Customer Reviews

The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Great Disruption is a wonderfully apolitical look at the rather disconcerting changes that have taken place in the social structure of western civilization during the last third of the twentieth century. Francis Fukuyama does this by examining the recent changes in social norms and values in western civilization as a whole, including the course they have taken in other countries, as well as in the United States. He lucidly examines the underlying causes for these changes, and compares them with those observed in other cultures as well as those that have taken place due to earlier social disruptions throughout the history of Western civilization. It is of special interest to those of us who grew up in the times prior to the disruption, when social norms tended to support individual happiness by stressing the more communitarian aspects of culture such as family, religion, and reciprocal employer/employee relations. For many of us, the world has become a cold, lonley place.

Fukuyama does NOT take sides in the culture war except insofar as to acknowledge changes that have come about, or are in the process of taking place. He does make judgments about the adaptability of some of the changes and their likelihood of remaining in their present form over the long haul. It is of particular interest to note that he does not attribute the various disruptions in social norms to politics per se, but rather to natural reactions of individuals to the changes in their environment wrought by the new technologies that have come to dominate western culture. These include the wide dissemination of information, increases in longevity and the shift from a society based on manual labor to one based on intellect. The politics on either side, from the feminists and the sexual liberationists on the left to the religionists on the right were not seminal in either creating or delaying these changes, and in fact, Fukuyama seems to be arguing that human nature will be the final arbiter of the form that social norms will finally take. In short, neither side will ultimately win the culture war, but then, neither side will lose either. The left will be happy to learn that the liberation of women is a natural phenomena and cannot be reversed. The right will be happy to learn that Fukuyama sees no clear, realistic alternative to traditional families (nuclear or extended), and that over time the rather devastating changes in family structure wrought by the change in status of women will certainly be modified, (as indeed is slowly happening now) not because of political arguments, but because human nature, the key to all social interaction, will demand it.

The first half of the book reads more easily than the second half because it deals with actual real life societal changes and their causes. The second half deals more heavily with socioeconomic theory and is a good deal more work, but rewarding if you have the will to stick it out. My major criticism with the book is that it does not deal at all with timeline other than to hint that the disruptions will be ironed out within a number of generations. It would have been cold comfort for Czarist loyalists to know that the Soviet experiment would eventually fail, but that it would take three generations and millions of political deaths for it to happen, and another several generations for Russian citizens to rebuild enough social capital to rejoin the rest of the world.

I was intrigued by his "The End of History." I thought his "Trust" was a brilliant book and used it extensively in my masters thesis and doctoral dissertation. I only hope this latest book is a disruption in an ongoing chain of good books. In the end, "The Great Disruption" is a down right silly book. It has a lot of usefull data but Fukuyama's humanistic ideology clouds it all. All his empirical data and any real understanding of history undermine his polly-anna conclusion: that things just have to get better because people are ultimately good. Fukuyama proves that the moral consensus -- the social capital -- of the earlier era has been wiped away. That crime has sky-rocketed and that the apparent drops in recent crime rates are only the result of high incarceration rates and lower percentages of younger men. Then he turns around and wants us to believe that disfunctional behaviour has dropped because people are naturally gregarious and have a natural inclination to rebuild social capital. He doesn't bother to deal with societies -- like Ethiopia -- that have never been able to build up enough social capital. He doesn't really look any further back in history past about 1950. His generalizations about the 19th century merely show how little he has taken into account the big picture of history. He thinks (based on his ideology of human goodness) that things just have to get better. If he had studied Pitirim Sorokin for a really big picture of history, he would know better. People can come to a similar optimistic conclusion as does Fukuyama but they will need to be much better grounded in history if they are going to make generalizations about long-term historical cycles. For that, I would recommend Robert W. Fogel's "The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism." Fogel, a Nobel prize winner, has all the optimism of Fukuyama but with the history to back it up.

This is an important book for readers who are interested in how our cultural landscape has shifted in the last three decades and what the future holds for us. Mr. Fukuyama is the premiere writer in American today when it comes to articulating the big picture and offering unique and provocative viewpoints. "The Great Disruption" is further evidence of that fact. Many Americans fail to appreicate the incredible social changes that have taken place since 1960 and Fukuyama pinpoints the prime culprit - a radical change in gender relations. Changes in the economy and the government are big enough but when you're talking about the way that families are raised and how men and women relate to each other - social mores that have lasted for thousands of years - you're talking about a seismic social shift. This revolution, which Fukuyama traces to the birth control pill, has led to serious social issues - teen pregancy, single-parent families, crime, low trust in government, and more. This is not a completely unique thesis but Fukuyama explains it in far more depth than any other recent author. Furthermore, Fukuyama reports that this "Great Dispruption" is mellowing and he uses the encouraging statistical data of the last five years as evidence. The author sites mankind's fundamental need for order as the catalyst for this social pause. What he leaves out, however, is a vision of what our country will look like ten or twenty years from now because of this development. Will these statistic trends level off? Will they reverse themselves? And if so, completely? Or is this just the eye of a storm waiting to churn again? This, I suppose, is left to the intellect of the reader. Nevertheless, this book is a must-read.

