Fukuyama's incontinent discontent

Francis Fukuyama writes in 'Liberalism and its Discontents'- 

Human beings are not free-floating agents capable of reshaping themselves in any way they choose;

This is meaningless. We may conceive of ourselves in any way we like and we can speak of reshaping ourselves in the manner we choose. I am at liberty to describe myself as the Galactic incarnation of the Giant Spaghetti monster. I am currently reshaping myself into Beyonce- but with a moustache and a thick Tamil accent. 

this only happens in online virtual worlds.

Only if we choose for it to happen. But, there were off-line virtual worlds- e.g. Dungeons & Dragons- before there was the internet or virtual reality.  One may think of World Religions- like Catholicism or Buddhism or Islam- as a virtual reality which, for believers, is more real than this second rate planet our species will but briefly inhabit. 

We are limited in the first instance by our physical bodies.

No. We are limited by technology and access to resources and the fact that people at cocktail parties run away when they see us approach.  

Technology has done a lot to free people from the constraints imposed by their physical natures.

Science and Technology has greatly advanced precisely because some human beings act like 'free floating agents' such that a doctrine and a praxis can arise which actually reshapes lives in, first an incremental, then an exponential fashion.  

It has liberated people from backbreaking physical labor,

Nope. There's still plenty of that around which is why God created immigrants. 

vastly increased life spans,

No. But that may be about to change. 

overcome many forms of disease and disability, and multiplied the experiences and information that each one of us is able to process.

What made this possible? The answer is that human beings can act like 'free floating' agents, unhampered by their 'facticity' and that the doctrine and practice of some such agents have enabled the complete transformation of the planet and the life-worlds of its dominant species.  

Some techno-libertarians imagine a future in which we could each become a completely disembodied consciousness that can be uploaded into a computer, allowing us to in effect live forever.

Just as some alchemists imagined a future where they would themselves drink the elixir of immortality while industriously transforming lead into gold. They may have failed, but they did help advance Chemistry as a highly utile Science.  

Our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by screens that allow us to easily imagine ourselves in alternative realities or as alternative beings.]

Listening to boring lectures has always had that effect. Many years ago, I taught Economics. My female students slept peacefully. The males were immediately plunged into alternative realities of a Jungian type where they had splendid adventures and were led to metanoiac wisdom by their own, otherwise fractious, anima.  

The real world, however, continues to be different:

Fuck would Fukuyama know about the real world? He's a pedant of some especially useless sort. 

wills are embedded in physical bodies

This guy has never heard of Wills as Last Testaments. They can create a Trust which gives effect to the testator's will long after his corpse has turned to dust.  

that structure and also limit the extent of individual agency.

Nonsense! Any day now, my farts will become powerful enough to propel me into outer space.  

It is not clear that most people want to be liberated from their own natures.

Which is why we don't like people who keep trying to knife us.  

Our individual identities remain rooted in the physical bodies that we are born with, and in the interactions of those bodies with the environment in which we live.

This is a hypothesis. We don't know for sure whether 'Yogijivas'- who exist simultaneously in several physical bodies- exist. Identities are epistemic or 'intensional'.  

Who we are as individuals is the product of the interaction of our conscious minds and physical bodies, and the memories of those interactions over time.

Again, this is a hypothesis- not a very interesting one. Who we are as individuals can change very dramatically depending on our choices- even those we make when out of our conscious minds.  

The emotions we experience are rooted in our experience of our physical bodies.

No. We may feel emotions about experiences we've never had but which are depicted to us- even if not very graphically.  

And our rights as citizens are built upon the need to protect both those physical bodies and our autonomous minds.

No. Rights are built on the incentive compatibility of remedies under bonds of Law. The need to protect bodies and minds is the reason we acquire weapons or hire people with weapons to defend us.  

A general principle for a liberal society would borrow a page from the playbook of the ancient Greeks.

No it wouldn't. The ancient Greeks did not have liberal Societies. Slavery? Sure. Tyrants? Plenty. Liberalism? Fuck off!

They had a saying, μηδεν αγαν (mēden agan),

which is like अति सर्वत्र वर्जयेत्. Which language doesn't have some similar saying?

which meant ‘nothing in excess,’

 We only say a thing is excessive if there is an opportunity cost to it. If the thing is a free good- i.e. no scarce resources are used up- there is no question of excess. 

and they regarded σωφροσύνη (sōphrosýnē), or ‘moderation,’ as one of their four cardinal virtues.

The Greek word σώφρων (sophron) means wisdom. Which culture counts Ignorance or Stupidity as cardinal virtues? What will Fukuyama tell us next? That the ancient valued breathing over suffocation? 

