Exit, pursued by a bear, or Fukuyama as Antigonus
Announcing a new contest! As summer wends its way to the end, I am delighted to offer this entertainment for the diversion and edification of readers:
The Challenge: Name the silliest argument to be offered by a serious academic in the last 25 years and to be taken up and be gravely masticated by the larger world of intellectual debate.
I know that there is a lot of competition for this palm–consider, to take just one candidate, the embarrassing things Al Gore has said about “global warming.”
I’ll collect proposals for the next week or two and then announce the winner. (The decision, from which there is no appeal, will be determined by a committee staffed, overseen, and operated entirely by me.)
In the meantime, I offer my own contender, namely Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, which first appeared in in the Summer 1989 issue of The National Interest.
While the response to the article was far from unanimously favorable, it was extraordinarily large and passionate. Such prominent figures as Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Samuel P. Huntington, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in the pages of The National Interest to comment on the fifteen-page piece. The article became something of a cause célèbre, attracting heated commentary across the U.S. as well as in Europe, Asia, and South America. Its millenarian title, sans question mark, soon became a slogan to be bruited about in Washington think tanks, the press, and the academy. The young Fukuyama, then a deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, quickly emerged as a minor celebrity, replete with a position at the RAND corporation and a generous book contract allowing him to expand on his ideas. Even those who took issue with the article–”I don’t believe a word of it,” was Irving Kristol’s rejoinder to its main thesis–were careful to praise the author’s intellectual sophistication. Rarely has the word “brilliant” been used with such cheery abandon: perhaps here, in the response to “The End of History?,” were those “thousand points of light” we had been hearing so much about at the time.
Why the fuss? Writing at a moment when Communism was everywhere in retreat, it was hardly surprising that Fukuyama should have proclaimed the end of the Cold War and “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” Such proclamations were already legion. What commanded attention was something far more radical. Claiming to distinguish between “what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history,” Fukuyama wrote that
What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
“The end of history as such,” “the evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”: these were the sorts of statements–along with Fukuyama’s professed conviction that “the ideal will govern the material world in the long run“–that rang the alarm.
Some of the negative responses to Fukuyama’s article, as he was quick to point out, were based on a simplistic misreading of his thesis. For in proclaiming that the end of history had arrived in the form of triumphant liberal democracy, Fukuyama did not mean that the world would henceforth be free from tumult, political contention, or intractable social problems. Moreover, he was careful to note that “the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world.”
What he did maintain, however, was that liberal democracy was the best conceivable social-political system for fostering freedom; and therefore–because “the ideal will govern the material world in the long run“–he also claimed that liberal democracy would not be superseded by a better or “higher” form of government. According to Fukuyama, other forms of government, from monarchy to communism to fascism, had failed because they were imperfect vehicles for freedom; liberal democracy, allowing mankind the greatest freedom possible, had triumphed because it best instantiated the ideal. In this sense, what Fukuyama envisaged was not the end of history–understood as the lower-case realm of daily occasions and events–but the end of History: an evolutionary process that represented freedom’s self-realization in the world. The “end” he had in mind was in the nature of a telos: more “fulfillment” than “completion” or “finish.”
True, one might still ask whether the career of History so understood is anything more than a speculative fancy–whether, indeed, the ambition to distinguish between “what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history” is not bootless, given man’s limited vision and imperfect knowledge. In any event, the idea of the end of History is hardly novel. In one form or another, it is a component of many myths and religions–including Christianity, with its vision of the Second Coming. And anyone familiar with the interstices of nineteenth-century German philosophy will remember that the end of History also figures prominently in the philosophies of G. W. F. Hegel and his disgruntled follower Karl Marx. It is perhaps worth noting, too, that one important difference between most religious speculation about the end of History and versions propagated by philosophers is hubris: orthodox Christianity, for example, is gratifyingly indefinite about the date of this eventuality. Hegel harbored no such doubts or hesitations. What he called “the last stage of History, our world, our own time” was ushered in by Napoleon’s armies at the Battle of Jena in October 1806. “As early as this,” Fukuyama writes, “Hegel saw . . . the victory of the ideals of the French revolution, and the imminent universalization of the state incorporating the principles of liberal democracy.” It is Fukuyama’s view that “the present world seems to confirm that the fundamental principles of socio-political organization have not advanced terribly far since 1806.”
As Fukuyama acknowledges, the philosophy of Hegel, especially as interpreted by the Russian-born Marxist philosopher and French bureaucrat Alexandre Kojève, was the chief theoretical inspiration for “The End of History?” Whatever else can be said of Hegel’s philosophy, or its interpretation by Kojève, there can be no doubt that it demands an extraordinarily cerebral view of the world. In the famous lectures that he gave in the 1930s on Hegel’s first book, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève tells us that History “cannot be truly understood without the Phenomenology,” and, moreover, that “there is History because there is philosophy and in order that there may be Philosophy.”
Like most world-explaining constructions invented by humanity, Hegel’s dialectic acts as catnip on susceptible souls. Once one is seduced, everything seems marvelously clear and, above all, necessary: all important questions have been answered beforehand and the only real task is to apply the method to clean up the untoward messiness of reality. It is very exciting. “All of the really big questions,” as Fukuyama puts it in his preface, “had been settled.” But the problem with such constructs is that they insulate their adherents from empirical reality: since everything unfolds “necessarily” according to a preordained plan, nothing that merely happens in the world can alter the itinerary. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski observed in his book Religion,
Monistic reductions in general anthropology or “historiosophy” are always successful and convincing; a Hegelian, a Freudian, a Marxist, and an Adlerian are, each of them, safe from refutation as long as he is consistently immured in his dogma and does not try to soften it or make concessions to common sense; his explanatory device will work forever.
What one gains is an explanation; what one loses is the truth. There are good reasons–from the rise of multiculturalism to the state once known as Yugoslavia–to believe that what we are witnessing today is not the final consolidation of liberal democracy but the birth of a new tribalism. For those committed to the end of History, however, it’s simply that “the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world.”
