The French mystic and thinker René Guénon, who was doing his best work nearly a century back, was one of them. In his two books (The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times), Guénon laid out his notion that the modern world had deteriorated into a realm of pure materialism as a result of what he called the “Western deviation” from eternal truth. He called this the “reign of quantity”, and predicted its future collapse. But Guénon was not simply talking economics or politics. What was going on, he said, was something akin to a spiritual war, and as a Sufi Muslim he wasn’t shy about naming its antagonist. To this age, he wrote, “the word ‘Satanic’ can indeed be properly applied”.

Presenting disorder as order and truth as lies — this, wrote Guénon, was the way that Satan rolled. The “more or less direct agents of the Adversary”, he explained, using the Biblical name for what Europeans would later come to call the Devil, always aimed to invert reality. Right is wrong, black is white, up is down, there is no truth, do what thou wilt: this has always been the Adversary’s line, and today it is prominent in all quarters.

The heterodox Catholic philosopher Ivan Illich, who died in 2002, also believed we were living in the time of Anti-Christ, but for different reasons. For Illich, any claims that we lived in a “secular age” were nonsense. The modern West was still Christian, he said, but it had disastrously attempted to codify the spontaneous expressions of love which Christ had shown to be God’s desire for humanity within systems and institutions. First the Church, and then the supposedly “secular” liberal states which had succeeded it, had attempted to transmute Christian love into obligation and enforce it by law, thus twisting it into a new form of oppression. His biographer David Cayley explained in a recent essay that Illich’s work “emphatically rejects the idea that ours is a post-Christian era. ‘On the contrary’, he says, ‘I believe this to be the most obviously Christian epoch, which might be quite close to the end of the world.'”

A decade or so before Illich was writing, the Jewish Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was also attending to the dark spiritual undercurrent of the age. He had a different interpretation of its source — or perhaps he was just using a different name. In Howl, he identified the forward march of industrial modernity — and especially the hypocrisy and brutality of the American empire — with the pagan god Moloch, who demanded human sacrifice from his devotees:

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! …

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! 

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Ginsberg, it seemed, could also sense that the spirit of his age was not under human control, either out in the world or in his own soul and mind. Usually this is easier to talk about in poetry or fiction, for the age doesn’t look kindly on anything which can’t be quantified. It can deal with Ginsberg, but it doesn’t want to talk about Moloch. It can just about cope with Christ if he has been brought down to our level — made into an activist or a defender of culture or a “cosmic” manifestation of the self — but it has nothing to say about Anti-Christ, who blows the whole story sky-high. As for St Paul’s famous notion that the world is subject not only to nature but to “principalities and powers” which wish us ill: this kind of talk was supposed to have been wrecked on the shores of the Enlightenment, never to be seen again.

But the powers and principalities didn’t die in the shipwreck of the old world, they just took on new forms. Today we can, in fact, still talk about these strange, underlying forces as long as we use the correct language. Take, for example, the Silicon Valley philosopher Kevin Kelly’s pet notion that technology has its own mind and its own purpose: that through the web of what he calls “the technium”, something is using us to create itself. Kelly sees technology growing into something self-aware and independent of its human creators, as he explained in his book What Technology Wants: “It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.”

Other breathless Silicon Valley mavens, from Mark Zuckerberg with his Metaverse to Ray Kurzweil with his Singularity, regularly talk in the same register about where the technium is taking us. Our job, they seem to imply, is simply to service it as it rolls forward under its own steam, remaking everything in its own image, rebuilding the world, turning us, if we are lucky, into little gods.

They never consider where this story has been heard before. They never confront, or seem to even comprehend, what Illich or Guénon or even Ginsberg would have known, and which many a saint would confirm if they could hear the technium’s new story: that “AI”, on the right lips, can sound like just another way of saying “Anti-Christ”.

