This has been on my mind for a while but it doesn’t really merit a full-fledged post, so I’m just going to write a few lines about it in this open thread intro…..
Why is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History considered to be so great? I understand that there’s an important idea there, that the world may tend towards some stable capitalist-democratic system, but that also seems to me to be an obvious idea. I remember having conversations with friends about this possibility as a teen-ager and I’m certainly no student of world affairs. So what’s the big deal? Did he somehow use footnotes to prove that it would happen?
El Cid
It is considered so wrongly if simply on the weightiness of its argument, yet for embodying the viewpoint of the establishment thinkers of its time, it is quite impressive.
ADM
Wikipedia makes it sound like it gives intellectual weight to the establishments’ preferences.
“Some see his thesis conflicting with Karl Marx’s version of the “end of prehistory”. [..] argued that the progress of history must lead towards secular free-market democracy, (conceived in terms of a multi-party system of political representation).
lamh31
Hi ya’ll,
I just got back from a 3 movie day. I saw in the following order: GI Joe, 500 Days of Summer, & The Time Traveler’s Wife.
GI Joe the cartoon, was more entertaining than the movie. I’d wait to see if at the dollar movie, or on DVD.
Time Traveler’s Wife was basically a romance novel come to life. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t say whether or not is was true to the novel, but my sister hadn’t seen it either, and now she wants to read the book, so work well done. Besides which, I really like Rachel McAdams who stars in it, and I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Eric Bana. Once he cleaned himself up in the movie, hubba, hubba!!!!
My favorite of the 3 thought was 500 Days of Summer. Once again, my sister and I were a spot of chocolate in a sea of vanilla, but it was worth it. 500 Days is this indie movie about the guy named Tom, and this girl, of course, named Summer. It’s about, obviously, 500 days in the life of the relationship between Tom & Summer. It is an indie rom/com, but it was really funny. For those who remember the feeling when you first fall in love, and your first break-up, you’ll love 500 Days. Isn’t it funny, how the little things that you loved about someone becomes the things you hate once ya break-up (ya know, how you like his smile, then you broke up, and you couldn’t stand his ole crooked azz smile). If you’ve ever thought you were in love and even if you hadn’t (I know I haven’t) then you will love this movie.
BTW, I want to take the time to plug your local library. I can tell you now, that the only reason why I am so into indies, and foreign films, brit comedies, and old 40s & 50s musicals/movies, it’s because of when I was young, and I found out that you could check out movies at the library. As you can imagine, at the time, the library was not known for having the most up to date movies available, but I didn’t have any money, but I had my library card, so I check out “Bringing Up Baby”, “Pillow Talk”, Doris Day movies, Gene Kelly movies, Monty Python tv videos, and all the big indies of the day, whatever the library had, I watched it.
To this day, I can credit the library for alot of why I have such an ecclectic sensibility when it comes to movies and such. The library is so different now of course, but I drag my sister along with me when I see these movies, and when I see a good one, I try to coerce as many people as I can to see them.
So anyway, rambling over.
500 Days of Summer was a great movie. Ya’ll should go see it…oh, and Julie & Julia too.
JK
OT
Stephen Bainbridge answers Rick Perlstein
“Rick Perlstein’s Asinine Take on the Health Care Town Yells”
http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2009/08/rick-perlsteins-asinine-take-on-the-health-care-town-yells.html
DougJ
BTW, I want to take the time to plug your local library. I can tell you now, that the only reason why I am so into indies, and foreign films, brit comedies, and old 40s & 50s musicals/movies, it’s because of when I was young, and I found out that you could check out movies at the library.
Yeah, me too, though I rented a lot from the one local video store that had foreign films too. I still remember the first time I rented “The 400 Blows”.
apistat
‘Is’? Don’t you mean ‘was’? I thought that the general consensus on it nowadays was that it was hilariously optimistic and naive, and pretty much a shortsighted product of the early post-Cold War years.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Don’t ask me. I see that last name and start a-sniggerin’.
General Winfield Stuck
Going to watch the last hour of BSG./ It’s been a treat watching it from the beginning with NF DVD;s the past 6 months. Don;t get Sy Fy /
Jackmormon
It’s a grand narrative that is convenient to argue for and against. That’s about it, really. Even people who think it’s stupid and simplistic can’t resist taking a shot at it—which has the effect of increasing its visibility.
DougJ
Stephen Bainbridge answers Rick Perlstein
For reasons that are too complicated to describe, I’m not allowed to discuss law professors here.
Funkhauser
I think the Fukuyama idea is influential for two reasons:
1) Its naive and simple theory was presented in easily-digestable form. It could be consumed by the elite class that reads Thomas Friedman and thinks he’s a deep thinker. It could be sold in airport bookstores.
2) Like Friedman’s books and anything Sam Huntington wrote, Fukuyama’s book is an easy straw-man. You can assign it to your students, and watch them poke holes through the arguments. It’s a very easy read, especially the article version.
3) And perhaps it was right, for its time, the approximately eighteen months after the fall of the Wall.
Caveat: aspiring academic writing here.
eric
Because it justifies the preferences and desires of the moneyed class. Intellectual justification raises income amd wealth differentials to goods instead of evils thereby rendering the System free from moral failings and thus to be excused from future revolutions. Eric
cbear
“Why is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History considered to be so great? ”
The question should be: Why is Francis Fukuyama considered to be so great?
Sorry, but in my book, you don’t get to align yourself with a notorious sack of shit like Bill Kristol and his fellow travelers and retain your credibility. That’s just the way I roll.
Fuk him.
Funkhauser
Ahem, three reasons. Wasn’t there once a preview button on this page?
MikeJ
When people see you read it on the plane, they’ll think you’re deep and you won’t get any those icky ideas on you.
Fern
@lamh31:
I thought “The Time Traveler’s Wife” was a pretty good read, though the ending was a little over-the-top melodramatic for my taste. The book sort of has “screenplay” written all over it, but I guess that worked out okay for the author.
eric
This process was attempted again with the Bell Curve. This is the whole point of Think Tanks and the like. If it is in a book or in a publication it is the impramateur of credibility. Eric
Demo Woman
@JK: I for one and so tired of they did it too… What’s up with that. Did they not have parents who taught personal responsibility?
aschup
@DougJ: As a class, I promise they’re not as stupid as the ones who take to the internet make it seem.
Anne Laurie
Fukuyama is to history as Laffer is to economics — they’re deeply and comprehensively wrong, but they use very professorial language to support philosophies the Ruling Powers want to be true. In other words, The End of History was never intended to be read, it was intended as a sort of protective shield against the heresies of the Reality-Based Community(tm).