Among the unpleasant side effects of adherence to such doctrines is the habit of intellectual arrogance. Hegel offers the supreme case in point. About his “firm and invincible faith that there is Reason in history,” for example, the philosopher assures us that his faith “is not a presupposition of study; it is a result which happens to be known to myself because I already know the whole.” It is cheering to possess knowledge of “the whole,” of course, but a bit daunting for the rest of us. Not surprisingly, such arrogance also expresses itself about competing doctrines. Thus we find Fukuyama, supplementing Hegel with Nietzsche, explaining that “the problem with Christianity . . . is that it remains just another slave ideology, that is, it is untrue in certain crucial respects.” How gratifying to be able to docket the whole of Christianity and file it away as an example of mankind’s spiritual immaturity!
Perhaps the most obvious problem with Hegel’s philosophy of history is that the “necessary” freedom which his system mandates can look a lot like unfreedom to anyone who happens to disagree with its dictates. As the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg observed, “If there were an immanent final goal of history, then those who believe they know it and claim to promote its attainment would be legitimized in using all the others who do not know it . . . as a mere means.” The twentieth century has acquainted us in terrifyingly exquisite detail with what happens when people are treated as “moments” in an impersonal dialectic. We find ourselves in a situation where “real freedom,” as Hegel puts it, demands the “subjugation of mere contingent will.”
It is hardly surprising that Leszek Kolakowski, writing about Hegel in Main Currents of Marxism, should conclude that “in the Hegelian system humanity becomes what it is, or achieves unity with itself, only by ceasing to be humanity.” Once again, the contrast with Christianity is illuminating. The good Christian, too, believes that freedom consists in the “subjugation of mere contingent will.” But he endeavors to act not in accordance with “the Idea” as formulated by a nineteenth-century German philosopher but with God’s will. Moreover, while Hegel insists that with the formulation of his philosophy “the antithesis between the universal and the individual will has been removed,” Christianity has had the good manners to attribute a large dollop of inscrutability to God’s will. By refusing to saddle mankind with “necessary freedom,” Christianity preserves a large domain for the exercise of individual freedom in everyday life.
Fukuyama’s commitment to the Hegelian dialectic leads him to some strange inversions. Early on in his book, he remarks that “it is possible to speak of historical progress only if one knows where mankind is going.” But is this so? Is it not rather that what one needs in order to discern progress is knowledge of where mankind has been, not where it is going? And in any case, whom should we trust to furnish us with accurate reports about where mankind is going? Is G. W. F. Hegel, for all his genius, really a reliable guide? Is Fukuyama? No: history, a humble account of how man has lived and suffered, is what we require to declare progress, not prophecy.
It is important to stress that the issue is not whether mankind has made progress over the millennia. Surely it has. The exact nature and extent of the progress can be measured in any number of ways. The material progress of mankind has been staggering, especially in the last two hundred years. Ditto for mankind’s political progress, despite the tyrannies and despotisms that remain. As Fukuyama points out, in 1790 there were only three liberal democracies in the world: the United States, France, and Switzerland. By 1990 there were sixty-one. That is remarkable progress. But it is also contingent progress, reversible by the same means that accomplished it in the first place: the efforts ofindividual men and women.
Indeed, one of the great casualties of Hegel’s system is the whole realm of individual initiative. Fukuyama has told us that “in the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy,” precisely because at the end of History nothing remains for those disciplines to accomplish. But how often, even before Hegel, has that end been proclaimed. Gilbert Murray, in The Classical Tradition in Poetry, recalled being told that “one of the very earliest poems unearthed in Babylonia contains a lament that all reasonable subjects for literature are already exhausted.” And just about the time Hegel was proclaiming the end of History, we find the French painter EugŠne Delacroix observing that “Those very ones who believe that everything has been said and done, will greet you as new and yet will close the door behind you. And then they will say again that everything has been done and said.”
It is also worth noting, as the philosopher David Stove pointed out in his response to Fukuyama’s original article, that
the mixture which Fukuyama expects to freeze history forever–a combination of Enlightenment values with the free market–is actually one of the most explosive mixtures known to man. Fukuyama thinks that nothing will ever happen again because a mixture like that of petrol, air, and lighted matches is widespread, and spreading wider. Well, Woodrow Wilson thought the same; but it is an odd world view, to say the least.
One of the most serious moral problems with the idea of the end of History is that it implacably transforms everything outside the purview of the theory into a historical “accident” or exception, draining it of moral significance. Hegel’s system tells us what must happen; what actually does happen turns out not to matter much. Fukuyama admits that “we have no guarantees” that the future will not produce more Hitlers or Pol Pots. But in his view, evil, e.g., the evil which produced the Holocaust, “can slow down but not derail the locomotive of History.” More: “At the end of the twentieth century,” he writes, “Hitler and Stalin appear to be bypaths of history that led to dead ends, rather than real alternatives for human social organization.” But what can this mean? The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was the tragedy that sparked Candide, Voltaire’s attack on Leibniz’s dictum that ours was necessarily “the best of all possible worlds.” What philosophical empyrean need one inhabit in order to regard the course of history since 1806 as the reprise of a completed symphony? How far shall we trust a “Universal History” that relegates the conflagrations of two world wars and the unspeakable tyranny of Hitler and Stalin to epiphenomenal “bypaths”? I submit that any theory which regards World War II as a momentary wrinkle on the path of freedom is in need of serious rethinking.
If Fukuyama’s commitment to Hegel is itself problematic, so at times is his interpretation of Hegel’s teaching. For it is not at all clear that Hegel himself was a champion of anything like what we call liberal democracy. Fukuyama complains that people have labeled Hegel “a reactionary apologist for the Prussian monarchy, a forerunner of twentieth-century totalitarianism, and . . . a difficult-to-read metaphysician.” Let’s grant that the bit about totalitarianism is moot. What about the rest? No one is going to give Hegel a prize for limpid prose. Perhaps, as Fukuyama says, Hegel was par excellence the “philosopher of freedom.” Perhaps. Certainly he talked about freedom a great deal. He was fond, for example, of claiming that “the History of the World is nothing other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.” We must of course hope that that notion is a consolation to the multitudes whom the dialectic has consigned to the uncomfortable (but, alas, necessary) role of unfreedom in the lower-case day-to-day history we all merely live through.