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Maybe it’s just me, but the ongoing and rapid inversion of so much we have previously taken for granted increasingly seems to be happening independently of human action. It is as if something else has become manifest in some way we can’t quite put our finger on, and has stimulated the craziness of the times. Perhaps it has become self-aware, like Skynet; perhaps it is approaching its Singularity. Perhaps it has always been there, watching, and is now seizing its moment. Or perhaps it is simply beginning to spin out of control, as our systems and technologies become so complex that we can no longer steer them in our chosen direction. Either way, this force seems to be, in some inexplicable way, independent of us, and yet acting within us too.

Let’s give this force a name: a less provocative name, for now, than Moloch or Anti-Christ. Let’s keep it simple. Let’s just call this force Progress. Then, à la Kevin Kelly, let’s ask ourselves a simple question: what does Progress want?

The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce saw the modern era as a thorough and permanent revolution — a radical break with the human past. He defined a modern person as “someone who thinks that ‘today it is no longer possible’”. We do not tend to see our time as continuous with what has gone before, he said. Instead, we believe we live after a “violent break with history”.

In the story of Progress that informs us today, the revolutions of the modern age — industrial, political and intellectual — are assumed to have radically changed the world. By sweeping away old ways of thinking, seeing and living, modernity has produced “a type of violence capable of breaking the continuum of history”.

What Progress wants is the end of history.

Del Noce seems to be having something of a moment at present, provoked by a recent collection of his essays and lectures, translated into English as The Crisis of Modernity. This crisis, in Del Noce’s seeing, is one of exclusion: it is what the modern way of seeing leaves out that matters: “what is excluded is the ‘supernatural’, religious transcendence … For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process … has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.”

The modern epoch, explained Del Noce, guided by science, reason and the self, rejects the notion of anything “unseen” or “beyond”. From the 18th century onwards, philosophy swept away religion: the world was now understood in purely human terms, and managed with purely human notions. Everything became immanent: literally, down-to-Earth.

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All of this, said Del Noce, marks a radical transformation in human seeing. It is, for example, a “sharp break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods”. Both the followers of Plato and the followers of Christ (not to mention every other old culture on Earth, in their own particular way) believed that truth was transcendent, eternal and uncreated, and could be known through some combination of faith, practice and reason. 

No longer, said Del Noce: the only “transcendence” that our age will permit is that which we create ourselves. With no ultimate truth or higher story, there is now nothing to stop us bending the universe to our desires: indeed, to do so is our duty. This, in Del Noce’s telling, explained 20th century history. Having replaced religion with philosophy, we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a grand scale, with terrible results.

How do we shape the universe in the age of immanence? According to Del Noce, “the spiritual power that in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Church … today can be exercised only by science”. In this “totalitarian conception of science”, “every other type of knowledge — metaphysical or religious — expresses only ‘subjective reactions’, which we are able, or will be able, to explain by extending science to the human sphere through psychological and sociological research.”

But the rise of science did not lead to the end of religion, however much Richard Dawkins might like it to be so. Instead — as noted by Illich — religion responded to the challenge by becoming immanent itself. Western Christianity progressively abandoned its commitment to transcendence and was “resolved into philosophy”, allowing itself to be brought down to Earth, into the realm of social activism, politics and ideas. “The conversion of a large part of the religious world to the idea of modernity”, said Del Noce, “accelerated the process of disintegration” that the modern revolution had unleashed.

What Progress wants is the death of God.

But Man cannot live by immanence alone. Religion meets a human need, and when it is gone, or corrupted, the hole it leaves will have to be filled by something else. What will that be? Del Noce’s answer is: revolution. Modernity, he suggests, could be defined as a permanent, ongoing revolution.

The desire to build Utopia on the bones of the old world has been the consuming fire of Western thought for 300 years. Jacobins, Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, Fascists, Nazis, neoliberals and many more have all attempted to scour the ground clean and start again, and we are not done yet. “The revolutionary attitude of creative violence”, writes Del Noce, “has replaced the ascetic attitude of seeking liberation from the world”. If once society’s refuseniks imitated St Anthony, now they copy Che Guevara. All that is solid melts into air: this, in the words of its most consequential revolutionary mind, is the best description of the age of immanence that we have ever had.

