History Has No End, Composing, 29/02/2016

The last third of Utopias will deal explicitly with political philosophy. I don’t aim to have some kind of comprehensive view of the overall state of political philosophy as its generated all over the academy. 

Ronald Reagan is loved not because of his real-world
achievements, which are as checkered as the career of
any great state power's leader. He's loved because of
the myths he built around himself and America.

From a purely practical point of view, I don’t have access to a lot of that material. And summarizing all the ongoing trends in – even just North American – political theory in all the major research journals is beyond the scope of the project. 

I’m not aiming to demonstrate some superlative level of comprehensiveness. I want to build and build on a specific tradition within political philosophy to make an important point explicit about the nature of our human society in the early 21st century. 

To me, that’s always been more important for philosophical creativity than simply tracking trends in a sub-discipline’s major research journals. Even when I was in the academy – maybe that played a part in why I found myself marginalized out of the academy once my doctorate was finished.

But since I’m still writing, I wanted to explain how I now write. When I was writing the original draft of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, I gave lip service to the demand for comprehensiveness of an established research field by peppering my writing with extraneous footnotes. 

Now that I don’t have to do that, my writing will be much more explicitly focussed on explaining and exploring concepts. Friday’s post explained that method a little bit. But today I want to focus on a specific example.

Last year, I wrote several posts about Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, where he talked about exactly that. Antonio Negri talks about the central ideas of Fukuyama's book in one section of Empire, and he’s quite rightly contemptuous of it, even though there are parts of the concept that are truly insightful about the world.

Reagan never took down the Berlin Wall single-handedly.
The most he did was make a speech and have a tourist
moment taking a brick after unification.

The central concept of The End of History is an attitude of faith in America. In Fukuyama’s writing, America as a real country in the world merges with the ethical ideal of America as the embodiment of freedom. 

Fukuyama works in the conceptual context of his funny, over-literal Hegelianism, where a society and nation actually does find its highest expression in its state. And the highest expression of such a state is as a regime to safeguard the freedom of the nation – each individual who constitutes the nation lives their liberty to the fullest.

So when America won the Cold War, it was literally the victory of freedom in a profound and plodding sense. Plodding because it didn’t take much. As Negri points out, America and Americans as a nation didn’t actually do anything to bring down the Soviet Union, despite the mythmaking of contemporary Republicans’ belief that Ronald Reagan’s speech alone brought down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Communist Party.

No, the Soviet Union collapsed because its state-controlled bureaucratic command economy couldn't adapt to technological and labour changes to the global market. Economic recession combined with the government’s weakening power to control its people, and the Communist states of Europe collapsed.

America happened to be the only globally dominant state whose economy and society was still vibrant and creative. This was a contingent fact – no great achievement, just a situation in the global economy's development that made the Soviet Union catastrophically maladapted.

Material reality popped Fukuyama’s mythical balloon* of America’s having not only become the culmination of human freedom in history, but to have actually made itself the culmination of human freedom in history.

When you believe that your nation once had a mythic
greatness, the contingency of real life burns extra hot.
That fire is easily channelled in dangerous directions.

* And, as he was their philosophical voice, the mythical ballon of conservative American nationalists at all levels of society from state leaders, business magnates, movers, and shakers, working people, and rural militiamen.

That argument will appear in the final Utopias manuscript in some form, as I work through my arguments that libertarian conservatism is not only a false, violent utopia, but is also a destructive self-delusion. Here’s the central concept of the argument.

The messy contingency of reality trumps mythmaking, every time. Mythmaking has enormous social power to mobilize people, but a myth is always false. It’s a distortion of the real development of the world that most often has many terrible consequences in the long term. 

In this case, nationalism, American triumphalism, the attitude that America is the culmination of the world, the victor of history itself. 

And to someone who thinks this way, the victor deserves the spoils of war. In real life, this concept is the voice of Candidate Trump.

Where a Thinker's Real Power Lies, Research Time, 16/10/2015

Since writing yesterday's post, I started thinking about another problem of Fukuyama's writing. I mentioned it in passing yesterday. It shows the disconnect between the networks and culture of university-based research, and the networks that enable direct political influence.

Iraq has been at war for a dozen years now, and it seems
the violence won't stop for a long time. Francis
Fukuyama's writings play a role in this. More power in
the real world than university-based philosophers dream
of in their worst nightmares.

By the standards of disciplinary academic philosophy, The End of History is an awful book. His political philosophy’s central idea is that capitalist liberal democracy is the only framework for society that perfectly recognizes universal human dignity. He bases this idea on how he understands Georg Hegel's political and historical thinking.

But he has a pretty shitty understanding of Hegel. It's too simple. He takes Hegel's idea to be equivocally clear. And when you read the books, it just isn't. 

Hegel's work spawned so much controversy because everyone who read his work knew it was a profound new way to understand humanity. It was revolutionary for its time.

The controversy was over what it implied. Fukuyama glosses over this pretty quickly. The generation after Hegel's death saw academic scholars take his ideas in conservative directions, and political agitators take them as inspirations for revolution.

Fukuyama takes the fall of the Soviet Union and growing freedom in Chinese markets as empirical proof that the revolutionaries were wrong. Update the principles to what a mainstream Western conservative would say in 1992, and Fukuyama's a Right Hegelian. 

But after 200 years (and enough additional creativity that even summaries of the tradition are enormous), there were too many different arguments and detail to paper over their significance. 

