Fukuyama's Glasses

“If you don’t start by thinking about big ideas, you’ll never get to them later in life, or your views will be shaped by the unsystematic opinions of people in your social set,” Stanford scholar Francis Fukuyama observes in his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man (p. 33). Fukuyama is most famous for being the man who declared that history had ended. That History, capital-H, is a dialectical process by which we produce the best political system, and that we found it in liberal democracy. It’s an idea whose misapprehension was entirely proportionate to its popularity. He’s spent the last 38 years correcting people on it; indeed, his exasperation about this Sisyphean task spikes through the memoir’s preface.

Fukuyama's life has been defined by History: the public attempt to reason our way through the big ideas that define our society. And his new memoir embodies a life lived in ideas. If one looks to the mere nature of Fukuyama's biography, one will find a family who spent World War II in internment camps before embracing American liberalism and capitalism, a young man who broke from his father's liberalism and his college set's postmodernism to embrace conservatism—before, famously, breaking from neoconservatism and losing his friends all over again. This is a life defined by its rejection of patrimonial ideas and patrimonial structures—a rejection of the structures he sees as the baser fraction of human nature.

And yet he balks when others seek to follow in those same footsteps, and use History to overcome mere nature. It is this contradiction that runs like a red thread through Fukuyama's later works, this memoir included. The book stands as his testament to a life lived through ideas, and may stand as the parting words to the liberals he leaves behind. It is, therefore, suitably contradictory and maddening in some of its reversals and elisions. It would not be properly Fukuyaman without being debatable. Even when he’s wrong, he gets there by tributaries that we can traverse back to the river of Big Ideas, finding our own path to somewhere better by going down a different river than he did. In that way, the memoir is wholly of its author. 

Memoirs are a sprawling entity that can barely be called a genre; riven with fraud and exaggeration, they’re veritably fictive. But the basic expectation of a memoir is that it confesses something personal. For Francis Fukuyama, the glimpses of the man behind the ideas is phantasmal and fleeting. He has, in one sense, always been a rather personal writer. Many of his books are peppered with anecdotes and dollops of commentary that have an Andy Rooney-esque view on the world we all share. But he was never intimate. 

That hasn’t changed with Realm, not in the slightest. There are no glimpses of his children, nor his wife of four decades, for instance. It’s a decision that could either be charming—perhaps he was respecting their deeply-held wishes—or illusive. What we get instead is his attempt at sketching a life lived in ideas. 

Fukuyama made his name as a neoconservative; indeed, his End of History-induced apotheosis occurred as a result of a neocon journal and was nurtured by many connections in that world. He sketches his ascent into that particular revolutionary Valhalla by way of his time in the circle of philosopher Allan Bloom. Like so many memoirs, Fukuyama’s is reserved about its notional autobiographical subject, but occasionally quite disclosive about others—and Bloom comes off as a conservative queen for whom Fukuyama held great admiration, while also driving him around endlessly and observing his profligate spending habits as he became a Wildean dandy of the ’80s. But what also shines through in these personal observations is that Bloom led something of a personality cult at Cornell, where Fukuyama began his education.

Cornell’s Telluride House gets more than a few shoutouts in this memoir, an incubator of philosophy, of Big Ideas, a place where the great human questions could be debated while the frat boys next door were having keggers. A place where the likes of arch-conservative scholar Allan Bloom could lecture hordes of (almost exclusively male) hangers-on while his cigarette burned to a limp coil of ash. “There was,” Fukuyama writes, “an authenticity to his eccentricities” (p. 44). An inestimable lecturer, “Bloom stayed at the House as a faculty guest…and he would hold forth in discussions of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and every other conceivable topic late at night in the ground-floor Telluride kitchen” (p. 42). 

Yet running through these reflections is a ley line of doubt about conservatism. This was the community that nurtured Fukuyama, that gave him his professional platform and all the standing it implied. But as the years wear on, he finds himself doubting conservative dogmas about capitalism and neoconservative nostrums about the illimitable power of Pax Americana. 

We get glimpses of intimacy when Fukuyama reflects on his break with neoconservatives in the early days of the Iraq War, describing how he got blanked in an elevator by Charles Krauthammer, for instance, or how Bill Kristol stopped speaking to him until they both aligned on opposing Trump decades later. “I was at a point in my life,” he writes, “when I really didn’t have to care what my old friends thought of me; I had other friends with different views and in any event was quite secure in my own skin” (p. 149). 

