The 'End of History' Revisited | Francis Fukuyama

[Music] top that Frank I'm Stuart brand from the long now foundation it's funny a while ago we had John Rendon who gave a talk a year ago and everybody assumed he was a conservative because he was doing work for the White House well he's done work for the last five White House's and probably will do work for the next five and he was a hard over Democrat basically born that way and will stay that way Frank is my favorite kind of conservative I used to know Herman Kahn and Herman was wonderful Frank is wonderful and one of the reasons Frank is wonderful is unlike many intellectuals he will stand up and be accountable for stuff he's said and thought and revisit it and engage in what's called intellectual honesty Frank Fukuyama [Applause] oh thanks very much sir and I'm really grateful to the long now foundation for bringing me out here I was actually supposed to have given a lecture in November but I had a little accident on my bike but I'm back on my feet and really glad to be here when Stuart first asked me to speak in this series he said this is a series on long-term thinking and can you talk about anything and I thought and you know most of what I do is pretty a policy oriented towards the next six months to two years I'll probably not then it occurred to me I'd written this book while ago called the end of history in the last man and I thought well actually that does fit in to the overall framework of this series pretty well and I have been thinking about this consistently ever since I wrote the original article with that title 17 years ago so maybe maybe we could talk about that so that's what I'm going to speak to you about today so what I'm going to do is first since there's been a lot of misunderstanding about this I'm just going to restate what the end of history was all about and then I'm going to go through four different objections every conceivable objection to this theory has been raised by one person at some point over the years but I want to deal with the ones that I believe are the most cogent and quite honestly they're ones that I don't necessarily have answers to and for all I know the theory could be complete bunk and will be disproven and in fact I'll I'll give you several empirical tests for whether the theory is is correct or whether you'll be able to see that it's correct as we go through as we go through the lecture and the four just to give you a little heads up the four objections first has to do with radical Islam and it's rejection of modernity second has to do with the lack of collective action and accountability and basically democracy at an international level the third has to do with the problem of poverty about how you get on the modernization escalator and then fourth has to do with technology now let me go to the question of what the end of history was about in about ten days I'm going to get on an airplane I'm going to go to Japan to give a couple of lectures and then after about ten days in Japan I'm going to fly down and spend a couple of weeks in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea now between Japan and Papua New Guinea you basically get the two ends of the development spectrum at least as it exists in today's world from a society in the highlands where you actually have certain pockets or tribes that have not seen the next tribe over in PNG much less a European or an Australian or a Japanese or anyone else it was a society that was completely a cephalus there was no state and many of the people in the highlands were are still basically living at a hunter-gatherer level of existence and then of course Japan is Japan so the question is there was a certain period in human history when virtually the whole of the world looked like Papua New Guinea everybody was divided up into these little groups of 5060 people very isolated without technology to produce agriculture without higher forms of political organization today increasing parts of the world look like Japan China the largest country in the world is hurtling in that direction and the question that this raises is is this a coherent process and is there a reason to think that the kind of modernization that takes you from the level of Papua New Guinea to the level of Japan is actually driven by deeper social economic historical forces or is it all just a big accident could we all return to the status of being Highlanders at some point in in the future and is there any particular reason to think that the kinds of political systems we see around us have a have this kind of deeper historical meaning now this is basically a theory about modernization I guess that's the simplest way to explain it and of course modernization is something that virtually every intellectual believed in over the past I would say a hundred and fifty years and in fact in the years prior to the 1980s a large majority I would say of progressive intellectuals believed not only that there would be a progressive modernization as human societies evolved but that there was also an end of history in the end of history would be some form of communist utopia and when I wrote my original article in 1989 I made a very simple observation which was that I too liked all of the Marxists believed that there was this progressive history that was propelling societies to different and more complex levels of social organization but that it didn't look like we're ever going to get to communism that whatever seemed to be at the terminal point of this modernization process was some version of a market-based economy and some version of liberal democracy and so it was actually a fairly modest thesis that we'd be getting off this train one stop earlier than most people had anticipated and so it was not an outlandish thesis in terms of the way that people have thought about human history but it did seem to reflect to me what were the big developments at that time now in terms of universal histories of which Marxism is a variant there have been a lot of them written in history a lot of them are Christian because the Christian Bible actually talks about a beginning of history in the Garden of Eden or the creation story and it talks about an end of history you plan God's kingdom arrives and in a certain sense of Marxism was a secular version it really in a sense took Hegel to say that what you have in the human historical process is something like the story of the Christian Bible except played out in increasingly secular terms and that was a story that then marks continued you can actually enlarge the story because the kind of human history that I am going to talk about has not been in existence for more than about 10,000 years Bob Wright wrote a book a few years ago called non zero in which he actually tried to place all of human history in a history of the biosphere in general in which he noted that there was this very long term over the course of billions of years an evolution as you went from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to multicellular organisms where individual single-celled organisms learn to live with each other and cooperate in multicellular beings and then so on up the evolutionary chain I'm not going to I'm not going to get into that part of the story but it is possible if you take a sufficiently long perspective as I guess we're supposed to do in the series to see that actually human evolution and the evolution of human societies does take place in a much broader