In Our Time - The Great Disruption

Episode Date: June 17, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the shift that has gone on through the 20th century from our being an industrial society to what is often called ‘the information society’. Francis Fukuyama’s book, The Great Disruption talks of the third great shift in the whole history of humankind. Along with all the technological and economic changes, in the past thirty years we have seen massive social changes. What has been the cause of this shift and how will we recover the social cohesion that preceded it? With Francis Fukuyama, Hirst Professor of Public Policy, George Mason University, Washington DC and author of The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order; Amos Oz, author and Professor of Hebrew Literature, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uket, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, I'm joined today by Francis Fukuyama and the Israeli writer Amos Oz. So look at the shift that has gone on through our century from our being an industrial society to what's often called the Information Society,

along with all the technological and economic changes in the past 30 years, we've seen massive social changes. What's been the cause of this shift and how will we recover the social cohesion claimed to have preceded it? Francis Fukuyama is Hearst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University outside Washington, D.C. Renowned, in some quarters notorious, for his best-selling and controversial books, The End of History and Trust, he's now widely accepted as one of the most influential and certainly the best-known commentator on global, political and economic conditions.

His latest book is The Great Disruption, Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, which covers many of the issues we'll be discussing today. The Israeli writer Amosos has lived for most of his life under Kibbutz, only recently moving to Arad, a town in the Negev Desert. He's held a number of academic posts in Israel, Oxford and America, and is now a professor of Hebrew literature at the Ben-Gurian University in Burshiva. He's the author of over 20 books, including Don't Call It Night, Black Box, and Where the Jackals How, and he has published several collections of essays.

He's been an active campaigner for peace in his country and has been in London talking about fundamentalism. His latest book, The Story Begins, Essays on Literature, is out this week. Francis Fukuyama, you describe the great shift from the industrial age to the information age as the great disruption. Why do you call it that and what is the main drive of what you're saying? Well, first of all, the great disruption, I think, is reflected in what was really a big rise social disorder throughout the Western world.

We felt it, I think, particularly intensely in the United States that can be measured by things like growing crime rates. Which decade are we talking about? Well, it's really something that began roughly in the mid-1960s and I think has continued through the early 1990s, but I think is now actually abating. But you can see this in terms of crime rates. You can see it in terms of the breakdown of traditional families.

You can see it in decreasing levels of social trust, both in government and in other citizens that have occurred. And it's not something, it was most intense probably in the U.S., but it's happened in really all of the non-Asian Western countries at that same time. And I think it was, you know, obviously a very complex phenomenon that had a lot of causes. But in a way, what we are moving into is a much more intensely individualistic age. You know, the individualism in one sphere in the economic sphere

brings innovation and technology and a lot of good things. I think that in many respects, authority becomes undermined in a lot of other areas as well, in the family and neighborhoods and other forms of community. And we have been dealing with the consequences of that shift towards a much more intense kind of individualism, really, for the last generation. You use anthropology and biology and politics and economics in your book to get at this great disruption. And it seems to me that broadly are relying two things, a disruption in the economy itself, which you haven't referred to,

and a disruption in the social order. You've begun to sketching the disruption in the social order. What about in the economy itself? Are these two allied? Oh, yes, very much so. And I think, you know, it really comes from the change in the nature of production. The simplest way to understand what it means to live in a post-industrial or information age is that you replace physical labor with mental labor.

and the first big consequences had was to propel millions of women all across the industrialized world into the labor market, which then had important consequences for traditional families because the norms of the industrial age were very much based on a traditional division of labor. This was necessary and an important shift, a very liberating shift for women, but it also had some negative consequences. And I think lies at the root of a lot of the particular social dysfunction, of this period. Amosos, what's your reaction with that? Do you share the views of Francis Fukuyama generally?

