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Francis Fukuyama: The End Of History Revisited 33분 - 2008년 10월 22일 Long Now Foundation San Francisco, CA Jun 28th, 2007 The End Of History Revisited with Francis Fukuyama speaking at a ... dotsub.com |
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, it's an imposing title. The book is about the question of whether there exists such a thing as what I would call History, with a capital "H." We usually associate history with just the routine flow of events the war in the Persian Gulf, the fall of the Berlin Wall. But my book tries to ask a larger question, whether there is such a thing as a history of human society, taking into account the experiences of all peoples and virtually all times and whether there's a kind of coherent evolution in the nature of those societies as they progress from very primitive, agricultural, tribal societies up through various monarchies and aristocracies up to the kind of liberal democracy and technologically-driven capitalism that we have today.
And "The End of History" refers to what I think still remains, the question of whether that process is one that can terminate, whether that evolution finally culminates in a certain kind of civilization that, in a certain sense, will be the last civilization that mankind will achieve because, in a certain sense, it's the right one; it's the one that fits human nature in an appropriate way.
And what I argue in the book is that liberal democracy comes much closer to fitting human nature in that sense than virtually any form of government or political organization or social organization.
LAMB: You can't pick up a review of your book or some other books -- and as a matter of fact, the reason I say some other books is I'm looking at a book review of Graham Fuller's book, "The Democracy Trap: Perils of the Post-Cold War World." And Paul Johnson, the historian, writes about you, instead of Graham Fuller, as this point. He says, "I doubt if" -- let me jump that sentence -- that "Francis Fukuyama's thesis about the end of history was one of the silliest ever propounded, and the fuss it caused was inexplicable." What was the fuss all about, and where did it start?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I think part of the problem is simply a matter of misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what "The End of History" represented.
You know, the book that I've written grew out of an article that I published in a small magazine called National Interest two years ago, just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall when all of these great events were happening in the Soviet Bloc. And what I was referring to was, really, the growth of a kind of universal consensus on the the justness or the rightness of the principles of liberal democracy, that that was really the remarkable fact about our world and certainly not that events would somehow cease to happen.
But I'm afraid that what happened was a lot of people, perhaps including people like Paul Johnson, simply saw the title, and they said, "Well, what's this? It's absurd, you know. History's not going to end, you know. We still have wars and poverty and a lot of struggle in the Third World and things of that sort, so prima facie, it's an absurd thing." And there was a lot of controversy simply over, I think, the misinterpretation.
But underneath that, there really is a more serious question that it used to be that there were many alternative forms of government monarchies and fascist dictatorships, and for many years we thought communism was our major rival and alternative type of civilization. And one by one, in this century, everyone of those has collapsed. And not every country is a liberal democracy; there are many dictatorships to the right and the left remaining, but as a systematic idea that has some dynamics, some real vitality, liberal democracy is really all there is now, and we've seen that now in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that communism was, in a sense, undermined by the fact that people did not believe that was a viable form of government, that it had no legitimacy, and that, in fact, democratic ideas were the primary ones that people found exciting and just and worthy of adulation.
LAMB: When you say "liberal democracy," what do you mean by "liberal" democracy?
FUKUYAMA: Well, it's an important distinction. I mean, democracy -- we have a good sense of it. It means something like elections -- multiparty, secret-ballot elections. But the kind of society we live in is a liberal democracy. It's elections plus guarantees of certain fundamental rights of individuals like freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of political association, and, most importantly, the freedom to participate in the political system.
And so true liberal democracy has to have both the election side and the constitutional or legal guarantees of individual rights. And when those are brought together, I think you have the essence of contemporary political systems.
LAMB: Can you name a democracy that you wouldn't put "liberal" in front of?
FUKUYAMA: Oh, sure -- in fact, there are a number of them now appearing in the Islamic world. For instance Iran now -- Khomeini's Iran or the post-Khomeini Iran I think can claim the title to being a more or less democratic country. They have elections of sorts. They're not the fairest elections, but there are elections. But it's absolutely an illiberal country. The women don't have rights; they can't participate in the political process. There's no freedom of religion. There's certainly no freedom of speech.
It's a real problem in many parts of the Arab world. For instance, in Algeria right now, you're having the struggle between an Islamic or fundamentalist Islamic group that really, I think, is very likely and is expected to win a majority in the election that was taking place. Now, democratically, they were elected, but their program is not liberal. I mean, they have no intentions of guaranteeing things like freedom of religion and freedom of speech, and it's a real problem in that kind of society. If they're elected to power, the first thing they're going to do is to disenfranchise a certain part of the population. And so it's very important that democracies be liberal democracies as well as simply based on popular sovereignty.
LAMB: Where were you born?
FUKUYAMA: I was born in Chicago.
LAMB: What year?
FUKUYAMA: 1952.
LAMB: How long did you live there?