This emphasis on moderation has been largely discarded in modern times:

No. Economics has become more mathematical and new technology has helped greatly increase allocative efficiency. If we achieve more with less, no question of excess or immoderate behaviour arises. Opportunity cost is declining. That's a good thing. True, some Ancient Greek pedants published stupid shite under the rubric of 'Economics' but the Epicureans took down their pants and made fun of their tiny genitals. 

university graduates are routinely told to ‘follow their passions,’

No. They are told to find some promising line of research and pursue it passionately so as to advance their discipline.  

and people who live to excess are criticized only when it harms their physical health.

No. They are criticised if the opportunity cost of what they are doing is positive and rising exponentially. This happens if their health or wealth or relationships or productivity are declining or are likely to decline catastrophically. 

Moderation implies and requires self-restraint,

No. It requires minimising opportunity cost. It does not require the use of restraints to stop you fisting yourself incessantly.  

the deliberate effort not to seek the greatest emotion or the fullest accomplishment.

Nonsense! The Greeks were cool with having the bestest orgasm ever or writing the funniest comedy ever. It's just that, more often than not, less is more. One reason my production of 'Lysistra' failed was because I sought to enhance Aristophanes' witty barbs by getting all the actors to fart incessantly.  I'm not saying this didn't get laughs. It's just that, sooner or later, farts turn into sharts and Mum slaps you and pulls down the curtain on your one-man show. 

Moderation is seen as an artificial constraint on the inner self,

by whom? Oscar fucking Wilde?  

whose full expression is said to be the source of human happiness and achievement.

said by whom? There may be boring shitheads who talk in that way but we give them a wide berth. 

But the Greeks may have been on to something, both with regard to individual life, and in politics.

Nonsense! They kept getting beaten and conquered.  

Moderation is not a bad political principle in general,

Only in the sense that Niceness is not a bad political principle- but only because it is stupid and useless.  

and especially for a liberal order that was meant to calm political passions from the start.

The liberal order was meant to promote enterprise and opulence. Passionate attachment to the Patria was cool. Passionate opposition to getting richer and more secure wasn't cool at all.  

If the economic freedom to buy, sell, and invest is a good thing, that does not mean that removing all constraints from economic activity will be even better.

Constraints on economic activity are either natural or contrived. The latter sort use up resources. The problem is that if circumventing those constraints becomes profitable, then there may be a disintermediation effect. The agency imposing the constraint loses salience. It can but toothlessly snarl as it is kicked in the testicles or, more cruelly, simply ignored.  

If personal autonomy is the source of an individual’s fulfillment, that does not mean

anything at all. Pedants of useless shite may babble about such things but nobody pays them any attention. We assume they are 'diversity hires' or have a history of drug addiction and incestuous sexual abuse. 

that unlimited freedom and the constant disrupting of constraints will make a person more fulfilled.

It may do. But then anything at all can be said to make a person more fulfilled. I have often argued that Amartya Sen's 'capabilities and functionings' can be enhanced by adding more dog poo to his diet. If he acts on my suggestion, I will feel very fulfilled indeed.  

Sometimes fulfillment comes from the acceptance of limits.

and sometimes limits come from the fulfilment of acceptance whereas, acceptance, more often than not, comes from the limits of fulfilment and so and so forth. This is an algorithmic method to produce vacuous, pseudo-intellectual, shite. 

Recovering a sense of moderation, both individual and communal, is therefore the key to the revival – indeed, to the survival – of liberalism itself.

No. For any 'ism' to flourish, the guys promoting it have to say interesting or at least potentially informative things. Gassing on about ancient Greek pedophiles hasn't cut the mustard since Gladstone's second Ministry.  

Is Fukuyama's entire book utterly foolish? The following quotations from it are given on 'Goodreads'. Is even one of them sensible or informative? Let us see.

“Even though individualism may be historically contingent,

What 'ism' isn't? 

it has become so deeply part of the way that modern people understand themselves

No it hasn't. Modern peeps listen to rap music, not stupid Professors.  

that it is hard to see how it gets walked back.

No it isn't. Wars lead to individuals coming together. Big enough wars completely change the nature of the Societies that participate in them. The American Revolution and the Civil War and then the Second World War profoundly changed America. The stupidity and pointlessness of the Vietnam war, too had an effect though there was a subsequent backlash.  

Modern market economies depend heavily on flexibility, labor mobility, and innovation.

Communist China's economy depends on these things. All successful economies do and did and will continue to do so. 

If transactions need to take place within limited cultural boundaries, the size of markets and the kind of innovation that comes from cultural diversity will necessarily be limited.

No. A limited market may lead to more intense innovation. France's 'Minitel' had a much bigger market than the Internet in 1993. But the latter was expanding exponentially through what was essentially a process of cannibalization precisely because the market was so much smaller and more specialized. 

