[lit-ideas] Re: Fukuyama and the end of history again
- From: "Veronica Caley" <vcaley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 16:26:08 -0400
This article is worth reading, if for no other reason to read John Adams
writing re the Constitution and religion. If you don't want to read the
whole thing, the Adams passage is about one third of the way up from the
bottom. Ronnie
> [Original Message]
> From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: <polidea@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 4/12/2006 1:07:13 AM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Fukuyama and the end of history again
>
>
> 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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