FUKUYAMA: Only two years. I really grew up in New York City, and then, at that point, began wandering to various places like a lot of Americans. I went to school at Cornell and graduate school at Harvard.
LAMB: What did you take? What was the subject matter?
FUKUYAMA: Well, as an undergraduate, I had a very unusual major. I majored in Classics. I spent five years learning Greek essentially to be able to read Plato and Aristotle in the original and studied a great deal of political philosophy at that time.
LAMB: You got a master's and Ph.D. at Harvard?
FUKUYAMA: No, I got a Ph.D. at Harvard. But at that point I had switched fields, and so I was in political science in the government department there.
LAMB: What was your dissertation on?
FUKUYAMA: Well, it was a very unphilosophical subject. I wrote on Soviet foreign policy or Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East.
LAMB: And you were born in Chicago, moved to New York. What did your mother and father do for a living?
FUKUYAMA: Well, my father worked for many years in the National Board of the United Church of Christ. He is by background a minister, and then later he became a professor of religious studies at Penn State and then went on to the Chicago Theological Seminary in Chicago, so he had gone to the University of Chicago originally and then returned full circle in a certain sense towards the end of his career.
And my mother met him originally at the University of Chicago, but later was a mother and a housewife.
LAMB: Where do you live now?
FUKUYAMA: I live in Washington.
LAMB: What do you do now?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I've spent the last couple of years writing this book. I'm a resident consultant at the RAND Corporation which is one of the oldest think tanks doing foreign policy, national security kinds of studies. And that's where I worked before I moved to Washington where I did studies of Soviet foreign policy and Middle Eastern politics and that sort of thing.
LAMB: Beside your Ph.D. and political science at Harvard and working for the RAND Corporation, what else have you done?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I have worked in the State Department. I was there twice. I was there in the early '80s on the policy planning staff which is -- it's a small office attached to the office of the Secretary of State that's supposed to give advice on long-term foreign policy ideas. So I was there in the early '80s and then I returned in 1989,and I was a deputy director in that same policy planning staff, but my second State Department career was cut a little bit short by republication of the original article, "The End of History," which led me to write the book.
LAMB: Was it cut short by your decision or by the decision of the State Department?
FUKUYAMA: Oh, no, the State Department had nothing to do with it. It was a completely voluntary decision. I simply thought that writing the book would be an opportunity, in a certain sense, that would be very hard to pass up, whereas you can be a bureaucrat any time you want.
LAMB: When you wrote the article, "The End of History," and published it, were you still a member of the State Department staff?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I had written the article actually when I was at the RAND Corporation before coming to the State Department, and it was in the works when I came to State. And then, all of a sudden in the summer of '89 when I was serving officially, it was published and then all the the hoopla and then reactions to it started, so I was in the Department at that point.
LAMB: Did you have any pressure when you were in the department that said, "Look, this is too hot a deal. It would be better off if you weren't here'?
FUKUYAMA: No, no. I was working indirectly for Secretary Baker at the time, and he took a very, I think, tolerant attitude, as did my immediate boss there.
LAMB: Is Fukuyama Japanese by ancestry?
FUKUYAMA: By ancestry, yes.
LAMB: How far back do you go before you have people that were born in Japan?
FUKUYAMA: Well, my mother was born in Japan, and she came to this country in 1949. And my father was born in Los Angeles, and his father came in 1905, so it depends on which side of the family you go back to.
LAMB: Back to the book, you have a chart. I don't know if we can get a close-up on it or not. I should have waited until the camera was on you so they could get real close on it. But this chart, basically, is what?
FUKUYAMA: Well, it's a table showing the growth in the number of liberal democracies around the world all the way back to the 18th century. And it really shows a kind of long-term and, I think, very widespread spread of democratic institutions.
LAMB: Right here, this line along here is 1990.
FUKUYAMA: That's right.
LAMB: And all those countries are now liberal democracies. You can see out here in this area they were not. You can even switch the page here and see some more of them on this page. And, again, almost all of them are liberal democracies. What's left?
FUKUYAMA: Well, what's left is most of Africa, most of the Middle East, and really the southern two-thirds of Asia, and then you have China and Russia or the former Soviet Union which is going through a very traumatic process of democratization.
But altogether I count something in the range -- it depends a little bit on how you define a democracy, but something in the order of 60 to 63 democracies in the world which is about something like 2.2 billion people, about 40 percent -- a little more than 40 percent of the world's population. And that compares in 1790 to only three democracies: France, the United States, and Switzerland.
So the progress of the spread of democracy, if you take a sufficiently long-term view of it, has been really quite remarkable. And it's a progress that has not been linear or uniform because we've had tremendous setbacks like in the '30s under the impact of the Depression and the looming outbreak of fascism. Many democracies were overthrown in Europe and elsewhere and again in the 1960s and '70s in Latin America. You had many democracies overthrown.
