The way a civilization views and understands history tells a lot about that civilization. In our notions of history ultimately lie the very goals of our civilization. Understanding history means knowing where we have come from, and knowing where we are (supposedly) to end up, according to that knowledge. All historical models can be boiled down to two basic types: cyclical history and linear history. Among the various peoples of Europe and Asia, it was cyclical history that was believed in. In cyclical history, time, like the seasons and the revolution of stars and planets, follows a constant schedule, and when it reaches the end of that schedule, it repeats itself. The Vedic religion is among the best examples of the Aryan notion of cyclical time, and the most exhaustively thought-out, although this notion of time also existed among the Chinese and other native groups of the East. Time was seen as a gushing river that was never to dry up, and the events and personalities of history, nothing but stones haphazardly tossed in, at the mercy of the rapids.
The other notion of time, linear time, originates among the Semitic peoples, and eventually was inherited by the Christian religion. In linear time, the universe has a definite starting point and a definite ending point. The events of history are strewn out statically between these two extremes, and nothing exists outside of them. At the end of history, there is nothing less than Judgement Day. God judges the masses of humans, who either spend the rest of eternity in Heaven or Hell. The End of History thus is the point in time when all evil is exterminated, and the good, who are all that remain, live in a perpetual utopia. With the spread to Europe of Christianity, this notion of time and of history all but replaced the native Aryan notion of cyclical time, and we find this reflected again and again in Western Enlightenment philosophy.
The ultimate goal of those who believed in the End of History, then, became the very achievement of that utopia. Utopianism is itself a very Western concept, and has its roots in Plato (one can say it reflects the Aryan spirit of constantly striving for improvement), but after Christianization and the Enlightenment, there was a lively conversation among the philosophers of Europe as to how that utopia was to be achieved. In many cases, this was accompanied by a Christian religious mission, as, for example, in the doctrine of the Social Gospel, which held that Judgement Day and the true End of History would only happen when man of his own ability created a utopia rid of evil on Earth. But, it is accurate to say that the modern notion of the End of History and its utopianism comes from Hegel. According to Hegel, the ultimate goal of mankind is the perfection of spirit (or "mind"), which is to say, spirit's full realization (both in the sense of "knowing" and "achieving") of itself, whereupon mankind enjoys perfect freedom. History, then, serves as the grueling journey of the spirit from the "state of nature", which is pure slavery, to the perfect civilization, aided by reason, rationality and scientific advancement, embodied in the modern omnipotens, omnifaciens state, where all citizens are perfectly moral and perfectly rational.
Hegel's model was expanded and brought to its full life (and, as is to be expected, stripped of its religious undertones) by Marx. In Marx, as in Hegel, history is man's one-way journey to perfect freedom, although that journey is ultimately limited by the availability of material substances which are the currency of economic life. Perfect freedom, therefore, consists in man's common ownership of all these material substances and the economic means of their transaction and production. Hegel's concept of the "contract", as explained in Philosophy of Right as "the process...by which I, existing for myself and excluding another will, am and remain an owner only in so far as I identify myself with the will of another, and cease to be an owner." (PoR, 24) is taken to its logical extreme in Marx, who advocates for a "contract" in which every citizen of the state is a party, at once owning everything and owning nothing. The entire history of the 20th century was defined by the attempted putting into practice of notions such as these, and not only in those states that called themselves "Marxist". For the very same Hegelian ideas of history, which posit us very close to the "end", went on to inspire, not just the communist and socialist regimes, but also the capitalist and liberal ones. In liberalism, the goal is the same as Marxism: the realization of perfect human freedom, albeit through democracy and the free market instead of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and state ownership. Marxism and liberalism thus differ not in their ends, but merely in their means. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Cold War, which was nothing but the liberal West and the socialist East competing to universalize their own specific version of that utopia; both were animated by the same Hegelian dream of "progress".
The idea of universalization is inherent to any linear model of history, because for history to come to its end, the "best" system must be universalized and spread to every continent and every nation. Hegel's perfection of the spirit consists in nothing less than that universalization, for the spirit which is perfectly rational necessarily will produce the perfect system with which to rule the masses of the world. Just as Christ said "there is no Greek or Jew" (in stark contrast to the pre-Christian ethnoreligions of Europe), so too must this system be as perfect for the people of Denmark as it is for the people of Zambia. The Marxist mission and utopian dream may have died with the USSR in 1991 (though it may live on in Xi's China), but the liberal West, spearheaded by the American superstate, has not given up its own version of that dream. The End of History is still in the works.
In 1992, just after the fall of the USSR, American political scientist and ardent apologist for the globalist liberal order, Francis Fukuyama, published The End of History and the Last Man. He argued that the history of humanity was ultimately the history of ideas, and that eventually the best idea would emerge that allotted the maximum amount of freedom to all peoples. This idea he identified as liberalism. With the emergence of this ideology, a few people may stubbornly fight against the rising tides of liberal "progress", but eventually, the whole world would come around to realize that liberalism was the best ideology we have, and would adopt it. With the fall of the USSR and the seeming defeat of liberalism's cousin ideology of Marxism, it would have seemed Fukuyama was correct. Since then, America has continued to live out that fantasy, in its worldwide promotion of "democracy", "human rights", "freedom" and the like. Not to mention the massive American corporations who are feverishly itching to "globalize", and expand their consumer markets to wherever man has set foot. The final version of the world, then, is to be an internationalized, denationalized world, where one cannot tell the difference between New York and Kabul, where everybody enjoys a narrow, Western notion of "freedom", and is never more than five minutes away from a McDonald's.
