Paul Sagar - The last hollow laugh - Francis Fukuyama and 'The End of History’
NB: This informed defence of Fukuyama contains the following arguments: Late capitalist modernity might be the highest civilisational point we could achieve, because it contained the fewest contradictions... The anti-capitalist Left, however, was a busted flush. Communism was now a known fraud and failure, and post-Historical people driven by megalothymia would have no truck with its egalitarian pretensions, or its nakedly tyrannical realities. Far more threatening to the stability of liberal capitalist societies would be the emergence of demagogic strongmen from the fascistic Right..
Three years after it was written, in the midst of a pandemic, perhaps the author will recognise the fatal flaws in his argument: late capitalist modernity is not a high civilisatonal point: if it is, we are doomed. And liberalism; communism and fascism are connected, because the authors' so-called 'fewest contradictions' are always present in all projects to conquer nature.
Three years after it was written, in the midst of a pandemic, perhaps the author will recognise the fatal flaws in his argument: late capitalist modernity is not a high civilisatonal point: if it is, we are doomed. And liberalism; communism and fascism are connected, because the authors' so-called 'fewest contradictions' are always present in all projects to conquer nature.
They have all contributed to the crisis we face today. Yet it remains true that democratic liberties are a crucial achievement of humanity, and along with reasoned, non-ideological speech provide us the platform from which we can correct ourselves. DS (commenting on April 29, 2020)
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Rarely read but often denigrated, it might be the most maligned, unfairly dismissed and misunderstood book of the post-war era. Which is unfortunate for at least one reason: Fukuyama might have done a better job of predicting the political turmoil that engulfed Western democracies in 2016 – from Brexit, to Trump, to the Italian Referendum – than anybody else.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Rarely read but often denigrated, it might be the most maligned, unfairly dismissed and misunderstood book of the post-war era. Which is unfortunate for at least one reason: Fukuyama might have done a better job of predicting the political turmoil that engulfed Western democracies in 2016 – from Brexit, to Trump, to the Italian Referendum – than anybody else.
This should sound
surprising. After all, Fukuyama’s name has for more than two decades been
synonymous with a fin-de-siècle Western triumphalism.
According to the conventional wisdom, he is supposed to have claimed that the
collapse of the communist regimes in eastern Europe and the United States’
victory in the Cold War meant that liberal capitalist democracy was
unambiguously the best form of human political organisation possible. To his
popular critics – sometimes on the Right, but most especially on the Left – The
End of History was thus a pseudo-intellectual justification for a
hyper-liberal capitalist ideology, whose high-water mark was the disastrous
administration of George W Bush. Fukuyama’s tagline – ‘the end of history’
– was seized upon by critics as proof that he was attempting to legitimate
neoconservative hubris, cloaking a pernicious ideology with the façade of
inevitability.
But (the conventional
wisdom continues) hubris was soon followed by nemesis: the 9/11 attacks and the
subsequent disaster of the Iraq War showed how wrong any triumphalist vision of
liberal-capitalist world order was. Fukuyama took particularly heavy flak in
this regard. Francis Wheen, in How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World (2004),
was typical when he accused Fukuyama of being a shill for neo-con interests. In
reply to the question ‘How do you get ahead by boldly making one of the worst
predictions in social science?’ Wheen sniped: ‘If you are going to be wrong, be
wrong as ostentatiously and extravagantly as possible.’ He claimed that
Fukuyama ‘understood what was required to titillate the jaded palate of the
chattering classes’ – and played on this for personal gain.
Yet all of this is
incorrect.
To see this better,
it’s worth elucidating the actual argument of The End of History.
For a start, Fukuyama never suggested that events would somehow stop happening.
Just like any other sane person, he believed that history (with a small h), the
continuation of ordinary causal events, would go on as it always had. Elections
would be held, sports matches would be won and lost, wars would break out, and
so on. The interesting question for Fukuyama was about History (with a big H),
a term that, for him, picked out a set of concerns about the deep structure of
human social existence.
