Do moderate dreams inspire you?

So there was Francis Fukuyama having the chutzpah to push his “end of history” thesis in Tel Aviv. Few places in today’s world look less like the end of history than Israel. So why did two former Israeli prime ministers and 1,200 people turn out to hear of it?

Perhaps because it is a dream. We need dreams. The socialist dream, which provided so much of Israel’s earlier inspiration (think kibbutz), is in worldwide decline. People need new and more convincing secular dreams.

The “end of history” is a version of the liberal dream. It says that market capitalism and liberal democracies have outshone all other models, and will never be bettered as an end goal. However much “history” (clashes of civilisation, wars, coups, struggles) it takes for all peoples to reach that model, the mega-debate is already over. This is where we are all going. That’s the concept.

It’s a less mystical and inspiring dream than socialism, this idea of liberal democracy, regulated market capitalism and bourgeois values spreading around the world. We know it involves reconciling ourselves to a human nature that is in significant ways selfish. It’s all about useful trade-offs, markets, give-and-take in parliamentary haggle-chambers.

It means we prioritise pragmatism and privatise religion. Abandon utopia.

Although this dream promises that the poor will get better off, it accepts that the rich will get richer faster. It legitimates vast inequality. The poor will make progress through sweatshops, the same route taken by the (very recent) ancestors of today’s affluent majorities in industrialised countries. By this argument, to deny today’s poor their sweatshops is to rob their descendants of a middle-class future.

It happened for today’s rich nations. The dream holds that it can work for all peoples. Pain, sweat, desperate thrift are required. Through that, if well organised, capital accumulates, machines are put to work, productivity grows, profits accrue, the masses get their share. It is said that 70% of the profits of productivity from 1880-1960 in the United States went back to the people.

And these masses will keep their quaint customs – their Christmas trees, Shinto shrines, acupunctures, blues bands, smelly cheeses, headscarves. Local cultures will not be entirely obliterated.

Better than misery without end, don’t you think? Still not inspired?

Non-believers say that the rich world got rich through coercive exploitation, not productive investment and comparative advantage, and therefore the dream will never work for all. These critics say there has to be an exploited mass for the liberal bourgeois dream to exist at all.

But it’s a seductive idea that the Marxists and curmudgeons may be wrong about this. It would be nice to think that creativity not theft is the key to wealth.

Critics call this a “neo-liberal” dream that gives carte blanche to big corporations. But that’s the fat cats’ version and it’s a sham. The real dream includes the democratic part. The people in the European liberal tradition have struggled over centuries for the state to respect their persons, property, rights, votes and collective bargaining. At best they have used their governments as counterweights to the power of corporations, churches, armies. The world has to learn to do the same. That may be the most energising and inspiring part of the dream.

Yes, a lot of species will die, but not as many as if we go on allowing mass poverty. It’s the affluent who have time and money to take care of nature. So says the dream.

In the “end of history” dream, in about 200 years (or so) the world will be highly unequal, but what does that matter if everyone is as well fed, housed, clothed, educated and politically empowered as the masses of the affluent nations are today?

That’s a loss for those of us who dreamt of equality and full inclusion.

But it may be more realistic. A lesser evil is a greater good.

If you live in the west, you may feel that the dream can’t be for export, because it’s barely viable at home. Poverty persists. A worldwide labour market will surely suppress wages in the rich countries. Money seems to be in the ascendant in American politics. It will all get worse.

But no one said the dream is guaranteed, or can ever go ahead without struggle. The people’s struggles never end.

My grandfather was a Christian socialist and pacifist, inspired by those dreams. I find much in them unrealistic and unconvincing. But that is true of many of the dreams that used to inspire people to combine to fight the apparently overwhelming powers of state, church and wealth. As David Brooks argued in the New York Times recently, the US civil rights struggle was – for the black leaders and led if not for their white liberal helpers – a religious movement with a political dimension, not primarily a political movement. Take out the religious inspiration, and where would the movement have been?

That’s my question about the end of history dream. If it is not to be a neo-liberal fat cats’ sham, it has to inspire people to rise up and organise for democracy worldwide. I don’t know what are the best models for democratising neo-liberal institutions. But all the models need inspiration.

Can moderate hopes, of the kind outlined above (a better life for all in a highly unequal world), ever inspire people enough? It seems that it is the wilder dreams that get people’s energy going.

Both former Israeli prime ministers, Simon Peres and Binyamin Netanyahu, seemed to welcome the prospect of Israel and the Palestinians moving into Fukuyama’s end of history: for them the question was not whether it was a good dream, only whether it could be achieved. Their own and their enemies’ religious enthusiasts seem to be the major stumbling block.

Getting beyond ultimate goals to concentrate on proximate ones: here not heaven, here not utopia. How to do that?

Do moderate dreams inspire you?