Now this guy is a play-ah. (Note to the Credulous: no it isn’t me. I’m married and my wife, not to mention my parents, reads this site. I let the dude borrow my templates, that’s it. I swear.)
Update: He password-protected the site, which is now a sort of datebook, and now rues its creation.
In the current issue of Policy, Francis “End of History” Fukuyama helpfully reminds us that:
More than ten years ago, I argued that we had reached the end of history: not that historical events would stop, but that History understood as the evolution of human societies through different forms of government had culminated in modern liberal democracy and market-oriented capitalism. It is my view that this hypothesis remains correct, despite the events since September 11: modernity, as represented by the United States and other developed democracies, will remain the dominant force in world politics, and the institutions embodying the Wests underlying principles of freedom and equality will continue to spread around the world.
This is a sort of Hegelian capitalism — the stages of history are lifted from Marx, only with the socialist paradise lopped off at the end. Now I’m all for modern liberal democracy and market-oriented capitalism, which I far prefer to the non-market-oriented kind. What I object to is Fukuyama’s Whiggish doctrine of their inevitable triumph.
Fukuyama hates that word, “inevitable.” Tough. The triumph of capitalism either is or is not inevitable. If it’s inevitable, then we’re channeling Hegel, and the usual objections to historical teleology apply. (Actual history, for instance.) But if world capitalism isn’t inevitable, if it’s just an odds-on favorite because of its big guns and excellent machine tools, then Fukuyama has nothing to be exercised about at book length. He’s just making a prediction, like my prediction that the Steelers will win the AFC Central this year because of their big linebackers and excellent receivers. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but nothing in the inner logic of football history obliges it to happen.
And apparently nothing in the inner logic of history obliges capitalism to triumph either, or so Fukuyama now says:
The struggle between Western liberal democracy and Islamo-fascism is not one between two equally viable cultural systems, both of which can master modern science and technology, create wealth and deal with the de facto diversity of the contemporary world. In all these respects, Western institutions hold all the cards and for that reason will continue to spread across the globe in the long run. But to get to the long run we must survive the short run. And unfortunately, there is no inevitability to historical progress, and few good outcomes absent leadership, courage and a determination to fight for the values that make modern democratic societies possible.
Hmm. Doesn’t a “struggle between Western liberal democracy and Islamo-fascism,” no matter how stacked in favor of the West, sound an awful lot like…history? If he wants to renounce “inevitability” at this late date, that’s fine with me. But he isn’t making deep philosophical pronouncements about the teleology of history any more. He’s just picking the Steelers.
Apparently Pope Pius XII wasn’t complicit in the Holocaust after all. My historian buddy Mark Riebling has many, many details. Ordinarily I would not bestir myself over this controversy, but I make an exception because:
Grokster would be fine, but you used to have to do a little work and swap out a .dll to get rid of the nasty ads and spyware that came with. Now Kazaa Lite does the dirty work for you. Their connection is flaky and you have to suffer through a few popup ads, ironically enough, so you may want to get it from me instead.
The Happy Fun Pundit boys are back, and demanding to be read, Steve on the Vast Light Wing Conspiracy and Dan on how to make money by giving stuff away.
Tim Blair, whom I have been remiss in not adding to the blogroll, an oversight that has now been corrected, eviscerates Lewis Lapham.
“The rights of the individual in the United States have been increasingly diminished and the rights of property continually augmented,” he gripes, as though people have nothing to do with property. Apparently in Lapham’s world property invents itself, then forces itself upon us humans. Go away, house! Leave me alone, car!
In Slate Marc Weingarten bemoans the Deadhead cult; he misses the point. ‘Twas the Dead killed the Dead. More accurately, the band was still-born.
You can put the entire Dead ouevre on a tape loop and not notice, let alone care, when one song ends and the next begins. It’s rock muzak, so mild that it won’t even offend your parents. Weingarten describes Live/Dead as “lysergic-stoked free rock” and Workingman’s Dead as “space-cowboy country” and Wake of the Flood as “baroque prog-jams.” (These records hail from the golden age of 1965 to 1975, when the Dead were supposed to be good.) What’s the difference? There is no difference. “Baroque free rock” and “lysergic-stoked country” and “space-cowboy prog-jams” would serve just as well.
An ardent colleague dragged me to a Dead show about seven years ago. A Dionysian frenzy? Not exactly. Acid was nowhere in evidence; it was hard to find anyone even drinking beer in the parking lot. Everyone wore nice clean casual clothes that they looked like they’d changed into right after work. Quite a few still wore suits: no time to change I guess. They filed into and out of the arena orderly as you please. You wouldn’t find better behavior at a Christian Youth Conference. The two biggest Dead fans I’ve ever known were a corporate headhunter and an actuary. To blame the “decline” of the Dead on these innocent souls seems rather churlish to me. Of course the crowd is staid: the band is staid.
Weingarten, remarkably, neglects to mention the Dead’s true innovation, marketing. They were the first and still, to my knowledge, the only band to encourage bootlegging, allowing fans to tape concerts directly off the mixing board. The idea was to sacrifice some revenue in the short run to build fan loyalty, promoting album and concert sales in the long run, and it worked brilliantly. I’d listen to them lecture on brand loyalty any day. Just as long as I don’t have to listen to them play.