[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Triumph of History

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (June 18 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Nearly two decades have passed now since Francis Fukuyama announced the
end of history. The chorus of catcalls that greeted this claim was by no
means undeserved. Still, his theory deserves a second look today, not
least because the logic that underpinned it also guides a great many
claims about the shape of the future in the age of peak oil.

Fukuyama's proclamation appeared in a 1989 article titled "The End of
History?" and was further expanded a book released later that same year,
The End of History and the Last Man (1992). His arguments were
misunderstood generally enough that a brief summary of them is probably
worth offering here. From the 19th century German philosopher G W F
Hegel, Fukuyama took the concept of history as a process of repeated
conflicts and syntheses between contending forces, leading to a final
state of perfection in which the ideal becomes manifest in historical time.

In Fukuyama's reading, the contending forces are different systems of
political economy, and history is the competition among them that ends
with the victory of the best. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the
intellectual bankruptcy of Marxism, he argued, marked the completion of
that process, because liberal democracy - his term for the hybrid
corporate-socialist bureaucratic states currently governing most of the
world's industrial societies - has proven to be the best of all possible
systems. Thus the historical process is at an end; in the years to come,
those states that have not yet adopted liberal democracy will do so, and
the world thereafter will bask in an endless afternoon, the closest
approximation to Utopia that human nature allows.

A profound irony surrounds this argument, for at every point, it
duplicated the Marxist theory Fukuyama dismissed so caustically - a
point Fukuyama himself admitted in a later book. Not all that many years
before "The End of History?" saw print, quoting Hegel and portraying
history as a grand process leading to the best possible society were the
distinctive badges of the Marxist intellectual. There was never much
that was new, and even less that was genuinely conservative, in the
thinking of the neoconservatives who embraced Fukuyama's claims so
enthusiastically, but his proclamation in many ways marked the nadir of
the process by which the American right turned into a mirror image of
the Marxism it thought it was opposing.

Fukuyama's claims, though, deserve attention on their own right. In
doing this it's crucial to note the special sense he gave to the word
"history". He was not claiming, as many of his critics suggested, that
what might more broadly be called historical events will stop happening;
while he claimed that liberal democracy is the best possible system, he
admitted its imperfections, and allowed that those imperfections may
still lead to wars, political and economic crises, and a great deal of
human misery. The end of history, rather, means that no one can ever
propose a better system to deal with these difficulties than the one
already in place; the challenges faced by the posthistoric world will be
matters of management, not of fundamental change or reconsideration.

It's at this point that Fukuyama's argument finds common ground with a
great many other claims about the future that circulate these days. Most
proponents of today's science, for example, argue that the scientific
progress of the last century or so does not simply reflect the
maturation of one culture's way of thinking about nature but, rather,
traces the discovery of objective truths that can be refined but not
refuted; the more enthusiastic of today's science writers, in fact, look
forward to a time not too far in the future when all nature's
fundamental laws will be known, and researchers will have to content
themselves with filling in minor details.

More generally, the collective imagination of the industrial world these
days seems increasingly unable to imagine a future that isn't either a
rehash of the present or a sudden, cataclysmically driven lurch backward
into the past. Today's peak oil debates are a case in point. The
mainstream consensus these days treats peak oil as a challenge to be
solved by finding some other convenient fuel to power the existing
machinery of industrial society; move toward the fringes and you'll find
most discussions center on a return to the past, ranging from the
moderate - back to the 18th century - through the extreme - back to the
hunter-gatherer lifestyle - to the limiting case - back to a world
without human beings, or even without life. All these claims, just as
much as Fukuyama's, treat the modern industrial world as the culmination
of a historical process that runs in one direction to one foreordained
conclusion.

What makes these proclamations of the end of history so fascinating is
that they are themselves a historical phenomenon. The assurance of
today's scientists that the universe's last mysteries will be solved in
due time has its precise equivalent in the confidence of medieval
scholastics that the nature of the world would be known for good once
the last few problems with Ptolemy's astronomy were worked out. Equally,
Fukuyama's confidence that liberal democracy was the final shape of
human society has its mirror in the panegyrists of the Roman Empire, who
saw the arrangements of their own time as the last word in human social
structures.