evolutionary story that includes nonhumans as well now the main person who has raised a systematic objection to my version of the end of history my version of modernisation that is to say that there is a universal process of modernization that sooner or later most societies will arrive at is actually my former teacher and still a friend a good friend Samuel Huntington who wrote a book a few years after the end of history called the clash of civilizations and he made a very different kind of argument he said that the evolution of human societies in the direction of liberal democracy was a kind of accident that culture is the ultimate way that this societies to find themselves that there will be seven or eight major cultural groups that will be largely in variant and that what I see as a universal set of values potentially universal set of values and institutions that were developed in the West are actually the cultural emanation of the particular Christian culture that happened to develop in this particular part of Northern Europe at a particular historical time but that if you grew up in a Hindu or a Confucian or an Orthodox Christian or Muslim cultural context there is no particular reason to think that you will develop similar sorts of political institutions and so in a sense his view is that all of the developments that we have experienced in modernizing societies is really culture bound and that ultimately you can be modern you can have an Islamic Republic of Iran that could presumably produce semiconductors and and you know very high quality cars and yet be ruled by a system of mullahs where authority comes out of the Quran because culture is as I said the ultimate defining characteristic of societies that will not be overcome by the integrating forces of modernization now I have a interlinked series of arguments about why if you step back a little bit and take this long perspective why should we think that history is directional as opposed to being simply cyclical or just random you know one damn thing after another and I would say that the probably the one social phenomenon that guarantees that you're not going to have a random or a cyclical history is the accumulation of knowledge related to modern science and technology because if you think about social phenomena the one thing that is cumulative and is not something subject to periodic loss unlike let's say the arts or literature or even particular forms of government is the study of emulation of knowledge that is driven by human curiosity and human desire to be able to master and manipulate the external world now I would say that at one end of this machine that I would construct you would put the development of science and technology as the driver and it's connected by a drive shaft to economic development because economic development is determined by the horizon of technological possibilities made possible by any given level of technological development so the world of coal and steel or the steam engine produces societies that look a certain way you start urbanizing you start developing an industrial working class you have highly centralized larger states but that is very different from the kind of world that emerges after the microprocessor after the internet in which power tends to be more diffuse in which it is much more difficult for centralized hierarchies to control the flow of information the flow of power the flow of resources and therefore each one of these economic ages is going to differ in systematic ways from the one that preceded it determined by the level of technology and I think that is fairly well accepted the process of industrialization as you go from resource exports to light manufacturing to heavy manufacturing to full industrialization and then to a post-industrial society that's a pattern that's been replicated by late developers whatever the cultural starting point from which they start off now so the the the engine of Science and Technology you have economics and then there's a much more loose set of connecting rods that tie the economy to politics it is the case that there is a very strong empirical correlation between high levels of economic development and liberal democracy now Huntington would say that this is simply accidental that it just so happens that the Christian West modernized first and therefore this correlation between wealth and democracy is a byproduct of this this cultural phenomenon but it is still striking that even outside of Western the bounds of what we call Western society including countries in Asia this very interesting pattern has emerged where at about six thousand dollars per capita income which is about the level that Taiwan and Korea achieved sometime in the early 1980s you get the development of an industrial working class urbanization much higher levels of education Universal literacy development of a professional class a complex civil society and the development of a property property middle-class or middle class to define in terms of its ownership of property and all of these things have been linked in various ways to the emergence of political demands for participation in systems there's no question that you can have authority Rhian modernization at very rapid rates this is what South Korea Singapore China today have all done but at a certain level of wealth it seems that there's a change in the nature of the society that seems to demand greater involvement and accountability in the way that governments function which is what we call political democracy so so the first two parts of the machine are connected fairly rigidly but the second part is a pretty wobbly connection there are very rich societies like Singapore that aren't democracies and there are relatively poor societies like Costa Rica or India that that that are democracy so it's not a perfect correlation now at the far end of this machine you get I don't know things connected by strings or something because when you get to the realm of culture I actually agree with Huntington that the the connections are not that great I believe that ultimately you are not going to get a homogeneous ation of cultures around the world in I would hope that we do not get a homogenous Asian of cultures but there probably is something in the boundaries of cultural evolution that that needs to take place in a in a really modern society one of them may be secular politics because among other things it doesn't seem like it's very safe when religion enters politics in a big way or when you get politicized religion but I think it's probably safe to say that at the end of this train of gears or whatever they are that that cultural homogeneous we're never going to become what what Huntington calls Davos man you know this global cosmopolitan globalized technology using consumer you know self-satisfied consumer thank thank goodness but the rest of the you know the rest of the process it does seem to me you can make an argument that there is this kind of set of connections and the question is whether the institutions that we see in currently modern societies are actually you know there's no question that Huntington is right that this stuff appeared in the Christian West for reasons having to do with a particular set of cultural and historical events that took place in early modern Europe democracy universal human rights is in a way as many philosophers Tocqueville Hegel Nietzsche have all said it is a form of secularized Christianity our doctrine contemporary