The End of the End of History?

In recent weeks, my thoughts have moved back and forth from the Declaration of Independence as the beginning of the end of history to Trump's right-wing nationalism as the end of the end of history.  (Is it significant that I am writing this on Bastille Day?)

Ever since it was published in 1989, Francis Fukuyama's article "The End of History?" has provoked a continuing debate over the question he posed in his title.  History as a continuing series of unpredictable events will never come to an end, Fukuyama conceded.  But history as the human search for the fully satisfying social order might have come to an end, he suggested, because with the defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War Two and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, liberal democracy remains with no serious challenger; and most of the people in the world today agree in principle that liberal democracy is the only fully satisfying social order.  In practice, of course, the ideals of liberal democracy--equal liberty for all--have not been completely attained.  Nevertheless, even if we disagree about how best to achieve these ideals, most of us agree on the ideals themselves.  Never before has this happened, because in all previous history there were fundamental disagreements about what the ideal society would be like.  To be sure, there seems to be some resistance to liberal ideals in certain parts of the world today--Islamic fundamentalism, for example.  But Fukuyama argued that although such resistance can create a lot of international conflict, this will only delay the inevitable victory of liberal democracy around the world.

According to Fukuyama, there are two reasons for the triumph of liberal ideals.  First, liberalism satisfies the human desire for material security and comfort through economic productivity, free markets, and the scientific conquest of nature.  Second, liberalism satisfies the human desire for recognition through an egalitarian cultural and political order in which all human beings are recognized as equal in their moral dignity.  Thus, the history of human striving for satisfaction comes to an end when human beings discover that liberal democracy is the only social order that satisfies their deepest longings--the longing for material prosperity and the longing for moral recognition.

One can argue that the move towards this end of history began with the Declaration of Independence, because the Declaration began the American founding of a set of ideas and institutions that would constitute the liberal democratic national-state in the modern world.  These ideas and institutions would include a large nation-sized republic based on the principle of popular consent, a free market economy, a secular state without any official religion, and the rule of law that treated all citizens as equal.  The fundamental principle was that all human beings are by nature self-governing individuals who can organize their political, economic, religious, and legal orders through voluntary association.

In recent years, however, the rise of populist right-wing nationalism around the world has provoked a lot of public commentary about the decline or death of liberal democracy and the trends toward demagogic authoritarianism and nationalism.  Trump's meeting with Putin in Finland might confirm this fear with the image of the two most powerful strongmen in the world working together to break up the international liberal order.

But if one pulls back from these recent events and looks at the larger context of history over the past 250 years, one can see that the human progressive movement towards the liberal open society initiated in the Eighteenth century Enlightenment continues.  For example, Marian Tupy at the "HumanProgress" website of the Cato Institute has written an article showing some of the evidence that the progress of democracy around the world remains strong today.  In 1800, there were almost no liberal democracies anywhere in the world.  By 2016, there were 121 democracies.  There have been periods of deviation from this trend.  The rise of fascism, Nazism, and communism between the two world wars was one.  In the early 1970s, there were more autocratic regimes than democratic regimes.  But from 1989, the trend has been steadily rising in the spread of democracies around the world.  Moreover, as Tupy notes, the combined scores for autocracies, as measured by the Center for Systemic Peace, has dropped dramatically since 1989, while the combined scores for democracies has risen dramatically.  The quality of democracy has never been higher in human history.

Of course, these trends towards liberal democratic progress are not absolutely inevitable.  There could always be some deviation towards illiberal regimes as occurred between the two world wars.  But still the empirical historical evidence for liberal progress over the past 250 years is stunning.  (I have written a series of posts on human progress in November-December of 2016 and January of this year.)

To suggest that Donald Trump is going to reverse all of this is a ridiculous exaggeration of the power of that "most stable genius."

If this is true, how do we explain it?  What is it about the principles of the Declaration of Independence--the principles of modern liberalism--that made them so powerful that they have swept across the world over the past two centuries?

One possible explanation is offered by Spinoza in The Theological-Political Treatise, perhaps the first full defense of modern liberal democracy.  He declared that the democratic state is "the most natural state," because it approaches most nearly the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature.

Darwinian evolutionary anthropology might confirm this by showing that the social life of our hunting-gathering ancestors manifests the individual liberty and equality that liberal theorists have attributed to the state of nature.  And therefore the liberal conception of government as instituted among men to secure the individual rights that first arose in the state of nature might indeed be "the most natural state."

Foragers assert their individual autonomy and liberty in resisting the attempts of anyone to establish dominance over others.  So the liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for all individuals and resistance to the sort of dominance hierarchies established in agrarian states can be understood as appealing to the original liberalism of the state of nature.

This kind of Darwinian liberal thinking is suggested--even if not fully elaborated--in the writings of people like Alexandra Maryanski, Jonathan Turner, Paul Rubin, and Christopher Boehm.

Some elaboration of this theme can be found in an earlier post here.

Fukuyama, The Iraq War, and Darwinian Conservatism

In my book Darwinian Conservatism, I say very little about international relations and foreign policy. Francis Fukuyama's article in The New York Times Magazine(February 19)on neoconservatism and the Iraq war indicates to me the kind of foreign policy that would be supported by Darwinian conservatism. Although Fukuyama would not identify himself as a Darwinian conservative, Carson Holloway does identify him--along with James Q. Wilson and me--as a Darwinian conservative, and thus an object of his attack.

Fukuyama announces in this article that he can no longer consider himself a neoconservative, because he disagrees with the neoconservative foreign policy that supported the American invasion of Iraq. He agrees with the neoconservatives that American foreign policy should advance the ideals of democratic liberty. But he does not think that the unilateral and preemptive use of force in Iraq is a good means to achieve that end. More generally, he accuses the neoconservatives of discarding what he thought was originally fundamental to the neoconservative position--a realistic suspicion that grand social engineering can work without undesirable and unintended side effects. In Iraq, American forces are attempting to impose a new democratic regime as a massive project in social engineering, and Fukuyama regards this as naively utopian.

I agree with Fukuyama, and I think his major points conform to my arguments for Darwinian conservatism on at least four points.

First, I agree with Fukuyama's "end of history" argument insofar as this means that liberal democratic capitalism has a universal appeal to human beings because it satisfies the 20 natural desires that constitute the motivational core of human nature. I also agree, however, with Fukuyama's claim that the Bush neoconservatives are mistaken in thinking that the "end of history" is best achieved by preemptive wars of democratic imperialism. Rather, this will be achieved only gradually over a long period of time as people around the world are attracted by the success of the Western liberal democratic regimes.

Second, I agree with Fukuyama that the "end of history" does not mean the end of war or conflict. One of the 20 natural desires is the desire for war to defend one's society against others. The tendency to in-group/out-group behavior is so deep that there is no reason to think that the "end of history" will bring perpetual peace.