But what the table, I think, shows is that we tend to take a short-term look at the little peaks and valleys, but if you take a longer term view that looks at the last two or 300 years, it's very clear that there's a worldwide trend towards democratic government.
LAMB: Now what's causing that?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I really have two very separate explanations that I go into in the book. The first, really, has to do in a way with economics, that if you look around the world there's an extremely high correlation between stable democracy and prosperity in the highest levels of economic development. So if you look at Western Europe, Japan, North America, these are all areas that are both highly advanced, technological, capitalist countries, and they're also very stable democracies, and that indicates that there is some kind of a correlation between a country's ability to industrialize in an advanced way and its ability to sustain a democracy.
And I think you can account for a lot of the the underlying cause of many of the recent transitions to democracy in Spain and Portugal and in many parts of Latin America, certainly in the Soviet Union does have to do with the fact that as economic development occurs, as a country industrializes, as it becomes more urban, it becomes, therefore, more educated. You create a certain kind of middle class that is raised and trained to be literate, to take an understanding of their own affairs.
And ultimately, I think, people like that a middle class society like that begins to demand a certain degree of democratic participation. And you can see it in a variety of countries around the world. In South Korea the military dictatorship was finally overthrown in the late 1980s, and that came at the end of the period where it had gone through a remarkable period of economic development. It developed in its -- say, 10, 15 years behind Japan in terms of turning itself into a modern consumer society. And I think at a certain point, people in Korea started to say themselves, "Well, it's ridiculous that we have this kind of military government. We want to be able to participate and to be a democracy like the rest of the developed world." And there are other cases of that.
So that's one explanation that forms one of the pillars, in a sense, of my argument, but the other one is, in a way, a more philosophical one and somewhat more difficult to understand. these economic explanations for democracy, I think, ultimately are not really satisfying because in the last analysis, people don't want democracy for economic reasons. I mean, you can have a high-growth society without a lot of political freedom. I mean, there are a lot of countries in Asia, in Singapore and Thailand and so forth that are like that.
And I think that if you look more deeply at what it is that drives societies to want democracy, you always end up with an uneconomic cause, and for that reason In the book, I go back to the German philosopher Hegel rather than to Karl Marx with his economic theories of history. And the reason for going back to Hegel is that Hegel had a theory of history, a theory of how human societies progress and evolve into a higher forms of organization. It was based, not on economics, but on what he called the struggle for recognition, that is to say a completely non-economical -- that we as human beings want to be recognized as as human beings with a certain dignity and human freedom.
And it is that search for recognition that leads to the relationship of masters and slaves. It's the path that lies behind, in a certain way, religion and movements like nationalism. But that ultimately -- that's also the way to explain democracy. That's why we want democracy. It's not that it creates capitalist prosperity for us, but that it is the political system that, by giving us individual rights recognized our dignity as human beings, and this is the essential driving force behind democratic revolutions, whether they take place in Eastern Europe or in Asia or in Latin America.
LAMB: When did Hegel live?
FUKUYAMA: Well, he lived in the early part of the 19th century and eventually rose to be a professor of philosophy in Berlin in the 1820s. But his life really corresponded to the period of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
LAMB: French Revolution was when?
FUKUYAMA: 1789 -- or it began in 1789 and culminated finally in Waterloo in 1815.
LAMB: You mentioned it a lot in the book.
FUKUYAMA: Yes.
LAMB: For what reason?
FUKUYAMA: Well, the French Revolution for Hegel really represented the -- it was the coming of the end of history, so to speak. Now, by the French Revolution, we don't mean just the limited historical event; what we mean is the emergence of what we understand as modern liberal democracy because in the French Revolution, ultimately what it was about was a revolution in favor of the principles of liberty and equality. Now you could substitute the American Revolution for that because, I think in that kind of ideological sense, those two revolutions were equivalent. I mean, they were both revolutions to create what I earlier defined as a liberal democracy as a political system based on popular sovereignty with guarantees of individual rights.
And for Hegel, the coming of the French Revolution was the event that heralded the end of history because it meant that the principles of liberty and equality on which modern liberal democracy is based had finally been discovered and had been implemented only in a small corner of Europe but back in the late 18th century. But at least the principle was established. And I think the modern Hegelians would argue that what's happened in the 200 years since the French Revolution is simply the implementation of those principles around the world. In other words, we haven't progressed in any fundamental sense since the French Revolution.
LAMB: At some point, you decided that you were going to write this book and tie it around a lot of historical figures and philosophy, historians: Kant, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Hobbes, Locke. For someone like me, I'm scrambling back to the old days when I first read all this stuff. Why did you decide to do that, and who are all these people?
FUKUYAMA: Well, the reason I decided to do that was that it all began, really, with the real world. I mean, we had these remarkable events that we've been living through in the last few years: the collapse of communism. But before that, you had a whole series of democratic revolutions in in Latin America, in Southern Europe, and so forth. And it raises certain fundamental questions about
whether there is such a thing as a direction to history and whether there's some larger process that somehow the newspapers miss in their day-to-day commentary.
