SPEAKING
FREELY Francis Fukuyama's
about-face By C Mott Woolley
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
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In evaluating Francis
Fukuyama's criticism of the US effort in Iraq, it
may be worthwhile to see what in his earlier work
has brought him to make this about-face. In The
End of History and the Last Man (1992),
Fukuyama asks: Is there some simple reason as to
how and why history unfolds? The centerpiece of
this earlier work is the collapse of the Soviet
Union: why did it happen and why was there a
failure in the West
to
anticipate it - of what use is history if so
momentous a development could come as a surprise?
In The End of History Fukuyama
quotes Henry Kissinger speaking in the 1970s:
"Today, for the first time in our history, we face
the stark reality that the [communist] challenge
is unending. We must learn to conduct foreign
policy as other nations have had to conduct it for
so many centuries - without escape and without
respite. This condition will not go away."
Although Fukuyama does not mention it, that
pessimism is shown by Kissinger's deeds as well.
When Alexander Solzhenitsyn toured the United
States, president Gerald Ford, acting on
Kissinger's advice, did not invite Solzhenitsyn to
the White House lest Soviet leaders take umbrage.
That is how strong the Soviet Union was perceived
to be. And it was strong. It had the capacity to
destroy the United States many times over.
For that reason, Fukuyama does not cite
Kissinger's misreading of history to humiliate him
- Kissinger was not alone in being surprised by
the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fukuyama, a
Soviet specialist, was surprised too; everyone
was. From such a misreading, he asks, what is it
about our understanding of history that we
misunderstand it so?
Fukuyama attributes
part of the West's failure to anticipate the
collapse of the Soviet Union to a pessimism born
of "the suicidal self-destructiveness of the
European state system in two world wars [which]
gave lie to the notion of superior Western
rationality". The Holocaust, he notes, "emerged in
a country with the most advanced industrial
economy and one of the most cultured and educated
populations in Europe". Not surprisingly, this did
little for confidence in the West and, Fukuyama
says, distorted the West's perception of how
history would unfold in the Soviet Union.
The threat of National Socialism is
unlikely to repeat itself because Nazi Germany was
obliterated, as was Imperial Japan. Whereas
National Socialism was grounded in fascism - an
urge to create a master race and dominate the
world - communism was altogether different,
Fukuyama says.
To explain why the Soviet
Union collapsed Fukuyama turns to Georg Hegel, the
German historian-philosopher who predicted that
what drives history is an urge to live in a world
where all are equal and free, and war and conflict
and suffering are no more. Ironically (as everyone
knows), Hegel is the historian Karl Marx had
turned to in seeking to explain how history would
ultimately reach the world Hegel predicted.
To show that Marx misunderstood Hegel and
thus led Lenin and Josef Stalin astray, Fukuyama
examines in fascinating detail the works of not
only Hegel and Marx but of Aristotle, Plato,
Niccolo Machiavelli, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Alexander
Hamilton, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln. He
also surveys the developments in Western thought
that brought about the scientific method, which
Hegel and Fukuyama say propels history to its
ultimate end.
Back when Fukuyama was in
the good graces of neo-conservatives, Charles
Krauthammer described this review of the West's
intellectual history as "scandalously brilliant".
It still is.
And what is the proper means
to Hegel's end? Liberal democracy. The end sought,
however, is also liberal democracy. Trouble lurks
here.
Quite apart from today's controversy
about Fukuyama's questioning the Iraq invasion,
The End of History is a remarkable book. It
is the story of how liberal democracy has
developed and why it may one day come to be the
norm throughout the world. As Fukuyama describes
the efforts in history that have frustrated and
delayed this forward march, one sees how the
resiliency of liberal democracy is not unlike that
of Christianity in the face of the Roman Empire's
ferocious effort to snuff it out. Fukuyama's
narrative is almost irresistibly compelling.
Little wonder that this book has had such an
effect upon the neo-conservative mindset and would
embolden some to distort evidence to justify an
invasion of Iraq.