Third, I agree with Fukuyama that social order arises not just from a universal human nature but also from cultural traditions and deliberate choices. Consequently, the 20 natural desires of human beings will be diversely expressed in different societies based on the local traditions and choices of each society. So although liberal democratic capitalism should have a universal appeal because it fosters the satisfaction of natural human desires, we should expect that the particular social orders around the world will develop in unique ways to express the traditions and choices of each people. The Darwinian emergence of social order is a complex interaction between natural selection, cultural selection, and deliberate choice. So if an Islamic democracy does emerge in Iraq, it will do so through a long period of social evolution and particular choices that cannot be planned out according to some rational design given them by Americans.

Finally, I agree with Fukuyama's fundamental point that the democratic imperialism of the neoconservatives is utopian, because it ignores human imperfectibility. To assume that we can design liberal democratic regimes for every society and enforce our designs by force assumes more knowledge and virtue than human beings have. When George Bush proclaims--as he did in his Second Inaugural Address--that American foreign policy will have "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world," he adopts a utopian idealism that is contrary to the conservative principle of the imperfectibility of human nature. In that Second Inaugural, Bush did go on to say that freedom cannot be imposed by force of arms because freedom must be chosen by every people, who will adopt institutions that "reflect customs and traditions very different from our own." But that prudent stance is denied by the democratic imperialism that Bush and the neoconservatives have adopted in Iraq.

Ukraine in the Global Battle Between Liberal Democracy and Illiberal Autocracy

Recently, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was interviewed by David Remnick at The New Yorker.  

She said:  ". . . the thing about the U.S. and NATO and the European Union is that we have ideas.  We are about democracy and freedom and capitalism and security, as well as individual liberties.  It's a fact that people are better off under democracies. . . . It's our ideas that attract others.  Russia under Putin doesn't really have that power of attraction.  He only has the power of coercion, and we are seeing that now in Ukraine in a brutal way."

Is that true?  Are the modern Western ideas of liberalism--democracy, freedom, and capitalism-- powerfully attractive to human beings today?  Is it true that people are better off when they live in liberal capitalist democracies?  Or has the power of those liberal ideas faded in recent history?  Must Putin rely only on the power of coercion?  Or does Putin also have the power of some illiberal ideas in defeating modern liberalism?  Do we see those illiberal ideas manifest in the thinking of Traditionalist philosophers like Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon, who support Putin?

That the war in Ukraine is part of the global battle of ideas between liberal democracy from the West and illiberal autocracy from the East has been affirmed by Ukrainian philosophers like Volodymyr Yermolenko.  Yermolenko is a political philosopher and political scientist in Ukraine who is the editor of Ukraine World, an English-language news outlet.  He has recently written an essay for The Economist.  Michelle Goldberg has written an article about him for The New York Times as explaining why Ukrainians believe they can win.

"Freedom is the key trait of Ukraine's identity as a political nation," Yermolenko says.  He explains:

"Ukrainian political culture is based upon anti-tyrannical, democratic and republican values.  Most Russians tend to approve of their tsar; Ukrainians identify with opposition to him.  Within politics they see a social contract.  This harks back to the early modern era, when the Ukrainian warrior class known as Cossacks made agreements with their leaders which ensured recognition of their rights and freedoms.  This mode of thinking runs deep and it is impossible to eradicate.  The Cossack, a free warrior on the open steppe, is one of the symbols of Ukrainian identity."

The word "Cossack" is derived from an Old East Slavic word kozak for "free man."  In speaking about how political culture arises from a "social contract" between free men to secure their rights and freedoms, Yermolenko restates the ideas of Lockean liberalism.

Yermolenko continues:

"Ukraine is also a political nation.  It is not centered exclusively on any single ethnic, linguistic, or religious identity.  It is pluralistic.  You can be a Ukrainian speaker, Russian speaker, or a speaker of Crimean Tatar and be ready to defend Ukraine.  You can be Ukrainian Orthodox, Greek-Catholic, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Jewish and stand shoulder to shoulder for this country.  Ukrainians have a Russian-speaking president who has Jewish origins."

Thus, in contrast to the ethnic and religious nationalists, Yermolenko sees that Ukrainians have embraced liberal pluralism, and that they can still be united in their patriotic defense of their country because they are united in their commitment to the liberal values of a free society.  If he is right, Ukrainian political culture is both cosmopolitan and patriotic.  It is cosmopolitan in affirming the universal values of liberalism and patriotic in affirming the national identity of Ukraine as rooted in those values.

That Ukrainian sense of national identity has been formed largely in response to Putin's aggressive attacks on Ukraine--first his annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbass region in 2014 and now his invasion of the rest of Ukraine.  Marie Yovanovitch observes: "When I was in Ukraine in the early two-thousands, nobody knew the words to the national anthem.  By the time I came back, in 2016, everybody knew the anthem.  They put their hands on their hearts.  The same is true now, as Russian troops are targeting kindergartens."

Yermolendo agrees:

"Our sense of Ukrainian identity has taken on a greater intensity in the past few years.  Russian aggression since 2014 helped consolidate it among people who might earlier have felt close to Russian culture or Russia's information space.  Mr. Putin's invasion will accelerate this process.  When Russians shell residential buildings and destroy the central square in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, every shot diminishes the number of those who have sympathy with Russia.  People who have felt they belonged in the Russian cultural space ten years ago, feel a strong Ukrainian identity now.  They might speak Russian or go to the Russia-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church.  But they are Ukrainians.  Russia has lost the battle for their hearts and minds."

This transformation of Ukrainian identity is also the victory of European liberal modernity, and particularly the victory of the liberal humanism of the Enlightenment over the illiberal authoritarianism of the counter-Enlightenment (as promoted by people like Dugin and Bannon).  Yermolendo observes:

"It is the extension of European values to the east.  It is the story of the strength of the European idea--which today's Europe sometimes shies away from.  It is the story of European humanism, rooted in Ancient Greek philosophy, through Roman republicanism, to Italian city-republics, the ideas of the Enlightenment and of anti-Nazi resistance.  Through their resistance to Mr. Putin's empire, Ukrainians are showing that this humanist tradition has the strength, energy, and courage to defend itself."

In the summer of 1989, The National Interest published Francis Fukuyama's essay "The End of History?"  This came just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall and two years before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Fukuyama argued that humanity has reached "not just . . . the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

When Ukrainians defeat Putin, as they surely will, Fukuyama might want to write a new essay entitled "The End of History--Again?"

As he argued in his original essay, this is not the end of the history of political conflict and war, but it is the end of the intellectual history of the debate over the best social and political order.  Because now most human beings recognize that liberal democracy is the best regime for securing human happiness, because it secures the human freedom that is the precondition for human happiness.

Another way of seeing this is to look at the empirical evidence for the correlation of freedom and happiness as presented in the Human Freedom Index, and to see how Ukraine is striving to move closer to those countries at the top of this index (countries like Switzerland and Estonia) and away from those countries at the bottom (countries like Russia and China).  I will write about that in my next post.

