My final work project for the year has begun in earnest and while fun, it's fairly intense. Lots of reading to catch up on, and I have to put aside my usual genres of fantasy and horror in order to read all these sober and solemn papers. Eeeps.
Anyway, I was reading up essays for work, and up popped the name Francis Fukuyama. Then I found Louis Menand's opinion in The New Yorker's September 3 2018 issue and couldn't stop laughing at his thoughts in his article, 'Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History'.
All of us who majored in political science would have taken a private stance when it comes to Francis Fukuyama's postulation(s) in his 'The End of History and the Last Man' (1992). The lecturer/author/political scientist put forth the eventual global triumph of political and economic liberalism. Well. Africa in the nineties was madness. Helloooo, China? I read it in 2000 at 22 years old, and thought the book gave rather sketchy theories and held premature ideas. But I suppose when you write political theories and assumptions towards the end of the dramatic Cold War era, looking only at Europe and America, it kinda turns out like that because one can't predict the future.
Twenty-nine years later, it seems that the realists haven’t gone anywhere, and that history has a few more tricks up its sleeve. It turns out that liberal democracy and free trade may actually be rather fragile achievements. (Consumerism appears safe for now.) There is something out there that doesn’t like liberalism, and is making trouble for the survival of its institutions.
Francis Fukuyama couldn't have predicted a shift of world politics either. Liberal democracy is something to aspire to for many political parties pre-1989, even for people in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Today, while it's an aspirational model still, other political models have largely critiqued it, and it's a painful model to study in 2018. Look at America's political winds that plonked a largely Conservative Republican on the world's stage who seems pretty enamored with non liberal democratic practices. Then Brexit, then dunno what else there might be to come.
To that, I'm really not sure if I want to read his upcoming new book, 'Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment' (September 2018). The article mentioned that "The desire for recognition, Fukuyama argues, is an essential threat to liberalism." Francis Fukuyama's new book is a discourse on identity politics. He has a name for this desire of recognition- thymos.
He says that thymos is “a universal aspect of human nature that has always existed.” In the Republic, thymos is distinct from the two other parts of the soul that Socrates names: reason and appetite. Appetites we share with animals; reason is what makes us human. Thymos is in between.
Okay, to be very honest, I kinda share the view and theories of Samuel Huntington, since my old university thesis (It allowed me to graduate with honors, thanks to the real work that had to be done for it) totally referenced the hypothesis in 'The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World' (1996). Of course Samuel Huntington has his detractors as well, and it's hard to argue the destruction of civilizations when people are turning on their own uhhh species. Francis Fukuyama spent all his academic career combating the theory.
Louis Menand's final two paragraphs sum it up his thoughts, of which I rather agree with, since world politics and the wishes of a people can never be categorized neatly.
Wouldn’t it be important to distinguish people who ultimately don’t want differences to matter, like the people involved in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, from people who ultimately do want them to matter, like isis militants, Brexit voters, or separatist nationalists? And what about people who are neither Mexican nor immigrants and who feel indignation at the treatment of Mexican immigrants? Black Americans risked their lives for civil rights, but so did white Americans. How would Socrates classify that behavior? Borrowed thymos?
It might also be good to replace the linear “if present trends continue” conception of history as a steady progression toward some stable state with the dialectical conception of history that Hegel and Kojève in fact used. Present trends don’t continue. They produce backlashes and reshufflings of the social deck. The identities that people embrace today are the identities their children will want to escape from tomorrow. History is somersaults all the way to the end. That’s why it’s so hard to write, and so hard to predict. Unless you’re lucky.
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