‘The Last Man’.

I have thought that the major part of what made Eutopia pacifist was the protection afforded by the US Military, freeing them from the expense of providing for their own defense and allowing them to indulge in Socialist welfare statism and feel good smug superiority over the cowboys standing on guard against the Soviet Communists, much like the thirty something ‘man’ living in his mom’s basement. Seems like that might have been just an enabler of sorts but not a cause of the Eu disease of emasculation and impotence.

I came across Life on Venus: Europe’s Last Man by Adam Kirsch via ALDaily and though it’s longish it’s well worth the time spent if you want a superb analysis through Nietsche’s Zarathustra, Fukuyama and three of the greatest Eu novelists of the last fifty years, Ian McEwan, W G Sebald and Michel Houellebecq.

The twentieth century, of course, did not turn out to be the age of the Last Man after all. The two world wars and the global violence of the Cold War demonstrated to anyone’s satisfaction that irrationality and cruelty, which Nietzsche feared were dwindling resources, still flourished in abundance just underneath the thin crust of modern civilization. But then came 1989 and the end of history—or at least The End of History and the Last Man, as Francis Fukuyama put it in his influential book. It is almost always referred to simply by the first part of its title; to his critics, Fukuyama is the man who declared “the end of history,” triumphally and, needless to say, prematurely.

But the second part of the book’s title is actually more telling, and more representative of Fukuyama’s argument. No sooner had humanity emerged from a century of hot and cold wars than Fukuyama was resurrecting Nietzsche’s admonition that a world of peace and prosperity would be a world of Last Men. “The life of the last men is one of physical security and material plenty, precisely what Western politicians are fond of promising their electorates,” he pointed out. “Should we fear that we will be both happy and satisfied with our situation, no longer human beings but animals of the species homo sapiens?”

While Fukuyama appreciates the seriousness of the Nietzschean warning, he hears it from the perspective of a partisan, not a foe, of liberalism. The danger he foresees is not simply that bourgeois democracy will cause human beings to degenerate, but that degenerate human beings will be unable to preserve democracy. Without the sense of pride and the love of struggle that Fukuyama, following Plato, calls thymos, men—and there is always an implication that thymos is a specifically masculine virtue—cannot establish freedom or protect it:

That’s a taste of what the article is about. It is interesting to one such as me who doesn’t have time to read novels anymore to have reconfirmed Milan Kundera’s assertion in The Art of the Novel, one of my favourite books by the way, that the novel was invented to say what philosophy, because of its technical nature, could not about history and the human condition.

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