The "Inner Logic" of Equal Liberty in Evolved Human Nature: A Response to Darrin McMahon

THE "INNER LOGIC" OF EQUALITY

I have written about Lynn Hunt's book Inventing Human Rights as an illustration of the Darwinian neurohistory of human rights, in which the understanding of human rights arises from the human brain's evolved capacity for feeling empathy for the victims of injustice.  

Part of her argument is that human rights have a kind of "inner logic" or a "kind of conceivability or thinkability scale" (150). She illustrates this by showing how the French revolutionaries of 1789 were driven by the logic of human rights to extend the circle of humanitarian concern. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had declared: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."  The abstract universalism of this declaration inevitably inclined them to extend that equal protection to new groups of human beings, and thus expand the circle of human empathy.  So, for example, once the French revolutionary leaders had granted religious liberty not only to Catholics but also to Protestant Christians, this made it easier to see the need for granting liberty to Jews.

Another example of the "inner logic" of equal liberty being extended to ever more groups of people is how the right to vote in America has been broadened so far that eventually almost all adult citizens have the right to vote.  Hunt illustrates this with a letter from John Adams to James Sullivan on May 26, 1776.  

Since the Americans had begun their revolutionary overthrow of British rule, the Second Continental Congress had called upon the American states to begin writing their first constitutions.  Part of the debates over those constitutions was the question of voting rights.  In England, electors had to own a 40-shilling freehold (land that produced an annual rent of at least 40 shillings).  In the American colonies, because of the cheapness and availability of land, this property requirement allowed between 50 percent and 80 percent of all while males to vote, which was a much wider franchise than was the case in England, where no more than 20 percent of adult males could vote.  But even so, when the Revolution began, some Americans questioned these property requirements for voting.  If republican government was based on the consent of the people, and if all the people had an equal right to consent to the laws, then it would seem to follow logically that all the citizens should have an equal right to vote.  That was the argument of James Sullivan for universal suffrage in Massachusetts, which he presented to John Adams.

Although Adams agreed that this was a logical application of the principle that all human beings have an equal natural right to consent to government, he warned Sullivan that making such a proposal was risky:

"Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open So fruitful a Source of Controversy and altercation, as would be opened by attempting to alter the Qualifications of Voters.  There will be no End of it.  New Claims will arise.  Women will demand a Vote.  Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State.  It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell."

Adams admitted to Sullivan that women "have as good Judgment, and as independent Minds as those Men who are wholly destitute of Property."  And so, once the property qualification for men is abolished, there will be no grounds for denying the right to vote to women.  "There will be no end of it."

Thus, Adams foresaw that declaring the equal human right to consent to government would logically require the constant expansion of the right to vote so that finally all citizens would have an equal right to vote.

Similarly, Abraham Lincoln saw the Declaration of Independence as setting a standard of human equality of rights that would be constantly approximated as its influence spread and deepened over American history.  The authors of the Declaration declared that "all men are created equal" in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"This they said, and this they meant.  They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.  In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon.  They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.  They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere" (Lincoln 1989, 1:398).

Thus it was, Lincoln claimed, that the Declaration of Independence "gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance" (1989, 2:213). 

Lincoln's contribution to fulfilling this "promise" of equal rights was to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and to lead the Union in defeating the Confederacy in the Civil War so that the emancipation of slaves could be fully enforced in the South.  After his death, during the Reconstruction era, the North forced the Southern states to respect the equal rights of the freed slaves.  But with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white supremacist leaders were able to establish Jim Crow laws that enforced a system of racial segregation that denied the equal rights of black citizens. 

In 1963, standing before the Lincoln Memorial and speaking to 250,000 people at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King invoked Lincoln's rhetoric of equal liberty and particularly his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as providing the "standard maxim of free society."  King began his "I Have a Dream" speech by pointing to Lincoln.  (I have written about this speech as showing the superiority of King's rhetoric of equality over George Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as separation.)

"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  . . . But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free."

He then turned to the promise of equal liberty in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

"In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.  When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.  This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the 'unalienable Rights' of 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.'  It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note."

He explained his Dream, repeating "I have a dream" eight times.  He began:

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:  'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

In this way, King advanced the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s as the fulfillment of the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence.

McMAHON'S CRITIQUE

And yet, Darrin McMahon (in his book Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea) has argued that Hunt,  Lincoln, and King were all wrong about the Declaration of Independence as supporting the "inner logic" of equality as a progressively unfolding tendency in history.

Lincoln was wrong, McMahon claims, for two reasons.  First, far from promising equality for all men, the Declaration of Independence was really only a promise of "white freedom," so that black slavery would be preserved (166).  Second, "the Declaration was less a promissory note for the future, or a charter of individual rights, than an intervention in international law that justified secession from the British Empire" (163).

Although McMahon does not mention Stephen Douglas's debates with Lincoln, McMahon's two points here repeat the two claims made by Douglas about the Declaration of Independence.  In defending the Dred Scott decision that blacks could not be citizens, Douglas insisted that the signers of the Declaration "referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared all men to have been created equal," and that the only purpose of the Declaration was "justifying the colonists in the eyes of the civilized world in withdrawing their allegiance from the British crown" (Lincoln 1989, 1:399).

Because he agrees with Douglas, McMahon can say that King was wrong in describing the Declaration's proposition that all men are created equal as a "declaration of intent" and a "promissory note" that would be fulfilled in time.  Actually, McMahon observes, "it is doubtful . . . that the Declaration intended any such thing, and still less that Jefferson's well-worn proposition was meant to portend the coming equality of all" (371-72).

Similarly, McMahon insists that Hunt was wrong about the proposition that all men are created equal having an inherent tendency that would drive revolutionaries to extend equal rights to all human beings.  In Hunt's "inner logic story," "equality is presented in strikingly idealist and teleological terms, as if it were gradually, yet inexorably, spreading across the globe according to some powerful necessity, overcoming barriers one by one" (219).  Clearly, McMahon thinks such a teleological conception of history patently absurd.

But McMahon's arguments for these conclusions are weak.  First of all, his assertion that the Declaration of Independence promises only "white freedom" is not grounded in the text of the Declaration.  The Declaration says that "all men" are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.  It does not say that only "all white men" are created equal.

In some previous posts, I have shown that Jefferson and the other founders always condemned slavery as an unjust violation of natural human liberty, and that slavery must eventually be abolished, although they disagreed about how and when slavery could be abolished without disastrous consequences.  Actually, Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a clause condemning the King for supporting the British slave trade:

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another" (Jefferson 1984, 22).

Jefferson reports that this clause was struck out because some of the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue the foreign importation of slaves, and because some people in the northern colonies had engaged in the commercial shipping of slaves.

