Where are the fault lines in the modern liberal project? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Dr Humeira Iqtidar and Dr Paul Sagar of King’s College London tackle this question in a dialogue on Francis Fukuyama’s new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.
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The Guests
Dr Humeira Iqtidar joined King’s College London in 2011. She has studied at the University of Cambridge, McGill University in Canada and Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan. Before joining King’s, Humeira was based at the University of Cambridge as a fellow of King’s College and the Centre of South Asian Studies. She is a co-convenor of the London Comparative Political Theory Workshop. Humeira’s research explores the shifting demarcations of state, market and society in political imagination, and their relationship with Islamic thought and practice. Her current research focuses on non-liberal conceptions of tolerance. Her research has featured in interviews and articles in The Guardian, BBC World Service, Voice of America, Der Spiegel, Social Science Research Council Online, The Dawn, Express Tribune and Open Democracy.
Dr Paul Sagar is a lecturer in political theory at King’s College London. His recent monograph, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the State from Hobbes to Smith, explores Enlightenment accounts of the foundations of modern politics, whilst also addressing contemporary issues regarding how to conceive of the state, and what that means for normative political theory today. He has also published a number of studies on topics such as: the political writings of Bernard Williams, so-called ‘realist’ approaches to political philosophy, the nature of liberty under conditions of modernity, and the idea of immortality. Paul is currently in the early stages of two major new projects. The first is a monograph study of Adam Smith’s political philosophy as rooted in his conceptions of history and commercial society. The second is an exploration of the idea of the enemy in the history of political thought.
Skip Ahead
0:55: Where do we see this book in Fukuyama’s larger oeuvre?
3:39: You can see Hegel’s influence more in his previous work, more in terms of a teleological thrust through history, and the metaphysics in Hegel… I really understand to be a kind of battle of ideas. And Fukuyama takes that on, and his argument is more that if we are thinking about ideas that will triumph, then liberal democracy is the best idea.
8:55: I think what Fukuyama wants to say in this Identity book is, the same threats to the last man at the end of history, which is the desire for recognition, will overwhelm contentment with stability. Because even if liberal democracy… would provide all the comforts of life… and solve the economic questions, which we know now that it hasn’t… but even back then Fukuyama thought that even if it does that, it will not solve the recognition problem, and if they don’t get that recognition, they will break things, they will smash things.
11:14: I actually find the narrative that he tells pretty plausible. The idea that we exist not just with the desire for recognition, but a desire that each of us has an authentic self, an authentic identity, which may be at odds with wider society, and that society itself may be a structural mechanism of oppression.
13:29: His account of the failure of multiculturalism, which… he doesn’t actually spell it out in so many words… but he lays the blame on a certain kind of identity politics at the doorstep of the left. What is interesting is… I think there is a problem with thinking of it only as a left failure, partly because the left remains undifferentiated in his thinking.
16:30: I actually think that a huge missing part of the story is… I hate using this term, but the rise of neoliberalism- that what’s often labeled as left wing identity politics is much, much more indebted to the intellectual victories of the right. What I mean by that is the rise of the view of the world that everything is about individual choice, every individual is a sovereign consumer who floats through the world unencumbered by structures, making market choices.
19:02: Neoliberalism moves much more strongly towards freedom… or a particular understanding of freedom which is entirely unburdened by a relationship to equality… and therefore to the economy and the state. It just becomes this abstract idea.
23:40: If we take out Marx, who does try to bring together ideas and structures in a very kind of comprehensive way, we may disagree with his approach but it’s an ambitious one and that’s partly why I think he has traction today. But one of the problems we do have in the history of political thought is that the relationship between institutions and ideas is unclear.
29:12: The entire narrative of the enlightenment as some kind of rejection of religion is just deeply deeply implausible… If you take almost all of the major Enlightenment figures, many of them were pious Christians…. the falling of religion in Europe is, if anything, a twentieth century phenomenon.
37:47: There’s this culture of Republicans and Democrats, top level politicians, who’ve perpetrated these wars for decades but of course, their class has not suffered the consequences of any of this. That area of identity, that sense of American betrayal, doesn’t seem to get as much of a look in. And again it is very odd to point to America as an example of successful integration when you still have the persistence of these enormous racial divides which cut across the left-right spectrum in all sorts of complex ways.