Here are a couple of excerpts from an essay I posted on this book. Contact me if you would like to hear more.

I was re-reading Francis Fukuyama's "The Great Disruption" on the airplane the other day, when the pilot came on to the speaker to announce that we were headed into "turbulence" near our Denver destination. (The next day, the storms to which he referred were the lead headline in the local newspaper.) He requested that all passengers return immediately to their seats and fasten their safety belts.

I glanced in the direction of the bathrooms, expecting to see people retreat unhappily from the queues to their seats. Instead, nobody moved from the aisle. On the contrary, additional people stood up and joined the lines. The pilot repeated his warning, this time more sternly, and still the queue for the lavatory did not diminish.

What I observed was a classic illustration of a central thesis of Fukuyama's new book. I was witnessing the dramatic breakdown of hierarchical authority that has taken place since the mid-1960s. . .

if after reading "The Great Disruption" you do not find yourself bringing it up in conversation with your friends, then you need to make some new friends who have more intellectual curiosity.

Fukiyama's End of History was a bit overwritten, but it contained some original and provocative ideas which he convincingly defended. The book caught my attention to the degree that I've bought Fukiyama's subsequent books: Trust, and now The Great Disruption.

Trust, Fukiyama's middle book, explored some of the links between what he calls "spontaneous sociability", circles of trust, and productivity. Not exactly the sweeping scope of End of History, but he did promote some new ideas.

The Great Disruption, in many ways, reads like "Trust Lite". This time around Fukiyama focuses on the relationships between rules, social order, and economic growth. He offers some empirical data (and nifty line charts) on statistics like crime, out of wedlock births, poverty, etc. There is some good information here, but I reached the end of the book without having acquired any new ideas or concepts.

The book's conclusion is strange. First, he puts in a plug for his End of History theme: that liberal democracy is the only viable alternative for the advancement of society. He then goes on to contradict his Hegelian theory of historical directionality by concluding that history in the "social and moral sphere" is not in fact directional in nature, but is cyclical. Finally, he concludes that the future of mankind depends on the "upward direction of the arrow of History", contradicting his previous point and again promoting his idea of the "directionality". Huh??

In the end, Fukiyama runs us around in circles (280 pages worth) without reaching any real conclusions at all. There wasn't really enough material here for a book, and as I read Disruption I felt that I was just getting bits and pieces that he'd forgotten to include in his previous two releases. This is recycled material. Not recommended.

It is quite difficult to me to feel anything but a benign "that's interesting" type of indifference to this book. On some things, Fukuyama does rather well. On others, I could not resist the urge to rhetorically ask myself: "Did he really get this published?"

First, the good stuff. As others have noted, Fukuyama provides decent factual documentation and analysis to support part 1 of his argument - that the social bonds common to the days of yore have dissipated through time (aside from a few contradictions that I'll get to later). He also provides a quite lively, if a tad oversimplified and/or overeager, section on the life sciences' recent findings that we are social creatures after all.

So that accounts for the two extant stars. What accounts for the three I decided to withhold? First, and most devestatingly, Fukuyama never makes it clear how this dissipation of 'social capital' can be attributed to the 'information revolution' - the transition from an industrial-based to information-based economy or culture. It seems his only strategy is to rule out, curtly and unconvincingly, other variables only to tell us: "Well it couldn't be those, and since the timing is right, so it must be the information revolution." I don't buy it (yet), and don't see how Fukuyama expects me to.

Second, there are an embarassing number of out-and-out contradictions in this book. First, there is the biggie: Fukuyama spends a lot of time telling us that via human nature, the rebuilding of social bonds is endemic and inevitable to humankind. Then, in the next section, he tells us that we must work dilligently to bring about what he just told us was endemic and inevitable. (This is reminiscent of Marx telling us that the revolution was inevitable and that therefore, the workers must be dillegent in ensuring that it comes about).

