<benmie@isdnet.co.za>

       The following paper was delivered in Moscow in 1997.
       Some readers will find this paper rather too long.        It would
have been ideal to have posted an abridged        version, instead.
Bottomley draws readers' attention to
       the journal New Contree published by the University of
       the North-West which has similar aims.

---------------------------

'THIS AGE'S MOST UNCERTAIN HOUR': POSTMODERNISM AND HERMENEUTICAL ANXIETY
IN THE 'NEW SOUTH AFRICA'.

JOHN BOTTOMLEY
UNIVERSITY OF THE NORTH-WEST

I began to write....and thought that at last I had discovered a form which
would contain and order all my losses. I was wrong. There is no form, no
order, only echoes and coincidences, sleight of hand, dark laughter.

Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore:
thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die: and the
memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of
tomorrow - only the string of my platitudes seems to have
no end.  As peasants say: 'Pray, brother, forgive me for the love of God'.
And we don't know what forgiveness is, nor what is love, nor where God is.

Assez  Joseph Conrad, 1898, History is natural selection. Mutant versions of
the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise, and old saurian
truths go to the
wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the
strong survive. The weak, the anonymous,
the defeated leave few marks...history loves only those who dominate her: it
is a relationship of mutual enslavement.   Salmon Rushdie, Shame (1984)

To recognize that the past has been altered understandably arouses anxiety.
A past seen as open to manipulation not
only undermines supposed historical verities but implies a
fragile present and portends a shaky future.  David Lowenthal, The Past Is A
Foreign Country, 1985.

When we discover that there are several cultures instead of
just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge
the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real,
we are threatened with the destruction of our own discovery. Suddenly it
becomes possible that there are just others,
that we ourselves are an 'other' among others. All meaning
and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through
civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins. The whole of mankind becomes
an imaginary museum: where shall we go this week-end - visit the Angkor
ruins or take a
stroll in Tivoli of Copenhagen?  Paul Ricoeur, _civilisations
and National Cultures,_ in his History and Truth

A sculptor named Giacometti once claimed that his pieces
were justified by the shadows they made possible. Thus the value of a
sculpture, which is a material and tangible thing, is reduced to something
immaterial, intangible, arbitrarily variable, in an optical transaction
where the rate of exchange depends
on the fall of the light.

At this early stage it is necessary to point out  that this work
consciously  takes the form of a collage, letting the many
voices and opinions speak for themselves and thus contribute
to our overall understanding of the crisis that  is postmodernism. In the
words of Hans Bertens and Etienne van Heerden: I will...let my theorists
speak for themselves, as
much as possible, with the inevitable drawback that my text
will be a minefield of quotations.  There is much to say for
the art of graceful summary, but I'd rather convey an impression of the
different voices that have contributed to the debate.

This article was originally conceived as a review of Francis Fukuyama's
second major work, _Trust_, published in 1995.
It was to have been an examination of the relevance of Fukuyama's work  to
history; instead, it evolved into an examination of the relevance of history
itself.

The underlying premise of this work is, that to comprehend
 the nature and extent of the crisis affecting the discipline of history in
South Africa it is necessary to study the broader context; to examine the
prevailing post-apartheid, post-industrial, post-marxist, post-modern,
post-positivist, weltanschauung, and the effect this iconoclastic
intellectual climate has wrought on the humanities.

Much of the rationale behind Fukuyama's book stems from
his belief that the fall of the Berlin Wall brought the 'Enlightenment
Experiment' to an end. This 'experiment'
began with the collapse of religious certainties during the
Early Modern Period (1500-1789). Science was transmogrified into the new God
of the Western world in place of religion.
The philosophes believed scientific absolutes and scientific methodology
would enable humanity to initiate progress, by ridding itself of those
superstitions and mythologies that had kept it imprisoned during the
metaphysically-dominated
medieval period.

The advent of the industrial world shortly thereafter, seemed
to vindicate this commitment to science as the means of bringing about
progress.  History assimilated the positivist impulse by committing itself,
in the Marxist/Hegelian sense,
to linear progress, and the idea that humanity advanced
towards a final, equitable goal.  Some historians moved so
far down the positivist path, that they imagined themselves
to be agents of social engineering and weapons of change.
Like their colleagues in liberation theology, they argued, the purpose of
history was to engage in the struggle for justice. One result of their
efforts is the prevailing confusion about whether history should be
politically committed or should
remain academically neutral as was demanded in the Rankean past.