No matter how remarkable the fall of the Soviet Union was (and no matter what its leaders wanted you to believe), there's more than one way to be influenced by Marx. That's what Spectres of Marx is all about. 

Think workers should be able to organize a union? You
know, Marx was part of an international union movement.

Hell, ideas we share with Marx are so ubiquitous today, they're mainstream whether you admit it or not. Do you think income inequality is dangerous to society? Should inheritance taxes be higher for large estates? Is it sensible for the state to own public utilities? All these ideas have roots in Marx. Or at least, he's among their ancestors.

Fukuyama looked at all the controversial and divergent ways to think about Hegel’s philosophy, and said with a shrug* that they were all wrong. The one correct view of the meaning of Hegel's thought is Alexandre Kojève’s.

* The End of History has such a casual tone at times, I can feel it shrugging. I’d like to write a book that can shrug, but that remains much trippier and stimulating than Fukuyama’s relaxed certainty.

Specifically Fukuyama’s interpretation of Kojève on Hegel, since even this is the subject of a lot of scholarship and argument. The priority of academic disciplines is to make your point, but engage seriously with as many (or at least the most remarkable) contenders as you can. 

Fukuyama never did any of this, and most academics dismissed The End of History as trivial and unremarkable. So why did its ideas form the heart of foreign policy thinking of the Bush-Cheney presidency?

Francis Fukuyama being more powerful in changing the
real world than every radical Marxist scholar in
every humanities faculty in every university in North
America.

The End of History was popular among a group of people who cared nothing for the opinions of university academics. He worked in the State Department under the Reagan presidency. 

There, he made friends with many Reagan and Bush Sr officials who'd later serve in higher positions with W. He was a key figure at the Project for a New American Century think tank, and worked at the RAND Corporation since the late 1970s. 

Fukuyama didn't need the approval of a university sector network. He made his career in networks that have real influence: think tanks and the government. 

That’s why it’s important to understand Fukuyama's ideas. Not because of their influence on academic philosophers; there isn't any. It’s because his ideas are key conditions for invasions, wars, and the suffering and deaths of millions.

Get Real II: Real Progress Comes From Movement & Agitation, Research Time, 15/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . There's a unique conservative world-view that’s coalesced as its mainstream since the Thatcher and Reagan eras. Its attitude is a tense, dynamic mixture of brutality, the cruelty of indifference, and naïveté. 

Because jail isn't just about free meals, a decent gym,
and good-quality dope. It's also about poverty and the
daily indignities of the social causes of incarceration.

Of the Big Four thinkers of modern conservatism, Francis Fukuyama is the most openly naïve. His The End of History will probably become (if it hasn't already) the first of new conservatism’s landmark works to be buried. The first one to start digging the grave was Jacques Derrida at the conference whose keynote became Spectres of Marx.

He starts with a point that a lot of academics see. For someone who depends so much on Hegel for how he understands history, Fukuyama has a ridiculously oversimplified version of Hegel. He sees certainty where the text is enigmatic. Clear pronouncements where Hegel himself was extremely ambiguous.

Those philosophical enigmas are why Hegel became a legend in the tradition. The ideas are clearly significant, but there are so many ways to understand him.

But Fukuyama's missteps (mis-thoughts?) are much more profound than this. His whole point is a terribly naïve conclusion that we’ve achieved the perfect form for human society. And it's the capitalist liberal democratic state. 

Why is it perfect? Because human nature is essentially to seek status and dignity among people. Capitalist liberal democracy ends conflict over social status by enshrining each of us as having the highest, equal dignity before the law in our civil rights.

These words feel like nonsense to me. I may as well have written “Staple booger quack-quack cauterizes flagellum footstool Doctor Tulip O’Snap.” 

Because when Jacky from Algeria starts shit with you,
you better look out.

Fukuyama completely ignores that the dignity of equal standing in civil rights isn't enough to preserve you against the material indignity of extreme poverty. It isn't even enough to secure you the material defence of your civil rights if you can't afford to hire a competent lawyer to defend you from a crown prosecutor.

Derrida says it himself, that people's material indignities are intolerable. They're only worse now than two decades ago.

“Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of Earth and humanity.”

Yet there’s an even deeper, more profound oversight here. One that shows what a clear eye Derrida had, despite his (sometimes deserved) reputation for obscurity in his writing.

It's an obvious fact today. So obvious that it's hard to think of this as having been news in 1992. But it was. 

Fukuyama's most naïve, blind mistake was to take for granted that the whole of people's political lives was their relationship to their state and its laws. This way of thinking doesn’t understand that the political actions that most speak to people's hearts lie beyond the relationship of an individual with her institutions.

There's a giant social field whose movements stretch beyond the boundaries of states. Even international institutions can get at best a limited grasp on this field. It’s the whole of humanity.

Most protest movements are, in some very important dimensions, about the relationship of people to their state, laws, government, and institutions. But the need for such a movement has other roots. Take an example. 

Black Lives Matter has a comprehensive political program to change the policies, rules, techniques, and daily habits of police officers so they genuinely serve citizens and protect their civil rights.

But talk of civil rights and institutions doesn’t capture everything that happens in a social movement. It doesn’t capture their actual drive – the reasons, causes, and motives that lie deep within each activist’s character and soul, which all move them to take part. 

