Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

weapons of mass destruction. The result was the Cold War, in which
every corner of the world was a pawn in a global chess match and
every neighbor and friend a possible spy for the enemy. The thought
of human progress seemed to become a naïve fairytale.
Some thinkers tried to argue that the Cold War was just a detour
in the long-term progress of humanity or, perhaps, even a time
that showed us what we needed to do in order to safeguard human
progress. The American political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick, for
example, argued that the Cold War provided a roadmap for cultures
that were ready to advance.
It was true that much of the world was run by violent dictators
who cared little for the well-being of their people and acted
viciously to protect their own wealth and power. It was also
true that these rulers were supported by the Americans and the
Soviets. As unseemly as it might appear to aid those rulers, it
was the best approach in the long run, according to Kirkpatrick,
as long as we select the correct brutal dictators.
If we help keep brutal right-wing regimes in power, we are
setting the stage for the eventual development of democratic
society. If, however, we support brutal left-wing regimes, we will
doom the country to wallow in terror and instability. In the dark
fog of the Cold War, there still could be human progress; we just
had to make sure to plant the seeds in the proper form of evil.
In the following generation, the American political scientist Francis
Fukuyama continued along Kirkpatrick’s line in The End of History
and the Last Man. He argued that history was following a necessary
dialectical path, but not the one Marx would have predicted.
Liberal democracy, he contended, was the end of history. All other
alternatives had proved themselves to be inferior.
Once a country achieved liberal democracy, there would be no
further development of the culture. There might be wars with
nations that had not yet reached the end of history, but ultimately,
those smaller nations would be defeated by the more powerful
nation-states that had completed their journeys.
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