Fukuyama and Huntington got it wrong

This just in:  

Human culture on planet earth didn't come to "the end of history" with the end of state socialism in the USSR, as Francis Fukuyama said.

The disappearance of Cold War ideological conflict didn't usher in an era of "The Clash of Civlizations," in which ethnic and religious identity are the main drivers of inter-cultural, international conflict, as Samuel P. Huntington says.

For the past decade and a half, this is the thinking that has defined the range of conversation about foreign policy and international relations.  It's time to open up the conversation and talk in plain terms about what's really going on.

Check out Fukuyama's essay, "The End of History," here.

Check out Samuel P. Huntington's essay, "The Clash of Civilizations?" here.

(Both authors turned these essays into books, but you get the gist from the essays.  The second link takes you to a preview site, where you get a summary and about 500 words.)

Their ideas, in a nutshell:

Fukuyama:

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." (quoted from "The End of History?", 1989)

The Huntington essay offers this summary:  

World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural. ...[Cultural] divisions are deep and increasing in importance. From Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Central Asia, the fault lines ...[between culturally coherent] civilizations are the battle lines of the future....The United States must forge alliances with similar cultures and spread its values wherever possible. With alien civilizations the West must be accommodating if possible, but confrontational if necessary. In the final analysis, however, all civilizations will have to learn to tolerate each other.

Me:

Wouldn't that be lovely.  But there's a major, major dynamic afoot in international relations that both authors have not taken the full measure of:  the crisis that will come about because of the unsustainable ecological foundation of modern industrial culture.  That crisis doesn't care whether a culture dresses itself out as a liberal democracy, a socialist command economy, a troubled monarchy straddling traditional Islaamic and modern Western values, or in any other ideological or cultural cloth.

The crisis has many forms, many tributaries.  

It is the crisis of Peak Oil.  It is the crisis of loss of natural capital.  It is the crisis of Peak Agriculture, Peak Water.  It is the crisis of population growth.  It is the crisis of global climate change--which is just one manifestation of the unforeseen consequences of failing to understand an economy as a thermodynamic system.  

The first and second laws of thermodynamics tell you:  you can't make something from nothing. You can't make nothing from something.  And you can't recycle energy.

It is impossible to have economic activity (the uptake and processing of scarce low entropy) without also having pollution (the discard and exhaust of degraded matter and energy, or high entropy).  Global Climate Change is one consequence of one kind of exhaust.  There are problems with others, and with the uptake of scarce low entropy that comes at the front of economic activity.  Exhaust and uptake constitute the economy's ecological footprint. The larger the footprint, the less natural capital is left to provide us with crucial ecosystems services (like water purification and recyling, water regulation, climate moderation, pollination, insect control, disease control, air purification, oxygen generation, food production, genetic diversity, etc. etc. etc.).

Fukuyama and Huntington are wrong, because of this:  the culture that will survive Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," the culture that will "universalize its values" and stand as the exemplar for all others, will be the first culture that learns how to live sustainably within its ecological limits.  

As the destruction of natural capital proceeds world wide, that task becomes increasingly more difficult:  the ecological limits shrink every day.

In the 250,000 year history of humans on the planet, we have lived in cities--civilizations--for only ten or twelve thousand years.  Within that ten or twelve thousand years, we have used antique sunlight--our draw-down of fossil fuels--for only a few centuries.  Within those centuries, our use of oil--the most compact fuel we've known, with the highest Energy Return on Energy Invested--has lasted only a matter of generations.  In the timeline implied by environmental history, agriculture is a recent human experiment, the results of which are not yet in; and the Age of Oil is a brief, paper-thin slice of human time, not so much an experiment as a spasm of frenetic activity that may pass when the oil runs out.

We who are alive today have it within our grasp to create something the planet has never seen:  a sustainable civilization with a high degree of creature comfort, with liberty and justice for all and an equitable distribution of the benefits of economic activity.  There are no precedents for this.  

The Era of Peak Oil means:  we're at the beginning of the end of unsustainable Industrial civilization, and there's quite a bit of history left.  

The Era of Peak Oil means:  conflict over resources--scarce natural capital, scarce low entropy--will be the main driver of inter- and intra-cultural/national conflict.  

We've got to acknowledge these truths and get to work.  Time is wasting.