inductive views of history and our postcapitalist future

I've got a host of opinions on blogospheric orientation towards presentism, triumphalism, and belief in progress. But I want to make this point with as little provocation as possible, so let me narrow myself to a particular point: I believe we have a postcapitalist future due to a simple inductive vision of history.

I'm inspired to write this by this Dave Roberts post on the limits of economic growth. It's a rare bird in that it does not assert that our current system is essentially healthy and will exist into perpetuity. There is a cottage industry online of a kind of "everything's great and will only get better" essay. It's notable both for its frequency and its cross-ideological flavor. I read essays online that assert the basic health of our system and the inevitability of progress nearly every week, and I read them written by people who identify themselves as liberal, conservative, and libertarian. Many people are very dedicated to the idea that this globalizing liberal capitalism is, while not a perfect system, the best possible system, and one that is here to stay.

The existence of this trope is, in its own way, self-troubling: why do so many people who claim to be so confident in the state of the liberal democratic capitalist system spend so much time announcing that confidence? The repetition of these ideas itself suggests a profound unspoken dissonance. Those who are genuinely confident generally have little cause to say so. You can accuse me of a psychoanalytic reading here, and it's a fair criticism, but I tend to find these arguments pregnant with anxiety.

In any event, rearticulations of Francis Fukuyama's general thesis from The End of History are common and popular. Some prominent resistances include the (numerically tiny) orthodox Marxists, who believe in the classically Marxist or Troskyist notions of overproduction and exhaustion of markets of exploitation, and the inevitability of proletarian takeover; environmentalist critics, as one of half of Dave Roberts argues, who contend that capitalism depends on the consumption of material resources which can be exhausted and which despoil the planet in their collection and use; and a revanchist Christian conservatism which holds that Western civilization and its attendant strengths are the product of a divine moral framework that is expressed in the Christian bible, and that our turn away from that worldview dooms us to collapse.

I'm not going to articulate an argument for the mechanism by which capitalism will be replaced. I won't articulate what I think the next order will be. I'm only going to offer a weak inductive claim: human systems of political and economic organization are temporary. Human beings have declared their systems the final system, the truth of humankind, for the entirety of human history. One of the odd things about how people talk about Fukuyama is that they act like it is somehow unusual or even unprecedented. And yet people have assumed that their system would be perpetuated forever throughout history. (Well, absent religious belief in literal apocalypse, that is.) The Roman system, complete with such ugliness as slavery and rigid castes, was the right and sensible system of governance and resource distribution. Feudalism comported not only with divine law but with natural reality. The Catholic church was the most powerful human force in the world and would always be. Chattel slavery underwrote the Anglo-Saxon domination of the world and was supported by the widespread belief that those enslaved where inherently inferior and thus ineligible for liberty. Explicit and unapologetic imperialism by great powers was the inevitable result of inequities in national character or human capital. On and on: people believe that their way is the way that it will always be.

Here in the post-Marxist world, we enjoy an intellectual tradition that has a vocabulary of ideologies, economic systems, and sociopolitical orders. Yet we don't seem to enjoy the fruits of that sophistication. Premodern peoples tended not to think in terms of social or economic orders but rather simply of "the way things are." Here, we are aware that social orders change and that the human project has been marked by permanent impermanence, and yet the consensus view is that we have transcended change. I don't feel that way. I think that, since humankind is constantly declaring one system or the other the endpoint, and constantly being proven wrong, it is sensible to believe that the capitalist system we now live under will itself be swallowed by a new order.

Constitutionally, I'm not an optimist. Unlike what some people assume, I don't believe that a socialist system is inevitable or near. Predictions are hard, particularly about the future, and history is filled with events that were not only unpredicted but essentially unpredictable. I don't pretend that the next stage will be in keeping with my political or moral preferences. Nor, incidentally, do I think that the next stage will be the final stage; that too will pass. And you'll note that I haven't said anything about my various disagreements with the present age.

Like I said, it's a fairly weak claim; just because things have always happened doesn't mean they will always happen. I'm definitely not arguing with as much certainty as the other side, who are very, very certain. Like their forebears in every other era of history, they believe completely in their ability to assess the present and predict the future. I just think that history and human life teach us to expect change.