It's Not The End of History, Not Even for You
What Do Political Narratives do for Our Limited Minds, and What Should Political Writing Do Differently?
Some 14 years, a small lifetime ago, another me, another Sarah, is hurrying off to another psychology lecture in the charmless Science Center Hall A, one of the largest lecture halls on campus.
As with all our past selves, this Sarah was locally knowledgeable but existentially clueless. She didn’t know, for example, that this class, taken as a mere graduation requirement, was the gateway drug for her slightly bizarre future career. She thought she wanted to be a history professor.1
One day in Science Center Hall A, Professor Daniel Gilbert shared his research on the “End of History Illusion,” a phenomenon where people “believe that they have experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment, but will not substantially grow or mature in the future.” We are, if his studies are to be trusted, simultaneously incredibly bad at knowing what will make us happy in the future, and terrible at knowing just how much change always lies ahead. We think we’ll always want the same things in life (because we’re all grown up now, basically). We think this implicitly even though we of course know that even very recently we had a totally different set of priorities. In his TED talk (it was the early 2010s, after all, so if you were a minor psychology celebrity what you had to have was a TED talk), Gilbert put it this way:
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.
This inability of humans to understand that they’re still changing helps explain why, when we have our hearts broken, we feel sure we’ll never love again. It helps explain why teenagers like lecture-hall-Sarah feel so smugly confident that they’ll never change their politics or preferences or that they’re sure what their career path will be. It explains why we cringe so very hard when we find old diary entries or social media posts or emails, and wonder how we could ever have been like that. It’s not just that we dislike or disagree with our older selves; it’s that the difference is humbling to our current selves, reminding us that we are ultimately the subjects, and not just the agents, of time.
Interestingly, this phenomenon appears cross-culturally, but differently in different places. For example, in one study, psychologists found that Japanese people tended to see their past selves as different-but-equal more than Americans, while Americans tended to hold tight to an understanding of themselves as always-improving: "US Americans' perception of their personality development is somewhat motivated by their desire to think of themselves as having improved and grown in respect to the past and as being stable moving forward in the future." American self-help culture is inscribed here in our understanding of time. Our brains may be bad at projecting time going forward, thus limiting what we can think. But our culture partially determines how this tends to work and how exactly we’ll be blinded to the realities of the past and present.
This brings me around to the real point of writing about all this, which is (as always) not really a nifty piece of cognitive science but the way it affects and relates to our social and political world. The theory-canny among you will notice, of course, that Gilbert named his study after a famous piece of political theory, by neoconservative-cum-classic liberal (more on this soon) historian Francis Fukuyama. In his 1992 book Fukuyama argues, with remarkable, almost-enviable certainty and confidence, that the spread of capitalism and liberal democracy were leading, irreversibly, to a world order without end, that humanity had reached
not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
After all, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed that there would surely never be another large-scale experiment with another economic system: surely once people have a taste of capitalism and our liberal democracy, they won’t be going back to dictatorship, which is, surely, the only form of communism? And surely there aren’t other options altogether…
Those of us living now, in an age where a certain presidential candidate boasts regularly of his desire to be dictator, know that this is not what happened. Things did not progress slowly to a peaceful horizon of liberal democracy and stable capitalist growth and prosperity. Fukuyama knows this now too, and has had to elegantly eat his words (more on that in a moment). As time went on, his book looked less and less plausible. As the reviewer of his recent, and rather different, volume, put it: “As events such as 9/11, the Afghan and Iraq wars and the 2008 financial crisis took their toll on liberalism’s self-confidence, Fukuyama’s work was denounced as the height of Hegelian hubris. He was seen as a naive believer in the inevitability of a western-defined idea of progress, and as someone who was blind to liberal democracy’s failings.” We were not, as it turns out, living through the end of history, although I can confirm that it felt like it a bit, even as late as the Obama-supporters-bubble of 2010, which is where young Sarah was trundling off to her psychology classes to learn about the End of History Illusion.
Why do I want to return to Fukuyama and the end-of-history illusion now, when even Fukuyama has discredited the idea that named it? Gilbert is making the point about politics only referentially, but we should take it seriously, I suspect, in that all the political ideologies have their specific curious conceptions of time and history, and these narratives are probably appealing in part due to this (and other) aspects of human psychology. We should take this seriously because the phenomenon shapes our imagination, and lack thereof, often in harmful ways.