What Progress wants is permanent revolution.

The two world wars of the 20th century — which Del Noce prefers to view as a single European conflict, lasting from 1914 until 1945 — spread this revolution against transcendence and tradition all around the world. After 1945, America, unchallenged monarch of the reign of quantity, took on the global responsibility for waging “the Enlightenment’s war against their own past”. Del Noce agreed with another prophet, Simone Weil, that “the Americanisation of Europe would lead to the Americanisation of the whole world” — and so it has proven. But Europe, by pursuing the path of pure immanence, had in any case already doomed itself, by turning on itself the weapons it had long used on others and hollowing out its own historic culture in the name of Progress: “Colonisation can be achieved by only one method: by uprooting a people from its traditions. Europeans have a long history of extensively practising this method (and this was Europe’s greatest historical fault). Now — oh, wonder! — in order to feign regret they are applying the same.”

Where would all this lead? The ultimate result of the revolution of modernity, predicted Del Noce, would be fragmentation, nihilism, and “the death of the sacred”. The twin revolutionary engines of the postwar era, he suggested, were scientism and sex. The first usurped the role of religion and culture, reducing all life to the level of the measurable and controllable. The second, via the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the resulting “permissive society”, unleashed a radical individualism cored around sexual desire, which would lead to the fragmentation of everything from nationhood to the family — but leave capitalism and its attendant class, the bourgeoisie, intact.

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Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce’s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a “new totalitarianism”. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth. Ironically, wrote Del Noce, “the rejection of authority, understood in its metaphysical-religious foundation, leads instead to the fullness of ‘power'”.

Create a void, in other words, and into it will rush monsters.

The new totalitarianism, suggested Del Noce, would “absolutely deny traditional morality and religion”, basing its worldview instead on “scientistic dogmatism”. It would negate all “spiritual forces”, including those which, in the 1930s, had been used to resist the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin: “the Christian tradition, liberalism, and humanitarian socialism”. It would be a “totalitarianism of disintegration”, even more so than Russian communism, which had presented itself to some degree as a continuation of national tradition. This time around though, “the complete negation of all tradition”, including that of “fatherlands” — nations — would lead to rule by the only large institutions still standing: global corporations.

Faced with this challenge, Del Noce insisted that “current political formulas are completely inadequate”. Neither Left nor Right were equipped to understand what was going on: both, instead, would typically retreat to their historic comfort zones, with the Left blaming “fascists” and the Right blaming “communists” for the ongoing disintegration. The real source of the disintegration, though, was not partisan: it was the Machine.

What Progress wants is liberation from everything.

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Progress. The Machine. Moloch. Anti-Christ. The Technium. We are all grasping here, trying to name something we cannot see, but whose impacts we can feel undermining the foundations of everything we have known. Augusto Del Noce’s analysis of the modern revolution — and the rootless, spiritless, immanent world it had produced — pointed to the ultimate destination as both totalitarianism and nihilism.

Kevin Kelly, of course, would disagree. For him and his fellow tech idealists, the clearing away of the transcendent realm is only a precursor to building another one — and getting it right this time: “Technology is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extends into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy.”

Del Noce is often referred to as a conservative or even a reactionary thinker, but he didn’t accept either label. Simple “reaction”, he said, was no solution to what was unfolding. Both nostalgia and utopia were ultimately fruitless as tools of resistance. If permanent revolution, and the consequent disintegration, is the baseline state of a world that denies transcendence, then the alternative is clear: a return to the spiritual centre. A rediscovery, or a reclamation, of the transcendent realm and its place in our lives. This, and only this, is the alternative to the reign of quantity and its attendant cast of gods, demons and machines.

