Review of the Month - July 1999.
The Great Disruption : human nature and the reconstitution
of the social order.
Francis Fukuyama. Profile Books.
Against Fukuyama
As any business consultant knows, the debate about
trust is a particularly lively one inside companies these
days. When managers have the performance of their brands assessed,
some measurement will surely be offered on each brand's performance
in the race to sustain the customer's trust. The very existence
of a brand pivots, after all, on the consumer's willingness not
to re-question the product's qualities at each moment of purchase.
Elsewhere, most large corporations and many small ones have an
active "ethics" policy whereby frequently enormous sums
are invested in ensuring the casual believability of all the company's
pronouncements. Trust-management has become a consultancy discipline
all on its own.
Before we give a notice on The Great Disruption, Francis
Fukuyama's sequel to his Trust: the social virtues and the
creation of prosperity indeed, before we tell you not to believe
in it - share this fantasy with us. Imagine you find yourself
in a bar situated on the outskirts of - let's say Tashkent . It
is a hot day and you want a cold soft drink. You are offered
two brands : one is Coca Cola, the other is a local offer called
Uzbeki which seems to come highly recommended by the waiter
(with whom, unfortunately, you share no common language). Which
do you choose? By the way, you have been in Tashkent for two
weeks and the food in the hotel has been awful. You just want
something nice. You will pick the Coke, no? Uzbeki might
be a real treat, but you will pass. Strange but normally you
never drink Coke. We will put down the story here for
now but we hope this little doodle of an example will clinch an
early point for us : trust is essentially a transactional concept
and its role within the given transaction can depend mightily
on the context. Trust is an event.
In the UK, most think tanks will give you a take on what they
would probably call the "trust-deficit". How often
do we see those charts showing the decline over the recent decades
in trust-ratings for the Royal Family, Parliament, Police ....
? They are used almost invariably to convince us of a malfunctioning
social and political order, a malaise in our midst, a crisis of
public confidence from which bad things must flow. The Great
Disruption is nothing more than a very grand American version
of this strangely common exercise in thought-substitution. Fukuyama's
global reputation was built by his (significantly) much shorter
piece The End of History and the Last Man in which a tightly
pulled flax of argument bound together a compelling thesis about
the role of technology in ensuring the global hegemony of liberal
democracy. That piece was so good it still makes the jobbing
intellectual swoon with jealousy.
But this is a dud. 7he Great Disruption is the doing of
a formidable, indeed polymathic, intellect. It is also the doing
of an intellectual plainly terrified of being accused of reactionary
conservatism. It is finally the doing of an argument that takes
a view on the modern evolution of trust and cannot make the data
fit. We respect Francis Fukuyama. We are troubled by his book
not because it is seriously unreadable; we are troubled by the
possibility that his posture may all too easily define
the contemporary debate about trust within companies and those
who advise them.
Let's stack the points in order. The quotes are from The Great
Disruption.
No, we do not believe that the period from the 1960's
to the 1990's can be defined in relation to "seriously deteriorating
social conditions in most of the industrialised world".
We regard such a proposition, in the light of some very obvious
facts, as utterly preposterous.
No, we do not believe that "the decline of
kinship as a social
institution ... accelerated sharply in the last half of the twentieth
century". Our reading of the available facts and figures
suggests to us that just the opposite is true.
No, we do not believe that, in the period in question,
"trust and confidence in institutions went into a
deep, forty-year decline". To argue this, we believe, is
spectacularly to misinterpret the very meaning of the words used.
Yes, we do not believe in the notion of the Great
Disruption. For us, it's more a potion than a notion. More a
political prop than an active proposition. Bad dogma, bad mantra,
bad karma.
Modern social analysis has become littered and cluttered with
grand myths of decline : trust has vanished, families are rupturing,
crime is an epidemic, children are being raised in conditions
of moral and emotional chaos, rampant individualism has left us
spiritually marooned..... In the UK, the psychologist Oliver James
has popularised a version of all this in his extraordinarily
titled book Britain on the Couch : why we're unhappier than
we were in the 1950's - despite being richer. His views are
accorded considerable credibility.