Fern
DougJ, you said:
“I understand that there’s an important idea there, that the world may tend towards some stable capitalist-democratic system, but that also seems to me to be an obvious idea.”
Could you explain why that is obvious? Especially the “stable” part.
eric
This is true for Posner too. An intellectual non-entity who should never be allowed to publish on anthing non-law. His law stuff isn’t good either. But that is the paradigm the Right adopted after the Goldwater Experiment. Also. Eric
lamh31
@Fern,
A couple of the ladies at work started reading the novel in anticipation of seeing the film. I personally have reading a novel after seeing the movie, so I rarely do. The only movie in recent memory that I recall reading the novel afterwards was “Girl Interrupted”, and i remember the film better.
BTW, during Time Traveler’s Wife, they showed a preview for that new Amelia Earheart biopic with Hilary Swank as Amelia, even though I pretty sure I know how the ending goes, it looked good. Might be another Oscar in it for Swank, plus Richard Gere is in it, and I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Richard Gere more than Eric Bana.
DougJ
Could you explain why that is obvious?
Note that I didn’t say “true”. If you look at Europe and the United States, which are quite stable, it’s natural to think that the rest of the world might be headed in that direction. I’m sure that thought has occurred to many people.
Mike in NC
IIRC, Fukuyama has tried on several occasions to distance himself from the neocons and disown his previous writing.
Anne Laurie
Well, I didn’t get that memo, so I’ll say that Professor Bainbridge’s ‘argument’ gives a window as why Glenn Reynolds sticks to “Heh, indeed.” so often.
kay
@JK:
Conservatives didn’t really own the birthers. They clearly saw some political advantage in casting any doubt on Obama, in anyway, but they didn’t own the birthers.
They absolutely own the deathers, and in a way that’s crazier.
The Democrats in the House drafted a proposal designed to kill old people, to cut costs. Rahm Emanuel’s brother, who is a physician, told the Democrats to do that, and so they did. That’s the conspiracy theory they endorsed, and not on the fringe, either. Just think about how insane that is. All the way up to the Senate. They absolutely own the deathers.
cbear
How ironic, and totally appropriate, it is that the 2 main topics of discussion on this thread are the works of Fukuyama and a romance novel.
Batocchio
I didn’t realize his book was that well-regarded. I give Fukuyama credit for admitting how wrong he was on many things, but some of the mistakes he made were pretty obvious, and deadly. I wrote a long piece on the neocons a while back, but I’ll just link my favorite piece on Fukuyama, “Breaking Away” by Louis Menard. It’s from 2006, but I still think it’s one of the best on the neocons.
arguingwithsignposts
Two words: Wingnut welfare.
This, also:
Re: libraries – I heartily recommend “The Devil’s Playground” about the Amish rumspringen, which I watched via my local library’s DVD collection.
Mark S.
I read it at least a decade ago, but the wikipedia article pretty much sums up what I thought was the main point (by way of much Hegelian wankery):
I think that is at least an arguable thesis, but by no means certain. One pro I can think of is that democracy is becoming pretty necessary for legitimacy; even dictatorships go through the charade of having elections. However, I could certainly imagine a future of dictatorships.
pragmatic idealist
“The End of History” is typical of a genre of books that take a great (IMO) essay and stretch it into book length so that it can be retailed.
Mark S.
@DougJ:
I should have read your post more carefully, since I just restated the point you thought was obvious. I don’t know, I’m not sure it is obvious. If China overtakes the U.S., will authoritarian capitalism become the dominant model? Or, will a richer Chinese population demand greater freedom? I would guess Fukuyama would argue the latter, but to me it is by no means obvious.
calipygian
Was Fukayama trying to cash in on being the Marx of his time?
Crashman06
@Mark S.: I’m not terribly informed on Fukayama or his book, but I seem to remember him backing away from some of his ideas a couple of years ago. Now, I don’t remember if he was trying to make a break with the neocons he was affiliated with around the new millennium, or if he was going further and actually backing away from some of the premises in the book.
jenniebee
@DougJ: I’m not sure that a country that just went through 8 years of Bush lying and hijacking the country into disastrous adventures, both foreign and domestic, capped by a year of Sarah 4 Class Vice-Prez! and followed by another of Birther Madness is the best example of “stable.” And Weimar was a Republic (as was Argentina, as was Chile) before it became a right-wing paradise, something conveniently brushed aside in Fukiyama’s book.
A democracy depends for its existence on the idea that its officers will be more interested in perpetuating the democracy than they are in achieving any particular goal within it. Capitalism, if allowed to run unchecked, tends toward a state difficult to distinguish from feudalism. Neither one is inherently stable, as was obvious to any student of history at the time that Fukiyama wrote his book.
DougJ
I give Fukuyama credit for admitting how wrong he was on many things
I don’t have that much against Fukuyama. Yes, he was totally wrong in a deadly way, as you put it. But he did admit he was wrong at great length and it’s tough (and valuable to do that).
I just don’t understand why the book got so much respect.
DougJ
I’m not sure that a country that just went through 8 years of Bush lying and hijacking the country into disastrous adventures, both foreign and domestic, capped by a year of Sarah 4 Class Vice-Prez! and followed by another of Birther Madness is the best example of “stable.”
The book was written before any of that happened.
kay
@Anne Laurie:
Read the comments. They’re offended, really offended, that they are being in anyway associated with any out-of-the-civic mainstream or unserious ideas.
There’s a problem, though. A member of the Senate Finance Committee endorsed the theory that there was a plot afoot to “pull the plug on grandma”. Not Glen Beck. Not Lyndon LaRouche. A GOP Senator. Yesterday.
JK
@DougJ:
I don’t want to get you into any kind of trouble, but I wish there was a safe way for you to offer a refutation to Bainbridge.
@Anne Laurie:
I find Glenn Reynolds more repuslive, smarmy, and nauseating by the day. It’s a damn shame that a lying putz like him landed a job as a law professor.
Mark S.
@Crashman06:
I’m no expert on him either. I know he became critical of the neocons. Wikipedia says he has also had second thoughts about The End of History:
But that’s too nerdy of a topic even for me.
jenniebee
@JK: boy, he went through a lot of pixels to say “oh yeah? well BILL AYERS, BITCH! BOO-YAH!”
cbear
@DougJ: “But he did admit he was wrong at great length and it’s tough (and valuable to do that).”
