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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

the end of history, the last man + two Americas « Previous | |Next »
March 17, 2006

There is an interesting question and answer session between Francis Fukuyama and Bernard-Henri Levy over at The American Interest's web site on the relative merits of Levy's American Vertigo. Now I do like this statement from Fukyama on the significance of the rootlessness of American democracy and its conception of the endless frontier:

That was the real practical meaning of American democracy: Every individual could set their clock to year zero; they could be what they made of themselves and not what their parents and ancestors expected of them. Europeans often look down on Americans for their loss of memory, their rootlessness, and, true enough, this becomes a real defect when Americans fail to understand that the other peoples they encounter do not suffer from their particular form of liberation amnesia. But it has also been very important to the success of American democracy. It meant that the United States has been more open to people from very different places and cultures who were themselves interested in starting over in a place where no one could locate Yerevan or Pusan or Lublin on a map. Europeans, whatever their aspirations to create a Habermasian post-national identity, are still rooted in communities of blood and memory, where people remember their ancestors and are defined by their parents.

Nice. But heavens me, what has happened to the question of the "end of history," as being ultimately a sad and emotionally unsatisfying era, and the creature who emerges at the end --Nietzsche's concept of the 'last man'? The one for whom nothing matters, who has no great passion or commitment, who is unable to dream, and who merely earns his living and keeps warm.

Well, we have this:

This doesn't lead the American demos to a happy animality, but to a restlessness and an energy and a willingness to bend rules to get ahead. Americans are religious, far more so than Europeans, which means that they actually believe in things that exist beyond the body and its needs, even if it leads them to strange debates over things like intelligent design. The End of History and the Last Man ended with ruminations about the possibility that modern democracy would yield "men without chests", wedded to ever-increasing peace and prosperity. During the Clinton years, in our preoccupation with the NASDAQ and Monica Lewinsky, that seemed a fair conclusion. But on further reflection, it has seemed to me that America was not remotely in danger of becoming the home of the Hegelian last man. Now that the United States has launched two wars in the new millennium, it seems like an even less apt concern. The last man actually lives in Europe.

Oh? The end of history is liberal democracy is it not? Isn't that when the dialectic between two classes-- the Master and the Slave--- meet in a synthesis, in which both manage to live in peace together in liberal democracy. So why is not the "last man" not to be found in the USA?


Bernard-Henri Levy responds, after bashing Europe for its appalling "criminal inclinations" and cynical deals to preserve its interests.

He says:

one must also question the health of America's democratic culture. And here I'm no longer talking about Las Vegas or about the war in Iraq. And I'm not even talking about the sense of discomfort felt by America's friends throughout the world when they saw how it responded so little, so belatedly and so clumsily to press reports about the scandals of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. No, I'm talking about the rest---about everything else, in no particular order: religious fundamentalism; the return of isolationist movements, both Left and Right; the rise of a nationalism reminiscent on some occasions of the worst trends of European national chauvinism; the upsurge of communitarianism that would negate American spontaneity and energy; the threats posed by mass consumerism---see the Mall of the Americas in Minneapolis, for example---that weigh down the individual spirit; and America's new hyperamnesia, which denies the "particular form of amnesia" that you rightly said has made this country a great one.

Bernard-Henri Levy then introduces the idea of the two Americas:
I could go on, but basically, my concerns reduce to a simple question: What is the state of health of American democracy? You know what my answer is: that here, too, there are two Americas, two American cultures. And between these two cultures---the great one and the other one; between the one we both love and the one whose evil characters I constantly ran into during my trip; between the great democratic and universalist America that is open to all newcomers and the America of megachurches, of Texas arms bazaars, and of huge malls, that is the source and at the same time the consequence of what I called a "vertigo" (and where I'm quite close, incidentally, to seeing, unlike yourself, the triumph of what you called "the last man")--there is a ruthless battle whose outcome neither you nor I can predict. But do you share my concern, especially my worries about American "polarization"?

And so it goes. Tis worth a read.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 04:06 PM | | Comments (0)
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