Twenty one years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is interesting to notice that the conflicts that our world faces nowadays are completely different from the ones that we, members of the human race, had to face before the "end of history", in the words of Francis Fukuyama*.
*Francis Fukuyama was born in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, a second-generation U.S. Japanese man, was trained as a minister in the Congregational Church and received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago. His mother, Toshiko Kawata Fukuyama, was born in Kyoto, Japan, and was the daughter of Shiro Kawata, founder of the Economics Department of Kyoto University and first president of Osaka City University in Osaka. Fukuyama's childhood was spent in New York City. In 1967, his family moved to State College, Pennsylvania, where he attended high school.
Fukuyama is best known as the author of The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argued that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies is largely at an end, with the world settling on liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Fukuyama predicted the eventual global triumph of political and economic liberalism:
"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar 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".
He has written a number of other books, among them Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity and Our Post Human Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. In the latter, he qualified his original ‘end of history' thesis, arguing that since biotechnology increasingly allows humans to control their own evolution, it may allow humans to alter human nature, thereby putting liberal democracy at risk. One possible outcome could be that an altered human nature could end in radical inequality. He is a fierce enemy of transhumanism, an intellectual movement asserting that posthumanity is a desirable goal.
In another work The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstruction of Social Order, he explores the origins of social norms, and analyses the current disruptions in the fabric of our moral traditions, which he considers as arising from a shift from the manufacturing to the information age. This shift is, he thinks, normal and will prove self-correcting, given the intrinsic human need for social norms and rules.
In 2008 he published the book Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States, which resulted from research and a conference funded by Grupo Mayan to gain understanding on why Latin America, once far wealthier than North America, fell behind in terms of development in only a matter of centuries. Discussing this book at a 2009 conference, Fukuyama outlined his belief that inequality within Latin American nations is a key impediment to growth. An unequal distribution of wealth, he stated, leads to social upheaval*, which, in turn, results in stunted* growth (from wikipedia.com).
Social upheaval: drastic change in society.
Stunted: adj. impeded the growth or development; of low quality; inferior in size
The greatest problem of our world, presently, seems to be the fact that the two most important nuclear powers of the eighties, URRS and USA, have been multiplied by an unknown number, thus producing an unimaginable amount of small nuclear powers. Due to the brutal and sudden transformation of a socialist power (the defunct URSS) into a democracy (Russia), many nuclear weapons (who can tell the number?) have fallen on the hands of terrorist groups that can detonate, at any moment, such artifacts without any previous demands or warnings.
So now, it seems that a new chapter of history, much more dangerous than the previous one, is being written. Without a shadow of doubt, you have a much more comfortable situation when you know who your enemies are than when you do not know who they are. On the other hand, the USA can divide the responsibility of being the police of the world, an extraordinarily expensive task, with other most important nuclear powers such as Russia, England, France, and China.
An additional problem for us, Brazilians, is that peaceful countries like ours, now, more than ever, have to realize that they are responsible for their own security. With neighbors such as the one ruled by the neo-dictator Capitán Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, we will have to start spending money in modern dissuasive weapons because, as you very well know, dictators love to promote wars, even when they know that their victory is most uncertain. Remember Galtieri.
I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate my representatives, Silvana and Wilson Covatti, for their most significant victory yesterday.
To all my fellow teachers, my sincere wishes of a Happy Teachers Day.
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