Bullshit. After providing the pseudo intellectual underpinnings for the muderous policies of Kristol, Cheney, Feith, Rumsfeld (and the rest of the PNAC cretins) that have resulted in the deaths of countless thousands, and human misery on a biblical scale— his belated “my bad” just doesn’t quite wash away the stain.
What the fuck is it with my fellow liberals that we will still even consider the thoughts and writings of asswipes like “Fifth Column” Sullivan and “Suck-on-This” Friedman and FUKayama, much less endlessly debate the respective merits of their ideas?
Crashman06
@Mark S.: Yeah, that is way outta my element!
jenniebee
@DougJ: OK, I’ll grant you that, but he was still overlooking Weimar, Chile, Argentina…
As for why it was taken seriously, the right had just lost the Great Soviet Enemy and needed a replacement. These aren’t exactly people who see a lot of glory (or a lot in it for them) in turning swords into plowshares.
Mike G
I’ll agree with many of the comments above about TEOH being shallow and Friedman-esque, a pre-approved product of the establishment, released at a moment in world events when it could easily slot into the narrative that Time/Newsweak were pushing. I can only ascribe it to American triumphalism of the time at ‘winning’ the Cold War. Which of course was all due to Ronald Reagan telling Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall (/FoxNews).
For my part, I could never understand why the book was considered so meaningful. Even my 19-year old semi-ignorant self knew from my own reading of history and politics that it was pollyannaish bullshit, a facile concept with an even more facile interpretation in the media.
Humanity does not move ever onward and upward; show a Roman from 50BC what happened to his civilization over the next few hundred years, or the German middle classes of circa 1910 the horrors of the decades following the achievement of supposedly ‘permanent peace and prosperity’ in Europe.
There are always demons lurking in society’s shadows, and they emerge in unpredictable ways and at unpredicatable times. We may succeed at minimizing or bottling them up for long stretches of time, but they are always there, and have the potential to destroy the carefully constructed institutions and structures of capitalism and democracy. Indeed, the Repigs appear to be poking those demons with a stick and taunting them right now.
srv
Yes, but not how you think.
Being the first AND last neocon screed to use footnotes, history is pretty much over. It is always 1939 from here on out.
tripletee (formerly tBone)
@cbear:
I understand your sentiment, but I’d note that our host here could have made that list pretty easily 5 or 6 years ago.
neill
Fuckwit’s “end of history” made the corporations come… that’s the whole story. they cream in their boardroom jeans and promote his fluff and froth…
the real end of history (mine) goes like this…
metaphysics =
technology =
nihilism =
the total mobilization of everything as inventory =
european culture becoming world history.
and that, my friends, is the beginning of a long endless night…
JK
Has anyone found a video of Charlie Rose drooling all over Fukuyama? I have to believe Rose interviewed him when his book was published.
Max
I’m watching Watchman. Not sure if I like it.
NY Times OpEd by our President in tomorrow’s paper. I still can’t believe we elected this man (in a good way).
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16obama.html?_r=1
DougJ
his belated “my bad” just doesn’t quite wash away the stain.
I understand that. My point is that, even leaving aside whether or not Fukuyama might be asshole, I don’t understand why the book was taken seriously.
srv
@tripletee (formerly tBone):
You know, I didn’t remember John talking about Fukuyama back in the day. So I googled.
https://balloon-juice.com/?m=200208
“What the hell is wrong with the 41% of the people who think he has or is developing weapons of mass destruction but who do not want to invade?????
I hate to say this, but we are going to have to be attacked several more times before people in this country are serious.”
Man, am I sorry I missed 2002 here. What a riot.
bago
OT: hot damn hempfest hot huge. When I played a stage there a few years ago it was a lil car cabin. Now it’s a 10k watt sound system.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/archives/176276.asp
Brett
Aside from simply stating the obvious in a best-selling book, Fukuyama’s point was considered important because when he meant “the end of history”, he was referring to history in a Hegelian sense.
According to Hegel, history was Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis. Fukuyama’s point was that there was no real “antithesis” to liberal democratic capitalism anymore in the broadly accepted sense, in the way that Communism was an antithesis in terms of ideology.
The Raven
Ideas aren’t books. It’s one thing to have the idea, another to research, develop, and analyze it.
cbear
@tripletee (formerly tBone): Point taken, but I don’t think JC, at his most wingnuttiest, was accusing his fellow citizens of outright treason, nor advocating the indiscriminate slaughter of ayrabs. Was he?
Fencedude
@Max:
Fuck that is still an awesome thing to read.
cusanus
The title of the book used the word ‘end’ ambiguously but was intended to mean more goal or telos. So the book is really about asking what is the goal in the sense of where is it all going, and if democracy is the goal, is that all there is? And will the Democratic man in a bread-and-circuses consumer-driven economy produce a society of Last Men, to use Nietzsche’s phrase? It’s a question that interests me and it’s neither sophomoric nor Friedmanesqe.
MBSS
I still remember the first time I rented “The 400 Blows”.
i still haven’t seen a truffaut movie. i’ll check this out next chance i get. i’m a big film buff. i’d like to second that emotion and give a big thumbs up to supporting your local library. mine has a great selection and most all of them are free. hell, rack up a few late fees and give the library some money, i’m sure they could use it right about now. or you could just give them the money and return the books and movies on time. i prefer the late fee route because it allows me to be bad and good simultaneously, which is my goal in life.
DougJ
It’s a question that interests me and it’s neither sophomoric nor Friedmanesqe.
I agree. But what exactly made the book so great?
Notorious P.A.T.
Hasn’t Fukuyama actually distanced himself, lately, from the ideas in that book?
Notorious P.A.T.
“Stephen Bainbridge answers Rick Perlstein
“Rick Perlstein’s Asinine Take on the Health Care Town Yells”
http://www.professorbainbridge…..yells.html”
Haha!
“Sure, racists torpedoed health care reform under Truman, but–Code Pink! Watch out for those grannies! ! !”
JK
@DougJ:
If you can ever come up with an uncomplicated explanation, I’d like to know why you can’t discuss law professors on Balloon Juice.
MBSS
You know, I didn’t remember John talking about Fukuyama back in the day. So I googled.
https://balloon-juice.com/?m=200208
“What the hell is wrong with the 41% of the people who think he has or is developing weapons of mass destruction but who do not want to invade?????