This epistemic break liberated Fukuyama, an inflection point in a life well-lived, and it presaged his shifts on economics and much else besides, to the point where he could become John Liberalism, in the words of one YouTube commenter. In the process, he’s become a determined foe of libertarianism, conservatism, and many elements of the political left he thinks of as illiberal.

You will not learn what it was truly like to be Frank Fukuyama in that tumultuous period at the turn of the century. Curtains draw everywhere you might care to look. But you will nevertheless learn a vital lesson about living in a social media age that drills conformity into each of us with the relentless precision of an earth auger. Fukuyama makes it plain in this book: being comfortable in one’s skin is more precious than any coin of the realm. 

But that brings us to the precincts of Fukuyama’s memoir that evince the worst of him. 

Let’s return to where we began: his love of epistemic sovereignty. From that fountain sprang his desire to carve his own tables and host his own servers. To know is to rule. At least over oneself. This book is also devoted to the exploration of its own title, of living in the realm of the Last Man, that dire figure he identified in his most famous book, the over-satisfied privileged asshole who believes in nothing yet still strives to find a cause worth dying for amidst his suffocating prosperity. 

As Fukuyama puts it memorably, one of the great tasks of liberal democracy is to build a house for the Last Man, one that will quiesce his bullshit and spare the rest of us from its effluence.

There is a fundamental—and all too defensible—pessimism in this view. It stems from Fukuyama’s idea of human nature, outlined in End of History. We always seek recognition of our human dignity, even to the point of toxicity and supremacism—drawing from Aristotle, he calls this yearning thymos. It is the seedbed both of every revolution and of every tyranny we revolt against. But his vision of ‘human nature’ really roars forth in his true magnum opus, the Political Order duology.   

In short, Fukuyama believes that while human beings are inherently social, our failure mode is that our sociality will always lead us to favour our kin and our friends. This is what leads to patrimonialism, a political system where those in power reward their chosen inner circle at the expense of the wider society. Repatrimonialisation is something akin to what we’re pleased to call Donald Trump’s "governance": descending back down from democracy, into naked corruption, looting the state for personal gain. 

Liberal democracy is a technology that channels our desires away from our natural tendency to cleave to our families and towards supporting a society made up of people we will never meet, much less form an intimate attachment to. But we will always be struggling against that tendency, a predator lurking in the reeds beyond the walls of democracy’s great city.

Fukuyama might characterize his liberalism as one of fundamental humility; unlike the hubristic revolutionaries he often criticizes, he recognizes that we cannot make the world just as we please. There are always limitations—and, for him, they are often dictated by nature in some fashion. This idea recurs throughout his memoir, where he explains his own work through a variety of elegant sketches that circle around his vision of “human nature.” 

He lays it out plainly in a chapter of that name. “The most prevalent form of social life lies in community with a small circle of friends and family, which in turn means that patrimonialism—that is, rule by friends and family—is deeply natural” (p. 128). He also believes—with no small amount of evidence in the historical record—that human beings struggle against a predisposition to violence. Indeed, his description of proto-genocidal mass graves in ancient China in The Origins of Political Order continues to haunt me  (Origins, pp. 100-101).

These are, he argues once again, our fundamental limitations as a species. We resist this at our peril. There are aspects of nature that simply cannot be overcome by human ingenuity, no matter how dearly we may wish it. 

Astute readers might see where this is going.

“The final frontier in the denial of the significance of biology is the contemporary transgender movement” (p. 133). Oh dear. 

He goes on, “Transgender activists, supported by a good part of the medical establishment, assert that gender is wholly unrelated to biological sex; that is, to one’s XY chromosomes.” And still further: “the notion that there is a strong underlying relationship between biological sex and gender identity became one of those verboten ideas in certain liberal circles during the 2010s and 2020s, a prohibition that has been rigorously enforced by transgender activists. The idea is not a very plausible one, however” (p. 133).

Indeed, it does read like a greatest-hits album from the New York Times’ or Guardian’s editorial page: Trans people deny basic biological facts, we’re all censorious hyper-activists who silence elementary truths, chromosomes are the totality of sex difference, et cetera. 

To say this is disappointing from Fukuyama, however, would be to miss an even greater failure here, which is exemplified by the chilling way he concludes this section: “There have always been a small number of individuals who were unhappy with their gender identities, and in a liberal society their choices need to be respected. But one cannot build a political right around a characteristic that may or may not be natural, and is shared by only a small minority of human beings” (pp. 133–134).