The course of the Twentieth century put an end to any
illusions of progress through positivism, science, and social engineering.
Doubt was first expressed during the romantic period, but it was the First
World War that destroyed much
of the optimism of the Enlightenment. The barbarism of
Nazism, arising in the midst of what had until that time been
the most cultured nation in Europe, led to further doubt and existential
angst.  It was only during the ultimate decade of
this millennium, however, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism,
that this doubt climaxed in the rout of positivism.

What was apparent in Fukuyama's work was the global nature of that crisis
that has been subsumed within the generic term postmodernism. South African
historians have largely interpreted postmodernism from their own particular
perspective. There has been almost no research into the
effects of postmodernism on the humanities in general, or research into
other dimensions/elements/forms of postmodernism.

This naivete is perhaps the major reason why some historians view the
present crisis in  transitory terms, as being merely a fad or fashion. In
this sense, South African historians have
been like those geocentrically-committed savants of old, who were so
preoccupied with their own methodology, that they failed to appreciate the
universal picture.  Like other epochal terms, postmodernism has been both
popular and unpopular with historians: popular because they help define the
obvious fact that there are seismic shifts in the processes of history,
the structure of culture, the nature of collective consciousness, and the
aesthetics, styles and preoccupations of the arts; unpopular because they
paste over fundamental differences
and generate endless quarrels about what such terms may
really be said to define.

At the same time the associations, definitions and implications of
postmodernism are so elastic and slippery that some commentators feel the
concept has no validity as a theoretical, hermeneutic or aesthetic label.

There is also confusion about whether postmodernism is the beginning of the
end or the end of the beginning. Some commentators view postmodernism as
being merely that
'slash and burn'  rejuvenation implicit in our literary heritage:
From time to time there occurs some revolution, or sudden mutation of form
and content in literature. Then, some way
of writing which has been practised for a generation or more,
is found by a few people to be out of date, and no longer to respond to
contemporary modes of thought, feeling and
speech. A new kind of writing appears, to be greeted at first with disdain
and derision; we hear that the tradition has been flouted, and that chaos
has come. After a time it appears that the new way of writing is not
destructive but re-creative. It is not that we have repudiated the past, as
the obstinate enemies - and also the stupidest supporters - of any new
movement like
to believe; but that we have enlarged our conception of the
past; and that in the light of what is new we see the past in a new pattern.

Other commentators argue that instead of viewing postmodernism on its own
iconoclastic terms,  this phenomenon should rather be seen as an extension
of other elements  of the past. Patricia Waugh,  for example, argues
that postmodernism should rather be interpreted as a late-flowering
Romanticism.  Some historians have gone
back even further into the mists of history in their search for antecedents
of this intellectual movement.

'The past really did exist. The question is : how can we know that past
today - and what can we know of it?' The hermeneutical transformation
implicit in postmodernism.
There are also those commentators who argue that postmoderism is neither an
aesthetic mode of thought nor cultural epoch, but is instead a 'millenial',
'fin-de-siecle', or other philosophical mood. Postmodernism, however, as
this paper will show,  is both an epoch and a milieu.

The common denominator in this bewildering array of theoretical
postmoderisms is the belief that far from bringing liberation, the
Enlightenment has proved to be a poisoned chalice.  Modernism (the
Enlightenment inheritance) has generally been perceived as being
positivistic, technocentric
and rationalistic, and has been identified with a belief in progress,
absolute truths, the rational planning of social
orders and the standardization of knowledge and production.

The fall of the Berlin Wall tore down Enlightenment certainties, and in so
doing, undermined the foundations of Western knowledge: Without such
metanarratives (God, history as purposefully unfolding immanent dialectic,
Reason), history itself becomes a plurality of 'islands of discourse', a
series of metaphors which cannot be detached from the various
institutionally produced languages which we bring to bear
upon it (Foucault), or a network of agonistic 'language games' where the
criteria are those of performance not truth (lyotard). The implication of
this is that 'truth' cannot be distinguished from 'fiction.