doctrine of human rights comes ultimately from the Christian doctrine of the universal equality of human beings under God based on their possession of certain divine attributes like choice all right so there's no question that historically there was this connection but the question is once you discover these institutions do they become functional in a way that they are usable by any other civilization regardless of its cultural starting points the scientific method was invented by Rene Descartes and and others in Europe at a certain historical point but once it's discovered it's invariant whether you're African or Asian or Latin American the scientific method becomes a kind of universal possession and so the question is our liberal democratic institutions market institutions in the economy like that or are they as Huntington would argue culturally culturally bound and I believe that even with all of the sometimes terrible political events that have happened since I first wrote this article back in 1989 right as the Berlin Wall was coming down that that basic story about modernization is still on track it is very fashionable I don't know maybe it's different here in San Francisco and Washington is very fashionably that's pessimistic about everything and a lot of people like the intelligence agencies are paid to be pessimistic and so you focus on terrorism in the Middle East but we are actually today and over the past five years have been living through one of the most remarkable periods in global human history where there's not a single region of the world that has not been experiencing sustained growth and the two largest countries in the world China and India are leading the pack in terms of growth rates now obviously there are downsides to this global warming and all sorts of you know perhaps unsustainable trends that we've started but in terms of people being lifted out of poverty you've had several hundred million in that category over the past 20 to 25 years because modernization has been very successful in many many parts of the world and so I think the basic storyline of human development is still very much with modernization the question is does that modernization then require liberal democracy or not and here you've got these really two interesting social experiments going on which are Russia and China because Russia and China are both modernizing growing economically but under basically under authoritarian regimes I mean in Russia you got a elections but basically no horizontal accountability in the political system and in China you got a fully authoritarian system that suppresses dissidents censors the internet does all of these other sorts of things so I told you I would give you a way of testing whether I'm right or not so one easy test is all you have to do is wait 20 years and then you can write to me but I'll be run hopefully I'll be around 20 years you can say you know has which of these systems has democratic modernization at a lower level like India or the high level like Europe in the United States and Japan has that proved to be politically stable and successful and economically you know productive or do these authoritarian modernizers prove to have certain long-term advantages I will make the bet on the side of the liberal democracies because I believe that modern political systems have to be accountable you cannot have good government without feedback loops built into the political system and as societies become more complex as they do more things and as government's do more things those feedback loops those accountability mechanisms become more and more difficult so that if people cannot protest the fact that a chemical factory is dumping very toxic chemicals into the a Moore River as happened in Harbin a couple of years ago you are going to have a less successful society than one in which those kinds of accountability mechanisms exist but it's a test and I you know I'm no prophet so we'll have to see how those experiments work out now let me go through the four objections to the theory I mean in a way the existence of China and Russia constitute in themselves a kind of objection but let me go through the other one so let's begin with Islam or not the religion Islam but but the phenomenon that we've seen particularly since September 11th of a very radicalized Islamist ideology many people have said openly this is a refutation of the end of history radical Islamist Osama bin Laden the al-qaeda folks do not want modernization in any way shape or form not only don't they want liberal democracy they don't want a modern consumer society and so they are very determinedly stuck in the Middle Ages now I have always felt even after September 11th that this is actually giving these groups too much credit because in fact with the one complicated exception of if Iran certainly none of the Sunni groups have succeeded in coming to power in a single country and in those places where they have succeeded of Saudi Arabia Afghanistan Iran this is not for anybody else that is not an alienated Muslim living at the fringes of a Muslim society these are not successful models of development that other people around the world want to emulate and the desire to promote this kind of political Islam really does not you know it's not something that's typically felt by people that are not culturally Muslim to begin with now the deeper question has been raised by a lot of scholars is whether there are permanent cultural obstacles to modernization either in the economic or in the political form and that somehow this one particular cultural group represents a particularly severe obstacle my general view of that is it's extremely unlikely that this is true that there is really as far as I can see no inherent reason in the religion itself Islam to think that in a Muslim society cannot modernize economically and in fact you've had several fairly successful cases of that like Turkey and Malaysia or Indonesia at a lower level of development and I also think there's no particular reason why a Muslim society cannot sustain create and sustain a liberal democracy and again you've got a number of apples again Turkey Mali Senegal Indonesia since 1997 so the question is really what is the radical rejection of modernity being driven by and here I would say it comes less out of the religion Islam percent because the rich Islam is a religion it's very legalistic it's very rooted in local traditions and customs that define and describe to individuals their particular identities but what's very interesting about the people in the contemporary world that tend to be attracted to these Islamists or jihadist groups is that they actually are not people living in traditional Islamist Islamic societies they are people living at the fringes of Western societies sometimes that's the case when they live in Western Europe in Muslim minority communities as was the case of Mohammed hata or Mohammed we re who was killed a Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh or the July 7th subway bombers in London sometimes the alienation comes when the modern world comes to visit people in the Middle East in the form of internet television you know the Western cultural onslaught that we associate with globalization and I would argue that the extremism you see is actually the result of actually what is a fairly familiar loss of identity for people that are caught in this cultural no-man's land between traditional societies and successfully