Stepping on the Devil’s Tail

I’ve been reading some fascinating stuff about Hegel’s concept of lordship and bondage in Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. It’s interesting because, to my mind, it explains a lot about the culture war between red and blue states. The red staters are still in search of replacements for their lost slaves. They cling to aristocratic pretensions of honor, clan pride, and bravery. Their sense of identity is derived from their domination of the other and their willingness to risk death. The blue states are inheritors of the “bourgeois revolution” of capitalism, which Fukuyama describes as a “slave revolt.” The slave gains his identity through his labor, in Hegel’s construction. There’s a lot to it that I’m still sorting out…. (Fukuyama has long been tagged as a neoconservative, but he has gone to the left over Iraq; opposing the war and voting for Kerry. This is an overlong piece about him: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10304).

What is annoying about him is that, like a lot of conservatives, he tends to wring his hands about vague concepts that are of little consequence, implying somehow that they are pressing social issues. The neocon bioethics honcho Leon Kass was recently derided for complaining about people eating ice cream cones in public, insinuating that this was some sort of symptom of moral decay. Fukuyama makes a lot of similar noises. Good chunks of the The End of History and the Last Man ought to be repackaged and marketed to the self-help section–it is political psychology after all. Regardless, I do like some of the concepts he uses. Besides Hegel, he uses a Greek term and two variants on it: thymos, isothymos, and megalothymos. Thymos means the seeking of respect: blue staters do it via their work, red staters do it via their concept of identity. Isothymos is the seeking of identity via one’s status as an equal among others. Megalothymos is the seeking of identity via placing one’s status above others. He notes that personages such as Lenin or Trotsky sought to create an isothymotic society, yet they could only do so by being megalothymos themselves.