A profound crisis of legitimation followed the collapse of metanarratives.
Patricia Waugh points to apocalypticism and crisis mentality, whilst
Comaroff sees this decade as being
''the age of multiple subjectivities, of dispersed senses of selfhood, of
anti-totalizing forces that render much in
our lives contingent, incoherent, polyphonous. This crisis is especially
profound for historians as the very foundations of their discipline are
shaken by this intellectual turmoil: that set
of challenged cultural and social assumptions that also
condition our notions of both theory and art today: our beliefs
in origins and ends, unity and totalization, logic and reason, consciousness
and human nature, progress and fate, representation and truth, not to
mention the notions of
causality and temporal homogeneity, linearity and continuity.

History is no longer conceived of as a linear construct dependent upon
evidence and concerned with the search for 'truth'. Postmodern writing has
taught us that history and fiction are discourses, that both constitute
systems of signification by which we make sense of the past. History is
a socially constructed, manipulated 'reality', whilst absolute truth is now
seen to be impossible. There is thus a growing fascination with the idea
that much of what people take for granted as "normal" or true, 'is merely
the reflection of
shared cultural biases - prejudices that are inherited through tradition,
reinforced by structures of authority, and inculcated
through habit.'

A new historiography is emerging that is concerned with distinguishing
between fact, fiction, certainty, anarchy, text
and context, varieties of historical situatedness, autonomy and agency,
reason and aesthetic: In these terms, to attempt to offer a rational account
of human experience through Enlightenment universal categories is to
'totalise'. The first lesson of Postmodernism is that it is impossible to
step outside that
which one contests, that one is always implicated in the values one chooses
to challenge...Any theoretical system is simply a provisional working
fiction to be used pragmatically and abandoned when no longer useful. As the
narrator in Salmon Rushdie's Shame puts it: 'I myself manage to hold large
numbers of wholly irreconcilable views simultaneously,
without the least difficulty. I do not think others are less versatile(p.
227).  What is valid in one context or 'just'
or 'true' may not be so in another: the universal gives way to the local, to
a recognition of situatedness or of a radically
fictional sense of truth. The notion of autonomy in any
practical sense becomes redundant. In neither mode can philosophy or art
stand outside or refuse implication in the
very economic and ideological dominants of the historical moment in which
they exist.

The result of this relativity is revealed by Linda Hutcheon:
To challenge the impulse to totalize is to contest the entire notion of
continuity in history and its writing. In Foucault's terms discontinuity,
once the "stigma of temporal dislocation" that it was the historian's
professional job to remove from history, has become a new instrument of
historical analysis
and simultaneously a result of that analysis. Instead of seeking common
denominators and homogeneous networks of
causality and analogy, historians have been freed, Foucault argues, to note
the dispersing interplay of different, heterogeneous discourses that
acknowledge the undecidable in both the past and our knowledge of the past.
What has surfaced is something different the unitary, closed, evolutionary
narratives of historiography as we have traditionally known it: as we have
been seeing in historiographic metafiction as well, we now get the histories
(in the plural) of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and
colonial) as well as the centrist, of the unsung many as well as the much
sung few.

The final aspect of the postmodern hermeneutic to be
discussed in this paper is the inescapably political nature of
this phenomenon.  During the 1980s, the Derridean attack on language and
representation gave way to a second phase of postmodernism initiated by
Foucault. Thereafter, the relation
of power to knowledge and to historical, social and ideological
contexts became an obsession of postmodernism: a
Foucauldian interrogation of the power inherent in representation and in the
institutions that privileged certain forms of representation at the expense
of others. As a result, issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and even
class...gradually
find a place in the debate on postmodernism and eventually come to
constitute one of its major themes.

In the work of Patricia Waugh, we can see the far-reaching ramifications of
this focus, particularly for the discipline of history. Waugh points out
that all metatheories are viewed by postmodernists as being merely disguised
enactments of a will to power functioning through unjust, violent and even
dangerous exclusions of vital elements.  Waugh discusses Salmon Rushdie's
Shame which is a text that consciously
seeks to expose oppression in its various forms. Rushdie discusses language
in the context of religious oppression as
one form of violence: So-called Islamic 'fundamentalism'
does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed
on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the
rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to
oppose it. This is how religions
shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the
people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.