The politics of the state and its institutions isn't enough to meet all the challenges of human ethics.

Another one of Fukuyama's major concepts is the essential role the human drive for recognition – for status, for dignity – has in our nature. But running your state institutions on the ideal of equal civil rights isn’t enough to secure human dignity against all possible violations.

Get Real I: Clashes of Four Civilizations, Research Time, 14/10/2015

When I’m reading a book that was epically influential on mainstream politics – like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History – I find the ignored chapters to have some of the more interesting stuff. Today, I want to talk about his less rosy predictions about future politics – his own take on the clash of civilizations.

About two-thirds of the way into The End of History, there are a few chapters on what his theory means for international relations theory. How will states relate to each other in a world that’s inevitably rolling toward universal capitalist liberal democracy? 

It’s a critique of realist IR theory, that war, suspicion, and power games are the inevitable way states relate to each other. International institutions are only really useful as dispute-settling arenas, and diplomacy is the job of working out compromises between great powers to avoid mutually devastating war.

Fukuyama's book never anticipated that China would
become a global power and the leader among Asia's
authoritarian states. He concentrated more on
Singapore as the key example. But China has made
the world bipolar (for now) again, and its leader Xi
Jinping rules not by straight Confucian principles, but
with ideas from the Legalist schools like Shang Yang's
writings. An innovator in authoritarianism.

Fukuyama thinks that the spread of democracy will change this, because pressure from the people will drive their leaders to peace. It’s the kind of optimism Fukuyama is famous for.

But he also considers a very pessimistic possible future. In this scenario, capitalism successfully spreads throughout the world, but economic freedom doesn’t carry democratic political culture with it. Instead, the world breaks down into three blocs, according to their cultural heritages that resist democracy.

1) There’s the West, with its cultural heritage of liberalism (and the liberatory drive that animated socialist and social democratic movements, though Fukuyama underplays these). This is straight-up liberal democracy.

2) The Islamic world, which Fukuyama describes in simplistic (and borderline racist) terms as fundamentalist. If Fukuyama had any deep knowledge of Muslim cultural heritage, he’d talk about the traditional union of social, political, religious, and state concerns through the concept of the unified community of all Muslims.

Islam’s first wave of expansion was as an empire, and its Prophet Muhammad was the political leader of this empire as well as a religious leader. The legitimacy of contemporary Arab monarchies – especially the most brutal ones like Saudi Arabia – are rooted in their embrace and export of their favoured branch of Islam.

3) Asian authoritarianism. Fukuyama discusses this as East Asia’s Confucian heritage. It’s a political culture that privileges group and community loyalty and deference to established authority over individual assertion and liberties. You can be a business leader, and a powerful one. But a top priority must always be loyalty to your country’s leaders.

It's easy to laugh at Vladimir Putin from a place like
Canada. But he's made Russia one of the most
dangerous and unpredictable states and armies in
the world. And world maps let us forget this, but
Russia is the state along our northern border.

If we want to carry Fukuyama’s analysis into our current world, you can add a fourth great power bloc to the two resisters of democracy.

4) Russia’s Czarist Petty Imperialism, which has been resurrected under Vladimir Putin. He’s returned to the power games of occupying territory along border states to subjugate them into obedience. 

We never stood up to him over the annexation of Georgian territory, and now he’s done the same with Crimea and Donbas in Ukraine. And he’s threatening Sweden and the Baltic states to leave their pro-European stances. Putin hasn’t brought Russia back to communism. He revived the Great Game of the 19th century instead.

In the 21st century, it looked as though Fukuyama’s more pessimistic picture of the future – which he didn’t even endorse in The End of History because he was so certain of democracy’s triumph – came true. 

But there’s one problem in the mix, which I kept coming back to last week.

The Arab Spring happened. Why? To be continued . . . 

The Society of the Selfish Bastard, Research Time, 09/10/2015

Of all the right-wing thinkers I’ve read so far for the Utopias project, Fukuyama is the closest I have to a real favourite. His arguments aren't nearly so rigorous as Robert Nozick’s. Unlike Friedrich Hayek’s deep knowledge of economics, his grounding in science is virtually non-existent.

Unlike Ayn Rand, he isn't a megalomaniac who’s inspired some of the most hilariously insufferable politicians in recent American history. 

What do I like about Francis Fukuyama? He's weird. He's an anti-Marx Marxist. A Hegelian revivalist in one of the most anti-intellectual social movements in North America. He thinks capitalism is a foundation of freedom, but The End of History oozes with contempt for capitalists.

Now, I have no idea how credible, in all the academic literature, Fukuyama’s reading of Hegel is here. My Utopias book project is unusual in philosophy writing in that I’m not really concerned whether Fukuyama ever gets Hegel “right” to some minimal degree. I just don't find that kind of argument very interesting, and I don't think many other folks outside the disciplinary academy do either.

Traditional liberal virtues understand Jordan Belfort an
example of humanity's essence. You can see why I have
a problem with traditional liberal virtues. We are better
for trying to be more ethical than a mercenary. 

What's interesting about Fukuyama, and the rest of the Big Four thinkers of new liberalism and new conservatism, is their real influence on American and global politics. More than any of the others, Fukuyama’s thinking reveals serious flaws in the general new conservative vision for society.

I’m mostly thinking about the bourgeois. The word isn’t used too frequently anymore, to the point where I've sometimes wondered whether such a class exists anymore. But they do. We just don’t call them that anymore.

