Dead End of History

Here is an online interview with Francis Fukuyama 20 years after the publishing the book that brought him into the limelight – The End of History. While I have many bad things to say about the original account, I really even don’t need to bother – for two reasons: 1) Fukuyama’s Hegelian view of the ultimate and irreversible victory of the liberal democracy has not only been challenged by a huge number of people, smart and otherwise, all around the world but has proven wrong also empirically, and 2) he seems to have learned next to nothing over the last two decades. So let’s take a look at some of the arguments that Fukuyama brings forth in his interview.

The basic point — that liberal democracy is the final form of government — is still basically right. Obviously there are alternatives out there, like the Islamic Republic of Iran or Chinese authoritarianism. But I don’t think that all that many people are persuaded these are higher forms of civilization than what exists in Europe, the United States, Japan or other developed democracies; societies that provide their citizens with a higher level of prosperity and personal freedom.

Oh really? Not all that many people out there who don’t agree with Western liberal democracy being the “highest form of civilization”, you say? Apparently Fukuyama hasn’t been watching news much. But this is even not really the crux of the point. The real question would be this – as Žižek has asked: what if Chinese authoritarian form of state capitalism ends up providing its citizens with a higher level or prosperity (if not personal freedoms – but the value of those vs. some personal prosperity might vary in different places and at different times)? What then? Does is then become a highest form of civilization? And if not, why should the western liberal democracy be it now?

The real question is whether any other system of governance has emerged in the last 20 years that challenges this. The answer remains no.

China, anyone?

Clearly, that big surge toward democracy went as far as it could. Now there is a backlash against it in some places. But that doesn’t mean the larger trend is not still toward democracy.

However, this also doesn’t mean that the larger trend IS toward democracy. I mean, it’s not that I loathe liberal democracy and think that it is bad for the people and should be just forgotten – quite to the contrary. But to see the events of last 20 years as a temporary setback, or – to quote the Black Knight of Monthy Python – “nothing but a flesh wound”, would be a prime example of wishful thinking.

At the same time, I don’t believe the existence, or even prevalence of cultural attributes, including religion, are so overwhelming anywhere that you will not see a universal convergence toward rule of law and accountability.

What if accountability could be framed not only within the framework of periodic elections but, for instance, precisely in terms of religion? And, one could argue that sharia is the ultimate rule of law – a law that permeates the whole society.

In the end, though, that is not enough. You cannot solve the problem of the “bad emperor” through moral suasion. And China has had some pretty bad emperors over the centuries. Without procedural accountability, you can never establish real accountability.

This didn’t prevent George W. Bush running two consecutive terms as the emperor of not only America but, de facto, of the whole world. Any accountability, should such be forthcoming, is purely post factum – kind of Nürnberg-accountability at best. Of course, it is better than none at all, and the statutory limit of two terms of office means that no matter how bad the president, his damage is temporally limited to eight years. But as George W. Bush demonstrated, one can do a lot in eight years, and unfortunately liberal democracy is no safeguard against disasters such as this. In fact, I’d venture a guess that it will be a lore more difficult to make democratically elected leaders of Israel, for example, accountable for shelling schools and bombing civilian targets than will be to convict Karadzic.

It is certainly possible that Fukuyama is right and I am dead wrong. It is possible that we’re simply living through some dark times right now, that soon China’s success will cave in and that America and EU will claim their rightful places as beacons of civilization once again, beyond any challenge or doubt. This all is possible, although not very likely in my opinion. But this is not the point – it is all right to have different opinions. As Blaise Pascal pointed out long ago – what we should do in a situation where we have different options and opinions under the conditions of uncertainty is to look at their respective outcomes. Not only say that “I believe eventually it will be all right”, but also consider what happens if it won’t, what happens if things go otherwise. What if liberal democracy is not the final form of the government and society, what if it is not the end but instead a dead end of history? The fact that we would like it to be doesn’t make it so. And this is where Fukuyama fails most miserably by my standards.

Scary other people

About a week ago, a friend posted a clip on “muslim demographics” on his Facebook-feed which, quite predictably, really got me going. It is 7 minutes of ominous-looking illustrative computer graphics with even more ominous-sounding voiceover that aims to demonstrate how Europe in particular and the Western world in general is facing a muslim onslaught and is about to be engulfed by the tidal wave of hostile culture within next couple of decades, lest we, the people of the free and enlightened world, start reproducing like rabbits and preaching gospel to infidels.