Notice that slaves are identified as "men," and thus entitled to the "rights of life and liberty" that belong to "all men."  Notice also the reference to the "market where MEN should be bought & sold."  Since female as well as male slaves were sold on the market, this must imply that "men" is being used in a generic sense to include women as well as men.  If so, then the affirmation in the Declaration that "all men are created equal" must include slaves and women.

Enslaving human beings is said to be a "cruel war against human nature itself."  This appeal to human nature as the moral standard for natural rights appears often in Jefferson's writings, where one repeatedly finds language about "the rights of human nature" and the abolition of slavery as "a complete emancipation of human nature" (1972, 87; 1984, 116).

Some of the most important Black Americans of the founding era recognized that the Declaration's principle of human equality of rights meant that slavery was an unjust violation of natural right.  In one sentence, McMahon identifies the African American preacher Lemuel Haynes as saying this (162).  But there were many other Black Americans who said the same thing (Basker 2023: 132, 152-54, 190-93, 251, 367, 510-511). 

One of those Black Americans directly engaged Jefferson himself and accused him of contradicting the principle of human equality in the Declaration of Independence by holding black slaves.  Benjamin Banneker was an African American mathematician and scientist.  He was the child of a free black mother and a formerly enslaved father from Africa.  On August 19th, 1791, he sent a long letter to Jefferson, who at the time was the Secretary of State in President Washington's cabinet.  He explained to Jefferson that slavery violated "the rights of human nature," because as human beings by nature, black slaves were endowed with all the natural rights to which all human beings are entitled.  Banneker quoted from Jefferson's Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  He charged Jefferson with contradicting this principle of human equality "in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves."

Along with his letter, Banneker enclosed his hand-written manuscript of an astronomic almanac that applied his knowledge of astronomical mathematics to predict the positions of astronomical bodies for the next year.  He presented this to Jefferson as evidence of the intellectual abilities of a black man.

Jefferson responded to Banneker in a letter of August 30, 1791:

"No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talent equal to those of the other colours of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America.  I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit.--I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris, and member of the Philanthropic society because I considered it as a document to which you whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them."

On the same day, he wrote to Condorcet:

"I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the sone of a black man born in Africa, and of a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician.  I procured him to be employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new federal city on the Potomac, and in the intervals of his leisure, which on that work, he made an Almanac for the next year, which he me in his own handwriting, and which I inclose to you.  I have seen very elegant solutions of Geometrical problems by him.  Add to this that he is a very worthy and respectable member of society.  He is a free man.  I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of talents observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any different in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends."

These letters were published shortly after they were written.  Some of Jefferson's Federalist critics saw this as evidence that Jefferson was actually a dangerous abolitionist.

Notice that Jefferson does not dispute anything Banneker said about slavery infringing on "the rights of human nature" and about the natural mental and moral talents of blacks that are suppressed by the "degraded existence" of slavery.

Notice also that Jefferson does not say that "all men are created equal" applies only to white men, which is what McMahon says.  Actually, McMahon does not even mention this correspondence.

Now, it is true that the purpose of Jefferson's Declaration was to declare the independence of the United States as "Free and Independent States" under international law and "Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown."  But this does not mean that the Declaration's affirmation of the natural equality of men as endowed with unalienable rights was not critically important.

McMahon relies on David Armitage's The Declaration of Independence: A Global History for his claim that the Declaration was not "a charter of individual rights" but rather "an intervention in international law that justified secession from the British Empire" (163, 451n.12).  But I have shown that Armitage's denigration of the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration is unjustified.

Armitage observes that the Declaration was a "document of state-making" declaring that these previously dependent colonies in the British Empire were now free and independent states in the international system of states.  "The rest of the Declaration," he explains, "provided only a statement of the abstract principles upon which the assertion of such standing within the international order rested, and an accounting of the grievances that had compelled the United States to assume their independent station among 'the Powers of the Earth'" (17, 66).  Therefore, the abstract principles in the second paragraph (about the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness") were "strictly subordinate to these claims regarding the rights of states, and were taken to be so by contemporaries, when they deigned to notice the assertions of individual rights at all" (17). 

But notice that in the first sentence of the Declaration, it's "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" that "entitle" this "one people" to claim a "separate and equal station" among "the Powers of the Earth."  And so, the immediately following paragraph ("We hold these truths . . .") explains exactly how the Laws of Nature and Nature's God "entitle" them to become free and independent states.  Even Armitage says that their claims to independent statehood "rest upon" these principles, which provide the foundation for their claims.  This denies his attempt to denigrate the second paragraph as unimportant or dispensable, because this paragraph constitutes the indispensable ground for entitling them to independence as states. 

It was that second paragraph of the Declaration that King saw as the "declaration of intent" or "promissory note" that would be fulfilled by achieving the equality of rights for both white and black Americans.  But McMahon objects that the Declaration did not in fact intend this, and "King likely knew that too."  McMahon explains: "To assume that the underlying logic of the country would eventually work itself out--that the founding principle of equality would somehow force Americans into line by dint of its inherent justice and right--was to risk 'complacency' and 'comforting myth.'  King was anything but complacent" (372).

McMahon here is referring to a paragraph in King's essay "A Testament of Hope":

"It is time that we stopped our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.  These fine sentiments are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, but that document was always a declaration of intent rather than of reality.  There were slaves when it was written; there were still slaves when it was adopted; and to this day, black Americans have not life, liberty nor the privilege of pursuing happiness, and millions of poor white Americans are in economic bondage that is scarcely less oppressive.  Americans who genuinely treasure our national ideals, who know they are still elusive dreams for all too many, should welcome the stirring of Negro demands.  They are shattering the complacency that allowed a multitude of social evils to accumulate, Negro agitation is requiring American to reexamine its comforting myths and may yet catalyze the drastic reforms that will save us from social catastrophe" (King 1986: 315).

Contrary to what McMahon suggests, King is not denying that the Declaration was a "declaration of intent" to eventually guarantee equal liberty for all American citizens.  Rather, King's argument is that to fulfill that "declaration of intent," we must give up the "comforting myths" in "our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness," and then we must satisfy the "Negro demands" for "the drastic reforms" required to finally guarantee equal liberty for all.

THE EVOLUTIONARY "END OF HISTORY" IN LOCKEAN EQUAL LIBERTY

But then, we must ask, what explains those "Negro demands" for the "drastic reforms" that would secure the equal liberty promised by the Declaration of Independence?  

One answer, suggested by Christopher Boehm's evolutionary theory of "reverse dominance hierarchy," is that these "Negro demands" express the natural desire of our evolved human nature to be free from exploitative dominance and to exercise the equal liberty to which all human beings are naturally inclined.  That's what John Locke saw in the evolutionary state of nature.

