Francis Fukuyama on why we’re better than our ancestors

In 1675, Madame de Sévigné wrote a letter to her daughter about a musician “broken on the wheel.” This meant being strapped to an X-shaped cross, where an executioner would systematically break the victim’s bones, leaving him to die slowly from blood loss or dehydration. And then, within a few lines, she’s talking about her neighbor Madame de Tarente enjoying the woods in enchanting weather.

In 1849, Charles Dickens recounted how he witnessed thousands of people gathered in Southwark to watch a husband and wife being hanged. And the crowd started singing a song. They took a popular tune — “Oh! Susanna” — and swapped out the words for the condemned prisoners. Like a crowd in a football stadium, drunk on beer and mass suggestion, everyone made a game of the hanging. How the crowd laughed.

Thomas Thistlewood was an overseer and later a planter in Jamaica between 1750 and 1786, and his diary, more than 14,000 pages, records the torture of the people he enslaved and his sexual assaults of more than 100 women. Alongside it sit 34 years of weather journals and notes on one of the finest gardens in western Jamaica.

This week, I interviewed Francis Fukuyama about his new book, In the Realm of the Last Man. According to Fukuyama, stories like this reveal to us that we are making progress as a society. They show that we are getting better. But what exactly is going on?

Below compassion

It’s a rare joy to have two Mini Philosophy guests within a single month disagree with each other. Oh, to have them side by side. A few weeks ago, I explained John Gray’s theory that we never make progress in ethics and politics because any advancement we make is short-lived and forever reversible. Technology and science accumulate over millennia. But ethics? Well, we’re no less brutal than we ever were. It only takes a strong wind to push us back into evil.

Fukuyama disagrees. He argues that if we look back at the stories of Madame de Sévigné, the Southwark hanging, and Thomas Thistlewood, we see societies that are either callously cold or flat-out cruel. These are societies that have normalized violence and desensitized themselves to witnessing or inflicting torture on others. De Sévigné treats the musician’s torture as just another item to report. The crowd at Southwark takes pleasure in the misery of others they deem deserving of it. Thistlewood has absolutely no qualms admitting what he is doing because this is utterly unremarkable in his world and around his people.

In other words, these societies had devalued another portion of society. They’d dehumanized them. The poor, the criminal, the outsider — these groups were considered below compassion. They were no longer moral subjects.

Everyone hurts, everyone counts

Fukuyama’s point is that this is no longer the norm. Of course, people still are terrible to each other. Just five minutes on your news app of choice will reveal that. Of course, we all treat people at work, on the street, or in our homes awfully from time to time. That’s a part of being human. But the point is that the norm is universality.

Most people, in most of the world, think that other human beings are at least worth some moral consideration. 73% of people think human rights exist. Most of the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty. Four out of five people think that torture is wrong, no matter what. Today, it’s widely accepted that no one is valueless. And that, for Fukuyama, is progress.

But what about Gray’s original objection? What about the point that even this is constantly precarious — that we’re only one disaster away from a Mad Max dystopia? “Well, yeah, of course,” Fukuyama says. “That goes without saying.” But his point is about the long perspective. It’s not a straight graph invariably pointing upward. It’s a trajectory with great ups and catastrophic downs. The move from de Sévigné and Thistlewood to today has been punctuated by two world wars, genocide, and the background omnipresence of violent crime. But for Fukuyama, the world emerges still a bit better than it was 50 or 100 years before.

Love thy neighbor

I asked Fukuyama a common question about universalism or global cosmopolitanism: Does this mean that we have the same responsibility to those thousands of miles away as to those who live next door? Fukuyama thinks not.

First, it’s psychologically implausible. We grow to love those people we see regularly. We care for those we help and who help us in turn. Communities and relationships are established through real-life, felt actions. To ask someone to hang up these feelings or loyalties in the interests of a faceless, distant name or number is like asking a parent to not love their child.

Second, and most relevantly, it’s politically undesirable. “The nation-state is a necessary political structure,” Fukuyama says.

“They empower police forces and armies to protect the community, and those forms of power have to be territorially limited. If you have a police force that can arrest anybody anywhere in the world for a crime you deem to be a crime, you’re going to be living in a very, very chaotic world.”

In other words, we need jurisdiction. We need a workable political boundary we can defend and within which we can enforce the laws that society wants. To create a universal law or universal responsibility undermines the most functional unit of operation we have: the nation-state.

So, perhaps Gray is right that progress is limited — or at least very hard — in the political sphere because, as even Fukuyama agrees, the nation-state and national interests are simply the most practical way to govern the world. This means jurisdiction and actionable policy, but it also means rivalry, competition, and possibly war. But maybe Fukuyama is right to argue that moral progress is possible. The move from “some people matter” to “all people matter” is an important one. And even if that move goes up and down, forward and backward, it’s still a noticeable trend toward progress. Few people you speak to will say other humans don’t matter. Few people will write diaries about abusing other people.

This article is featured on Big Think.