MEMORY-ESSAY #1
This ESSAY has FIVE parts. Click here for the second part, “THEN AND NOW”. CLICK HERE FOR THE THIRD PART, “SILENCED”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FOURTH PART, “WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FifTH PART, “ETHOPOEIA”.
1. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (1951; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), p. 226.
2. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest, Summer 1989, 3–18: p. 4.
3. Ibid., p. 17.
4. Ibid., p. 18.
5. Tony Blair, speech delivered at Economic Club of Chicago, 22 April 1999. I have transcribed this excerpt from video of the event available on Youtube here.
I
CROCODILE PHILOSOPHY
CROCODILE PHILOSOPHY
Francis Fukuyama claimed in a Summer 1989 article in The National Interest that history was ending. He argued that the global crisis of communism pointed to “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government”.2 This claim is often mocked in retrospect for its broad sweep and inaccuracy, but Fukuyama included enough caveats in the article that his forecasting can’t be entirely dismissed despite its errors. For example, he speculated that communism might go on to be replaced in Russia not by liberalism but by a revived nationalism (Fukuyama actually wrote “Russian chauvinism”3), which is what duly happened.
But this way of looking at “The End of History?” is to treat it as an effort of objective, rather than aspirational, analysis.
At the time he published his article, Fukuyama worked at the State Department. The article was therefore institutionally linked to an official victory narrative. Fukuyama’s overconfident generalisations were to some degree ideological advocacy: the line between scholarship and propaganda was blurred, though this didn’t stop the arguments making a significant impact in both areas. “The End of History?” and the long book which followed three years later successfully shaped a wide debate. It wasn’t immodest that the title of The End of History and the Last Man dispensed with the original article’s question mark.
Fukuyama concluded “The End of History?” with some unexpectedly subjective remarks: “The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.”4 It is rather an odd passage: I notice a peculiar time-jumping, which placed the vaunted end of history first in the future (“will be a very sad time”), then in the wistfully remembered past (“the time when history existed”). The soon-to-be-regretfully-remembered mystique of self-sacrifice also puzzles me. Presumably the reference was to western, liberal cold warriors such as Fukuyama himself; however, given the mention of a threat to life, the mystique seems more relevant to the many communist or anti-imperialist rebels who died in the effort to establish a society managed scientifically to provide for everyone’s needs (along lines Fukuyama evidently didn’t approve). Much as time floated around in Fukuyama’s finale, so did the ideal of valour. It isn’t easy to work out what Fukuyama was really saying, or trying to say.
Perhaps the confusing conclusion reflected the burdens imposed on anyone in the dual role of bureaucrat and intellectual, anyone paid to combine state policy and academic analysis. Maybe what often goes along with mixed work of this sort is a daydream combining activism and emotional opennes (neither of which would normally be part of the job description). Yet if there was something romantic and even furtively rebellious in the whimsical ending of Fukuyama’s agenda-setting article, there may also have been something lost and burnt-out. If so, surely this emptier quality would have been closer than any adventurous daydream to the truth of the salaried philosopher’s stifled situation—and, what is more, closer also to the essential political truth of that sloganeering and bloody era of consolidation of elite power which the idea of the end of history, among others, conveniently but misleadingly promoted as dutiful technocracy.
“The end of history will be a very sad time”: a weird statement conveying to me only a distant or second-hand kind of sadness. Sadness may actually be quite difficult to define, but if it is anything more than a minor disturbance of mood, and more than nostalgia in the everyday meaning of the word, and if it is something different from despair, then sadness is a feeling deeply rooted in a person, in the past and in shared experience. To detach sadness from these painful foundations—to find it instead in the jumpy time and emotional inhibition of an ideologically charged, bureaucratic world-view—is to turn the profound feeling into a bullet-point. And perhaps this reductiveness was an inevitable companion of the ruthless political dishonesty which emerged in the neoliberal Nineties. Fukuyama’s shrunken “sad time” would in that case connect to the illogical and violent humanitarianism of the post-cold war era of crocodile tears: “I hope that no one who has seen what has happened in Kosovo to those refugees can doubt that NATO’s military action is justified. Bismarck it was who said that the Balkans were not worth the bones of one Pomeranian grenadier. But anyone who has seen the tear-stained faces of the hundreds of refugees streaming across the borders into Albania and Macedonia, heard their heart-rending tales of cruelty, or contemplated the unknown fate of those left behind can be in any doubt that Bismarck was wrong. This is, I believe, a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on good, decent values.” That credo was pronounced in 1999, the same year Thomas Harris published his novel Hannibal, in which a Grand Guignol character likes to mix the teardrops of a child, made to cry for the purpose, into his martini.
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