Liberal political philosophy, at least in its traditional form, aims to be the framework by which a society of devils would be peaceful and fair with each other. Those devils are the bourgeois. Fukuyama gives a very good definition of such a person.

He’s the fundamentally selfish man. Liberal political principles are meant to produce harmony from the tensions between people struggling against each other to enrich themselves. Everyone is out for themselves, ready to take from others whenever it will benefit them. The only motivator in their lives is money. Homo Economicus.

So . . . assholes. 

And this vision of humanity is held up in so much of contemporary conservative thought as a model of virtue. Think back to the 2012 Presidential election in America. One of the Romney campaign's main messages was that his ability to run large, profitable companies qualified him as a virtuous political leader.

But Bain Capital's business model was stripping companies for their parts like a stolen Chevy in a chop shop. And it never really occurred to these Republicans that people would find this fact distasteful.

Acceptance of selfishness as a sacred attitude in liberal philosophy shows up in the theoretical end of modern conservatism. Remember Nozick’s radio show allegory. In a community where every member takes a turn each week producing a radio show that everyone listens to, I’d face social pressure to take my turn.

But Nozick says that our liberty is the essential human right. We must always be free to act without constraint, or at least with as few constraints as possible. So I can walk away from my radio show. Nozick even goes farther, claiming that social obligations are violent restraints on our liberty.

Fukuyama won’t stand for this, and returns to Hegel as his successor because he wants to restore some nobility to liberalism. He wants to build a liberal politics that has higher aspirations than constantly acquiring personal wealth. He wants a liberalism that cares just as much for virtue and strength of character as for material success.

So freedom for Fukuyama is more than just the absence of constraints. Authoritarian government oppression isn't terrible only because it restricts your movements and choices. The centrepiece of virtue is our dignity. Democracy is the best political structure for a society because it guards our dignity. 

Genuine Freedom Is Empty Freedom, Composing, 08/10/2015

Why did I write those last two posts the way I did? I’m trying to understand the roots of modern conservative thinking. Why folks like Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul believe what they do. 

Playing these esoteric and over-complicated ideas in Fukuyama's writing against my thoughts on the Arab Spring helped me wrap my head around a problem. It goes a little something like this.

We will be greeted as liberators, they said. Let's see if
this all works out, then.

Start from this premise. 

Premise 1

Think back to the first years of this century, if you can bear it. It’s not much worse than the state of the world today, honestly. George W Bush and his administration genuinely believed that all people universally yearned to live in a capitalist liberal democracy. 

This was especially true of those who had worked for the think tank Project for a New American Century in the 1990s. This think tank developed the democratic domino effect theory of Middle East politics: if one Arab country overthrew its dictators and democratized, then they would all quickly follow suit.

Fukuyama’s End of History was the key source for this idea, that capitalist liberal democracy is humanity’s universal aspiration. I explored why this is so strange and self-contradictory (or at least hypocritical) yesterday.

Fukuyama and the neoconservatives of PNAC were also impressed by the fall of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union. All their lives, they’d grown up with the idea that there wouldn't be an end to the Cold War but nuclear annihilation. 

Everyone thought that everyone in communist countries loved their regimes. Then the citizens overthrew their communist governments and embraced capitalist life and democracy. 

At least it seemed the case in 1992. Russia and Serbia threw us all for a bit of a loop since then. And no one noticed the exception of Belarus, which remains a strange military dictatorship. 

And they didn't count the central Asian former Soviet Republics that remained totalitarian monarchies, like Turkmenistan under Saparmurat Niyazov – Turkmenbashi.

American marines at the Battle of Fallujah. This
"liberators" thing isn't working out well by now.

Test Premise 1

The problem with this theory of the universal democratic dream is that when it was tested – overthrowing Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq in 2003 – liberal, culturally pluralist democracy didn’t replace him. Instead, the population of Iraq split on sectarian grounds. Shia factions took over the government and armed Sunni resistance grew.

So Shia and Sunni nationalism tore Iraq to pieces, and inflamed tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Since then, the Middle East has been engulfed in proxy wars as they jockey for dominance. 

The incompetence and violence of the US occupation only made things worse. The US had an army with no real training in peacemaking or guerrilla warfare, was grossly underfunded, relied on desperate volunteers for their numbers, and still relied on unreliable and psychotic teams of mercenaries to do most of the real offensive work of the occupation.

Let's not forget that ISIS formed in America's Camp Bucca. It’s the product of the most dangerous and radical members of Al Qaeda in Iraq growing even more deranged under day after day of torture.

Conclusion

So looking at this, you’d say that capitalist liberal democracy isn’t a universal aspiration. If it was, Iraq would be a peaceful democracy and not a country on fire.

And this is Tahrir Square, Cairo, in June 2011. The
revolution was televised, and I watched it on TV.

Hey, Wait a Minute . . . 

But the Arab Spring happened, even though its revolutions were cruelly suppressed. Only Tunisia's was successful. Yet those revolutions were driven by the real desires of the populations of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf Emirates for freedom.

Maybe This Conclusion?

So maybe the desire for freedom from autocratic, totalitarian, and military governments really is universal. But precisely what that freedom is may not always take the form of Fukuyama’s ideal society: Western capitalist liberal democracy.

