|
Francis Fukuyama and The End of History and the Last Man
Coming at the start of the Clinton era and influencing the neoconservative regime to follow, Fukuyama's study of the divide between liberal democracy and traditional forms of government is useful reading for scholars of any stripe. As its title implies, there is a duality of hope and fear in the vision Fukuyama describes for history.
His thesis: history is a linear process which will produce an ultimate system of government that addresses all human needs, and therefore, history will stop "evolving" or cycling through different types of government or society. This ultimate system of government works by rewarding the individual with economic prosperity and "freedom" (not defined in the book). Pacifism would be achieving by buying off the citizens with wealth and liberty, and so (he reasons) aggression would be reduced if not outright end.
The type of government that ends history in Fukuyama's view is the liberal democracy: a conglomeration of democracy with individual rights and "economic freedoms" e.g. ownership of income-producing property by all citizens. As he illustrates, this type of government so clearly defines the context of politics around its own aims that it is difficult to conceive of an alternative:
"We who live in stable, long-standing liberal democracies face an unusual situation. In our grandparents' time, many reasonable people could foresee a radiant socialist future in which private property and capitalism had been abolished, and in which politics itself was somehow overcome. Today, by contrast, we have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist. Within that framework, of course, many things could be improved: we could house the homeless, guarantee opportunity for minorities and women, improve competitiveness, and create new jobs. We can also imagine future worlds that are significantly worse than what we know now, in which national, racial, or religious intolerance makes a comeback, or in which we are overwhelmed by war and environmental collapse. But we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better. Other, less reflective ages also thought of themselves as the best, but we arrive at this conclusion exhausted, as it were, from the pursuit of alternatives we felt had to be better than liberal democracy." (46)
As the title suggests, Fukuyama sees the potential hollowness in this vision: thymos, or a "spiritedness" of the soul as described by Plato, is not satisfied with an existence of personal satiation alone. Fukuyama correctly orients Nietzsche, Aristotle and Plato as defenders of this idea. In their view, the "last man" is a form of entropy: a shallow character who accepts the pursuit of pleasure and wealth as all there is to life, and therefore is the death of human greatness.
We can sketch in a host of other characters here who have noticed this tendency. Schopenhauer spoke of the opposition of all higher thought and spiritual peace to this kind of callow materialism; Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, portrayed a mechanistic society driven by the satiation of desires which was ultimately empty from its lack of passion or the kind of meaning that a Tolkienesque quest gives to the individual. One of the more dramatic thinkers contemporary to this book's writing, Ted Kaczynski, suggests that the last man suffers a crisis of underconfidence by the very nature of being satisfied with individual desires and not an overall plan toward intelligent, ascendant society.
In fact, the unspoken crux of the book is the conflict between these views, as it spends a good amount of time in a style that after the successive clarity of ideas of Industrial Society and Its Future seem rambling and disconnected, like a drunk man arguing away an obvious conclusion. Thymos is the desire to create, the desire to make existence more significant; liberal democracy is a mechanical process more than ideological that guarantees the peace by ensuring individual physical needs are satisfied. But like so much of modern society, we find that look at the external is unsatisfying to the part of us science cannot see, whether soul or personality or "spirit" as Plato suggests. Fukuyama's synopsis of this is some of his best writing in the book:
