Philo-aesthetic digest 7/24

Does it matter that this waste of time is what makes a life for you?

I’ve been a little derelict in keeping up with these digests, largely because my reading over the last two months has mostly been very boring. Nobody signed up to this newsletter to read the New England Review of Straussian and half-read(John Ganz’s new book is quite good but I’m still not done with it) American history books! I’ll try to be a little faster next time.

Probably the end of something or other: some preliminary musings on Francis Fukuyama

I recently read in full (after many years of familiarity with its 1989 parent essay and various excerpts of the book itself) Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History & the Last Man. This is one of those books that is frequently mocked without actually being read, dismissed as a dated panglossian vision of an endless capitalist paradise, disproven a hundred times over by events of the last twenty-three years.¹ I maybe get why you’d think that- Fukuyama is a very dry prose stylist, is often making triumphalist asides along the lines of “and this is why the Left failed” and his argument rests heavily on continental philosophy, particularly the system of a Russian-French philosopher the average reader has never heard of (it doesn’t help that the book also relies in some ways on Strauss’s tripartite model of modernity) but all the same to do so strikes me as an error.² Techno-optimism and end-Cold War triumphalism aside this an insightful and at times rather gloomy meditation on why our system has succeeded, and the faults inherent to it. One might not be entirely with him when he talks about the illegitimacy of left regimes (I am ambivalent) or one may roll their eyes (I did) when he repeats Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s line about how our despotic allies are better than those filthy, Godless commies, but the argument about the mechanism of desire does I think help to explain some the difficulties the Marxist-Leninist world ran into from the 1970s on.

The most engaging parts of the book are probably the middle chapters where he slightly revises Kojève’s Hegel, and the final section in which he offers a meditation on the flaws of liberal democracy through the Last Man of Nietzche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Kojève’s idea that at the end of history man will become re-animalized. There are some interesting hints at possible solutions, ways to balance thymos within a liberal society and the like.

While we do not, for now, have to share Nietzsche's hatred of liberal democracy, we can make use of his insights concerning the uneasy relationship between democracy and the desire for recognition. That is, to the extent that liberal democracy is successful at purging megalothymia from life and substituting for it rational consumption, we will become last men. But human beings will rebel at this thought. That is, they will rebel at the idea of being undifferentiated members of a universal and homogeneous state, each the same as the other no matter where on the globe one goes.

They will want to be citizens rather than bourgeois, finding the life of masterless slavery-the life of rational consumption-in the end, boring. They will want to have ideals by which to live and die, even if the largest ideals have been substantively realized here on earth, and they will want to risk their lives even if the international state system has succeeded in abolishing the possibility of war. This is the "contradiction" that liberal democracy has not yet solved.

For the most part I find Fukuyama’s thesis convincing or at least unfalsifiable, with a few caveats about his neoconservatism seemingly occluding the possibility that there might be some structural, material rather than simply Nietzchean-philosophical deficits to liberal capitalist civilization.³ On the other hand I also can’t deny that he’s onto something in those Kojèvian-Nietzchean terms-many of the central problems of the way our society has developed since 1993 are clearly issues of recognition. That those who have attained some measure of success without recognition have become increasingly resentful, and increasingly unified, for one. I’m not sure this has a necessary political value, although it does seem to reside primarily on the right at the moment. My half-baked inclination is that the wiping out of the cultural middle has something to do with this, but I may of course be wrong, pushing my own hobby horses on you. I’m reading Liberalism and Its Discontents now, although the real Fukuyama heads tell me that his two volume Political Order books are the real must-read. We’ll see!

Comic books: Morrison’s New X-Men, Moore’s From Hell (spoilers)

I reread the ending of Morrison’s New X-men a few weeks back and it reminded me why a bunch of this run has wound up being mostly ignored, while on the other hand it all did come together a little better than I remembered the first time around. For me this is probably the most uneven of Morrison’s early major works, a complicated mixed bag that frustrates and excites throughout its many pages. On one level this is with The Invisibles by far the most prophetic of Morrison’s various visions, while on another mutant hand the anxiety of influence about the Chris Claremont era of the comic which haunts their Doom Patrol run is in full, catastrophic display. The decision for Xorn to have been Magneto all the time and much of what follows feels a bit hollow and sticking it to fans of the status quo, even if I do actually like the meltdown and resolution for the character, and the art is uneven, as is so often the case with projects like this which lack a consistent artist.

Morrison is on the whole I think better suited for DC’s stable of characters, being somewhat retrained in their extremity by the more mythic style of characterization, but I will admit that this made me curious about what the results of him writing for let’s say Spider-Man would have been. I’m more of a DC than Marvel reader inasmuch as DC has made more of the type of comics (one is supposed to say graphic novel, but this is a deception) I enjoy, but they’re certainly not unique-Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk was the best comic I’d read in years-and I do wonder.