modernizing societies it's quite interesting that successfully modernizing societies like India and China do not produce this kind of terrorists but they really come more out of a stratum of people that have been exposed modernization but have not gotten on the train successfully and this actually I think makes the phenomenon something it's not that it should make you feel good about it but it's something we've seen before because that was the classic sociological explanations for the social origins of both fascism and Bolshevism that typical Bolshevik or fascist was a working-class person who did not find a home in the industrialized world just left the village the tightly woven community now living in a big city without a clear identity Hitler comes along and says I'll tell you who you are you are a German and I think Osama bin Laden in many ways has been doing that he says I'll tell you who you are you're a member of this global Muslim Ummah and I can define your identity very precisely in terms of the following ideology so that doesn't mean that we are not going to have a lot of big problems dealing with this political movement now but I just do not think that this is you know rises to the level of a civilizational challenge second big objection to my theory has to do with the problem of international society and democracy at an international level now we have these things called nation-state democracies United States France Japan South Korea so forth and actually after a couple hundred years of political development we pretty much know you know there's a lot of variance but we pretty much know what the institutions of a modern liberal democracy ought to look like what we really do not have in the contemporary world are mechanisms that enforce a certain degree of accountability and reciprocity at and and you know and that's another word for democracy at an international level and one of the things I think that's been quite striking just traveling around the world after the Iraq war is the degree to which this has been exacerbated by the overwhelming dominance of the United States at a whole variety of levels the United States today spends as much on its military as the entire rest of the world combined you know the British at the height of their empire tried to size their Navy so would be as large as a second in the third next second and third largest navies and we beat everybody combines and that hegemony is true at a political level we can overturn regimes 8000 miles away we can in in economics the dollar carry continues to carry very great weight and culturally the United States is very hegemonic but it sets up the ground for a huge amount of anti-americanism in the world I think ultimately because of this lack of both American what what non-americans regard as American accountability and the lack of mechanisms of reciprocity I don't know how many non Americans I've heard say in the last few years you know I really wish I could vote in an American election because who you elect as president has a big effect on my life but American presidents are only accountable to American voters and so I think there is a kind of institutional problem there institutional problem by the way that I do not believe is ever going to be solved by the United Nations I think it's going to be solved by actually a layering of multiple and overlapping international institutions many of which will not look like traditional international organizations that I believe you know simply have to populate the world is one of the consequences of globalization because globalization does create winners and losers and if you're going to keep the world stable at an international level those kinds of mechanisms of accountability you have to be there so that is a task I don't know whether it'll be accomplished but I think it's it's a task that's crying out to be done third objection has to do with poverty and the question of how you get on this economic escalator to begin with I mentioned earlier that the correlation between a relatively high level of economic development and liberal democracy is you know as far as you know I'm just a social scientist I'm not a natural scientist but as far as we social scientists code almost qualifies as a law that these two things are are pretty well are pretty well linked but that presupposes that you can somehow get yourself up to the level of $6,000 per capita and it turns out that that is actually not that easy for many societies and there's a big chicken and egg problem here the problem with development I think is really not the question of resources it's not needing an external big push ala Jeffrey Sachs it is a question of institutions you cannot have long-term economic growth unless you have a state and unless that state can do things that states are supposed to do like provide public services and public goods maintain a basic rule of law domestic order defense from enemies and the like and I think if you look around the world today you'll see that those parts that have successfully developed had relatively strong states in their pre-modern periods and it was only a matter of getting the policies right that then allowed them to take off so the state in many respects in China was more ancient than it was in Europe you go all the way back you know three and four centuries and you still had things that look like centralized administrative apparatus 'iz with bureaucrats and Taxation and cadastral surveys and all those sorts of things that states states undertake and so it actually wasn't that big a leap for a relatively strong state like China to figure out that communism was a kind of stupid economic policy replace it with one that listened to market signals and then they take off like like gangbusters but in many parts of the world including where I'm going Papua New Guinea and including many parts of sub-saharan Africa there was not a prior tradition of stateless there were in certain parts of Africa but in many other parts of the developing world you had institutions that were at a lower level of development than than anything that we would call a state and in many other parts of the world what institutions you had were severely disrupted by colonialism and I think you know the case of this was was clearly the worst in Africa where you had a whole variety of traditional institutions at the time of European colonization in the and colonization came very late there in the 1870s and 1880s and the Europeans basically by the time they got to Africa didn't want to give them real institutions because they wanted you know they're kind of exhausted they were looking at each other wearily in the decades prior to the Great War and they wanted to do colonialism on the cheap so instead of what the British did in India which was spending a 200 year period building in Indian institutions they tried to empower local elites they did various variations on local law local rule that managed to undermine traditional institutions without transmitting anything like modern state institutions and I think that this is one of the big problems in global development right now you cannot solve the poverty problem and get people on this escalator that will get you up to this six thousand dollar level without being able to solve this prior question of having a state and having a political order that can provide these sorts of basic services I would go further than that and say that there is actually an important degree