How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. Francis Wheen

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ ‘you can be sure it has touched something in the popular mood.’ And, sure enough, a great power overburdened with defence commitments duly succumbed to imperial overstretch soon afterwards. Alas for Kennedy, it was not the United States but the Soviet Union, whose speedy and spectacular demise he had quite failed to foresee. Undaunted, he interpreted this unexpected plot-twist as confirmation of his prophecy of American decline, since the end of the Cold War reduced ‘the significance of the one measure of national power in which the United States had a clear advantage over other countries’, that is military strength. (The other measures of American dominance – economic, cultural, technological – were apparently invisible from Professor Kennedy’s study at Yale.) Besides, didn’t the collapse of Soviet Communism, which even many American Cold Warriors had thought impossible, re-emphasise his central point: that nothing lasts for ever? With that, at least, few could take issue – or so it seemed until the summer of 1989, when the National Interest magazine carried a fifteen-page article entitled ‘The End of History?’ Its author was an obscure young official from the policy planning staff of the US State Department, Francis Fukuyama.

      Once again, a shy, tweed-jacketed historian woke up to find himself famous. Even those who disagreed with Fukuyama paid tribute to his intellectual audacity, which was further rewarded with book contracts, lecture invitations and a professorship at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. ‘How is it that some people become famous while others do not?’ a jealous rival asked. ‘Of course, it smacks of sour grapes for one of the latter to ask this about one of the former, but Francis Fukuyama’s career begs for the question. How exactly do you get ahead by boldly making one of the worst predictions in social science?’ The question answers itself: if you are going to be wrong, be wrong as ostentatiously and extravagantly as possible. Had Fukuyama confined himself to saying that the end of the Cold War marked a victory for economic and political liberalism, scarcely anyone would have paid attention, since identical observations could be found in newspaper editorials any day of the week. But he understood what was required to titillate the jaded palate of the chattering classes: simplify, then exaggerate. ‘What we are witnessing’, he proclaimed, ‘is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’ By the time he had expanded his essay into a book, two years later, even the question-mark in the title had disappeared.

      The obvious flaws in this terminalist teleology were magicked away with similar nonchalance. The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who was cited by Fukuyama as his chief inspiration, also believed that we had reached ‘the last stage of history, our world, our own time’ – but dated it to Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena in 1806. Some political soothsayers might interpret this precedent as a cautionary tale of reckless complacency, but not Fukuyama. With nimble dialectic – or, if you prefer, shameless chutzpah – he argued that Hegel was right after all, since ‘the present world seems to confirm that the fundamental principles of socio-political organisation have not advanced terribly far since 1806’. Ergo, we had reached the zenith and terminus of political evolution: Nazism and Communism were mere ‘bypaths of history’. (‘How far shall we trust a “Universal History” that relegates the conflagrations of two world wars and the unspeakable tyranny of Hitler and Stalin as “bypaths”?’ the American commentator Roger Kimball asked in a review of Fukuyama’s book. ‘I submit that any theory which regards World War II as a momentary wrinkle on the path of freedom is in need of serious rethinking.’)

      History is itself an ambiguous term, of course. It can mean no more than what occurs in the world, or the techniques for finding this out, but it is also the discipline that orders events and experiences into an evolutionary narrative – summarised by the Enlightenment historian Lord Bolingbroke as ‘philosophy teaching by examples’, and later defined by R. G. Collingwood (in The Idea of History) as the reality of the present tempered by the necessity of the past and the possibilities of the future. This too was declared obsolete by the Terminalists. Fukuyama did not merely foreclose all possibilities other than the universal and perpetual reign of liberal American capitalism, the predominant present reality; he was also implicitly slamming the door on the past, muffling the cries and whispers of previous generations. Since ‘all of the really big questions had been settled’, he argued, ‘in the posthistorical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history’. Imagination, heroism and idealism would be supplanted by economic calculation.

      Not the most appealing manifesto for a brave new world, you might think. And Fukuyama would agree – sometimes. When celebrating the ultimate triumph of liberal capitalism he chides those tiresome nations which are still somehow ‘stuck in history’, and means it as an insult; yet in his more wistful moments he admits that ‘the end of history will be a sad time’. Sad, and deeply dull: he fears that sheer boredom, married to ‘a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed’, may yet ‘serve to get history started again’. The incredulous italics are mine: having asserted that modern Americanstyle capitalist democracy is so manifestly unimprovable that it has seen off every conceivable challenger, Fukuyama casually concedes that this invincible titan could yet be overthrown by nothing stronger than the sleepy ennui of its beneficiaries. One is reminded of Karl Marx’s private confession to Frederick Engels after writing a newspaper article on the likely outcome of the Indian mutiny in the 1850s: ‘It is possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.’

      Fukuyama’s dialectic is similarly artful. He parades Hegel’s philosophy of history as supporting evidence for his own blithe certainty; yet he acknowledges (if only in a footnote) that the Hegelian historical terminus, the supreme desideratum, was not American capitalism but the absolute monarchy of nineteenth-century Prussia, described by Hegel as ‘the achievement of the modern world, a world in which the substantial Idea has won the infinite form’. No doubt Stone Age men and women, if they ever gave it a moment’s thought, assumed that their own way of life was just as immutable: few people have ever been able to imagine any kind of society other than the one that they inhabit. If Hegel was wrong about the eternal reign of Prussian absolutism, why should we believe that the present system has any more staying power? Fukuyama has an answer to that, too: ‘We cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better. Other, less reflective ages also thought of themselves as the best, but we arrive at this conclusion exhausted, as it were, from the pursuit of alternatives we felt had to be better than liberal democracy.’

      The contempt for ‘less reflective ages’ is deliciously ironic. Fukuyama’s beloved Hegel had a fatal penchant for concepts such as the Substantial Idea and the World Spirit – the Geist – but, thanks to the Enlightenment’s legacy, he did work in an era which enjoyed an embarras de richesse of truly imaginative reinterpretations of the world. After the collapse of Communism there was an eruption of grand universal theories whose reflectiveness was in inverse proportion to their réclame. Cretinous oversimplification seemed to be what policy-makers and political analysts required. Where Fukuyama led, his old tutor from Harvard, Samuel Huntington, soon followed. His pitch for the Big Idea market – global chaos theory – mimicked Fukuyama’s own product-launch so closely, indeed, that one wondered if both men had taken the same correspondence course on How to Be a Modern Political Guru in Three Easy Lessons.

      First, summarise your tentative thesis in an American policy journal: Huntington’s essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ (note the query) was published by Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993.

      Secondly, devise a concept so arrestingly simple that it can be understood and discussed even by half-witted politicians or TV chat-show hosts. Again, Huntington was happy to oblige. ‘It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic,’ he wrote. ‘The great divisions among humankind and the dominating СКАЧАТЬ