Proactionary Biology: Recovering the Science of Eugenics

Abstract

If The Proactionary Imperative is so future-oriented, why are we so preoccupied with history? The answer is that history makes a progressive contribution to general culture by searching for decision-points in the past that set in motion a train of events that over time have resulted in something that we now take for granted. But the progressive historian’s point is that things could have gone otherwise back then and can go otherwise here now. Thus, the proactionary argues that the current situation is sufficiently similar to that historic turning point to allow us now to pursue a path significantly different from the one chosen back then. It follows that a proactionary reading of history does not aim to legitimize the present but to reveal the original openness of the past — when what now appears inevitable was merely optional. Whenever history has ‘critically’ informed the contemporary scene, it has been on this epistemic basis, which normally travels under the rubric of ‘counterfactual history’ (Fuller 2008c). Proactionaries assume that there is enough freedom and flexibility in the human condition — if not the causal structure of time itself — that latter-day analogues to ‘paths not taken’ may be revisited anew (cf. Fuller 2010: chap. 9; Fuller 2011b).