Not surprisingly, the source of this “call to action” is religious itself. One of the underlying assumptions of the grand and dark picture that emerges from the clip is that – while christians seem to be giving birth to people who are endowed with reason and capacity of free choice, and who can subsequently become not only christians but also citizens of the state they live in, doctors, drivers, writers, athletes, and yes, sometimes even muslims – muslims are begetting only muslims, always and over many generations. So if christianity (or belonging into Western culture) is a, supposedly enlightened, state of mind, being a muslim is akin to dominant gene. Many claims that are being made in the clip do not of course stand any closer scrutiny (here is an excellent recent article from FT that deals with most of this stuff), but that’s the thing – most of the people watching it and then forwarding it to others apparently do not feel that there’s a need for any closer scrutiny to something that is already evidently clear. After all, isn’t that what Spengler and Huntington said? Who cares of details such as muslim birth rates in Europe plummeting way faster than average western ones? Isn’t it a lot easier to talk of “muslim crime” than deal with the cultural and racial discrimination of immigrant population in European countries?

This, however, led me to reflect back upon something that we ended up discussing with students in a seminar a couple of weeks ago – and namely, why is it that we feel threatened by people who are somehow markedly different from us? Of course, we may perceive them as a threat to our way of life, we may feel that if church bells tolling are being taken over by prayer calls from mosques then our worlds will be changed too. But in many cases, this doesn’t go very far to explain our fears. Why, for instance, do many heterosexual people feel threatened by homosexuality? After all, their fertility rates should lead us to believe that the threat of homosexuals taking over the world is non-existant and indeed, that the mere fact of their survival thus far is nothing short of miraculous. Why can’t we, free people, tolerate someone’s choice to wear ḥijāb? Why is the only way to make sense out of such choice that the person so choosing must be deluded in that being her own free will – and should be subsequently forcibly liberated from such tradition?

But maybe it is because the existence and presence of someone markedly different simply undermines the notion of our world being the best or even the only possible one? This is what Judith Butler has argued with gender and sexuality – as long as gender is defined through the discourse of heterosexual practices (such as woman being defined as an object of heterosexual male desire, or marriage being a union between man and a woman), a homosexual person stands as a challenge to the clear and unambiguous notion of gender of everyone so defined. Similarly with muslims – the presence of people in our midst who do not necessarily adhere to our deeply held notions of what it means to be free or what constitutes a life worth living, but appear, against all odds, still be able to lead fulfilling lives, is a threat to our way of life in a way that runs much deeper than we would like to acknowledge.

Why so few?

A couple of days ago I happened to stumble upon a lecture by Nick Bostrom, the director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and probably the world’s foremost transhumanist. If you don’t know who he is, or haven’t heard of transhumanism before, I suppose it’s an interesting viewing – kind of TED stuff that so many people seem to really like (and sure enough, Bostrom has several lectures available there as well).

In the lecture, Bostrom explains in about 20 minutes his well-known view of existential risk for humanity and outlines a “possibility space” for human species, along with his threefold model of future of human development (extinction/stagnation/posthuman). I have in fact all sorts of different problems with Bostrom’s approach, but now I suddenly realised that they don’t even matter. Bostrom argues that what defines us as human, compared against animals for instance, is our superior mental, cognitive or whatever other capabilities, and argues quite persuasively that there is no reason to believe that the limits we currently face in those terms should be considered as somehow final and unsurpassable. Therefore it follows that if we were to increase those capabilities (for instance, by increasing our brain volume) we would likely become able to think thoughts that are currently impossible, and indeed, unimaginable for us. And I don’t really even disagree with that.

Where I do disagree though (and, as I said earlier, this is quite apart from all kinds of different ethical objections) is that I honestly don’t believe that things such as brain volume or our current cognitive capacities (such as ability to hear only within certain frequency range or see within certain spectral range, and so on) could honestly be considered serious limitations for “most of the people, most of the time”. I would maintain that for vast, vast majority of us those limits are never came nowhere near of. Apart from very select few we all live our lives well below what we would actually be capable of, by virtue of being humans. And this sentiment is, for me, perfectly captured in this small episode in a wonderful movie “Waking Life”:

Montreal

As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to take a short trip to the disunited state of Canada before heading back to Europe and I must say that Montreal is every bit as great as I heard it would be. After four months of America it is truly relaxing to walk the streets filled with good restaurants and small cafés, hearing french spoken all around you and smelling someone smoking pot every few hundred yards – in the middle of the day and in the middle of the town. And nobody seems to mind the least. There is also some of the most impressive graffiti around that I have seen anywhere.