I hate to say this, but we are going to have to be attacked several more times before people in this country are serious.”
on the days when i’m really sad, and need a giggle, i’m going to have to go back and read some old john cole, with a splash on megan mccardle on the side.
srv
@cbear:
“Point taken, but I don’t think JC, at his most wingnuttiest, was accusing his fellow citizens of outright treason, nor advocating the indiscriminate slaughter of ayrabs. Was he?”
Ask, and you shall receive:
https://balloon-juice.com/?p=848
JK
@MBSS:
YUCK YUCK YUCK
Did you have to mention Megan McArdle?
Greatest quote of all-time from McArdle
“I’m not voting because I forgot to register” – Megan McArdle, 04 Nov 2008 09:36 am
Source: http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/11/vote_though_it_pains_you.php
MBSS
OTOH john cole does seem somewhat contrite. hopefully he conducts some sort of flagellation as he walks the dog around the neighborhood.
cbear
@srv: Ooopsey daisey.
Nancy Irving
It was Reaganist triumphalism.
Needless to say, history did not come to an end.
MBSS
@ JK
speechless. H.O.F. mccardle there. i really need my own column if that’s all it takes nowadays.
Viva BrisVegas
I don’t see that it is at all obvious that the world may tend towards some stable capitalist-democratic system.
The battle of the 20th Century was essentially between authoritarianism, both socialist and corporatist, and social democracy.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union that struggle has morphed into a competition between authoritarian capitalism and social democracy. China being the best example of the former and Europe of the latter. The US flip flops between the two camps whenever there is a change in the ruling party.
I can’t help thinking that our ruling elites are watching places like China and Singapore very carefully, trying to work out just how much democracy is required for a functioning market economy.
If the answer turns out to be very little, then I have grave doubts over the future of democracy.
jenniebee
@srv: Reading those, the weirdest thing I noticed about them is that not only did Cole’s political views radically change, his grammar has also improved dramatically.
Fern
Maybe the most influential and well-regarded books are the ones that say what people want to hear, or that justify something they were going to do anyway?
cbear
@jenniebee: Probably helped with his sex life, also. Also, too.
AhabTRuler
@cbear:
ThisThat.JGabriel
jenniebee:
Yeah, I just read a few of those older posts too and… Jesus Christ. The grammar is nearly as bad as Bush’s (maybe he didn’t have editing function yet, in which case I sympathize). And the less said about the rhetoric, the better.
Are we sure the John Cole we read everyday is the same John Cole that wrote those posts?
.
srv
@jenniebee: Well, that’s what happens when you become an elitist professor.
Or maybe he was just DougJ’s original personality.
MBSS
jimmy carter has the real john cole tied up in the basement. he just got fed up.
jenniebee
@srv: I just figured that the illiterate texts he was reading then rubbed off, and the literate ones he reads today do the same.
cbear
@JGabriel: My thoughts exactly. Maybe he became one of those human hybrids the goopers are always going on about.
tripletee (formerly tBone)
@cbear:
Looks like srv had it covered, but yeah, JC occasionally surfed the event horizon of the Wingularity. I’m sure he’ll appreciate me giving people an excuse to dig up some of those gems from his archive. Sorry John.
@jenniebee:
See, I always figured the mind control eels interfere with higher cognitive function. I haven’t gone back and checked, but I bet in the midst of the Schiavo thing, John had a post that simply read “KHAAAAANNNN!” and then all subsequent posts displayed markedly improved grammar and syntax.
Linkmeister
@JK: Ye gods and little fishes. Bainbridge’s argument (Ayers! Weathermen!) is dumb enough, but his commenters are worse.
Mike G
Not only did Cole’s political views radically change, his grammar has also improved dramatically.
Just as rock music sounds most appropriate in an American accent, neanderthal rightard political screeds are most naturally expressed in retarded, broken syntax and redneck grammar.
Brachiator
I can understand why the book is considered to be important, because it helped provide the theoretical justification for neo-conservative interventionism in Iraq and other countries. They figured that since the world tended towards liberal democracy, they could help the process along by means of invasions and regime changing toppling of dictators.
However, I cannot understand how anyone could rationally consider the book to be great.
Fukuyama insists on jumping into the same huge intellectual hole that has swallowed many historians and social critics that have preceded him, by attempting to falsely appropriate science into supporting his flawed synthesizing vision of history. According to the Wiki, Fukuyama claims that “history should be viewed as an evolutionary process.”
This is a nonsensical proposition since evolution has no goal or tendency toward progress or improvement, but is simply a random process. You can always tell the amateurs who are misusing evolution (and yeah, I’m talking about you, Robert Wright) when they start talking about how evolution is trying to improve the species, or that evolution has some mystical purpose that magically coincides with human desires.
So Fukuyama’s underlying theory of history is nonsense, and his analysis of actual history is easily refuted by the facts.
This may be an “obvious idea.” The problem is, it’s obviously wrong.
Many supposed democracies are really single party authoritarian regimes. Other countries are either failed states, or threaten to collapse into anarchy (Somalia, Zimbabwe). Islamic fundamentalism is threatening to consume a relatively stable, authoritarian government in Pakistan. And various forms of nationalism and assertions of the rights of indigenous peoples (Wales, Scotland, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador) are suggesting new models of nations that may not involve anything remotely resembling an inclusive liberal capitalistic democracy. And then there is Russia, which is degenerating into a classic kleptocracy, as is also happening in the various “stan” countries. And China is turning into a weird mercantilist society that only a Ferengi could love.
On the Ferengi, more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi
There is also an ironic counter-movement in stable societies, which paradoxically encourage groups who are not particularly oppressed to assert their nationalist desires (Scottish, Catalan and Basque nationalism).
Any supposed theory has to have predictive value. If it doesn’t, it is, by definition, false. By this standard, The End of History is not even good science fiction.
JK
@Brachiator:
This is the most illuminating, and interesting post I’ve read on this thread. I wonder if those nationalist desires to which you refer will result in the creation of any new nations. Thanks for the insight.
Brachiator
@JK:
Gosh. Gee. Thanks. Thanks very, much.
And with that, I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead. Good night, everybody. See ya tomorrow.
mclaren
Everyone so far has gotten it wrong, except Brachiator, who points out some of the underlying reality.
Here’s the explanation:
In every era, certain ideas sweep the population like wildfire and become so obsessively ingrained that they qualify as a form of secular religion. These are belief systems which, in that era, literally Cannot Be Questioned.
