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
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.
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I read the Fukiyama book and wasn't impressed, so I agree with you. I'd LIKE to think liberal democracy will eventually oust all other forms of government, but assuming it is an inevitable process does indeed smack of Marxism. .
If you believe in human nature, that all people generally have the same basic needs and wants, regardless of culture, and globalization will eventually allow the majority the mechanisms to access what other people have, then Fukiyama's statement is probably inevitable.
Safety, home, family, religion, occupation . . . . not necessarily in that order, seem to be a foundation core in the lives of most humans.
Beyond that, you could apply the "Keeping Up With The Jones Theory" where people commonly want something if they perceive it's better than what they already have and secondly, others already have it thus increasing it's desireability even more.
With Marx, it was a critical issue of having to continually impose his beliefs that doomed his predictions to failure, even if there might have been a free willingness initially.
His theories were doomed to fail because they did not account for the very human differences we all have, some of us placing greater priorities on certain things than others.
It was a cookie cutter formula for a species that requires chaos.
It's simply a matter of removing obstacles and letting people choose or, more precisely, creating the circumstances where they can make those choices that points to the inevitability of western liberal democracy.
The majority of people WILL choose western liberal democracy, regardless of culture, if given sufficient opportunity.
Unlike Marxism, it is, in fact, the only system that people, through time, will willingly choose to implement AND retain.
That is the critical observation.
Now, in my initial post, I did remark about culture's that may put society ahead of self. We might say that's the case with China or perhaps Russia right now, where we march towards western liberal democracy but eventually bump up to a place that's almost there but not quite . . . . and we have a society that's content with that.
Perhaps. But I would surmise that even those barriers would eventually break down in time.
In this day and age, information is power, more than ever before. The medium is the message and it's impossible to prevent large ideas from disseminating, more than at any other time in history. We are seeing that in Iran and throughout the Middle East.
One thing from the late 80's stands out for me, a description of the Berlin Wall coming down and East Germans spending the night wandering the mercantile streets of West Berlin, mouths hanging open agog at the spectacle of wealth confronting them . . . . . then returning to their homes more determined than ever to bring down the system that had imprisoned them in a lie.
By the way, I was one of the few people who seemed to welcome the election of Hamas in Palestine in an apparently legitimate election. It made the Palestinian people responsible for Hamas, and the consequences of having radicals in charge, rather than that organization always hiding in the background, unreachable. That was a good thing.
Everywhere Al Quada goes, the attractiveness of them in theory for a local populace eventually gives way to the menacing reality. They're a self-defeating organism because everything about them as a longer-term system is against human nature. We saw Pakistan serving as a hiding place with a welcoming population, then any dissent or contrary opinions being met with beheadings and threats and, now, very lately, tribes are hunting them down just as they eventually did in Iraq.
Western Liberal democracy as a base form of government is virtually inevitable in this day and age because the majority will choose it to happen . . . . . populations will choose, through time, to replace what they have with some other maleable alternative that offers the most freedom to accommodate our common desires as well as our individual differences.
Because that's who we all are.
To believe in the basest aspects of human nature is to also believe Fukiyama's statement of inevitability.
I think totalitarianism will be harder and harder to implement, but authoritarian forms of government will remain attractive to underdeveloped nations for the traditional reasons, and so military juntas, fanatic clerics, and technocrats will afflict the world for the forseeable future
By the end of this century, we'll probably have very little of that left in the world or it will be insignificant pockets.
Thusly, the end of Fukiyama's statement will probably be true . . . . . "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
Is that the foreseeable future?
Cowperson
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I have twice had the privilege of sitting, poorly shaved, on the floor and attending the Friday prayers that the Iranian theocracy sponsors each week on the campus of Tehran University. As everybody knows, this dreary, nasty ceremony is occasionally enlivened when the scrofulous preacher leads the crowd in a robotic chant of Marg Bar Amrika! -- "Death to America!" As nobody will be surprised to learn, this is generally followed by a cry of Marg Bar Israel! And it's by no means unknown for the three-beat bleat of this two-minute hate to have yet a third version: Marg Bar Ingilis!
Some commentators noticed that as "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei viciously slammed the door on all possibilities of reform at last Friday's prayers, he laid his greatest emphasis on the third of these incantations. "The most evil of them all," he droned, "is the British government." But the real significance of his weird accusation has generally been missed.
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Good article. Interesting that the Biritsh angle goes so deep. That is the first I heard of it.
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Cowperson, I like your post a lot. However, it is beset with one central contradiction, which I don't see an easy way out of: you're willing to presume that there is such a thing as "human nature"--some basic quality or set of desires that all humans possess. But you claim that Marx's error was not recognizing that human desires are different from what he imagined.
