You can perhaps judge the rise and decline of a society by the quality of its public intellectuals. In the last century, the United States had some genuinely great thinkers such as Walter Lippmann and Hannah Arendt who addressed a literate public while producing enduring works that can still be read today with great benefit.
Now you have people like Francis Fukuyama and Sam Harris who may be studied in the future more as a symptom of their society. A podcast between the two last month went viral because the end-of-history guy now acknowledges authoritarian China may be a viable political model after all while democratic America looks less and less attractive to others.
“I think that the Chinese have created a pretty impressive system. It is authoritarian. It’s quasi-market-based and they are very successful at marshalling new technology,” Fukuyama told Harris. “They’re capable of innovating a lot of things we thought they weren’t able to do. And conversely, democracy, especially American democracy, looks like it’s falling apart … if the Chinese keep their development machine going, it may turn out that they have a real alternative.”
Fukuyama has gone from “the West is the best” to “the end of the West is nigh”, and now seemingly, “the East is red”. Perhaps he does deserve credit for daring to change his views, though it may be just his readiness to follow whatever is trending at the moment. From the fall of the Soviet Union to the rise of Donald Trump, tracking post-Cold War America’s triumph to its hegemonic decline must have been a tragic journey.
Harris is a neuroscientist who comments on everything, including defending Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. He thinks it is a myth that the two sides – the Israelis and the Palestinians – in this conflict are “equally civilised, equally entitled to respect, and equally worth protecting”.
I should think that support for equal rights would be the least controversial position to take in this terrible conflict.