to which the current international system actually promotes state weakness in a whole variety of ways sometimes we kill countries by kindness about eight to twelve percent of the GDP of every sub-saharan African country actually comes from the international donor community so it's not lack of generosity I think that's the problem but what happens is that when you transfer money on those levels you also infantilize countries because they actually don't need to create their own institutions they can rely on NGOs and external donors to do this a lot of cases we freeze conflicts Europe went through in its historical evolution to its current 20th century stage it went through actually three separate stages of evolution there stage of state formation which is a bloody period European rulers fought each other to create territorially coherent spaces political spaces a lot of that required basically ethnic cleansing to make sure that they were relatively homogeneous a process that really continued up through the late 20th century he excuse me second stage was the implementation of a liberal rule of law that restrained the sovereign and then finally and only at the end you had democratization and that process that took 500 years in the case of a country like France we are expecting developing countries to replicate within a generation excuse me and so for that reason the problem of poverty remains well I've been fighting a cold for the last week my voice may be giving out fortunately we're at the fourth point now last point is technology as I said the historical process is driven by the unfolding of modern science and technology up till now Tecna excuse me technology has been able to solve the problems that it's set for itself particularly the problem of economic productivity there's no particular reason to think that this will continue forever and we have certain technological developments that could obviously end modernization tomorrow the one that we've been particularly particularly worried about is is the question of global warming but there are others as well there's been a democratization of military technology the whole problem of weapons of mass destruction democratizes extremely powerful means of destruction that used to be only in the possession of nation states now individuals potentially can employ it and there are other issues as well the ability to shape human behavior in very subtle ways through biotechnology is another issue that I have written about in the future and there's no guarantee that our political institutions will keep up with this pace of technological development you just look at the collective action problems that are engendered by dealing with global warming and you see some dimensions of that problem and on this fourth point I give you no particular assurance I cannot predict whether the growth of the institution's at an international level will meet these requirements or not and if they don't I think that the technology itself that has been the source of this broader story that I've been telling you about modernization may bring all of that to an end now I just want to end by saying the following I have been accused of being a kind of Marxist and of course the end of history was a Marxist concept and as I said I was just getting off one station early but I think that I am quite different from most Marx's in the sense that I do not believe that there are iron laws of history I do not believe that any of the forces that I have described that would tend to create a long term process of modernization or a universal history as I described it Locke societies in agency individual human agency is extremely important if particular battles had not been one if particular politicians had not gotten elected or had not taken power in a coup d'etat the entire subsequent history of those societies could be written very differently I believe as does Bob right that in the end there are certain équilibre ting mechanisms in human societies so that if an invention is invented in one society and then squelched as the as the rifle was in early Tokugawa Japan it eventually will get out because it confers an advantage and there will be a process of defensive competition as societies interact with each other that means that none of these inventions can ever be suppressed for terribly long but it doesn't mean that in the meantime you can't have tremendous variation simply based on the kinds of political choices that we as citizens or we as politicians or we as government officials make so the fact that I still believe that there's such a thing as history does not relieve any of us from our responsibilities as individuals to be political participants because we in very important ways can continue to shape our political futures I'm not going to take any more risks with my voice completely going out so maybe I'll just stop there and we can just take questions but thank you very much for your attention [Music] take a long drink in a long breath there thank you Frank ah from Dan there's a question in red ink raise your hand if you're Dan with a red ink do you believe in Jared Diamond's collapsed scenario could happen on a global scale and I would ask while we're talking about Diamond he got his start on the Guns Germs and Steel thesis in Papua New Guinea that's right they were saying that how come you know I'm carrying your stuff well yeah I've got a lot to say about that first of all as I just said I think that you could have a civilizational collapse for very straightforward reasons I mean if some of the more dire predictions about global warming are true we'd probably it's probably too late to do anything about it and you know we could cook ourselves and you know they're there so there are various ways that that could happen I think though that his you know so it's it's a good warning on a general level I do think however that there is probably more robustness built into human societies than then collapse suggests I reviewed that book actually and I was struck by the fact that you know half of his cases took place in these extraordinarily marginal environmental niches where human beings were probably never designed you know destined to live in any event and so the fact that they all died out of these little islands in the South Pacific that really couldn't sustain you know vegetable life of any sort you know is probably not a big accident there's a much more important issue with regard to development that he raises in Guns Germs and Steel which is that he's basically a materialist determinist in a sense I mean that was the big thrust of that book that most people looking in development would say well it's institutions its culture its you know politics and so forth and you said no no that's not right it's the material endowments the disease burdens the mineral resources other you know sorts of things that countries were given not as a result of their own choice but but by nature and this is actually among development economists led to a big argument because Jeff Sachs among others has taken this up and argued that you know the real reasons for the lack of development in places like Africa is essentially you know disease burdens malaria and things that are really beyond the control of the particular societies and that institutions are simply a function of getting richer and there's another school which I actually adhere to that says it's the other way around that you can create modern societies in very