The full Fukuyama: the end of everything

“The end of” is also the perfect headline for our age. It fits a moment that fetishizes disruption over stability. It grabs an audience enamored of what is next, not what is here. It suits a public debate in which extreme positions are requisite starting points.

by Carlos Lozada
I hope you had it while you could because, last week, sex ended. That may sound like a big deal, but it’s not when you consider everything else that has ended already. Nature and truth. Money and markets. Men and marriage. Faith and reason. They’ve all ended. Power ended in March, but that makes sense because leadership ended last year. History ended more than two decades ago, while the future ended just two years ago.

On the plus side, illness has ended, along with poverty, racism, war — even homework.
If you thought these things were still around, just pick up “The End of Sex,” by Donna Freitas, published last week, or Moises Naim’s “The End of Power,” which came out last month. Try David Wolman’s “The End of Money” or David Agus’s “The End of Illness.” Those came out in 2012, the same year that Hanna Rosin affirmed “The End of Men” and John Horgan imagined “The End of War.”

One could dismiss this proliferation of “The End” as a plea for attention by publishers, magazine editors, authors, bloggers, TED talkers and the rest of the ideas industry — a marketing device signaling little more than the end of imagination. But it is more than that. “The end of” is also the perfect headline for our age. It fits a moment that fetishizes disruption over stability. It grabs an audience enamored of what is next, not what is here. It suits a public debate in which extreme positions are requisite starting points.

We don’t know what is coming; that’s too hard to discern. All we know is that what we have — old jobs, old ideologies, old phones — is boring, dated, over. Ended.

The Patient Zero of the end times has to be Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” in 1989. In a 9,000-word essay in the National Interest, Fukuyama declared the triumph of free markets and free people, not in the real world but in the world of ideas. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history,” he wrote, “but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy.”

This erudite, sprawling work replete with Marx and Hegel references became a sensation — debated and dissected by scholars, journalists and politicians around the world. And it planted the 36-year-old Fukuyama on the big-thinker map. Why the appeal? Declaring an end “conveys a kind of apocalyptic sense that there is a big transition underfoot,” Fukuyama told me. “You perceive there is something going on — saying it is the end of something gives you that aha moment.” The essay — which three years later became a hefty book — had a built-in defense mechanism: The end of history was not yet upon us, but would happen in an unspecified “long run.” So if history doesn’t end, be patient. And in his conclusion, Fukuyama suggested that if ideological struggles did end, life might become so dull that we’d “get history started once again.” Either way, he’s right.

“The End of History?” offered a rough template for the end. Today, chances are, if your book is titled “The End of” something, it’s long, contradictory, disputable — but still feels irrefutable. And if you spend enough time with these books and articles, five distinct types of ends emerge, with varying degrees of credibility, bombast and persuasiveness.

The fake-out end
In 2010’s “The End of the Free Market,” Ian Bremmer chronicles the showdown between traditional free-market capitalism and what he calls “state capitalism” — think China, Russia and the Arab monarchies, in which governments harness market forces but still control big chunks of the economy. The book, Bremmer says in the introduction, explains how this new form of capitalism “threatens free markets and the future of the global economy.”
It’s a good story, and Bremmer offers copious stats and anecdotes to support it. But in the final chapter, we get confusing news: Over time, he writes, “free markets will probably outlast state capitalism . . . just as they bested Soviet-style communism.”

Wait. So, in “The End of the Free Market,” the free market prevails?

Bremmer takes refuge in his subtitle: “Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?” He believes free markets will win, he wrote in Foreign Policy, “but that’s a long-term process, and the outcome is far from certain . . . which is why the full title ends in a question mark.” Ah, the question mark — the indispensable fig leaf of so many “the end of” arguments, shielding authors from the demands of consistency. Richard Susskind deploys it in his 2008 book, “The End of Lawyers?,” which argues that information technology will upend the legal profession. On the first page of the introduction, he cautions readers: “As the question mark in the title should at least hint, I write not to bury lawyers but to investigate their future.” Yet Susskind’s investigation yields a most definite ambiguity: “The future for lawyers could be prosperous or disastrous,” he concludes. “The arguments and findings of this book could support either end game.”


The as-we-know-it end

This may be the most popular type of end, and features some of its best-known works. Something doesn’t really have to end, but if it is changing in a meaningful way, then you can declare that it is the end of that thing as we know it. (And your title feels fine.) Most authors are up front about this tactic. Early in “The End of Power,” Naim acknowledges that power has not disappeared and that some people still possess a lot if it. His point is not that power has disappeared, but that it is “decaying,” that powerful people, institutions and nations — constrained by new competitors and heavier scrutiny — aren’t as strong as they once were.
Similarly, Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men” argues that the balance of economic power — from jobs to education levels — is flipping the sexes. “The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” she proclaims.

Yet male power is far from ended, as Rosin writes: “Yes, the United States and many other countries still have a gender wage gap. . . . And yes, the upper reaches of power are still dominated by men.” But, she says, these disparities are “the last artifacts of a vanishing age.”
When I asked her recently about the title, Rosin offered some misgivings. “I’ve gone back and forth on whether I like the title many times — in particular, whether I should have used a question mark,” she said. “I come out just not regretting” the title. It fits, she decided, because the book is about “the end of a presumption of male dominance,” she says. “The end of an idea of a certain kind of men.” The end of power or of men? Not quite. Big changes in both? Sure... read more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-end-of-everything/2013/04/05/a278623c-7fab-11e2-8074-b26a871b165a_print.html