Quote:
Originally Posted by Cowperson
I would say the opposite . . . . . and then I would step outside and go for a nice run in the afternoon sun.
It seems he's going to probably be right . . . . . . although some might argue that cultural differences placing society ahead of self might prevail in places like China, as example, whereas the opposite would be true in America.
Generally though, we seem to be moving towards a central conclusion, sometimes violently but inevitable nonetheless.
Cowperson
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Well, runs in the sun aside, there's ample historical evidence that you could easily point to that shows that he is wrong. I personally don't believe in that sort of millenarian, apocalyptic reasoning anyway, but the Reaganites were afflicted with it in a bad way, so it doesn't shock me coming out of that group. In fact, Bush II was guilty of that too.
I think you're on safer ground if you say that liberal democracy is
the best polity that preserves our values, and those values are worth preserving. We happen to live in a liberal democratic society, and I kind of like it--I'm a big fan of my iPod, for instance. But ours is not the dominant form of government on earth; heck, it's not even the case that a
plurality of people can claim that they live in an American-style lib-democracy.
There just isn't any evidence for his claim--and since it is, in essence, an empirical claim about the nature of history... the only possible conclusion given current evidence is that he's wrong, just as Marx was. The main difference is that Fukuyama adds jingoism and ethnocentrism to his millenarian, apocalyptic daffiness.
My own (admittedly a bit gloomy) view is that there is no endpoint to history, any more than there is a distinct "beginning." It merely
is. Some things progress. Others regress. Some things change, others stay the same. What this means, effectively, is that if we go to the mattresses for our liberal values (as I tend to think we should) that we must continually do this, for ever and ever with no end in sight. It's not that our ideology is inherently and inevitably going to dominate the future, it's that as a question of moral imperative we must strive to liberalize autocratic polities around the world through a variety of means.