Fukuyama the Great Disruption 1999

7/28/2019 Fukuyama the Great Disruption 1999

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Social Capital Disrupted? (Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption:

Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order), Arena Magazine 44

December-January, 1999, p 49-51

Paul Gillen

There is a broad consensus that the 1960s were some sort of golden age, but

there is little agreement about why. Conservatives tend to see the decade as a

redoubt of traditional values, the last gasp of old-style virtues before the

self-indulgent counterculture messed everything up. Radicals, by contrast,

are more likely to see it as the budding of a movement towards freedom and

harmony that was sadly nipped. These impressions are surely founded more

on myth than reality, but it remains true that most people who remember the

1960s think they were pretty good, if only for the popular music or the filmsof the New Wave.

So what went wrong? One answer emerged from the derided computer

modelling of the Club of Rome report of the early 1970s. It predicted that

technologies based on non-renewable resources would have a positive effect

until the late fifties; after that, the negative consequences of population

pressure, declining natural resources and growing pollution would gradually

outweigh their benefits.

Francis Fukuyamas explanation for what went wrong is quite different. A

RAND consultant and former adviser to the US Department of State,

Fukuyama would be a significant American intellectual even without the two

best-selling books that have brought him international renown. The End of

History and the Last Man, appeared in the wake of the collapse of Soviet

communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Influenced by

Nietzsche and Hegel, it contended that the triumph of liberal democracy had

ended History in the sense of a narrative of human progress towards ever-

greater freedom. Probably the author was quite aware that his catchy title

would be misunderstood as predicting the end of 'history' in its everydaysense of important events. How absurd, many chorused. Others embraced

the phrase, though not always with the same optimism as its inventor.

Fukuyama did not deny that small-h history would continue. His claim was

that the future will bring no fundamentally new political ideas. Even

dictatorships and theocracies now pretend to be liberal democracies, because

no other system of government is in serious contention. This is as good as it

gets and utopia has arrived: all that remains to do is to make it work.


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Fukuyamas second book, Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of

Prosperity, addressed an issue that he saw as a major difficulty in getting our

post-historical paradise to work. By trust he meant the social norms and

values that facilitate co-operation between people, in workplaces, business

environments, and generally in society: what the American theorist Robert

Putnam called social capital, a concept endorsed by the World Bank. High

trust societies like Germany, Japan and the dominant culture of the United

States have an advantage in maintaining growth and adapting to the post-

industrial economy over the likes of China, Korea, France and Italy. The

latter foster lack of trust outside the family circle, which leads to a demand

for a high level of state economic intervention, with the attendant problems of

bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. Eastern Europe, Latin America and

the black culture of the US are even less trusting: that is why it is so difficult

for them to get on the bus of democratic capitalism. The idea appealed to the

global business elite. Trust was named Business Book of the Year by theEuropean, and madeBusiness Week's annual list of Top 10 Business Books.

The Great Disruption continues many of these themes. Most of the first half

of the book is taken up with a survey of the evidence for a Great Disruption

that is supposed to have eroded the stock of social capital in the decades since

those happy sixties. It occurred in all the developed economies, but struck the

US with particular severity. Fukuyama's accounting of its symptoms is a

typical conservative list: family breakdown, crime, multiculturalism and the

miniaturisation of community, but unlike most conservatives he does not

blame government intervention and the welfare state. Nor does he point thefinger at growing economic inequalities, like many leftist critics.

The evidence he reviews for this weakening of social ties is debatable. Like

the classical sociological concept of solidarity, which it closely resembles,

trust or social capital is difficult to pin down. The ability to co-operate is not

an attribute of individuals or groups, but a potential of changing

relationships across changing contexts. How to quantify it so that it can be

observed to rise and fall like a stock index is not at all clear. Fukuyama relies

on what people reveal in surveys about their attitude to government, and on

crime, divorce, and single parenthood rates. At best these are crude proxies ofthe very abstract entity he wants to measure. The issue is further

complicated for him because one index that would appear to provide a

relatively direct measure of trust membership of voluntary groups has not

declined at all in the US in the past few decades; on the contrary it has been

increasing. Fukuyama explains that voluntary groups are less meaningful

than involuntary associations like the family. There is, he argues, a


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difference in quality between kinship and friendship, marriage and

cohabitation. There is something distinctly ad hoc about this argument.

Having established to his own satisfaction that there was a Great Disruption

following the 1960s, and that it was moral in character rather than economicor political, Fukuyama contends that its chief cause was the transformation

of womens social position. This in turn was an effect of the post-industrial

economy, which pushed many blue-collar men out of the workforce while

providing jobs for their wives and daughters. At the same time artificial

control over fertility enhanced womens independence and helped to

undermine traditional family structures.