Well, I haven't read the great disruption yet, unfortunately, but I think a great disruption lies in the fact that somewhere around the middle of this century, in many countries, particularly in the northwest of the world, of course, people switched their addiction, fascination, with certainties, with a new kind of fascination, a fascination with instant happiness. There was a very widespread notion

that happiness is actually sitting on the shelves. And if you earn enough money and do the right things, you will get it, sit back and enjoy yourself for the rest of eternity. This provided for immense unhappiness, because paradoxically, the replacement of the famous right to strive for happiness, which is one thing,

by the idea that happiness is at your fingertips, which is another, caused a tremendous amount of this orientation, family-wise, social-wise, economically-wise. Now we have to remember that the northwest corner of the world is not the world. And I suspect that the jealous society, the societies which have not succeeded to enter this gadget-oriented cycle, those societies are secretly thinking that happiness indeed lies on the world. the shelves, except it's very far away from them. And the fundamentalism, the hatred, the jealousy, the denial of this world, the denial

of the miasma of the West, has to do with the paradoxical fact that even out there in Iran they crave for the gadgets. If there was this shift, you're putting it a different way, it seems to be that what you're saying is complementary to what Francis Bukuyama say. If there was a shift in the middle of the

century towards the belief that happiness is on a shelf and should be Can you give us some idea of what, in your view, were the basic causes of such a major shift? Well, we have to go back to the 19th century to explain this. Up until about 100 years ago, most people all over the world had three simple certainties. Everybody knew where they were going to live, most likely very close to where they were born.

Most people knew what they were going to do in their life. Most probably earn a living the way their parents earned a living. and they knew what's going to happen to them after they die. If they behave themselves, they will go to a better world. Those certainlies were eroded, at least in most parts of the northwest of the world. It's no wonder that the first half of this century was marked by a powerful craving for replacement certainties, ideologies. Communism, social progressiveness, strict nationalism,

various kinds, various forms, of righteousness. Well, none of those could deliver, of course. There are uncertain certainties. They all failed. As a result, people were beginning to think in terms of something they can fulfill in their own lifetime. Francis Vukuyama, you talk about social capital, and it's very important in your version of a civil society. Can you explain what social capital is and why you think it's essential? Well, social capital is a third form of capital. You have physical capital, which is land and labor and buildings and so forth.

And human capital, which is the skills and knowledge we carry around with us. Social capital is simply the ability of people to work together and to cooperate in groups. And it's necessary for politics. It's necessary for the economy. I mean, everything we do is a result of some kind of group activity. And I think that, you know, the kind of change that Amos O's was describing in a way, I mean, I think is complementary to what I'm talking about, that you had previous ages in which you had, you know, religion and other social institutions

that defined a certain set of social relationships. And then those got corroded by a lot of things. I mean, by the, you know, the death of God and by, you know, all of the intellectual trends of this century that promoted, in a way, liberated the individual from all of these constraints. And so you live in this kind of odd world in which you have a part of it that is, you know, subject to fundamentalism and to very great certainties. But in our, I mean, I think it's more than just the northwestern corner, but that's really where it started of Europe and North America.

In a way, you have people living with total uncertainty, I mean, with a kind of complete relativism of values where every individual sets his own or her own set of standards. And I think that from the standpoint of social capital, that can lead to its own kinds of pathologies because people don't, you know, no longer are able to create community with one another. Amosos, do you think that that is looking towards a society which needs rules? You think it is possible in the northwest and elsewhere

because you talk about people in other countries craving for the happiness that's on the shelf. Do you think it is possible to see a society coming in the next 20 or so years where rules, the rule-based societies, are brought back? It's not rules that we need. It's a revived kind of intimacy. I have lived on a kibbutz community for 30 years of my life. I know the pros and cons of such life, but essentially the fact that people had to exist all the time

within the circle of shame and pride where other people knew immediately, everybody knew, when you did something shameful. And everybody knew when you did something for which you deserved credit. I thought this was an essential blessing. It's no good for people to be among strangers most of the day, most of the week, most of the month. It's no good for people to relate most of their lives to superiors, to subordinates, to customers and to competitors.

It's good to have neighbours, in the old sense of the word neighbours, someone whose business is different than yours, someone who is no competition, but someone who is part of your life, someone in front of whom you might be very pride if you did well, or someone who make you feel ashamed and look down at your shoes if you have done something wrong. So I am fantasizing about the society where more and more people will work from home and therefore be able to revive the neighborhood atmosphere. Go out and have coffee at the corner of the street with people who are of totally different disciplines. This may create a certain revision of the shame and pride society I'm talking about.