And it turns out that these questions have all been addressed in the past, and they've been addressed by the greatest minds or the greatest thinkers of the past. And a philosopher like Hegel has thought about the question of history. I mean, he's thought about the question of whether there's such a thing as progress, whether we can see human society evolving through a series of stages. And it's for that reason that I thought that now in 1992 it's appropriate to go back to a dead philosopher from a couple hundred years ago because he's the one that really posed the question most acutely and provided a certain answer to it.
LAMB: Did you have to go refresh yourself on what they all said, or do you have it all tucked away up there?
FUKUYAMA: Well, of course, in the course of writing the book I had to go back to the original text. A lot of them I hadn't really read since I was in graduate school. when I was a graduate student, I was very much interested in political philosophy, and these were all very live authors for me in many ways. And so I had lived with them in a certain sense in all the years when I was doing very day-to-day policy-oriented things and the sort of things they do here in Washington.
But, really, one of the pleasures of writing the book was the opportunity to go back and reread some of these political philosophers and, indeed, to read a number of books that I hadn't read previously and to to actually learn something in the process.
LAMB: Besides Hegel, who of that list that I gave are the most interesting to you?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I think the other towering figure that is really by far the most important was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and it's from him that the part of the title, "The Last Man," comes, because he, in a certain sense, was the philosopher that argued that, well, yes, there's been historical progress, perhaps, but it's led not to greater human happiness, but to a total disaster. And in a way, the book is about the, you might say, a dialogue between these two philosophers as to how we ought to evaluate the goodness and how satisfactory is our society at the end of history.
LAMB: How about your own political philosophy at this stage? What would you call yourself?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I call myself a liberal in the classical sense. That is I believe in liberal democracy. I believe very firmly in the need for human beings to govern themselves according to the rules of constitutional governments. And in temporary American politics in a sense, we're all liberal democrats, but I would say that I tend to favor a kind of strict sense of that that the power of the state ought to be limited in both politics and in economics.
LAMB: In your acknowledgments, you mention a number of people that the
audience may recognize, and I bring them up to ask you if there's a
certain thread of philosophy here: Allan Bloom, from Chicago, John M.
Olin -- John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of
Democracy at the University of Chicago. You know who Olin was?
FUKUYAMA: Well, he was a philanthropist, and there's a foundation that was established in his name that has funded the Center for the Study of -- essentially, it's the relationship between political philosophy and real world politics at the University of Chicago that's headed by Professor Bloom.
LAMB: You also thank Owen Harries, the editor of the journal The National Interest. Who owns The National Interest?
FUKUYAMA: Well, The National Interest is a very small magazine devoted to foreign policy, and that is published by Irving Kristol. There are two companion journals: The Public Interest and The National Interest. The Public Interest deals with domestic policy questions, and The National Interest deals with foreign policy.
LAMB: And how would you describe Irving Kristol's philosophy?
FUKUYAMA: Well, it's I think he's generally thought of as a so-called neo-conservative, that is someone who became a conservative, in a certain sense I think largely for foreign policy reasons in the course of the '60s and '70s. And that's largely the perspective of The National Interest as well.
LAMB: You also say "most important of these has been Abram Shulsky who will find many of his ideas and insights recorded here." These are people that you've had conversations with. Who is Abram Shulsky?
FUKUYAMA: Well, he was also a student, like I was, of Allan Bloom's back at Cornell and then he went to the University of Chicago and he is a close friend of mine who currently works for the US Government here in Washington. But in a certain sense, quite a few of us here in Washington that have this kind of common background where we're involved in nitty-gritty policy issues in our quote, unquote, "real lives." I mean, that's what our jobs are about, but we've had a background in political philosophy and we think that those issues are very important and we want to -- it's very good having that kind of a support group in a certain sense because you have people that you can bounce these more philosophical ideas off of.
LAMB: You dedicate this book to Julia and David. Who are they?
FUKUYAMA: My daughter and my son.
LAMB: How old are they?
FUKUYAMA: Just three-and-a-half and one-and-a-half at the moment.
LAMB: And who did you write the book for? What level of understanding?
FUKUYAMA: Well, that is a very -- that was a very hard thing to do in writing this book because on the one hand, I wanted to address the very difficult philosophical issues -- I mean the question of, whether there's a universal history; whether history has a directionality; whether we can say that there's such a thing as the end of history, but on the other hand, I had wanted to make the book accessible to a general reader who was educated broadly speaking, but not a specialist in either philosophy or political science or any of the topics that I cover and so, in a way, I had a rather schizophrenic sense of my audience that on the one hand it was this general audience, but on the other hand I knew that there'd be a whole battery of specialists in Hegel, and specialists in development theory and economists and sociologists that would also be there with a microscope analysing the different parts of the book that dealt with those specialists as well, so it was a it was a very challenging thing to do.