What I’ve figured out so far is that freedom is the ability to change your society. Putting that power in the hands of the people. What solutions you come up with will depend on the problems you have to solve. 

The last ten years of financial crisis and economic recession gave us plenty of problems. Now, we need to figure out how to solve them. Freedom is when the people drive that change.

Unseen Theology II: The Ghost of an Image, Research Time, 07/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . So what does this mean? That the animating spirit of W-era neoconservatism was Christian supremacy in disguise?

It's a pretty heavy and simple statement to say about a writer whose ideas and works are as complex as Georg Hegel's. But because Fukuyama takes up an oversimplified version of his ideas, I suppose that can be my playing field.

You could say that this is the most powerful face in the
Arab world: Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who's
become the de-factor ruler of Saudi Arabia, thanks to
the dementia and possible Alzheimer's of King Salman.

Fukuyama pitches his idea – history bends toward capitalist liberal democracy – as having universal scope. He gives a brief dismissal of Muslim cultures from being part of this trajectory. Oil wealth, he says, perverts the natural character of their societies so much that the supposedly universal yearning for democracy and freedom fades away.

Fukuyama dismisses the Muslim world too quickly. Quickly enough that probing why can reveal a very deep problem with his program.

His philosophical roots in Hegel inadvertently – and invisibly, even to Fukuyama himself – cut not only the Muslim world, but the entire non-Western or non-Christian world out of consideration. 

When I read Philosophy of History, I found an important limitation of the book was that the progress of human history culminated in Europe, in the West. Typical for the early 19th century in Europe. But that story of humanity can't work in an era after colonialism, when we can't really hide anymore from what European colonialism really was.

Any philosophical conception of humanity's history has to account for our plurality, our diversity. Go ahead and think messianically about the history and development of human civilization. The notion that human freedom will have a single, unified form is a deservedly tough sell these days.

You know what’s an even tougher sell? That the single, unified form of human freedom is fundamentally Christian. In the peculiarly Christian idea of the Kingdom of Heaven, Hegel saw the culmination of human politics. It’s the restoration of paradise, where everyone is equal in status and lives in harmony.

When I worked full-time in academia, I rarely found
authors or colleagues who took Fukuyama seriously
as a political philosopher. We really should, if only
because of how effective his ideas were.

European humanity becomes God by building a system of civil government where everyone in society perfectly and mutually recognizes each other’s equal dignity and rights. 

When I think about how Derrida described Hegel, I see parallels to my discussions over this Winter with Steve Fuller about his book Knowledge. 

There, we talked about how a very peculiar theological conception of humanity as being "in the image of God” sparked a revolution in our knowledge institutions. We started learning about the world because that knowledge brought us in tune with God, more like God. For Christians, humanity and God share a common nature.

God and Christianity doesn't figure in Fukuyama’s messianic vision of a planet full of capitalist liberal democratic regimes. Globally omnipresent democracy would be the paradise in which everyone recognized each other's inherent dignity and inalienable rights. 

These dignity and rights are grounded in human nature alone. Nothing about the image of God here. Fukuyama has, to his credit, learned the post-colonial lesson: We shouldn’t fit all peoples into a world-view that’s the product of only one culture.

But his break isn’t clean enough. Fukuyama still relies on Hegel for the framework of his political thinking. And Hegel's philosophy is so firmly rooted in Christian culture that, long after the ideology of Man as the Image of God faded from Europe’s scientific culture, he’s still riffing on it. 

You could also say that this dead fruit salesman is
the most powerful face in the Arab world. It's
a case I could certainly feel safe making.

Fukuyama’s entire conception of this universal yearning of humanity as human bends all the peoples of the world to a Western cultural narrative. His supposed liberation in Western democracy is an imperialist ideology in its heart.

This is Jacques Derrida's basic criticism of The End of History in chapter two of Spectres of Marx.

And you think it’s over. You think Derrida, the established philosophical genius so famous as to have an adjective made of his name, would have schooled this right-wing upstart. Fukuyama's just a booster for capitalism, after all.

Then came Bouazizi and the revolution.

Unseen Theology I: The Only Outcome, Research Time, 06/10/2015

You see, sometimes, my voracious and borderline psychotic reading habits end up striking some really cool, productive synergies. 

Late last month, I began diving into Francis Fukuyama, the last of the Big Four thinkers that define modern conservatism that I have to explore for what I want to do in my Utopias manuscript. He’s also the weirdest of the Big Four, for reasons I've gone into before, and will again.

I also discarded the second-hand biography of David Foster Wallace I had been reading, for reasons I've also explained on the blog. Instead, I picked up Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx from my shelf. An old friend from McMaster gave me a pile of Derrida books when he was cleaning out his bookshelves a few years ago. And I finally got around to this one.

Because that "invading a country into democracy" plan
worked out really well, didn't it?

I thought it would be a little useful to the project, but I didn't realize just how much. Spectres of Marx is an extended response to the popular impact of Fukuyama’s End of History. 

Derrida takes End of History to task for all kinds of flaws, all the flaws that made it so seductive to the movement in the Washington elite that would found Project for a New American Century. 

The idea that, as soon as oppressive or autocratic state machinery was destroyed, its population would naturally form a peaceful, fully functional liberal democracy, because this was the universal endpoint of the human struggle for freedom. This is the notion behind the W. Bush Administration's ideology that the people of Iraq would welcome the invading American army as liberators.