But liberal democracy? No doubt it was just one of those lucky strokes of fortune, an example of life imitating art: still, it is remarkable that “the Germanic world” of the nineteenth century should emerge as the political zenith of Hegel’s system, primus inter impares of “those nations on which the world spirit has conferred its true principle.” Mirabile visu, convenience once again jibes seamlessly with necessity. But question: was Hegel’s Prussia, the Prussia of Metternich, of Frederick William III, et al., a “liberal democracy”? Did Hegel believe that it was? Fukuyama is surely correct that to have a liberal democracy, the people must be sovereign. But in The Philosophy of Right Hegel seems to think that the sovereign should be sovereign. “The monarch,” he tells us, is “the absolute apex of an organically developed state,” “the ungrounded self-determination in which finality of decision is rooted,” etc. He says, further, that constitutional monarchy such as we see in . . . oh, well, in nineteenth-century Prussia, for example, is “the achievement of the modern world, a world in which the substantial Idea has won the infinite form.” In other words, Hegel likes it.
Or at least he appears to like it. In a footnote, Fukuyama acknowledges that Hegel overtly supported the Prussian monarchy. He nevertheless maintains that, “far from justifying the Prussian monarchy of his day,” Hegel’s discussion in The Philosophy of Right “can be read as an esoteric critique of actual practice.” Presumably, it is by virtue of some such “esoteric critique” that Hegel, champion of the Prussian state, turns out–truly, essentially–to be an enthuasiast for Kojève’s “universal homogenous state,” a.k.a. liberal democracy. It is nice work if you can get it.
It may also be worth pointing out a curious inconsistency in Fukuyama’s account of the end of History. If, as Hegel’s famous slogan has it, “the real is the rational and the rational is the real,” how are we to understand Fukuyama’s “provisional inconclusiveness”? Indeed, how are we to understand his suggestion that nostalgia, or boredom, or evil might “re-start” history? What, is mere nostalgia a match for the imperatives of History? Can boredom contravene “God’s walk through the world,” as Hegel once described the process of history? If the end of History is a logical and metaphysical necessity, how are we to understand Fukuyama’s hesitations? In fact, his ambivalence contributes greatly to his book’s vividness, for it provides a little space for reality to enter. But considered on his own–i.e., Hegel’s–terms, Fukuyama would seem to be a disappointing dialectician.
It should go without saying that none of these criticisms is meant to deny that the Hegelian system possesses tremendous aesthetic appeal. The panoramic drama of absolute being struggling to achieve perfect self-knowledge in history: it is an imposing tale of a thousand and one nights for the philosophically inclined. The inconvenient question is only whether the story it tells is true. Perhaps, as Kierkegaard suggested, Hegel was a man who had built a palace but lived in the guard house.
Fukuyama’s own addiction to palace building shows itself in a response to critics that he published in the Winter 1989-1990 issue of The National Interest. “In order to refute my hypothesis,” he writes “it is not sufficient to suggest that the future holds in store large and momentous events. One would have to show that these events were driven by a systematic idea of political and social justice that claimed to supersede liberalism.” But this would be the case only if one grants Fukuyama’s premise–that we are in possession of a “systematic idea of political and social justice.” In fact, it may be that what we need is not a better theory but less theory. In current issue of The Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan, with explicit reference to Fukuyama, wonders whether “Russia’s invasion of Georgia will finally end the dreamy complacency that took hold of the world’s democracies after the close of the Cold War.” Maybe so. More and more, at any rate, Shakespeare’s famous imperative in A Winter’s Tale, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” seems the pertinent stage direction.
silliest argument
Anything by Edward Said, but, particuarly that there is such as thing as Orientalism.
The point was that there was really no systems of belief (thesis)that would develop in the new era. Russian nationalism, like that exhibited in the Crimean War, or in the period of Ivan the Terrible; although Catherine the Great, and several of the Alexanders, exhibited similar systems) is a close analogue of what we see today under Putin. Wahhabism and Deobandism, where common long before the Russian revolution.
And there are still some Marxist holdouts (notably N. Korea, and seemingly Chavez)
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and its academic champions (such as that professor in Australia you wrote about sometime in the past year whose name I cannot remember).
Diversity.
As in “we value diversity in our student body.” One major ivy-league university (Cornell), for example, states that it “is committed to extending its legacy recruiting a heterogeneous faculty, student body and staff; fostering a climate that doesn’t just tolerate differences but treasures them [etc.]” You cannot now find a university that isn’t constantly and loudly devoted to diversity.
However, we can be sure that by this they do not—and should not—mean intellectual diversity. This should be obvious. For if we merely wanted to increase intellectual diversity, we would create classes and recruit subject matter experts in “How to Murder”, “Advanced Pedophilia”, “Creative Robbery”, “Marxist Theory”, or similar idiocies. You often hear conservatives ask to increase intellectual diversity on campuses; conservatives are arguing poorly, because they really mean they want to increase conservative thought.
Diversity, then, cannot mean intellectual diversity. There are other possibilities, such as proportional representation in sex, religion, country of origin and so on, but these are unlikely candidates because women are usually at least the same, if not a larger percentage, of the student population, and religion and country don’t elicit consistent interest. This leaves skin color (race), and possibly “sexual orientation”.
Therefore, to “increase diversity” usually means to “without regard to merit, forcibly manipulate the ratios of student/faculty skin colors so that it matches that of an (unstated) specific goal.” Of course, this implies quotas, which is to say, legalized discrimination based on skin color.
To: Mr. W. Briggs:
I personally like – and have profited – from “diversity”. I like it because it automatically lowers standards across the board.
For me, this means that I don’t have to exert myself nearly as much as I would, should only merit count. In other words, my ivy league university education, sterling grades, full scholarships, first few jobs and so on were largely the result of the ineptness and bumpkin backgrounds of others. Frankly, it was like taking candy from a baby.
And I have ridden roughshod on the back of the cornucopia of diversity well into adulthood.
On my resume, for example, I make it very plain that one of my “strong” points is that I can not only READ but can also actually WRITE a clear sentence without spelling or other errors. Not only that, I can structure a coherent PARAGRAPH with ease! To many employers, this is quite an accomplishment worthy of praise and raises.
Victimhood, the latest allomorph of the philosophy of disenchantment and marginalization, came a little late for me to benefit fully from. But I’m working on it.
They say that you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip. But given the right circumstances (and frame of mind), you actually can.
I have to vote for Fukuyama. At the time I thought the end of history was astonishingly naive, if not willfully stupid. I especially appreciated how he appropriated Marx’s interpretation of Hegel, in that the dialectic would come to a screeching halt as soon as The Perfect System had arrived on scene. To Marx the arrival of Communism was the end of history.