In recent decades, that "freedom" has been subject to continual redefinition. This is what I call the transition from liberalism to neoliberalism. The liberal ideology, in its Christianity-esque eschatology, is modernist to its core. It's greatest moment of glory was its triumphant conquest of Japan, dismantling the ancient rule of the Emperor and forcing him to renounce his divinity, and forcing that country to adopt a modern, "democratic" constitution that guaranteed "rights for all". Civilization's conquest of barbarity. Therein was the conquest of the old world, the "state of nature" as Hegel would have called it, a backwards world ruled by religious superstition and selfish despots and traditional sociocultural notions that oppress the people. But this species of American modernism underwent a radical mutation over the course of the second half of the 20th century. These notions of "freedom" and "equality" were taken to their logical extremes, extrapolated into every sphere, and thus arose the neoliberal critical doctrines of race, gender, sexuality and so on. This transition also marks the boundary between what Hans-Georg Moeller calls the "right and left wings of American civil religion," the former represented by such figures as Trump and Jordan Peterson, and the latter by what is generally called "Wokeism", and which is the state ideology under the Biden regime. Still, despite their differences, they are two phases of the same thing, and ultimately have the same goals. The older phase is more associated with the Boomer generation, and mainstream American "conservatism", which does nothing but cede ground to the younger neoliberal phase anyway. In any case, it is well on its way out, to be replaced by a more virulent and insane version of itself.
This more recent phase is much more characteristic of postmodernism than modernism, though it retains the same mission as modernism: to universalize itself, and propagate itself all over the world, as the objectively best system, and thereby to create a global utopia of "freedom" at the End of History. As the US establishment and military became dominated by the new, neoliberal phase, images like the following--a pride flag flying above a US military base in Afghanistan--became more and more common.
The modernist mission of US foreign policy, which was to spread "freedom" and "democracy" has, as of the present year, largely been subsumed into the new phase, which is much more focused on these "woke" issues--a perverted Western "freedom" which consists in excess, abuse and license--and humorously been described as a campaign to promote "buttsex in Botswana". It requires the sacrifice of soldier's lives and taxpayer's money in no less magnitude. After all, Biden has made it clear that "human rights" is to be the central focus of US foreign policy going forward. The Western ruling class has convinced itself and all the Western people that this is what Fukuyama's End of History will truly consist in. A world which, in the words of neoliberal "intellectual" Richard Rorty, is a "global civilization in which love is the only law."
If there is to be only one law, regardless of what it is, then it must be a universal law, or a law made universal by its universalization (either willing or forced). A global civilization can only come about through the destruction of all previous civilizations, and their assimilation into the monoculture. Battles for such universalization have taken place all across the world since the start of the 20th century, all in accordance with the eschatology of modernism. Most recently one of those battles reached its conclusion in Afghanistan. But contrary to those who believe, as Fukuyama would have, that the triumph of (neo)liberalism is inevitable, the outcome was rather the victory of the old world over the new. The victory of illiberalism over liberalism. The Taliban, an organization which represents at one and the same time the righteous anger felt by the Afghan people over decades of imperialist domination, and the winds of an ancient force that lies deep within the tradition of Islam, is now in control of the Afghan state. And the US's departure from that country can be described as nothing less than an embarrassing blunder.
For some, the victory of the Taliban may be taken as proof that the road towards "progress", while inevitable, is not always straightforward, and may from time-to-time face setbacks; for me, it simply proves that "progress" is not inevitable, and further that there simply is no such thing as "progress". "Progress" is meant to create a system that is perfect for Man, that is to say, for all men, regardless of nation, race, religion and culture. Man's "Manness" or "humanity" is seen as essential, and these other things as accidental, like a coat of paint that can be changed at any time without consequence. But the reality is the opposite. Man on his own is little more than an animal with red blood and four limbs; it is nation, race, religion and culture that give to men their essential characteristics. These statements would be faced with much opposition if put forward before any Western anthropologist, but, I say, they need no further proof of their validity than the recent events in Afghanistan.
If Western ideals were so perfect and truly worthy of being universalized, why would an entire organization, consisting of average Afghan people from every corner of the country, dedicate decades and risk their lives to oust them? As much as they claim to love "human rights", the Western elites do not seem to think the Afghan people have the right to choose how to run their own country, but must have Western ideals, made for a different people in a different place and different time, forced upon them. If these ideals were so perfect, we would see people flocking to them from all corners of the world. Instead, we see nation after nation rise in opposition to them.
At the same time, these events show the world that America's perverted flavor of (neo)liberal imperialism is not invincible. Like every powerful civilization before it, American has convinced itself of its own history-ending perfection. It is a hubris unlike any seen before, underlined and given form by the notion of linear time. But pride always comes before the fall. The embarrassment in Afghanistan just shows that maybe the American way of doing things isn't as infallible, and the American empire as mighty, as was previously thought. I believe trajectories such as these are all heading towards one inevitable conclusion: the end, not of history, but of modernity.