inauspicious places you know Singapore is in the tropics if you have the right kinds of institutions and without boring you with that whole argument I I think that in a way the the collapse book began to recognize the importance of some of these non material factors in development to much greater extent than the you know then the first one did which I think was a that was an important change I get the sense you take global warming more seriously than you're used to I I I never didn't take it seriously and it seems to me that even if you think that it's not you know the science isn't there it's still a matter of risk you know and and given the consequences of betting wrong on this you know it probably pays to hedge so I don't know what the problem is so you've been looking at Islam because it's one of the four questions raised about your thesis do you think that Islam can have a basically what amounts to the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation in a period of time that will be part of your 20 year time frame well not the 20 year time frame I would suspect there's a very interesting parallel between radical Islamism and the Protestant Reformation there's a French Islamist Olivier law who wrote a book about three years ago called globalized Islam that made this very interesting case that he said you know that that a lot of people have complained that there's no there's no Muslim Luther to set about a more liberal form of of Islam and voix argued that maybe the Muslim Luther is living among us and his name is Osama bin Laden and the reason for that is actually quite quite evident once you think about it you know the Protestant Reformation was not a liberal revolution John Calvin ran a very authoritarian very intolerant City in Geneva and people the Protestant Prince's in the you know in in in Central Europe were not fighting for pluralism they were fighting to impose their particular brand of Christianity on everybody else but it did create the grounds for modern individualism because Protestantism separated belief from actual practice and made it something internal and laws argument is that in a way that's what's happening in the Muslim diaspora if you're a Muslim in Britain surrounding society does not endorse your religiosity and it has to become something internal and so maybe that plus another hundred years of conflict in the Muslim world will lead to similar conclusions has happened at the end of the you know early modern period in Europe but that's that's really long-term thinking Robin has a question where's Robin right here the other part of your books title is and the last man right and you described the end of history as being populated by these sort of sublimated pallid men without chests all lawyers and bureaucrats as your review changed as Myrna D have to be that way well you know the end of history the the fella that wrote about this most cogently was Alexander Coe Jeff was a Russian French philosopher that did this very influential seminar in Paris in the 1930s and 40s and of course his view which I would agree with was that the end of history is really represented not by America but by the European Union and then he went on to become a bureaucrat in the European Union and I think actually the European Union today represents you know the end state at the end of history much more than the United States I'm Americans you know we're actually quite militaristic we love fourth of July parades and we like our army and we launch Wars and do all sorts of things that last men really don't do whereas Europeans actually you know believe that they're in this post national period where the big problem is sovereignty and national selfishness and that they're creating this yeah this home for the last man called the European Constitution where you get beyond all of that stuff so the San Francisco you may know is planning to join the European Union Schwarzenegger is making the connection [Applause] you spoke about you know France taking 500 years to do something and and Singapore and Dubai have been attempting the same thing in much shorter time Eric has the question when that happens to places like Singapore and Dubai have a long-term effect on neighboring regions particularly with respect to groups resistant to modernization in those regions sometimes yes sometimes no I think that sometimes they serve as positive examples Taiwan for example I think was extremely important in changing the thinking of the Chinese Communist leadership because they saw a Chinese society just across the Taiwan Straits that was growing like crazy because it had a market economy and you know I think they drew some lessons for that but you know on the other hand modernization produces all of these complex effects it's very socially disruptive and so there are other places they could be destabilized by very rapid modernization so it's interesting there is Taiwan kept much more of the traditional Chinese culture herb shops and things like that then mainland China did and so part another part that seemed to go across the the Straits was some of the traditional Chinese practices yeah well of course I mean you had communism intervening in China which you know went after Confucianism and the foul and you know many aspects of traditional Chinese cultures so that may be part of the you know explanation of course a couple of political ones I know you don't mind cuz you had a whole ravening group of communists in New Hampshire or somewhere else going after you Marxist sorry we don't have communists anymore except in Cuba this one's from John Rhenish what do you think of the project for a new American Century which you endorsed back in 2000 and since then it's been pretty thick in the u.s. foreign policy yeah well I don't know I I find it very amusing all these conspiracy theories built around the project for the new American Century because this was basically Bill Kristol in a fax machine and every time you know every time he thought something ought to be done he'd sent a fax around to all of his friends including me and say well would you be willing to sign this letter and so and so on a couple of occasions I signed the letter and you know I don't think that as an organization it represented anything more than that now underlying that were all sorts of networks of people that had worked together in different administrations and you know with common educational that I mean you know Bill Kristol is actually I inherited his apartment in Cambridge because we were classmates in graduate school you know in the Harvard government department so you know so you have all these social ties that go back but they're you know that organization in and of itself I don't think was was important since then you started a magazine you want to see a little bit about that oh free advertising all right I started a I started a new magazine called the American interest I my article the end of history had originally been published in a magazine called the national interest which went under new management about three years ago that I didn't like and so I left that and it seemed to me that you know we in the late 1940s centrism and bipartisanship were really very popular and then we entered this 30-year period where it was just not cool to be centrist you know and everybody was pushing the envelope on both ends of the political spectrum mostly on the right but then you know on the left and in response to that and you could always get airtime for