When I first read Marx, I immediately doubted that the thesis+antithesis=synthesis cycle was fixed to inevitable forward progress. I considered it quite possible, if not likely, that there could be retrograde movement in the wake of a cataclysmic event, or simply due to stressful historical conditions. Post Soviet Russia, for example, does not appear to have moved one whit towards a more free system. In fact, any movement they have made is backwards, and their synthesis appears to be a combination of Soviet brutal lawlessness and Tsarist autocracy.
When I first saw the sixth Star Trek film, The Undiscovered Country, I laughed in the theater at Captain Kirk’s dismissal of “the end of history.” I thought if even that persistently goofy optimist Gene Roddenberry was mocking Fukuyama, then he’d gone very wrong somewhere. In any event, at this particular point in history, I think it’d be a kindness to enroll Fukuyama in the Witness Protection Program.
It’s a tough choice between “The End of History” and “Anthropogenic Global Warming”. I’ll go with Fukuyama’s thesis, since even when he presented it it was clearly false.
Even when Fukuyama wrote his thesis it was contradicted by the radical Islam of the Iranian mullahs, who advocated an ideology that presented a radically different view of justice and future progress than that of liberal democracy. Since then further varieties of Islamism have risen to prominence making the same claims. With the beneficiaries of liberal democracy losing confidence in their own civilization and its ideals there is the real possibility that it will be replaced by something else. The next “End of History” could be the end of liberal democracy.
And why should civilization not go backwards at times? We have evidence in the historical and archaeological records for at least two such episodes over a period of two millenia, at the end of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean and Southwest Asia and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Mr Kievalar,
You have me there. Which leads me to think I should have subsumed “Diversity” into its main category of “Moral Equivalence.” This is the ridiculous idea that all ideas are ethically commutable.
“Multiculturalism” falls under this umbrella, as does “Diversity”, and also the idiotic notion that “there are many ways of knowing.”
Multiculturalism is just as bizarre as Diversity. I have often thought it would be instructive to set up a “Multiculturalism Booth” at a college fair. Participants would take part in common rituals of many different cultures. For example, there would be the stoning of homosexuals, the honorable murder of raped women, the clitorectomy ring toss, a foot race whereby the losers are killed and eaten, and so on. Naturally, the booth’s staff will be equipped with native costumes and pamphlets describing the history and cultural relevance of each topic. This is meant to be educational, after all. At the end of the day, those that survived would be given a survey asking their opinion on the importance of multiculturalism.
How many participants would finally admit that all cultures are not equal, that some are better than others?
My entry:
http://neveryetmelted.com/index.php/silliest-argument-contest/
Cheers,
David
How about:
“The Living Constitution”
Completely illogical, yet somehow taken seriously in law schools everywhere.
If Fukuyama was on the Hegel train and believed that liberal democracy was the last stop then we can all ignore the beggars, muggers, and graffiti until our stop.
According to Islamic tradition – which means according to Islamic belief and therefore NOT open to discussion – the End of History actually occurred in 622 AD, the date marking the beginning of the Islamic calendar in which the Prophet Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina – the so-called Hijra, variously spelled and properly translated as the “Emigration” not the “Flight”.
NB: calling this date the “flight” is an example of “Orientalism”, whereby an Islamic event is given a derogatory slant, in this case, a derogatory definition.
NB: calling this date the “emigration” is an example of the Islamic tendency to laud and acclaim an event regardless of how prosaic or even contrary to fact it might really be.
In other words, according to the Islamic tradition, the End of History took place over 1300 years ago.
Moslems believe that the seminal event in the history of humankind was the coming and establishment of Islam. Everything after that was of no consequence, was derivative or was already foretold.
It is Hegel’s March of History brought to a screeching halt a thousand years before Hegel was born.
Thus, for example, you get Moslem PhDs from MIT in Quantum Mechanics, who in their heart of hearts, sincerely believe that the formula E=mc2 can really be found in the Koran——-if you just knew where to look and how to interpret what the text really says (the good ol’ “you just don’t understand” thesis).
That is to say, all scientific discoveries of the last 2 centuries, any progress of any kind in the physical world of ours and so on, has already been presented to the world if only in basic outline form within the context of Islam.
What’s difficult for Westerners to grasp is that Moslems REALLY believe this…..this is not just a flight of fancy which occurs during the fasting period of Ramadan or some such in which the mind goes into a spiritual and not-of-this-world mode.
Compared to all this, Fukuyama’s End of History is really small potatoes.
To me, what was interesting about Fukuyama’s thesis is that he was a State Department employee….that is to say, he was presumably up to date on international issues and so on.
That he could have been ignorant about what over a billion people in the world believe, in a historical sense, and to have the audacity to completely disregard this point of view, is a chilling reminder how inept Foggy Bottom (The US State Dept…i.e….the Foreign Service) has really become in the last 30 years or so.
One might even go so far as to say that the world-wide publicity Fukuyama’s theory garnered was a factor, however distant and tenuous, in laying the groundwork for the events that occurred on 9/11.
I nominate Noam Chomsky’s utterly unfalsifiable theories regarding (psycho)linguistics. I don’t dare to mention his political ideas, because like most views on politics, the falsifiability is not really an issue, but in my humble opinion he has really shown that he’s mad as a hatter!
I nominate Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, propounded in his 1983 book Frames of Mind (barely making the cutoff!).
So far as I can tell, this theory has been uncritically adopted everywhere in the world of education (at least in the US) and has had exactly the pernicious effects one could have predicted a quarter-century ago.
It is simply not the case that abstract intelligence (what Gardner calls logical-mathematical and/or verbal-linguistic) is in any way the same as bodily-kinesthetic ‘intelligence.’
What Gardner ‘discovered’ was that people are different — something I learned at my mother’s knee well before 1983. He did, however, help greatly in the formulation of Bartlett’s Law of Education Research:
All results of research by educationists are either obvious or wrong.
