The End of Everything Except for History

“The End of History” has been talked about endlessly in recent years. There was a book by that name by the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama published in 1992. It was very popular…and then became a popular target for mockery once Trump won in 2016, and we felt like history was restarting. But it was always wrong. History has been more alive than ever in the 20th century, and it lives in the same way in the 21st century.

In fact, it is the only thing that is really alive—art is dead, politics is dead, the future is dead, even science is dead. (Einstein had his main discoveries in 1905, and there hasn’t been a paradigm shift since then. There was a good book written about the death of science a few years ago, called The End of Science). There was a great book called The End of Art written in 2005, and its main points still hold up. Nobody really even disputes that art is dead anymore—it’s kind of too obvious a point and doesn’t even need to be made. It’s self-evident.

Part of the reason that art is dead is that the bourgeoisie have totally dominated society, culture, and taste for so long now—they dictate what is considered good art. And the bourgeoisie have the worst possible taste—they have no idea what beauty is. Why? For the simple reason that they do not need beauty. They have everything they need. They don’t have to struggle to survive. Beauty is just a luxury for them.

Working people, who live day to day, hand to mouth—they need beauty. They have nothing, so beauty means everything to them. The bourgeoisie are interested in beauty only as an ornament. It doesn’t really mean anything to them, so they don’t take it seriously. Art is dead precisely because the working class has been so marginalized and the bourgeoisie dictate all tastes.

Art is dead in this big sense that beauty is dead, but also in the smaller sense, that TV and movies—the two main art forms we have—are also dead. Hollywood stars make less money now (and they aren’t really “movie stars” in the way they used to be). And the era of so-called “prestige TV” (TV shows that were supposed to be as artistic as novels and as big-budgeted as movies) has come to an end.

And for all the talk about the future and the cult of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) nowadays, nobody really believes that the leaders of the science community have any real vision for the future. Even though we live deep in the future, in the futuristic date of 2023, it feels like we all think about the future less now than people did in the 19th century. We have so many amazing scientific tools, but nobody really believes that they will bring about a good future, a future that makes any sense. There was an article that came out today about how there “cutting edge” of science is blunter than ever—fewer breakthroughs than ever, and no hope of any on the horizon.

God is dead too, of course—Nietzsche declared this in the 1880s. And God remains dead. But the real God—capitalism—is also dead. Nobody believes in capitalism anymore. The secret is out. The emperor has no clothes.

But socialism is also dead—Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism had its moment from 2016-2020, but that moment has passed. And resurrecting any kind of communism or Marxism is not going to happen—it has failed too much and has too much baggage (even if it is correct and useful). As a political and social project, it is dead.

This is all to say that just about everything is dead. Everything except for history itself, which is more alive than ever. How can this be the case?

The German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer has an insightful essay called “The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie” that points out how history is the only real art form that exists in the 20th century. He wrote the essay in the 1920s, and it is even more relevant now than it was 100 years ago.

It isn’t history per se that is more alive than ever, but the historical form of biography. History may be dead, but biography is more alive than ever. Kracauer points out that biographies were a pretty rare thing before the 20th century—and they were mostly about great artists, and sometimes about statesmen like Caesar, Napoleon, and a handful of others.

But now there are tons of biographies, and most of them are about politicians, generals, and diplomats—not even great or important ones, just all of them. And there are very few biographies about great artists anymore—because the form of biography is itself the art.

Biographies aren’t being produced because people are more interested in history, or in the lives of politicians, generals, and diplomats now—far from it. It is because, after World War One, the sovereign power of the individual was exposed as being a total lie. This was a big problem, because the 19th century, and its main art form, the novel, was based in the belief in the power of the individual.

It was the main basis of the novel as an art form—“The unified structure of the traditional novel form reflects the supposed unity of character, and its problematic is always an individual one.” The War forced everyone to experience their own insignificance—great men died in battle in the blink of an eye, and millions were obliterated by machine guns, gas, and other forms of technology that showed how insignificant and frail human life is.

The cult of personality and heroism of the individual—of Great Men who shape history—was destroyed in the aftermath of World War One. And along with it, the novel itself, which was based on a deep dive into character, no longer made sense as a form.

This is where biography comes in. It isn’t an attempt to rehabilitate the idea of history, or of Great Men or individuality itself. It is an art form—the only one left after the shattering horrors of World War One. As Kracauer says: “The moral of the biography is that, in the chaos of current artistic practices, it is the only seemingly necessary prose form.” This is why so many biographies were produced after World War One—and why this has continued up to the present. It is a form that is ready to go, in a time when form itself has become so confused. It is a story that makes sense and is easy to produce. When everything is dead—God, individuality, the future, art, etc—nothing seems like it makes sense or has any necessity. Biography is the only art form that remains.

As Kracauer says: “Literary biographers believe that this historical figure ultimately provides the support they had been seeking in vain elsewhere…Every historical figure already contains its own form: it begins at a specific moment, develops through its conflicts with the world, takes on contours and substance, draws back in old age, and passes away.”

We see this phenomenon today in so many ways. The wild success of the musical Hamilton in the 2010s was all about this—it was a biography turned into an art form, and it was fetishized and celebrated by the liberal bourgeoisie.

And in a broader sense, we see it in the progressive fetish of storytelling and identity—tell your story, live your truth, and all these cliches, are viewed as empowering because they are forms of art that merge with politics.

Identity politics itself is nothing but the biography as art form taken to its logical conclusion by the liberal bourgeoisie. Politics is now just about the biography of certain chosen groups—but groups that are selected by the ruling class, as a form of art and entertainment.

Identity politics is not real politics, and it is not real history. It changes nothing and it does not move history along. It is biography—history/politics as art. And as art continues dying, this has increased, as a form of compensation and of making sense of the world in the void.

I also think that biography has influenced science. In part this started with Einstein—he had his breakthroughs in 1905, but he lived until 1955, and didn’t really produce anything notable for those last 50 years. He did change the paradigm of science, but he also became something of a character afterwards, who was more well-known for his biography than for his contributions.

And today nobody really believes that Elon Musk or other Big Tech leaders will bring about a future that is desirable or that makes any sense. But science and the cult of STEM keeps growing, because it is a way of empowering individuals and expressing their personalities.

The actual inventions of Big Tech leaders matter less than their existence as personalities and characters—without them, there would be almost nobody on the world stage to give any direction or meaning to anything. They exist not because of what they produce or contribute—Elon Musk has produced a handful of shitty exploding cars!—but because they offer good fodder for biography now.

History is dead, but biography—as an art form and increasingly as a form of politics (as politics and art merge), keeps flourishing. If we want history (and politics, and art, and even science) to live again, then biography must die. But we are too attached to it—we can’t make sense of the world at all without it. And since everything rests on biography now, all other forms of art and meaning have withered away.