Reading Fukuyama's book,
it is easy to see how the neo-conservatives would
be inspired to force-feed democracy to the Middle
East. If that is where history is headed anyway,
why not hasten the process? This Hegelian
assumption is what got Marx and Lenin and Stalin
off track. They believed that because they knew
their man Hegel (as explained by Marx), they
understood the universal rules that drive history.
The deaths of some 30 million people under Stalin
can be attributed to that belief; that is, to the
germ inherent in Hegel himself: the end and the
means can and should become one. Marx, Lenin,
Stalin (and Mao Zedong) resorted to means
antithetical to the end sought and thereby
destroyed what it was they were seeking to create:
a better world. The same is occurring today in
Iraq.
It is plain that the US
neo-conservatives, in adopting the Hegelian
outlook for how history unfolds, have come
uncomfortably close to the self-delusion that
characterized the leaders of the communist world.
Those leaders believed they were what Hegel said
drives history. After September 11, 2001, US
leaders speak not in terms of limitation, caution
and prudence but in terms of absolute, universal
truths. This certitude is made all the more
uncompromising because it is driven by the
conviction that good is being done. That
conviction, as Fukuyama notes, polluted
Christianity as it came to be molded by the papacy
and led to the Reformation - a development not yet
evident in the history of Islam. It was a mind
frame that Thomas Jefferson so feared.
The
essence of Fukuyama is this: by invoking Hegel
(history is not a collection of random acts, it is
a purposeful unfolding of mankind's urge to be
free), he asserts that human nature is not static
but is, like history itself, something that
develops and improves, and which will one day
reach perfection. Original sin is utterly
rejected. Fukuyama explains it this way:
The radicalness of Hegel's
historicism is evident in his very concept of
man. With one important exception, virtually
every philosopher writing before Hegel believed
that there was such a thing as "human nature",
that is, a more or less permanent set of traits
- passions, desires, abilities, virtues, and so
forth - that characterized man as man. While
individual men could obviously vary, the
essential nature of man did not change over
time, whether he or she was a Chinese peasant or
a modern European trade unionist. This
philosophical view is reflected in the common
cliche that "human nature never changes", used
most often in the context of one of the less
attractive human characteristics like greed,
lust or cruelty. Hegel, by contrast, did not
deny that man had a natural side arising from
needs of the body like food or sleep, but
believed that in his most essential
characteristics man was undetermined and
therefore free to create his own
nature.
The writers of the US
constitution emphatically rejected this view. The
enduring value of the document is its rejection of
Hegel and Fukuyama. While Madison and Hamilton
believed that people at their best were capable of
reason, self-discipline and fairness, they also
recognized an everlasting susceptibility to
passion, intolerance and greed. In a famous
passage, after discussing what measures were
needed to preserve liberty, Madison wrote in
The Federalist Papers:
It may be a reflection on human
nature that such devices should be necessary to
control the abuses of government. But what is
government itself but the greatest of all
reflections on human nature? If men were angels,
no government would be necessary. If angels were
to govern, neither external nor internal
controls on government would be necessary. In
framing a government which is to be administered
by men over men, the great difficulty lies in
this: You must first enable the government to
control the governed; and in the next place
oblige it to control itself.
If US
liberty is to endure, Fukuyama's idea of the
perfectibility of mankind must be rejected. And,
to the extent the neo-conservative mindset has
fashioned its world view upon the teaching of
Fukuyama and the perfectibility of humankind, it
too must be rejected. We Americans must never lose
sight of the insight of the founders of the United
States: human nature is determined and man is not
free to "create his own nature". When a dull knife
was used to behead Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, human
nature showed its most enduring feature: cruelty
and hate.
If this is lost sight of, US
liberty cannot survive. Krauthammer's view that
Americans, unlike other imperial powers in
history, invade not to occupy but to liberate is
equally disturbing inasmuch as it is premised upon
Americans having reached a more perfectible form
of human nature: Americans, unlike the rest of
humankind, are beneficent only. That is fatuous.
The American experiment in self-governance has
only managed to prevail by rejecting the
underlying premise inherent in Hegel: the means
and the end of government cannot be the same.
