THEORY OF THE END - Part 2: The End of History?

The second part of a series exploring various theories on the end of human civilization.

[Note: This is Part 2 of an ongoing series. If you have not yet read Part 1, you can do so at the link here.]

In order to more fully understand the narrative presented in the book “The End of History and The Last Man,” we must first examine the global circumstances under which it was written.

To Fukyama’s credit, the idea that the system of governance that he calls “Liberal Democracy” would spread throughout the globe was probably a more obvious conclusion at the tail end of the 80s. Fascism as a formal doctrine had effectively been annihilated in the developed world after the defeat of the axis powers in World War 2, and in 1987 Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed his initiative to democratize the ailing Soviet Union via the slogan of “Demokratizatsiya” while its constituent republics were on the verge of independence. I doubt that it’s an exaggeration to say that “The End of History and The Last Man” was written in the midst of the soviet union’s collapse.

Thus with both of Liberal Democracy’s biggest geopolitical rivals, i.e. Communism and Fascism, out of the picture, the Liberal Democratization of the globe may have seemed all but certain. However, one must keep in mind that Fascism and Communism both inevitably fell due to their inability to prove their legitimacy in light of their espoused beliefs and values, something Fukuyama argues with much vigor in his writing, stating: “All regimes capable of effective action must be based on some principle of legitimacy.” Of Fascism, Fukuyama explains:

Fascism was not around long enough to suffer an internal crisis of legitimacy, but was defeated by force of arms. Hitler and his remaining followers went to their deaths in their Berlin bunker believing to the last in the Tightness of the Nazi cause and in Hitler's legitimate authority. The appeal of fascism was undermined in most people's eyes retrospectively, as a consequence of that defeat… Fascism suffered, one might say, from an internal contradiction: its very emphasis on militarism and war led it inevitably into a self-destructive conflict with the international system.

In other words, when Fascism promised military might and the supremacy of the peoples it championed, only to suffer devastating military defeat at the hands of supposedly inferior populations, its own raison d’être effectively became the cause of its ideological unraveling and future irrelevance.

Communism, on the other hand, promised to create a new man through the machinations of a revolution and subsequent Communist state in accordance with Marx’s thought that man’s very consciousness “changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life.” To accomplish this, the USSR implemented a new governmental philosophy “backed by efficient police power, mass political parties, and radical ideologies that sought to control all aspects of human life.” This philosophy is now known as “Totalitarianism.” Fukuyama describes it thus:

The totalitarian state hoped to remake Soviet man himself by changing the very structure of his beliefs and values through control of the press, education, and propaganda. This extended down to a human being's most personal and intimate relations, those of the family. The young Pavel Morozov, who denounced his parents to Stalin's police, was for many years held up by the regime as a model Soviet child. In Mikhail Heller's words, “The human relations that make up the society's fabric — the family, religion, historical memory, language — become targets, as society is systematically and methodically atomized, and the individual's close relationships are supplanted by others chosen for him, and approved by the state.”

This, however, led directly to the most obvious failing of the USSR and really all Communist regimes, that being the overestimation of man’s malleability and the resulting inability to completely fit the roundness of man into the square peg of Marxist thought. “Soviet citizens, as it turned out, had all along retained an ability to think for themselves,” Fukuyama says. “Many understood, despite years of government propaganda, that their government was lying to them. People remained enormously angry at the personal sufferings they had endured under Stalinism.”

The other major failing, however, was economic in nature. “It was much more difficult to tolerate economic failure in the Soviet system because the regime itself had explicitly based its claims to legitimacy on its ability to deliver its people a high material standard of living,” explains Fukuyama.

Indeed, this shortcoming came into stark focus during Boris Yeltsin’s 1989 trip to a grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas, during which he reportedly shook his head in amazement as he wandered through the densely food-packed aisles. “When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin later wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”

It’s difficult to argue against the fact that the Liberal environment of America gave it an edge in terms of economic growth. Much of this can be attributed to the decentralized nature of a Liberal economy, which can respond far better to the increasing complexity of the economic and technological environment far more efficiently than a centralized bureaucracy. As Fukuyama states:

Bureaucrats sitting in Moscow or Beijing might have had a chance of setting a semblance of efficient prices when they had to supervise economies producing commodities numbering in the hundreds or low thousands; the task becomes impossible in an age when a single airplane can consist of hundreds of thousands of separate parts.

The importance of the technological aspect to this cannot be overstated, but we will indulge more on this topic later.

It should also be noted, however, that America’s abundance of food was not a simple matter of economic liberalization. Contrary to this narrative, the government played a large role in America’s victory in the cold war era “farms race.”

“If U.S. agriculture policy was aggressive in earlier decades, then in the Cold War era, it was pretty much on steroids,” claimed Freakanomics Radio in a piece entitled “How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War.” It continues: “And this wasn’t just about feeding a growing U.S. population. The policy had a political thrust, meant to show the Soviet Union — and the rest of the world — just how mighty the United States was.”

