[lit-ideas] Fukuyama and the end of history again
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: polidea@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:07:07 -0700 (PDT)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HD12Aa01.html
SPEAKING FREELY
Francis Fukuyama's about-face
By C Mott Woolley
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that
allows guest writers to have their say. Please click
here if you are interested in contributing.
In evaluating Francis Fukuyama's criticism of the US
effort in Iraq, it may be worthwhile to see what in
his earlier work has brought him to make this
about-face. In The End of History and the Last Man
(1992), Fukuyama asks: Is there some simple reason as
to how and why history unfolds? The centerpiece of
this earlier work is the collapse of the Soviet Union:
why did it happen and why was there a failure in the
West
to anticipate it - of what use is history if so
momentous a development could come as a surprise?
In The End of History Fukuyama quotes Henry Kissinger
speaking in the 1970s: "Today, for the first time in
our history, we face the stark reality that the
[communist] challenge is unending. We must learn to
conduct foreign policy as other nations have had to
conduct it for so many centuries - without escape and
without respite. This condition will not go away."
Although Fukuyama does not mention it, that pessimism
is shown by Kissinger's deeds as well. When Alexander
Solzhenitsyn toured the United States, president
Gerald Ford, acting on Kissinger's advice, did not
invite Solzhenitsyn to the White House lest Soviet
leaders take umbrage. That is how strong the Soviet
Union was perceived to be. And it was strong. It had
the capacity to destroy the United States many times
over.
For that reason, Fukuyama does not cite Kissinger's
misreading of history to humiliate him - Kissinger was
not alone in being surprised by the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Fukuyama, a Soviet specialist, was
surprised too; everyone was. From such a misreading,
he asks, what is it about our understanding of history
that we misunderstand it so?
Fukuyama attributes part of the West's failure to
anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union to a
pessimism born of "the suicidal self-destructiveness
of the European state system in two world wars [which]
gave lie to the notion of superior Western
rationality". The Holocaust, he notes, "emerged in a
country with the most advanced industrial economy and
one of the most cultured and educated populations in
Europe". Not surprisingly, this did little for
confidence in the West and, Fukuyama says, distorted
the West's perception of how history would unfold in
the Soviet Union.
The threat of National Socialism is unlikely to repeat
itself because Nazi Germany was obliterated, as was
Imperial Japan. Whereas National Socialism was
grounded in fascism - an urge to create a master race
and dominate the world - communism was altogether
different, Fukuyama says.
To explain why the Soviet Union collapsed Fukuyama
turns to Georg Hegel, the German historian-philosopher
who predicted that what drives history is an urge to
live in a world where all are equal and free, and war
and conflict and suffering are no more. Ironically (as
everyone knows), Hegel is the historian Karl Marx had
turned to in seeking to explain how history would
ultimately reach the world Hegel predicted.
To show that Marx misunderstood Hegel and thus led
Lenin and Josef Stalin astray, Fukuyama examines in
fascinating detail the works of not only Hegel and
Marx but of Aristotle, Plato, Niccolo Machiavelli,
Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke,
Thomas Hobbes, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and
Abraham Lincoln. He also surveys the developments in
Western thought that brought about the scientific
method, which Hegel and Fukuyama say propels history
to its ultimate end.
Back when Fukuyama was in the good graces of
neo-conservatives, Charles Krauthammer described this
review of the West's intellectual history as
"scandalously brilliant". It still is.
And what is the proper means to Hegel's end? Liberal
democracy. The end sought, however, is also liberal
democracy. Trouble lurks here.
Quite apart from today's controversy about Fukuyama's
questioning the Iraq invasion, The End of History is a
remarkable book. It is the story of how liberal
democracy has developed and why it may one day come to
be the norm throughout the world. As Fukuyama
describes the efforts in history that have frustrated
and delayed this forward march, one sees how the
resiliency of liberal democracy is not unlike that of
Christianity in the face of the Roman Empire's
ferocious effort to snuff it out. Fukuyama's narrative
is almost irresistibly compelling. Little wonder that
this book has had such an effect upon the
neo-conservative mindset and would embolden some to
distort evidence to justify an invasion of Iraq.