Full Transcript
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
Welcome to the Governance Podcast at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London. My name is Humeira Iqtidar and I’m a reader in politics here at the Department of Political Economy. And joining me today is my colleague, Paul Sagar. He’s a lecturer in political theory also here in the Department of Political Economy. Today we’re doing basically a discussion of Francis Fukuyama’s latest book ‘Identity: The demand for dignity and the politics of resentment.’ The book was published in 2018. We have both now read it, and we’re ready to discuss it. So we’ll start actually, Paul has been, I know you’ve been a long-time Fukuyama watcher. So should we just start with you kind of laying out his argument and where you see this book in his larger oeuvre.
Dr Paul Sagar
So I think what’s interesting about Fukuyama is he has a very bad public reputation. And he is known as that crazy guy who wrote ‘The end of history’ and supposedly claimed that, you know, history has come to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and liberal capitalist democracy was perfect and the couldn’t be improved upon. And history was therefore at an end. And he was lampooned for this and indeed is often still lampooned for this view. And it’s quite unfortunate, because it’s not what he thought, and it’s not what he argued. And interestingly, I went back and actually read the ‘The end of history’ about three or four years ago, and realised that it’s, it’s a much, much more interesting, much more intellectually sophisticated, and although personally, I didn’t agree with the argument, not a stupid argument by any means. It’s, it has a certain persuasiveness and I wrote a short essay for the website where I defended it 25 years later. And so, I think the identity book here was actually a continuation of themes that Fukuyama has been thinking about for a long time. So for those who aren’t familiar with the argument of the ‘The end of history’, it’s probably worth just briefly recapping what he actually said there.
So, when he said history would come to an end, he was using history in a very technical sense, drawing on a tradition from the German philosopher Hegel, which of course, was picked up in other ways by Karl Marx. And with the idea that history in this context is not what we normally mean by history, causal events happening in sequence, in sports matches and wars and politics, what what he meant what Fukuyama knows in this, again, in tradition, history with a capital H, and the idea that there is a logical progression to human societies that improve over time. And Hegel for this was because of the abstract structure of the metaphysical universe and an argument that I personally have never been able to understand but people who do understand that explained it to me. Marx saw it was because of the inherent productive forces driving history in the economic fabric of reality meant that this was steady improvement which would eventually in Marx lead to communism.
Fukuyama replaced those views with an idea about science and enlightenment and scientific method being emerged with history. And so he dropped the metaphysics of Hegel and Marx, but what he suggested is that basically, science would prove that there were better and worse ways to organise societies. And that liberal capitalist democracy was probably the best we were going to get. Now, he didn’t think it was perfect by any means. He didn’t think it would solve all the world’s problems before, there’s still many problems. But he thought this was probably as good as we could do.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
Actually, I mean, so I think Hegel’s influence really, you can see in his previous work more in terms of kind of a teleological thrust history and the metaphysics in Hegel and I really understand it to mean really a kind of a battle of ideas. And Fukuyama takes that on, so his argument there is more than this if we are thinking about ideas that will triumph, then liberal democracy is the best idea. And we will have variations on it, we will have, we have had conversations about it in the past. But what we have right now is this is the best idea out there. And all we now in a sense have to do is to wait for it to work itself out. And to that extent, I think the criticism that he received was justified. I agree with you that, you know, the book was more sophisticated than many critics have, have, have accepted it to be. But nevertheless, there is relying on Hegel lent him led him down a particular path, which actually ties into a theological reading of history, which is problematic.
Dr Paul Sagar
I absolutely agree with that. Of course, the important rejoinder is the book had a further subtitle. It wasn’t just ‘The end of history’, which was the name of his original article. It was ‘The end of history and the last man’, right? And that’s a direct reference to the thought of Nietzsche. And Nietzsche’s worry that precisely when we’d move beyond metaphysical understandings of the universe basically believing that God was looking at us and was going to sort it all out. But what would happen is that human beings would become kind of stunted, pathetic little creatures, but they would not aspire for greatness. But aspire to petty competition with each other, and sometimes they might find peaceful outlets for this, rock climbing is a precarious example which is close to my heart, pointless endeavours that put your life at risk for no real reason other than to sort of glory over the achievement. But what he worried about was that with nature, ‘The End of History’ could go very, very backward, could go very wrong. That we could slide back off this. So I like you. I’m suspicious. I’m very doubtful that liberal democracy is the final synthesis of the best ideas that have out competed the worst that is, I don’t find that particularly plausible but what I did find always very sort of hard thing about Fukuyama as an artist was the idea that there’s no reason to think that this is going to be stable. Like, even if he was correct, let’s grant him the fact it’s the best form of society. He didn’t think it would necessarily last. The last man is a warning about you know, in fact, as he says, in that book, people brought up within the comfort of the bosoms of liberal democracy, they have nothing to struggle for, they will struggle against liberal democracy, right. And a key reason for this comes up in the identity book and is this idea that Fukuyama is absolutely convinced that human beings are to a large extent driven by what he calls Thumos by which he means the desire for recognition, right.
