Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
14
Resistance Is Futile: The Posthuman
Condition and Its Advocates
Langdon Winner
Twentieth-century philosophers skeptical about “progress” have
sometimes argued that the quest to dominate nature for the benefit of
humanity was likely to backfire. Eventually, the same techniques and
powers used to dam the rivers, split the atom, and adapt plants and
animals for our consumption would be focused on human beings them-
selves, leading to a thorough modification and, perhaps, the elimination
of the human altogether. This prospect was sometimes upheld as the
ultimate horror involved in the thoughtless proliferation of sciences
and technologies in modern society—an impression echoed in hundreds
of science-fiction novels and motion pictures from the 1950s to the
present.
Concerns of this kind appear in the concluding pages of two notable
works that explore the deeper roots and broader prospects of our civi-
lization. In the final chapter of
The Technological Society
, French soci-
ologist and theologian Jacques Ellul ponders the future of what he
describes as “the monolithic technical world that is coming to be.” “The
new order,” he writes, “was meant to be a buffer between man and
nature. Unfortunately, it has evolved autonomously in such a way that
man has lost all contact with his natural framework and has to do only
with the organized technical intermediary which sustains relations both
with the world of life and the world of brute matter.” Ultimately, Ellul
believes, this will lead to “a new dismembering and a complete recon-
stitution of the human being so that he can at last become the objective
(and also the total object) of techniques.”
1
Similar musings appear at the end of Lewis Mumford's last great work,
The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power
. The topic explores
several centuries of philosophical, scientific, technical, industrial, and