We see this throughout history, from ideas such as Aristotle’s famous dictum that “80% of the human race are natural slaves” to the belief during the middle ages that this world was a veil of misery and meant nothing and only the afterlife was important, to the belief during the Renaissance and Baroque eras in the necessary and inevitable divine right of kings, to the belief in the early 20th century that Hegelian dialectical historicism represented the grand underlying plan of history.
These viral memes obsess different cultures at different times, and vary from one place to another and from one time to another. In every case, however, they assume the power of a secular religion, and warp a culture’s entire thinking to the point where even contemplating questioning or doubting the meme becomes impossible for most of the population.
One of the most powerful viral memes in America has always been the application of pseudoscience to justify human selfishness, assuring Americans that however we brutalize or lie to or cheat one another, it’s due to some vast cosmic historical process of nature that will ultimately make Americans better and stronger and faster and smarter and richer. In short, what I’m saying here is that one of America’s most power belief systems is American exceptionalism. This goes wayyyyyy back, to the “city on a hill” quote, all the way back to the 17th century. It’s written deeply in America’s cultural DNA.
American exceptionalism is of course nothing but the Calvinist doctrine of the Elect, democratized.
The Calvinist doctrine of Election said that some small fraction of the population had been chosen by God to go to heaven and consequently no matter what heinous acts they performed, no matter what crimes or atrocities they indulged in, they were predestined to have their sins forgiven and enter into heaven when they died, just as the vast mass of the human race was predestined to go to hell.
American exceptionalism democratizes this Calvinist superstition by marrying it to the genuine science of Darwinian macro-evolution in a pseudoscientific hybrid. In the American exceptionalist version of the Calvinist superstition, Americans are always forgiven their rape and torture and mass murder of people in other countries because Americans’ hearts are pure and their motives are good (i.e., Americans are the Calvinist elect). Likewise, Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism assures Americans that no matter how heinously their business leaders lie and cheat and steal and brutalize poor people and crush anyone who stands in their way, they’re still nonetheless the best and the worthiest of our population — because they’re rich. Social Darwinism assures us that the mere acquisition of wealth, regardless by what means, indicates the economic survival of the fittest.
When we apply American exceptionalism to the moment in history at which the Soviet Union collapsed and fell apart, we discern that Herbert Spencer’s doctrine of Social Darwinism was being applied by Francis Fukuyama on a vast scale. Instead of merely indicating that an individual was the “fittest” and the “best” of his species, Fukuyama put Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism through a Marshall Stack and turned it up to 10 to arrive at the conclusion that Social Darwinism applied to entire cultures.
Thus, the distingeration of the USSR in 1991 “proved” (according to Fukuyama) that the American culture was “fittest” and “best” of all the possible methods of social organization in the world.
Even a dullard can see a lot of problems with this form of superstition.
For example: American outlasted the Soviet Union, but so did intensely mixed economies like Japan and Singapore and Malaysia. Those economies do not function as traditional capitalist free markets: in Japan, for example, unneeded workers are typically set in front of windows to do nothing (they’re called “window workers”) but they’re not fired. In Japan, giant government bureacracies like MITI dictate technological and industrial policy. In Japan, intesnely protectionist measures shield mom-and-pop stores from international competition, with the bizarre result that eleectronic goods like DVD players or laptop computers are much more expensive in Japan for Japanese, than the exact same Japanese consumer electronics exported to other countries like America for Americans to buy. Try explaining that with the “capitalist free market.”
Singapore is an authoritarian country in which the capitalist free market is very often shunted aside in favor of centrally planned schemes like the Singapore indentured apprenticeship system, in which a novice who wants to learn a trade signs a contract with a master craftsman. The contract requires the novice to work for the master for X number of years at Y pay but in return the master must teach the apprenctice everything s/he knows. If the apprentice wants to break the contract and go out on hi/r own before the end of the time period, the apprentice must pay a large fixed sum. Once again, hardly a free capitalist market.
Likewise, South Korea uses chaebols, interlocking corporations which conspire in restraint of trade to capture entire foreign markets. This is legal in South Korea, but it has nothing to do with a free market.
Countries like Norway and Sweden also outlived the USSR, but once again these countries are far from capitalist free markets — they have many intensely socialist features in their economy.
Japan and Singapore and Malaysia and South Korea aren’t socialist economies but they’re not capitalist free markets either. We don’t have a terminology for how those countries’ economies are organized. The European countries are by and large socialist economies. China is a weird mix of government bureaucratic centralized planning and capitalist free market, and once again, we don’t have a simple term to sum up the Chinese economic model. It’s not simply authoritarianism married to free market capitalism because the Chinese government makes crucial decisions about the direction of their economy, as for example the recent decision to shut down China’s mainland low-age low-skill factories and concentrate instead of high-wage hi-tech manufacturing. That was not dictated by the free market, it was a GOSPLAN-style decision by the Chinese central committee.
All of these economic systems outlasted the USSR but only one of them, America, is a genuine free market. So Fukuyama was wrong in jumping to the conclusion that the free market capitalism represents the only possible alternative after the fall of the soviet union.
As we are now seeing, important new economic paradigms unforeseen by Marx or Engels or Adam Smith or David Ricardo are now taking over entire sectors of the American economy, and, indeed, the world economy. In fact entire sectors of the American capitalist free market economy are falling apart, collapsing, and disintegrating in abject retreat and total defeat before these new non-capitalist non-market economic paradigms.
The most important new non-capitalist non-market economic paradigm is free open source peer production, more commonly known as crowdsourcing. This new paradigm represents as radical an upheavel in the world economic system as the introduction of coinage, or the inauguration of the world’s first stock market. Throughout America and the world, industry after industry trembles, totters and falls before the irresistible power of crowdsourcing.
Consider the most recent examples:
The capitalist free market of the music industry has collapsed in the face of free mp3 downloads.
The capitalist free market of the traditional newspaper has disintegrated in the face of free classified ads in craigslist and free online info courtesy of the internet.
The capitalist free market of network TV is in the process of collapsing faced with hulu and bittorrent downloads of the lastest TV shows and free YouTube videos.
The capitalist free market of the book publishing industry is falling apart before the internet, with resources like bookchan to download free ebooks of all the latest bestsellers, and new paradigms like authors (Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi) who systematically give away their new books for free…paradoxically increasing the sale of their printed books.
Crowdsourced information troves like Wikipedia crush and exterminate the products of free capitalist markets like Encyclopedia Britannica. There isn’t even a competition, the free capitalist market is simply being driven into the sea and destroyed by a superior economic mode: FREE. Zero cost. As in, pay nothing. Remove money from the economic model. Free market capitalism can’t even begin to put up a fight against free resources like Wikipedia, any more that the GOSPLAN-directed hopelessly inefficient centrally planned Soviet economy could even begin to put up a fight against free market capitalism.
