The Normless Society

Abstract

In The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, Fukuyama writes about the crises of social disintegration, and traces the cause to the proliferation of technology, which speeds information exchange beyond society's adaptive capacity to adjust appropriate norms for the organization of social action. While he correctly identifies the problem, his analysis is fragmented and disconnected from the current debate on the intrinsic problems built into the Enlightenment project with its naive presumptions on progress, individual liberty and empirical truth. Fukuyama has not inquired into the root assumptions informing the theoretical foundations of both the natural and social sciences. In his epistemological blindness, he elevates certain models of natural science (e.g. Darwinian biology) and political science (e.g. liberal democracy) to the status of `Absolute Truth', which transgresses the bounds of social consensus. The problems with Fukuyama's analysis call for a radical review of the foundations and practices of the sciences. The old epistemologies should be replaced by a new knowledge which embeds meaning within a historical context of social discourse that is sustained on the basis of first-person(s) authentic expressions of affects and behaviours.