In the first chapter of his book, McMahon adopts Boehm's theory as the best explanation of the original foraging society in which the evolved human nature of egalitarian hierarchy was shaped:

". . . the theory balances nicely the bipolarities of our nature.  For at work in the construction of reverse dominance hierarchies is both something like a will to power and a will to parity, a drive for dominance and a drive for fairness, a desire to rise up the ranks and a resentment of those who do so by bullying others.  The reverse dominance hierarchy accommodates both hierarchical and anti-hierarchical feelings at once.  As one anthropologist's East African informant summed up the logic, 'All men seek to rule, but if they cannot rule, they prefer to remain equal'" (38).

This evolutionary theory of egalitarian hierarchy and the "bipolarities of our nature" runs throughout McMahon's history of equality, either explicitly or implicitly.   In the last paragraph of his book, he reaffirms the primacy of this evolutionary psychology of dominance, deference, and counter-dominance:

"Resisting hierarchy is part of who we are as a species.  But we are also better than any other at building it back up, using the vaunted wisdom of Homo sapiens to construct regimes of hierarchy and domination of a scale and intensity unknown in the animal kingdom.  We will never make them go away entirely, and we must be mindful of how our views of equality can serve to reinforce them.  But we hold it in our power to make them less severe, and more fair, by recalling the vigilance of our ancestors who have fiercely resisted upstarts and fought against the force of things, imagining equality in different figures and forms" (419). 

At the beginning of McMahon's history, we see the equal liberty of our foraging ancestors: "equality, and its early concomitant, freedom, . . . were arguably among the greatest blessings our foraging ancestors knew, even if they didn't know it.  The two went together.  Equality among members of the group prevented the domination of all save the would-be upstarts, forestalling severe constraints on the liberty of others.  Equality served as liberty's foundation and guarantee" (59).

Then, beginning in the Neolithic era, we see the transition into agricultural settlements and urban states in which rulers become despotically dominant and most human beings live as peasants or slaves.  Once this despotic inequality reaches a breaking point, moral and religious reformers begin to denounce the injustice of the elites; and resistance to domination is expressed as peasant revolts.  These are signs of what McMahon calls a "legitimation crisis" (78-79,  82-83, 146-47).

McMahon does not recognize how this idea of "legitimation crisis" points to the Lockean idea that all government depends on the consent of the people, and that even the most powerful tyranny needs at least the acquiescence of the people to dominance.  Sometimes McMahon exaggerates the power of the first "god kings" in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and he ignores the evidence that these states were weakened by resistance and rebellion (60-62).

The most recent stage in this history of egalitarian hierarchy is the emergence of modern liberal democracies over the past three hundred years.  McMahon recognizes these evolutionary stages of history in Peter Turchin's "Z-Curve of Human Egalitarianism" (84-85).   First, human foraging bands moved away from the extreme inequality of ancestral primate groups to the egalitarianism of the foraging order.  Second, human beings moved away from foraging egalitarianism to the extreme inequality of archaic states.  Finally, in recent centuries, human beings have moved to constitutional democracies that approximate the egalitarianism of the foraging order.

McMahon does not notice that this confirms Boehm's claim that modern liberal democracies fulfill the natural human desires for equal liberty as they were shaped in the foraging state of nature (Boehm 1999: 225-258).

Previously, I have written about the similar three-stage evolutionary history of Douglass North and his colleagues: the foraging order, the limited access order, and the open access order.

McMahon does not recognize how this evolutionary history of egalitarian hierarchy culminating in the equal liberty of modern liberal democracy confirms Francis Fukuyama's argument for the "end of history".  History as the human search for the fully satisfying social order might have come to an end, he suggested, because with the defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War Two and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, liberal democracy remains with no serious challenger; and most of the people in the world today agree in principle that liberal democracy is the only fully satisfying social order.  In practice, of course, the ideals of liberal democracy--equal liberty for all--have not been completely attained.  Nevertheless, even if we disagree about how best to achieve these ideals, most of us agree on the ideals themselves.  Never before has this happened, because in all previous history there were fundamental disagreements about what the ideal society would be like.

In one sentence, McMahon speaks about Fukuyama's claim "the 'the end of history' was on the horizon and that it was the 'march of equality' that was taking us there, to a time when political evolution would end in liberal democracy for all" (400).  McMahon argues that this idea has been refuted by the evidence that over the past fifty years there has been a global turn to massive inequality, even in the modern liberal democracies.  He thinks the proof for this is clear in Thomas Piketty's collection and analysis of the data for economic inequality (404-405).

But McMahon makes no attempt to answer the many criticisms of Piketty's handling of his data--criticisms that I have surveyed in some previous posts.

McMahon also says nothing about the fact that countries ranking high on the Human Freedom Index tend to have the lowest Gini coefficient scores.  Liberal social orders have low levels of inequality and high levels of freedom.

Moreover, McMahon ignores the fact that Lockean liberal social orders tend to have Gini coefficients comparable to those for foraging societies.   This suggests that modern Lockean liberal social orders approximate the equal liberty of human beings in the evolutionary state of nature.

I take all of that as evidence that Fukuyama was right about the "end of history": the "inner logic" of equal liberty in evolved human nature has reached its consummation in liberal democracy.

REFERENCES

Basker, James G., ed.  2023.  Black Writers of the Founding Era.  New York: The Library of America.

Boehm, Christopher.  1999.  Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hunt, Lynn.  2007.  Inventing Human Rights: A History.  New York: Norton.

Jefferson, Thomas.  1972.  Notes on the State of Virginia.  Ed. William Peden.  New York: Norton.

Jefferson, Thomas.  1984.  Writings.  Ed. Merrill D. Peterson.  New York: The Library of America.

King, Martin Luther.  1986.  A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches.  Ed. James M. Washington.  New York: HarperCollins.

Lincoln, Abraham.  1989.  Speeches and Writings.  2 volumes.  Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher.  New York: The Library of America.

McMahon, Darrin M.  2023.  Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea.  New York: Basic Books.    

The End of History (Again?). Trump, Putin, and the Triumph of Liberal Democracy

 

The New York Post has been Donald Trump's favorite newspaper.  I am sure this cover and the article by John Podhoretz has added to his outraged reaction to the midterm elections.  As Podhoretz points out, in every case where a Republican won a primary because of Trump's endorsement, that candidate lost.  

Two of the examples are in my home state of Michigan and in my third congressional district.  Tudor Dixon won the Republican primary for governor and John Gibbs won the Republican primary for the third congressional district because they got Trump's endorsement, and he endorsed them because they enthusiastically affirmed Trump's Big Lie about the stolen 2020 election and embraced the overturning of Roe v. Wade by Trump's Supreme Court.  Both lost.  Dixon lost to Gretchen Whitmer, who had become unpopular with many Michiganders, particularly because of her hard lockdown orders during the pandemic.  Gibbs lost to Hillary Scholten, even though Scholten had lost to Peter Meijer by 7% of the vote in 2020.  Trump wanted to punish Meijer for being one of the Republican congressmen who voted to impeach Trump.  This is the first time in 30 years that Grand Rapids has elected a Democrat as its congressional representative.  This is also the first time almost 40 years that all levels of the Michigan state government--the Governor, the top state executives, and both houses of the legislature--are controlled by the Democratic Party. 