"Nietzsche believed that man's awareness that nothing was true was both a threat and an opportunity. It was a threat because, as noted earlier, it undermined the possiblity of life 'within a horizon.' But it was also an opportunity , because it permitted total human freedom from prior moral constraints. The ultimate form of human creativity for Nietzsche was not art but the creation of what was highest, new values. His project, once he liberated himself from the shackles of earlier philosophy that believed in the possibility of absolute truth or right, was to 're-evaluate all values,' beginning with those of Christianity. He deliberately sought to undermine belief in human equality, arguing that this was simply a prejudice instilled in us by Christianity. Nietzsche hoped that the principle of equality would give way one day to a morality justifying the domination of the weak by the strong, and ended up celebrating what amounted to a doctrine of cruelty. He hated societies that were diverse and tolerant, preferring instead those that were intolerant, instinctive, and without remorse -- the Indian Chandala caste that tried to breed distinct races of men, 'or the blond beasts of prey' which 'unhesitatingly lay terrible claws upon a populace." Nietzsche's relationship to German fascism has been debated at great length, and while he can be defended from the narrow charges of being the forefather of National Socialism's simpleminded doctrines, the relatiopnship between his thought and nazism is not accidental...The modern liberal project attempted to shift the basis of human societies from thymos to the more secure ground of desire." (333)
The philosophical chain by which we arrive at Fukuyama is simpler than one might think. The ancient Greeks, mostly Socrates, spoke of the cycle of governments: from monarchy to democracy to tyranny. G.W.F. Hegel translated this into the idea of a single linear history for all of humankind, instead of cycles specific to individual societies, and Karl Marx picked up on this idea with his manifesto that, parallel to Fukuyama, posited that Communism was the ideal and final state of history. Interesting how one line of Plato (writing of Socrates) translates into a proliferation of systems so distinct they cannot all be right and in fact may all be wrong. What it illustrates is the primary difference between liberal/Marxist thought and traditional thought.
The liberal view is inherently globalistic, as it descends from the same moral impetus as propelled Christianity: care for the equality of the individual. Thus it knows no borders, recognizes no nations, sees no reason anyone would do things differently (one of the many factors in modern people being unable to conceive of a philosophy outside of liberal, democratic, capitalist framing). For this reason, liberal thinkers see all of history as a single entity, and by the nature of affirming their own belief, visualize a liberal solution as the final state of it all.
The traditional view, on the other hand, sees civilizations as each on their own path through a cycle that includes birth and death. No society is immortal. Those that uphold values that are eternally true -- "tradition" -- remain healthy, just as while individuals live and die those who act in realistic, sane ways stay healthy as familial lines. The traditional view is a biological one, where the liberal view is a technological one, which The End of History and the Last Man illustrates by pointing out the correlation between industrial revolutions and the rise of liberal democracy ("liberal democracy" refers to societies that confer the vote on the general populace, which goes hand-in-hand with universal property rights).
Fukuyama includes a helpful chart which shows the progression of nations toward liberal democracy: a trickle from 1776 to 1900, at which point the wealthiest nations with colonial empires became liberal democracies, reaching a proto-peak in 1919 when the world was exhausted with war, then experiencing an interruption of unsteady change until the 1990s, at which point globalism and the wealth it spread expanded worldwide. This is what liberal thinkers refer to as "progress," or the idea that by spreading wealth and freedom, society slowly reaches an ideal state. Fukuyama hints at but does not explore the thought that, much as Socrates suggests societies go through cycles, what we call "progress" might be part of a cycle -- a cycle that thanks to globalism is not limited to one civilization, but encompasses the entire industrialized world.
The iconoclastic French writer Michel Houllebecq discusses Huxley in the context of biology in his book The Elementary Particles. In Brave New World, he argues, Huxley was suggesting that the future of society was not technological in the material sense, but in the biological. The final frontier would be to overcome our own ties to reproduction and death, and to liberate ourselves to a new age of -- well, what? Struggle is gone, material satisfaction guaranteed, and nothing but the seeking of ever-higher pleasures remains. What Houllebecq suggests through Huxley is that it is not the tangible, or the difference in pleasure and pain, that motivates us, but the accomplishment -- the intangible idea of what has been achieved, what has been worth struggling for, and how it was won. In this Houllebecq cuts to the core of thymos: no one except a flaming untermensch is happy being merely bought off. Comfort does not give meaning to life, nor does excess of sex, drugs or material goods. We need meaning because no matter how we extend our biology, we will always be mortal in that we can be killed and if our lives taper off into boredom, will choose to die.
