Being Fukuyama’s Sunday School Teacher or
“The Never-ending End of History”
Many decades ago, I was Francis Fukuyama’s Sunday School teacher. This is not important because of what was taught or learned then, but because of where we both were at that time. It was at the Judson Memorial Church in 1961 on the north side of the Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, New York City.
I was a twenty-five-year-old newly arrived student at Union Seminary coming to New York City on a Rockefeller Fellowship to explore professional life as a clergy. Francis, born in 1952, would have been nine years old by then. He was there as the son of a professional family of Japanese Americans whose father, Yoshio, was a church bureaucrat. Yosh worked for the Department of Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ. This mainline Protestant agency supported the revival of this congregation for a strategic social witness in this city.
Under the crew-cut pastoring of the Rev. Howard Moddy, Marine veteran of the island-hopping battles of WWII, it became a seedbed of Reform Democrat politics, youth gang social work, and cultural avant-garde art initiatives. Since my previous education had been at Baylor and Iowa universities majoring in theatre, Howard assigned me to work with the Rev. Al Carmines newly appointed to create The Judson Poets Theatre as an outreach to the theatre community. This theatre produced Joel Oppenheimer’s The Great American Desert in the choir loft as the first offering — with what would become the sotto voce motto — “No Censorship.” Later Rosalyn Drexler and Irene Fornes offered in-your-face sexual and sacrilegious plays that almost cost this church its American Baptist status.
Al would discover a way with composing music fitting for Gertrude Stein’s words when turned into lyrics with What’s Happening. Yvonne Rainer danced movement into what became the Judson Dance Theatre. By 1964 this theatre won five Obie Awards as a leading Off-Off Broadway house. Arts flowed through this church onto the streets changing it and the larger Village scene.
By 1969 the Fukuyamas were off to Penn State where his father took a teaching appointment and where high school finished, Francis was off to Cornell, then Paris, and finally back to Harvard to finish with a Ph.D. in political science. Much like his father his career would first flourish as a bureaucrat with the Rand Corporation and the State Department, until he pronounced “The End of History” for The National Interest in 1989.
Does that seem a bit of a jump in time and in topic? Not at All. That essay was an “Off-Off Broadway” hit upsetting the political science world much like Judson’s theatres twenty years earlier had in the Village. Even the ambivalence that its policy-making readers made of the title by questioning whether Fukuyama meant that no more politically significant ‘history’ was to happen at all. No, instead, as he insisted in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, it was the ‘End-as-the-Goal’ or change of the world’s political and economic system. Liberal Democracy had won the battle for the future.
In his two most recent books, Identity and Liberalism and its Discontents, he expands his analysis of why only the political and economic organization of nation-states modeled after the European Union, Great Britain, and specifically the United States have met the challenge of proving his “the end of history” thesis. They are thriving even as challenged internally by populous movements and externally by authoritarian regimes in Russia, Iran, and especially China.
Practical freedoms and social success for citizens in economic and political institutions are robust today only where Classic Liberalism lives. In this enthusiastic estimate he does note the specific challenge of the increasing diversity of the people who inhabit these nations. After listing the four necessary forms of political economy they must maintain he ends in the second book with a call for following Ancient Greece’s political wisdom of Moderation.
Nevertheless, if we back track to his earlier work on Identity, there his discussion of Democracy is rooted in another Platonic analysis of citizenship with its threefold description of logos, eros, and thymos — i.e., reason, love, and recognition. It is in the third motive, thymos, where he places the emotional engine for a successful democracy. “Democracies will not survive if citizens are not in some measure irrationally attached to the ideas of constitutional government and human equality through feelings of pride and patriotism.” (Identity,131) He concludes that individuals in a democracy must receive praise-worthy respect for their dutiful public participation.
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Plato placed his hope in the first, logos, reasoning to lead the other two motives for a successful political order — but his ideal is not a democracy, rather a monarchy led by a philosopher. Fukuyama implicitly acknowledges this difference in his choice of the need for “irrationally attached. . . feelings of pride and patriotism.” So, he combines two ideas, Athenian moderation, and irrational respect as his solution to how you manage democratic diversity in today’s nation-states.
