Ironclad wrote:Good morning

jamest wrote:

SafeAsMilk wrote:Put away the booze and go to bed, jamest. Spend your time being with and loving your family instead of posting this meaningless gibberish that doesn't tell anyone anything and serves no clear purpose except to stroke your ego.

I don't bend into the wind, especially farts.

Jamest wrote:The final social revolution will/must obviously, by logical default, encompass all minds and be thus irreversible. Hence, the final social revolution = a signal of the end of competing finite mindsets.

In February, 1989, ...

Fukuyama’s argument was that, with the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, the last ideological alternative to liberalism had been eliminated. Fascism had been killed off in the Second World War, and now Communism was imploding. In states, like China, that called themselves Communist, political and economic reforms were heading in the direction of a liberal order.

So, if you imagined history as the process by which liberal institutions—representative government, free markets, and consumerist culture—become universal, it might be possible to say that history had reached its goal. Stuff would still happen, obviously, and smaller states could be expected to experience ethnic and religious tensions and become home to illiberal ideas. But “it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso,” Fukuyama explained, “for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind.”

[snip]

Twenty-nine years later, it seems that the realists haven’t gone anywhere, and that history has a few more tricks up its sleeve. It turns out that liberal democracy and free trade may actually be rather fragile achievements. (Consumerism appears safe for now.) There is something out there that doesn’t like liberalism, and is making trouble for the survival of its institutions.

Fukuyama thinks he knows what that something is, and his answer is summed up in the title of his new book, “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The demand for recognition, Fukuyama says, is the “master concept” that explains all the contemporary dissatisfactions with the global liberal order: Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Xi Jinping, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, gay marriage, isis, Brexit, resurgent European nationalisms, anti-immigration political movements, campus identity politics, and the election of Donald Trump. It also explains the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Chinese Communism, the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, multiculturalism, and the thought of Luther, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Simone de Beauvoir. Oh, and the whole business begins with Plato’s Republic. Fukuyama covers all of this in less than two hundred pages. How does he do it?

Not well. Some of the problem comes from misunderstanding figures like Beauvoir and Freud; some comes from reducing the work of complex writers like Rousseau and Nietzsche to a single philosophical bullet point. A lot comes from the astonishingly blasé assumption—which was also the astonishingly blasé assumption of “The End of History?”—that Western thought is universal thought.

[snip]

jamest wrote:The final social revolution will/must obviously, by logical default, encompass all minds and be thus irreversible. Hence, the final social revolution = a signal of the end of competing finite mindsets.

PS:

jamest wrote:...for those of us dumb enough to ignore the bigger picture, solace can be found in thumbs-ups...

jamest wrote:I have to confess that few people love me, either here or elsewhere, but I am not concerned.

As usual, the irony and blatant oxymoronic nature of these statements made me laugh out loud. So I give the OP a thumbs up.

Spinozasgalt wrote:I'm a Spinning Jenny!

Spinozasgalt wrote:I'm a Spinning Jenny!

jamest wrote:I have to confess that few people love me, either here or elsewhere, but I am not concerned.

Fallible wrote:

Spinozasgalt wrote:I'm a Spinning Jenny!

I don't - mean to - brag, but I be like - 'put it - in the - bag'. When you see them racks, they be stacked up like my ass, yeah.