Fukuyama does not touch these subjects, but it would be inappropriate for his thesis. What he does do is leave us the unsettling notion that change is becalmed as much as our souls in a time of plenty and even more plentiful spiritual boredom. "Spiritedness" cannot exist when we care more about preserving the right of every individual to pleasure than what might happen if we encouraged war, struggle, accomplishment. As Nietzsche hinted, the conflicts of life are natural selection: through them those with the most disciplined and realistic view persist. When modern society protects everyone equally, it does not allow the strong to rise over the weak except in business, which will truly breed a uniform worldwide race of "last men" who care about nothing besides comfort and pleasure. The soul will be dead.
What his argument silhouettes but does not discuss is that we as moderns view "progress" entirely in terms of the individual, but that significance exists in the whole of life, which includes but is not limited to the individual -- thus we perceive it for the most part as external. Fukuyama attempts to compensate for this by arguing that "recognition," a function of thymos, drives us toward liberal democracy, but a philosopher will notice that Fukuyama is still stranded in a physical, external, individualized view of the human animal. In many ways he is unable to approach the one thwart to his view he outlines in his introduction:
"The Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects anticipated by taht great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de Tocqueveille. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave and a kind of slavish morality. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was 'last man' who, schooled by the founders of modern liberals, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced 'men without chests,' composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of pety wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest...Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human." (xxii)
Through this observation we see how self-interest, the strength of liberal democratic societies, can also form the cataclysm seen in the West: wealthy and able to pursue our pleasures, we are swarmed with a form of enduring tedium in that there is nothing for which we struggle. Newspapers are filled with glowing accounts of the war against inequality and human interest stories, but yet signs of decline are here. Our cultural output in literature, music, art and philosophy has declined into little more than comment on already-established details. We have become masters of the trivial. We have our pleasures, but this is like setting out on a quest already completed: redundant. There is economic competition and mobility, but is there spiritual mobility? "No more mountains left to climb," sing pop band Wolfsheim, named for the ganster in F. Scott Fitzgerald's epic The Great Gatsby in which one character moans, "What will we do today? And every day, for the next thirty years?"
Houllebecq again: "Most of the people Bruno had encountered in his life had been motivated solely by the pursuit of pleasure -- if one includes in the definition those narcissistic pleasures so central to the esteem or admiration of others." And where does this lead us? "In the midst of the suicide of the West, it was clear they had no chance." The pursuit of material comfort that is the great strength of liberal democracy also ends history, but personal history. We have nothing undiscovered to achieve. Even more, we cannot reorganize in any radical way what we have, as this would conflict with the "equality" and "freedom" of others.
In the West, we regress into the self. It is probable that as Huxley observed, the future will be one of biological control in which we are bred to be optimal workers and lush out our worries, doubts and emptiness with some soma or another. Having fallen into the material self, and neglected the root of thymos -- spiritedness -- we amuse ourselves as best we can with pets and television, have dysfunctional relationships and fewer children, and pave the way for liberal democracy as a global phenomenon to undertake its next stage: tyranny. This tyranny will not come from Hitlerian leaders but from a combination of public interest and the demands of moneymakers, and will at some point result in biological control. At that point, we might be motivated purely by boredom to consider the option.
As for Fukuyama, his thesis launched his career. Bill Clinton read the book and swore by it; as if continuing his half-liberal policies, the Bush administration folks act on it: liberal democracy must take over the world so that each person gets recognition and we can continue our lives of comfort in the industrialized world. Of course, cracks are appearing on that windscreen as our climate rebels against the unjust burden of seven billion humans who each want air conditioning, homes, cars, and bags full of Wal-Mart junk to throw into landfills when it breaks. Anyone reading the epithet "last man" might feel a stirring of fear, or compassion, or pity, and as an analysis of Fukuyama suggests, they are more accurately perceiving the situation than the self-congratulatory rhetoric of liberal democracies would have us believe.
|
| 