Cornell blues

And so the six weeks of 2009 School of Criticism and Theory have came to end. It will be strange and certainly sad to leave Ithaca – I’ve really gotten into the groove with seminars, lectures, colloquia, gym, receptions, sitting in library, participating in reading groups, etc. With about 80 SCT people around, you’re always bound to meet somebody where-ever you go, and often those meetings turn into spontaneous evenings spent together with food, some booze, and good discussion. In a strange way people have really grown together and I am sure that many of us will be meeting in the future. I am seriously considering coming back to the US for the next year’s ACLA conference, for the reason of meeting SCT people as much as to hear the actual presentations.

Anyway, tomorrow it will all be over and this means that I will drag my 30 books to a post office and mail them home and then slowly start thinking of moving back towards Europe myself. My initial plan was to fly from Montreal to Paris but meanwhile when I was trying to make up my mind over how and when exactly, the Paris airfare for next week flights went up about 4 times. As I am so close to Canada now – and as I hear that Montreal is a very nice place in August – I will probably just go there anyway and then make my way back to NY and catch my flight from there.

Isn’t it ironic…

David Pogue reports in his blog that Amazon zapped two book from its’ e-book reader Kindle as “the publisher [had] changed its mind about offering an electronic version”. I.e. people who had purchased the e-book suddenly discovered that it had disappeared from their e-readers with money credited back to their account.

This is of course a bit strange and certainly provides much ammunition to the ranks of Kindle-skeptics and opposers of e-books in general. However, the otherwise silly and unfortunate incident acquires a whole new level of irony by the simple fact that the books so recalled happened to be Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. And the cherry on top of this hilarious situation is of course the fact that both books’ copyright has actually expired and the full text is available in many places on he internet (for instance here).

I mean… what were you thinking, Amazon?? In terms of PR blunder, this thing surely ranks at par with the recent news about Gazprom’s Nigerian joint venture.

Reflections from damaged life

Despite of having made myself a promise last year NOT to teach anything before I have the draft my dissertation finished, I agreed this week to doing a seminar in anthropology this fall in Tallinn. And although the idea is exciting right now I can already see myself wondering somewhere down the line in October that HOW THE HELL did I get myself into this once again. I guess my excuses are that 1) it is only two months and not the full semester, and 2) I was given a free reign to choose the texts and approach. Besides, it’s a graduate seminar so I really don’t feel that I’d need to overly restrain myself in choosing the reading material – both in terms of volume as well as difficulty. So I will pick three ethnographies (Jackson, Mahmood and Klima) and read them side by side with theoretical texts that have inspired as well as provided a structural framework for them (such as Adorno, Benjamin, Butler, Merleau-Ponty, and Sontag). All this should amount to a fun and interesting experience, at least for those who are able to consider reading ethnographies, critical theory and philosophy as fun.

One of the texts I will assign is Adorno’s “Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life” and thus I braced myself to re-read it with attention. I must say that, now having managed to almost completely detach myself from what would normally be my quotidian existence, this is probably the perfect book for me to read at the moment. It consists of short but incredibly rich and allusive reflections on everyday matters, something that results from a towering intellect such as Adorno taking a step back and looking at life in a critical yet almost Proust-like (who also gets a formal nod at the very beginning of the book), slightly nostalgic and deeply ironic way.

Here’s a small sample for you:

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, delibration, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations. What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden?

Steady succession of days

I am fully aware of having neglected my blogging duties – it would take much greater a writer than yours truly to produce something even remotely interesting about days spent in a small university town in upstate NY in the middle of the summer. This is not to say that I am bored – not at all. The summer school is great but I feel that trying to describe the discussions that take place here would risk seriously testing the patience of most of my readers. And between the seminars, lectures, reading groups, colloquia, working in library and an odd social event every now and then, I feel kind of like living in a bubble for a third week now. I don’t read newspapers, never see TV and thus it was only the news about the death of Michael Jackson that managed to reach my consciousness recently (which, in all honesty, would be quite impossible to miss here in the US) – apart from that I am pretty much oblivious of what’s going on in the world. I’ll catch up in a couple of weeks.