Fukuyama’s revival of Hegel as a prophet of capitalist liberal democracy is the unexpected philosophical centre of this notion that’s led to more than a decade of brutal war in Arabia, the Maghreb, and the Fertile Crescent already. 

Fukuyama essentially pitched liberal democracy as the only possible outcome of the inherent human drive for freedom because it’s the only kind of state through which everyone recognizes each other as having equal civil rights before the law. 

I’d venture that Derrida is probably best at poking holes in other people's supposedly iron-clad ideas and ventures by hauling their blind spots into the light. An example is one jab at Fukuyama that appears in Spectres of Marx. 

Fukuyama considers his conception of freedom ideologically neutral when it comes to religion. Freedom in liberal democracy is entirely secular because liberal democracy enshrines your freedom to worship as you wish among your civil rights to freedom of thought. As long as your religious practice doesn't infringe on the rights of another, you’re cool. 

Fukuyama was also wrong about the Middle East's
Muslim population having no desire for freedom from
their autocratic regimes, as we could see in the
revolutions of 2011-12. Bouazizi lives.

Then he does something very weird, not only for a supposedly secular thinker, but for one who'd have such a deep influence on people who believed they could democratize the entire Middle East by invading Iraq and installing a parliamentary government.

He says the Muslim world of the Persian Gulf and the Maghreb are exceptions from this universal drive. Ostensibly, this is because their governments satiate their populations with handouts from their states' massive oil wealth. 

But this is a poor excuse, making no allowance for autocratic regimes in Muslim states without oil wealth, like Egypt and Jordan. It makes no allowance for there having been no successful revolution against Saddam Hussein during the international sanctions regime, when oil wealth couldn’t reach the populace anymore. It makes no allowance for why there hasn’t been a mass uprising among the enslaved populations in Saudi Arabia and the small, oil-rich emirates.

There's something more going on here, and Derrida identifies it as rooted in the parts of Hegel’s philosophy that Fukuyama wants to ignore when he adapts the German's system to justify the perfect character of liberal democratic ideals. 

It's a philosophy that holds Christianity to be the one true religion. . . . To be continued

It Is Accomplished IV: Tying Myself Up in Red Tape, Research Time, 29/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . See, this is what frustrates me about having political conversations sometimes, that a lot of the time, people think I’m one type of person when really I’m another. 

This was clearest in conversations with my old libertarian friends. I would say I’m a person of the left, and they’d talk to me as if I was a doctrinaire, state-centric socialist. But I actually think that kind of government is ridiculous. 

It stifles economic sectors that are more productive and ethical in competition under state ownership. It enables mass corruption, since the state becomes a universal monopoly that people game to advance in society. 

Brazil depicted a central character who was stuck in a
world of bureaucratic conformity, but who dreamed
of being absolutely unique.

The tradition of art from Franz Kafka’s The Castle to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil helped me form a lot of my political sensibility. I saw clear expressions of the economic and political flaws of state socialism when I studied the history of North America and Europe, and clear expressions of state socialism’s ethical flaws in films like Brazil.

So when I say that I think the post-Reagan political order needs some serious structural change if we’re really going to lift millions out of poverty (again) and start repairing our immense ecological harm (for the first time fucking ever), state-centric communism won’t be an answer.

Fukuyama makes that much clear. Mind you, he emphasizes what I think is ridiculous because he believes it and makes it the centrepiece of his conception of economic progress. Fukuyama says that human mastery over nature – his core principle of science’s unity and progress – ensures our prosperity.

This was an important element of Marx’s philosophy too. Science progresses by growing humanity’s mastery over nature, so we produce more and more from the Earth. He just considers communism the best political system for fairly distributing the bounty from our authority and control of nature.

Environmentalism – and ecological thinking more generally – shows us how dunder-headed this way of thinking really is. The last 200 years of humanity understanding “mastery” of nature as our ability to exploit it with increasingly efficient rapaciousness* hasn’t made us more powerful at all. Instead, we’re the engines of Earth’s sixth Great Extinction.

Because humanity-enabled atmospheric changes have
dried out so much of what was once lush land that
huge swaths of forest are burning down and will likely
become desert in decades. I mean, holy fuck.

* My ecological perspective (which you can read about here) is what makes reading about Fukuyama’s virtue of insatiable desire so off-putting. I’m too accustomed to the idea, which should be MORE taken for granted today, that insatiable desire is terribly destructive.

Humans need a government that guards their freedom. Democracy generally does that best. Or at least, it has the best potential. Where I differ from a liberal is how.

Robert Nozick struck such a chord in traditionalist liberal thinking because he situated his philosophy in a long-established liberal premise: people fundamentally need physical security above all else. So the primary (and it turns out, only) legitimate function of the state is to provide physical security: national military defence and domestic police. 

If the politics of my own time, the early 21st century, demonstrate anything on this matter, they at least call it into question. You can’t take seriously mass-scale domestic espionage and the inevitable disaster of anti-terrorist intervention with a military built to fight states, and say there might not be an essential problem with a state monopoly on our physical security.

Folks who worry about state socialism say that a political institution shouldn’t have a monopoly on all industry and employment. This is true. But not enough people worry about the political institutions that hold a monopoly on the use of lethal weapons and the prison system. 

I’m not going full libertarian here, but Latin Americans – even more than the most paranoid North Americans – have lived through generations of military men who think their power over the guns and prisons gives them more right to rule than civil servants and elected officials. 