yourself by trumping and saying something more outrageous than last part I mean and culture is now you know the absolute queen bee of all this all of this stuff but I think that you know that period is over now because I think that if you don't get back to some kind of reasonable discussion that doesn't begin from your political label but begins with actually the problem that you have to solve then you know you're not going to get anywhere as a as a democracy so the American interest was founded with that in mind the other thing about it is that it relates to this business about America in the world because when we started the magazine a lot of people would say you know I just don't understand what the United States is right now and that wasn't just non Americans saying that I mean I think a lot of Americans can't figure out exactly what's going on in the country and so the magazine was designed both to promote that kind of reasonable political discussion but also to try to explain the United States to everybody else and to try to reconnect the u.s. with with the rest of the world okay one more partisan question this one from Diane Pfeiffer two words scooter - Libby explanation as I understand you were an advisory committee member or something in support of him and yeah old friend I'll come clean you know I I worked for Paul Wolfowitz on two occasions in the arms Control Agency in the mid-1970s and then where I met scooter was when I worked for him on the policy planning staff in the early 1980s in the White House and so I've been a friend of scooters for the last you know what you count the years since 1981 and and then he went on to do the things that he did and then he got into trouble and he called me up and said would you be on my whatever it is you know committee a legal defense committee and I said of course you know an old friend of mine and it's quite independent of my you know at this point I had already written my last book America at the crossroads in which I explained why I was bailing out of this hole you know neocon way of looking at the world but you know that doesn't may mean that you're not a friend of you-know-who you're a friend of so that's the only explanation let's see a little bit about your book at the crossroads is in the in the outside the theater and I recommend it just say a little bit about what your critique of neo-cons came to be and maybe where it is this very minute yeah well that'll trigger a whole new tape here I'll give you the three-minute version of it sure what other stuff here no I mean part of the reason I wrote that book was that I did not think that you know neoconservatism goes all the way back to City College in the nineteen late 1930s and all of these very radical groups some of them Trotskyite and some of them Stalinist that inhabited the alcoves of the cafeteria there and they all you know there were people like Irving how Irving Kristol Daniel Patrick Moynihan Nathan glazier Daniel Belle's Seymour Martin Lipset people that became absolute Giants as academics and as public intellectuals in the next generation and I thought that it was too bad that a movement with this kind of pedigree was being associated with advocacy of the Iraq war because there were other principles that they had talked about that I think would not have necessarily led to that among which were a very great cautiousness about social engineering the Irving Kristol magazine the Public Interest was all about the potentially negative effects of social engineering when it came to American domestic social policy and it just struck me that a group of people with that kind of pedigree would then want to engage in one of the biggest social engineering projects you could imagine in in the Middle East biotech now sometimes you sound a little bit like Bill joy the the democratization of weapons of mass destruction biotechnology that may be coming in to alter human nature itself and moving into speed faster than you think the political process can keep up I want to see a little more about that yeah I I don't see foresee inevitable doom here because in the past our institutions really have have adjusted to take account of these new technologies it's always you know Debra spar wrote this book called ruling the waves a few years ago where she actually looked at radio and television and a whole bunch of technological innovations and you know first few years saying oh it's completely unregulated entity they figure out how to regulate it and then it comes under you know greater control and so I expect that process to continue but I think that there are going to be some you know difficult dimensions this particularly in biotechnology because so many of the things that troubled me about it are also the things that are great that make it good you know the the fact that it's therapeutic means that it's an undoubtedly good thing to promote but the same drug that can be used for therapeutic purposes can be used for enhancement purposes in ways that you know you might find or one might find ethically questionable and so I think as a has a problem of political control it's it's you know it's a tough one but but I'm not you know necessarily a pessimist about this even in the case of nuclear weapons I think that you know we we we created this miracle I mean the non-proliferation regime if you look at the writing on the bomb in the period right after 1945 people were predicting that there would be nuclear wars and 50/60 nuclear states within a generation and you know that simply didn't come to pass we got close a couple times close there's been three talks in this series talking about the singularity the idea of accelerating technology not only getting ahead of the political process but basically getting ahead of history history and everything else so that one can't know what's coming next reycarts well gave the full story on that Bruce Sterling and mocked it and Vernor Vinge II came here and gave three scenarios of how he thought it might not happen but he still thought it probably would happen now Roger Smith who's here raised the question Bruce Sterling sees a threat that human cognitive in cognition will become industrialized by hyper acceleration of Technology leading to their version of the end of history which is the singularity I don't have an opinion about that I mean wow this is your stuff yeah yeah I know that that's the Christian rapture only you know modernized you know I am not convinced that the that the story of ever accelerating technological change at least as it plays out in society is necessarily one that I accept this is one comparison that I have asked my students to think a lot about if you compare the nature of American society between the years 1850 and 1900 and between the years 1950 and 2000 which of those produced greater changes in the way that Americans lived and I think without question it was that earlier period 1850 majority of Americans lived on farms and isolated places without good national communication by the year 1900 they were living in cities in industrialized circumstances mass education all sorts of you know really important social changes brought about by essentially industrialization if you look at you know between 1950 and 2000 you know of course there's the internet and information technology which has had a big impact but we're still living in a carbon-based you know set of energy technologies many other things are we have more of but in many respects the you know in