Throughout history, many people have posited the “end of history” as a certain form of government, whether communist, absolute monarchy, or most recently, liberal democracy, that is the ultimate formulation of human society and to which, no other legitimate contenders can or should arise as challengers. Most recently, this concept was laid forth by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, unlike every other time a philosopher declared that history was at its end, nothing has immediately risen to disprove Fukuyama’s claim. But even more pressingly, with the political and economic stagnation that’s taken hold of politics around the globe, it’s starting to look like “the end of history” is far from a good thing, especially in the face of the persistent recession that’s overshadowing America and Europe. The world, to some extent, seems to be suffering from a lack political innovation and becoming a place where society is fundamentally unable to reckon with the ever-changing problems confronting it.
As it is now, the world is at a loss for definitively new ideas. Our politicians argue and harangue over whether we should be cutting taxes and cutting spending, or raising taxes and increasing spending. Yet no matters one’s sympathies, it’s obvious that none of the policies being proposed are fundamentally new. Debates about whether deficit spending works or not, and whether austerity is the correct move during a recession, have been happening since at least the Great Depression, if not earlier. But unlike during the 1930s, these aren’t novel ideas anymore. In fact, they are part of the established economic canon. So why are we still arguing over the same topics? We’re entrenched in a crisis caused at least in part by uncontrolled innovations in finance and banking, but we’re still tackling it with the same toolkit that we’ve been using for ages.
Even if we look in the direction of “radical” solutions, we’re grasping at straws. On each end of the spectrum we have those like the Tea Party advocating a reduction of government and those who believe that the state capitalism of China, Singapore and other East-Asian countries is the most economically efficient. However, neither of these theories is truly ground-breaking in any sense, considering that “Tea-Party”ism, at it’s best, is merely a purification of capitalism rather than a new formulation, and that state capitalism is simply the latest form of authoritarianism to assert dominance over democracy. At the cores of both of these ideas, there are no new variables. Neither proposes a fundamentally new structure or new way of looking at the world, but offers instead a mere shifting of the current paradigm.
To be curt, the West, and more expansively, the world, seems to be at loss for new ideas. We don’t have a Marx, or a Friedman, or a Smith, or a Goldman or a Keynes, or really anyone advancing new ways of seeing the world, or even challenging orthodoxy in the systems we already implemented. There’s no FDR or Lenin or Reagan or any other politician fundamentally pushing forward with new, controversial ways of organizing our society, either economically or politically. Despite one’s position on the political spectrum, this critical dearth of any new ideology or framework should be jarring because at this point we don’t even have that many theories left to reject. We’re just spinning our wheels in the same debates that spanned the 20th century. Even in a Darwinian sense, it is far from a good thing that our current framework has been left unchanged and is, in a sense, “inbreeding.”
Now, this is not to diminish the short to mid-term ramifications of things like the battle between state capitalism and free-market capitalism, or the rise of China, or the Tea-Party. However, it is to say that there is more than a fair chance that these events will eventually all be part of the greater narrative of the shallowing of political and economic debate. Even if we allow for the current political debates to be settled one way or another, when (not if) the next big crisis occurs that challenges the basic credos we base our lives around, where are we going to draw inspiration for solutions? To be precise, the problem is not with the type of formulation of capitalism, it is with the fact that nothing is left but somewhat varying flavors of the same basic thought.
But, why is this ideological shallowing happening now, and what can be done about it? The answers for the former are nearly infinite and the latter nearly zero. Addressing the former, we can look at the rise of mass-media as something that has homogenized thought, or blame main-stream politics that seems to go out of its way to crush any nascent radicalism. Maybe, we could blame a culture that disapproves of non-normative thought or an education that fails to foster intellectual thought. All of those and many more possible explanations could be the reason why we’re stuck in this ideological hole. Still, most explanations seem to fail on some level because they aren’t exclusive to our time. And really, it’s beyond the scope of this article, or really anyone, to know what conditions bring about the rise of paradigm-breaking ideas because, by their very nature, such new concepts go against the truths we’ve established around us.
In looking for solutions, there isn’t really much that society can do to promote new ideas, aside from being more open to them and giving them time and an opportunity to be heard. Even that, though, is far from a guarantee that some brilliant new political plan will emerge. Really, if we knew how to generate novel solutions to our lives, we wouldn’t be in this situation to start with. Therefore, it seems as if, at least temporarily, all we can do is sit down and personally start to question the world around us until we come up with something new and able to coherently challenge it. If we don’t, the consequences could be, and most likely will be, unsettling.