Some thoughts on Ukraine and the End of History
As Russia breaks the post-Cold War peace and moves toward decimating Ukraine, we are forced to ask, once again, whether the lights are going out all over Europe. It is by no means certain that this is the case. The war may remain limited, and Vladimir Putin, as unhinged as he appears to have become, may not choose to challenge NATO directly and thus create a genuine threat to the regime he has so painstakingly built over decades.
One thing, however, is certain: the lights have gone out on the End of History. This theory, famously proffered by the American intellectual Francis Fukuyama in 1989, greeted the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration of a new world order with the assertion that mankind’s political development — as expressed by Hegel and other modern philosophers — had come to an end. The liberal democratic welfare state had triumphed, it was the best humanity was ever going to do, and the great political conflicts were now over for good. The most likely state of mankind in the future, Fukuyama speculated, was boredom.
We now know that the world is, unfortunately, no longer boring. Nonetheless, it is worth looking back at one of the more cogent and early refutations of the End of History theory, and ponder what we ought to do about the End of the End of History, which is now upon us in the form of the first major war in Europe since World War II.
Even before the Soviet Union officially dissolved in 1991, the British skeptic philosopher John Gray asserted:
All the evidence suggests that we are now moving back into an epoch that is classically historical, and not forward into the empty, hallucinatory post-historical era projected in Fukuyama’s article. Ours is an era in which political ideology, liberal as much as Marxist, has a rapidly dwindling leverage on events, and more ancient, more primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian, are contesting with each other. In retrospect, it may well appear that it was the static, polarized period of ideology, the period between the end of the First World War and the present, that was the aberration.
If the Soviet Union does indeed fall apart, that beneficent catastrophe will not inaugurate a new era of post-historical harmony, but instead a return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great-power rivalries, secret diplomacies and irredentist claims and wars. The vision of perpetual peace among liberal states, which has haunted Western thought at least since it was given systematic formulation by Immanuel Kant, will soon be seen for what it always was — a mirage that serves only to distract us from the real business of statesmanship in a permanently intractable and anarchic world.
Gray and the many others who criticized Fukuyama now appear to be thoroughly vindicated, even more so than after 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror — which may be seen in the future as little more than a brief aberration before the real trouble got started.
But perhaps the most important aspect of Gray’s criticism is a simple one: it was not simply that history would eventually reassert itself after the declaration of its “end,” but that history had never ended in the first place. The West, in other words, was living in a world that did not, in fact, exist. All the ancient forces of “great-power rivalries,” “irredentist claims,” and above all war, were already at work, festering beneath the euphoria of the moment, and the West’s refusal to acknowledge them was making things a great deal worse — even if few recognized it at the time.
This would appear to have been borne out in recent days, especially after Putin’s grievance-laden and slightly deranged speech just before the invasion. Putin made it quite clear that his grievances are not new. They went back to the very moment of the fall of the Soviet Union, which he has previously described as a “catastrophe.” All aspects of the tyrant’s case for war trace to the decisions made by the West in that euphoric moment of triumph — most especially the expansion of the EU and NATO.
And, in many ways, Putin’s grievances go back much further than that. Putin is not a neo-communist who wants to bring back the Soviet Union. He is a Russian imperialist of the type that has existed for centuries. He sees rule over Eastern Europe and the national greatness it brings as Russia’s birthright, and he intends to reclaim it. What he wants is the imperial glory despots have coveted since the dawn of civilization. History, in other words, millennia of history, did not end — in fact, it remained where it always has been, at the helm of events, and even in the moment it seemed to have ended, it was sowing the seeds of our current crisis.
This is not a happy prospect to contemplate. History is, in many ways, a veil of tears, and the necessity of admitting, not its return, but its endlessness, is painful. This is especially the case for Western liberals and most of all American liberals, who have always harbored — born perhaps of their Protestant patrimony — a kind of political messianism that envisions a redeemed world as the endgame of all their efforts. The reality that the world is probably irredeemable is not simply unappealing to them, but in many ways evil and even blasphemous — a submission to a fallen world, a loss of faith, a violation of the will of God.
But Fukuyama’s failure and Gray’s criticism may allow us to contemplate a way forward. If Gray is right that we not only find ourselves in but have always lived in a “permanently intractable and anarchic world,” then we must ask what this demands of us. The demand, of course, is to simply submit to reality, because as Richard Feynman put it, “Nature cannot be fooled.” We ought to summon up the strength to perceive the world as it is, and to admit that this world is the only world we have and we all have to live in it. We have no choice. The question then becomes how we ought to live in it.
A possible answer may be found in another subject on which Gray has extensively written, which is the idea of “incommensurable values.” That is, there are a diversity of value systems in the world, and they cannot be measured against each other on the basis of a universal standard. Western liberals have long presumed — for centuries, in fact — that liberalism constitutes such a universal standard, and indeed, this is in many ways the basis of Fukuyama’s unfortunate thesis. In our current predicament, the incommensurable values are obvious: To Putin, Russian imperial greatness is the highest value, whereas for Americans, the cultivation of freedom is the highest value. We may subjectively or even objectively decide that the American value system is superior, but the pointlessness of attempting to convince Putin of this should be obvious.
The way forward, then, may be to accept that there are such things as incommensurable values, and it is, at best, futile to deny it. Worse still, denying it can be profoundly damaging, as it causes us to live in an illusory world, out of sync with reality, and as a result we anticipate results that will never happen and make mistakes that can be disastrous. What is demanded, perhaps, is a kind of political modesty.
This does not mean that those of us who believe in liberal democracy should in any way give up on our own values. What we should do, it seems to me, is to adopt a kind of Stoicism. The basis of ancient Stoicism was the idea that one should live according to nature, but at the same time cultivate virtue and seek to live a virtuous life. The imperative for the West in the face of the current crisis may be to cultivate our own virtues and our own “incommensurable” values, to treasure those values as we have not in recent years, and above all to be proud of our values and proud of ourselves and our nations for cultivating them.
Precisely how to go about this cultivation, and how we should act in the face of other values that are incommensurable with ours, is an open question. But it seems that, with the revelation that history not only has not ended, but in fact has always been there, it is long past time to begin the attempt to find an answer.
Photo: kremlin.ru.