I think one of the ways that I tried to deal with it is simply by putting the stuff for the specialists in the footnotes so that a general reader doesn't have to be bothered with references and complicated counterarguments and that sort of thing. So there's a big apparatus as far as that's concerned, but I tried to stick more to the broad arguments that are more generally accessible in the text itself.
LAMB: Let me ask you, this is off the wall, but Paul Johnson criticized you in that review.
FUKUYAMA: Yes.
LAMB: Paul Johnson -- do you know him?
FUKUYAMA: No, I don't. I know his books but I don't know him personally.
LAMB: OK. I remember reading the Broder-Woodward series on the Vice President and the Vice President said the book that he has spent the most time with is Paul Johnson's "Modern Times."
FUKUYAMA: Yes.
LAMB: When you hear that as someone who pays attention to words closely, what does that say to you?
FUKUYAMA: Well ...
LAMB: Paul Johnson's criticizing you; the Vice President is reading his book. Is there a philosophy there that Paul Johnson has that we should know about?
FUKUYAMA: No. I don't think so. I must say, I mean, from the moment my article was published, it was criticized virtually by everybody; I said some of it on the basis of, I think, simple misunderstanding, but there was no particular political bias to the criticism, that is to say, conservatives, and liberals and people in the center took issue with different aspects of it. Back in with the original article, I think conservatives tended to say, "Well you shouldn't count communism out prematurely, they're still a powerful force in the world," and that sort of thing. and liberals, or people more on the left tended to say "Well, this is an inappropriate self-congratulation of the United States or of liberal democracy, or of the West in general and it's not really such a perfect society, and we have a lot of problems yet and that sort of thing. So it's very hard to to overinterpret the fact that the Vice President is reading someone like Paul Johnson and drawing different conclusions because there are all sorts of political standpoints from which you can come at it.
LAMB: Does someone like you who has steeped in political science and history and philosophy sit back and watch the world go by saying "Well, that's not a surprise that was written about 212 years ago and I remember where it was and there's nothing new in the world"?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I wish I could say that, but the course of world events has been just absolutely remarkable and totally unpredictable in the last five or 10 years. If you had asked me 10 years ago when I was training as a professional, Sovietologist or specialist in that part of the world, "Is it possible that communism could collapse by the year 1992, not only communism but the Soviet Union itself," I would have said, "Absolutely ridiculous. It represents a viable, legitimate, alternative form of of government. It's very internally strong, and I expect it to be around the rest of my lifetime," and I think virtually everyone else did. And that's one of the wonderful things about the world right now is that all of these developments are happening that nobody really anticipated what happened. And as a result world politics has just careened off in new directions. I mean, right now in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, you're seeing a very major geopolitical transformation and I don't think anyone can really predict what's going to come out at the other end of that.
LAMB: You write a lot about something called the struggle for recognition.
FUKUYAMA: Yes.
LAMB: What's that all about?
FUKUYAMA: Well, the struggle for recognition is in my view the motor that drives this process of human history, and it's a concept that comes from Hegel. But I don't think you really need to read Hegel to understand it, because there's a very commonplace way that it can be understood. That is to say all human beings want to be recognized. That is to say they want other human beings to affirm their value or their goodness or their dignity or their freedom. And according to a philosopher like Hegel history starts because of a struggle which begins with a battle, a conflict over recognition, where in a sense, one caveman gets up and says to the next caveman, "I want you to recognize me, that I'm greater than you, I'm your lord and master," and they fight over that. And according to Hegel, the result of that is a relationship of master and slave because one of these early men submits, and the other wins the victory and so you have this very unequal relationship of lord and master, on the one hand, and slave, on the other, that grows up.
But all of the major phenomenon of human history can be understood in a certain sense as a form of recognition. I mean, we all want recognition of our own value. For instance, something like contemporary nationalism is not driven by any kind of economic motive, it's driven by the nationalist's desire that his nation, his group, his ethnic group, whatever it be, is recognized as a nation among others. So Lithuania, for example, you've just seen a very vivid recent example of this, that the Lithuanians didn't want greater wealth -- in fact their struggle for national independence cost them a lot in terms of their wealth and their economic development. What they wanted was recognition of their status as an equal, among other nations. And it's an extremely powerful force.
I mean, you can see it tearing apart Yugoslavia today, that the Croats and the Serbs in those areas want recognition for themselves. And so I think you can see much of the 20th century, all these nationalist wars as in a way, a manifestation of the basic desire for recognition -- for human recognition. And so it stands at the core of a lot of what's evil and unjust and leads to violence in our world. A religion, in a certain sense, can be understood as a form of recognition because a religious believer wants other people to recognize his gods and his idols and his sacred practices ...