The two primary reasons for these two candidates and other Trump-endorsed candidates losing are their denial of a woman's constitutional right to choose an abortion and their endorsement of Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election.  In Michigan and other states, voters have supported referendums in favor of abortion rights.  In all five of the states where there were referendums on abortion rights (Michigan, California, Kentucky, Montana, and Vermont), the voters favored the constitutional right to reproductive freedom.  Voters have also been disgusted by Trump's attack on electoral democracy.  As indicated in opinion polls, these were two of the top issues for many voters.

I had predicted that the overturning of Roe by Trump's Supreme Court would be a disaster for the Republican Party, because this was the first time in the history of the Court that it has overturned a long-settled constitutional liberty.  I had also predicted that American Lockean liberal democracy would prevail over Trump's illiberal populist demagoguery.

This confirms what I have said in support of Francis Fukuyama's announcement in 1989 of the "end of history"--that it has become clear that in the human search for the best social order, liberal democracy has prevailed over all the illiberal and undemocratic alternatives.  In recent years, it has been common for political commentators to say that the popularity of the illiberal nationalism of people like Trump and Vladimir Putin proves that Fukuyama was wrong, because it shows that people around the world are turning against liberal democracy.

Putin has attacked "the liberal idea," and he has praised Trump for turning America against liberalism.  Putin has also defended his invasion of Ukraine as part of his striving for a "Eurasian Empire" that will challenge the Western liberal order.  Eurasian nationalists like Alexander Dugin have provided the philosophic defense of Putin's invasion as part of the global expansion of illiberalism.  But I have argued that Ukraine's victory over the Russian invaders will vindicate the powerful appeal of liberal democracy in the battle against illiberal autocracy.

The events of the last few days have presented new evidence for this.  The Russian military commanders have announced that they are retreating from Kherson--another sign that Ukraine is winning the war.

At the same time, on Monday, some Russian oligarchs publicly bragged about how yes, of course, they have interfered in U.S. elections to help the Trump Republicans, and they have continued to do this in the midterm elections.  But then, yesterday, it was reported that Russian TV commentators are expressing their shock that the Trump Republican "red wave" has become hardly a ripple.

Fukuyama should publish a new article entitled "The End of History--Again."

John Gray's Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Steven Pinker

Perhaps the most vehement attack on Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature is John Gray's review in Prospect magazine.  Gray is just as vehement in his attack on Frank Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order in The New Republic (November 9, 2011).  Both reviews show Gray's angry scorn for liberal capitalist republicanism and his nihilistic disdain for the Enlightenment idea of moral progress.

Gray's commitment to the intellectual tradition of the counter-Enlightenment is evident in his books Straw Dogs and Black Mass, and in an interview with Laurie Taylor.  A. C. Grayling has written a good rebuttal.  (See Peter Lassman, "Pluralism and its Discontents: John Gray's Counter-Enlightenment," in John Horton and Glen Newey, eds., The Political Theory of John Gray [Routledge, 2007].)

Gray dismisses the idea of moral progress in history as showing a utopian blindness to the harsh reality of the human condition, a utopianism that can only be explained as a secularization in the Enlightenment of the Christian faith in salvational history as leading to a final age of redemptive bliss.

Grayling points to the fundamental idea that Gray ignores: "trying to make things better is not the same as believing that they can be made perfect. . . . meliorism is not perfectibilism."  Contrary to what Gray implies, Pinker never claims that human history is headed towards the perfection of perpetual peace--a world without any war or violence.  But Pinker does claim that history shows a general pattern of declining war and violence, although the pattern can be broken by random contingencies that lead to irruptions of horrific killing. 

Another way of saying this is that Gray fails to see the differences between the French Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the British and American Enlightenments, on the other.  Pinker embraces the "tragic vision" of the British and American Enlightenments, in which human progress was constrained by the imperfections of human nature, in contrast to the utopian perfectionism in some strands of the French Enlightenment that explains the excesses of the French Revolution.  Pinker writes: "An acknowledgement of human nature may have been the chief difference between the American revolutionaries and their French confreres, who had the romantic conviction that they were rendering human limitations obsolete.  In 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror, wrote, 'The French people seem to have outstripped the rest of humanity by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species'" (185-86).

A crucial part of Pinker's argument is numerous statistical analyses of historical data showing a decline in violence.  How does Gray respond to this?  He repeatedly speaks about Pinker's "impressive-looking graphs and statistics," his "not always very illuminating statistics," and his "panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts."  That's it.  He breezily dismisses the statistics as "impressive-looking" without ever explaining what's wrong with the statistical arguments.  In fact, he never even mentions any of the details of these arguments, and thus he refuses to specify exactly what he thinks is wrong with Pinker's statistical reasoning.  We can see here the style of writing that Gray prefers--confident assertion unsupported by factual or argumentative reasoning.

Gray might respond to this by insisting that he has demonstrated Pinker's "resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts" by citing the many wars of the past 65 years that are ignored by Pinker.  Against Pinker's claim that the world has enjoyed a "Long Peace" since World War II, during which the Great Powers have not fought one another, Gray writes:

The Korean war, the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, decades of civil war in the Congo and Guatemala, the Six Day War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Iran-Iraq war and the Soviet-Afghan war--these are only some of the armed conflicts through which the great powers pursued their rivalries while avoiding direct war with each other.  When the end of the Cold War removed the Soviet Union from the scene, war did not end.  It continued in the first Gulf war, the Balkan wars, Chechnya, the Iraq war and in Afghanistan and Kashmir, among other conflicts.  Taken together these conflicts add up to a formidable sum of violence.  For Pinker they are minor, peripheral and hardly worth mentioning.

Gray's readers are left with the impression that Pinker says nothing about these 19 wars listed by Gray because for Pinker, they are "hardly worth mentioning."  But any reader who actually looks at Pinker's book will notice that not only does he mention most of these wars, he offers evidence that they conform to the pattern of declining violence.  Consider, for example, the following passage:

To be sure, the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first decade of the 21st century show that the country is far from reluctant to go to war.  But even they are nothing like the wars of the past.  In both conflicts the interstate war phase was quick and (by historical standards) low in battle deaths.  Most of the deaths in Iraq were caused by intercommunal violence in the anarchy that followed, and by 2008 the toll of 4,000 American deaths (compare Vietnam's 58,000) helped elect a president who within two years brought the country's combat mission to an end.  In Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force followed a set of humanitarian protocols during the height of the anti-Taliban bombing campaign in 2008 that Human Rights Watch praised for its "very good record of minimizing harm to civilians." (266)

Pinker's point is that even as the U.S. continues to fight wars, we can see the pattern of declining violence in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they show "an extraordinarily low number of civilian deaths for a major military operation" (267).  If there is a flaw in Pinker's reasoning, Gray has not identified it.