The scary part for the liberal tradition – from Hobbes to Nozick – is that this conclusion can follow from having made physical security the primary purpose of the state.

Where I fall for an alternative is with social democracy. But it’s a form of social democracy that keeps the state and the military in a very subservient role. It’s my humbly radical utopia. . . . To be continued.

It Is Accomplished III: A Necessary Revolution, Research Time, 28/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . Last time I talked about Francis Fukuyama's work, I got hung up on how weird I found it that he conceived of naked, insatiable consumerism as a human virtue and a necessary condition of political freedom. Seriously. Pretty strange.

But today (and possibly tomorrow, depending on how long this post eventually runs), I want to talk more specifically about his explicit political thinking, revolutions in particular. 

This is seriously important for my Utopias book project, because of the Big Four philosophers of modern conservatism,* Fukuyama is the only one, to my knowledge so far, who endorses social revolution as an essential engine of historical progress.

The American Revolution is an inevitable historical
touchstone in any story of the evolution of democracy.
But too many writers in American conservative society
treat the revolution and the origin of the United States
as the culmination of political freedom. It was really
a phase transition in what we understood political
freedom to be.

* Say the incantation with me now, in chronological order: Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, Francis Fukuyama.

There’s a particular point in some social process when the entire order of the government, civil society, and the most powerful organizations in the economy just kind of have to go. Any of these can be destroyed by some popular uprising or other shock at any time when things are fragile. 

But beyond this contingency, there's a point where there can be no other way forward than to upend the entire order of things. Revolution becomes necessary, not just in an ethical sense, but as if the very nature of things determine an explosion. Strike a match. It burns because of what it is, and what's happened to it.

Fukuyama calls the issue that brings a society to its breaking point a contradiction. He's following Hegel, who saw such necessary explosions as dictated by the universal logic in nature. 

So I'll just call the issue an essential problem. A society has a structure that creates different groups, but the nature of the groups themselves means they'll inevitably conflict. You can't solve the problem without fundamentally changing all the groups.

Fukuyama says that capitalist liberal democracy is a society with no insoluble problems because in its society, everyone is free from authoritarian government and has a share of the material prosperity that enterprising economics produce. He dismisses Marx’s idea that the impoverished masses essentially conflict with the super-rich.

He does so because he’s already explained how capitalist societies allow everyone to prosper. It helped his case because he contrasted mid-20th century economic growth in capitalist societies with the snowballing stagnation of authoritarian communist states. A capitalist worker is twice as productive and works twice as hard as the communist worker. So the capitalist worker is four times richer.

But that's not how it worked out. In the decades since Fukuyama wrote, ordinary workers have seen wages and salaries stagnate, legal protections and the ability to bargain with employers stripped away. Many workers are now treated as independent businesses, even though they're individual people, allowing employers to cut away their obligations to workers. 

As a result of this loss of economic power, people in the middle class have grown more indebted, less prosperous, and less secure. In such an era when the very rich are the only ones with much economic power, conflict is inevitable.

That’s the conflict of the 21st century's populist left. The rich have become oligarchs with enough influence over state laws and international trade agreements that they can remove the capacity of people who have to work for a living to build any kind of material parity to demand moral obligations from the folks who sign their paychecks.

Social stratification of the rich and poor is the conflict of our time. But unlike Marx’s answer, we now know that full state-centric communism won’t emerge from this conflict. . . . To be continued

It Is Accomplished II: Perfection Is Satisfaction, Research Time, 25/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . Francis Fukuyama wrote to reclaim Georg Hegel for liberals. The strong influence of the old German Logician™ on Karl Marx had relegated him to the hated left. But Fukuyama made a successful bid to restore his influence for the Cato Institute set. 

Didn’t really turn out to be the best idea, but that’s how the catastrophic military occupations go down.

The real fantasy of They Live!, apart from how
unbelievable it is that a movie could be so awesome, is
that humanity has to be told by infiltrating alien
overlords to care only for consumption. At least, so says
(and I'm paraphrasing) Francis Fukuyama.

Fukuyama resurrects Hegel as a foundation to argue that there’s a mechanism driving human history to a necessary conclusion, a conclusion where human society has the shape that guarantees people’s maximum freedom. He considers such a society capitalist liberal democracy.

Now, in the broad sense, this is a controversial claim to say the least. But I’m going to leave the controversy to the side because what I find really fascinating about Fukuyama is why he believes that capitalist liberal democracy maximizes human freedom.

There’s the negative reasons why. Fukuyama is writing in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and during China’s transition to authoritarian (and heavily corruption-enabling) capitalism. 

These authoritarian communist governments were notoriously inefficient at managing their economies because increasing technological complexity results in too many components in even everyday household items to price by centralized bureaucracy. 

Just think about all the individual components that go into your smartphone, computer, television, kitchen gear, and car. Imagine the expense and slow speed of having to make all those pricing decisions in an economic central planning committee. Plus, they had a massive secret police apparatus to instil universal paranoia and quash all dissent.

Fukuyama’s positive reason why? I stare at it, conceptually, in amazement, like one of Arthur C. Clarke’s explorers in an impossibly smooth and massive alien ship. I’ve rarely come across an idea that combines naïveté, misanthropy, and personal ego into a package of utopian optimism.