In England we carry it out as a very, very powerful, I'm not joking here, a very powerful notion of the village which is powerful inside cities as well as in the countryside. and it's very strong in this country and growing. And what you've said about the Kibbutz. I mean, one of the things that I was most impressed by when I went to Israel, which is the most thought-provoking and moving country I've ever been to,

was the Kibbutz life. A very small percentage of people in Israel live on it, almost. I'm not criticizing it for that reason. I'm just pointing that out. It's pretty clear to me that Kibbutz's way of life is not meant for everybody. It's meant for people who are not in the business of working harder than they should be working

in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don't really want, in order to impress people they don't really like. Francis, do you, this miniaturization almost, which is a phrase you used, do you sense that, what Amos says, do you think that that is some kind of solution to what you really see as a big social disruption,

don't you, which are coming on to in a moment? Well, actually, you know, this is a very good point. I mean, the life in a kibbutz is intimate in a way because it's not modern, and I think that that's at the, of the problem. The subtitle of my book is Human Nature and the reconstitution of social order. And part of my

argument is that if you live in a more natural kind of setting where people are intimate, they know each other, they interact repeatedly, then you'll get the development of shame and guilt and all of these kinds of informal moral rules that will keep people without a lot of laws and police behaving fairly well. And I think that one of the problems of

modern societies is that they're big, they're impersonal, you live in cities, you move, you follow, you know, where the labor market takes you and you lose any sense of intimacy, you have to deal with a succession of strangers. And I think that one of the characteristics of human beings is that if you deal with someone you don't, you're never going to see again, it doesn't matter how you behave.

But Francis, don't you think that with more and more people working from home, there is a good chance that the kind of block intimacy or neighborhood intimacy might be revived? You know, I think that that's actually one of the hopeful things actually about the information age that may contain a solution to some of these problems. I mean, in the United States, there are probably hundreds of thousands of, for example, middle managers that were downsized out of corporate jobs who are now working as consultants from home. And I think, in a sense, this whole division of home and work where the woman stays home and the man goes out to an office is completely an invention of the industrial era. I mean, it's not a natural way to live.

And if you can reconstitute some of that wholeness of life to reunite those two spheres, I think it would be very important. At the centre of your great disruption in the 60s, you seem to be one of the things you put the centre, I think at the centre, if I read the book correctly, you see the ending and the splitting up of the nuclear family as being, as it were, the atom, the splitting of the atom which split the society. Can you talk to that? You think that's one of the greatest threats and so on, and you worry about the sexual revolution. You don't think it was gender neutral, you say it served the interests of men and it put sharp libit on the kind of gains

that women might otherwise have expected and you're very worried about women, one parent families, that this is adding very much to the disruption. I've thrown a bit of a bundle at you, but there you are. Can you talk out of that? Well, this is perhaps a greater problem in the States than it is in Europe.

We have higher in divorce rates here. But, you know, for example, in the United States, about one-third of all children are born to an unmarried mother. And I think there's just a whole host of, you know, sociological studies and empirical studies that have shown that it actually is, you know, it's bad for children. I mean, it basically creates a great deal of poverty. It's much harder for a single woman to raise a child. The part about the sexual revolution, you know, I think that women in a way were liberated the same as men,

but for, you know, for various reasons, in a sense, men benefited more. I mean, you know, for every younger woman that, you know, had greater opportunities, you know, I know probably 10 older women that are trying to struggle to raise a child with a husband that abandoned them for a younger woman. And it seems to me that men were constrained in an earlier age in a way as women were. But is there real hard evidence that shows that people brought up with single families? Because there's a recent report out in England actually just came out of day to show that actually a lot of men did go back. and 85% of, although there were single mother families, it seemed, men went back rather more than had been thought before,

and they're attending more to the families than was thought before, and men were trying to work out the new role, post-industrial role, of where the men were in families. What I'm trying to get at is, are you actually saying that this splitting up, the end of the nuclear family as the absolute almost 100% known, that is the fundamental reason for the great disruption? Is that what it comes down to? No, well, first of all, I mean, anything this large and complex doesn't have a single source.

I think that this is an important element, and I think that social historians looking back at this period of Western social development will point to these changes in gender relations as among the most important. You know, I don't know the British data terribly well. It's certainly the case that with the American data, there's just a host of studies that show that growing up in a single parent family really is not good for the life chances of, you know, of the children that do that. because, you know, basically, I think children need fathers. It's a kind of commonsensical thing. Well, I think I slightly disagree here. I can't discuss. I think I'll probably talk to what you said.