That can't work. For one thing, presuming that liberal democracy is consistent with "human nature" is a fundamentally ethnocentric assumption. It presumes that the fact that most people on earth don't live in a liberal democracy is simply because they are not as advanced as we are. That's subscribing to Fukuyama's teleological thinking wholesale--assuming that history has one course--and we are its representative, regardless of empirical evidence to the contrary.
If you think about it--this was precisely Marx's error. Marx assumed that people had universal needs, and that a system that failed to supply those needs was fundamentally unstable. As it turns out, the stability of a system only depends on the collective's ability to account for and assimilate individual action, which means that it is enough for a system to promise that one day it may fulfil your material needs, which is exactly what lib-democracy does.
If you substitute "material needs" for "fundamental freedom" you've turned Marx into Fukuyama. And the test for the two thinkers is the same: they make basic predictions about reality, and when those predictions turn out to be wrong, the theory falls apart.
So let's evaluate Fukuyama's claim that 1989 represents the end of history and the ascendance of a golden age of American-style liberal democracy. Has liberal democracy expanded faster than other types of polity in the post cold-war era?
Clearly not. In fact, just as they did in 1989, liberal democracies contain a tiny fraction of the world's population. There are many authoritarian polities that like to masquerade as democracies (Iran, for one), but I fail to see how the world has "settled on liberal democracy" as the dominant world system. Given the evidence, such a claim is nonsensical. And in any case, they were in the first place motivated by the Reagan administration's curious, arrogant, apocalyptic and millenarian way of thinking about the Cold War. In other words--for Fukuyama to imagine that the end of the Cold War would bring about the age of liberal democracy was just naive magical thinking designed to raise the stakes of the ideological divide between the Americans and the Soviets. Those of us who study history will remember that it was this same magical thinking that gave birth to the new face of American Exceptionalism: the neocon movement and the "Project for a New American Century," ostensibly the practical application of Fukuyama's theory of "realistic Wilsonianism" with the end of bringing about American ideological dominance around the globe.
Interestingly, Fukuyama himself has recanted on many of these neo-con ideas that he helped to create in the 90s. In 2006 he had this to say about neoconservatism in the 21st century:
Quote:
[we neoconservatives]…believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
Heck, if even the author of these ideas thinks that they have now degenerated into a parody of Marxism, who am I to disagree?
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I don't think the fact that non-democratic regimes exist disproves the idea of "human nature." What it says is that tyrannical regimes are extremely hard to overthrow, I'd say bordering on impossible, unless the regime decides to "loosen up" and even then it is an uphill battle. But if you look at the world wide immigration, the flow is from tyranny to lib democracy, almost never the other way. I'd say it's pretty clear what people of any origin prefer and I'd say it is in the human nature to prefer "more freedom to less freedom."
I don't think the fact that non-democratic regimes exist proves the idea that people in lib democracies are somehow "advanced," either. Move Calgary to North Korea and I don't think many would be actively battling the regime to regain their freedom. It would be the same people, but it is pretty difficult to show your "advancement" when you can be shot dead on the spot. They would be just like the North Koreans are right now.
Well, which is it? Does the media only show the demonstrations and flag burning, or are they talking to people who are saying hello to Jon Stewart?
I don't consider the Daily Show to be part of the media establishment. It's a comedy show that is specifically geared to take on the western news mass media establishment and show their shortcomings.
I don't think the fact that non-democratic regimes exist disproves the idea of "human nature." What it says is that tyrannical regimes are extremely hard to overthrow, I'd say bordering on impossible, unless the regime decides to "loosen up" and even then it is an uphill battle. But if you look at the world wide immigration, the flow is from tyranny to lib democracy, almost never the other way. I'd say it's pretty clear what people of any origin prefer and I'd say it is in the human nature to prefer "more freedom to less freedom."
I don't think the fact that non-democratic regimes exist proves the idea that people in lib democracies are somehow "advanced," either. Move Calgary to North Korea and I don't think many would be actively battling the regime to regain their freedom. It would be the same people, but it is pretty difficult to show your "advancement" when you can be shot dead on the spot. They would be just like the North Koreans are right now.
I don't disagree. I think the issue of "human nature" is kind of a separate problem, and in any case I kind of doubt that polities are a natural outgrowth of "human nature" anyway. If they were, the news isn't good for "human nature" if you look across history.
