Fukuyama Offers Insight Into The World To Come

            There’s not a whole lot written about identity politics and immigration that makes much sense. From the right come claims of apocalyptic doom, with a violent caravan headed our way to rape, pillage, plunder and kill. From the left, comes the kumbaya chorus, chirping about our obligation to care for any and all who trundle across our order. In the meantime, every life matters, unless, of course, you’re a white male, in which case the best thing you can do is shut up and listen.

            What’s needed is sanity.

            I found some in Francis Fukuyama’s latest book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and Recognition (2018).

            Fukuyama’s thesis is simple: Folks want recognition. When they don’t get it, they become resentful. Consider the role of honor in Ancient Greece. Warriors were given special recognition for their willingness to place their lives on the line. In the Republic, Plato recognized the role of spirit, or thymos, in the class of guardians – those dedicated not to the life of reason, the world of the philosopher-kings, or to the mundane task of producing goods and services.  Warriors, or guardians, are driven by a sense of honor, or recognition of their worth by others.

            As readers of the Republic know, the city he imagined was merely a device for illustrating what a well-ordered soul looks like. We all crave recognition. The long arc of western civilization is the struggle to assure equal regard for all.

            But a funny thing happened on the road to modernity. The distinction between inner worth and external appearance in the world that was once was tethered to a spiritual conception of life’s worth and meaning has yielded to a secular commitment to equality in the here and now. The accelerating pace of claims for equal treatment yields new and novel claims that are, frankly, wearying to behold.

            We’ve taken an odd turn. We value diversity for its own sake, in part because we lack the means of distinguishing better from worse.  The result is atomization of society into a series of ever smaller, and some might say, ever more bizarre tribes.

            I overstate Fukuyama’s claims.

            Let’s look at his own words.

            Is diversity an end itself?

            “[D]iversity cannot be the basis for identity in and of itself; it is like saying that our identity is to have no identity; or rather that we should get used to our having nothing in common and emphasize our narrow ethnic and racial identities instead,” he writes.

            A community is more than a mere collection of individuals grazing on the commons. A community is bound together by common conceptions of right, as Cicero once said.

            “[We] need … an understanding of positive virtues, not bound to particular groups, that are needed to make … democracy work,” Fukuyama states.

            Where do such values come from?

            Fukuyama doesn’t say. He merely makes a plea for the future. We need “citizenship and the exercise of certain virtues,” he claims. “While the United States has benefited from diversity,” he writes, “it cannot build its national identity around diversity as such. Identity has to be related to substantive ideas such as constitutionalism, the rule of law, and human equality. Americans respect these ideas; the country is justified in excluding from citizenship those who reject them.”

            This is almost heady stuff. Fukuyama is playing John the Baptist; he sets a prophetic expectation without offering a glimpse of the promised land.

            But his discussion is helpful, especially with regard to immigration. Somehow he cuts through the hysteria of the left and right, drawing a bead that seems true:

            “What refugees are owed is sympathy, compassion, and support. Like all moral obligations, however, these obligations need to be tempered by practical considerations of scarce resources, competing priorities, and the political sustainability of a program of support.”

            And again:

            “No state can undertake an unlimited obligation to protect people outside its jurisdiction, and whether the world would be better off it they all tried to do so is not clear. While countries rightly feel an obligation to shelter refugees and may welcome immigrants, such obligations are potentially costly, both economically and socially, and democrats need to balance them against other priorities.”

            Surprisingly, no one seems to comment on the fatal flaw in our immigration policies. We permit skilled and talented immigrants to come here from around the world, thus depleting other nations of the best their fellow citizens have to offer. Is it any wonder less talented folks clamor for a place among us? What would happen if we recognized the reality of scarce resources, and encouraged the talented tenths of the world to build a better world in their own backyard?

            I watched the mid-term elections with a sense of foreboding. Where do we go from here?, I wondered. 2020 fast approaches, and with it I am sure of one thing: Another whirlwind season of political blather devoid of substance but chock full of emotion. Both the left and the right are tedious masters of tired tropes.

            I urge you to read Fukuyama. There will be a tomorrow. That much is almost certain. Whether we can make it one we care to live in is the question. Francis Fukuyama warns of the excesses of identity politics severed from claims of values common to all, and he warns of a naïve sense of globalism.

            What comes next?

            I haven’t the faintest idea. But for the first time in a long time, I became hopeful reading Fukuyama’s book. You should read it, too.

Jill Lepore's Almost Brilliant American History

            Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States, promises to be just the book we need in divisive times. It sets out to consider a question posed at the time of the republic’s founding by Alexander Hamilton: “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

            I raced through the first several hundred pages of the book with a hunger to learn what course she could suggest through what looks like a complete collapse of civility and republican principles in our time. Yes, Magna Carta’s commitment to the rule of law mattered; yes, the English Civil wars and the beheading of Charles I in the 17^th century shed new light on a people’s power to resist and laid bare the foundations of political authority; yes, the colonial experiments with self-government sowed seeds that would blossom into rebellion.

            She writes in balanced and sometimes moving prose. (But first you must endure an introduction that putters where it should soar: the Constitution was sent to printers “who set the type of its soaring preamble with giant W, as sharp as a bird’s claw." God save the ornithologists.)