He believes that our base, insatiable desire for more and better stuff combines with scientific and technological progress in exploiting nature to produce a world of constant innovation in consumer goods and a free economy so that everyone can buy as much of it as physically possible.

It's just a weird feeling as I read The End of History and
the Last Man that only occasionally appears. But I
sometimes feel like Fukuyama's voice in the text is
what Patrick Bateman would sound like if he wrote a
book of political philosophy.

It reads like a pure misanthropy: human progress is driven by our never-ending drive to gorge ourselves on more and more. A society that perfectly satisfies humanity will be a constantly innovative push to feed our all-devouring maws. Yet in this image, Fukuyama sees our highest dignity: innovation and progress.

Actually, it reminds me of the conceptions of desire that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explored in their work. But they at least took an open joy in perversity and the grotesque. Fukuyama feels too clean-cut, which is disturbing for someone with this conception of human desire.

Capitalism is the best social system to satisfy this blazing nuclear furnace of consumerist desire because of its immense productivity.

Fukuyama discusses the most famous remarks that Karl Marx made about the post-communist paradise of perfect productivity and a perfectly satisfied humanity. That we’ll work in the morning, and pursue all our passions and loves for the rest of the day. And Eastern Bloc countries, he says, often had four-hour workdays, which were able to satisfy everyone’s basic needs.

But capitalist production is so efficient and so innovative that enough work to satisfy basic needs can be done in an hour. Then the worker happily continues his eight-hour day – so Fukuyama says – so he can have as much surplus money as possible to buy more and more things and services. 

CONSUME! 

CONSUME!!!!!!!

Sorry, I don’t know what came over me there. Maybe I should shut this down for today and continue to work through this utopia after Shabbos.

That’s why I’ve been taking Saturdays off from blogging lately. Living with my Jewish partner has exposed me to a lot of positive ideas and material benefits of taking a day off. 

If not a total day off from everything electronic or creative (I’m not sure if I could ever do that), then at least a day to relax and step back from my everyday projects to think about why and how I do what I do. To step away from frenzied activity and enjoy low-intensity life with the one I love, and with friends. 

That, at least at this moment, is no better refutation of Fukuyama’s perversely normalized conception of human nature than any other I can think of. To be continued . . . 

It Is Accomplished I: What Will Make Our World Collapse? Research Time, 24/09/2015

There’s been a fundamental shift over the last 70-ish years in how we understand ourselves and the world, at least in the West. I consider it to mark a categorical shift in our culture. The generations since the advent of nuclear weaponry understand that the end of humanity can be entirely contingent and purposeless.

If you ever watch the movie Threads, it's a docu-drama
depicting how what remains of society would collapse
into mass misery after nuclear war, if we were unlucky
enough to survive. It's traumatizing to watch.

This isn’t universal for every culture or society, because some societies have such strong religious beliefs that even a contingent end is seen as the culmination of a divine plan. Or their education standards have been terrible. 

It makes sense to say that for the vast majority of human history, we’ve understood ourselves as having some kind of role in a divine order. Maybe it’s the profound humanism of the Western religions, the broadly ecological Asian faith and ethics traditions, or the animist traditions of the rest of humanity. But there’s a divine order to the world and time.

Except I can’t bring myself to believe that, and I think that view became very popular since the Second World War. The main driver was public knowledge of what nuclear weapons could do, and the cultural context of the American-Soviet arms race and geopolitical standoff. 

A global misunderstanding with just a teaspoon too much paranoia could end all life on Earth in a bath of fire and radiation. During the same era, the environmentalist movement also took hold, whose core concept is that pollution and other destructive side effects of otherwise productive human industry could lead humanity to drown in its own shit.

So it’s weird to read Francis Fukuyama and find him seriously considering the notion that history culminates with a human triumph. While humanity could come to a contingent, undignified end, he gives the idea lip service, as if it were a possible accident unimportant to understanding human purpose.

Fukuyama envisions the culmination of human history in a secular kingdom of heaven where everyone is perfectly satisfied. Such a kingdom, says Fukuyama on the democratization of Russia, is capitalist liberal democracy.

It's weird to me to read someone so sincerely write this. Most ardent defences of unrestrained capitalism are today made by right-wing ideologues for whom suggestions of building a universal health care system or unionizing the local Walmart is totalitarian communist subversion. 

Even the dry economist’s tone of Friedrich Hayek could sometimes burn with the nervous electricity of an extremist’s pitch black fear.

Progressive left politics today are the social movements popular protest and utopian visions of a world free of racism, authoritarian police power, or environmental destruction. The expressions of the new 21st century Western left in state politics are similarly opposed to unrestrained capitalism: Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Syriza, Podemos.

I’m not accustomed to hearing a voice as calm, peaceful, and hopeful as Fukuyama’s praising pure capitalism as the only social system that provides universal prosperity. 

This is because he believes in a mechanism – a universal framework of human desire and knowledge – that drives human history toward a society that most efficiently and creatively develops our knowledge to satisfy our always-shifting desires. For Fukuyama, that’s capitalism in a liberal democratic society.

His reason for believing this lies in how he understands why societies collapse. Fukuyama talks about societies collapsing from internal contradictions, social and economic structures that put different populations in conflicts that can only be solved through confrontation.

So the perfect society would be one that’s immune to revolution. Is that really pure, individualistic, capitalism without restraint? To be continued . . .