These seem to be key substantive claims of the book, so it is surprising that

little empirical support is adduced for them. The argument that the recent

mutation of family patterns is a by-product of the information economy criesout for more evidence. Fukuyama wants to draw a parallel between the post-

sixties social malaise and the European malaise of the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries: just as the earlier revolutionary period is widely

believed to be a product of industrialisation, so Fukuyama attributes the

present turbulence to post-industrialisation. Moreover, just as Victorian

values supposedly restored social capital to industrial Europe in the later

decades of the nineteenth century, a similar renewal, he reassures us, will

soon take place in the West, if it is not already with us.

But the details of his case are questionable. He claims that the GreatDisruption began in the 1960s, when even in the US the shift to a post-

industrial economy was but a cloud on the horizon. For most developed

countries the period represents the peak of industrialism. Furthermore, given

that women do indeed appear to have more and better paid jobs in economies

with a large information sector, why is this so? Must it be? Although it may

seem intuitively plausible that women will find more work in an economy

that requires less physical and more mental labour, societies are not

necessarily organised on intuitively plausible lines. There is no compelling

economic reason why men cannot continue to do most of the paid work in a

post-industrial economy. Indeed, Fukuyama himself stresses this point in hisdiscussion of Japan and Korea. He agrees that the onset of the Great

Disruption was heavily influenced by culture, but suggests that culture can

only delay its consequences, an argument which bears a curious resemblance

to the unprovable Marxist tenet that the organisation of production

determines everything in the last instance.


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Instead of focussing on these tricky historical and sociological issues,

Fukuyama steps sideways in the second half of the book, and provides us

instead with a fascinating but very abstract discussion of the roots of social

order, drawing on ideas from sociology, political science, game theory and

neo-Darwinism. Following the Enlightenment philosophers, he sees order as

based on both Human Reason and Human Nature: social life is partly self-interested calculation and partly the outcome of innate human sociality.

Individual intelligence and social cohesion are intimately linked. Social

capital is handed down as tradition, and at the same time is continuously

created by people in the course of living together.

In societies of any size spontaneous self-organisation has to be supplemented

by hierarchical control imposed by a state or a religion. However, Fukuyama

is convinced that the disorder left in the wake of the Great Disruption will

not be rectified in contemporary liberal democracies by dictatorship or

religious revival, but will occur through a renewal of civil society. Such arenewal is inevitable because self-created order, far from being confined to

markets or even to society, is intrinsic to life itself. How then can we stray for

long from the paths of virtue?

For this serene philosophy one might almost say Confucian, though it may

be more relevant to mention that his father was a Protestant minister

Fukuyama appeals to a rather unlikely support: sociobiology. It has proved

notoriously easy to reconcile the chaotic, unpredictable nature of Darwinian

evolution with the ostensibly contradictory conviction that evolution can be

directed for human benefit: the use of evolutionism to justify colonialism,

racism, eugenics, genetic engineering and laissez faire economics attests to

this. But as an optimist of the political centre Fukuyama reads a quite

different lesson in sociobiology. For him, it demonstrates that social harmony

is natural, arising from the evolutionary pressure on human beings to signal

co-operation and detect cheating. There is then no need to direct evolution: it

is beneficial sui generis.

Fukuyama is an intellectual as well as a political pluralist. All disciplines

find a place beneath his equable gaze. He contrives to combine the geneticfocus of sociobiology with the cultural emphasis of the human sciences, liberal

individualism with sociological holism. He shares the Rights distress about

crime and the breakdown of the traditional family, but denigrates its

prophecies of doom and authoritarian solutions. He acknowledges the Lefts

concern over oppression and injustice, but is convinced that these can be

ameliorated within the existing system. Countering the often-repeated claim

that capitalism depletes social capital by destroying age-old traditions and


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rewarding selfishness, he notes that capitalism also replenishes social capital

by promoting honesty, punctuality and the work ethic. He pins his hopes for

recovery from the Great Disruption on the ability of people to self-organise,

but distances himself from anarchist spontaneity, insisting that hierarchy is

natural and necessary. Finally, although we should not expect to make

society fully rational - that would be unnatural we should strive to bringour values and behaviour under the spotlight of Reason, since Reason leads

to Truth.

In light of the terrible difficulties confronting humanity, many readers may

find Fukuyama rather complacent. The innocent pride he displays in the

processing power of his desktop computer in the preface ofThe Great

Disruption is a piquant reminder of his comfortable horizons. He comes

across as earnest and well-meaning, and perhaps for that very reason seems

incapable of fully comprehending the depth and urgency of the worlds

problems. But at any rate his philosophical quietism offers scant justificationfor states to pursue aggressively interventionist policies, either nationally or

on the global stage. Given the patchy record of the US government, this is

something of a relief.

Fukuyama the Great Disruption 1999

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