As these examples suggest, claims that history has reached its final and
unchanging state appear at a distinct stage in the development of
cultures, and also in such cultural phenomena as science. Claims that
Rome's empire would last forever surfaced just as that empire's
expansion neared its limit, and took on a more insistent tone with each
stage in the following decline. In the same way, Ptolemy's
earth-centered cosmology became steadily more entrenched in medieval
culture as the problems fitting it with the observed facts became harder
to ignore. Proclamations of an end to history, in fact, are one of the
standard phenomena of periods in which the prospect of historical change
has transformed itself from a promise to a threat.

It's worth noting that the same stage of history also gives new impetus
to the seemingly opposed belief that total cataclysmic change is
imminent, and the existing order of things is about to pass away "in the
twinkling of an eye". The opposition here is more apparent than real,
however; the new world waiting on the far side of apocalypse, whether
it's defined as the Kingdom of God, the dictatorship of the proletariat,
the neoprimitivist hunter-gatherer utopia, or what have you is just as
immune from history, at least in theory, as Fukuyama's liberal
democratic consensus. The only point under dispute is whether the
ahistorical world of the future is the fulfillment of the present, or
its total repudiation.

The rhetorical force and theoretical conviction of these expectations of
an end to history cannot be doubted. Equally, though, it's clear that
every such claim that has been tested by events has been flattened by
the steamroller force of historical change. The learned doctors who
pronounce history dead, and the poets, prophets, and philosophers who
write her epitaph, keep on being inconvenienced by the patient's awkward
refusal to lie down and stop breathing. Today's prophets of history's
end commonly insist that it's different this time, but then so did their
predecessors, right back to the beginning of recorded history.

A meaningful philosophy of history, by contrast, needs to take history
itself as its guide - not the few decades of history in which the
Marxist-capitalist quarrel played out, as Fukuyama did, nor the few
centuries from the end of the Middle Ages to the flowering of today's
technology, as the contemporary myth of progress does, but as broad a
view as possible, embracing every human culture and every age of which
sufficient details survive to make the exercise worthwhile. One lesson
taught by any such broad view of history is that proclamations of the
end of history are always premature. Another is that such proclamations
are always popular at a time when attentive minds come to suspect that
if history continues, the attainments of the present may not turn out to
be as lasting as their propagandists claim.

To me, at least, it seems symptomatic that so many historians who
attempt such a grasp of history as a whole come to see it in cyclical
terms. From ibn Khaldun and Giambattista Vico to Oswald Spengler and
Arnold Toynbee, the theorists of historical cycles have argued that the
historical process has no endpoint. Their logic cuts to the core of the
argument Fukuyama borrowed from Hegel, and it also challenges some of
the most common assumptions of today's debates concerning peak oil,
anthropogenic climate change, and the other manifestations of the crisis
of contemporary industrial civilization.

The central problem with Fukuyama's argument, from the point of view of
a cyclical conception of history, is that it treats the idea of "the
best possible society" as an abstraction, divorced from any sense of
context and any awareness of the inevitable dependence of human
societies on the nonhuman world. What is possible at one time is not
possible for all times, and what is good at one point in history may
turn out to be far from good at another. Whether what Fukuyama calls
"liberal democracy" is the most satisfactory form of human society, then
- a point I don't propose to address here - it depends utterly on
radically unsustainable relationships with the planetary biosphere, with
the societies it exploits, and with the majority of its own population.

While it's popular just now to argue that these problems can be fixed
without undercutting the system itself, the evidence increasingly points
the other way. The American way of life, for example, depends on
arrangements that allow five percent of the world's population to
exploit some 33% of its natural resources. The convulsions set off in
recent years by modest improvements in China's and India's standards of
living demonstrate that on a finite planet with rapidly depleting
resources, Fukuyama's vision of a world made over in the image of
America is a pipe dream.

Thus, as the theorists of historical cycles have been pointing out all
along, history has no end; the consequences of each stage in the
historical process set in motion the forces that lead to the next. The
question we need to be asking as peak oil makes the transition from a
theory to a hard reality, in turn, is not how we can impose an
ahistorical permanence on a historical situation that, by its very
nature, is unsustainable; nor how we can get ready for an apocalyptic
transformation to some other, equally ahistorical future; but instead,
how we can cope with the triumph of history over our fantasies of
immutability with some measure of grace.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/06/triumph-of-history.html#links


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