What Moloch wants — Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks — is sacrifice. We must sacrifice ourselves and our children to the robot apartments and stunned governments. What Anti-Christ wants is the opposite of transcendence. If the coming of Christ represents the transcendent breaking into the temporal in order to change it, then His opponent will herald a world of pure matter, uninterrupted by anything beyond human reach. Everything in that world is up for grabs. Anything, from rainforests to the human body, can be claimed and reshaped in the interests of advancing the realm of the human will. It is the oldest story.

The rushing power that runs beneath the age of Progress, the energy of the modern world, the river that carries us onwards — where is it taking us? We know the answer. Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people — they must be superseded, improved, remade. Flawed matter is in our hands now. We know what to do.

What Progress wants is to replace us.

Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.

A longer version of this essay first appeared at The Abbey of Misrule.

I was 18 years old, interrailing around Europe with a friend to see what the world looked like beyond our provincial English town, and I had accidentally wandered into a pivot point in history. In the divided German capital, less than a year before, World War Two had finally come to an end, with no shots fired.

The joy was palpable everywhere. By the time my friend and I got to the Brandenburg Gate, half of the wall had already been chipped into bite-sized pieces, which were being sold to tourists by enterprising locals, along with suddenly useless Soviet army uniforms, military passbooks and the helmets of East German border guards. Marxism hadn’t been dead a year, and the market economy was already booming. The world, or the little part of it that I knew, had suddenly changed shape entirely.

Everyone of my generation grew up with the Cold War hanging over them. The possibility of nuclear armageddon was as ever-present for teenagers then as climate change is today: we didn’t think about it much, but it was the background hum of our lives. Nobody thought the Russians would invade, really, but there didn’t seem much chance of them going away either. There was always a chance of their tanks rolling across some border somewhere, or so the Americans kept telling us. Plus ça change.

This was just the way the world was: the free West and the unfree East. If you didn’t believe that story, then one look at the wall, the barbed wire, the machine gun towers and the fate of those who tried to cross the “death strip” from East to West would make you think again.

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And then, just like that, communism fell. This system that was supposed to free the people from exploitation and oppression, but had quickly become a monster itself. We didn’t know what was coming next. But from today’s perspective we can see that the fall of the East ushered in a new era.

After the wall would come a unipolar world, dominated by finance capital, overseen by the United States of America, the last empire standing. Its architects told us we were entering a long age of benign “globalisation”, in which “free markets”, human rights and democracy would spread around the world as naturally as the sun rose in the morning. The future would be free, open, liberal, prosperous and, well, American.

30 years later, we live in a world in which most Russians have a positive view of Stalin, and their current leader is mustering the biggest army since Soviet times on the border of a neighbouring state. The once-free-ish West is boiling in a stew of hate speech laws, vaccine mandates and ever-accelerating censorship and intolerance. “Populists” continue to barrack and harass its leaders, who still have no idea what to do about it: witness Justin Trudeau running away from the big scary men in their lorries. The last global empire is led by a confused octogenarian, and within a few years the biggest economy in the world will be a communist dictatorship. We didn’t see that one coming back in 1990.

Remembering the rubble strewn across Potsdamer Platz, it’s hard not to miss the End of History. In those halcyon days, I thought I lived in something called “the free world”. The liberal West was supposed to be the point on which the arc of history converged. We wanted it to be true, that story, but history has a habit of rolling on, and people don’t change, not really. I’m just grateful to have been there.

Looking back, we can see that what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.

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This was the thesis of Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, written before the populist wave of 2016, and perhaps the most reliable guide to the world we live in now. In his telling, liberalism was one of three ideologies that dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other two — communism and fascism — were shorter lived, and died in the West in the twentieth century. Liberalism — the elder brother — is only dying now. One reason for its comparatively long life is that it piggybacked on older stories, presenting itself as the inheritor of established traditions of liberty when in fact it was something quite different.