After all, consider how many, many political visions are at least in part about time. Progressives are seeking, well, a story of progress. Conservatives are generally seeking a return to a past, sometimes a mythical one. Leftists often have a sort of mythical future revolutionary moment that they’re looking forward to. Centrists… honestly I’m not sure, as with so much about centrism.2
One way to think about the relationship between this psychological tendency and political accounts of history is that the latter are meant to be tools to help us overcome the former. If people tend to think they are finished products, and struggle to imagine future change (which is Gilbert’s theory for why we experience this illusion: it’s just cognitively so difficult to project forward) their default state might also be to assume the world is going to continue in roughly the same way as well. For the same reason we can’t imagine forthcoming personal change like a new relationship, living somewhere else, or having different musical preferences than we do now, we struggle to imagine the world not only can but will be ordered another way. And political-ideological-history narratives are meant to help us overcome this, at least in many cases. They function, anyhow, as devices that help us internalise the idea that alternate futures are possible. That sounds nice on the surface, because “imagination” has a nice to ring to it, but I think it’s worth noting that in many cases, perhaps most, these highly defined futures available to the imagination are at least a bit nuts, in the same way that corporate visions, or religious stories about the apocalypse tend to be. Political visions of the future are oversimplified and emotionally gratifying so that they can be imagineable at all.
In other words, what I suspect happens in practice is that most political visions set out to either accomodate or combat the End of History Illusion.
Accommodate: for a very specific kind of Western comfortable person in, oh, 1992, the idea that everything would continue in roughly the same way but more and better seemed plausible and works in line with this psychological bias.
Combat: For, well, most other political ideologies, something is needed to overcome the sense that things are always going to be the same. Often-extreme possibilities are conjured up, in the form of revenge fantasy, utopian ideal, or even dystopian apocalyptic vision—because human beings can imagine these sorts of outcomes.
In other words, I suspect that most political ideological systems choose their wildly simplified narratives about the past, the present, and the future precisely because we are already poorly equipped to understand the passing of time, such that we can only ever really think about ourselves as either finished products or transformable via easily-conceptualisable turns of events, like a very linear concept of progress, a nostalgic return, or a revolution. (In our personal lives, it’s more like: the self improvement glow-up, the return to the childhood home, the radical makeover). The problem, though, in both personal and political life, is that none of these easily-imaginable kinds of change are likely to be our future. It is more likely that things will simply be very, very messy, with gradual yet unimaginable change. We will not return to the past, we will not make steady progress, and no revolution is straightforward (indeed, many are disasters).
In 1992, when Fukuyama’s The End of History was published, it was probably not that hard to imagine that things would keep going as they had, with steady gains to the stock market and the fall of Soviet dictatorships. It seemed (to him) that history was progressing, however mixed and uneven-ly, towards a horizon where no more “progress” would be necessary or even possible. This turned out to be neither true nor a particularly good material account of how the world worked, but it is not surprising given that human beings are all, to quote Gilbert, faced with “the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining.” I don’t want to say I sympathize with Fukuyama’s error, exactly. For one thing, I have a serious disagreement with him about how to analyse and understand history. But I do think it’s worth noticing that his error related to time specifically is human, and that we all might be subject to it in different ways.
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Time came for Fukuyama as it does for us all. In fact, Fukuyama has revised his ideas repeatedly in light of history. For example, while he originally supported the “war on terror” (e.g. US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq) he eventually withdrew his support and also acknowledged one issue with the idea of the “war” involved is that “wars have beginnings and endings,” but that some struggles simply go on slowly, forever. (Notice, once again, that the problem was a faulty implication about time).
Writing this post, I skimmed Fukuyama’s Wikipedia page (I wanted to know how long he’d been at Stanford) and was rather struck by this pull quote, where he (once an avowed neocon!) grappled with the question of the place of socialism in the economy:
“It all depends on what you mean by socialism. Ownership of the means of production – except in areas where it's clearly called for, like public utilities – I don't think that's going to work. If you mean redistributive programmes that try to redress this big imbalance in both incomes and wealth that has emerged then, yes, I think not only can it come back, it ought to come back. This extended period, which started with Reagan and Thatcher, in which a certain set of ideas about the benefits of unregulated markets took hold, in many ways it's had a disastrous effect. At this juncture, it seems to me that certain things Karl Marx said are turning out to be true. He talked about the crisis of overproduction… that workers would be impoverished and there would be insufficient demand.”