And again, he’s getting this from Hegel, but he’s also getting it from Jacques Rousseau from Thomas Hobbes and all the way back to Plato, and a key part of the Fukuyama is moral psychology if you like. It’s there in ‘The end of history and the last man’ and in the identity book, and it’s also there and his big books on the origins of political order which are actually very, very good books. And it’s the idea that human beings need recognition from other people. What does he mean by recognition? Humans being well off in the eyes of peers, having status, many people can get along with equal status, but some people want more than equal status when it goes mega mega low time megillah female and I’m never quite sure how he wants to pronounce it because he made that word up and but but it’s this idea that people need to compete for status and so that in particular economic explanations, the idea that we all just do stuff profits or or just interested in maximising our utility Fukuyama things I agree with him here hopeless his explorations of human psychology.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
I think he’s saying they go so far, they go no further. He’s saying that they do tell us something about human action and they do explain quite a lot but then there’s a lot that they don’t explain. So they don’t explain why somebody in his words he says would fall on a grenade. Why would somebody choose to die for something, some idea that they believe and when there’s no, they’re letting go of that biggest utility that we have, which is our lives? So he’s a bit more nuanced, but carry out.
Dr Paul Sagar
These are actually themes. They’re very interesting to me because I’ve been working for the last few years on 18th century political thought, which is all about this stuff. And the language is not time, it’s pride, and the modern discourse, its recognition. So Axel Honneth, very eminent German political theorist has done a lot of work on this. And so I’m very tuned in to these ideas, because it’s what I work on, and I have to say Fukuyama is a very good reader of people like Rosseau and people like Hobbes, he’s a very smart man and he gets their theories right. And what he wants to say and I think this identity book is the same threat to the last man at the end of history, which is the desire for recognition will overwhelm contentment with stability. Because even in liberal democracy, though, we’ve seen that it probably doesn’t do this so well, but he thought it would provide all the comforts of life very straightforwardly in the early 90s, that we can solve the economic questions now. We now know that it hasn’t but Fukuyama even then though even if it does that, it will not solve the recognition problem, it will not solve the need for people to have recognition if they don’t get that recognition, they will break fix, they will smash things in search of that. And one of the things he says in the identity book is recognition is more important than economic desires. But when you add economic failure, which I think it’s fair to say, you know, the end of history, the western liberal democracies did not provide adequate solutions to the economic questions. When you mix those failures, with a lack of the recognition that ordinary people feel that they’re entitled to, then you’re going to get a very, very, very combustible political situation.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
Yeah, in that sense I think this book does a very good job of falling out for a wide reading public. So it’s an easy read. It’s not a complicated read. It does a good job of laying out some complex ideas for a wide reading public, makes kind of an intellectual history or history of political thought of a particular kind available to, to a reading public. And he does make this point quite clearly that it’s not necessarily that there’s an economic disaster, but this economic inequality and liberal democracy has not been able to address the problem of economic inequality. And that coupled with this kind of desire for recognition or recognition of our words, is the problem that he thinks we now really have to contend with. So in that context, what I liked about the book, first of all is the approachability and and the kind of laying out these complex ideas and then this kind of desire to take head on a kind of a big question and meet the philosophy around that available to a wider audience, I have to say that is about it for me, but what are the other positives you can see in this book?