So if you say that again, fellow listeners. Well, I'm afraid I have to slightly disagree here. I'm not a sociologist. I don't know. The divorce rate or the unhappiness rate of split families in this country or across the ocean. But as a diligent student of conventional families, which is what I am in my novels and my stories, I have noted many times that the happiness-oriented conventional family is far from generating happiness. Sometimes, more often than not.

The family is the cradle of fanaticism. Fanaticism begins at home. It begins with the very deep human inclination to change the beloved one for his or her own good. Be like myself in order for you to be happy. Or God, heaven forbid, don't be like myself. I don't want you to be miserable. This constant urge in a family, inside a family, to shape the others is one of the most violent sources

of human fanaticism. After all, fanaticism is a very altruistic thing. The fanatic is a giver. The fanatic is more interested in you than he is in himself. He is always falling on your neck, trying to change for your sake, change your drinking habits or smoking habits or voting habits or whatever.

Now, if it doesn't work and you prove to be unredeemable, the fanatic will be at your throat, which is very close to being falling on your neck. But all of this begins in the family. And I have been a pit of a voir year into families as a storyteller, as a writer. I think it's not enough to simply strive for the restoration of the conventional family. I think we all need to deeply, perhaps theologically reconsider our notion of happiness. perhaps replace it by something much less pretentious, by the term joy, assuming that joy comes and goes. The idea of everlasting happiness is an oxymoron, and everlasting happiness is no happiness.

It's like an everlasting orgasm. It's everlasting, it's no orgasm. It's a plateau. To be a climax, it cannot be a plateau and vice versa. So something about the contemporary notion of happiness, the vulgarization of the notion of happiness, is where I see the great danger for both conventional families and split families and for contemporary society. How does that attitude towards families? Because in your book you talk about the stability of Asian societies and Japanese society

because of the stability of the family. Now, what Amos has said is a fair old assault on that. Well, that's true. I mean, look, they're obviously very unhappy families and authoritarian families and the like. What's tended to happen, particularly in the United States, is that you have entire neighborhoods where children, you know, children. grow up without fathers. And far from being a thought,

I mean, what it means when you don't have the parents socializing children is that the children socialize each other. And this is a disastrous situation because, you know, children don't know how to socialize one another. And when they do that, you know, what you get is gangs and a lot of violence and, you know, very high propensity for crime. And so, you know, I think that, you know, for better or worse, you have several choices.

You can have children raised by other children. You can have them raised by the state. you know, you have, the anthropologist Lionel Tiger talks about this new form of family we have, which he calls bureaucracy, in which basically a single mother, bureaucracy, in which the single mother is basically married to a welfare agency who provides the traditional role of father by providing the, you know, the check and the support and so forth. And I think that of these, you know, different forms, for all of its, you know, for all of its dysfunctions in many cases, you know, it's probably better to be raised by,

mother and father. But you do propose some future. You do believe that despite disruptions and the figures you give about job shifts, industrial to information changes, crime rises, in Europe in the deleterious effect of the splitting up

of the Nuka family. This in the end you say will be redeemed because human nature is innately moral. Well, it's a little hard to, you know, in this week when we're liberating Kosovo and seeing all these atrocities it's a little bit hard to, you know, to make that argument in those terms. But my...

The argument has to sustain yourself through those terms, isn't it? Well, you know, my argument is that people by nature tend to seek rules for themselves in groups. Now, in some cases, this takes a very ugly form of, you know, group exclusivity, which is the sort of thing that we're seeing in Kosovo. But that's why, you know, I think we have modern democracy and, you know, constitutions and a kind of universalism of rights. And in those Western societies,

where we do take those for granted. It does seem to me, and again, this gets back to Amos Oza's point about, you know, the kind of natural form of moral relations that exist in intimate communities. People are perfectly capable of doing this. I mean, there's a certain conservative idea that somehow we had a set of traditional values and that we lost them because of secular humanism

or because, you know, somehow we just went astray and that we, you know, we're kind of helpless to give ourselves values, you know, apart from somehow getting those back from a kind of hierarchical source of authority. And I think that that's just not right, that the human beings actually have, you know, capabilities for norming themselves and that we are in the process of doing that, you know, as we move into an information of society.