Likewise, open source hardware like the Arduino and crowdsourced software like Linux is in the process of wiping out the crufty junky products of clunky old-fashioned obsolete economic paradigms like free market capitalism.
In more and more fields, from grameen banks which remove profit from banking and substitute person-to-person microloans, to reprap individual fabricators and time-shared numerical machine tool facilities in which you upload a CAD/CAM digital model and get your machined metal or plastic part mailed to you in a week or two, free market capitalism is retreating and collapsing. It’s being driven to extinction by a new economic paradigm which removes money from the economic model and does everything for free.
Traditional capitalist market systems can’t compete with “free,” so they collapse.
Now, the exponentially accelerating wave of economic transformation represented by open source peer production is conquering realm after realm of the world economy, forcing the capitalist free market into exctinction in one area after another — the army, for example, just announced that it was wikifying its field manuals. Instead of paying experts to write them, the new army manuals will be written by the grunts on the ground and will be infinitely editable, so theyi’ll change from one day to the next. This is so far from any traditional Army chain of command concept, and so distant from any top-down CEO-style free market capitalist paradigm, that any reasonble person who looks at the world today must conclude that free market caplitalism is in the process of dying out.
Naturally, faced with this overwhelmingly obvious fact, it stands to reason that DougJ would therefore conclude that the universal triumph of free market capitalist democracy is “obvious” and seems inevitable.
That’s not facetious. Because DougJ’s statement is so hallucinogenic, so bizarrely contrary to observed reality, that it offers puissant proof of the tremendous power of belief systems like American Exceptionalism to warp our thinking. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, everyone in America (including DougJ and of course Francis Fukuyama) conclude that free market capitalism and traditional representative democracy are “the only possiblity left” and “obvious” and “inevitable.”
What we observe throughout the world is exactly the opposite of Fukuyama’s thesis. Just as the soviet centrally-planned Hegelian dialectical historicism economic model collapsed and disappeared before the vastly superior paradigm of free market capitalism, free market capitalism is itself collapsing and disappearing because it’s unable to compete with the vastly superior economic paradigm of open source peer production.
Essentially, American Exceptionalism boiled down to the doctrine that socities are red in tooth and claw like Darwin’s model of nature, and that savage cannibalistic competition therefore assures that the best will rise to the top. But, as Friedrich Hayek pointed out in his chapter in The Road To Serfdom titled “Why the Worst Rise to the Top,” that’s not the way it works. Unlimited competition and infinite savagery produces not the best, but the worst — you get Enron. In TV The Beverly Hillbillies drives Playhouse 90 off the airwaves and Fox News crushes MSNBC and CNN.
The same applies to most other industries, in which limitlessly savage competition produces scams and crappy products locked-in by means of sadistic monopolies. Microsoft Vista forced on customers who hate it and eagerly downgrade to Windows XP…Blu-ray copy protection resulting in the public shunning the format…the RIAA suing its customers and destroying itself…Detroit building and selling vast numbers of SUVs resulting in its own collapse… In industry after industry, free market capitalism produces the worst products forced on consumers by corrupt incompetent monopolies who repsonse to consumer complaints is to sue them into silence.
The intellectual foundations of free market capitalism, namely Nash’s game theory, have long since crumbled. As Nash himself noted and his fellow RAND researchers gaped at in astonishment, when Nash’s equilibrium theory was tested out on the RAND company secretaries, they produced results exactly the opposite of what Nash’s game theory predicted. We observe the same results today: psychology experiments have consistently shown that participants in economic simulations will choose to disadvantage themselves if the alternative is an outcome perceived to be unfair but advantageous to both parties. This was never predicted by game theory and is contrary to all the math. (Example: in experiments in which ordinary people were given a choice between rewarding someone who had cheated in a prisoner’s-dilemma-type situation as well as themselves, or taking a big loss themselves and no gain for the person who defected in the prisoner’s dilemma, participants consistently chose to take a huge loss themselves in order to insure that the defectors did not gain from their dishonesty. This runs completely contrary to all modern game theory, as well as violating all the basic principles of the Chicago School of Economics paradigm of the free market, which envisions each actor as a rational utility-maximizing dispassionate calculator.)
Kahneman and Tversky have repeatedly shown in many behavior experiments that humans do not behave even remotely the way economics theory claims they will. People consistently make irrational decisions which disadvantage them, given complete information about an economic transaction. (For example, Kahneman and Tversky have shown in many experiments that participants will take huge losses rather than sell, in order to preserve the illusion of a previous gain; likewise, people will bid wildly different prices for the same commodity if they are given a different set of choices. In one case, participants in a study were given two options: an online newspaper at one quarter price or the print edition at regular price; almost none of the participants chose the print edition. But given three choices, one quarter price on the online newspaper, regular price print edition, or print edition _and_ the online newspaper at half the regular price, most of the participants chose the online version + print edition at a slight discount. Once again, economic theory says this cannot happen. In the same way, K & T showed that simply starting bidding at a higher price typically yields higher final auction prices; and, depending on the product, INCREASING the price actually increases sales, particularly of luxury items. All these results from behavior psychology experiments systematically contradict the fundamental tents of free market capitalism, which assure us that a free market reaches an equilibrium, that a free market gives an accurate valuation of goods and services, that participants in a free market are rational actors, that people engaged in buying and selling seek to maximize the utility function of their transactions, and so on.)
Since it’s so glaringly self-evident that free market capitalism represents a defective and faulty model of reality and since it’s so completely obvious that free market capitalism is in the process of being driven to extinction by the superior economic paradigm of open source peer production, it’s worthy asking why Fukuyama or DougJ regard the triumph of democracy and free market capitalism as “inevitable” or “obvious” or “necessary.”
The answer is that America finds itself in the grip of a mindless superstition — the superstitious belief in American Exceptionalism, or, if you prefer, Calvinist election democratized. In John Calvin’s version of this myth, God chose the Elect at the beginning of time and nothing could alter that decision. In the American version, the great God named the Market chooses the Elect and nothing can alter that decision.
As we have seen, democracy is failing rapidly and being replaced around the world by religious fundamentalism, including here in America. Fukuyama has no explanation for this, but when we view this process through the lens of American Exceptionalism (i.e., Calvinism democratized) it becomes simple and obvious why fundamentalism is trumping democracy everywhere in the world, including in America (with the rise to power of fundamentalist kooks the Drunk Driving C Student who previous infested the Oval Office, and more recently the strong showing of fundie cranks like Sarah Palin.)