LAMB: Does everybody want to be recognized?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I think that that is the argument that it is at the core of our humanity, that in a certain sense, that is what makes us human beings much more so than other aspects. And for instance, we have an animal side we all want -- we need to sleep, we need to eat, we need shelter sex, we need a lot of biological, sorts of things, but what makes us uniquely human is our desire to be recognized by other people and this is ultimately what leads us into political life, because politics is really about recognition. It's a struggle for recognition.
LAMB: You got a paragraph taking about the end of history and I'll read a little bit of it. "The end of history would mean the end of wars and bloody revolutions. Agreeing on ends, men would have no large causes for which to fight. They would satisfy their needs through economic activity, but they would no longer have to risk their lives in battle. They would in other words become animals again as they were before the bloody battle that began history. A dog is content to sleep in the sun all day provided he is fed, because he is not dissatisfied with what he is. He does not worry that other dogs are doing better than him, or that his career as a dog is stagnated or that dogs are being oppressed in a distant part of the world. If man reaches a society in which he has succeeded in abolishing injustice, his life will resemble that of a dog." Finally, "Human life then involves a curious paradox. It seems to require an injustice, for the struggle against injustice is what calls forth what is highest in man."
FUKUYAMA: Well, that's right. That is an essential paradox of human life, because in a certain sense, if we can achieve what we all want, a perfectly just society where all men are recognized and treated equally in which there's great material prosperity, in a certain way, that robs us of a very important side of life which is the side that wants to struggle that wants great causes, that wants to act and to live and to die for ideals for higher causes or that somehow wants to transcend just the satisfaction of the body and of its needs and that sort of thing. So I think that's the essential paradox of the end of history, or the the good life, the good society at the end of history, that by its very success it robs man of something that's very important to him.
LAMB: Do you examine yourself as you -- I mean, you're talking about human beings in this, and as you're going about your task, do you say "I fit in there/;?
FUKUYAMA: Well, sure. I think ...
LAMB: I mean, what's your need for recognition?
FUKUYAMA: Well, it's as I said, it's universal, and of course it applies to me as well as anyone else. Now, I don't struggle for recognition by getting into battles, literally violent battles. I mean, we're at a different stage of civilization on that, but you can struggle for all sorts of things. I mean, you can struggle to write the most serious book on politics and philosophy -- the struggle for recognition I think permeates everything, and what makes it important is it's really the basis for any kind of human excellence. That is to say, you don't become a great pianist or an opera singer unless you in some sense want to be recognized as that. That's really the underlying motive that drives people to spend all that time disciplining themselves and practicing and doing things that are extremely difficult.
LAMB: When you wrote the original article that got everybody interested a couple of years ago, did you like that? Did you like the reaction? I mean, here you were getting recognition for your talents.
FUKUYAMA: Well -- sure. Well, that gets into another complicated issue which is the quality of recognition, because you can be recognized for all sorts of things. I mean, you can be recognized as a pop star or you can be recognized as the greatest serial killer in North America. I mean, there are all sorts of forms of recognition, and in the end you have to ask the question, are there certain forms of recognition that are inherently more pleasing or more satisfactory than other kinds? And I think that of course, it's gratifying to be recognized in the popular press or by the media, or to go on television, that sort of thing. But there's really a higher form of recognition that comes from a recognition by people that really understand your argument, that can interact with it, that can appreciate all of the nuances and the structure, and the detail that sort of thing, and I think that's really the form of recognition that if you're writing a book of the sort, that I've done, I mean, that's what will be important unless the the kind of immediate, sort of pop-culture, media kind of recognition.
LAMB: What do you think of the reaction to the reviewers and the press and all about the book so far?
FUKUYAMA: Well, it's still at this moment, a little bit early to say. At least one thing that I've been happy about is that there has been a certain recognition that what I'm trying to do is not simply rehash arguments from a couple of years ago -- the question of whether democracy is really breaking out all over the world and that sort of thing -- because that's a somewhat old argument, but to move the discussion to the question of what is the meaning of our democracy now. I mean, should we be happy with it and what is the reason that we desire democracy? And to move to questions like the struggles for recognition. Is that an appropriate way to understand what's going on in the world and why there've been these democratic revolutions in in different parts of the world?
LAMB: How do you like this cover?
FUKUYAMA: It's not bad.
LAMB: Do you have any sense of why they decided to do a black cover with red letters?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I think the idea was that is would simply be a striking jacket that would be quickly recognizable and it has a certain seriousness to it.
LAMB: Do you have a plan from here as to how to continue the discussion on what you're writing about?
FUKUYAMA: Well, not really a plan. I'm going to be talking about this book in this country, and then it's being published in about 14 foreign countries at the same time, and so there are going to be little -- I mean, that's one of the interesting things about this particular idea is it stirred a comparable degree of debate and controversy in a lot of places outside the United States as well, and I think that that's going to preoccupy me, but I will be continue to be interested in this general problem of democracy, where it fits into our contemporary world.
LAMB: Tell me if I'm pronouncing this right, because you use this a lot, is it thymos?
