My Take | Why won’t Fukuyama shut up about ‘the end of history’?
- A dodgy philosophical and religious concept has again been ideologically exploited to justify and promote American supremacy
“Liberal democracy – with its subordination of such substantive matters as equality, freedom, and general welfare to procedural issues, elections, and norms – has turned out to be the best way of concentrating oligarchic power.” – Pankaj Mishra, Indian essayist
In the cult horror movie Event Horizon, a rescue mission is dispatched to retrieve a spacecraft that they will subsequently learn has travelled through a worm hole to hell and back. The ill-fated crew end up raping, torturing and tearing each other into bits. The doomed captain somehow knows Latin – or perhaps Satan made sure everyone spoke it – and is recorded saying, “Libera me”.
That caught my attention because it was the title of one of my favourite arias, from Gabriel Faure’s Requiem: “Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death/on that terrible day/When the skies and the earth shake/As you’ll come to judge the world by fire.
“Terrified, terrified I have become/and I fear, as the tremor will come/and the rage/That day, the day of rage/of danger and misery/That day, great and bitter, very bitter day.”
Early Christians thought judgment day was coming, any day now. Call it end time, doomsday, the apocalypse or Armageddon, the point is that when the time comes, everyone will know. After all, you are about to be sent to heaven, or hell. You won’t need some theologians to tell you, or have them debate among themselves: “Gee whizz, do you think we are at the end of days?”
So I imagine if we really are at the end of history, which is clearly a secular version of Christian eschatology, we would know it. We wouldn’t need Francis Fukuyama, the American political scientist, to tell us, and have others, including yours truly here, to debate if he’s right or not.