The End of History, Again

Identity and Belonging

An essay by Sanjana Hattotuwa

Does he make you think 
of Francis Fukuyama?

Someone for whom I have great respect has asked me to review an essay by Sanjana Hattotuwa that appeared in the Island on 29 September. I do so somewhat unwillingly. The kind of writing this essay represents is of little interest to me because I view historical processes (including, inter alia, all social and political processes) as being ultimately beyond human control. It is true that men and women, individually and in groups, can grasp and sometimes make use of these processes to further their own ends, but in doing so they unavoidably change both the process and its results. These changes and effects are not fully predictable by anyone and can have serious unforeseen consequences. Hence my deep conviction that sociopolitical activism is at best ambiguous in its effects, and at worst downright dangerous.

Readers of an optimistic, pragmatic or executive bent will surely contest this. What nonsense, they’ll say. Of course you can plan a course of action, carry it out and if all goes well you will see the results you expected to see. That’s exactly how people win wars, succeed in business, fly to the moon and do all the other great things they have done throughout history. Anyone who claims otherwise is surely deluded.

Yet it takes no more than a moment’s reflection to vindicate my thesis. Yes, indeed, we can predict the outcomes of processes – but only some of the outcomes. Whatever the process, there will always be unintended, unforeseen consequences attendant upon it. These can be problematic, negative, even fatal unless they are addressed by further action – that is, by more process. This may – may – offset the negative consequences of the first action, but it will produce further unforeseen outcomes that will then have to be addressed by more action, and so on. The people performing these actions may kid themselves that they’re controlling some process or the other, but any fool can see that the process is really controlling them.

Of course this does not mean we should give up studying history (or political science, or sociology); it is both our instinct and our duty to learn about the world we live in and how our words and deeds affect it. Our knowledge will always be imperfect, and we cannot help changing the things we study simply by the act of studying them, but we may yet learn something useful. The question, for me at least, is whether Mr Hattotuwa’s essay helps us in our understanding of the historical process.

Well, does it? The essay opens with a longish description of an LTTE child soldier fascinated by the workings of an ‘in-dash CD player’ fitted to a van in which the author was travelling in the course of his laudable fact-finding and peace-building activities during the Sri Lankan civil war. This was apparently intended to serve as an affective, human-interest-filled introduction to the rather cerebral think-piece that follows, but I’m sorry to say it failed to evoke in me any emotion whatsoever. Neither did it provide any logical point of ingress to the ideas and arguments contained in the essay.

The child soldier, says Mr Hattotuwa, reminded him of Francis Fukuyama, the turn-of-the-century political scientist who famously proclaimed that the fall of Communism and the worldwide success of the liberal-capitalist model of political economy had brought about the End of History. Prof. Fukuyama is hardly the first person I would think of if a teenager were to point a loaded gun at me, but I suppose Mr Hattotuwa may have been reminded of him by the potentially imminent end of his own history. Or maybe the kid just looked like Prof. Fukuyama. Never mind: it is with the ruminations of Professor End of History that the essay is really concerned.

Francis Fukuyama’s famous prediction was, of course, a washout. It failed for precisely the reasons I describe in my first paragraph above: the developments that brought about the supposed end of history also had other, unforeseen consequences, making sure that, Gorbachev and Walesa and the falling Wall notwithstanding, history still kept rolling along like Old Man River. This does not, however, appear to have dinted the good professor’s standing with Mr Hattotuwa, who writes that

Fukuyama’s central thesis is that populism’s rise and appeal at present is because of the indignity suffered by those in society who are rendered invisible by the dominant narratives undergirding the politics, practices and policies of the government.

Oh, nice. So the rise of populism isn’t due to any characteristic or tendency in the populists, or in the populus, themselves, but to the way they’re treated in ‘the dominant narratives’ of the State. Here we encounter the great Illusion of the Reformers, one that goes all the way back to Rousseau: humanity in a state of nature is perfect, and it is only society (or rather its engines, such as the State) that mar his perfection and turn him selfish, violent and anti-social. Reform society – as Communists, Socialists, Nazis, Islamic fanatics, Tamil Tigers, Sinhalese nationalists and zealots of all and every description are forever dying to do – and we shall all be transformed into angels. Yes, there it is – that doleful, superannuated hunk of philosophical horseflesh, the Perfectibility of Man, dragged out for yet another flogging, another hopeless totter round the track.