Another text Waugh uses is Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Walker sought to
expose the implication of historical situatedness by the use of an aesthetic
manipulation of voice and discourse: The novel...recognises the way in which
the same words or discourses can come to take on different meanings and
values in different contexts and situations.  As Celie learns to use her
vernacular to explore the possibilities
of asserting her own sense of agency and personal memory...(she)begins to
perceive what official history writes out in its legitimation of a
particular set of power relations as 'truth': class relations filtered
through racial victimisation and sexual relations determined by economic
domination

The end of marxist revisionism was not to be the end of political
consciousness as some observers argued. If it was
the privileged status quo that sought to re-establish itself by asserting
postmodernism, it had greatly miscalculated the tenor of the milieu. There
was to be no going back to the absolutist past.

Budding bewilderment amidst growing interdependence in  the humanities.  In
our study of the crisis in the humanities, we
turn to economics which was closely aligned with history during the years of
struggle.  The field of economics is dominated by neo-classical or free
market economists like
Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and George Stigler. There is, however, the
growing apprehension that little has changed, that economics is still based
on simplistic models of behaviour that fail to capture reality.

At its most basic, the problem lies with a conceptual toolkit that insists
that all economic activity can be reduced to 'rational utility
maximization'. Neoclassical economics is based on the premise that human
beings are actuated solely by self-interest; that they are essentially
rational but selfish individuals who seek to maximize their material wellbeing.

The superficiality of this construct mirrors the economic determinism of the
past.  In which the key issue was similarly how ideas relate to material
reality.  Most materialists in South Africa rejected any independent role or
ermeneutical/ontological status to such abstract expressions of social
reality as feudalism, clientism, ethnicity, parochialism or nationality.
They denied that ideas, ideologies, cultural values, belief systems or
ethnicity had ever been powerful or independent determinants of events.
This abstraction of economic actions from the values and beliefs of those
performing them, ie, Marx's utility maximizing 'economic man', was to
undermine the value of much of the research of those decades.

In his new work Lila, which is largely written from an anthropological
perspective, Robert Pirsig concludes that neoclassical economics has failed
almost as completely as its predecessors in dealing with human motivation.
According to Pirsig this failure is the result of similarly flawed
hermeneutics, and the fact that the 'body of theory from which deductions
are made is wrong at some fundamental level': The whole
field seemed like a highway filled with angry drivers cursing
each other and telling each other they didn't know how to
drive when the real trouble was the highway itself. The
highway had been laid down as the scientific objective study
of man in a manner that parallelled the physical sciences. The trouble was
that man isn't suited to this kind of scientific
objective study. Objects of scientific study are supposed to
hold still.  They're supposed to follow the laws of cause and effect, over
and over again. Man doesn't do this. Not even savages. The result has been
theoretical chaos.

Pirsig believes this hermeneutical crisis is the result of the continued
reliance of the humanities upon mechanistic empiricism and especially
Enlightenment positivism; that the existing meta-theoretical approaches are
sterile because they continue to be based on the idea of scientific purity
that is simply reductionism.

The profound consequences of this relativist stance have been pointed out by
David Lowenthal: To recognize that the past has been altered understandably
arouses anxiety.  A past seen as open to manipulation not only undermines
supposed historical
verities but implies a fragile present and portends a shaky future.

This iconoclastic position verging on intellectual anarchy is taken a stage
further by Paul Ricoeur: When we discover that there are several cultures
instead of just one and
consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural
monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of
our own discovery.
Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves
are an 'other' among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared,
it becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges
and ruins. The whole of mankind becomes an imaginary museum: where shall we go
this week-end - visit the Angkor ruins or take a stroll in Tivoli of
Copenhagen?

Pirsig claims that postmodernism is responsible for the  global paralysis of
moral patterns. All the social sciences including anthropology, Pirsig
claims, were founded upon the bedrock metaphysical belief that physical
cause and effect laws of human behaviour exist - that it is possible to
quantify, define and replicate human behaviour given the correct
methodology. The uniqueness of humanity Pirsig argues, is hereby sacrificed
to some common denominator.

