Reawakening the Cold Mind

Reawakening the Cold Mind

Fukuyama, Francis.  Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

                In contrast  to Allan Bloom's effort in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) to excoriate his fellow citizens for complicity in allowing higher education to fail democracy and impoverish the souls of students, Fukuyama makes an effort to warn his fellow citizens that aspects of the soul ---thymos (craving recognition of dignity), isothymia (demanding  "to be respected on an equal basis with other people") and megalothymia ("the desire to be recognized as superior) ---propagate the multiple issues that torment contemporary forms of democracy (xiii). There is more than a little profit in reading Bloom and Fukuyama against one another in order to grasp how what is now touted as intersectionality is naught but another name for the complex simplicity which Richard Wright noted in "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937) is necessary for representation and interpretation.

                An exceptionally avid reader might take up Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (New York: Liveright, 2018) as a stick for measuring the merits of Fukuyama and Bloom, and even go further to give a hearing to Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Race (Boston: Beacon, 2018).  As we drift into fascism and fret about the possibility of already being actors in the Cold War of Cyberspaces, we need to be brutal as  we  analyze what  the identity of democracy is not from the vantage of the cold mind.  Those of us who need a crutch to be brutal can resort to reading the blogspot "Methodical Insanity" --- 

https://methodicalinsanity.wordpress.com

 We need to consider how the mendacity of hope divides and unites citizens in a republic that pretends to be a democracy. It is liberating to remember, is it not,  upon whose land we squat. 

                In her review of Bloom [("Undemocratic Vistas. "New York Review of Books (November 5, 1987): 20-26.], Martha Nussbaum took him to task for writing in "unqualified universals" (21) and for distancing himself from ethical and social concerns beyond the cloister of a narrow elite (24) and for thinking, apparently, that  history would undermine  "the realization that the greatest truths are timeless" (26).   Fukuyama qualifies his universals.  He is not overtly elitist.  He gives due attention to history.  Thus, he projects himself to be as much the champion of liberal democracy as Bloom was its antagonist.

                 The cold mind does not have to take Fukuyama to task for the social science fiction he inscribes in his book,  or in the beginning and ending sentences of a single paragraph pertaining to what is to be done.  The paragraph begins with "Our present world is simultaneously moving toward the opposing dystopias of hypercentralization and endless fragmentation" and ends with "Social media and the internet have facilitated  the emergence of self-contained communities, walled off not by physical barriers but by belief in shared identity" (182). At this point it is necessary for the cold mind to remember that Fukuyama was once associated with RAND,  an enterprise to connect military planning with research, development, and policy decisions in the service of the state, the sovereignty which  calls the shots, and that he is yet serving the interests of statist ideology in a new key.  The cold mind congratulates Fukuyama for bravely hinting that a politics of resentment is a valuable tool for maintaining dignity and for giving delusions about the identity of democracy the burial they deserve.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            December 15, 2018