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between them. There are serious problems in presenting history as a ge–
netic or teleological process. Fukuyama argues that history has ended with
the victory of the modern liberal state. The argument is persuasive so long
as you define history as the contest of social classes from which your
b.–
vorite class is to emerge victorious. If liberal democracy is your chosen
political mode, you can then tell a story of a beginning, perhaps a middle,
and an end in that felicity. But history is not merely, or always, a contest
of classes; it is often a contest of races, nationalities, castes, religions. Con–
flict in Northern Ireland is not a contest of classes but of people of much
the same social class who feel themselves otherwise different, and mutu–
ally threatened in their difference. The difference is one of religious and
historical experience. Conflict in the former Soviet Union and the former
Yugoslavia is not between social classes. But I agree with Fukuyama that
ifyou construe history as the struggle of social classes, then history may be
said to have ended with the emergence of the modern bourgeois liberal
state.
It
is implausible that a society which has developed to the point of a
secure liberal democracy is going to yearn for a further categorical devel–
opment. Everyone wants an improvement in the political form - liberal
democracy - but not a new, unthought-of form. Members of any un–
happy social class now want to be middle-class, preferably in its highest
reaches.
But it would be a serious error to conclude that we have moved into
a condition in which we are free to create ourselves and to float through
a weightless life. John Searle has noted, in his recent book,
The Construc–
tion of Social Reality,
that the widespread carelessness in intellectual debate
in our society is a symptom of something worse:
It is somehow satisfying to our will to power to think that "we" make the world,
that reality itself is but a social construct, alterable at will and subject to future
changes as "we" see fit. Equally, it seems offensive that there should be an inde–
pendent reality of brute facts - blind, uncomprehending, indifferent, and utterly
unaffected by our concerns.
People want the world to yield to their desires.
The bearing of this on the relation between literature and culture is
fairly clear. We can now revise Malraux's formula to read: Art is the re–
volt of artists against the liberal democratic state. Or rather: art is one of
the forms in which gifted men and women express dissatisfaction with so–
cial conditions which, for the most part, they find agreeable. These
expressions of dissatisfaction have a further quality: they exercise, in each
case, the artist's capacity to invent images and rhythms not given by na-
