Ebook: Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry

For a generation absorbed by the question of human destiny and’the meaning of history, Post-historic Man will be the most daring and provocative forecast of man’s future that has yet appeared. Drawing its analogies from the laws of Modern science, and closely analyzing the accelerating trend toward increased organization of every aspect of life, it projects a future state of human society in which the word human, as we define it today, can hardly be applied.
Seen in the perspective of this book, thee whole of man’s historic existence appears as a transitional period. Preceding that period lies the vast stretch of prehistory during which instinctive human life was governed by the slow processes of geologic evolution. In the future—near or distant—man is destined to arrive at a post-historic stage, in which the impersonal organizing drive of intelligence will have become dominant over the resistance of instinctual forces. In this inherently unavoidable drift man will approach a static condition of fixity—an ultimate state of automatism. The attibutes and values that we regard as human— freedom, personality, conscience, and even consciousness itself—are interpreted as transitional products of the friction between the great contending forces in human evolution.
Post-historic Man is the product of a profound intelligence and a ruthless logic that is willing to carry the implications of modern ideas to their ultimate conclusions. Particularly brilliant is its wholly new and original conception of the ultimate role of the machine in the course of human evolution. It presents a challenge to every thinking man, whether he is scientist or humanist, believer or skeptic. Yet it is a thoroughly undogmatic book. The bones of the argument show through at every point, and the author never fails to note the alternatives that offer themselves at each step. Clearly and concisely written, and rich in its allusiveness to contemporary writing, from Spengler to Toynbee, it is a book that, as Lewis Mumford says, “fulfills the canons of humanism which the argument itself professes to overthrow.”