Dr Paul Sagar
I actually find the overall narrative that he tells pretty plausible. And so the idea that we now exist not just with the desire for recognition, but a desire that each of us has an authentic self and an authentic identity, which may be at odds with wider society, and that society may itself be a structural mechanism of oppression, which is a very powerful idea in modern culture, and that we need ways of satisfying a desire for authenticity, which is in a way to have identity recognised, and I find it also quite plausible the various important historical movements in the past have attempted to satisfy this. One of his big examples is nationalism, the rise of national identity in 19th century and other is the rise of various forms of religious identity, which he thinks are very, very pernicious ways of satisfying this that are dishonest to many of our practitioners about what had been delivered, but are in our in some ways a real attempt to satisfy this need for recognition and this need for authenticity. And I also found his critique of left wing identity politics fairly plausible that on the one hand, it is completely understandable that it proves you have been historically discriminated against and should desire to be recognised and acknowledged. But the ways in which that’s been done at a practical level have tended to be counterproductive. So I find the overall, his overall claim his identity central to modern politics, and it’s very Western focus, right? It’s very, very Anglo European. And that’s not such a problem for me because that’s my world but it is not a universal claim. It’s about European, European and post enlightenment society. So I think that identity central to the politics of these days and it’s not going away, and it’s hopeless to bring identity politics both its left wing and also the new the rise of modern right wing identity nationalism in all the many Anglo European countries. And it’s a deep product of this need for identity recognition, but it’s not going away. It should we call it Western, or maybe it will disappear. I think that’s always but what I found, I found very frustrating is the solutions.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
So I think that on the question of, you know, his account of the failure of multiculturalism, which, as we were just talking, he doesn’t actually spell it out in so many words. He doesn’t say it’s a failure of multiculturalism. But he lays the blame for the failure of a certain kind of identity politics at the doorstep of left. Yes. And what is interesting and there’s not, there is certainly someone can agree to it with him up to a point but I think there is a real problem with thinking of it only as a left failure, partly because the left remains undifferentiated in his thinking. So this idea that, you know, it was the left that there is a version of the left that actually has been proposing what he proposes as a solution. There’s a version of the left that has been saying that national identity should not be racial, should not be ethnic, should be based on certain values. You can call that a republican left or you can call that a socialist left. But there is a version of the left that actually has been calling for precisely the solution that he says, he puts forward and has been critical of this individualization of identity right, so there is a critique within the left for instance, within left among left feminists of new liberal feminism, what they call new liberal feminism, within which the individual capacity to success and individual successful people are the emblem of identity of gender politics. And that’s so I think when he lays that kind of blame, there’s a version of liberals who have supported that identity politics. Right. So it’s it’s actually, I think once we start parsing about what he calls the left, and we see that the problem may actually lie within the solution that he’s proposing in terms of that focus, to stay with the focus on liberal democracy. This is actually a premier anti liberal solution that each individual is then separated out and their identity is passed through in various ways and their individual aspirations are then the standard to which we establish our identity politics, that I think is disingenuous on his part. He’s actually framing the left in a particular way that I understand that actually within the American politics, what he’s talking about our left liberals but It is not necessarily the left that we would recognise in Europe, it’s not necessarily the left that we would recognise in France, it’s not the left we would recognise in Germany and obviously there are elements of that, that you wouldn’t recognise in Britain either. So that’s one actually, let’s I
Dr Paul Sagar
I agree with that, as you think there’s also a big lacunar in this book, and I don’t know if it’s was deliberately left out, or he just doesn’t see it this way. But I do think that a huge missing part of the story is, I hate using this term. But the rise of neoliberalism that was often labelled left wing identity politics is much much more indebted to the individual victories of the right and is often acknowledged, what what I mean by that is the rise of a view of the world where everything is about individual choice, every individual is a sovereign consumer, you just float through the world unencumbered by structures, making market choices and therefore you can be whatever you want to be. And there’s a discourse around. And I found it very ironic that many of our students who themselves profess to be on the left, I often find are so much more substantially neoliberal than they realise, because they’re not interested in structure. They’re not interested in the traps imposed by economic conditions. They’re not interested in the idea that certain things are constrained and far beyond your powerful forces are far beyond your control. They view themselves as almost attached sovereign agents, you can just flip between one identity to another as a matter of choice. And weirdly, that’s not a left wing idea. That’s a deeply right-wing idea that conquered the world in the 90s. And indeed, this is where Fukuyama does pass some responsibility for this, because the idea that we could transcend previous historical constraints, because we reached the end of history, enable this mindset, and that very oddly a sort of progressive left wing commitment to ending injustice which is very noble and respecting the identities of all individuals equally which is very nervous, I’ve got married up with a view of the world well, we can all be whenever we want to be. We can’t actually, that either enormous constraints on these things real the power structures that prevent that. And actually so the rise of identity is a combustible, combative people say what I said my identity simply in the face of yours. And I just want you to acknowledge me without thinking about the wider embeddedness of the thing. That is actually a deep product of the major economic and social shifts that happened in the 90s and 2000s.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
And I think, you know, neoliberalism the way I understand it, and I’ve written about it in one particular article, especially I flushed it out. I think the problem is, yes, it’s a problematic term. But it is useful because what it helps us do is to think about that version of liberalism, which which cuts away from the dominant trust. The dominant trust in liberalism is this kind of tension between freedom and equality. A new liberalism really moves much more strongly towards freedom – one particular understanding of freedom, freedom entirely unburdened by our relationship to equality, right?