Furthermore, Gray is silent about how Pinker sets the "Long Peace" of the past 65 years at the end of a history of declining violence stretching back to the Stone Age.  It's the expansiveness of this deep historical pattern that makes Pinker's argument so powerful.  Gray does not even acknowledge this, much less refute it.

Oddly enough, Gray does acknowledge--in one sentence--that "no doubt we have become less violent in some ways."  This seems to be an admission that Pinker's argument is at least partially true.  But Gray says nothing more about this. 

Actually, I suspect that Gray has not bothered to read all of Pinker's book.  There is lots of evidence for this in Gray's review.  For example, Gray suggests that Pinker has ignored the scientific evidence showing that "human thought and perception are riddled with bias, inconsistency, and self-deception."  And yet Pinker actually stresses this point as part of his argument, because he explains that one reason why it's hard for us to see the decline in violence over human history is the "availability bias"--the illusion of calculating probabilities based on examples that are most easily recalled.  So we easily remember the dramatic atrocities of the recent past, but we are unaware of the great atrocities of the distant past, so we infer that violence is increasing rather than decreasing, and thus it has become a cliche to say that "the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history," although a statistical analysis of history denies this (189-99).  This is one of the main ideas of Pinker's book.  Gray says nothing about it.

Gray asserts that The Better Angels of Our Nature contradicts Pinker's earlier book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002).  In Blank Slate, Gray says, Pinker's "emphasis on the constancy of human nature limited the scope of future human advance."  By contrast, "the decline of violence posited in The Better Angels of Our Nature is a progressive transformation of precisely the kind his earlier book seemed to preclude."  But as I have pointed out in an earlier post, Pinker's argument in Better Angels is largely an elaboration of what he said in Chapter 17 ("Violence") of The Blank Slate.  There's no contradiction in saying that both violent conflict and peaceful cooperation are rooted in human nature, and so, while violence can never be completely eliminated, we can see moral progress towards declining violence as conditions cultivate the "better angels of our nature."

Another bizarre feature of Gray's review is that he accuses Pinker of not understanding Darwin's evolutionary science.  According to Gray, Darwin teaches us that moral progress is impossible, and thus "if Darwin's theory is even approximately right, there can be no rational basis for expecting any revolution in human behaviour."  Gray does not cite any particular passages in Darwin's writing to support this conclusion.  His only support is a vague assertion that Darwin taught that human beings are just brute animals, and therefore they can never rise above the violence of the animal world.  This ignores Darwin's insistence in the Descent of Man that the cultural evolution of reciprocal cooperation supports moral progress.  So, for instance, he declares in the last chapter: "The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection."

Gray's assertions about Darwin are as ungrounded as those about Pinker.

How Leo Strauss Predicted the Nietzschean Nihilism of Trump's Intellectuals

                                                                          Leo Strauss

Francis Fukuyama has published an essay for Persuasion on "A Chilling Prediction by Leo Strauss."  He reproduces an excerpt from a lecture on "German Nihilism" that Strauss gave in 1941 at the New School for Social Research.  In his prefatory remarks, Fukuyama says that we should find this text "chilling" because Strauss's intellectual analysis of the young German nihilists supporting Hitler's Nazism describes perfectly the thinking of those far-right intellectuals who today are supporting Trump.

Just like the German nihilists described by Strauss, Fukuyama observes, American far-right thinkers today--like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamariu ("Bronze Age Pervert")--want to destroy liberalism because it is morally degrading in promoting the soft hedonism of the open society rather than the hard heroism of the closed society. 

This points to Strauss's primary claim in his lecture:  "German nihilism desires the destruction of modern civilization as far as modern civilization has a moral meaning." He explained: 

It is a moral protest.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Strauss saw that the intellectual godfather of this German nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche--the Nietzsche who scorned the ignoble pleasure-seeking life of the "Last Man" based on the slave morality dictated by the Christian principle of the equal dignity of all human beings, which denied the master morality of the few noble masters fit to rule over the multitude of inferior human beings.  In foreseeing the future emergence of a new nobility of those few superhuman higher men entitled to enslave the many subhuman lower men, Nietzsche has had a seductive appeal to those young nihilists who imagine themselves becoming the masters at the top of the natural order of rank in a new hierarchical closed society at war with its liberal enemies.

As Strauss indicated, what made this intellectual attitude "nihilistic" was that while it was clear about what it denied--liberalism--it was not clear about what it affirmed because its preferred alternative to liberalism was vague.  Since its No was more emphatic than its Yes, it was nihilistic in its passion for destruction--for Nothing--without offering any vision of what exactly would replace liberalism.

Similarly, Fukuyama suggests, today's "post-liberals" have no coherent conception of what should replace liberalism.  On the one hand, Deneen and Vermeule seem to want something like Catholic integralism--a Catholic theocracy enforcing a religious morality.  On the other hand, Yarvin and Alamariu are atheists who want to return to some kind of pagan hierarchy enforced by a strong, even tyrannical, government.  All that the two sides have in common is their hatred of liberalism.

This hatred of liberalism is also what moved the German nihilists to support Nazism.  And, as Fukuyama indicates, Strauss seemed to clearly reject Nazism in his 1941 lecture when he identified it as the "lowest, most provincial, most unenlightened and most dishonorable form" of German nihilism.  But still, Strauss argued, liberals needed to understand the nihilistic roots of illiberal politics in order to see the power of the Nietzschean nihilistic critique of liberalism.  Fukuyama thinks the same is true today in America: liberals need to understand why the American far-right intellectuals hate liberalism and why that hatred of liberalism as rooted in Nietzschean nihilism has such an appeal for many people today--particularly, the young men supporting Trump.  

Actually, Fukuyama does not explicitly mention Trump in his remarks, but the implicit reference to Trump is clear.  It should be noted, however, that while Fukuyama explains the far-right intellectuals supporting Trump as illiberal nihilists, he has explained Trump himself as motivated not by any ideology but by what Nietzsche called ressentiment--"acute resentment of others based on wounded pride, perceived disregard, fears of inadequacy, and a desire to exact revenge on those who had earlier failed to pay adequate respect."  I have explained this resentment as an expression of Trump's chimpanzee grandiose narcissism.  Moreover, Fukuyama has suggested, the core of the MAGA movement is mostly moved not by any ideology--like the illiberal nihilism of the far-right intellectuals--but by the shared resentment of people who think they have not been respected by those who belong to the elites and look down on them with disdain.  This explains why Trump's staunchest supporters will remain loyal to him even when they suffer economically from his policies--such as high tariffs that will harm many of Trump's voters.