The ideology of liberalism has, since it emerged from the Enlightenment, claimed to liberate the individual from oppression. In practice it has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures: of bringing down walls. The societies we have built around this way of seeing claim freedom for the individual from society itself, and proffer a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted in time and place, liberalism offered a new conception: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans were now “rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.”

What is crucial to understand — and this is what makes liberalism an ideology — is that in order for the liberal world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the traditional family, the church and private land ownership so that communism could materialise, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth.

After the trauma of the Reformation, the Western nation-state took over the functions of the ailing Church, colonising for itself the sense of sacredness and obedience once demanded by religion. In this “migration of the holy” our religious sensibility was redirected from its proper focus towards worldly political constructions, and this in turn laid the ground for the revolutions of the modern age.

Each of these upheavals, whether in Jacobin France, Marxist Russia or Nazi Germany, failed to create the promised utopias. But they did have the effect of clearing away the traditional structures of the pre-modern era. And into the void rushed industrial capitalism — the system which G. K. Chesterton called the “monster that grows in deserts” — with its sensibility of control, measurement, utility and profit. Liberalism was, and remains, its nursemaid and press officer.

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Liberalism, like its competitor ideologies, is in this way totalitarian: ruthless and all-encompassing. But it outlasted its rivals because it promised not tyranny and order, but the messiness of a certain kind of freedom. At the height of the liberal age, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, individual human freedom was indeed possible in the West as it had never been before. Humans, or some of them, could detach themselves from their backgrounds and origins and seek something new, and plenty of us did. Openly tyrannical government became harder to sustain, oligarchies were required to subject themselves to regular plebiscites to sustain their power, previously ignored groups in society clamoured for access to its heartlands, the rule of law protected the poor as well as the rich, and capitalism’s Luciferic power created previously unheard of levels of wealth, as well as grinding poverty.

But in liberalism’s very success lay the seeds of its failure. The project of liberating the individual from his or her networks of loyalty, locality, family and culture, and the unleashing of the vast destabilising engine of capitalism, created a social instability which could only be controlled or directed by the last institution standing: the State.

An ideology premised on protecting and promoting the freedom of the individual led to the era of unprecedented state power we live in today. Governments now claim the right to direct our speech patterns, regulate our lives and businesses to increasingly radical degrees, shut down whole societies in the name of “public health”, and even legislate for acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and opinions.

The cultural ructions of today’s West — the cancellations and contradictions, the screaming matches over race, gender, history and identity — all of this is the manifestation not of liberalism’s failure but of its success. The “progressives” who are aggressively cramming identity politics into every crevice of society have met with resistance from many self-professed liberals. These woke radicals, they cry, are destroying our culture with their fanaticism! We need to return to “classical liberalism”! But culture wars happen when no real culture remains; and 200 years of “classical liberalism”, manifested in the economic and the cultural spheres, have seen to that.

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This is the legacy of an ideology which has been championed for centuries by both “Left” and “Right”. We have all become islands of self-definition, and we see now where that leads. A society premised on freedom becomes daily more fearful and closed. A society which boasts of its “diversity” becomes daily more homogenous. We can invent our own gender at will, and yet genuine individuals are in short supply, old-fashioned eccentricity is positively persecuted and originality has become career-ending. The Internet has enabled self-expression on a previously unimagined scale, and the result has been violent groupthink. The self, it turns out, mostly doesn’t have much to say.

But there’s more. Liberal ideology, as well as redesigning culture, must also redesign nature. In all the discussions of liberalism and its discontents that we’ve seen in the last few years, few seriously consider the power source that allowed the liberal age to conquer all before it: fossil fuels.

Without steamships, cars, planes, factories, supermarkets, modern roads, the Internet, the smartphone, the project of liberation would have been much less far-reaching. Fossil-fuelled liberalism allowed people to abandon place-based community, and to create for themselves an individual identity in an isolated but free kingdom of the self. But as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use”. Everything from mass democracy to feminism to multiculturalism to human rights floats on a vast bubble of fossil energy: . Nothing about the modern West could exist at all without vast concentrations of fossil energy: a fact of which Mr Putin is well aware.

