Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay “The End of History” — often cited,
less often actually read, and frequently misunderstood — is commonly
thought to have been rendered irrelevant and proved
wrong.
After all, aren’t we perpetually at war — and didn’t 9/11 show that
history, far from having ended, seems not to have noticed Fukuyama’s obituary
of Clio? Yet if one actually
reads what Fukuyama wrote, it’s clear he foresaw the continuation of conflict
in what we used to call the Third World, and that his thesis — the end of the
cold war signaled the end of ideological conflict between rival universalist
creeds in favor of Western neo-liberalism — retains much of its persuasive power.
In any case, I bring this up because I am haunted by Fukuyama’s final paragraph:
“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition,
the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide
ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism,
will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems,
environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.
In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just
the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I
can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the
time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition
and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though
I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization
that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian
offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of
history will serve to get history started once again.”
Surely one of the largest exhibits in Fukuyama’s Museum of Human History, and
the one most accessible to our understanding, is devoted to the cold war between
the Western powers and the old Soviet Union. And if boredom, nostalgia, and
the desire to restart history is what motivates our political class, then this
final paragraph perhaps explains the current revival of the cold war.
Shorn of viable enemies against which to test their mettle — and their bloodstained
“idealism” — Western elites are opting for historical reenactment, like those suburban
burghers who don Civil War uniforms and reenact the Battle of Appomattox around
this time every year.