I agree with everything Fukuyama says here.  By the way, I also agree with Fukuyama's defense of liberalism as first announced in his 1989 "End of History?" article.  

But I do think Fukuyama misses three crucial flaws in Strauss's reasoning that should come out of a careful reading of his "German Nihilism" lecture that are pertinent to our understanding of, and our response to, both German and American nihilism.  

First, Fukuyama does not notice Strauss's quiet endorsement of the "young nihilists" that Will Altman and others have identified as evidence that Strauss was attracted to the nihilism of the Nazis.  

Second, Fukuyama also does not notice that in naming Nietzsche as the godfather of illiberal nihilism, Strauss failed to recognize Nietzsche's support for liberalism in the writings of his middle period (particularly, Human, All Too Human).  

Third, Strauss had also failed to see how philosophic proponents of liberalism like John Locke and Adam Smith had shown that liberalism cultivates the moral and intellectual virtues, which refutes the charge of the illiberal nihilists that liberalism must be ignoble and degrading.

Since I have previously elaborated each of these points, I will only briefly summarize them here with links to previous posts and references to the 4th edition of Political Questions (PQ4).

STRAUSS'S NAZISM?

Fukuyama's excerpt from "German Nihilism" does not include this passage:

I have tried to circumscribe the intellectual and moral situation in which a nihilism emerged which was not in all cases base in its origin.  Moreover, I take it for granted that not everything to which the young nihilists objected was unobjectionable, and that not every writer or speaker whom they despised, was respectable. . . . Let us then not hesitate to look for one moment at the phenomenon which I called nihilism, from the point of view of the nihilists. . . . A new reality is in the making; it is transforming the whole world; in the meantime there is: nothing, but--a fertile nothing.

Notice that in taking "the point of view of the nihilists," Strauss actually goes a long way towards endorsing their position: some (most?) of that to which the nihilists objected really was objectionable, and some (most?) of the writers and speakers whom they despised really were despicable.  This is one piece of evidence cited by Will Altman for his provocative claim that Strauss supported Nazi nihilism in its attack on liberalism (PQ4, 491-99).

In "German Nihilism," Strauss took "the point of view of the nihilists" in explaining their argument that an illiberal "closed society" was ennobling, while a liberal "open society" was degrading.  Any reader of Strauss will know that he often embraced this idea that every healthy society--and particularly, the premodern societies like Athens and Sparta--was a closed society as opposed to the modern open societies of liberalism that inevitably became corrupt.  Actually, as I have argued, Athens was a much more open and liberal society than Strauss was willing to admit--that's why the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle could flourish in Athens but not in Sparta.

Strauss did not allow "German Nihilism" to be published while he was alive.  It was not published until 1999 (in Interpretation), which was 26 years after his death in 1973.  Was this because he feared that it was too open in suggesting his sympathy for German nihilism?

Similarly, Strauss's praise of Martin Heidegger in "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism" was not published until 1989 (in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism), 16 years after his death.  Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933.  He offered vigorous philosophic defenses of Hitler and the Nazi Party.  And he never apologized for his support of the Nazis--right up to his death in 1976.

Strauss had been a student of Heidegger, and he praised Heidegger as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century.  In "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," he left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger's Nazi attack on liberalism:

All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.

Notice how emphatic Strauss is in using the word "I" here.  He once explained that one form of esoteric writing was to use the word "we" to seemingly endorse a common opinion, rather than saying "I," which suggested that one was truly endorsing that opinion. 

This is part of the evidence supporting Altman's argument that Strauss saw himself as the culmination of the "Third Wave of Modernity" that overthrew liberalism--first Nietzsche, then Heidegger, and finally Strauss.

Although I am not fully persuaded by Altman, I am persuaded that he has proven that Strauss often implied some endorsement of the Nazi attack on liberalism, and he never publicly and emphatically rejected Nazi nihilism and affirmed liberalism--as did some of his friends like Hans Jonas.  That was a moral and intellectual failure on the part of Strauss. 

NIETZSCHE'S DARWINIAN LIBERALISM

Another of Strauss's failures was in saying that Nietzsche initiated the Third Wave of Modernity that would lead to the illiberal nihilism of Nazism.  Although this might be true for the early and late writings of Nietzsche that were so often praised by the Nazis, it is not true for the writings of the middle period, and particularly Human, All Too Human.

In this book, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian liberalism that rejected many of the main ideas of his later writing--such as the celebration of the Ubermensch (the Superman or Overman), which became a theme for the Nazis.  

One can make a good case (as Bruce Detwiler does) for "Dionysian aristocratic radicalism" as the political teaching of Nietzsche in his early and late writings.  But one also needs to recognize that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy rooted in Darwinian evolution in the writings of his middle period contradicts what he says in his other writings.  Then, if one compares those two teachings, one can make a good argument that Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is morally and intellectually superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism (PQ4, 457-60).  This is Nietzsche's defense of liberalism against the attack of the German nihilists.

Strauss failed to see this.

LOCKE AND SMITH ON LIBERAL VIRTUES

Strauss also failed to see how Locke and Smith had made powerful arguments for liberalism's moral and intellectual virtues.  One of Strauss's most influential pieces of writing--particularly among the far-right intellectual critics of liberalism--is his interpretation of Locke in Natural Right and History, which presents Lockean liberalism as promoting a vulgar and soul-deadening soft hedonism, which Strauss famously called "a joyless quest for joy."  This is the Locke that "post-liberals" like Patrick Deneen have scorned.

But as I have argued, this ignores much of what Locke wrote about how a free society secures the liberty that allows for the cultivation of moral and intellectual excellence--including the freedom to live the philosophic life (for people like Strauss!) (PQ4, 489-91).  So, while critics of liberalism like Deneen insist that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires," he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78).  Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110). 

Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe.  Deneen and Strauss are silent about all of this.

They are also silent about Smith's argument about how a liberal society--"allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice"--promotes the moral and intellectual virtues.  Strauss said almost nothing about Smith, but Strauss's thinking about liberal political philosophy shaped the interpretation of Smith developed by Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's student and colleague.  Cropsey claimed that in Smith's "commercial society," commerce takes the place of virtue.  But as I have indicated, Cropsey ignored or played down everything Smith said--particularly, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments--about how the moral and intellectual virtues are cultivated in a free society (PQ4, 340-48).

Moreover, Cropsey was completely silent about how Charles Darwin saw that Smith's moral philosophy was confirmed by his scientific theory of moral evolution, and how this has been deepened by the evolutionary studies of morality over the 150 years since Darwin's Descent of Man (PQ4, 316-28).

Strauss and the Straussians have failed to see how a careful reading of Nietzsche, Locke, and Smith can reveal the nobility of liberalism in securing the liberty that makes virtue possible, thus refuting the moral critique of liberalism by the illiberal nihilists, including those today who try to provide the intellectual justification for Trump's illiberalism.