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Adam Gurri's avatar

A few thoughts.

First, I think the qualified defense of Fukuyama is that the events since the book was written have not in some way rendered it obviously wrong. That is, I don't think empirically it is on any weaker footing today than it was the day the original essay, never mind book, was written. And a great deal of it beyond the central thesis is stuff that people should take to heart; namely, the weakness of the many contemporary forms of non-democracy that have at various times been trumpeted as superior. It's striking to reread the book today and be reminded that he was not resting that component of the argument on the fall of the Soviet Union, but on the long decline of non-democracies starting in the 70s and very much including right-wing authoritarians. In short, there's a lot of value to the book even if one disagrees with the central argument.

Second, I have to agree with you. More than agreeing with you, I think Fukuyama's Hegelian framing is very strange. He rests not on structural changes in the human situation with the onset of technological/scientific/productive advances in the 19th century, but on the logic of democratic narratives as legitimators. I simply can't get on board with that; it brings on board too many assumptions with too little to go on. And ultimately I'm with you: history is long, and the period since the onset of the Industrial and Scientific revolutions has been a blink of an eye. It could be that there will be some unrecognizable institutional forms in a hundred years or in five hundred years. It could also be that the gains of the last two hundred years are a flash in the pan and we'll end up back at the horrible old equilibrium, or some other, nevertheless worse one. I find that one unlikely, but not exactly impossible. Certainly just as possible as that we've discovered all the institutional arrangements that we are going to, so soon after the old agrarian era has ended.

Finally, at the risk of an unwelcome comment, I have to disagree with the idea that Hanania is an interesting thinker or at all worth engaging. I'm not big on "no-platforming," but in my view we'd all be much better off if he ended up unable to draw any audience whatsoever. He is a moral black hole, a completely reprehensible human being, who revels in childish cruelty and delights in the attention. That's all I have to say on that matter; I won't make myself a nuisance by commenting again should you mention him again.

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Dewey's avatar

I think "now" is the only version of the world we can grasp.

"Yes. It is senseless to claim that things exist in their instancing only. The template for the world and all in it was drawn long ago. Yet the story of the world, which is all the world we know, does not exist outside of the instruments of its execution. Nor can those instruments exist outside of their own history. And so on. This life of yours is not a picture of the world. it is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained."

-Cormac McCarthy

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