Liberalism, like modernity itself, requires a war against nature; but it is a war that can never be won. As the climate shifts in response, the excesses of liberalism, and the project of self-creation it enabled, will not be possible. We will no longer be able to outsource our muscles or our minds to technology. We will need each other again — whether we like it or not.

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So what comes after liberalism? The question has filled plenty of column inches in recent years, but the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the likely future we face. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen predicts that two post-liberal worlds are on offer: “a future of self-limitation”, in which people choose to practice “self-governance in local communities”, or “a future in which extreme licence coexists with extreme oppression”.

I know which I’d prefer, but I also know which looks most likely. As extreme individualism deepens, and an all-powerful state intervenes ever more deeply and widely to manage the resulting fragmentation, Western democracies show every sign of transforming openly into authoritarian oligarchies in which dissent — especially dissent aimed at liberalism itself — is ruthlessly suppressed by politicians who claim to represent “the people”. The vast bulks of those stationary Canadian trucks are currently the perfect symbol of this process.

The immediate future looks to me like the grinding down of what previous norms remain, and the parallel expansion of the State-corporate leviathan to both mop up the resulting mess and profit from it. That in turn will generate more “populist” (i.e. anti-liberal) reaction from both “Left” and “Right” and neither, and a consequent deepening of repression and propaganda from the besieged minority defending the remains of the liberal order. All of this will take place in the context of a planet with nearly ten billion people on it, hitting economic and ecological limits on all sides.

It seems likely to me that the liberal era will end much as the communist one did: flailing and corrupt, hiding behind walls of its own making, its leaders in denial but its people increasingly open-eyed. Perhaps the Russians won’t roll into Ukraine and spell the end of the vaunted “liberal order”, but its end seems to have been baked in from the beginning. All ideologies are based on a view of human nature that looks better on paper than in the confusing mess of the world, and the one we grew up with was no exception. No man, as John Donne had it, is an island. Now we see how right he was.

A version of this essay was first published at The Abbey of Misrule.

Now that history has returned with the vengeance of the long-dismissed, few analyses of our present moment are complete without a ritual mockery of Fukuyama’s seemingly naive assumptions. The also-rans of the 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations thesis and Robert D. Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy, which predicted a paradigm of growing disorder, tribalism and the breakdown of state authority, now seem more immediately prescient than Fukuyama’s offering. 

Yet nearly thirty years later, reading what Fukuyama actually wrote as opposed to the dismissive précis of his ideas, we see that he was right all along. Where Huntington and Kaplan predicted the threat to the Western liberal order coming from outside its cultural borders, Fukuyama discerned the weak points from within, predicting, with startling accuracy, our current moment.

In The Last Man, the under-discussed addendum to The End of History, Fukuyama took his intellectual cues from Nietzsche rather than Hegel, observing that “it is impossible to complete our present discussion without refer­ring to the creature who reportedly emerges at the end of history, the last man,” a creature who is, “in essence, the victorious slave”. With all his demands met and material wants assuaged, will the last man be content at last, pausing the endless revolving wheel of history?

“Left to themselves,” Fukuyama asks, “can those stable, long-standing liberal democracies of Europe and America be indefinitely self-sustaining, or will they one day collapse from some kind of internal rot, much as communism has done?” Beyond the demands for absolute equality, freedom from want and overarching authority which underlie the politics of liberalism, Fukuyama contends, “lies the question of whether there are other deeper sources of discontent within liberal democracy—whether life there is truly satisfying.”

How does this vision compare to the world we live in today? It’s worth noting that Fukuyama radically overestimated the prosperity that the triumphant liberal order would provide for those sheltered under its wings. By all metrics, living standards have declined across the liberal West, leading to the rapid proletarianisation of the middle class in the United States and much of Europe.