Dr Paul Sagar
And therefore to the economy and the state to any of these other things, it just becomes this abstract idea. And you can do whatever you want.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
And then that kind of individual consumer slash citizen or citizen as consumer, then that’s the kind of that’s the kind of identity politics that is really playing out, particularly in the US, and he gives us the example of university campuses, etc. So I think that it to that extent, is great. We both agree that Fukuyama is actually laying the blame somewhere where it actually doesn’t really belong.
Dr Paul Sagar
The entire left right spectrum is just breaks down at these points. And accordingly, his attempt to kind of have a left versus right wing identity politics for me underestimates the depth of the complexity of the problem. Really?
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
Absolutely. And I think the the second thing for me in this book was that when I see you know, it’s interesting to read it as a history of say, what one might call European political thought. And, and it is one reading, it is not necessarily the most authoritative read a it’s an interesting and useful reading, but it is one reading. But also it is a very limited reading. It’s a very limited reading, because it is taking certain debates and ideas within European political theory and then attempting to explain events in other parts of the world without any reflection on whether you know, these ideas really travelled well, or they’re not how much do they explain and how much do they not? So had his examples been only about Europe and North America, I would have bought the argument a bit more. But you know, you right from the beginning, he jumps onto the rear square in Egypt. He’s talking about China- He’s talking about India. And there is absolutely no humility in thinking about, well, actually the problems, they may not just be identity as I understand them from the American context, there might be other factors there, there might be structural inequalities, there might be, you know, nationalist politics that is not just of the kind that I see in America and that I’m responding to. They may be overlapped, but they may be huge differences as well. And there’s absolutely no recognition of that throughout the book, which is a really strange lacuna for a book on identity.
Dr Paul Sagar
If I was going to offer a partial defense of Fukuyama, you may not agree with the premises, but I think he would say reply as he probably has a fairly universal misconception of human nature, which if one doesn’t agree with him on them or just disagrees with him, then I think he would say the need for recognition because time loss is a human universal. And so this does translate across borders. On the other hand, I totally take your point that is probably too thin as an actual social science explanation for what’s going on in these places. We probably need some thicker ethnography, political science, real actual going and finding out what’s happening in, for example, the Arab Spring, simply saying, well, it’s all about recognition. Yes, of course, maybe, but that in itself is a bit adios as an explanation. And the other and this is a, I guess, you’re completely right to point this out. And it’s something I struggle with in my own work because I’m a historian of political thought, I fall into this trap to food killer has this kind of it’s again, it’s the Hegel type stuff, and it’s all ideas. It’s driving the world to, we can go back to Rousseau and see he invents the idea of authenticity and identity, and then everybody has it including the market vendor in Tunisia, and of course, Rousseau had some very interesting ideas, but very few people have read Rousseau even fewer have understood Rousseau even fewer had their psyche fundamentally shaped by Rousseau’s understanding authenticity. And this is a problem that people like me, who have a similar intellectual like Fukuyama. But we tend to spread out our political theory and just jump the gap to the real world say, Aha, well, you know, as the 18th century proves, this is what’s going on. And, and this is where the real the limits of that kind of method show up is that we should be a bit more humble we intellectual historians, because it can’t possibly be the case, as Plato explained 2000 years ago, that’s why the Arab Spring happened.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
It’s an interesting research agenda that if we take out Marx, who does try to bring together ideas and structures in a very kind of comprehensive way, we may disagree with his approach, but it’s an ambitious approach, and that’s partly why I think he still has a lot of traction today. But one of the problems we do have in history of political thought intellectual history said, it’s unclear the relationship between the institutions and ideas is unclear, right? So is it that Rousseau thought is and then this happens, all that whoso recognises something that is happening and then talks about it in a cogent way that helps us understand what’s happening. So, so there is that tension, but to give you a more kind of concrete example of why his narrative is 10, and cannot help us understand some of these ideas, so he lays out this history of the, the, the emergence of the self, right, and this is, again, of a European narrative. There’s a particular point in which human beings start thinking of themselves as this kind of interiorized self, and that’s where that happens, you know, at a particular time in European history, and, and, and he wants to bet the whole world of that conception. So if I think about this within the context of Islamic political thought, there is a much more developed sense of the individual because the individual’s intention is central to every actor. There are various concepts like the concept of Nia, which is deciding internally making an intention. And then if your actions don’t even bear the fruit that you intended, it doesn’t matter. It is the intention which is central. So this is a central concept in Islamic thought. And it’s been debated and it’s played out in different ways. So I’m not saying that it, you know, it only has one trajectory, but they said the idea of the interiorized self, this the birth, the internal kind of conversation that each person has to have with herself, is actually quite well established in Islamic thought much earlier. So it has a different trajectory, right. So, so not recognising that and then using that history to then think about ideas and their life outside of Europe and North America. Fukuyama is jostling himself out to very easy criticisms.