The Fukuyama of 1992 could not have imagined.
The broader historical point here, of course, is that the weird thing about political visions is they never quite happen the way one originally imagines, but some parts of them do come all the same, one way or another. Marx’s originally-described grand revolution has not come, except in rather some profoundly-troubled-at-best, and horrific-at-worst, ways. The end of history also did not come via liberalism and capitalism. But that does not mean that political theory is pointless: some of the more accurate ideas do eventually become evident, not least about the dangers of the accumulation of capital. (Yes, capital eats away at the system that sustains it; that’s part of why history cannot end where Fukuyama imagined.)
Ideas do unfurl over the course of history, it’s just that they have a nasty habit of doing this slowly and unevenly, rather than in a single, transcendent moment.
And of course, this disjuncture between a neat narrative and the real makes human responses to history messier and often, well, stupider. Because human beings, at least those we can measure in our current society, seem pretty bad at spotting what is going on if it doesn't conform to these kinds of oversimplified stories. This is why so many relatively minor events can get interpreted variously as moral decline, The Revolution, or Progress. Sometimes the same event can be understood as all three.
There are many documented time-related biases that demonstrate this trouble humans have with understanding the passage of time in the psychology literature, from the peak–end rule to the rather fascinating “illusion of moral decline” to the often-noted problem that human beings do not respond to the threat of climate change well because it is not causing destruction in the same rapid way that (say) terrorists do. Because we can’t grasp the reality of time, we do blind, foolish, even wild things. For example, personally, we choose, even work hard for, a future that future-us won’t want, whether that’s a career or a relationship or a concept of “cool”. When it comes to politics, we do, well, the same, writ large, with the supplemental and ultimately unhelpful assurance from one political narrative or another that there’s a given shape to what’s coming next.
My point here is not primarily to dig at Fukuyama (that’s too easy). It’s to turn the mirror around. The “left” for example, is eternally full of burnt-out disappointed people, upset that x or y social movement didn’t achieve its goals and eventually fell apart. Equally, there are the sort of vanguardist-Leninists and company, convinced it’s all ultimately going according to plan, and willing to do nearly anything that seems like a part of that plan. Both expect or have expected trajectories neater than history will ever allow.
Beyond this, our current political moment may well be a little extra bonkers because we’re having a hard time relying on old narratives. We’re simply not seeing “progress” as inequality widens and various rights are rolled back around the world. We’re not seeing a return to tradition really, either, certainly not in any uniform way. The revolution is not here, despite lots of things that almost look like one if you squint very, very hard.
We’re simply not or even near the end of history, nor are we like to be, and it’s exhausting and disorienting in equal measure. And this leads to panic, bad hot takes and general confusion.
I don’t have a lot of neat answers for what to do here about this psychological illusion and its historical counterparts and counters, but I will say this: I think the first and maybe foremost task of a writer-about-politics is to be honest, including with themselves, about the messiness of reality, to work through complexity instead of around it, even when it hurts, and then to make that complexity tolerable for others without engaging in reduction. This of course includes the jumbled unfolding of history that will never easily match one’s ideals . If political narratives compensate for our bias towards feeling that history has ended, good writing and thinking should compensate for these narratives’ tendencies to assume history is happening in a particular shape. This adherence to complexity is not the same as giving every “side” of a struggle or conflict the same due or wallowing in ambivalence; we are called to be analytic and sometimes partisan and always decisive. But we should draw out what is dark and difficult and mixed and uncertain, not obscure it.
Even now, I think it is possible to do this without abandoning one’s ideals.
So with that in mind, I hold on to this as I plunge ahead: what’s coming is going to be much weirder than we imagine. And when we get there, we won’t be the people we are now.
I think the future Sarah she envisioned would have been a really good idea, if the Western political world and academia hadn’t simultaneously exploded.
Maybe they think about progress as just especially gradual and/or technological?
Loved this. I’m surprised Thatcher’s TINA (There Is No Alternative [to neoliberalism]) didn’t find its way in, no worries. Are there any studies I should check out regarding the “Givers/Takers/Followers” hypothesis that seems to be everywhere (e.g. Adam Grant, et al., etc.)? It seems to track, so maybe worth looking at, especially for the “follower” types? And/or, any studies on early adopters and the friction they always experience socially?