Since American Exceptionalism is a fundamentally religious superstition of a particularly crude kind, based on the most remote past in which primitive hominids trembled and cowered before inanimate phenomena like lightning and thunderstorms and imbued them with magical omniscient intellgience and imaginary special powers, it’s obvious why religious fundamentalism makes such great inroads against democracy in an America that believes so fervently in American Exceptionalism. Just as primitive pithecanthrepoid hominids bowed down to and worshipped the lightning, giving it imaginary godlike powers, modern Americans bow down to and worship the all-power God they call the Market, giving it imaginary godlike powers (the market sees all, knows all, dispenses infalliable justice, dictates inevitable and irreversible outcomes, exactly like an old testament God or some even earlier more primitive deity like Baal or Mithra).
As Americans grovel ever more abjectly before their imaginary god The Great Omnipotent Market, they find themselves compelled to make ever more valuable sacrifices to the Great Omnippotent Market: they must sacrifice their children…their homes…their families…their life savings… But these are all a small price to pay to placate The Great Omnipoptent Market, for the Market is a jealous god and will have none other before it. This naturally leads to the most deluded and degraded form of fundamentalist religion, complete with speaking in tongues (the economic version is the double-talk of the highly paid economic “experts” all of whose predictions turn out to be worthless and wrong) and handling venomonous snakes in a state of Pentacostal religious ecstasy (the economic equivalent is the handling of ever more dangerous derivative options in an increasingly fragile “shadow economy”).
As the world increasingly writhes in the dust and abases iteslf before the hollow imaginary god called The Great Omnipotent Market, naturally enough the world’s population slides into the habit of religious fundamentalism — for what is fundamentalist religion but the carryover of our beliefs and practices in the Great God called The Omnipotent Market into non-economic spheres?
Of course The Great Omnipotent Market, like the imaginary god of the lightning worshipped by proto-humans, is a fantasy, a mere figment of the imagination with no actual connection to the reality. Like the hollow golden idol Baal, the Great Omnipotent Market is entirely a human construction, as Douglas Rushkoff reminds us in his recent essay “Economics Is Not Natural Science”:
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/rushkoff09/rushkoff09_index.html
There is of course nothing novel or insightful about my discussion here, since it merely parallels Isaiah Berlin’s devastating essay debunking Marxist-Leninist dialectical historicism. Berlin pointed out that the Soviets had simply made an Old-Testament-style graven idol out of Hegelian historicism, attributing to it imaginary omnipotent powers which it never had, in a spectacular display of false reification.
In the same way, contemporary Americans have made an Old-Testament-style graven idol out of the capitalist free market, attributing to it imaginary powers which it never had, in yet another spectacular display of false reification.
In reality, a survey of American history shows that the American economy is not even free market capitalism. It’s a mixed market, with large elements of socialism and communism, and even larger elements today of open source peer production.
For example, prior to the early 20th century, all fire departments were for-profit enterprises, and different fire departments would often sabotage one another or cut one another off on the way to the fire to prevent their rivals from getting business. Today, this is unimaginable: today we use socialized public fire departments, non-profit operations all.
Once upon a time, public education meant paying a hefty fee, whatever the market would bear. This resulted in a population mostly illiterate and innumerate, and America proved unable to compete with the rest of the world becuase our workers were uneducated. Starting the 1950s, America began a program of free public education, with the result that our workers were soon the best educated and most productive in the world.
Likewise, public libraries didn’t exist until Andrew Carnegie started them in the mid 19th century: and throughout American society we find one example after another of heavily socialized or outright communistic social systems, such as publicly financed municipal water systems, free public parking, free public parks, free broadband computers in public libraries, and on and on.
In 1812, young girls hauled carts of coal out of American coal mines at a penny an hour because when the girls died of overwork, they were cheaper to replace than horses. Would any American assent to this economic arrangement today? If not, why not — isn’t it economically advantageous? Doesn’t it offer a superior profit? Why don’t we allow GE to sell crack on the street corners? Why don’t we permit our parents to whore out their 6-year-old daughters? According to a utility calculation conducted by a rational economic actor, these transactions would be highly profitable. Clearly something is missing from our conception of economics.
In area after area in American life, we have taken the profit out of the economic system, refusing to enage in what would be highly profitable transactions in such as a way as to completely violate the precepts of free market capitalism. The most spectacular example of all remains the American military, in which profit has been eliminated for the soldiers and the entire operation is heavily socialistic, complete with socialized medical care (The VA), defined pension benefits, and so on, but for the civilians who work as military contractors, vast rivers of gold make them rich — encouraging startling inefficiencies, such as weapons systems that don’t work and cost far too much to repair and break down much too easily, requiring fabulously expensive (and lucrative) repairs by the civilian contractors. Economically speaking, we should use paid mercenaries but compel slaves to produce war materiel for free — that would be economically maximally advantageous, as the Soviet munitions factories of WW II showed. But we do exactly the opposite.
So the fantasy that America even was much of a capitalist free market never fit the reality after about the 1920s, but today, with the advent of open source peer production, it has become completely disconnected from reality.
This is the nature of the superstitions which hold sway over entire cultures. Even when their human sacrifices were destroying their culture, the Aztecs remained committed to them because they were sacred beliefs, undoubtable, all-powerful, concepts so hugely important to the Aztecs that these beliefs warped their thinking and prevented any rationality from escaping the way a black hole prevents light from escaping its event horizon.
In the same way, American Exceptionalism in its modern incarnation of The Great Omnipotent Market and its sacred avatar here on earth, the All Conquering Savior Named Democracy have attained such infinite power over the American mind and over American culture that no one can question these sacred beliefs even as all the evidence shows that reality contradicts their alleged supremacy and inevitability at every turn.
Marshall
Well, history has quite obviously ended, so there you go!
What I would like to know is when being 100% wrong all of the time became a positive attribute.
Leelee for Obama
@Brachiator: Late to this party due to bad weather last night. Your post was amazing, Thank you for explaining things well-the Ferengi reference was spot-on.
My only thoughts on Fukuyama revolve around the fact that he has repudiated a lot of what he wrote and said. Commendable, but too many lives and too much money bought that education for him. He can’t build enough furniture to make up for it.(furniture building is a hobby of his.)
Nutella
Because he said that winning the Cold War was the most important thing that ever happened. People obsessed with either the Cold War or winning or both thought that was very profound. They were wrong.
