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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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Oct 4, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer

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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Completely agree. One of the reasons I like reading about history is I get a sort of quiet comfort knowing that everything going on right now will be a few pages of a general history text in 500 years. The Mike Duncan of the year 3000 might not even give the 21st century a full podcast episode.

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Oct 4, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer

Nietzsche captures the inductive argument perfectly (in 1885!)

"What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame."

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Oct 4, 2022·edited Oct 4, 2022

When I was in undergrad, a professor asked me and the other women in the room, "Do you know what sets you apart from 99% of women for all of human history?"

We eagerly offered up that we were statistically likely to survive childbirth, and indeed statistically much unlikelier, than our forebearers, to ever give birth. He shrugged and said in some places, in some cases. Someone said we were less likely to be married, another that we were less likely to devote a lot of time and energy to cooking. Again: maybe. Finally, the professor said, "How much of your time is devoted to textiles?"

In a pre-industrial world, a huge - a staggering - proportion of "women's work" (and some men's) was that of literally producing textiles, making clothing, bedding, bags, cushions, caps, stockings, tablecloths, napkins, aprons, ribbons, string, twine, sacks, and the like. This work, which has largely vanished in the west outside of artisans, is a hundred times more automated and faster even for textile workers elsewhere. That physically producing fabric would occupy so little of our collective time would be, to anyone around before the adoption of the cotton gin, unfathomable. I think about that whenever someone talks about the end of history, about us having nowhere else to go.

In 1999, a teacher told me - then aged six - that we'd reached the end of history. I think he was kidding. I think his point was, humans have conquered the land, the sky, and the sea; we have beaten back a century of world wars and liberation movements, we are on cruise control now. Easy enough to see why he thought that, in a suburb of Boston in 1999, but I always wonder how his thinking went on the morning of 9/11. There's always something more, and it's usually inconceivable without context that won't reveal itself to us for decades, or centuries. Tom Stoppard once wrote that everything lost to time will crop back up again, and I imagine history will keep echoing itself for a long time, but nothing about the fundamentals of our society was obvious 7,000 years ago - even the things that were obvious 6,000 years ago, and that's on a very long timetable.

To paraphrase Stoppard again: The procession is very long, and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march, so nothing can be lost to it.

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"First - yes, the now boilerplate defense of Fukuyama is more or less correct. His end-of-history argument wasn’t that things would stop happening but rather that there would be no real challengers left to liberal capitalism after the fall of the USSR. "

China has entered the chat.

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He is wrong. We don't live in a liberal democratic capitalist society. We live in oligarchy controlled by the handful of rich and powerful. It is neither liberal nor democratic nor capitalist. History continues.

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There’s a lot of that book that isn’t about liberal democracy being the end state but rather that (and disclosure I also read this last as an undergraduate) liberal democracy accords a dignity to the citizen that once tasted, is never forgotten, and that systems which don’t respect that raised expectation of dignity will be viewed as inferior by those peoples ever after.

To be honest, those are the parts I remember from it. The idea that progress towards liberal democracy will be uniform and ever forwards, and that liberal democracy will never ever be superseded, don’t seem particularly persuasive, to the point that I even question if they’re in the book because they seem so straw-mannish. I guess they must be.

But the idea that liberal democracy is a gate and once a people goes through it, they will feel it to be a retrograde step to their dignity ever go back, that I kind of believe.

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Have you ever read Reinhold Niehbuhr's "Faith and History"? It's a larger commentary on how our ways of framing history - are shaped by our religious teleology. So for example, many religious traditions like the Greeks saw each cycle of time as a gradual *decay*. Each age, a movement *away* from a better time. This, in turn, informed how they thought about innovation in the world (i.e. - trying to discover deeper immutable rules/higher forms that transcended an ersatz and gradual material degradation).

However, Judaism and Christianity both were teleologically distinct. In Judaism, history will be culminated at some point in the future, when Jews return to the promised land - and the larger covenant with God is fulfilled. Christianity, emerging out of Judaism, adopted this teleological expectation: history would culminate at some point in the future - with the rapture, etc.

I always this about this whenever anyone mentions Fukuyama, because it's interesting how much of our historical thinking - still always presupposes an end/culmination - one we're moving towards - as if it's the most self-evident, inescapable framing. Be it Hegel or our larger expectation of redemption via technology. And yet, why must history have some culmination? Who keeps wedging this plot device in there? It feels like a type of baggage from the narrative arcs we've deeply internalized.

I get that it's a snappy title, but why is anyone still debating "an end" like it's a real thing - instead of an internalized teleological trope.

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Oct 4, 2022·edited Oct 4, 2022

Glad you threw in a brief mention of climate change, but we should be at least as worried about resource depletion, IMO. It's debatable how soon we'll "run out" of readily accessible phosphorous or groundwater or rare-earth minerals, or commercially viable seafood stocks, but then again, we don't have to "run out" for major problems to arise. There is less and less low-hanging fruit WRT obtaining those resources, and that alone has the potential to strain governments or global economic systems to the breaking point, especially if those systems have already been weakened by other political/economic/social upheavals. "We've always found technological solutions and we always will" is a nice idea, but even if those solutions exist, we need to have our shit together enough to determine and effectively implement those solutions. And I have increasingly less faith in our collective ability to do that.

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founding

Our lifespan is the only time we will ever experience so it seems natural to me that we will always mark our lifetime as special. Where we lose perspective is trying to come up with other rationales.

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"Here’s the trouble: history is long, and [people under 40] have a really, really hard time not participating in a kind of historical chauvinism about their place in it."

Fixed that for you. :]

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Watching a Netflix series The Sandman. In the current episode a man is given immortality and would meet with The Sandman every 100 years at a pub at the same date in the year ending 89. This started in 1389. The depiction of the location, people and customs over the fist 400 years were only slightly discernibly different. Then the 1989 version and wow... clearly "history" had accelerated.

But the main plot point there was that people really had not changed... their hopes, dreams and fears where all fundamentally the same. History without people would not exist because it would not be written. This "end of history" meme only makes sense with the end of human existence. Otherwise, there will always be another chapter to be written.

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Good points and historical basing of them. I chuckled the day his book came out. It was doomed to be wrong.

I think another reason people want to believe now is the best (or whatever) is a version of The Illusion of Control. If now is better than then, then tomorrow will likely be good or better (and I can sleep at night.).

Virginia Postrel (she ran REASON back in its hayday) explored this desire to control the future in her book "The Future and Its Enemies". IIRC, she posits that the best future is one where basic simple rules are set and people free to pursue their own interests. But, people, both right and left, are frightened by an unknown, unknowable and ungovernable future, so try to control the future via laws, social pressures etc. The effect of these is to diminish the future. So, people salving their anxieties today, diminish everyones' future.

I guess it's just the macro version of what most people do individually, though, in their own lives......

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Your closing thoughts say it all “ history moves very slowly, then all at once”. Perfection!

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I completely agree with the main thrust of this argument. And Fukuyama did choose an audacious title. In fairness to him I don't think he was necessarily arguing that we would have liberal democracy for billions of years until the sun implodes and destroys the galaxy. I haven't read the book so I don't know what timeline qualifiers he was offering, if any.

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