Early government policies ranged anywhere from price controls to insurance for farmers, and after demand dropped during the Great Depression, much of the unsold grain was used in the development of what we now call “factory farming,” or it was purchased by the federal government itself. Moreover, the United States military was constantly engaged with experimentation in service of preserving food for as long as possible. Many of these experiments have fundamentally altered the diets of US citizens. A 2015 NPR article entitled “Cheetos, Canned Foods, Deli Meat: How The U.S. Army Shapes Our Diet” states:

Many of the foods that we chow down on every day were invented not for us, but for soldiers.

Energy bars, canned goods, deli meats — all have military origins. Same goes for ready-to-eat guacamole and goldfish crackers… Many of the packaged, processed foods we find in today's supermarkets started out as science experiments in an Army laboratory. The foodstuffs themselves, or the processes that went into making them, were originally intended to serve as combat rations for soldiers out in the battlefield.

Indeed, military needs have driven food-preservation experiments for centuries.

Regardless of how large a part economic liberalization and/or Democracy played in America’s victory in the realm of the material, it’s undeniable that such a victory did indeed happen, and many other countries in places like Southern and Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America sensed the shift in the winds of the global zeitgeist and followed America’s example in the pursuit of Liberal Democracy.

This could be partially attributed to the application of game theory, as a country whose material development has fallen behind inevitably opens themselves up to be conquered by those more modernized, thus becoming modernized by force instead of voluntarily and losing their agency in the process. On this point, Fukuyama invokes the image of Commodore Perry’s comparatively advanced naval guns “persuading the daimyos in Japan that they had no choice but to open their country up and accept the challenge of foreign competition…” He continues:

The persistence of war and military competition among nations is thus, paradoxically, a great unifier of nations. Even as war leads to their destruction, it forces states to accept modern technological civilization and the social structures that support it. Modern natural science forces itself on man, whether he cares for it or not: most nations do not have the option of rejecting the technological rationalism of modernity if they want to preserve their national autonomy.

General Ishiwara Kanji would have agreed. In his view, the technological progression of his age was leading to an equalization which would render physical confrontation unfruitful and thus undesirable. He states in his lecture on the “Final War”:

The arrival of guns in Tanegashima was the reason why unification of Japan was possible. No matter how great Nobunaga and Hideyoshi were, it would not have happened if they had only spears and bows. Nobunaga understood the times clearly, preached the cause of respecting the Emperor, and made clear the central point of unifying Japan, but he also purchased a large number of guns, effectively laying the foundation for unification.

None of this is bemoaned by Fukuyama as an unfortunate set of circumstances, of course. Rather it was all leading to humanity centering on a system of societal organization that was better than everything which came before:

… Despite the powerful reasons for pessimism given us by our experience in the first half of this century, events in its second half have been pointing in a very different and unexpected direction. As we reach the 1990s, the world as a whole has not revealed new evils, but has gotten better in certain distinct ways.

But, as he also states, “there is no such thing as a dictator who rules purely ‘by force,’” thus the Liberal Democratic system must supply its constituents with a coherent guiding philosophy as well as tangible results from said philosophy’s implementation in order to underpin its perceived legitimacy. In other words, it must justify its own existence and deliver on its promises, something that its early 20th century rivals of Fascism and Communism had utterly failed in achieving. But in that case, what exactly are the guiding principles through which Liberal Democracy can be defined? Francis Fukuyama supplies us with a few parameters:

Liberalism is defined by Fukuyama as a system of governance that recognizes certain individual freedoms from government control. To aid in this, he sources exposition from James Bryce:

While there can be a wide variety of definitions of fundamental rights, we will use the one contained in Lord Bryce's classic work on democracy, which limits them to three: civil rights, “the exemption from control of the citizen in respect of his person and property”; religious rights, “exemption from control in the expression of religious opinions and the practice of worship”; and what he calls political rights, “exemption from control in matters which do not so plainly affect the welfare of the whole community as to render control necessary,” including the fundamental right of press freedom.

Some astute right-wing readers may already notice some potential practical conundrums rear their heads in this definition, but we shall put those away until the next chapter. As for the “Democratic” aspect of Liberal Democracy, Fukuyama defines that simply as “the right held universally by all citizens to have a share of political power, that is, the right of all citizens to vote and participate in politics.”

Using these definitions, I will lay out a series of “problems” with Fukuyama’s narrative by examining the principles of Liberal Democracy itself, as well as events that have transpired since the publishing of “The End of History” which I believe lay bare both the contradictions and inevitable degenerations of this supposed “old age of humanity.” Through this analysis, we can attempt to determine whether or not Liberal Democracy is truly an end point in civilizational development, or if it is instead a mere transitional phase.

According to Fukuyama, Americans by the end of the 80s had trouble “imagining a world that is radically better than [their] own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist.” Let us survey the modern global environment to see if this proclamation still holds true today.

Thank you all for reading, and I hope to see you in Part 3.

To be continued…