            Once past the preface, however, the prose serve, and serve well. But Lepore never really answers the question she set out to consider. It’s almost as though she wrote 600 or so pages, got us to the post-World War II era, and then, rather than quit while she had a complete narrative arc, decided to press on through the 2016 election.

            Here’s her thesis: As soaring as our founding documents sound, their words do not match the reality of our lives. We speak of the equality of men, but for generations regarded women as something else, and African-Americans as less still. At the heart of the American promise lies a hypocrite’s compromise.

            We’ve stumbled through a civil war in an effort to make plain words have plain practical meaning, but always our prejudices and biases get in the way. Equality? Not so then, at the time of the founding; not so at the time of the civil war;  and not so now – the color line remains real, so, too, does the gender line. And lest you think full equality has arrived, consider now the widening gap between rich and poor.

            We’ve never lived up to the dream we sold to the world as proud inhabitants of a City of a Hill.

            Lepore chronicles the fault line in our lives.  She writes well about W.E.B. DuBois and Susan Anthony. Malcom X speaks, and so, although in an oddly muffled voice, does Martin Luther King. She doesn’t wince when recounting how often our founders and political leaders asserted that this a country built and destined for white folk.

             We’re struggling, all sinners in need of the grace ideals can bestow. Preach, sister. Tell me how to hear the muse of our ideals today, in a post-truth era, where identity trumps character and pathos is king, where fake news is the coin of the realm.

            Somehow, Lepore fails to make the transition into the 21^st century in a convincing way. She has plenty to say about the role of parties and polling and computing power to divide us in instrumental ways designed to win elections at all costs. She writes about how computers and IPhones have transformed our worlds. Yet not once did I see her discuss artificial intelligence and the replacement of human capital by the Internet of Things.

            Too much time is spent on Alex Jones, Infowars, and cable news. Yes, we’re divided, fractured, and living in ideological silos. Lepore provides no account of how we’ve become so fractured, except to write extensively about the advent of political consultants. (I learned a boatload about Campaign, Inc., a consulting firm founded in 1933 by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter,  that helped torpedo national health insurance and then served as the slash and burn strategists for a series of office seekers. If Donald Trump has ever read anything, I suspect he’s read a Campaign, Inc., playbook. Their campaigns were all about going on the offensive, using half-truths, even lies, boldly proclaimed, and castigating your critics.)

            But slick advertisers, pollsters and political hacks working for a fee didn’t knock us off course. These are the vultures feeding on the culture in which they live.

            Lepore writes as though culture, ideas, philosophy don’t matter. Just how she managed to write a nearly 800-page narrative on American history without ever discussing Isaiah Berlin and his discussion of pluralism and monism, or his essay on liberty, is beyond me.

            Isn’t it possible that the current malaise is nothing more than pluralism taken to its extreme? When everything matters, there is no longer any sense in drawing distinctions between better and worse. We value diversity for diversity’s sake now. There is no meaningful discussion of the good life. In an effort to make every odd duck feel safe, we tolerate everything except the voice foolish enough to assert that some things are better than others. The bottom has fallen out of pluralism, I say. In the absence of even the semblance of trying to distinguish between better and worse, all that really matters is pathos. Everything suddenly matters. A certain weariness sets in, and is soon replaced by exhaustion. You, too? We mutter, as yet another victim -- no, make that survivor -- demands recognition.

            My hunch is that our time is a time of fear. Rapid change has displaced settled notions of what a good life can and should look like. A displaced middle-class looks warily at the immigrants coming here to escape devastation in less fortunate parts of the world. The American pie is shrinking, and, when it is served, the invisible hand doing the serving is less the market that a computer’s idea of efficiency.

            Not a word about opiod deaths, Ms. Lepore? Consider the following possibility: that in an era bereft of common ideals, where the only claim to distributive justice is being a victim,  suicide is less an epidemic than a vote on the American prospect.

            Sure, this is a depressing conclusion. But history has winners and losers. We’ve lost our way and it is by no means clear that there is a way out. Consider simply the confirmation fight in the Senate over Brett Kavanaugh. The U.S. Senate as the world’s greatest deliberative body? Only if you think a food fight is fine dining.

            Unless something changes the answer to Hamilton’s question will be “no.” The government now is less an instrument of common good and more a tumor to be managed.

           I want historians like Lepore to dig harder. What are the currents that are undoing us?

            The American experiment succeeded so long as there was abundance. In an era of scarcity the rich grow richer. The rest of us scramble in any way we can to matter. Hence the thrill of identity politics. In the absence of realistic hope for earning a share of a shrinking pie by contributing to the public weal, claim victimhood. But when everyone is a victim, then no one is.          

            I hope Professor Lepore does a new edition of this book. She should rework the last four chapters, the part on the post-World War II era. After brilliant analysis of our distant past, Lepore seems to lose her way the closer she got to our time. This, more than anything, tells me that despite her wish to claim that a society founded of choice and reflection can endure, she’s secretly reached the conclusion that it cannot.

            I’m hoping she’s wrong, but nothing in her book reassured me. Everything about the daily news tells me a certain deadly inertia has set it. We the people are enduring dark times.