The Future of Post-Human After-Development
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is greed really so important to human development that, as Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street once infamously said, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”? This favorable view on greed can be contrasted with the opposing one by Mahatma Gandhi, who equally famously remarked that “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” (GR 2017)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human development studies (in relation to development and anti-development—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no development without anti-development (and vice versa), to be explained by the “achievement-carefreedom principle,” the “absoluteness-relativeness principle,” the “regression-progression principle,” and other ones in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Of course, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that human development studies, as a field of study, has no value, or that those diverse fields (related to human development studies)—such as economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, history, theology,  psychology, communication studies, migration studies, demography, environmental studies, and so on—should be dismissed. (WK 2017) Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human development studies (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between development and anti-development (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the theory of post-human after-development) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human developments studies (in relation to the dialectic relationship between development and anti-development—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.