Dr Paul Sagar
So I entirely agree on that point. It’s something that I find remarkably common actually, in, in, in my sort of field of intellectual history, this bizarre idea that there was a radical transformation in the 18th century in Europe and suddenly human psychology, I’m a feeling because it’s suddenly, suddenly in the content you this is massive transformation. So where did it come from? How have people ever survived before? You know? Are you really saying that everybody for the century was just radically different, but then simultaneously, that Oh, and then it just magically translate well, across the whole globe at the same time, I once heard a professor who shall remain nameless claim that in the 17th century before the invention of the novel in the 18th century, people didn’t share their emotions in the 17th century. So Thomas Hobbes, for example, was like a lobster he had and that’s why there is no theory of shared feelings in Leviathan. And I just think this is just absolutely incredible. And I find that very just wildly implausible that it may have taken people time to theorise things, it may have taken them time to work it through various forms of human literary and artistic creativity. But I just find it vastly plausible that the Romans say didn’t have their own internal struggles in their own sense of identity, and it took Rousseau to come along and manage, right.
And so it’s not at all surprising you say that in Islamic physical thought that having these ideas, but it is it’s and there’s a tension here between Fukuyama’s sort of universalist view of human subnormal psychology, but then the idea that only one particular time and place at a very important aspect of what it means to be a human suddenly getting vandalised, and it’s not just Fukuyama. This is a weird trope that you can find across many different disciplines about the enlightenment and that’s sort of part of a wider I think, misunderstanding of what enlightenment was, but that’s probably not but this part of this podcast.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
That is a very interesting point because of course, there is now a lot of historical research that is looking at the fact that the enlightenment was not that kind of a break. And also we have at least some people coming forward and thinking through the kinds of ideas that enlightenment thinkers put forward as, as actually expressing a desire rather than actual reality, riight. So when we think about the question of religion, for instance, the idea that everybody was religious and equally religious, and yet we have these mediaeval accounts of not just laypersons but monks behaving badly. So this idea that you know, the mediaeval ages were just pervaded with this blind religiosity and then we have the light of enlightenment, bursting forward and illuminating truth. There is obviously we now have to kind of work through that in, within Europe as well. So I think the question is not just of outside of Europe, but also within history.
Dr Paul Sagar
The entire narrative of the enlightenment was some kind of rejection of religion is, is deeply, deeply important. This is my personal field. So, if you take all almost all of the major enlightenment figures, they were very many of them were the Christians. Rousseau was a straight-forward Christian, Kant was a Protestants, David Hume was definitely a kind of atheist, Adam Smith maybe ,his religious views are very unclear. Someone like Edmund Burke, complete Christian to the core. The mainstream of European thought in the 18th century is religious, almost everybody is religious. The falling away of religion in Europe is if anything, the 20th century phenomena,
It’s a false history. They’re there. They’re putting enlightenment values that atheism isn’t enlightenment value is. It’s just a complete misnomer and a massive oversimplification of a complex period.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
Bringing that in, I think Fukuyama does some injustice to his own arguments, but actually, this is probably a good point also then move on to the solution. Yes, and why we think his solutions are problematic. So why do you think so? So
Dr Paul Sagar
Let’s recap what those solutions are. One is this noble aspiration that we should read the we need to reunite identities around a common bond. In particular, he thinks the only locus for that will be the nation, the nation status away, but for obvious and very understandable and good reasons. He doesn’t want that to be a sort of blood and soil nationalist. He doesn’t want that to be the ethno nationalism that’s emerged on the right because what we know from history, just how dangerous that is, and nobody in their right mind should be supporting that. kind of politics. On the one hand, he wants to reject that.