In my view what is missing is the third motive Plato discussed — eros, love, desire, passion, a bonding fellow-feeling that we are all in this together. This is what authoritarian states understand and insist upon through micro-controlling the public reality that all their citizens are absorbed into daily. America and other democracies are all caught up today in the social media whirlpool experiencing their political life through means whose goals are ‘decided elsewhere’ by the technological elite few.
Where is the shared ‘common bond’ for democratic diversity for unifying the citizenship to be found? Fukuyama offers none. He hopes somehow it will be found but by ignoring the third motive he leaves the “heart of the matter” at best ill-defined. Why? Is his fear the enforced uniformity the authoritarians do? Yet only movements of popular enthusiasms have ever provided this third ‘power rail’ of political life. In Classical Liberalism this is always feared as ‘irrational,” to be tolerated but not encouraged socially or politically. This is where the polis becomes the demagogue’s mob.
In the 1960s this passionate enthusiasm was first expressed in the streets, marching for Civil Rights. Those gains were legalized by President Johnson as recompense for JFK’s killing in Dallas. Next came the New Left student revolutions from 1964 through 1970 shutting down campuses from the West to the East coasts. Their Free Speech demands for students and more participatory democracy in “multi-versity” governance was raucous but right.
Later those students and their faculty allies led Anti-Vietnam War Teach-ins beyond the regular curriculum to enlighten all citizens by their knowledge of what was happening. These rebellions were strangled by acts of accepted political violence as Major Daley’s Police rioted at the Chicago Convention and when New York City’s Finest clubbed the Student Rebellion at Columbia.
To complete the violent cultural coup against the Sixties there were assassinations of King and of Kennedy by August of 1968, and in November the election of Nixon for “the return of normalcy.” This normality would include the secret bombing of Hanoi, the Enemies List of electoral opponent targets, and the bungled Watergate burglary.
Such political violence pushed the most desperately radical young underground where the Weathermen self-emolliated in a Village townhouse explosion. The ferocity of “the return to normalcy” came in 1970 when four students were mowed down by the Ohio National Guard on the green hills of Kent State. This accepted reign of terror against the young would not end until 1974 with Nixon was forced to flee his presidency with a hastily granted pardon for all this “normalcy” from the unelected President Gerald Ford.
“Normalcy” of this kind shows one version of the “irrational” basis for democracy Fukuyama foresees and fears. Political passions must be tempered by the third force — love — fellow-feeling for others — compassion — empathy. It is not the irrational, but is the nonrational, imaginative in its vision with insight into how we are all in this polity together. It takes more that respect for differences, it takes “the pursuit of happiness” celebration of them in a pluralistic democracy.
Democracy must find a means for living with a diversity of interests whether expressed in the voting booth or in the street marches. It is in the third political motive, eros, where the nonrational energies emerge through metaphors — “Black Lives Matter,” or “Take Back Our Streets,” or even the fearful, “You will not Replace Us.” All, however, are rooted in the morality, the ethical framework, the ground of each one’s “lived experience.” Is this “rational, irrational or nonrational?” It just is. Genuine democracy must reckon with these “People.”
Democracy can only survive and even prosper if all three of the motives the Athenians experienced in their politics — logos, eros, & thymos — public reasoning, empathetic enthusiasms, and shared respect for all are lively presences. Humane political leaders must learn to play with improvised skill at the timing and on the emphasis of which to enact in a authentic democracy. None can be ignored, nor suppressed, nor leveraged endlessly without expressing the others in the rhythmical dance of discussion and debate, marching and voting, metaphors and mottos, all representing the diversity that underlies the turbulent heart of our species.
Aristotle wanted us to be rational animals, but even he when he looked at tragedy recognized all three motives were at play in our actions. Fukuyama in his recent works believes the balance will be restored if ‘respect’ is offered to all the political players. Let’s add the other, empathic enthusiasms, passionate loving, to achieve the full mix of what is at play in a democracy.
This is what the Judson Church found the arts expressing in the Sixties. The messy metaphoric mix of collaborations across all categories that enliven our communal lives together. As we learned from the horrors of the Holocaust of World War II, there is no “Final Solution.” For our species this continuing threefold dance of democracy where our reasoning with, our rejoicing in, and our respecting of others is “the Never-ending End of History.”