Reading Fukuyama's book, it is easy to see how the
neo-conservatives would be inspired to force-feed
democracy to the Middle East. If that is where history
is headed anyway, why not hasten the process? This
Hegelian assumption is what got Marx and Lenin and
Stalin off track. They believed that because they knew
their man Hegel (as explained by Marx), they
understood the universal rules that drive history. The
deaths of some 30 million people under Stalin can be
attributed to that belief; that is, to the germ
inherent in Hegel himself: the end and the means can
and should become one. Marx, Lenin, Stalin (and Mao
Zedong) resorted to means antithetical to the end
sought and thereby destroyed what it was they were
seeking to create: a better world. The same is
occurring today in Iraq.
It is plain that the US neo-conservatives, in adopting
the Hegelian outlook for how history unfolds, have
come uncomfortably close to the self-delusion that
characterized the leaders of the communist world.
Those leaders believed they were what Hegel said
drives history. After September 11, 2001, US leaders
speak not in terms of limitation, caution and prudence
but in terms of absolute, universal truths. This
certitude is made all the more uncompromising because
it is driven by the conviction that good is being
done. That conviction, as Fukuyama notes, polluted
Christianity as it came to be molded by the papacy and
led to the Reformation - a development not yet evident
in the history of Islam. It was a mind frame that
Thomas Jefferson so feared.
The essence of Fukuyama is this: by invoking Hegel
(history is not a collection of random acts, it is a
purposeful unfolding of mankind's urge to be free), he
asserts that human nature is not static but is, like
history itself, something that develops and improves,
and which will one day reach perfection. Original sin
is utterly rejected. Fukuyama explains it this way:
The radicalness of Hegel's historicism is evident in
his very concept of man. With one important exception,
virtually every philosopher writing before Hegel
believed that there was such a thing as "human
nature", that is, a more or less permanent set of
traits - passions, desires, abilities, virtues, and so
forth - that characterized man as man. While
individual men could obviously vary, the essential
nature of man did not change over time, whether he or
she was a Chinese peasant or a modern European trade
unionist. This philosophical view is reflected in the
common cliche that "human nature never changes", used
most often in the context of one of the less
attractive human characteristics like greed, lust or
cruelty. Hegel, by contrast, did not deny that man had
a natural side arising from needs of the body like
food or sleep, but believed that in his most essential
characteristics man was undetermined and therefore
free to create his own nature.
The writers of the US constitution emphatically
rejected this view. The enduring value of the document
is its rejection of Hegel and Fukuyama. While Madison
and Hamilton believed that people at their best were
capable of reason, self-discipline and fairness, they
also recognized an everlasting susceptibility to
passion, intolerance and greed. In a famous passage,
after discussing what measures were needed to preserve
liberty, Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers:
It may be a reflection on human nature that such
devices should be necessary to control the abuses of
government. But what is government itself but the
greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men
were angels, no government would be necessary. If
angels were to govern, neither external nor internal
controls on government would be necessary. In framing
a government which is to be administered by men over
men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in
the next place oblige it to control itself.
If US liberty is to endure, Fukuyama's idea of the
perfectibility of mankind must be rejected. And, to
the extent the neo-conservative mindset has fashioned
its world view upon the teaching of Fukuyama and the
perfectibility of humankind, it too must be rejected.
We Americans must never lose sight of the insight of
the founders of the United States: human nature is
determined and man is not free to "create his own
nature". When a dull knife was used to behead Daniel
Pearl in Pakistan, human nature showed its most
enduring feature: cruelty and hate.
If this is lost sight of, US liberty cannot survive.
Krauthammer's view that Americans, unlike other
imperial powers in history, invade not to occupy but
to liberate is equally disturbing inasmuch as it is
premised upon Americans having reached a more
perfectible form of human nature: Americans, unlike
the rest of humankind, are beneficent only. That is
fatuous. The American experiment in self-governance
has only managed to prevail by rejecting the
underlying premise inherent in Hegel: the means and
the end of government cannot be the same.