The fact that more people live under autocratic rule proves only one thing: that the global landscape has not undergone some massive upheaval in 1989, after which we will see the permanent rise of the liberal democracy as the dominant form of government in the world. It certainly doesn't mean that liberal democracy isn't better by whatever standard you choose. It just means that it is not some inevitable outgrowth of the end of the cold war.
Your last paragraph I completely agree with--and that is why we should be thanking our lucky stars for the cosmic accident that gave us freedom and others not. We should also work to spread that gift around, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it will happen by itself.
Check out this fantastic article written by an Iranian reporter. He takes a roadtrip through Iran prior to the election and there are many great insights and interviews with people of all strata and regions of Iranian society. There is a great deal of knowledge of the west. Even poor cab drivers/police officers mention that their concern is just their own lives. They don't go out of their way to hate America or Isreal. Even a kid prior to the election was prescient enough to see that if Ahmadinejad was re-elected, the system would go into chaos. I really liked the part comparing the bargaining that happens in an Iranian bazaar with their religionship with America in that the bargaining Iran is doing is the same as business. It's not an emotional one. It's not outright hate. http://www.newsweek.com/id/199144
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Speaking of human nature and autocratic rule, many observers believe that Supreme Ruler Ayatollah Khamenei is grooming his son, Mojtaba Khamenei to be his successor!
The Supreme Leader is supposed to be chosen by a council, but ultimately he had ultimate say and sway in the system. That would be like a Pope saying that his son was going to be next pope. I just have to laugh when I see these things because you look at all the political and religious rhetoric and you see that powerful people are just as corrupted and human as the next guy (Kim Jong Il is supposedly passing on his rule to his own son as well). As much as you say something might be divinely willed, it is simply your human selfishness and genetic animal drive that makes most of your decisions.
Many Iranians already are suspicious of their clerics and mullahs and ayatollahs because of their extreme wealth. It's just another ruling/upper class disguised as clergy...just has been repeated for thousands of years in human history.
Check out this fantastic article written by an Iranian reporter. He takes a roadtrip through Iran prior to the election and there are many great insights and interviews with people of all strata and regions of Iranian society. There is a great deal of knowledge of the west. Even poor cab drivers/police officers mention that their concern is just their own lives. They don't go out of their way to hate America or Isreal. Even a kid prior to the election was prescient enough to see that if Ahmadinejad was re-elected, the system would go into chaos. I really liked the part comparing the bargaining that happens in an Iranian bazaar with their religionship with America in that the bargaining Iran is doing is the same as business. It's not an emotional one. It's not outright hate. http://www.newsweek.com/id/199144
Great article - thanks.
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In case anyone is good with photoshop, here is the supreme leaders 3rd riecht council member
Someone should tell him "dont eat the microphone you ass"
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I don't disagree. I think the issue of "human nature" is kind of a separate problem, and in any case I kind of doubt that polities are a natural outgrowth of "human nature" anyway. If they were, the news isn't good for "human nature" if you look across history.
The fact that more people live under autocratic rule proves only one thing: that the global landscape has not undergone some massive upheaval in 1989, after which we will see the permanent rise of the liberal democracy as the dominant form of government in the world. It certainly doesn't mean that liberal democracy isn't better by whatever standard you choose. It just means that it is not some inevitable outgrowth of the end of the cold war.
Your last paragraph I completely agree with--and that is why we should be thanking our lucky stars for the cosmic accident that gave us freedom and others not. We should also work to spread that gift around, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it will happen by itself.
Well, Aristotle would disagree with you. Man is by nature a political animal, all polities stem from some root in human nature. Now what that nature is is an entirely different question, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there.
Well, Aristotle would disagree with you. Man is by nature a political animal, all polities stem from some root in human nature. Now what that nature is is an entirely different question, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there.
I agree with you man is by nature a political animal, and at the end of the day man is a simple animal. There's no creature on this planet who will resort to violence so easily as man can.
Someone once said that politics is civilized warfare defined. For the most part the average man while not good at the civilized part understands that violence in its many forms is the quickest and easiest path to not only gaining power but keeping power.
Given the right amount of leverage, your average peace loving tree hugging hippy will quickly resort to violence, warfare and dominance.
Its not religion thats evil, its mans inate nature to dominate conquor and gather wealth and keep it.
Whether its some god built kill switch that he's given each of us, or we've never been able to breed out of us.
Call it our own version of population control. Show me someone who doesn't bow down to his darker nature, and I'll show you a defect.
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Well, Aristotle would disagree with you. Man is by nature a political animal, all polities stem from some root in human nature. Now what that nature is is an entirely different question, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there.
If that's true, it follows that most people throughout history have lived in misery and under tyranny of various sorts because that is their nature. I'm too much of an optimist to believe that.
