THE END OF HISTORY?

ELGIZ POZDNYAKOV

I am not going to dwell here on the threat of self-destruction by nuclear missiles, on the pollution of the environment, on human rights violations. I’d like to discuss something else.

Have all these things appeared of their own accord? No, we have only ourselves to blame for them. Now we are sounding the alarm over the danger to mankind’s very existence. A seemingly trivial but characteristic detail: all are talking about the threat “hanging over” us, as if someone from another planet has “hung it over” us. This is a case of false modesty. Why not say, in so many words: we have created this threat and “hung it over” the world; by “we” I meant the Soviet Union, the United States, Western Europe - in a word, the whole of mankind; politicians, scientists, designers, factory workers, public speakers. All those who have contributed, each in his own way, to the creation of unheard-of means of mass destruction.

Whither too world?

The slogan of survival sounds most convincing and attractive to many. What kind of survival? For the sake of what? For the sake of going on making ever more monstrous and sophisticated means of self-destruction and turning the earth into a latrine? Has anything indeed happened in the world to give us reason to believe that given a guaranteed survival it will change and beat swords into ploughshares rightaway?

It is not survival that matters actually, there is something bigger. The end - to survive at all costs - does not secure survival because as long as we are what we are the threat to our survival will haunt us like our own shadow, since it is an integral part of our existence.

I am not infallible at all, I admit; I may misunderstand things, or be altogether wrong, I am ready to hear out the arguments of those who insist that our world is on the ascent, that it is steadily climbing up from less to more advanced social forms, and that in the process man himself is improving, becoming kinder, more humane and attaining moral perfection ...

Somehow, those who used to hold forth about “progress” have now quietened down; the word “crisis” has come into prominence. A scared man in the street hears voices shouting from all quarters about the crisis of morality, society and civilization. What past generations used to regard as moral and cultural values is steadily depreciating before our very eyes, but no other values have been created instead. As a result, man is losing the ground under his feet; he doesn’t know any longer what he and the world around him are all about.

Physical existence, however, is not all there is to our being. The crisis of ideals, of faith is perhaps the most dangerous crisis of all. Who are we, whither are we, what are we living, working and procreating for?

If there are no ideals or faith, if there is nothing to live for, won’t there appear a more formidable threat than the threat of war - the threat of losing our spiritual identities? Won’t we slide down to negating morals and virtues? In this case survival is frightening ...

Who will give us the answers to these questions, show us the road to embark upon, and illuminate it with the light of faith and hope?

I don’t know whether mankind is no longer capable of producing great brains, or whether it has spent too much strength and energy working its way out of the dark it has been in for ages. Anyway, having reached the “promised land” of civilization, of milk and honey, it has probably considered its great historical mission fulfilled.

Having skyrocketed to the transnebular heights of reason and conceived the idea of kingdom of justice on earth, human thought is now no better off than at the start, buried deep in mundane affairs, superstition and prejudice - a fantastic evolution. Is that the big idea? Is having enough to eat, being well dressed and having enough to eat, being well dressed and having the roof over one’s head and a job all there is in life? Does it really make any difference what to do for living – to put together nuclear warheads or coffee grinders, to design a new deadly missile or a recreation centre, to grow a culture of cholera germs or grain? Any occupation is useful and respectable.

What is it – a sign of human progress, or a symptom of crisis? Who knows?

One of the likely answers is to be found in the article under the meaningful title “The End of History?” by Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist and diplomat, which has created quite a stir in the West. This is a serious attempt to find out what mankind is in for and what the future has in store for us. Fukuyama’s paradoxes help us discern what otherwise might have been concealed from view.

Back to Hegel

To Fukuyama, history is the Hegelian embodiment of the World Spirit, of the Absolute Idea. Having embodied in world history, the “life-giving” Hegelian spirit brings its self-development – and, consequently, history – to completion. According to Fukuyama, the “end of history” began in 1806 when Napoleon’s troops defeated feudal Prussia – and, as a matter of fact, the whole of old Europe – at Jena. Hegel regarded that victory as a sign of the liberal – democratic idea spreading all over Europe.

Since then and until the present day this idea has been steadily spreading all over the world. Many revolutions and wars, unleashed for the sake of the ideas opposed to liberalism (such as fascism and communism) have roared past but now, according to Fukuyama, we witness full triumph of liberal democracy. Although not all the countries have embarked on this road yet, the idea of liberal democracy will prevail sooner or later. Therefore, history has come to an end, Fukuyama proclaims. The post-historical age has begun.

In accordance with this scheme of things, Western Europe, North America, Japan and other countries have already happily landed in the post-historical period with the rest of the world still stuck in the quagmire of history. However, other countries have also started moving towards liberal democracy, in Fukuyama’s opinion. He claims that the political reforms launched in the Soviet Union and China go to bear his concept out.

“All this is very interesting, but what is so sensational about it?” some may ask. I recall Ecclesiastes: that which hath been is that which shall be, there is no new thing under the sun. Therefore I repeat, without any enthusiasm, just out of habit, Feuerbach’s question: where’s the man?’ We keep talking about history, but we forget all about the man. Fukuyama – just as Hegel of whom he is a faithful follower – loses sight of the man, the very man who, for all his weaknesses and whims, remains the only and unique maker of history.