Well. Let’s put a pin in this.

What makes us human? 

It’s one of the properly grand philosophical questions that Fukuyama enjoins us to study, that he cites as critical in his development as both a scholar and a person. His is a life lived in ideas, sketched in flourishes throughout this book which—when it talks about his personal life—is mostly a series of minor landmarks along the mighty river of his philosophical education.

Having the freedom to ask big questions and learn about them philosophically is, assuredly, a gift. One he wants more of us to share in. So let me do a little exploring of my own here and see if I don’t lose you.

Humans are not the only animals who possess intelligence. One might say that we simply possess more of it. Unlike dolphins (so far as we know, anyway), we create algebra and iambic pentameter. But that misses something even more fundamental: why create algebra or poetry at all? We are the species that asks why and tries to answer, yes. But even more fundamentally than that, we assign meaning to the inherently meaningless.

To put it even more simply, we’re the only species to escape evolution’s leash and create a whole new epochal force that was far more significant to our lives: Fukuyama's beloved History. For humans, evolution ceased to be the primary driver of change; we replaced it with a new motor of our own. Our very first engine, if you like. That engine has been driving us forward ever since.

Fukuyama’s work is a great way of understanding this. Recall when I described liberal democracy as a technology; it is a tool we use, like any other, to refashion the world around us and transcend our nature. Indeed, our nature is to chafe against nature. From the invention of the first handaxe, humanity has striven to transcend our limitations rather than be enslaved by them. 

Liberal democracy is a means of overcoming our worst instincts. In the Political Order duology, Fukuyama writes that primordial individualism is a myth; humans were prehistorically tribal (Origins, pp. 29, 89). Instead, we had to invent individualism as a value, in many different cultures, to sustain this thing called modernity. 

So, why draw the line at trans people? If challenging our nature is our nature, then how can we call people expressing a sex and gender that exists within human nature its opposite? As humans, we make meaning of a world that inherently lacks it, and then dream of ways to be something other than what our nature dictates.

Everything we do is downstream of that mountain spring. This includes democracy itself.

But my objection points to a fundamental philosophical difference between myself and Fukuyama, and not just because I’m a trans woman whose thymos was offended by that passage. 

Rather, that objection comes in large measure from Fukuyama’s deep skepticism of any technological intervention on the human body (hypocrisies abound here too, of course; Fukuyama’s been known to wear glasses). But he does, to his credit, try to draw a line somewhere he deems reasonable; the advances of modern medicine, the advent of birth control and safe, legal abortion are all things he seems to be firmly in favour of. Singularity-chasing futurism and transhumanism (e.g., life extension), considerably less so.

In an especially droll passage Fukuyama observes (p. 142):

Human societies would never evolve if there were not generational turnover; a world in which people routinely lived to be 150 or 200 would be a nightmare. I once had a debate on this subject with the science editor of a libertarian magazine who gushed about the possibilities for life extension. I responded that I was not looking forward to a world where he would be able to spout the same dumb libertarian views a hundred years from now.

Truly a sick burn, we can all agree. But I’d also posit that this perspective is fully continuous with his transphobia. Humans can overcome a lot of their nature, but there are limits: you can’t change human lifespans and you can’t change sex. 

The problem for me lies in how he decides to draw that line. The average human lifespan has dramatically increased thanks to science. Why were eugenicists and white supremacists (all of whom Fukuyama loudly criticizes) wrong to say that technology shouldn’t uplift certain groups of people? Appeals to nature are, as Fukuyama himself admits in the “Human Nature” chapter, often used in tendentiously illiberal ways.

But then how are his lines also not tendentiously illiberal? And what horrors do we admit when we allow a standard whereby “unnatural” expressions can be deemed exempt from a rights-based framework? He even seems to suggest that trans people’s small numbers may preclude us from claiming trans identity and expression as rights. But how small a minority is too small? 

The questions pile high. Or, perhaps, as deep as the mass graves he writes about elsewhere.

At any rate, Fukuyama does not seem to mind freedom of religion—which is one of the biggest and most common “unnatural expressions” protected by liberal democracy. One cannot help one’s race, say, but one can quite easily change their religion, in theory. 

So why enumerate religious freedom as a right? Cultural ubiquity? Sheer numbers?

