On Why We Like What We Like
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We like what we like because others like these same things, we purchase goods precisely because others have purchased them, we watch shows because others have or are watching them; human decision-making makes sense only in light of the social matrix in which our decisions and actions are embedded. This is great for business, as it tends to lower acquisition costs; it also means that human beings are astonishingly malleable: we are each many different potential beings, depending on the particular crucible in which we find ourselves. There is enough individual variance that no equilibrium becomes fixed, but suboptimal equilibria are both surprisingly common and can survive a depressingly long time. (In general, we should be more concerned with avoiding harms than securing possible upsides, although not to the extent of becoming complacent). This sensitivity to social cues is at once humanity’s curse, and also its salvation.
And:
Does history have an arrow? Is there a directionality to events? Can we develop an historical teleology? Or is history, literally, a sequence of events, quite without pattern, or harmony, rhyme, or reason? (Please note: we will consider here only non-theological explanations yielding viewer-independent claims without recourse to a set of fundamental beliefs or axioms).
Francis Fukuyama, in his (in?)famous book The End of History and the Last Man, thought so, fleshing out a line of argumentation he first advanced in the summer 1989 issue of National Interest. In it, he reduced History (capital-H) to a series of opposing ideologies, or ways of organizing society. Lower-case history he separated out: this was the study of events, who said what where, when, and why. Viewed through Fukuyama’s lens, History emerged as a grand arena of clashing world-views. Questions of this nature are not susceptible to proof; one’s answer might be defended by a consilience of facts relative to a given social, political, or economic context, and by appeals to logic, or emotion, but by their nature were not equivalent to a mathematical theorem, which is timeless and context-free. One unfortunate consequence of this is that politics is zero-sum, very unlike (say) economics, where trade benefits both sides.
For Fukuyama’s purposes, this meant History was composed of a series of death-struggles between incommensurate ideas. Incautious critics might object that this was an argument perfectly sized to a person who had grown up during the Cold War and who worked in Ronald Reagan’s State Department. But Fukuyama, a careful political scientist with a historical bent, took a broader view then this. He saw ideology not just as political-economic abstractions labeled “communism” or “capitalism,” but also modes of civilization: hunter-gatherer, agricultural, industrial. Each pushed the previous system either to extinction or ti the margins. By the beginning of the twentieth century, at the latest, it was obvious that industrialization was table-stakes for development; more than the “best” way to organize one’s polity, it was, quite literally, the only game in town. With industrialization’s triumph, the theater of combat shifted to which type of industrial society was best fit: fascist, communist, or liberal? That was the question of the 20th century; it was answered, definitively, by 1989: liberalism, in both politics and economics; a rules-based, individualistic, and secular regime. This was history’s prime attractor, with all human development to that point as prelude.
Fukuyama’s thesis attained wide celebrity in the 1990s, and with the Soviet collapse and China’s embrace of free market reforms (Tiananmen not withstanding, democracy was certain to follow; the United States need only wait), coupled with the expansion of U.S. power and influence post-Cold War, underpinned by Silicon Valley’s digital revolution, seemed to have been borne out by events. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 knocked confidence in this ineluctable trajectory badly askew. Fukuyama, first a prophet, was now a useful idiot.
Francis Fukuyama remains widely respected and a prolific author. His most cited work remains The End of History, however, and its reputation has not worn well. When cited today, it is usually as an example of American hubris, entirely of its moment, and perhaps tinged with nostalgia, depending on one’s source. I believe, however, that Fukuyama’s thesis is due for a rehabilitation. Certainly, Fukuyama is ascribed beliefs he himself did not hold. The End of History never claimed the end was circa 1990, only that there was no logical development beyond liberalism, that in terms of society organization it was a global maximum. Fukuyama was well-aware many societies in the 1990s were far from liberal, and that many individuals held beliefs that were either antithetical to liberalism or openly hostile. His claim was solely that liberalism represented a kind of highest common denominator representing the best outcomes for the broadest number. Any other conceivable system would necessarily privilege a narrower constituency. This group might benefit more than under a liberal regime, but its gain was at the expense of others.
Aristotle, the father of political science, held that there were only three basic types of government: by the one, the few, or the many. Two-and-a-half millennia latter, we have been unable to identify a fourth, likely because there is no fourth option. In this sense, Fukuyama was merely footnoting a truth inherent in Aristotle’s original analysis.
In truth, the only defensible critique one can charge Fukuyama with is that he got his timing wrong. This is a particularly thin reed. Fukuyama may have personally suspected, but did not argue in The End of History, that liberalism’s victory was nigh. Fukuyama’s thesis is robust to authoritarian revanche (this is why China’s failure to democratize or Putin’s consolidation of power do not falsify Fukuyama). The End of History, at its core, is the belief that there is no fourth option, and that the best implementation of the third option (government by the many) is liberalism.
From the perspective of 2017, the near-absence of Islamism in The End of History is glaring. It is untrue that Fukuyama did not mention the Islamist dissent; he did, but in passing, noting that it was a particularist agenda incapable of universal appeal. Undoubtedly, he did not foresee its success to date in the twenty-first century. But this is irrelevant to the merits of his thesis. Again, The End of History nowhere argues when that date will come, or that backsliding is forbidden. Rather, The End of History predicts that the Islamist project will ultimately fail.
Almost a generation on from its authorship, The End of History has stood the test of time. It has not, contrary to its many critics, been falsified. It is worth remembering that, today, more than ever, the basic correctness of liberalism. But, and this is Fukuyama’s claim, even if liberalism were to disappear everywhere, in every society, to replaced (perhaps) by a technodistopic alliance of AI and ethno-authoritarianism, its disappearance would only be followed, in time, by its rebirth. It is liberalism’s incapacity for evolution that is the true driver of History’s end. Liberal polities can collapse, but there can be no supersession.
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If The End of History erred, it did so in conveying the impression to its readers (already primed to hear it) that once attained, a liberal consolidation was permanent. The Soviet project was in collapse at the time The End of History was published; it was all too easy for Fukuyama’s (Western, cosmopolitan) readership to believe itself the true vanguard of history.
For those gifted (or cursed) with the tragic imagination, or simply the historically-minded, this interpretation of The End of History appears risible: it is only too apparent that whatever history is, what it is not is end-directed. There is no ultimate destination; history is cycle and epicycle, without cease. Yet such a belief is commensurate with The End of History; Fukuyama in his conclusion, all but states this plainly. That many of his (uncareful) readers did not understand this does not indict the author.
Finally:
It is clear that any super-human artificial intelligence (“AI”) would not be rational. Reason is a human instinct and subject to evolutionary pressures. Its valorization is a human conceit, nothing more. It is a very human error to imagine our gods in our own image. But an actual superhuman AI would be a-rational and a-logical; it would not be interpretable in human terms, and consequently would present itself as entirely insane.
Book Recommendations: "The War for Gaul: A New Translation,” by Julius Caesar, translated by James O’Donnell; “The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace,” by Paul Chamberlin.
See you tomorrow!
JT