The ongoing wave of protests, now curdling into civil conflict in the United States, in which the heavily indebted and downwardly mobile products of the  American university system play such a prominent role, represent a serious challenge to the liberal order birthed from within liberalism. Indeed, here it is darkly ironic to observe Fukuyama in 2011 appreciate just such a threat, though  he directs his warning at China rather than America.

Debating with Weiwei Zhang, the triumphalist theorist of the Chinese civilisation-state, Fukuyama warns that  growing prosperity threatens China’s future stability because “revolutions are never created by poor people. They are actually created by middle-class people. They are created by people who are educated to have opportunities. But these opportunities are blocked by the political or economic system. It is the gap between their expectation and the ability of the system to accommodate their expectation which causes political instability. So the growth of a middle class, I think, is not a guarantee against insurgencies, but a cause of insurgencies.” 

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Similarly, in The Last Man, Fukuyama underestimates the potential of liberalism to adopt the zealous moral certainties we now see being proclaimed with revolutionary fervour across the United States, claiming that liberal democracies “do not tell their citizens how they should live, or what will make them happy, virtuous, or great… In America today, we feel entitled to criticise another person’s smoking habits, but not his or her religious be­liefs or moral behavior.” 

Within the realm of liberalism, Fukuyama asserts, the furious passions of the past had, at the time of writing, been superseded by comfort and plenty, and “the loyalties that drove men to desperate acts of courage and sacrifice were proven by subsequent history to be silly prejudices.” Instead, “men with modern educations are content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism.”

And yet, Fukuyama predicts, this would be only a temporary reprieve from the great revolving wheel of history. Like August 1914, when “many European publics simply wanted war because they were fed up with the dullness and lack of community in civilian life,” the human soul clamours for more than peace and plenty.

Harking back to the Homeric heroic ideal of Thymos, the greater passions which drive man to seek glory and renown, Fukuyama observes that “Thy­mos is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice, that tries to prove that the self is something better and higher than a fearful, needy, instinctual, physically determined animal. Not all men feel this pull, but for those who do, thymos cannot be satisfied by the knowledge that they are merely equal in worth to all other human beings.”

The danger of liberal democracy, for Fukuyama, is that it cannot assuage these passions. With all our material and political wants satisfied, the human soul will search out deeper, older drives, a need for recognition and glory like that which drove Achilles, foreknowing, to his death on the battlefield of Troy. “Those who remain dissatisfied will always have the potential to restart history,” Fukuyama observes, simply because “the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies.” Instead of a world of pacific consumers, blissful lotus eaters happy to enjoy the material benefits and hedonic pleasures of liberalism, “the absence of regular and con­structive outlets for megalothymia may simply lead to its later re­surgence in an extreme and pathological form.” 

In this world— our world— Fukuyama argues, people “will want to risk their lives in a violent battle, and thereby prove beyond any shadow of a doubt to themselves and to their fellows that they are free. They will deliberately seek discomfort and sacrifice, because the pain will be the only way they have of proving definitively that they can think well of themselves, that they remain human beings.”

We are reminded here of Orwell’s comparison of the Utopian technocratic appeals of liberalism, the essential “falsity” of their “hedonistic attitude to life,” with the dark, heroic passions offered by Hitler to the German people. “Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet,” Orwell observes, adding “whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood.”

In a world with no great causes, where all the grand passions and conflicts of the past have been settled, Fukuyama predicts, “if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier gen­eration, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and pros­perity, and against democracy.” 

We can see these frustrated passions in the way the miseries of the Syrian Civil War provided a source of relief for thousands of frustrated Westerners who flocked to join one side or another, or to propagandise for their chosen faction from behind a computer screen. As Fukuyama notes, “the fact that a large historical world co-exists with the post-historical one means that the former will hold attractions for cer­tain individuals precisely because it continues to be a realm of struggle, war, injustice, and poverty,” observing astutely that “it is probably healthy for liberal democracies that the Third World exists to absorb the energies and ambitions of such people; whether it is good for the Third World is a different matter.”