With regards to
History, Fukuyama advanced a complex thesis about the way opposing forces play
themselves out in social development. Here, he drew inspiration from the work
of the German philosopher Georg Hegel, via the reinterpretations of the
Russian émigré Alexandre Kojève. Hegel (and Kojève) proposed
that History is a process by which contradictions in the ordering of societies
work themselves out by eventually overcoming conflict, so as to move to a
higher order of integration, where previous contradictions drop away because
the underlying oppositions have been solved. The most famous instance of such a
‘dialectical’ view is Karl Marx’s (also made under Hegel’s influence): that the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat would eventually move past their combative
opposition, via a period of revolution against capitalism, into the harmony of
communism.
In essence, big-H
history was, for Fukuyama, an understanding of human development as a logical
progression (or dialectical working out of contradictions), generating a
grand-narrative of progress, in which each step forward sees the world becoming
a more rational place. For Fukuyama, the long-run development of humanity was
clearly discernible: from the Dark Ages, to the Renaissance, and then crucially
the Enlightenment, with its inventions of secularism, egalitarianism and
rational social organisation, paving the way in turn for democratic liberal
capitalism. This was the cumulative, and thus far upward-curving, arc of human
development.
Fukuyama jettisoned
Hegel’s implausible metaphysics, as well as Marx’s idea of ‘dialectical
materialism’, as the proposed motor of historical synthesis. In their place, he
suggested that the modern scientific method coupled with technological
advancement, alongside market capitalism as a form of mass
information-processing for the allocation of resources, could explain how
humanity had successfully managed to develop – haltingly, but definitely – on
an upward course of civilisational progress. The catch, however, was that we
had now gone as far as it was possible to go. Liberal democratic capitalism was
the final stage of Historical synthesis: no less inherently contradictory form
of society was possible. So, while liberal democracy was by no means perfect,
it was the best we were going to get. Big-H history was over, and we were now
living in post-History. That was what Fukuyama meant by his infamous claim that
History had ‘ended’.
To be sure, many
critics see Fukuyama’s theory as no more plausible than Hegel’s metaphysics or
Marx’s materialism. And his claim that Western liberal democratic capitalism
represented the necessary end point of the grand Historical
working-out of human existence – such that no society more desirable than the
US of the 1990s was possible – strikes many as no more likely than Hegel’s
notorious claim that the end of History was the 19th-century Prussian state
(which just happened to pay his salary).
But whether Fukuyama’s
neo-Hegelianism is plausible is not the most interesting aspect of his thesis.
For throughout his analysis, Fukuyama insisted on the centrality of thymos (the
Greek for ‘spiritedness’), or recognition, to human psychology: what Thomas
Hobbes called pride, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau labelled amour propre.
This denotes the need to be liked and respected by other people, and to have
that recognition outwardly affirmed – if necessary, extracting it by force.
Some human beings, Fukuyama thought, are always going to be inherently
competitive and greedy for recognition. Some will therefore always vie to be
thought of as the best – and others will resent them for that, and vie back.
This has the potential to cause a lot of trouble. Human beings demand respect,
and if they don’t feel that they are getting it, they break things – and people
– in response.
It was this
psychological feature of people, Fukuyama claimed, that guaranteed that
although we might have reached the end of History, there was nothing to be triumphalist about.
Just because humans could do no better than liberal capitalist democracy –
could progress to no form of society that contained fewer inherent conflicts
and contradictions – it didn’t mean that the unruly and competitive populations
of such societies would sit still and be content with that. Late capitalist
modernity might be the highest civilisational point we could achieve, because
it contained the fewest contradictions. But there was strong reason to suspect
that we’d slide off the top, back into History, down into
something worse.
This was because,
Fukuyama thought, human beings didn’t just exhibit thymos, but also
what he termed ‘megalothymia’: a desire not just for respect and
proportionate recognition, but a need to disproportionately dominate over
others in ostentatious and spectacular ways. Megalothymia was
by no means always or necessarily a bad thing: it was what had driven human
beings to build cathedrals, achieve great works of art, found empires and
political movements, and generally help push the direction of History forwards.
But if not channelled to appropriate ends it could quickly turn vicious,
finding an outlet in the domination and oppression of others.
What was remarkable
about liberal capitalist democracy, Fukuyama thought, was that it had managed
to put a lid on the more destructive expressions of megalothymia,
encouraging citizens to direct such energies into socially harmless
expressions, such as mountaineering or competitive sports. Which might sound
like a pleasant conclusion. Except, Fukuyama thought, that a sanguine response
failed to see the hidden dangers lurking in the end of History.