This is but to say (Fukuyama
notwithstanding) that the French Revolution and
the American Revolution mean two different things
entirely. If it is thought that human nature is
trustworthy and perfectible, one need not take
pains to restrain it. While Napoleon Bonaparte's
armies may well have spread the idea of Liberty
and Equality, that was not Napoleon's most
enduring act, it was reimposing Christianity upon
all of France in his famous concordant with the
Roman Catholic Church. He knew this would do for
the people of France what the US constitution has
done for Americans: maintain order.
The US
founders did not separate church and state because
they rejected the ethical meaning of Christianity
and the need for normative standards, including
the sense of self-imposed limitation that
underlies the idea of Original Sin. Their quarrel
was with the habiliments that had grown up in the
Catholic Church in contradiction to those
normative standards. As he was fond of reminding
Thomas Jefferson in later correspondence, John
Adams wrote in the Boston Gazette in August 1765:
Numberless have been the systems of
iniquity. The most refined, sublime, extensive,
and astonishing constitution of policy that ever
was conceived by the mind of man was framed by
the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of
their own order. They even persuaded mankind to
believe, faithfully and undoubtedly, that God
Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of
heaven, whose gates they might open and close at
pleasure ... with authority to license all sorts
of sins and crimes ... or withholding the rain
of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the
management of earthquakes, pestilence, and
famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful,
incomprehensible power of creating out of bread
and wine the flesh and blood of God himself.
All these opinions they were enabled to
spread and rivet among the people by reducing
their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and
staring timidity, and by infusing into them a
religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus
was human nature chained fast for ages in a
cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude ... Of
all the nonsense and delusion which had ever
passed through the mind of man, none had ever
been more extravagant than the notions of
absolutions, indelible characters, uninterrupted
successions and the rest of those fantastical
ideas, derived from the canon law, which had
thrown such a glare of mystery, sanctity,
reverence, and right-reverend eminence and
holiness around the idea of a priest as no
mortal could deserve ... the ridiculous fancies
of sanctified effluvia from Episcopal
fingers.
The neo-conservatives (thanks
in no small measure to Fukuyama) are doing to the
idea of democracy what John Adams said had been
done to the idea of Christianity. On the one hand,
it is said that the essence of democracy is giving
voice to the will of the electorate, yet when the
electorate speaks in Palestine, the George W Bush
administration rejects the voice of the electorate
and threatens to cut off funding unless the newly
elected government submits to the West's view of
how an election should turn out. That is rather
like burning John Huss at the stake for seeking to
express his view on the meaning of the Bible. Or,
we are told, the duly elected prime minister in
Iraq must go, not because of some defect in the
electoral process, but because his views are at
odds with what US policy prefers.
That too
is on par with the thought control so vehemently
opposed by John Adams, the second president of the
United States. Most disturbing is the US
interference with the independent judiciary's
conclusion in the case of a man in Afghanistan who
stands accused of converting from Islam to
Christianity. If it is the studied judgment of an
independent judicial body that the law must punish
such a man, by what right can the US power
interfere with a separate judicial assessment of
the law? If an independent judiciary in
Afghanistan is subject to the control of a foreign
power, there is no independent judiciary in
Afghanistan. Perhaps China or Russia should
intervene as well and admonish the judiciary in
Afghanistan to accomplish a result more to their
liking?
If it is the inevitable outcome of
history that humankind is to be free, the US
effort to control the outcome of elections that it
initiates in the Middle East suggests that effort
is at odds with the historical forces invoked by
the neo-conservatives. This effort to control
would also suggest the process of elections
initiated by the Bush administration may have as
its aim a result not in keeping with the
"democratic" ideas being advanced. As noted above,
trouble lurks here: the end sought cannot be the
means utilized to achieve liberty.
One can
only wonder whether the neo-conservative
allegiance to the idea of democracy has a greater
fidelity to the perpetuation of US power than to
the principle upon which US power fundamentally
rests: all power must be limited and controlled.
C Mott Woolley is a practicing
lawyer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a graduate
of the School of International Service at the
American University in Washington, DC, and, prior
to entering law school, served as an intern in the
Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Near
East/South Asia Division, Department of State.
(Copyright 2006 C Mott Woolley.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