Pirsig believes that most Western societies are still dominated
by the Enlightenment doctrine of scientific disconnection. According to this
positivist perspective, all cultures are unique historical patterns which
contain their own values and cannot
be judged in terms of the values held by other cultures. There are no
absolute moral laws and value patterns that can be applied globally.
According to Pirsig, this hermeneutical fallacy
has led to social catastrophe.

Scientific disconnection is not possible Pirsig argues, and we cannot
understand other cultures, without taking into account differences of value;
cultures can only be defined as a network of social patterns of value Thus,
for example, when we ask how the Victorians could stand to live in the
hypocritical and superficial way they did, we cannot get a useful answer as
long as we superimpose twentieth century values on them that they did not
have. Our scientific description of nature is always culturally derived.
Nature tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear. The selection
of which inorganic patterns to observe is always made on the basis of
contemporaneous  patterns of social values.

On another interconnected plane, neo-classical economists believe that a
universal law of economics is possible. They advance a meta-theory, which
they argue is equally  applicable to Russia, the United States, Japan,
Burundi or Papua New Guinea - irrespective of any specific historical or
cultural features. This is yet another aspect undermining the
explanatory power of neo-classicism.

Further criticism of the neo-classical school of economics, this time from a
sociological standpoint, has been expressed by David Lazar. In a recent
article, Lazar examined the rationale behind the various economic ideologies
applied to South Africa. In particular, Lazar has drawn attention to the
artificiality of distinctions between, economic rationality and sociology or
what he terms 'the rest of our lives'.

Following the work of Karl Polanyi with his concept of the 'sociology of
economic life', Lazar argues for a concept of 'embeddedness': we must treat
economic life as 'embedded' in social life; that is, economic action is a
form of social action...(thus) the sociological concept of 'embeddedness' is
used to explore the limitations of the notion of economic
rationality associated with neo-classical economics...In other words, for
sociological analysis, economic action is a form of social action, not
merely a matter of individuals acting in pursuit of individual interests,
and must not be analysed as if it exists in a rarefied realm with its
peculiar, autonomous economic form of motivation.

Lazar points out that real people, as opposed to the abstract economic
actors in textbooks, 'hold particular beliefs and cherish specific values
and recognize their continuing interdependence with others, whether in
networks or formal organizations'; the point being that economics and
society are never autonomous. Lazar concurs with Polanyi that rather than
economics being embedded in social relations,
social relations are embedded in the economic system'.

Lazar thus argues that it is essential to 'emphasize the embeddedness of
economic action, economic institutions and economic ideologies and their
associated rationalities in their cultural, normative, political and
structural contexts'. However, Lazar concludes, there is still a very real
need to beware when treading that torturous middle path between 'the
under-socialized conception of human action characteristic of classical and
neo-classical economics and the over-socialized conception which sees the
individual's action as the passive effect of social forces'.

From a predominantly political science perspective, Mathew Horsman and
Andrew Marshall in After The Nation-State: Citizens, Tribalisms And The New
World Disorder(1994), also criticise the existing consensus: We do not know
much about economics - even about growth. We know little about the dynamics
of societies, about what makes them stay together or
come apart; and we know very little indeed about how to arrange political
systems.  What we do know is geared to fundamentally C19th ways of thinking:
and these are becoming irrelevant. Most of them are dependent on the
nation-state, or
a system of political organization that accords very poorly with the present
reality, and even less with the probable future...the forces of modernity do
not inherently respect nationality.
There is nothing national about capitalism, industrialism, warfare or
technology, the principle motors of change.

Horsman and Marshall argue that the classically constituted national state
is directly threatened in this last decade of this century. The nature and
reach of capitalism (for instance, multinational corporations),
technological advance, market deregulation and the altered relations of
citizens to the emerging global political structures are all calling forth
contradictory impulses in tribalism, ethnicity and fragmentation on the one
hand, and global integration on the other. This transformation makes a
mockery of existing hermeneutical structures that cannot comprehend the
immensity of the changes under way.