Fukuyama’s discomfort with transness stems from discomfort with the most modern and invasively technological means by which we transcend nature. While Fukuyama may disagree, trans people do change sex in many of the ways that matter. For many of us, our secondary sex characteristics change, along with our endocrinology, and countless other second-order effects from hormone replacement therapy. And ‘gender’ itself is nothing if not pure culture, a meaning we impose on the facticity of the human body. 

It’s the changing of that facticity that discomfits Fukuyama. Modern gender transitions have only been truly enabled by the vaulting medical advances of the 20th century, with new frontiers unfolding beyond us. There will, one day, be a trans woman who receives a transplanted womb and bears a child as naturally as a human being can. 

But Fukuyama expresses extensive doubts about such frontier technologies like CRISPR-Cas9, for fear it could “alter our understanding of political rights” (p. 134). He fears, not unreasonably, that such genetic editing will have unpredictable consequences—and that’s before we get to issues of political control; who gets to decide what changes to make, and to whom?

The risks are enormous. But a little philosophical elbow grease is all that’s needed to deduce the differences between the self-directed reconstructions of transgender people and the potential dangers of an immortal genetic upper class. Alas, we don’t entirely get it from Fukuyama, even if we get the foundations of some useful ideas. 

For instance, according to Fukuyama, we face the enduring challenge of thymotic striving; the out-of-control demands for dignity from an ever-multiplying collection of interest groups based on ever-narrower identities, each asserting their right to dignity in the face of an ever-expanding majority. This forms the basis of his skepticism of contemporary identity politics—including his obvious nose-wrinkling about trans people.

For him, this fractional proliferation of identity threatens the sense of civic unity required for modern democratic states to exist, where we identify as members of a pluralistic polity rather than primarily as part of some tiny tribal unit. The latter inhibits democratic decisionmaking and corrodes the foundations of the modern nation state, after all. It disrupts everything from the development of programmatic political parties (as opposed to clientelistic ones pursuing the narrow, sectional interest of a specific group, like a religious sect or ethnic group) to the sense of transcendental unity required to overcome racial and ethnic hatreds.

This is not an entirely new idea—and it has been expressed before with greater precision. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada’s last great truly intellectual prime minister, put it plainly in Federalism and the French Canadians:

To insist that a particular nationality must have complete sovereign power is to pursue a self-destructive end. Because every national minority will find, at the very moment of liberation, a new [national] minority in its bosom which in turn must be allowed the right to demand its freedom. And on and on would stretch the train of revolutions until the last-born of nation-states turned to violence to put an end to the very principle that gave it birth. That is why the principle of nationality has brought to the world two centuries of war, and not one single definitive solution.

Here he inveighed against what he regarded as the self-defeating nature of Quebecois nationalism, but it also reflected his sincere liberalism on the larger questions: he believed in supranational institutions like the European Community and United Nations. Trudeau was convinced that nationalism was suicidal in its atavism, and that we could transcend it.

Leftist labor organizer Cassie Pritchard might well agree with Fukuyama and Trudeau here, while echoing the narrowness and smallness of Fukuyama’s view. Writing in The Argument about whether it’s worthwhile for trans people to assert the reality of our ontological claims (i.e., that trans women really are women, and trans men really are men), she takes aim at the angry posture of activists, especially on social media: 

Anyone who has spent time in progressive or leftist circles is immediately familiar with this dynamic: an unyielding commitment to rhetorical hostility coupled with a demand for affection from the very people they’re attacking. There seems to be a belief that respect, affinity, or solidarity can be enforced through disciplinary measures like shaming, belittling, and ostracism. […]

Whenever I make the case to other trans people that we need to stop making demands on cis people’s feelings, beliefs, and speech—and instead appeal to common principles like liberty and equality—I am met with choruses asking me, incredulously, ‘Where’s your self-respect?’ This further complicates the picture; it seems that self-respect is curiously tied up in the active antagonism of the majority.

In Fukuyaman terms, this is all about the thymos. What Pritchard describes as “respect” or “self-respect” here is what Fukuyama would regard as a thymotic striving on the part of trans people, demanding a form of recognition from the majority—and, in his view, a form of recognition that defies nature itself and is thus prima facie suspect. Like the aspirations of nationalism, this assertion of transgender ontological truth, too, is an ancient curse we need to either dispel or contain.

So how do we square this circle? 

Fukuyama writes so movingly about his passions. The woodworking, his photography, his avid tech geekery. We do not make the world as we please, but humanity lies in striving to be more than our nature dictates. 