FUKUYAMA: Thymos.
LAMB: Thymos.
FUKUYAMA: Yes.
LAMB: I knew I'd have it wrong. Megalo ...
FUKUYAMA: Megalothymia.
LAMB: Megalothymia. What is it?
FUKUYAMA: Well, thymos -- it's a Greek word that comes from Plato that represents a certain part of the or to put it in modern terms, it's a part of the personality, or a part of the human psyche that precisely demands recognition. And according to Plato, there are three parts of the soul: there's the desiring parts, and we understand what that it is like -- the part that desires food and water and so forth -- and there's reason, human capacity to calculate, and to make decisions based on fundamental logic, this sort of thing. But Plato says that there's a third part of the soul which is thymos, which essentially is, in a way, a source of self-esteem, it's the valuing part of the soul. It's the part of the soul that says, "Yes, I am a human being. I have a certain dignity of worth and I am proud of that worth." And it's impossible really to reduce any understanding of human psychology simply to desire and reason alone, and there's a very important assertive side of human personality that that wants recognition and demands, that other people recognize me at at my worth, at my understanding of what I'm worth.
Now megalothymia is another Greek word, but one that I made up myself. Megalos in Greece means great and thymia refers to thymos and megalothymia means the desire to be recognized as greater than other people, and in my view, this is in a way the sense of both things that are good about politics and the things that are bad about it because a tyrant is in a way, a prototype of the person that wants to be recognized as greater.
LAMB: You get specific on page 316 here, and you're talking about capitalism and you say, "At the level at which entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie or Ted Turner operate, consumption is not a meaningful motive; one can only have so many houses and cars and wives before one loses count. Such people of course are greedy in wanting even larger amounts of money, but the money is more a token or symbol of their ability as entrepreneurs rather than a means to acquire goods for personal consumption."
FUKUYAMA: That's right. I mean, I think when you understand these great entrepreneurs or founders of big industrial empires -- what's going on is not simply -- as is commonly portrayed -- greedy people wanting more and more, I mean it really comes out of this part of the soul that's called thymos. I mean, we want recognition. A guy like Ted Turner at this point in his career has all the money that he can possibly use -- what he wants is -- I don't know if it's being Time's Man of the Year exactly, -- but he wants people to think of him in a certain way, that he's the man that founded CNN, that created an entirely new media business, that has done something that the networks could never do. That's pure recognition.
LAMB: You also write later on -- it says, "It is in the very design of democratic capitalist countries like the United States that the most talented and ambitious natures should tend to go into business rather than into politics, the military, universities or the church."
FUKUYAMA: Yes.
LAMB: Why?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I think that's right, because if you say that we are potentially threatened by would-be tyrants that have this megalothymia, that want to be recognized as greater, it is much safer if they become Ted Turners than if they become let's say politicians or military people, that will turn their desire to be recognized as greater into some political movement or cause -- or in a way, it would have been much better if if Hitler had stayed out of politics and gone into the sign painting business and then become the Ted Turner of house painting in Germany in the 1920s and he would have made a lot of money, he may have gotten quite recognized as a very innovative house painter, whatever, and we would have been spared a lot of the fascist politics of that period.
And I think that part of the wisdom of the America founding was an understanding that this kind of business activity would be able to absorb the talents and ambitions of people that were inclined in that fashion but turned it to a kind of public good, so that they produce wealth for the rest of society, but the main thing is that they're kept in an occupation that uses their ambitions and talents and gives it a certain outlet without creating a political tyranny as a result.
LAMB: Later on I'm going to leave something out here, you might want to fill in the blanks.
FUKUYAMA: Yes.
LAMB: "The result is that modern leaders seldom rule: they react and manage and steer but are institutionally restricted in their field of action so that it is hard for them to leave their personal imprint on the people they govern."
FUKUYAMA: Well, I think you can see that in our country, that we have a constitutional system that is essentially designed to constrain ambitious people. It's designed to constrain people with megalothymia and the Napoleon or the Stalin or the Saddam Hussein that would enter American politics and want to turn it into some kind of a dictatorship -- and that's why we have this system of checks and balances and the three branches of government and that sort of thing, to constrain political ambition. First of all, ambition is pushed into the area of business and economic activity, and for those that are not satisfied by it, they have the system where they have to go around, as they're doing in New Hampshire, kissing babies and promising voters, that they'll deliver on certain goods, but completely constrained by a system of law that forces their political energies into a certain very safe -- well, perhaps not productive, but at least not terribly harmful directions and that's in a way, the genius of our political system.
LAMB: When you got into politics back here in -- why did you get in politics in the '80s?
FUKUYAMA: Well, because I was really a foreign policy specialist, and it seemed to me that the greatest issues at that time were those of war and peace, US-Soviet relations, the arms race, instability in the Middle East, that sort of thing.