Another recent work that is similarly critical of the existing
hermeneutical consensus is John Comaroff and Paul Stern's, _Perspectives On
Nationalism And War_ (1995). Comaroff
and Stern point out that scholars have traditionally made 'boundary'
assumptions that have limited the scope and
concerns of intellectual inquiry. These boundaries have always been
artificial and limiting, whilst enabling disciplines to focus more narrowly;
this is especially true in this nano-second world.

With the precipitous pace of change, and the interpenetration of social,
economic and environmental phenomena, Comaroff and Stern argue that such
convenient intellectual boundaries are no longer possible. Disciplines must
transform themselves and interrelate still more closely with each other, in
order to make sense of the sheer magnitude of societal transformation.

Comaroff and Stern focus on the politics of identity and difference and
conclude that a crisis of conceptualization exists throughout the broad
field of the humanities: Efforts are being made to rethink the theoretical
and methodological bases
of the study of cultural identity in general, and nationalism in
particular; we are witnessing a sea-change in which new or transformed
discourses are struggling to take shape.

Comaroff and Stern write of their feeling of humility in 'the face of the
banality of theory - of social scientific theory, that
is - as it reduces an escalating world-historical reality to a bloodless
abstraction'. Like other researchers, Comaroff and Stern believe the cause
of this problem to lie with the extent to which contemporary social theory
has continued to mirror the great theoretical axes of post-enlightenment
thought.

In defining nationalism and the politics of difference, researchers continue
to cling either to simple primordialist theories of collective identity, or
to counter with an equally crude constructionism. Comaroff and Stern's
methodological division thus mirrors the traditional
articularist/organic/romantic versus
positivist/rationalist/universalist/determinist split. The crux of the
matter is the question of where national
identities have their roots - in primordial affinities or particular
historical conditions.

The primordialists argue for an intrinsic awareness of their collective
being; they believe that very strong common loyalties are called forth by
this common identity; and argue that such sentiments are the legitimate and
irreducible bedrock upon which material and political claims to a national
identity should be based.

By contrast, the constructionists argue that collective consciousness is a
response to historically specific and
practical circumstances. From this standpoint, nationalist and ethnic
identity is always an entirely situational matter. For these researchers,
'national identities are as much relations as they
are things: being the historical product of the making of
human groups, their content and boundaries'. Collective identities therefore
rest on  the interaction of various forces with one another, in processes of
collective self-definition.

There are thus material constructionists who emphasize
material interests in identity politics; cultural constructionists, who
emphasize shared symbols and signifying practices; political
constructionists who focus on power elites and their manipulation of other
classes; and radical historicists who see social identities in terms of
long-term processes in which collective consciousness becomes a function of
an international
division of labour - a division of labour that inscribes material
inequalities in cultural differences.

Comaroff and Stern argue that the hurricane of social forces unleashed by
the collapse of the Soviet Union has made a mockery of existing academic
constructs and reveals their absolute inability to account for the politics
of difference.  For instance,  there has been an 'almost millennial faith
across all grand theoretical traditions in the inevitable demise of cultural
localism'.

Both marxists and liberals alike, have argued that collective identities
would inevitably disappear. For marxisms of most kinds, the object of
scientific socialism was the overthrow
of an inequitable capitalism and its replacement with a modern collective
consciousness. Discussing the quixotic nature of this scenario, Comaroff and
Stern remark that 'classical' Marxism
'never really comprehended the complexities of nationality (or, for that
matter race and gender) as the basis of social identity'.

The liberal tradition also embodied the positivist belief that
modernization would render obsolete all modes of particularist identity
through social and economic development.  The fact that this has not
happened has led Comaroff and Stern to write that our theory has failed and
we are witnessing in this postmodern decade: the reconstruction of many of
our dominant social and political forms - as well as the conceptual
apparatus through which we grasp them.. And yet national consciousness and
cultural identity are still very much alive. If
anything, the politics of particularism, of local difference
within global uniformity, has been revitalized with (literally) a vengeance.

We turn finally, to the work that initiated this study, Fukuyama's _Trust_
(1995). Fukuyama's conclusions support those of the other authors in this
study by arguing that the existing consensus, and particularly our economic
vision, is flawed. Fukuyama writes: economics is not what it appears to be
either; it is grounded in social life and cannot be understood separately
from the larger question of how modern societies organize themselves. It is
the arena in which modern
recognition struggles play themselves out.