The second half of
Fukuyama’s title, The Last Man, was a direct reference to the
thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that, although modern society with
its emphasis on truth and transparency had ‘killed God’ (the future of Western
politics was egalitarian and secular), it had nothing to replace Him with. The
vast majority of modern human beings would now be small-minded, stunted,
pathetic creatures, possessing no sense of how to achieve greatness, only of
how to accrue petty comforts and easy pleasures in a materialistic,
self-obsessed world. In other words, if megalothymia went out
of human life, so would greatness. Only base mediocrity would remain.
Fukuyama combined
Nietzsche’s idea of the last man with his own diagnosis of underlying human
psychology. His prognosis was that the outlook for post-History Western society
was not good. It was possible that the last men at the end of History might
sink down into a brutish contentment with material comforts, rather like dogs
lying around in the afternoon sun (this was what Kojève predicted). But they
might well go the other way. There was every chance that the last men (and
women) would be deeply discontented with their historically unprecedented ease
and luxury, because it failed to feed megalothymia. If the last men
went this way, they would become bored by what Fukuyama called ‘masterless
slavery – the life of rational consumption’.
The spread of egalitarian values
that went along with secular democratic politics would open up spaces of severe
resentment – especially, we might now postulate, among those who had lost their
traditional places at the top of social hierarchies, and felt cheated of the
recognition that they believed they were owed. (Sound familiar?)
Fukuyama predicted
that such restlessness and resentment would eventually need a political outlet
– and when it came, it would be explosive. The anti-capitalist Left, however,
was a busted flush. Communism was now a known fraud and failure, and
post-Historical people driven by megalothymia would have no
truck with its egalitarian pretensions, or its nakedly tyrannical realities.
Far more threatening to the stability of liberal capitalist societies would be
the emergence of demagogic strongmen from the fascistic Right, cynically
feeding narrow self-interest and popular discontent, preying on human impulses
for mastery and domination that the hollow comforts of consumer capitalism
could not hope to appease.
Fukuyama was here
looking to a future that still lies beyond our present (although we might be
taking the first steps towards it). His was a grim warning that if overly
recognition-thirsty individuals lived in a world ‘characterised by peaceful and
prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that
peace and prosperity, and against democracy’. More starkly: ‘Modern thought
raises no barriers to a future nihilistic war against liberal democracy on the
part of those brought up in its bosom.’
Triumphalism this most
certainly was not. To be sure, Fukuyama’s vision of how History could be undone
does not predict the detailed dynamics of the tumultuous year that was 2016, or
of post-9/11 global politics more generally. (He says little about China in
relation to US hegemony, for example, while displaying a characteristically
early 1990s preoccupation with Japan.) Nonetheless, he perhaps has a better
claim than anybody else to have seen the unrest of 2016 coming, and where the
events set in motion during that dramatic year might yet end up taking us.
While his recent public interventions have not explicitly returned to his
themes of the early 1990s – emphasising instead the rise of class as refracted
through national identities and educational opportunity – it is nonetheless
Fukuyama, and not his many vocal critics, who now looks entitled to a last
hollow laugh.
One final thing. In
describing the shallow celebrity culture, the essential emptiness, of the
habitat of the last man, Fukuyama had a particular example in mind. He went to
the same individual for illustration when looking for an archetype of megalothymia –
who else but ‘a developer like Donald Trump’. Fukuyama didn’t predict that it
would be that very individual who would crash through the comforts of the end
of History, turning the certainties of the post-Historical world upside down.
But he got closer than most.
see also
Book review: The Government of Desire
A moment
of moral and political nihilism: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis
Jon Henley: Rise of far right puts Dreyfus
affair into spotlight in French election race
Science,
society and related matters: an exchange
Two lectures on time and ideology: January
23 and 24
A pre-history of post-truth, East and West.
By MARCI SHORE
Michiko Kakutani - The death of truth: how
we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump
Farewell to reality - WHY WE’RE POST-FACT
by Peter Pomerantsev
Why can’t we agree on what’s true anymore?
By William Davies
Alexander Klein: The politics of logic