I loved Fukuyama’s book and, for me at least, it was transformational. (I was 25 when it came out, in 1991.) Don’t forget, the title was “The End of History AND THE LAST MAN.” Fukuyama was largely concerned with the implications of the end of history thesis on INDIVIDUALS, and how they lived their lives. Like Nietzsche (who first presented the “last man” concept), Fukuyama was concerned that a too-easy life could eat away at human character. Much of his book — especially the last 35 pages, which I found to be the most interesting — is a discussion of the problem of HOW TO LIVE in a world full of boring, unchallenging democracies. As Roger notes, Fukuyama very clearly stated that men may get tired of a world of peace and choose to “re-start” history. Bottom line: while the cyclical theory of history may ultimately make more sense, Fukuyama’s argument and his book were anything but silly.
There will never be an “end of history” because of one big thing… the bell curve. There will forever be some on one side ready willing and able to exploit those on the other.
Which bell curve, you ask? economic, intelligence, geographic, education… pick one or more.
I would like to nominate the cult of “Brain Based Learning”, the latest cult fad to hit the schools and trivialize the education of American children, waste the time and money of taxpayers and destroy the futures of otherwise bright and capable children. New Age pop psychology meets pedagogy and no ones left in the education establishment to defend learning. Robert Borks comments years ago about the effects of the academy on the quality of the culture were indeed prescient. The public schools and colleges of “education” of this nation are the the repository of the Pied Pipers leading the children of this nation to Gomorrah.
Yours is the best refutation of Fukuyama’s fantasy that I have read. When he initially released his treatise, my initial reaction was very base: What kink of fool wrote this drivel?
The intervening years have not caused me to reconsider my gut instinct on this; and, I have looked at most of his subsequent writings with extreme skepticism.
Why is it that academe seems to be driven by “the greater fool theory”? Have they become so insular that they are incapable of actual thought and reason?
While Mr. Fukuyama’s thesis was undeniably naive and an overly optimistic reading of tea leaves, I don’t see how it could possibly compare to the unbelievably dangerous, misguided and fraudulent hoax known as global warming. While Mr. Fukuyama’s analysis may have been subsequently vetoed by the unfolding of events, how can that compare to the massive scam being deliberately perpetrated on free societies by the likes of Al Gore and the global warming mob? One is incorrect wishful thinking. The other is a crime.
As Glenn Reynolds referred to him, the
reliably wrong James Carroll for my minor
nominee.
I’m rather fond of Anthony Cordesman’s “Buffy Paradigm” paper, but more because it’s a hoot to picture Cordesman sitting down to watch “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” than because of its impact on the world.
Paper available from CSIS here: Biological Warfare and the “Buffy Paradigm” http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/buffy012902%5B1%5D.pdf
As for a major nominee, Paul Kennedy’s GREAT POWERS book – although one wonders if its theory of overstretch for the USA was merely a mild warning which was then taken by reviewers for a klaxon.
It worth noting that Fukuyama spent a chapter or two of his book exploring how history could ‘re-start’, even after its ‘end’. That is, he postulated that people in modern democracies could grow bored with the peace and prosperity of their systems, and eagerly efface them in order to satisfy their thymotic desires.
Anyway, Fukuyama’s favor for the speculative metaphysics of Hegel and the quasi-Hegelian Kojeve were very strange. Hegel was fundamentally a spiritualist—the ‘real is the rational and the rational is the real’ because history was supposed to be the dialectical thought process of some vast supernatural entity, of which humans were mere sub-units.
If it weren’t outside of 25 years alrady, I would have nominated John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice for fashionable silly book.
I would like to put up Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction” that, by his own admission, could not be defined, since the very act of defining would destroy the its meaning.
I thought you said “serious academic”! — Al Gore??? Well, I suppose he does represent the voices of Real Scientists Everywhere, so maybe that counts.
But if the category is indeed elastic, then maybe we could entertain the racial theory of musical style, plus the Jesus-was-a-black-man claims, of renowned theologian and musicologist the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright.
Then there’s the idea that the Anbar Awakening occurred because the Democrats took over Congress — an idea so stupid it MUST have been treated with deference among polistical science professors everywhere.
How about the notion that Islam is a religion of peace?
How about George Lackof’s “Framing” arguement.
Dear Mr. Kimball: Inominate Alan Sokal’s essay, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” He sent it to the notorious quack Stanley Fish, who swallwed it, cork, bottle, and wrapper and published it in Fish’s journal SOCIAL TEXT, solemnly nodding inagreement. Trouble was, Sokal made it up, conning Fish beautifully. Once exposed, Fish bawled that Sokal had committed a heinous academic crime, breaching the socially constructed trust. Not a syllable about Fish’s own 200 proof fraud, laced with LSD. Fish continued at Duke University, inoculating students and faculty alike with his poisonous hokum, building a dangerous machine that finally tried to crucify the lacrosse players, and damn near succeeded.
Sokal’s article is a gem all by itself, but by exposing the fraudulence that is characteristic of today’s academy, did a great public service. So why nominate it for the worst category? Because the hoax failed miserably. After some scattered hoots and jeers at Fish for his witlessness and gullibility, the academy marched along, trampling wisdom underfoot. The emperor had no clothes, everyone admitted it—and marched along in the procession.
A fair roundup of the hoax and its aftermath is here:
http://www.math.tohoku.ac.jp/~kuroki/Sokal/
Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster
Since when is Al Gore a serious academic?
Dear Mr. Kimball:
What’s the point of announcing a contest if you immediately fire the Big Bertha at all prospective contestants? Of course it must be the “End of History”.
The euphoria of 1989 provided the perfect setting for Fukuyama’s seductive idea but he may not have published his piece had he not disregarded a great American philosopher’s postulate:
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”
The problem is in part that Mr. Kimball and Mr. Fukuyama are at different points in the script. Mr. Kimball tarries at “Exit, pursued by a bear” Mr. Fukuyama starts at “Enter and Old Shepard,” the immediately following stage direction.
Although, I’ll grant that “The End of History?” has certainly proved to be rather a winter’s tale.
If you hadn’t cut the argument off at 25 years, I’d say Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” (1968) and its sequels. It was the book (and movement) that gave the Global Warming enthusiasts their blueprint.
Crazy predictions like this: “… at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death…”, “By 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million.”, “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” He lost that one, he also lost the bet with Julian Simon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager). Matter of fact, he lost every one. Every disaster he predicted failed to occur.
Ehrlich was/is a serious academic, but not on populaion control. He’s an entomologist specializing in lepidoptera. I think we know where the butterflies were hiding.