Cultural diversity drives a search for the lowest common denominator. A bigger market may lead to less diversity a la Hotelling's theorem.  

Individualism is not a fixed cultural characteristic of Western culture as alleged by certain versions of critical theory.

The theories of cretins are cretinous not critical.  

It is a by-product of socioeconomic modernization that gradually takes place across different societies.”

Which is why the individualistic Japanese are so similar to the individualistic Dutch- right?  

“The postmodernist critique of liberalism

like the modernist critique of the pieties of Nineteenth Century liberals in their top hats and frock-coats 

and its associated cognitive methods has now drifted over to the right.

But postmodernism drew on Far Right nutters like Heidegger and Schmitt.  

White nationalist groups today regard themselves as a beleaguered identity group.

Whites, in America, started off as a beleaguered identity group. Smallpox and gunpowder enabled them to beleaguer the fuck out of the original inhabitants. 

During the Covid epidemic, a much broader group of conservatives around the world used the same conspiratorial critique of modern natural science that had been pioneered by critical theory and the left.”

But so did Agamben and Jeremy Corbyn's elder, smarter, brother.  

“The substantive conservative critique of liberalism

consists of farting noisily. There is a story about F.E Smith who always made a point of taking a dump at the National Liberal Club. On being confronted by a porter who asked if he was a member of the Liberal Party, the future Earl of Birkenhead expressed surprise that a decent enough lavatory had become the nucleus of a political association.  

—that liberal societies provide no strong common moral horizon around which community can be built—is true enough.

No it isn't. Gladstone was plenty moral. He spent his spare time picking up hookers and scolding them till they took up a less strenuous profession.  

This is indeed a feature and not a bug of liberalism.

Nonsense! British Liberalism always had an Evangelical aspect- except in the Celtic fringe where it went hand in hand with Temperance and the natural consequence of abstention from strong drink- viz. Adultery.   

The question for conservatives is whether there is a realistic way to roll back the secularism of contemporary liberal societies and reimpose a thicker moral order.”

I suppose Fukuyama is taking a dig at the American Catholics here. Sadly, the Pope appears to be totes cool with the LGBTQ community. Perhaps he got round to reading the Sermon on the Mount. Seriously, the Bible should have a trigger warning. 

“The self-care and wellness movements are simply contemporary manifestations of Rousseau’s vision of the “plenitude” of the inner self.

No. Rousseau gave himself a hernia jacking off. He was as crazy as a shithouse rat. The self-care and wellness movement is about sad, fat, losers like me trying to stave of Type 2 diabetes.  

That self is good, and its recovery is the original fount of human happiness.

My self is not good. It likes eating pizza and watching Netflix. It doesn't like going to the gym or eating salad. The original fount of human happiness is money. As you get older, a secondary fount arises- viz. postponing death.  

But it has been polluted by an outer society that feeds us unhealthy foods full of pesticides and artificial flavors,

if you have enough money you can eat healthy food which doesn't taste like shit.  

that sets goals and expectations that build anxiety and self-doubt,

not if you have a hundred billion dollars in the bank. Elon Musk doesn't exactly reek of anxiety and self-doubt.  

and by competitive urges that undermine our self-esteem.”

Only if you don't have billions of dollars and plenty of super-yachts and supermodel girl friends. 

“Liberal individualism does not preclude or deny human sociability; it simply means that most social engagements in a liberal society will ideally be voluntary. You can join with other people, but what groups you join are, to the maximum extent possible, a matter of personal choice.”

Very true. I can chose to belong to the British Royal Family. Liberalism is not antithetical to notions of 'natural' oikeiosis. It is comfortable with the 'bourgeois strategies' which arise by reason of uncorrelated asymmetries- e.g. being the child of this Mummy and Daddy rather than that Mummy and Daddy. Furthermore, though the Roman notion of the 'bonus pater familias' observing a higher standard of diligence or duty of care, was translated in the Anglo-American notion of 'the reasonable man', most lawyers were aware of the relevant genealogy. True, in the Twentieth Century, Cicero's influence declined but then so did Classical Liberalism. 

“Liberalism was one of the early driving forces of the French Revolution,

It was reasonable to want something like the English 'Glorious Revolution'. The problem was that France wasn't an island. It had an invasion to deal with. 

It should be remembered that registering voters for adult manhood suffrage is a tacit way of conducting a census and enabling conscription. Still one must be careful to rig things such that only those representatives are chosen who will most help in extracting tax revenue because of their superior local knowledge and 'social capital'. 

and was initially an ally of democratic forces that wanted to expand political participation beyond the narrow circle of upper- and middle-class elites.

