Hi Ed, I know that you will have read Francis Fukuyama's article, "History Is Still Going Our Way" in the Wall Street Journal (5 October) but, for the benefit of any other FWers who have not read, it I will abstract from it:
(FY) <<<< A stream of commentators has been asserting that the tragedy of Sept. 11 proves that I was utterly wrong to have said more than a decade ago that we had reached the end of history. . . . It is on the face of it nonsensical and insulting to the memory of those who died on Sept. 11 to declare that this unprecedented attack did not rise to the level of a historical event. But the way in which I used the word history, or rather, History, was different: It referred to the progress of mankind over the centuries toward modernity, characterized by institutions like liberal democracy and capitalism. My observation, made back in 1989 ["The End of History"] on the eve of the collapse of communism, was that this evolutionary process did seem to be bringing ever larger parts of the world toward modernity. And if we looked beyond liberal democracy and markets, there was nothing else towards which we could expect to evolve; hence the end of history. While there were retrograde areas that resisted that process, it was hard to find a viable alternative type of civilization that people actually wanted to live in after the discrediting of socialism, monarchy, fascism, and other types of authoritarian rule. This view has been challenged by many people, and perhaps most articulately by Samuel Huntington. He argued that rather than progressing toward a single global system, the world remained mired in a "clash of civilizations" where six or seven major cultural groups would coexist without converging and constitute the new fracture lines of global conflict. Since the successful attack on the center of global capitalism was evidently perpetrated by Islamic extremists unhappy with the very existence of Western civilization, observers have been handicapping the Huntington "clash" view over my own "end of history" hypothesis rather heavily. >>>> Fukuyama then goes on to argue in the rest of his article that the Islamic extremists who planned the attacks on 11 September -- and who seem to be planning more -- are, in fact, extremists and don't represent a 'silent majority' of people in Islamic countries who want to progress towards Western-type liberalism. He mentions young people particularly. I think that he should also have mentioned an even more silent 'silent majority' -- young womenfolk -- who are particularly oppressed by fundamentalist Islam. Even though they are not yet vocal, it seems to me that they are much more savvy than the young men who are the principal troublemakers and terrorists, and that, in due course, their opinion will count for a great deal more than we suspect at present. I think that Fukuyama's case is much sounder than Huntington's. Even though the latter hypothesis has superficial attractions, it is a relativistic view of history which accords far more importance to Islam that it deserves and makes no qualitative conmparisons between the major cultural groups he talks about. A much more powerful case against Fukuyama is implicitly made by Robert Putnam (in "Bowling Alone") but the latter doesn't seem to have come into the picture so far (vis-a-vis 'end of history'). Briefly, Putnam says that social capital and trust is declining in America (and, presumably, the Western liberal world generally) while Fukuyama is saying that social capital is still strong enough to support continuing development of the social institutions which are necessary for Western-type capitalism and future economic progress. Once again, as with Hartington, Putnam's case appears to be superficially attractive. His sociological research is sound and really cannot be faulted. But only at the level of the "institutions" he examines -- that is, the sort of social bodies (like Parent-Teacher groups, Boy Scouts, Bowling Clubs, and so on) that were so prominent in the ordinary American social life of the last century. But I think that Putnam's earlier, extensive researches, into the various social and economic constitutions of Italian cities in the Middle Ages, tends to undermine his later views. In his earlier papers, Putnam shows pretty conclusively that the more successful Italian cities were the republican quasi-democratic ones -- and that it was their traditions which survived in better heart than the autocratic cities, and thus influenced the political development of modern liberal nations. Thus the 'contemporary' Putnam doesn't give sufficient weight to the strength and persistence of man's ability to re-create new social institutions as required in different historical periods. And, in my view, the most recent of the social disciplines -- sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, call it what you will -- is adding powerful evidence to the idea of the persistence of social bonding, and its constant regeneration, by drawing attention to 'epigenetics'. Epigenetics is a much more sophisticated version of genetic theory. Instead of genes, by themselves, producing certain sorts of behaviour in a sort of deterministic way, there is also a feedback loop by which certain cultures preferentially select individuals with those genes. This is a form of evolutionary selection which overlays and modifies the previous (relatively crude) notion of selection for physical fitness alone. Epigenetics suggests that social bonding was the additional driving force that caused a sort of 'runaway' evolution of homo sapiens away from the other primates and, incidentally, caused the otherwise quite astonishingly rapid evolution of a large brain, language, and art (also, dare I say it, trade?) in its wake in a relatively short period of a few million years. On this basis, Putnam should not be too worried by the demise of bowling clubs and boy scout groups. Social regeneration will always occur. It's built into us. Even though Western civilization may appear to be increasingly individualistic and fractured with no apparent unified ethos, yet new social institutions are probably forming, exiguous though they may be at present. So, on the whole, out of the three main historical forecasters of today, I support Fukuyama even though his case seems to be the most difficult (abstract) one to make at the present time. Keith ___________________________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org> 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