rise of you know female empowerment you know diversity a lot of other big social changes but in many respects I'm not sure that those collectively were as great as the ones experienced a century before and so I guess hmm so you essentially do we could have a singularity and barely notice or it you know it could be that the social response to this acceleration is equilibrating mechanisms that exist on a whole variety of different levels that tend to push back against you know whatever you know whatever change is taking place but me raises cell phone question in this context it's when you go to Japan you'll see japanese schoolgirls pushing the edge of the possibilities what you can do with a cell phone here comes the iPhone it's going to push another set of possibilities and when you got up happen again II probably pretty far in the bush you're gonna see folks with cell phones and you know the numbers we're hearing now is that about three billion people have cell phone connectivity in the developing world you can get a cell phone or or access to a cell phone for ten dollars oh and everybody's using it and it's a thing which cuts right through all of this poverty stuff all this failed state stuff a whole lot of the things which you've laid out as kind of the defining forces here one question I guess I would put to you now and then maybe you would be fun to do it again after your trip where do you think cell phone plays into your story of the coming of liberal democracy the cell phone and other information technologies of the past generation have broadly been good for liberal democracy because I think broadly speaking they tend to defuse power rather than to constant I think the you know the steel and iron and coal age was probably bad for democracy because economies of scale tended to centralize power and so forth so on that kind of very abstract level I think that's the case but as I understand the idea of a singularity you have one set of technological developments that then produce results that are really not linear and and and very unanticipated and so forth and I would be astonished if the cell phone revolution created a a real state in Papua New Guinea in 25 years or solved the poverty problem in Africa there are certain dimensions of those problems that I think that or maybe technology we don't know about you know could could address but you know my understanding of you know the sources of development is that it is so complex and it is so much based on an interlocking of a lot of different factors that there are very few times when you just you know turn one knob and then you know the whole switchboard lights up now that's fair but we should honor the ok well this being a Royce one more question this one's from Kevin Kelly after universal values are reached for most of the world what's next well there's actually a part of this that I think is is here and now which is really in a way the problem of the last man that even in well in in in modern liberal democracies we have a very thin moral community that's you know where Sir allistic and tolerant we do not impose very strong opinions about good and evil on people that live in our societies and for the most part this is not adequate for a lot of people that they don't want to just be recognized as equal free and equal human beings equal to every other human being on the earth they want to be québécois or they want to be you know women or members of indigenous community or Ukrainian or some other source of communal identity that is not universal but that does have stronger values or is bound by you know something tighter than then just citizens in a impersonal democracy and this is why identity politics has I think become so important in all developed societies and in and there's some versions of identity politics that then actually corrode the basis of liberal democracy itself there they're facing this problem in Europe already if a Muslim family wants to force their daughter to marry somebody back in Morocco and she doesn't want to do it right what does the state do about that in terms of you know do you enforce her rights as a as a free citizen or do you defer to the community's interest and there's just a whole series of problems that we are living with now because of this tension between group rights and individual rights as you'll see a trend well obviously for a long period from the 60s up until the past decade the trend was towards multiculturalism and towards the acceptance of group identities increasingly I think what's interesting in Europe right now is that there's been an absolute revolt against us because of the violence that you've seen in Holland and Britain and elsewhere and in fact the Dutch are kind of at the extreme of this because they not only recognize groups I mean they you know Protestants and Catholics and socialists are all organized with their own political parties schools trade unions newspapers I went and when the Muslims showed up they just said okay you can have your own pillar which is a you know it's kind of the ultimate version of this identity politics it but you know the problem was that it turned out that people in the Muslim pillar were not actually feeling like they were part of Dutch society and so there's been this big backlash against against that and towards the feeling that you have to have a broader more inclusive national identity and so we'll see where we go with this because well it see this for a minute because it does really challenge your thesis in a sense you were saying European Union is the model yeah and but European Union is having more of an identity politics that's right issues in militaristic jingoistic yes this is the other another way in which I could be falsified is if you get backlash movements for example against immigration in Europe that undermine the liberal basis of European society which i think is conceivable I wouldn't bet on it it's conceivable yeah I mean my book you'll write then as well history is back on well you know this is really no I mean I would say that Huntington then would be right I mean this is this is a retreat mm-hm you know this is the basic difference between us he believes that these communal identities are primary and that you're never going to get beyond them and that liberal institutions and globalization whatever forces for integration they represent are not strong enough to melt this kind of communal glue and I believe that the integrating forces are strong enough that the defeat of them by these primordial attachments is not given and that's you know that's the essence of the dispute between us that's clear do you think we'll know by 2050 what which way it's going I would hope a lot sooner than that because I think a lot of this stuff is going to hit a crisis you know much sooner than than 20 facetious a little more European goes in crisis because of migrants yeah you're already seeing a lot of that and backlash politics you're seeing that in in a different form in in in this country as well and so I do think this was actually going to play out in the next decade and we don't have to wait till 2050 to see okay well thank you very much all right thank you [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 31,226

Rating: 4.7051792 out of 5

Keywords: History, Economics, Globalization, Climate Change, Science, Technology, Culture, modernization, biotech

Id: w240nD5whsE

Length: 72min 25sec (4345 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020