I’m rereading Alan Moore’s From Hell, which I plan on reviewing at greater length at a later date, so I’ll mostly spare my thoughts for now. It’s simultaneously an aesthetic triumph and something of a failure which utterly escapes from its original framework as an angry denunciation of the whole of the Victorian Britain which produced the ripper murders, becoming utterly hijacked by its ripper, Sir William Gull, who as the greatest of Moore’s Prometheii becomes God through his ritual mutilation of the female body. It doesn’t quite work and is also probably Moore’s best, I’ll get back to you on that point someday.

After we worked so hard to make it cool: significantly belated musings on Beavis & Butt-Head’s 2011 revival

I have a peculiar relationship with the adult cartoons of the period that produced The End of History & the Last Man, and the works of Mike Judge in particular-none of them were I think quite as formative to me as the early seasons of South Park, but his are the ones I really keep coming back to.⁴ Lately I found myself in the peculiar position of watching the 2011 revival of Beavis & Butt-Head, having watched a little of it when it was new and regarded it as a curiosity for most of the next decade or so.

It’s a dangerous thing to romanticize the past, and I barely experienced the 90’s, but still, it’s hard to avoid feeling like the room-temperature IQ of the culture in the broadest possible sense has declined a few points over the course of this century, and this affects the commentary segments of the 2011 season of Beavis & Butt-Head quite a bit I’m afraid. Beavis and Butt-head are simply smarter than Jersey Shore or a camera crew following a porn-addicted 20-something through his day to day life, and that shouldn’t be possible! Also bizarre is watching two quintessentially 90s icons riffing on the musical detritus of my own teenaged years.

I think this is like, music for white people who have never had anything bad happen to them….. They decided to rebel against their parents by making even softer rock.

The show got revived again two years ago, and I haven’t quite made up my mind about whether to watch it or not. Truly this is the condition of the Last Man.

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What’s next? Some stuff in the works & why it’s not here yet

• An essay on Lionel Trilling and Allan Bloom’s contrasting vision of what Trilling called the “adversary culture”-threatening development of modernity or necessary portion of one’s intellectual journey? That description flattens both men’s positions a bit.

• Albert Murray essay I’ve been working on for about a year but can’t find quite the right hook for.

• Another long-gestating piece about Susan Sontag, Dave Hickey, Camille Paglia, poptimism, and Strauss’s idea of the cave below the cave. Have the hook but can't get the argument quite right.

1. This is not to say that you can’t read the book and disagree with it, or that the various permutations of Fukuyama memes aren’t funny (I think they are) only that people tend to dismiss a pretty one dimensional version of his argument.

2. One of the things which is interesting about Fukuyama as a (kind of) Straussian is the way he almost entirely does away with Strauss’s aversion to historicism and is a more or less faithful Hegelian* of a certain stripe, albeit his Hegel is that figure whom we discussed briefly in May:

we are interested not in Hegel per se but in Hegel-as-interpreted-by-Kojève, or perhaps a new, synthetic philosopher named Hegel-Kojève. In subsequent references to Hegel, we will actually be referring to Hegel-Kojève, and we will be more interested in the ideas themselves than in the philosophers who originally articulated them.*

*While I don’t have the breadth of reading to be authoritative about this in any way it’s interesting how this seems to be where a certain type of Straussian or post-Straussian goes-back to Hegel in one way or another. There are shades of this even in view of the American founding as the culmination of History one finds in late Harry Jaffa, although that is of course its own discussion.

3. He’s seemingly more or less in agreement with that diagnosis these days.

Fukuyama added, to my surprise: “At this juncture, it seems to me that certain things Karl Marx said are turning out to be true. He talked about the crisis of overproduction… that workers would be impoverished and there would be insufficient demand.”  

This is perhaps part of what annoys people about Fukuyama-in the present he genuinely seems to understand in a way many thinkers of his ilk don’t how the end of a viable revolutionary left led to the wholesale collapse of the old Bismarkian social contract which underlay the postwar liberal order and how the consequent growth in this century of “the peasantry should be grateful we let them earn their pennies in our capitalist utopia” type attitudes amongst the ownership classes has produced all manner of instability, so shouldn’t he have gotten it in the 90s? The opening of the book-its list of recent democratizations and autocratic regime collapses-does give one an idea of why he painted as sunny a picture as he at times did, and while he was certainly wrong on some counts, unlike his mentor Samuel Huntington, his book didn’t get anybody killed (I think!)

4. This is allowing for some occasional although severe misfires such as The Goode Family, which is pretty much unwatchable.