I went to see roller derby on Saturday night, which was pretty much the peak of non-academic excitement of last two weeks. For my non-American friends, roller derby is a high-octane female contact sport of sorts, where two teams of girls with serious attitude problems skate on a rink and basically try to knock each other silly. After having seen it I fully understand why it is predominately female sport – if you had men competing on this it would inevitably turn into a testosterone-charged bout of pure aggression, carried out when skating at high speeds on a floor of concrete – and I can’t see how this could end any other way than very badly. The matchup of this Saturday wasn’t a very fair one – the Canadian guest team never had a chance and I think that the final score ended up something like 138:30 to the local team. I only watched the first half and left after watching the memorial moonwalk contest for the public that was held during the break.

In the middle of July there are two potentially interesting events coming up though - Finger Lakes Grassroots Festival of Music & Dance and Finger Lakes Wine Festival. I am less excited about the latter, but the music festival features among other artists a very fine Malian singer Oumou Sangaré, so I will certainly go there.

RT: You shall not pass!

There is a good article at salon.com about the recent twitter craze over the events in Teheran. Of course, it is great that we care – that we tweet and re-tweet on demonstrations in Iran or that we join Facebook groups such as “I ♥ Iran”, “Palestine..you’re not alone..”, “Russia get your hands off of Georgia”, “For Every 1,000 that join this group I will donate $1 for Darfur” and so on. Nothing wrong with all of that.

I fully appreciate that for people caught in a plight such as refugees at Darfur, Palestinians during the Israeli bombing or Iranians now, such gestures of support can mean a lot – if they are among those lucky few who do have the language skills and technical means to actually see them. I am however rather skeptical about how useful such things ultimately can be. Is there anyone who REALLY believes that twitter will deter tanks? Or that, for instance, if there had been Facebook around in 1994 that this would have helped to avoid the Rwanda genocide? Or that those things (FB and twitter) even register on the scale of problems that those who send an army against their own people would consider?

As such, Facebook groups and other similar things are simply a digital part of the broader “ribbon culture” – a movement of awareness ribbons that got started in early years of the 20th century and really took off in 1990 with the red AIDS-awareness ribbon that Jeremy Irons wore during the Tony Awards. Since then, ribbons have become ubiquitous. Of course, the problem is not with “being aware” – which in itself is only laudable. The problem is with the fact that, for many people, putting on a ribbon or joining a group at Facebook pretty much settles the issue and lets them to go on about their own lives feeling that they’ve done their part. In her brilliant and important book about the awareness ribbon culture titled, appropriately, “Ribbon Culture”, Sarah Moore writes:

Both a kitsch fashion accessory, as well as an emblem that expresses empathy; it is a symbol that represents awareness, yet requires no knowledge of a cause; it appears to signal concern for others, but in fact priorities self-expression.

And this is where the issue gets thorny. Clicking “Join group” is very easy and, even more importantly, free. And not necessarily free in terms of money – as awareness ribbons often do cost something – but in terms of sacrifices we would have to make in our own lives. And when it comes to that – i.e. making sacrifices – then our collective will to stand for causes such as “Free Tibet” or “Stop FGM” all but evaporates. We demand resolutely that people in Congo stop killing other people in Congo, but when it comes to a question of relaxing immigration laws we suddenly think that people should stay where they were born – even if they risk getting killed by a stray bullet or would have their children dying to malaria. The occupation of Tibet is conveniently forgotten and put aside at the sublime moment of joy and national pride upon winning an Olympic medal (those who read Estonian can find a very good essay on that particular topic here). We buy Fair Trade coffee but at the same time vote for customs and subsidies that “protect the local agriculture”.

I guess this is what Kant had in mind when he said that generosity is a vice – in the world that is just there simply would be no need for it.

Theoretically speaking

Somewhat surprisingly my Odyssey has taken me to Ithaca only after six months of toil and travels.

Today was the first day of the 2009 School of Criticism and Theory, now in its 33^rd year. I am going to stay here for the next six weeks, and it looks that it is going to be some pretty intensive time. There are 3-hour seminars every Monday and Wednesday, plus two public lectures and one colloquium every week, in addition to assorted social events. I will try to squeeze in some time in library as well, but we’ll see how it goes, as there is a lot of reading to do even without it. I am in the seminar on Fascism, Modernity, Politics, Aesthetics by Geoff Eley which sounds promising and, looking at the state of things back home, also very much relevant to the present.

Cornell University has a beautiful campus on top of the hill overlooking a town and the lake below, and it’s a very nice summer weather outside. Looks like it will be another one and half months of modern monastic existence coming up. But now, back to reading.