When ‘History came to an end’ in America

In the name of the Beneficent, the ever Compassionate.

“Verily, (there) is in their stories a lesson for men (of) understanding; (The Quran) is not a narration invented, but a confirmation (of that) which (was) before it and a detailed explanation (of) all things, and a guidance and mercy for a people who believe…” (Quran 12:111)

Brethren! On November 8, 2016, two types of histories appropriated the global world- the first relates to the history that was birthed, the second, the history that came to an ‘end’. The first is reminiscent of the genome of history anticipated by Francis Fukuyama, the American thinker and writer, in 1992; the second relates to the unpredicted-for-unpredictable tsunami in human intellection which sometimes occur in human reality when cognition and critical perception becomes feckless experience in the wilderness of unreason and is exacerbated by the triumph of evil over goodness and dignity.

Brethren, the event of last Tuesday, November 8, 2016 in United States reminded me of that of 28th of March, 2015 in yet-to-be-United States of Nigeria. Pursuant to the election of President Muhammad Buhari, I tried to derive meanings from the event by, among others, deploying aspects of Francis Fukuyama’s theorizations in his book entitled The End of History and the Last Man as tool of analysis.

In the book, Fukuyama, in a typical American intellectual fervour, argues ‘that the advent of Western-liberal democracy may signal the endpoint of humanity’s socio-cultural evolution and the final form of human government’. He says: “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”.

Brethren, it was my argument last year, that if Fukuyama’s conception of history is the essentialized American version of it then the assumption that that history had come to end could be plausible. However, if indeed the cultural construct commonly known as history is the one referenced by Fukuyama in his analyses, I suggested, in line with other critics in the field, that the end of history was actually not there yet. I argued that Fukuyama would have become wiser after pondering the rebirth of the Cold War and indeed the break out of proxy wars on behalf of the super powers in new outposts in Middle East and Asia.

I also remember that in that sermon, I moved from theorizations of history to its practical manifestation and application on the bustling landscape of the post-colony known as Nigeria. I suggested that if indeed history could be said to have an end, such could be read into the ways political power and authority pass from one group to the other in human society. It is when history becomes embodied and objectified in its actors and players that we can become witnesses not only to its beginning but also to its end. It was at that juncture that I used the victory of President Buhari in the election of last year as one instance in which history could be said to have come to ‘an end’ in Nigeria. I said: “On the 28th of March, 2015, ‘history’ came to end for some Nigerians. On that day, an uncanny collusion occurred between terrestrial and celestial portents which eventuated in the dissolution of the dissolute powers at the ‘centre’; powers which have held this nation in the jugular since close to a decade now…”

Brethren, face to face with the event of Tuesday, last week, I found myself in the same historical labyrinth; a form of interstitial space where any attempt to make sense of history becomes an infraction of the historical. The election of the otherwise unelectable in the United States in a process and a system which had constituted itself and had been constituted by the world as exceptional made nonsense of all pretensions to logic and also makes the reconsideration of the posture of Francis Fukuyama a necessity. At the dawn of ‘history’ last week Tuesday, the deployment of the incisive insights from the works of Henry Louis Mencken, became a categorical imperative.

Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. He was a social commentator and a cultural-literary critic. Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress, skeptical of economic theories and critical of osteopathic and chiropractic medicine. As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was a detractor of religion, populism and representative democracy, which he believed was a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.

Mencken later persuasively captures his aversion for representative democracy, or better still, American democracy, which has become the doxa of modernity today, as follows: “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’ desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.”

Brethren, when Mecken made the above statement in 1920, Woodrow Wilson was in the White House as the US President. It is evident that his pen was targeted not at President Wilson in person but at the whole idea of democracy and its negative potentials to give authority to the most unfitting among men. He says again: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed … by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Thus I found the event of last week Tuesday to be highly instructive for many reasons. Among others, the event brought the reality closer home that contrary to the popular notion particularly among political scientists, democracy represents both the best and the worst system of governance formulated by humans to govern themselves. Last week Tuesday equally took democracy to ‘new levels”. Unlike before when politicians needed to avoid incitement and anger of the electorate, Tuesday, the 8th of November, took democracy to the realm of the new-normal: the more unprintable social and cultural infelicities the politician says, the more electable he becomes.

Tuesday last week equally showed the facticity and the inanity of all claims to the knowledge of the unknown by men no matter the cultural or religious garbs they are cloaked. The irony however of the human experience is that each time the deceitful goes to the market to sell his wares, he would always come in contact with those whose singular intention for coming to the public sphere is to meet with those who would deceive them.

When the most eminently unqualified, that is in line with President Obama, becomes the Commander-in-Chief, then the whole world could very well be prepared for Armageddon so says a Prophetic tradition. The latter has been hinted at by the call on Muslims to not venture into America. But this call is like one side of a coin: the other side should consist of telling American Muslims to not venture out of their country. When critically contemplated however, we would discover these are in reality difficult if not impossible options. One way to relate to the new reality in America is to consider it a bad dream that will soon go away; but for it go away the ‘America’ in the Americans would have to wake up from its slumber. (0812246511 for texts only)