Fukuyama argues for the increasing salience of culture in the
post-industrial global order. He points out that having
abandoned the promise of social engineering, virtually all
serious observers understand that a healthy and dynamic civil society is
essential. A thriving civil society, however, depends on a people's habits,
customs and ethics, 'attributes that can
be shaped only indirectly through conscious political action
and must otherwise be nourished through an increased
awareness and respect for culture'.

The problem, according to Fukuyama, is that Americans  have been ill-served
by contemporary economic debates that fail to recognise cultural factors,
and especially the relevance of social capital,  in their models of human
behaviour. Fukuyama points out that he is returning to Max Weber's work, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism published in 1905.  Weber
stood Marx on his head by insisting that it was not  underlying
economic forces that created cultural products like religion and ideology,
but rather culture that produced certain forms of economic behaviour.

If Weber is correct, Fukuyama argues, then it is essential that we assess
societies in terms of the nature of their political institutions and the
historical circumstances of different countries. We will thereby be able to
isolate and understand the nature of those particular  civil societies that
produce prosperity. The problem with this type of assessment is the
hermeneutical fallacy that it is wrong to apply value judgements to
different societies: The purpose of multicultural curricula in American
classrooms today is not to confront and understand cultural differences
squarely, if that were all there was to it, no one could possibly object to
this kind of broadening of
horizons. The problem with multiculturalism as it is practiced in the
American system is that its underlying objective is not to understand but to
validate the non-western cultures of America's various ethnic and racial
minorities. Arriving at a positive evaluation of these cultures is far more
important than being accurate about them. In some cases, the underlying
message is an ecumenical but false one that all cultures ultimately uphold
the same decent, liberal values as the writers of the multicultural
curriculum itself.

Fukuyama points out that the United States was never forced to pay attention
to foreign cultures as a matter of survival and this has handicapped her
understanding of the factors essential for global competitiveness: The more
one is familiar with different cultures, the more one understands that they
are not all created equal. An honest multiculturalism would recognize that
some cultural traits are not helpful in the sustenance of a healthy
democratic political system and economy. This should not be the grounds for
barring certain peoples with cultures deemed unacceptable but, rather,
grounds for the assertion of positive aspects of American culture like the
work ethic, sociability and citizenship as immigrants move through the
educational system.

Fukuyama concludes that as long as culture is rejected as a determinant of
global success, our understanding of human development will be seriously
handicapped.

Crisis? What Crisis?
The crisis in the humanities subsumed within the generic term
postmodernism, might seem distant, rarefied, even spurious to more
traditional historians - but this is emphatically not so. This paper has
attempted to unravel the nature and extent of this phenomenon and the fact
that a crisis exists throughout the humanities. It seems clear that the
discipline of history is about to be smashed by a tidal wave of massive
proportions - and no-one will be immune. The task ahead facing historians
is to accommodate the coming seismic shifts as best they can. It seems
fitting to leave the last word to Colleen Kriger of the University of North
Carolina. In a recent e.mail posting Colleen exposes some of the dilemmas
and ambiguities of post-Enlightenment history that increasingly face us
all: This seems to be a peculiar time, when on the one hand so many of us
are recognizing the futility of aiming for a 'grand theory' or 'absolute
truth', while on the other hand there can be such condemnation of this or
that assumption, this or that oversight, this or that error in someone's
work. The tone of such critiques often seems to betray an underlying
expectation that the author SHOULD know everything, SHOULD reach some
perfect ideal. Seems there is still a ot-so-completely-hidden secret wish
for the final grand story
or the last word. I think we need MORE ATTEMPTS at telling a story, warts
and all, because although there is a need for
narrowly drawn, tightly focused works, I for one, would miss the pleasure of
viewing someone else's version of the big picture. I would like to see us
foster a collegial environment in which bold efforts at synthesis are not
faulted and dismissed
for their admitted imperfections but are seen for what they are - attempts
to tell a history that is not confined by the perspective offered by a
specific kind of source material or body of
evidence or theoretical perspective or postulate.

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