Well, I’m not buying it, especially not from a failed prophet like Francis Fukuyama. Yet this, I fear, is the meat – if you will pardon the expression – of Mr Hattotuwa’s essay:

Fukuyama suggests that the politics of the left has lost its way, focussing on ever smaller issues anchored to specific communities, giving way to right-wing politics that uses identity politics, including by appropriating the language of marginalization and outrage, to appeal to ever greater numbers. Fukuyama focussed on the deterioration of liberal democracies in the West, but his critique of polarization in political dialogue, lack of robust critique, the rise of emotion over reason, short-term fixes instead of long-term reform holds true even in Sri Lanka. 

Seriously, did we need a somewhat discredited Japanese-American political scientist to diagnose our ills for us? ‘Polarization in political dialogue, the rise of emotion over reason and short-term fixes in place of long-term reform’ have been staples of Sri Lankan politics since before Francis Fukuyama was born. Anyone who has struggled to follow the self-interested antics of the constituent groups and individual members of the Ceylon National Congress and its precursors during the early years of the twentieth century will have learnt more about polarization in political dialogue than he may well care to know. Polarization in Ceylon politics began the day the Jaffna Association rejected Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s attempts to create a non-communal basis for political activism in Colonial Ceylon; it has been the very basis of Lankan politics since the death of D.S. Senanayake, the last truly unifying figure in our country’s political history. As for the rule of emotion over reason, identity politics is simply the only demotic politics we have; such has been the case ever since the Sinhalese Buddhist revival of the late nineteenth century. Reasonable polities are concerned with issues such as the economy, national defence, law and order, public welfare, education and health; polities ruled by emotion get themselves all worked up over race, religion, language, caste and other issues in which government rightly has no place at all. As for ‘short-term fixes in place of long-term reform’, what else can you hope for from a political culture in which everyone is in it for what they can grab?

The problems of Sri Lanka are, no doubt about it, similar to those facing Western democracies today; but while the disease may be the same, the symptoms in our country are far more extreme than they have yet become in the West. Our patient is not nearly as strong, and the disease is much further advanced in its course.

The disease? I call it civilizational decline. In Sri Lanka, as in the West, it has been discernible – if only to hindisght – since about 1900 or so, and acquired real momentum after the Second World War came to an end. Barring calamitous climate change, however, the fall of Western civilization may yet be deferred for a generation or two, perhaps indefinitely; it is a high civilization, quite possibly the highest in human history, and it has far to fall. In Sri Lanka the collapse of civilization is already pretty well accomplished. People like Mr Hattotuwa and me are its relics.

I speak, of course, of the civilization imposed on us by our erstwhile masters the British. Our own high civilization has been dead these seven hundred years or more; barbaric successor kingdoms and foreign powers then fought over Lanka for half a millennium until at last, about twenty years after the establishment of British rule in the island, civilization returned – as a foreign product. It didn’t stay long: in less than a century it had begun to ebb away again. Much was already lost by the time colonial Ceylon gained independence in 1948; by 1972 the decline had become unstoppable. Today what little is left of the modern, democratic nation-state of Sri Lanka is running on the dregs of momentum acquired in the colonial past. Very soon that will be gone, and we shall have returned to the conditions of oriental despotism punctuated by periods of bloody anarchy that were the only political reality the people of Lanka knew from the death of Nissanka Malla of Polonnaruwa in the thirteenth century to the adoption of the Colebrooke-Cameron mission report by the British colonial authorities in 1833.

History, of course, never ends. Yet it is hard to see any great change being accomplished in Sri Lanka without a revolution so comprehensive that it destroys not only the present order and its institutions but also our national myths and superstitious fictions. It might even have to be a world revolution, for these days not even an island is an island. And revolution alone will not suffice: a century or so of rebuilding – or else occupation by yet another foreign power – will have to follow before any kind of civilization returns to our beautiful, unhappy motherland.

I am selfish enough to hope the revolution doesn’t come to pass in my time. As for occupation by a foreign power, well, my Oriental-language skills have always been rather poor. Much as I would like to see a return to civilized life in Lanka, I don’t see any hope of it for generations to come. Certainly it will not be brought about through ‘constitutional reform to address issues around identity and dignity that were drivers of violent conflict’, as Mr Hattotuwa suggests. For constitutional reform to work, people have to take constitutions seriously. And only civilized people can do that.