Whats really scarey is he has parleyed this “perfect score” into a job. He’s currently President of the Center for Conservation Biology and Bing Professor of Population Studies, both at Stanford. These are supposed to be directed towards butterflies, but according to his Stanford web-page “The Ehrlich group’s policy research on the population-resource-environment crisis takes a broad overview of the world situation…” It’s unfortunate he didn’t stick to something he understands, like butterflies.
The efficient market hypothesis.
Evidence available real time at CNBC.
History actually ended 1400 years ago. We just don’t know it yet.
A bracing romp through some notions that have really messed up the world. I’m surprised that five star restaurant at the end of History wasn’t mentioned – that is Marx’s stateless paradise. At least it promised to be good clean fun. Now all we have to look forward to is everything turning into foul smelling, warmish goo on the rubbish tip of History.
Fukuyama: “In order to refute my hypothesis it is not sufficient to suggest that the future holds in store large and momentous events. One would have to show that these events were driven by a systematic idea of political and social justice that claimed to supersede liberalism.”
Scene: Putin, paraphrasing Stalin; “How many divisions does liberalism have?”
Just try to conceive of Fukuyama as an “intellect” and ask yourself whether he ever imagined a “systemic idea” that did not *concern* itself with “justice” at all. Try it.
I think Fukuyama wins The Challenge hands-down.
Gregory Koster picks the bullet instead of the target. Sokal’s essay was the bullet that hit the target of postmodernism, which has espoused the silliest of theories. They are really too numerous to mention, but just think of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and their ilk.
One of my favorite examples of postmodernist drivel is one Luce Irigaray, herself a generator of lunacies too numerous to mention:
“Luce Irigaray
The phallogocentric system generates many binary oppositions; one of which is:
penis/vagina/nothing/clitoris/labia
In this binary, the penis is privileged over both zero and multiples.” …..
She’s considered a “serious academic” in postmodern circles.
Another howler:
“Is E=Mc² a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us.”
How about Michael B. Stupid, and his book Arming America? He should be good enough for at least second place.
Cross-posted in comments at William Briggs:
I’m going to offer you “The Tragedy of the Commons”, by Garrett Hardin.
Published in 1968, this article generated, and yet generates, extreme forms of breathing when confronted as prattle.
One of the crazy assumption posited? “(T)he important concept of a class of human problems which can be called ‘no technical solution problems,’ and, more specifically, with the identification and discussion of one of these.”
The next statement? “It is easy to show that the class in not a null class.”
Of course, more compelling, is the final paragraph of his conclusion:
“the only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. ‘Freedom is the recongition of necessity’–and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessityh of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.”
I’ve posted links to this tripe in this article:
http://tinyurl.com/5pcbmb
Let me know what I have won!
Unfortunately, the world of “serious” academics is opaque to most of the rest of us, more to be stumbled upon individually than collectively, from time to time, in the course of general exploration. As a number of the comments suggest, the real challenge for us outsiders is rather the reverse of yours. It consists of trying to identify both the source of ideas that seem unsupportable, if not laughable, in actual practice and the means by which they are nevertheless translated into conventional wisdom.
Where Fukuyama, not your challenge, is concerned, Thomas Kuhn springs immediately to mind. Our instinctual search for unified fields knows few academic or even human, boundaries, from physics to the “systematic idea of political and social justice.” The emphasis on systematic can, indeed, be an obstacle to understanding rather than the reverse — superstition once sufficed. As does the history of science, the history of history presents us with a succession of comprehensive theories which, one after another, are felled (as you suggest) by the cumulative weight of exceptions, to be replaced by a new, improved, more comprehensive theory, in what is usually described as revolutionary fashion. Whether academically or actually, those with a vested interest in the old theory must be defeated for a new paradigm to take hold.
Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, which seems broadly applicable to me, is susceptible to its own thesis, of course, but it provides an interesting perspective on Fukuyama’s endeavor. It is not surprising that history takes on its own being, as an entity with its own imperatives when so much of academic endeavor is directed at uncovering a systematic replacement for God. While the superiority of the rational over the inspirational has gained a solid foothold, Fukuyama is less persuasive.
So long as theorists deny, rather than incorporate, the spiritual (not necessarily religious) side of the human equation, that general revolution will never be completed. The ability to imagine something which has yet to be, or cannot be, observed is, in truth, a strength, not a weakness. It is not only the foundation of the arts which both entertain and edify, it is the foundation of scientific (and political!) progress toward an endstate which, itself, can only be imagined. That state might, conceivably, not be better than the status quo, seems self-evident, especially, and ironically, if we are but cogs in an existential wheel of a god-like History whose designs are not yet entirely clear.
Peak Oil – The Hirsch Report by Robert Hirsch
The concept that world oil peaking is going to happen, and it will be abrupt and revolutionary.
Main point is, history – beginning, middle & end – is not made by fey academics fighting politely in journals, it’s made by big strong men shooting guns and trying to kill each other any way they can.
Paul Kennedy’s imperial overstretch is my sentimental favorite.
But one also has to consider Thomas Friedman’s Lexus and the Olive Tree (or actually anything by him)and John Arquilla’s and David Ronfeldt’s Netwar. Just because something is new to them doesn’t mean it is new…
Len Frankel:
> Main point is, history – beginning, middle & end
> – is not made by fey academics fighting politely
> in journals, it’s made by big strong men shooting
> guns and trying to kill each other any way they can.
Exactly.
“Deeds, not words.”
http://www.filibustercartoons.com/comics/20070605.gif
I’ve just finished, this month, reading the 2006 edition of “End of History.” I found it engaging and thoughtful. Was it a guide to future behavior, that is, did it have pragmatic use in the real world? I’d say no, except to beguile drunks at cocktail parties.
When reading it two ideas crossed my mind. Hasn’t the good professor ever heard of sex? Isn’t it a powerful temptation for all men to acquire harems and all women to flock to men with power and resources? Who really listens to philosphers when there are fertile women to be had? Human, oh so human.
Second, his writing of Nietzsche’s “men with no chests” IMMEDIATELY brought to mind a novel from 1932 – Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
I will definitely grant Fukuyama one point – no one today seriously advocates in public an alternative to liberal democracy – except the fundamentalist Muslims. Even Putin makes a public display of it.
Any thoughts on Malcolm Gladwell?