And they probably didn’t look to closely at his main point, according to Wikipedia: “History should be viewed as an evolutionary process.” You know how the wingnuts feel about evolutionary processes.
Nutella
But to be serious about evolutionary processes: Brachiator is right that anyone who claims that evolution is a directed process leading to a specific goal knows nothing at all about evolution and should take Biology 101 before making bone-headed biological analogies.
kth
The End of History (everyone raise your hand who has actually read it) isn’t nearly as terrible as has been suggested here, though the book’s supporters are much to blame, for grafting their delusions onto it. The Robert Wright comparison upthread is exactly correct: like Wright, Fukuyama is a mildly interesting thinker who is continually raising issues he lacks the intellect and the erudition to properly address. But for its faults, The End of History is no brief for imposing liberal democracy around the world by force, but merely ponders the meaning of then-recent world events.
The Menand article linked upthread is very good; Page 3 of it contains an accurate precis of Fukuyama’s thesis if you don’t want to read the whole article.
HyperIon
@Anne Laurie: re Laffer
I saw Laffer on CSPAN just this week and he is still flogging the “tax increases are going kill democracy”. He also managed to work in a completely xenophobic “we have to drill offshore because if we don’t, the Indonesians will and they will screw it up because they don’t respect the environment (due to browness?) and i’m really a treehugger, doncha know”.
God, he is stupid.
HyperIon
@Batocchio: Louis Menard
This guy is great. On UWTV they occasionally show a lecture by him on the topic “Do movies have rights?”. He outlines the history of the NAACP/Birth of a Nation court case and other movie censorship litigation. Clever, insightful. I also enjoy reading him in the New Yorker.
A real contrast to that dick Fukuyama. I hope he enjoyed his 15 months of fame.
HyperIon
@MBSS: i still haven’t seen a truffaut movie.
try “day for night”.
HyperIon
@Nancy Irving: It was Reaganist triumphalism.
best summation so far.
Thomas Levenson
@kth: Well…yes-ish, if you are someone who thinks philosophy of history w/out much historical knowledge is an interesting intellectual pursuit. FF was/is a moderately competent Hegelian; Hegel’s thesis as an actual theory of history was roundly stomped, IMHO, within his own century by other much more historically competent German(phone) historian/philosophers. See e.g. Dilthey and especially Ranke, not to mention what may be my favorite 19th century work of history, Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which is an implied rebuke to Hegel from stem to stern.
FF wrote his warmed over Hegelian tract with conspicuous ignorance of the particular histories of competitors for his claimed endpoint. That the facts on the ground have pretty well stomped his ideas from two sides comes as no surprise to just about any competent professional historian of virtually any political stripe.
(The two sides: rise of ethno-religious conflict in the wake of the end of the cold war; and the rise of imperial scale economic powers like China that are (as noted by many above) attempting, at least, to preserve non-democratic power structures whilst achieving world-leading economic status….all not to mention responses like that of Italy, in which you have corporate/media power center ruling through the form but not the function of democracy. There are those who would say that the Italians under Berlusconi are only more overt in this than other so-call mature democracies.)
All this by way of the reading that becomes possible when you inherit the historiography library of one’s top-flight historian father, J.R. Levenson (for those of you of China studies background.)
Shorter form: yes FF was that bad, in part because of his own badness, and in part because of hte intellectual poverty of the tradition in which he wrote.
HyperIon
@Brachiator: I’m talking about you, Robert Wright.
the only think worse than reading Wright’s crappola is watching him be inchoherent on video. his recent appearance on Bill Moyers’ Journal was “must miss TV”.
i had never heard of him before watching bloggingheadsTV with him and kaus several years ago. kaus is immediately recognizable as a moron. with wright you have to listen for a few minutes.
HyperIon
@mclaren: Here’s the explanation:
wow. that’s gonna take some time to digest.
but since the thread appears dead, no problem.
thanks, mclaren.
srv
@mclaren: A little over the top with expectations of crowdsourcing (nipping on the entrails of commoditized markets does not a brave new world make – at least in the next couple generations), but worthy and interesting for those who don’t get it. Would be interesting to see this tied to Bacevich’s views on military exceptionalism.
Corner Stone
@srv: You’re doing yoeman’s work on this thread.
Steeplejack
@MBSS:
Start at the top: The Four Hundred Blows or (my favorite) Jules and Jim. But almost everything Truffaut did is worth watching.
Mississippi Mermaid (1969) was on one of the cable channels a few weeks ago. It’s a moody, semi-Hitchcockian thriller about a planter on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion (Jean-Paul Belmondo) whose mail-order bride turns out to be not what he expected. The movie is pretty good, but you have to come up with a gigantic dose of “willing suspension of disbelief” in the early going. Belmondo meets the boat bearing his intended, and it’s Catherine Deneuve. She is nothing like the pictures he has been receiving by mail. She gives him a sort of lame–and, given the framework of the movie, suspiciously foreshadowing–excuse, then asks him, “Are you disappointed?”
Yeah, um, my mail-order bride turns out to be Catherine fucking Deneuve. But, you know, I think possibly, given enough time, I might be able to get over my disappointment and come to grips with that.
I laugh every time I see that scene. But the movie is good.
P.S. It’s not directed by Truffaut, but I wish That Man from Rio (1964) would come out on DVD. Belmondo again, this time with Deneuve’s younger sister, Françoise Dorleac, in a screwball comedy about an army private on a week’s leave whose girlfriend is kidnapped from Paris to Brazil. Gorgeous photography, gorgeous music, complete piece of fluff. But memorable.
TruthOfAngels
@mclaren:
Well. That was quite the best comment I’ve ever read in any comments section of any blog, ever. And the longest ;)
Incidentally, is Berlin’s essay available online anywhere?
kth
@Thomas Levenson: well, from what I gathered from the book, Fukuyama didn’t have much direct exposure to Hegel, even in translation, but got it all filtered through that Kojeve guy (who, perhaps not so oddly given the milieus involved, is mentioned in Saul Bellow’s More Die Of Heartbreak).
Obviously there was much to take issue with (though I’m not exactly the meta-historian to do it), but I didn’t think my time was wasted in reading the Fukuyama book, especially the “Last Man” essay.
(website overlords: i can haz preview now plz? as long as I’m placing an order for free ice cream, make it a preview button, not the javascript thingee that slows my netbook to a crawl.)
MBSS
thanks for the movie suggestions, guys
i will definitely check those out.