It would be stupid to deny the fact, of course, that man is often powerless vis-a-vis the stream of history. I mean man as an individual. But what about man as a species, as the Man? Dostoyevsky, who hated any formulas, schemes, rules and ultimate objectives mankind’s “luminaries” seek to confine it to, wrote the following: “...But why does he also love so passionately to bring about general ruin and chaos? It may well lie in the fact that he has an instinctive dread of completely attaining his end, and so of finishing his building operations ... Besides, who knows ... that the aim which man strives for upon earth may not be contained in this ceaseless continuation of the process of attainment (that is to, say, in the process which is comprised in the living of life) rather than in the aim itself, which, of course, is contained in the formula that twice two make four? Yet, ... this formula is not life at all; it is only the beginning of death!”

Let us give Fukuyama his due: the end of history, he concludes, is a most gloomy and uninteresting time; in it, there will be no room for philosophy, the arts and few ideals. Sheer utilitarianism, material and economic calculation will reign supreme then. Fukuyama is not at all happy about the triumph of the idea of liberal democracy he has proclaimed himself; he is prepared to forgo post-historical “paradise” and would like history to respect itself all over again.

Bubbles on the surface of prosperity ...

Such is man – unfathomable, contradictory, split, integral...He always gravitates towards the state opposite to the one he is in, be he a Hegelian, like Fukuyama, or an ordinary man in the street with all his weaknesses and his inherent distrust of any “twice two make four.” Therein, perhaps, lies the guarantee of history never coming to end for as long as man exists. He may advance, stagnate or suffer crises – this is what history adds up to. He will go on marking it even when, in his opinion, he has reached the end of the road. As Dostoyevsky put it, “You may heap upon him every earthly blessing, you may submerge him in well-being until the bubbles shoot to the surface of his prosperity as though it were a pond, you may give him such economic success that nothing will be left for him to do but to sleep and to eat dainties and to, prate about the continuity of the world’s history,” yet he will end by playing you some dirty trick, for the only purpose of proving that he is a man, not a cog in a machine someone else has invented. For that very purpose he’ll break it and start afresh.

There is no denying that liberal democracy is really quite an achievement of man and mankind. An achievement, but not an end. The very triumph of the liberal democratic idea does not look so triumphant, after all, even when it prevails beyond all doubt. This is to be regretted, but failure to admit the obvious would amount to lightmindedness. Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher and publicist, maintains that liberal democracy has proved too refined for the volatile, crude and varied human nature. There is nothing surprising about the fact, he says, that mankind is prepared to give it up – the experience has proved too complicated and difficult to strike root. If only it were as simple as all that! A liberal democracy with a nuclear missile stuffing, with rampant drug addiction and crass consumerism ... is that the culmination of human history?

The prospect of society coming back to its “natural state”

As I followed the reasonings of Fukuyama. I recalled those of the Soviet scientist Alexander Bogdanov relegated by us to undeserved oblivion. He formulated (for the first time, it seems) the so-called “law of minima.” If, for instance, you have a chain consisting of unequally strong links, the overall strength of the chain will depend on that of the weakest link. The speed of a squadron consisting of ships moving at different speeds will depend on that of the slowest ship. In the same way, the efficiency of a number of interconnected factories is determined by the least efficient one.

Consequently, any functioning system tends to take the line of least resistance, and depends for its strength and stability on its weakest and the least stable component. The movement of any system governed by the “law of minima” actually amounts to regress.

Whereas ascent, or progress, calls for continuous and enormous efforts on the part of many generations, and advancement is the line of the greatest resistance, which involves the overcoming by man of his own ineftness and that of his environment, the destruction of what has peen achieved in the process takes no special effort-suffice it merely to, stop overcoming negative inertia. The road from barbarism to civilization is long and hard, while the “return journey” is quick and easy.

If we now look at Fukuyama’s idea from the angle of the “law of minima,” we shall have to admit that the progress of civilization is determined not by the societies which are well into “post-history,” but by those still in the “quagmire” of history. This is the greatest danger for our civilization: a quagmire sucks in those who get caught in it. Even those who are already in the “post-historical” stage have to make truly heroic efforts to stay there. Otherwise they might end up relapsing into stagnation and, finally degradation. And this is a direct route back to “history.”

The road to harmony

Should those who, as Fukuyama puts it, still remain in the “quagmire” of history worry about its coming to an “end?” Fukuyama thinks they should. “The liberal Soviet intelligentsia rallying around Gorbachev,” he writes, “has arrived at the end-of-history- view in a remarkably short time ...”

Well, it has indeed arrived at the end-of-history view, but in an entirely different sense. We have our own end of history, not hypothetical but perfectly real. It has taken up long seventy years to reach it. This is the end of a history prescribed in the shape of a formula, the end of an attempt to build a “crystal palace” designed by great thinkers – on the selfsame good old “twice two make four” principle, as it has turned out. The people in it – as in Fukuyama’s “history” – were not creators but mere “piano keys” for someone Great to play an inspired symphony of his own composition on. Actually, great plans and designs materialized in barracks, and the inspired symphony sounded to many like a funeral march. This is not the end of history full of premonitions of a satiated, drab and dull vegetation. This is the beginning of a new history, the history of Man and for Man. We hope so, at any rate.

Fukuyama’s article sets one thinking about many peculiarities of our life and unpredictable whims of history. On reflection, I personally am inclined to think that if history ever comes to an end at all, this will happen not due to the triumph of the liberal democratic idea. More likely than not we shall bring it about ourselves – just look at all the nuclear missiles we have stock piled, and at all the damage we are doing to the environment.

Let us face it – “history” and “post-history” are, after all, as abstract and metaphysical opposites as socialism and capitalism, matter and spirit, good and evil... Harmony lies in the unity of all the aspects of life. Let us bear it in mind that by destroying the unity of opposites, we sow chaos and destruction.

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