The most disturbing about this debate? That the “Hegel” everyone (including Fukuyama and Kimball) keeps talking about is largely a fiction concocted second- or third-hand from later sources, mainly Marx and Popper.
In his mature works, Hegel never made predictions about the future and renounced making such predictions. He saw the philosopher of history as understanding the present in terms of the past. When his Philosophy of History was published in the 1830s, based on his teaching notes, he had seen where the modern world was headed. Tocqueville saw the same thing less than a decade later. Fifty years later, Nietzsche saw the same thing. What’s so objectionable about Hegel’s view?
When Hegel used the term “Germanisch,” he meant roughly “modern Western.” There was no good term at the time in German to mean what he meant, which was the collection of post-Roman barbarian peoples who made modern Europe (as distinct from classical antiquity). If Hegel had meant *Germans* (the country known then and now as Germany), he would have used “Deutsch.” In fact, he carefully distinguished the two.
Anyone who’s read any Hegel at all knows that he saw the development of “liberal” regimes as the tendency of modernity. (His actual term is “Rechtstaat,” or roughly, “rule-of-law state,” not precisely the same as democracy.) He plainly viewed the semi-liberal regimes of western Europe and north America as the paradigm, *not* Prussia, and he says or implies it repeatedly. (Saying it out loud in Europe after 1815 might have caused more trouble than it was worth — later Hegel was teaching in a period of reaction and quietism.) Hegel was mainly talking about the Western world, and he says so. He has little to say about the non-Western world, as he viewed the course of history as unilinear. He has been fairly criticized for this, even at the time.
Finally, while eschewing historical prophecy (contrary to the ingrained legend), Hegel did have negative forbodings about modern Europe’s ultimate fate. When he talks about an “end of history,” *this* is what he had in mind. He saw the Americas as the new world and, in all probability, the historical successor to Europe. The “young Hegelians” (Marx among them) reacted strongly to Hegel’s tentative pessimism and developed utopian theories of history and political programs to fit. There is where you’ll find the origin of the popular “Hegel myth.”
It’s depressing to see debates like this carried on at such a dumb level, with discredited and tendentious secondary sources as the starting point. What makes it inexcusable is that Hegel’s later works (lecture and teaching notes from his classes) are generally clear and available in decent 19th and 20th century English translations. There’s no excuse for relying on the garbled legend transmitted by Marx, Popper, and others.
Choices seem balanced between the optimistic — End of History — and pessimistic — Peak Oil, Population Bomb, and so on.
On the optimistic side, I nominate “Singularity” — the notion that technological progress is accelerating and that some time within the life time of many of us here, we will reach this kind of Star Trek utopia of mastery of matter and energy through the Warp Drive, Transporter, and Replicator that will mark the end of Capitalistic striving because there will be complete freedom from want.
I am talking about people who take nanotechnology seriously in the form of Drexler’s Assemblers (the Star Trek Replicator I was talking about).
Mr. Milenkovic -
On the optimistic side, I nominate “Singularity” — the notion that technological progress is accelerating and that some time within the life time of many of us here, we will reach this kind of Star Trek utopia of mastery of matter and energy through the Warp Drive, Transporter, and Replicator that will mark the end of Capitalistic striving because there will be complete freedom from want.” Erm, you got the first part right: Kurzweil, Bill Joy et al do indeed argue that technological progress is accelerating, in the basic fashion of Moore’s Law.
The utopia thing is off the mark, or at least unduly selective in its targets. The major voices talking about accelerating technological progress are split on whether it’s a good thing at all. Certainly Bill Joy isn’t wild about the idea. Eliezer Yudkowsky is quite openly worried about the major risks involved. Inevitably some people ignore the good or the bad aspects of it, but even notable optimist Kurzweil gives his critics plenty of space in his own books, and responds to their criticism in detail.
So, why don’t you think technological progress is accelerating? Or do you have good reason to believe that this acceleration will slow/stop/reverse in the future? Or are you just irritated at the utopian strain?
Getting out of our backyard for a moment, for me the silliest argument of the last 25 years was the witch-hunt conducted by academics in Denmark against Bjorn Lomborg for having the temerity to acknowledge the blindingly obvious (i.e. that in many ways the state of the environment has improved over the last several decades), and to do so with copious evidence.
The argument against Lomborg could only be carried out in bad faith. It’s disgraceful that the argument appealed to so many academics.
1) Chomsky and Said were both before 1978.
2) I disagree that Fukuyama’s propositions is or was silly. Since the collapse of the USSR, no alternative to liberal democracy is put forward anywhere. There are conflicts, but they are between liberal democracy and plain old corruption and tyranny masquerading as liberal democracy (with the limited exception of Islamic fundamentalism).
3) It may seem cavalier to dismiss fascism and Communism as mere distractions, or World War II as a momentary eddy in the current of liberal democracy. But the fact is that fascism started in 1920, and by 1945 was completely destroyed, without any major impact on the world outside Europe. (Japanese imperialism was a separate phenomenon, and was even in World War II regarded as a lesser threat to be dealt with later. Nor did it ever command material resources comparable to the U.S., the USSR, or the British Empire.) Communism was a more serious challenge; but its limits were shown in the 1930s, when even in the depths of the Depression, not one country adopted Communism, and Communism was a fringe movement in all but a few.
Now if one wants a genuinely silly idea, I would propose the “Black Athena” thesis of Martin Bernal and other
Afrocentric scholars, which has the advantage of being constructed of falsehoods from the beginning.
I don’t know if she is considered to be a serious academic, but I am intrigued by Tal Nitzan’s revelation that Israeli troops don’t rape Palestinian women because they’re racist.
“In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences – just as organized military rape would have done.”
And I believe that her faculty advisor was recently charged with rape. If guilty, he probably had a good ideological reason.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124674
I Need Elbow Room for this Brainstorm
This effort is a response to the charge to single out the silliest argument in the last 25 or so years from an academic that has reverberated in the larger intellectual world. For this accolade I choose body of work from one Daniel Dennett, distinguished author of Brainstorms, Elbow Room, Consciousness Explained, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Freedom Evolves, and Breaking the Spell. One can construe my comments to apply mostly to the Darwin tome, though it is the common theme among the works that will be the focus of my observations.