To be a democrat, whether liberal, leftist, or somewhere in between, is to technologically transcend something that dug mass graves since the days of the earliest cities. We achieve this by becoming mistresses and mavens of the forces that, left unchecked, might dominate us. Historically, our first great victory was over evolution itself. Then, we began to transcend what remained of our evolutionary inheritance: our propensity for patrimonial systems and willingness to put our friends before society as a whole. That struggle endures, enlivened by a struggle against the technologies we ourselves have created.

In Martha Nussbaum’s magisterial exegesis of Greek philosophy and tragedy, The Fragility of Goodness, she explores the idea of tuchē, a contrast to techne (‘skill,’ and the root of our word ‘technology’). Tuchē is a form of luck or contingency, but Nussbaum’s analysis reveals it to be something bigger still. Indeed, it’s the biggest thing of all: forces greater than ourselves that we cannot control.

The long march of History has led us to a point where, as History itself begins to end, we are left with the tuchē of techne. We struggle now against the technologies we have created and all the terrifying dominion that they can exert: nuclear weapons, gouts of carbon in the atmosphere, the false public squares of social media tech baronies, and now the political economy of generative AI. It’s not hard to see why Fukuyama fears these things; I share that anxiety. But trans people represent one more triumphant struggle against all the larger forces that threaten to suffocate our lives. A symbiosis with technology more than a defiance of our nature as humans.

This is entirely in line with Fukuyama’s own practice; he fears AI yet has informed opinions about Claude. He laments Apple’s walled garden precisely because he knows how to build his own computers. Trans people do much the same with our bodies, mastering biology rather than being suborned by it.

Humans have, in a real sense, always been cyborgs. From vaccines to psychiatric drugs to Fukuyama’s glasses, we fashion the tools that allow us to climb above the tuchē that threatens to limit us. In different ways, Nussbaum and Fukuyama counsel humility—and Nussbaum in particular is an advocate for reverence. But reverence is best understood as a map, not submission. For a mariner to respect the waves is not to refuse the crossing. 

Fukuyama is surely correct that there is a line somewhere, some militarised border of reality that we dare not cross on pain of death. But where he draws it now strikes me less as reverential humility than pessimism of a low order—and perhaps petty prejudice. Perhaps he simply finds us icky.

His memoir gives ample reason for pessimism; it begins with a needful polemic against Trumpism, in whose screaming maw all that Fukuyama loves may yet die. As his academic corpus warns, one of the chief reasons we’re in such dire straits is our atavistic yearning for tribalism. From that ancient desire flows all manner of hatreds and oppressions; every challenge we now face seems to trace its lineage back to Fukuyaman patrimonialism. 

But if history proves anything, it’s that we are as capable of ending it as surely as we ended evolution. 

Fukuyama’s elisions in his biography are quite striking. We get the occasionally intimate sketches of his family, and how they either avoided or languished in Japanese-American internment camps during the Second World War; the impacts resonated throughout his family and his life. But he never abandoned the systems that momentarily abandoned him; for all his strife with his father, they agreed on that much. Yoshio Fukuyama took up the mantle of American liberalism, and his son took up the mantle of its conservatism. Late in life, Francis returned to what his father never left: the wretched faith all liberals share in the plurality of man, the reality that ‘man’ is, in fact, made of men and women; he simply struggles with the next step.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that Francis Fukuyama programmed his own strategy game about military logistics—or that he built his own server racks for storing countless renditions of the entire Great American Songbook. But it’s rather fitting that his reasons for doing so amount to an unwavering belief in “personal autonomy” (p. 171). Cognitive sovereignty is everything to Fukuyama. Indeed, it’s the throughline of his life.

In a life made up of hairpin turns, iconoclasms, and—as an entire chapter of this memoir is devoted to exploring—the changing of one’s mind, we can live in hope that he changes it one more time. 

But even if he doesn’t, it hardly matters. The thinkers that Francis Fukuyama so admired might have thought little or nothing of his own humanity. Those of us who come after him may use his theoretical oeuvre in similar ways: in ways that he did not fully intend, or would not fully endorse. That is, after all, human. 

To, in the words of Susan Stryker, be something more and something other than our makers intended us to be. That is how the torch of liberalism is inexorably carried forward—and it may light our way out of the realm of the Last Man. 

Featured image is "Penryn Glasses," CC BY-SA 4.0 Echo Severs 2024.