Fukuyama firmly agrees that there was, by all available measurements,
a better time before and only perhaps a better time to come.
He thinks that the technological revolutions of our time have
corrupted the established sources of authority and trust while
de-ordering the conventional roles and values that let society
be, genuinely, society. Individuals, he thinks, have simply gone
too far: -
"Thus people question the authority not just of tyrants
and high priests, but of democratically elected officials, scientists
and teachers. They chafe under the constraints of marriage and
family obligations.... And they do not want to be excessively
bound by the moral teachings imposed by religion.... Individualism,
the bedrock virtue of modern societies, begins to shade over from
the proud self-sufficiency of free people into a kind of closed
selfishness, where maximising personal freedom without regard
for responsibilities to others becomes an end in itself'.
Oh, Papa don't preach!
Let's offer another interpretation. High income levels (doubling
each generation), a dramatically increased stock of educational
achievement, the spread of economic self-reliance and personal
self-confidence, the culture of transparency and exposure delivered
daily by powerful news media .... all such things re-condition
our need for and indeed our respect for institutions. Along the
way, millions of people - especially, dare we say, women - are
leading much more easily enhanceable lives than ever before.
And, as ideological tensions and intergenerational conflicts have
subsided, so the doings of politicians matter so much less to
us. Much has been resolved and progress, for millions of people
who in a previous time would have known terrible drudgery at work,
seems real enough. As these conditions mature, trust simply does
not have the same transactional force that it once had. Of course,
there are intense social problems and bad adjustments taking place
all over the West. But historians are much more likely, in our
submission, to look back on this time as defined by peace-and-plenty
than vertiginous decline.
Reflect once more on our little example of the imaginary soda
Uzbeki.
In the Spring of 1998, after the Monica Lewinsky story
- in all its lurid detail - began to break, Bill Clinton's
poll approval ratings reached 69% : the record of his presidency.
This was widely seen as a gesture of support for him, a display
of trust in him. When the Gulf War began, the British
Prime Minister, John Major, won a poll approval rating that made
him - for a brief period - the most popular PM since the Second
World War. It is just wrong to characterise our common culture
as either riddled with cynicism or stewing in moral confusion.
We trust when it matters; we respect traditional authority when
specific conditions impel us; we do not trust less, but we may
trust differently. Consider in this sense how much we still place
our trust in brands. Even sophisticated consumers want their
experiences and their choices inside markets to be simplified
for them by the presence of familiar shapes and names and logos.
Brands live or die by the play of the trust relationship and,
for all the consumer awareness that has come with our better educated,
better informed times, brands are - unless we have missed something
- booming still.
In the late 1990's, Eurobarometer found that more than two-thirds
of Europeans agreed that they wanted a world "in which people
live by traditional values". Fukuyama would doubtless interpret
such a figure as corroborating his theory that we are quietly
revolting against the Great Disruption and "re-norming"
ourselves furiously. But surveys like Eurobarometer (and countless
others mentioned by Fukuyama) measure what people say; they do
not in themselves analyse how people live. Nostalgia is a powerfully
dynamic force within our experience of life for all life, no matter
how it might be improving in material terms, involves some loss,
some longing. We must not elevate nostalgia into a scientific
discipline - something which Fukuyama and indeed Oliver James,
for all their contrary protestations, precisely and distortingly
do. And they do it most brazenly within the debate about families
and children. It is our view - and we are not the only consultancy
to think this - that the data tell us that along many dimensions
family life has improved in the last generation and that
parenting is better and that love and commitment are in many ways
stronger than ever before. But decline-theory is doing good business
these days.
Francis Fukuyama has plainly a tremendous and laudable ambition
: to be the theoretician of our global life and times, the social
scientist of the age. But this is more Newt Gingrich than Isaac
Newton. As the pages of tormented argument run remorseless on,
he writes at one point:-
"One of the first questions we need to raise is whether
the Great Disruption happened at all". (Chap. 3)
Quite.