There are other contradictions: Fukuyama tells us in the book that crime is and has been on the rise for some time. A bit later, though, he tells us that the vast majority of American neighborhoods are safe and that it is only people's perception of rising crime via the media tht seems to be the problem. He also tells us that marriages dissolving in their first few years is a new frightening trend, while later in the book teling us that it is "not uncommon" for marriages to dissipate only after the kids are raised. I just don't understand!

Anyhow, I could go on, but I'd rather get to my main point: although this book may have a few eye opening moments (generally those moments where Fukuyama is reinforcing things we already know), all in all, it is not worth your time. If you want to explore the weakening of the 'social fabric' try Etzionni's "The Spirit of Community" or Callahan's "The Cheating Culture." If you are interested in the life sciences' research on the sociality of humans, try Ridley's "The Origin of Virtue," or Axelrod's 'Evolution of Cooperation.' Both do a better job than this book.

Although the title looks controversial, one comes to understand easily toward the end that the author continuously looks at the good sides of hierarchy and social order. I thought that trait extremely oriental and similar to some Japanese sociologists. For him creating social orders is one of the most valuable endowments human beings are born with. His discription and enourmous data of the present state of "the Great Disruption" is breathtaking and insightful. The only point which disappointed me was that, although he stresses the change of women's attitudes towards job, family, kids, etc. as the major shifting force which dismantled the community, he does not link the human impulse to go back to social order with the women's increasing role in society. He merely talks about how men and women should adjust to the post-nuclear family style, and I was lost how he evaluates women's role in society.

I started out really liking this book and if it had continued in the vein it began, I probably would have given it four or five stars. The author's definition of social capital is key to the book's good and bad points: "Social Capital can be defined as a set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permits cooperation among them." He proceeds from there to analyze various factors in the world that add to or detract from social capital and correlate these to historical changes in culture, economy, crime, etc. Things that help social capital include trust, community, marriage, education; things that hurt it include crime, greed, individualism, single parent families, etc. After all his outstanding analysis, I could only imagine the chapter on capitalism would have to point how the greed and individualism it inspires is a problem. But no! Instead he seems to stop and redefine what social capital is, just so he can say that capitalism is a good thing: "The view that social capital is a public good is wrong." "...rather a private good that is pervaded by externalities." So this rationalizing basically gets to a point where he is suggesting that greed and individualism now do work for the common good and therefore add to social capital. It was enough to make me want to throw the book out the window! Luckily, the window I was next to didn't open!

In the end his conclusions were very anti-climactic. There have been many of these "disruptions" in the past and this current one is just another like the ones before (not so "Great" after all?) and it is currently on the decline, taking care of itself, so apparently all you and I need to do is sit back in our LazyBoys and have another beer! NOT a feel-good book, they say? I think it IS. I would recommend it only for the first half of the book.

In a world of propaganda and hype, Francis Fukuyama has crafted an elegant, brief synthesis of theory and practical reality which does more to explain what's going on than all the Right and Left pundits combined. Detached without being haughty, Fukuyama sticks with objective reality and calls trends by their real names, without rhetorical device or manipulative effort.

As a third world citizen this book impressed me with one of its main idea that says that no matter the storms of selfishness and individualism, sooner or later, we will come back to be social and reliable to each other again. That trend to be social to other people would be, under Fukuyama's point of view, based on physiological features of our human constitution. The references Mr. Fukuyama cites, for instance, to relate the human brain's functioning and language to our "natural" trend to be social should be reviewed by the readers interested in deeper understanding.

Mr. Fukuyama would not be the first scholar who believes that is human culture what makes more intensive our "hidden" trends to be social (or, the reverse, what makes us violent to each other and intolerant). Reading "Trust", another book of him, oneself realizes how important is the society's culture towards the role of family and work and school to build up social capital. The very essential difference between one society and the rest, in the race for competitiveness, under the ideas from "Trust" would be human created: culture, related to social capital and his formation. But now, in "The Great Disruption" appears our physiology as an important source of explanations of our collective and cultural creations (like language, attitudes towards work,and our social capital too).

What i can comment from my knowledge of peruvian history is that the social capital is a cultural product, made by people in history, with all our rational and non-rational choices, made individually and colectively. Being together in the same territory, under the same national state, and tolerate each other group, even though among different groups of peruvians we don't trust, could be explained by some physiologicals fundamentals. But this is not the same of building up social capital.Our biology,probably, makes harder having some behaviors along the time, but nothing else. So, was our human physiology an important explanation of what made less harder troublesome times in peruvian history, making us at least "just a little" tolerant to each other groupe, despite of all our differences?. May be. But the solutions of our pending challenge, of building up more social capital, will come from choices, determined by culture and social motives, not from physiology.

A very interesting book, against all their debatable ideas.