This is but to say (Fukuyama notwithstanding) that the
French Revolution and the American Revolution mean two
different things entirely. If it is thought that human
nature is trustworthy and perfectible, one need not
take pains to restrain it. While Napoleon Bonaparte's
armies may well have spread the idea of Liberty and
Equality, that was not Napoleon's most enduring act,
it was reimposing Christianity upon all of France in
his famous concordant with the Roman Catholic Church.
He knew this would do for the people of France what
the US constitution has done for Americans: maintain
order.
The US founders did not separate church and state
because they rejected the ethical meaning of
Christianity and the need for normative standards,
including the sense of self-imposed limitation that
underlies the idea of Original Sin. Their quarrel was
with the habiliments that had grown up in the Catholic
Church in contradiction to those normative standards.
As he was fond of reminding Thomas Jefferson in later
correspondence, John Adams wrote in the Boston Gazette
in August 1765:
Numberless have been the systems of iniquity. The most
refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing
constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the
mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy for the
aggrandizement of their own order. They even persuaded
mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtedly, that
God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of
heaven, whose gates they might open and close at
pleasure ... with authority to license all sorts of
sins and crimes ... or withholding the rain of heaven
and the beams of the sun; with the management of
earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the
mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating
out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God
himself.
All these opinions they were enabled to spread and
rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a
state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by
infusing into them a religious horror of letters and
knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages
in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude ... Of
all the nonsense and delusion which had ever passed
through the mind of man, none had ever been more
extravagant than the notions of absolutions, indelible
characters, uninterrupted successions and the rest of
those fantastical ideas, derived from the canon law,
which had thrown such a glare of mystery, sanctity,
reverence, and right-reverend eminence and holiness
around the idea of a priest as no mortal could deserve
... the ridiculous fancies of sanctified effluvia from
Episcopal fingers.
The neo-conservatives (thanks in no small measure to
Fukuyama) are doing to the idea of democracy what John
Adams said had been done to the idea of Christianity.
On the one hand, it is said that the essence of
democracy is giving voice to the will of the
electorate, yet when the electorate speaks in
Palestine, the George W Bush administration rejects
the voice of the electorate and threatens to cut off
funding unless the newly elected government submits to
the West's view of how an election should turn out.
That is rather like burning John Huss at the stake for
seeking to express his view on the meaning of the
Bible. Or, we are told, the duly elected prime
minister in Iraq must go, not because of some defect
in the electoral process, but because his views are at
odds with what US policy prefers.
That too is on par with the thought control so
vehemently opposed by John Adams, the second president
of the United States. Most disturbing is the US
interference with the independent judiciary's
conclusion in the case of a man in Afghanistan who
stands accused of converting from Islam to
Christianity. If it is the studied judgment of an
independent judicial body that the law must punish
such a man, by what right can the US power interfere
with a separate judicial assessment of the law? If an
independent judiciary in Afghanistan is subject to the
control of a foreign power, there is no independent
judiciary in Afghanistan. Perhaps China or Russia
should intervene as well and admonish the judiciary in
Afghanistan to accomplish a result more to their
liking?
If it is the inevitable outcome of history that
humankind is to be free, the US effort to control the
outcome of elections that it initiates in the Middle
East suggests that effort is at odds with the
historical forces invoked by the neo-conservatives.
This effort to control would also suggest the process
of elections initiated by the Bush administration may
have as its aim a result not in keeping with the
"democratic" ideas being advanced. As noted above,
trouble lurks here: the end sought cannot be the means
utilized to achieve liberty.
One can only wonder whether the neo-conservative
allegiance to the idea of democracy has a greater
fidelity to the perpetuation of US power than to the
principle upon which US power fundamentally rests: all
power must be limited and controlled.
C Mott Woolley is a practicing lawyer in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. He is a graduate of the School of
International Service at the American University in
Washington, DC, and, prior to entering law school,
served as an intern in the Bureau of Intelligence and
Research, Near East/South Asia Division, Department of
State.
(Copyright 2006 C Mott Woolley.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that
allows guest writers to have their say. Please click
here if you are interested in contributing.
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