It doesn't seem very high on the list at the moment. Amosos, what's your view of this? Well, the capability of norming ourselves, which Francis Bukuyama mentions, exists, of course, but it's a very thin crust. having been myself on the battlefield a couple times of my life and seeing the face of war real clothes, I'm aware of the fact that it's as easy as anything

for this crust to break and for the cruelty, selfishness, sadism, monstrosities in human nature to burst out. First time in my life I saw a dead body on the field, a kind of shattered human body. I thought I shall never in my life be able to eat or drink again. A couple hours later, literally couple hours later, I was eating a sandwich a few yards from a heap of corpses.

Only shows you how fragile this is, and this is a mild example of what can happen to human beings under certain circumstances. So the one thing I would not do is trust the kind of essentially good, norm-loving, a well-behaved component of human nature. I'd remain very suspicious. How do you respond to that? You use biology as one of the disciplines.

Do you think that the idea of innate morality and the redemptiveness of cohesion is, as it were, in our genes? Well, you have to understand there's a kind of tougher element to this in evolutionary biology that, you know, I think what that tells you is that human beings learn to develop

cooperative rules in their evolutionary history in large measure to compete. I mean, there's an item on the news about the similarity between chimpanzees and humans, and in fact, chimpanzees develop all these elaborate social rules in order to go murder other groups of chimpanzees. And so in human history and human evolution, you know, the competitive and cooperative sides

were intimately linked. And so that that's why, you know, for every good aspect, you have all these, you know, these horrible aspects as well. But that's, you know, that's part of our situation of, you know, of being human. The idea of religion used to be thought of, perhaps wrongly, the more examined, as the social glue, as the tranquilizer, also as the aspiration and inspiration, all those things. Now, you come from a country, Hamasos, which is historically and perhaps in the present, the most religious and profound in that sense, country in the world.

where do you see, do you see religion playing, being a healing force in any future? I come from a country where guilt feelings were invented. They were initially invented in Jerusalem by Jews, then marketed all over the world by the Christians. By the way, it's a Jewish invention of which I'm not at all pride. It makes me feel guilty that I'm one of the people who had invented guilt. But I do realize that religion can serve not only otherwise. not only as a tranquilizer or as a social glue, it can serve as an inspiration for generosity, for altruism, for self-sacrifice.

But here precisely lies the danger. There is a very fine, invisible line between self-sacrifice and fanaticism. As I said earlier, the fanatic is a self-sacrifier. The fanatic is not the person who is willing to die for a cause. He is rather the person who looks for a cause to die for. So the line is very fine, and I would say that the moment religion gets mixed with anything else at all, with nationalism, with ideology, with one or other crusading energy, it becomes lethal. Paradoxically, religion is a wonderful asset for people who have no weapons in their hands. The combination of religion and weapon, religion and power, religion and institution is lethal.

Do you think that going back, as it were, to religion is a way forward, or do you think that is a redundant form for the future? No, I don't think that that's the solution. I mean, religion takes different forms in different societies, and I think one problem in Israel is taken a very political form. In the United States, it tends to be less politicized and tends to be more the expression of the moral values of relatively small communities that are not particularly political. and in that respect I think plays a useful role. But I guess part of my point is that in a sense we're not bereft of moral resources, even in the absence of religion. I mean, some of the most or early communities are, you know, in Scandinavia

or, you know, in Israeli kibbutzim, which are not terribly religious, you know, where you have plenty of rules and, you know, good moral relations between people. So religion is not the sinokanon of social order. Well, I agree with Francis Mukoyama that we have the, initial ability to know when we are doing evil. We know this. This doesn't always stop us. I think essentially every one of us, even a small kid, knows what pain is from experience. And consequently, when we actually inflict pain on others, any form of pain, we know what we are doing. That's where I have a slight disagreement with no other than Jesus Christ himself, who said,

forgive them, they know not what they are doing. I don't argue with Jesus about the forgiveness. I argue with him about the no-not, about the granting of some sort of moral imbecility or moral infantility to all of us. We know what we are doing. Unfortunately, knowing what we are doing is not enough to stop us from doing it. Thank you very much, Amosos.

His book is The Story Begins, that's your start. And to Francis Fukuyama, whose new book is The Great Disruption. Next week, I'll be joined by Edward Lutvak and Anatole-Kaleski. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.