But he wants to say that there can be a good kind of patriotism that’s organised around civic values. It’s organised around say, shared political commitments to a constitution to a certain way of order to what he views as basically liberal democracy. And this is where and you mentioned this before, and I think you’re absolutely right. He never says it out loud. But what he is kind of saying is that multiculturalism has failed. And that difference people, immigrants, in particular, need to accept the native values, man, whether they’re the moral and political values, they need to get on board, they need to integrate. And therefore people need to have a shared identity which they can group together through. And I find this problematic in all kinds of ways. One, I just don’t see what the mechanism is. Even if it were true, how, how do you force people to integrate? I’m half French and I’ve seen the the enormous difficulties of a, I have an uncle who says things like, you know, the problem with the Muslims is that they won’t integrate and I said well partly that’s because people like you are so hostile so of course they retreat back into their own enclave.
It’s more sort of sense of the state with its policy of you know that you cannot wear the headscarf in schools, you cannot display religious elements, but they don’t really mean Catholics, they mean Muslims and the heavy-handed system integration has not worked. So on one hand forgiveness is all in both cultures and failed. We’ll look at a state like France which is basically attempted to reject Canadian American British attempts of multiculturalism and said no, you must integrate which hasn’t worked either. So the insistence that we all will rally around the common set of moral ethical values. It’s nice in the abstract, but I do not see what the mechanism absolutely
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
This is where it’s really interesting that the example that he uses is the US. Yeah. And and it really, he starts with the US as being the problem. He starts with the rise of Trump, the white kind of racist nationalism that is now beginning to define America that as the problem that he’s starting this, this quest with his book, and then to end with America as the example of a state that seems to have done it generally right, right.
So all these examples are, well, if you could just figure out our immigration system a bit more, just make it you know, better easier to get people in that we want to get in and when people come in, they’re already beat screen out people effectively. What he’s saying is when when we choose people, we screen out the ones who don’t agree with American values. We just have a better immigration system that screens out those people and then they already should have English competence, English language competence, etc. So their integration should be easy. And then we just structured everything around values rather than race and ethnicity. And so I agree with you not only is the mechanism missing, but in fact what he seems to give us as an example of a working kind of a solution. It’s deeply flawed that itself is the problem that we are actually working our heads through.
Dr Paul Sagar
That’s absolutely right. And I find some of the others suggestions, I will we should have a national service that everybody can, can come together and share in the common, it’s the classical republican values of you know, patriotism, I think there’s a reason those values died out and that we don’t do those things anymore. And absent the context of, you know, basically which we want a proximate cause and the end the reasons at the end of history, it’s the victory of the Western liberal democratic state, and then we gave up on doing those things. You don’t expect your American children to sing to the flag, but they certainly don’t want to give up two years of their lives to serving in the Peace Corps or the army. I mean, they can do those things if they want that has to be voluntary. And that voluntary is absolutely the core of what is what these societies are structured around. So some of those kinds of solutions just seem to me absolutely pipe dreams. I mean, there’s just no way that’s going to happen. And, and I don’t think it would work anyway. Because absent a real reason for this, you know, we know that the enemy is coming, then these things don’t work.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
Well, I mean, I can see the inverse. And I kind of sympathise to be to give him this deal. America has been at war for almost 20 years actually. Yes, but where they have been sending soldiers, and you may remember that both with the Afghanistan and the Iraq War, actually, the vast majority of soldiers were African American, Hispanic. And in fact, there was a scheme that you may remember of giving citizenship to Hispanic youth who signed up to fight in those wars. So, so to Fukuyama’s defence, he may be saying, well, we’re already he doesn’t say it, which is why it is we have to kind of pull it out. And it’s like pulling teeth, but he doesn’t see it. But it is the case that America has been at war. It is the guest and part of the inequality that people have experienced are white working class young men, Hispanic men, you know, African American men going off to fight these wars. And the people who are making those decisions about those wars are not implicated, their children don’t have to go , they don’t have to serve in Iraq. They don’t have to serve in Afghanistan. And to that extent a national service is an egalitarian idea within that particular context. To first of all propose it as a universal solution is deeply problematic. And to second of all to propose it without putting it in this context, without making explicit what is the inequality that it will address? I think again, he’s doing himself a disservice.