Napoleon did give adult males the vote even in occupied territory, but the results were rigged in multiple ways. The upshot was that, though the principle of universal manhood suffrage was upheld, it was understood that the results could be far from popular. Indeed, 'narrow circles' didn't matter. Nationalism was a fact of life. For forms of government only fools contest when what is urgent is throwing out the foreign invader.  

The partisans of equality, however, broke with the partisans of liberty,

Phillipe Egalite, who voted to put his cousin to death soon met the same fate. His son's reign ended in the same way as that of Charles X.  

and created a revolutionary dictatorship that ultimately gave way to the new empire under Napoleon. The latter, nonetheless, played a critical role in spreading liberalism in the form of law—the Code Napoléon—to the far corners of Europe. This then became the anchor for a liberal rule of law on the Continent.”

No. Austria and Prussia had already been at work on Codes which were intended to be universal. Speaking generally, German, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon legal regimes have been better for private enterprise and economic growth than the statist Napoleonic code. Moreover, the former give more scope for judicial law making. Liberal in the Continental context often meant 'enlightened absolutism' or Beamtenliberalismus- i.e. the liberalism of senior Civil Servants.  

“an idea that became foundational in modern thought, that we have deeply hidden inner natures that are smothered by the layers of social rules imposed on us by the society surrounding us.

this is an ancient idea. Enkidu, in the Gilgamesh legend, is the 'natural' man. But behind the Rousseauvian 'Social Contract' is the barnyard economics whereby animals content to dwell with us do so only on a transactional basis. I suppose, the reverse is also true. I once gave up the tenancy of a flat because its vast population of cockroaches made themselves scarce anytime I started reciting my poetry. 

Autonomy for him meant recovery of that authentic inner self, and escape from the social rules that imprisoned it.”

Enkidu dies. A grief-stricken Gilgamesh tries to find the elixir of immortality. He fails. Escaping social rules is all very well. It is death we want to cheat.  

“Kant picked up on Rousseau’s idea of perfectibility, and turned it into the core of his moral philosophy.

Rousseau helped turn Kant away from Scottish 'moral sentiment' towards rationalism and deontology. This involved seeing any contradictory impulse as imperfection and gave rise to a notion of perfectibility as the power of self-rule and moral progress to create a species-wide solidarity and irenic harmony. Sadly, death would still exist. Plain old religious solidarity was preferable coz God might let you into Heaven for all eternity. Better yet, God might grant you madness. 

Still, Kant and Hegel and so on were happy to be 'Beamten'- i.e. not so much pedants as Civil Servants- and thus their notions of 'duty' and 'autonomy' and 'freedom' and so so forth were hilariously topsy-turvey. 

At the beginning of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says that the only thing that is unconditionally good is a good will,

why not a good soul? What's the point of taking God out of your pi-jaw if all that is left is stupid shit? A Professor who has a good will won't teach worthless shite. 

and that the capacity to make moral choices is what makes us distinctively human.

These fuckers used to confuse birds and insects with human beings till they discovered this distinction. The trouble is animals aren't really Cartesian meat machines. Some dogs make moral choices.  Some humans don't. 

Human beings are ends in themselves and should never be treated as a means to other ends.”

Which is why you should never pay money to gain instruction from a Professor. You are treating him as a means to some end you yourself find valuable. You should just pay your fees and then abstain from attending lectures. At any rate, that's what I did when I was at Uni.  

“an autonomous self that has been detached from all prior loyalties and commitments

is desirable if you wish to avoid Agent-Principal hazard or ensure that adjudication will be free from bias.  

“is not to conceive of an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth”:”

No it isn't. The Stoic sage has reached a higher level of oikeiosis such that all the world is his family. He may have plenty of character- e.g. he may be witty, he may be dull- and may have great moral depth arising from a superior theory of mind or else a better conception of moral sentiments.

Fukuyama, on the evidence of the above, lacks intelligence. He misunderstood everything he read but regurgitated it in a blander and more bigoted fashion so as to get ahead in a worthless profession. Alternatively, maybe the guy is smart. For some Straussian reason, he wishes to appear an ignorant fool. That's how you make money if you peddle worthless shite. This is a Keynesian beauty contest in which everybody assumes other people are as stupid as shit and thus will value the vapourings of a worthless wanker. Also, it helps to have a foreign sounding name- like Amartya or Fukuyama or Zizek. People may think your bunch of backward barbarians are only now discovering that Kant said it was wrong to eat all your babies while Hegel pointed out that History is about the Past. We live in the Present. Stop hanging by your tails from trees. Darwin didn't say we are monkeys. He said our species evolved from monkeys millions of years ago.