LAMB: How close did you work to George Shultz?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I worked several bureaucratic layers down from him, but I was a member of the policy planning staff and worked at that time mostly on Middle Eastern issues.
LAMB: What about Jim Baker?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I was one level up, but in a way in a more sinful role because I was working on US-Soviet relations and German unification and a variety of issues like that.
LAMB: Do you have any desire to take another couple of jumps up? I mean, are you going to stay with this stuff for a long time?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I don't know. When I quit the government to write this book, I had always intended to go back into government when it was over, but in a certain way, I've had such a good time writing it, that I think that maybe that I'd like to do more of it.
LAMB: Well -- I forgot my train of thought. I had a question I wanted to ask you. I want to go to another chapter. Why the chapter titled, "A Vacation in Bulgaria"?
FUKUYAMA: Well, it's a chapter that is in the section that describes what the struggle for recognition is, and the important point that I was trying to make in that section is that in a way, the the real problem with communist societies was not that they were economically inefficient or didn't produce a West German standard of living for East Germans, the problem was a kind of moral one -- that it forces people to make compromises with themselves, with their thymos. They could not rise above themselves precisely because these communist governments dangled a kind of consumer culture in front of them. It wasn't a very rich consumer culture, but they dangled things like a better apartment or a refrigerator, or possibly a car or a vacation in Bulgaria, I mean, that's their equivalent of the Grand Bahamas in front of people and it said, "Look, if you people want to be part of this system, if you want to have a successful career, if you want to get along, if you want your vacation in Bulgaria, then you have to sign this petition denouncing your colleagues; you have to shut up when you see somebody being unjustly persecuted by the party," that sort of thing.
And I think if you look at the writings of someone like Vaclav Havel you'll see that that's precisely what he identifies as the real evil of the system. I mean, it wasn't that it produced shoddy goods and no food on the shelves, it was that morally it was a bankrupt system because it really made people accept this Faustian bargain, in a sense, to trade away their souls for the sake of a few meager consumer goods.
LAMB: You use the green grocer story with Mr. Havel to make a point.
FUKUYAMA: Yes.
LAMB: What was it?
FUKUYAMA: Well, he tells this very amusing story in an essay that he wrote while he was still in jail called "The Power of the Powerless" in which a green grocer hangs a sign in front of his window that says "Workers of the World, Unite!" And Havel goes into some of the psychology behind why he should do a thing like that and he said "Well, does he really believe that the workers of the world should unite?" And he says "Well, no." the real reason that the green grocer did it is that he's afraid. He's afraid that if he doesn't put that sign in his window then the communist authorities will come and they will harass him or threaten him with jail or various other terrible things that they could do to him.
And Havel says what the sign really says if you can look beneath the surface is not "Workers of the World, United," it is "I am afraid." I am a humble green grocer living in this political system ,and I know that if I don't go along I will suffer the consequences, and therefore I am obedient and I want to show my superiors that I'm obedient. And so in a way, I mean, this is a way of his demonstrating the the moral complicity of what was required to live in that kind of a society. And he said that people could avoid facing up to that because they put up a high-minded slogan like "Workers of the World, Unite" and because of ideology they could tell themselves, "Well, I'm not really compromising moral worth, what I'm doing is displaying some high-minded slogan, but nonetheless I compromise existing." That was the real that was the evil of the system.
LAMB: You said that you learned a lot of Greek and you were able to read Greek. Can you still read it?
FUKUYAMA: No. I haven't I haven't used any of my Greek in probably 10 years now.
LAMB: Could you speak ...
FUKUYAMA: Well, what I learned was not modern Greek, but ancient Greek which was the Greek that they used in the fifth century Athens, and today nobody really knows how that was pronounced or spoken. It's quite a bit different from modern Greek but I could read it pretty well.
LAMB: How many languages can you speak?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I can speak French and a bit of Russian, and then I know, some a smattering of other languages, you know.
LAMB: We're about out of time. Given your knowledge of Russia, what do you think's going to happen? What's your guess?
FUKUYAMA: Well, I think that they are in for a terrible time, not on a political level, because I think that with the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Russia and these other republics, they've achieved a kind of precondition for the emergence of real democracy in that region. But the real problem is going to be this terrible, terrible economic transition that I think everybody has agreed in that part of the world that they would like to be a prosperous capitalist country like West Germany or France. The trouble is that to get from here to there requires now this period of price liberalization and inflation in a country that doesn't have any food on the table. So I am actually rather pessimistic in the short run as to what's going to happen in that part of the world. I expect that there could well be many further political explosions as people simply don't have a way to feed their families.
LAMB: Do you think the end of history is upon us?
FUKUYAMA: Well, if you understand it in the specific sense that I have, yes, it's certainly been here, but it's been here for a good 200 years and we just haven't realized it.
LAMB: The book is called "The End of History and the Last Man" and our guest has been Francis Fukuyama, the author. Thank you for joining us.
FUKUYAMA: Thank you.
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