In 1992, Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argued that with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, history as a conflict between opposing socio-economic and political paradigms was over. Free market democracy had won out.
Fukuyama’s thesis did not fare particularly well. What appears to have bothered his first critics was the conclusion that in a post-historical world there would be nobody left to fight. Samuel P. Huntingdon, for example, argued in The Clash of Civilizations (1993) that the conclusion of the Communism/Capitalism debate merely left the stage of history open for the return of a far more primal conflict between East and West, Muslim and Christian. In light of 9/11 and its aftermath, to many observers Huntingdon’s thesis would appear to have proved correct, and at the very least still corresponds broadly to the dominant tenor of the western political imagination. Fukuyama and Huntingdon have been interpreted as representatives of two opposing trends in politics at the turn of the century: a naive and misguided optimism on the one hand, and a grim realism on the other.
Don’t worry, dear reader, this essay is not going to be an in depth comparison of their respective arguments. Before we can judge an argument (facts, figures, proposed relationships of causality, interpretations) we first need to check the premise of the argument. If this is faulty, then none of the rest matters, and we may safely stop reading. Fukuyama and Huntingdon share the same faulty premise: that history is a horizontal conflict between competing ideologies, be they economic, political, religious or otherwise. That such conflict exists and has always existed across space and time is undoubted. But this horizontal axis of conflict between what we may term ideological communities is secondary to the vertical axis within those communities: the axis of oppression.
An ideological community is a hierarchical and pyramidal polity in which those at the top oppress and feed off of those at the bottom. Ideological communities are thus symbiotes (an organism made up of two or more organisms), and may take many forms: nations, religions, nuclear families, corporations, economic communities, etc. The glue that holds the pyramidal structure together and which ensures a flow of wealth from the bottom to the top may be termed an ideology: a story told by the top about itself and to the bottom. (In a sense, we might say that an ideology is the perversion of a philosophy for the purpose of extractive oppression.) The fact of these symbiotes - their emergence, their endurance - is the primordial fact of history. Conflict between symbiotes as and when they encounter one another is a secondary phenomenon.
Only when societies cease to be hierarchical - that is, when the extractive, pyramidal symbiote is replaced by something centerless and vector-less, like a rhizome - can we start to talk about the end of history as we have known it. This has happened from time to time over the centuries. The dynamic of commoning which characterises the rhizomatic has tended however to be met with fierce resistance by the top of the given symbiote in which it emerges, being identified by that top group quite rightly as a threat to its comfortable and unearned dominance.
The history of the later twentieth century in the West reveals many instances of rhizomatic commoning within the bloated symbiote of free market capitalism. For example, the fact that so many average folk became cultural leaders in all the arts - from music and the plastic arts to the intellectual and scientific arts of academia and science - in the twentieth century and in such numbers is historically pretty unprecedented. There was in the twentieth century a kind of popular culture never seen before, and what we’re seeing now is it being enclosed and being sold back to us.
The assault on knowledge which we see both in the proprietary mechanization of our educational institutions, and in the dismantling, enclosure, and strip-mining of our cumulative cultural archive (painstakingly assembled over decades if not centuries) is a breaking of the bridges between us and a vision of a truly horizontal history briefly attained for some people for some years in the late twentieth-century West.
It also, arguably, represents the emergence of a new symbiote, a new player on the field of history. We are all being engulfed within its pyramidal structure, and bathed in its techno-messianic ideology. Those at the top no longer want our muscle power, as the Industrialists did 200 years ago, nor do they want our killing and dying power, as did the Imperialists of 150 years ago. They want our brainpower. By reducing our brainpower to a steady state of bare attention, they want to syphon it all away and into their beloved computers.
We must, all of us, pay attention - and above all, to whom and for what we are paying it.