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We see it also in the stirrings of the multifaceted revolt against the liberal order growing at home, whether the warnings of the Catholic integralist R. R Reno that, tired of the bloodless anomie of liberalism, people will search out “strong gods” in their search for meaning, or in Jacob Siegel and Angela Nagle’s typology of the alt-right as a front in “modernity’s perennial war against itself” which ends with “a camp of rebels fleeing freedom into an embrace of violence, absolutism and the idolatry of race”.

Liberalism, for Fukuyama, if severed from its pre-liberal roots, is destined to fail. “Stable democracy re­quires a sometimes irrational democratic culture,” he cautions, “and a spontaneous civil society growing out of pre-liberal traditions.” Indeed, there is in The Last Man, a striking distaste for the blandness of liberalism, an aesthetic and moral disgust with the world liberal principles has brought into being that goes beyond conservatism into reaction.

“Liberal economic princi­ples provide no support for traditional communities; quite the contrary, they tend to atomize and separate people,” Fukuyama warns. Contrary to the assertions of absolute equality which, at least rhetorically, govern the liberal order, Fukuyama argues that if liberalism attempts “to outlaw differences between the ugly and beautiful, or pretend that a person with no legs is not just the spiritual but the physical equal of someone whole in body, then the argument will in the fullness of time become self-refuting, just as communism was.”  

Like any 21st century internet reactionary, Fukuyama pronounces that “a civilization devoid of anyone who wanted to be recognized as better than others, and which did not affirm in some way the essential health and goodness of such a desire, would have little art or literature, music or intellectual life. It would be incompe­tently governed, for few people of quality would choose a life of public service. It would not have much in the way of economic dynamism; its crafts and industries would be pedestrian and un­changing, and its technology second-rate.”

Furthermore, Fukuyama predicts, in a startlingly prescient passage foreshadowing the rise of the 21st century civilisation-state, “perhaps most crit­ically, it would be unable to defend itself from civilizations that were infused with a greater spirit of megalothymia, whose citizens were ready to forsake comfort and safety and who were not afraid to risk their lives for the sake of dominion”. 

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In his aristocratic distaste for the world summoned into being by the temporary triumph of liberalism, his Nietzchean disgust at the Last Man it has created, and his awareness of the stronger and more meaningful passions aroused by the prospect of struggle, sacrifice and glory, Fukuyama is widely at variance with the worldview ascribed to him. Were he writing in today’s more hysterical climate rather than in the early 1990s, he would more likely be accused of meandering towards fascism than of liberal triumphalism.

“The virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies,” he observes, and not in celebration. His Last Men, “those earnest young people trooping off to law and business school, who anxiously fill out their résumés in hopes of maintaining the life­styles to which they believe themselves entitled,” neutered by the “liberal project of filling one’s life with material acquisitions and safe, sanctioned ambitions,” are more or less identical to the “Bugmen” of the modern internet far-right. 

Indeed, Fukuyama uncannily foreshadows writers of the modern internet Right like the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, whose Nietzchean glorification of the piratical hero, the Homeric warrior or steppe warlord figure come to overthrow the liberal order in its age of terminal chaos is viewed by liberals as a hateful threat and by a sprinkling of American conservatives as a source of inspiration.

The lazy popular reading of Fukuyama as a liberal triumphalist ignores the darker prophecies he appended to his bestseller, the stark warning that “modern thought raises no barriers to a future nihilistic war against liberal democracy on the part of those brought up in its bosom.” He warns us that, contrary to the assertions so often invoked in his name, “those who remain dissatisfied will always have the potential to restart history”.

Observing the world around us, particularly the wave of popular protests in America, the omphalos of liberalism, that have already devolved into shootings and revenge killings, we now see clearly they already have.