first Earth Day in 1970.

But the technology lovers quickly bounced back, with new toys and new products that they could manufacture and sell. And as in earlier periods of technological development - what economic historians call “long waves” - the radical innovations of the 1970s, in particular, the personal computer and genetic engineering, have simultaneously given rise to huge industries and to enormous amounts of hype. Information technology and biotechnology are seen by many pundits as the driving forces in a new era of economic expansion, and, as in the past, the new technology is glorified throughout the American society, and, for that matter, the increasingly Americanized rest of the world.

The problem, however, is that many people, in the United States and elsewhere, simply donít like genetic engineering, or see any particular reason for its development other than corporate greed and commercial hubris. At least computers can be fun; you can play games on them. But genetic engineering isnít necessarily fun. It is more a matter of solutions looking for problems to solve. Ever since that day in 1972, when scientists managed to transfer some genetic material from one organism to another in a laboratory in California, the genetic manipulators have been looking for ways to make money out of their newly discovered techniques. And almost everywhere they have looked they have run up against opposition - from environmentalists, small farmers, the religious minded, and all those people who would simply not like to have to decide whether or not to check out the genes of their forthcoming babies. Genetic engineering has raised economic problems, environmental problems, and, of course, a range of ethical and moral problems that primarily have to do with power relations, and, more specifically, with who is to have power and control over processes of life.

Now Francis Fukuyama comes along and tells us that the real problem with genetic technology has to do with political philosophy. Like the good established American academic that he is, Fukuyama loves not only technology but he also loves the American constitution - that highly flawed document, which contains a lot of talk about human rights and human nature, but not a word about slavery. What bothers Fukuyama about genetic engineering is that all that “rights” talk simple becomes irrelevant and meaningless now that the genetic manipulators are able to change the meaning of being human. All of the other economic and environmental issues pale by comparison to this fundamental issue of “posthumanity”.

Fukuyama has made a name for himself by having big thoughts, and this time, as in his earlier books, he is both inspiring and silly in just about equal doses. The inspiring part is that he provides an interesting and well-written overview of the whole debate about the genetic determinism of human behavior, which has been raging for quite awhile. There is a basic disagreement among scientists about what role the so-called genetic code actually plays in human behavior, and Fukuyama presents the debate in a readable, if overly opinionated manner (heís on the side of the genetic determinists). He also has some thoughtful things to say about the new sorts of personality-affecting drugs - Prozac and Ritalin, in particular - and again covers a wide range of literature about their costs and benefits. Perhaps most inspiring of all is the openmindedness he shows about how to deal with the challenges of biotechnology. He rightly criticizes the fact that in the United States, as opposed to Europe, there are no proper regulatory institutions in place - neither laws, government agencies, technology assessment boards (that was closed down in 1995), ethical commissions, or even ethical rules for companies - all of which exist, in one way or another, in many, but certainly not all European countries. He also challenges what might be called the conventional wisdom in the United States, namely that policy making is best left to the private marketplace, and that consumers are the ultimate decision-makers.

But the words of inspiration tend to get cancelled out by the silliness, and, in particular, the strange idea of a universal human nature that Fukuyama would have us believe hasnít changed in any fundamental way since the time of Aristotle, the guru of all Western political philosophers. The problem with that, of course, is that Aristotle, and Thomas Jefferson, as well, for that matter - another Fukuyama hero - lived in slave societies, and their idea of human nature, among other things, didnít involve working for a living. Slaves by definition were not humans, and, with such a point of departure, their political ideas strike me as somewhat inappropriate for dealing with genetic engineering. Indeed, it seems to me that we need to think about the political aspects of biotechnology in a very different manner than Fukuyama.

The real challenge of genetic engineering is that powerful techniques for manipulating elements of living organisms are almost entirely out of public control and access. In keeping with the dominant neo-liberal belief system of our time, our politicians have given private commercial companies the right to experiment with these powerful techniques without much in the way of public oversight. Making biotechnology and the biotechnology firms publicly accountable is the task at hand, not defending some old-fashioned notion of human nature that was never particularly convincing in the first place.