The end of “The End of”

We all know that Francis Fukuyama says history has ended.  Now, to his credit, his thesis is much more subtle than his detractors allow.  As I understand it, important events did not stop occuring in 1991; they just stopped providing an alternate metanarrative.  Liberal democracy had shown its superiority by, most importantly, harnessing the innate desires of humans to express themselves by discarding their slave mentality (in the Hegelian sense).  (Or something like that, as I remember it.)  Anyrate, I do support the idea that we all seek agency over our lives (our tolerance for it resembles a natural distribution and is not a set quantity however), but that does not mean that democracies will flourish everywhere.  More importantly, the future is too difficult to predict, so the simple odds are that Fukuyama is wrong.

On September 11th, 2001, irony ended.  (I think it has ended several times before.)  Any time a cultural critic says that society is witnessing the end of a disposition – the end of humor, the end of joy, the end of melodrama, etc. – it’s okay to laugh.  I have never even understood how terrorist attacks destroy irony.  Is it that they use our technology to destroy us?  That we said we could not be attacked on our soil?  That we were over there so they wouldn’t be here (but that’s post-9/11 thinking)?  I’m pretty sure that irony is one of the most abused concepts in our society, more often a malaprop than a scathing appraisal.  I guess it is ironic that I am using my computer  to write about terrorism*

Thankfully, David Brooks finally hit the nail on the head.  Science has led to the end of philosophy, he enlightens us.  My intimate knowledge of philosophy comes from a high school class, an anthropology class, a good friend who majored in philosophy, and my brother.  (Get the irony????? ?)  Brooks’ understanding of philosophy is laughably sophistic: if it does not seek to differentiate good and evil, it is not philosophy.  Brooks’ conclusion is based on neuroscience which shows that we act and react without deeper moral analysis; according to Brooks, “This yogurt tastes funny,” has the equivalence of, “Charity is moral” because we reach these conclusions without deeper reflection.  This is because we evolved that way.  (Sociobiology has become the tool for bullshit theories when people smart enough to know what sociobiology is are not smart enough to think through a problem.)  Politics, aesthetics,  epistemology, and metaphysics do not constitute philosophy.  A question such as, “Why do we reach instinctive conclusions before rational analysis?” can be faux-answered by faux-science, therefore philosophy is dead.

After Brooks’ humorous failure, I hereby fail to envision any future where an author or pundit can proclaim the end of (noun).  I therefore proclaim the end of “the end of”!**

I was wrong three paragraphs ago.  Obama ended irony.

*It is not ironic.

**This is a phrase, not a noun.