And that theme is Dennett’s unabashed scientism. This term can be seen through the newly pressed volume entitled “How Successful is Naturalism” (Georg Gasser, ed., 2007) in which two forms of naturalism are discussed and dissected. The first, let’s call it “hard naturalism” is the worldview: that only material things exist and these can only be known by scientific methods; that there is no such thing as freedom, consciousness, first person experience, or anything transcendental because only the real is real; and that humanism is swallowed up by reduction to scientific objectivity and its naturalistic ethics. This is scientism—it is the be all and end all—a metaphysic, a closed system of known truth of everything and it is self-justifying. In contrast there is a version of naturalism, let’s call it “soft naturalism” which holds that science is not self-justifying because its grounding insights and precepts are philosophical (i.e., not subject to scientific verification); is not the basis for total human self-understanding; does not reduce first person experience to third person accounts. This form of naturalism is open-ended, fallible, and its metaphysical foundations are subject to constant revision. This second approach will be the implicit framework of the following criticisms. In other words, I will hold to this form of naturalism while criticizing its reified cousin.
However, rather than criticizing Dennett from this foreign viewpoint, I will engage in what philosophers used to call “immanent critique” which, after the French invasion, is now termed “deconstruction”. That is, I will try to show that this view comes apart at the seams because it is internally incoherent and its worldview ends up being just one more tired dogmatism.
The first hurdle that hard naturalists like Dennett must overcome is what Jurgen Habermas tirelessly points out about a host of metaphysical beliefs: they are performative contradictions—that is, the claim that science is the source of all truth and meaning cannot itself be verified according to the methods of science because it is an assumption of the practice of science. Thus the very raison d’etre of the enterprise of science is itself not scientific, but philosophical.
Second, Dennett’s claim that evolution, that dangerous idea, is the only possible explanation for the world as we know it is circular because only empirical evidence can establish anything about the world. But evidentialism is not the standard for all of science. Mathematical string theory may never be verified, nor will the contents, if any, of black holes. And, again, the principle of verification is not established by verification, rather it is a pragmatic position of scientists who do science. It is a precept, just like Occam’s Razor, of the conduct of science.
Given these arguments, and others, one begins to see a picture of scientism as a metaphysical just so story. A through analysis of the substantive and methodological foundations of science will show that they are fanciful creations. They are, as Kolakowski argued, mythic or mythopoetical creations They are aesthetic objects for they reflect an aesthetic stance–the products of the human mind as nurtured within its cultural context. As stories, they can be supported by empirical evidence and inference to a point as well as by good and cogent reasons. Above all, however, they are supported by the feelings—some known and some less so–that invariably accompanies these ideas and gives them their valence. For if we did not care about them,if they had no import, why would we bother talking about them? It is this sensuousness and the creative nature of the judgments that posit these norms that determines their mythical nature.
The dangerous idea then is not Darwin’s but of Dennett the scientismist, who mystifies and transmutes science into an untenable scientism. Yet the reach of these tales, as seen in the works of Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens, is considerable. Scientism is not nor will it ever be the moral equivalent for an enchanted worldview because its story of the reduction of everything human to scientific evidence and its objectification of human subjectivity is but a story full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Here’s a relatively minor but concrete silliness, but one that continues to do fundamental economic and political damage to Western economies – “negawatts.”
Proposed by Amory Lovins of “Soft Energy Paths” fame, it posits that saving energy is more valuable than making energy and our financial systems should reward the “producers” of negawatts with real cash. This concept fuels large cash transfers from taxpayers and utility ratepayers to subsidize energy conservation implementation.
The problem is that negawats have no accounting constraint. Negawatts are purely intention and of that, there is an infinite supply. Hence, it is ripe for rip-off. Even the National Academy of Sciences admits that there is no reliable way to measure negawatts and hence any rewards are without firm basis. Enron pulled a few good negawatt plays off Californians during their 2001 electricity crisis and picked up a few million in return, all from strictly paper plays.
Said’s ‘Orientalism” was published in 1978, which is 30 years ago, but, the noxious odors have not abated in all that time. In fact, they infect just about all Middle East Studies departments rendering them useless, at best, in our fight against Islamo-facism.
When Roger Kimball is pessimistic, which is most of time, he writes very well. But when he is in his optimistic free market mood he doesn’t write very well and contradicts himself.
Here and in the earlier article on “decline-ism” he seems to adopt the Whig interpretation of history. Every day and in every way we’re getting better and better. Sounding much like Barack Hussein Obama in fact. This is the familiar line of Reason Magazine and the irrational cult of “Dynamism”, perpetrated by Virgina Postrel.
This is completely incompatible with conservatism and is a fault in Roger Kimball’s thinking and writing. The Closing of the American Mind is surely a work of “decline-ism”.
Reason Magazine by the way receives government funding so it is socialist as well.
Roger has prepared a fine buffet, but then as chef de cuisine has himself consumed the choicest victuals, in choosing Fukiyama’s work, before allowing the rest of us to come to the table. Nevertheless, I shall propose a work that is as long and as little infused with skepticism as is Fukiyama’s. I refer to “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, a MacArthur Fellow and Professor of Geography at UCLA. In a short prologue, entitled “Yali’s Question”, Diamond recounts a conversation he had with an interlocutor, one Yali, while doing field work in Papua, New Guinea. At length Yali asks him “Why is it that you white people have developed so much cargo, and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” In the ensuing 400 plus pages, Prof. Diamond proceeds, with Hegelian modesty, to explain to us why the world is the way it is. He reformulates the question in the best current academic style as “Why did wealth and power become distributed as they are, and not some other way? For instance, why weren’t native Americans, Africans, and aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated Europeans and Asians?” (Don’t say you weren’t warned)
In all cases it comes down to something like this, But for contingencies such as a better spear point here or a hardier strain of cereals there, the Tierra del Fuegans might have swept through a continent much as King Cyrus’s legions overwhelmed western Asia in the sixth century B. C. The book is filled with much learning and factual information and worth reading for that alone. His theories have the virtue of being irrefutable much as the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli once described the work of a colleague , “It is not even wrong”
Significantly, he does not seem to ask himself questions like “How did it come about that the Tierra del Fuegans (or the aborigines or the tribes of New Guinea) and not the Sioux or the Iroguois become confined to one of those places, of all the Earth, most inhospitable to human habitation? It is also probably not necessary to add that superior organization, leadership, and technological innovation, don’t seem to have played much of a part.