Dr Paul Sagar
I think I entirely agree with that. And that’s something that’s really quite striking in its absence is he doesn’t mention occasionally, the real decline of the white working class and the people in rural American and the opioid crisis. And this isn’t I think it’s completely very heavily linked to these incredibly long lasting wars that have bubbled away but have decimated some parts of American society, but others, the chicken hawks as well, particularly like Donald Trump, who of course, was a draft Dodger, but it’s all about banging the table when he feels like you’re talking back and forth foreign policy but but, but this this culture of Republican and Democrat, top level politicians who’ve perpetrated these boards for two decades, but of course, their class has not suffered any of the consequences of it, and that that area of identity and a sense of American betrayal doesn’t seem to get as much more located. And again, it’s very odd how you could point to America as a society of success, some way successful integration, when you still have the persistence of these enormous racial divides, which cut across the left right spectrum and all kinds of complex ways.
And, and another thing that you remind me of is it’s always difficult to keep perspective in the modern moment. There’s many things that are wrong in our politics at the moment. There’s all kinds of reasons to be deeply worried about the future of the world, the climate crisis, the instability of the Middle East are just too obvious right now. But as always wonder if we need to keep things in perspective, the identity crisis that elected Donald Trump who I think this we certainly agree is deeply unfit to be president is bad, and there are all kinds of things to be worried about. But if you think about the state of America in the 1950s, and 60s for, for example, blacks in the South or people who had no means to economic subsistence and security, the situation of many women, and this time, America was an appalling place for these people in the 1960s.
And it’s still, in many ways, not a good place for some members of these demographics. But we must, I think, resist the idea. And Fukuyama could have done a bit more to make sure he doesn’t fall into it. But we’re in terminal decline and the end is nigh, and that the identity politics of today isn’t going away, as he says. But we should also remember that it has brought a lot of progress that there have been improvements, and we can lose those we can slide back down. And but there is a sense in which I feel that by fixating on a particularly idealised version of America, he paradoxically, both underestimates and overestimates how bad things can be. But that’s not just him. I think this is a symptom of, of how complicated the problem is that we are all are trying to wrestle with and just how many things are in play and how difficult it is. So I was more well predisposed to the book than you were overall. Which is strange because we seem to actually agree on a lot of what we’re
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
Have you changed your mind now?
Dr Paul Sagar
You helped me bring into focus some of the things that were in my subconscious about what I was dissatisfied with. But those don’t, for me outweigh the value of what I think it was worth in writing it. And I was worried that it was going to be a polemic against a left wing identity politics on on the American university campuses, which so much of what’s written about identity is and it’s not that it has things to say about that, but it’s not bogged down in that and it tries to talk talk about something bigger. It tries to talk about things I think are real, and it does them in a way which is as a light touch but but deals with serious ideas. It’s flawed. It’s a short book. No, I haven’t written a book, which is I’m unflawed. I’m not sure anybody has. And so I think it was worthwhile reading, I think it would be worth other people reading. And I’m certainly glad that I took a couple of days to work my way through it.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
Yeah, no, no, I would say I mean, I’m the one thing that I really do appreciate is the fact that he made this attempt. Too many of us have some kind of an idea about how to go about addressing some of these problems. And especially in political theory and philosophy, we don’t really put ourselves out in the public eye in that sense, right. So we don’t really make that effort to leave ourselves open to these kinds of questions and, and Kim’s beyond conferences where it’s a conversation amongst mostly the converted or or at least people who are familiar with some of this language. So in that sense, it is a brave thing to do. As I say, I find it a very frustrating book. So I actually picked it up with a lot of enthusiasm. But I found the first half more interesting just because he does a good job of bringing to focus some deep running ideas and their implications within Europe and North America. But I found the second half quite frustrating.
Dr Paul Sagar
Every book’s final chapter has any here’s how you fix it. Of course, he’s done that and that’s probably partly a demand of the publishers and partly because he has some ideas, and I suppose really one of the frustrations as well. There is no one or small group of solutions. These problems are incredibly difficult, and certainly a 20 page large print small four book chapter isn’t going to solve these problems. And again, like you I think it’s a brave thing to put yourself out there and as someone who often feels just overwhelmed by how complex these questions are, and, and really struggles and we all get things wrong and to be brave enough to just get it wrong in the public eye because you’re trying is I think is very commendable. And so overall, I’m glad I read it. Thank you very much for having me on.
Dr Humeira Iqtidar
Thank you.
