Skip to main content

The End of History

Geo-Cosmos in the National Museum of Emerging Science & Innovation (Miraikan) in Tokyo

Francis Fukuyama wrote a famous book in the early 1990's that argued capitalism had won. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, capitalism did win - and its victory precipitated the end of history.

Liberal democracy had proven itself the ultimate form of government and a repudiation of Karl Marx's assertion that communism would be that governance system claiming the ultimate position.

For the Gen Y (and younger) generation who did not experience the anxieties of the Cold War, the debates around governance systems are somewhat arcane, replaced by more current worries related to social media and acceptance of various cultural and religious beliefs.

It seems that every generation carries the full potency of their history with them, unique to their times. The Baby Boomer generation, for instance, would know more about the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement and the volatility of a decade of assassinations from JFK to MLK to Malcolm X to RFK. The Greatest Generation would know more about the horrors of war and the want for uneasy peace and prosperity of post-WWII and so on.

I reflected on this in relation to the temporal nature of our lifetimes and the unique circumstances and events that shape what we know. Within our own generations, we directly experience so many things that other generations will not quite know as we do, same as the experiences they know more directly than are only notional for ourselves.

In other words, Mr. Fukuyama was on to something profound, this idea of the end of history. It just had less to do with governance systems and more with his own personal experiences than he might have appreciated.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...