I believe the future of humanity will stand on a combination of both claims by Walzer and Fukuyama. The end of history I believe has not come and we will progress as a species on this earth by expanding the reach of our moral minimum. Currently in the world in which the world order has become majority democratic and capitalist, there are still many forgotten people. Economist Paul Collier has spoken on and wrote a book titled “The Bottom Billion.” This population is living in the same world of great prosperity and security that those in the first world are however they face abject poverty, and all of the negative outcomes that flow from it, such as increased levels of disease and hunger. I believe as we move forward it is very possible that there will not be another geo-political breakthrough and another legitimate viable alternative to the democracy that is presiding over most of the developed world. However in the coming years, with more complacency being seen in the forms of government, there will be less in the sphere of influence from our powerful governments to solve the moral problems of the world. When Walzer speaks of his moral minimum he states that in conventional democratic societies the area where such ideas would be housed would be that of rights, which in the united states and many other countries round the world are considered to be unalienable. Walzer outlines some elements of this minimum morality specifically stating it would include “rules against murder deceit, torture, oppression, and tyranny.” when looking at the most developed countries of the world most of these aforementioned transgressions are not to be found but there are many places among the world where they are still a part of the daily lives of citizens. Also I would venture that in addition to negatives like those above, moral minimum also includes positives such as having enough food, clean water, and access to medicine. These positives are sometimes not even seen in first world developed societies. I believe the next epoch of human civilization will be to find compromise between democracy and capitalism in which everyone globally is subject to inspection under the lens of minimal morality.

In the second sentence of Nietzsche’s second treatise in  On the Genealogy of morality he states “Forgetfulness is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial believe; rather it is an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of suppression.” He then goes on to say later in the paragraph ” a little tabula rasa of consciousness so that there is again space for new things, above all for nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, foreseeing, predetermining — that is the use of this active forgetfulness, as a doorkeeper as it were to an upholder of a psychic order, of rest, of etiquette: from which one can immediately anticipate the degree to which there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness.”

Here Nietzsche presents a polar circumstance in which there is no forgetfulness, but the overall point in made in these sentences is that forgetfulness must be used strategically. There will be instances where forgetfulness will keep a society from moving forward and will place democratic institutions, tendencies and aspirations into harms way, this is the when it is beneficial. However, in the real material world justice must at times be served and those who committed atrocities must be held accountable.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb my father would mention, “be as hard as the world makes you be, and as soft as the world lets you be.” I feel as if this principle can be applied to the situation of forgetfulness. If there is a way that the new democracy of a nation coming out of non-democratic rule can function and become prosperous and stable while also finding justice for actions committed in the past, than this is probably the best course of action. But if not some level of forgetfulness must be adopted to keep the stable democratic trajectory.

I believe that the documentary Please Vote for Me does show an instance of democracy in action. Here I feel as if the three candidates are representative of bigger motifs in national and global political society. Lou Lei seems to represent the established centrist, while respectively I took Cheng Cheng and Xiaofei to be loosely representative of the right and left. Noting this, I believe one can pull from the Burmeo thesis in that when presented with a candidate that has the potential to threaten democracy, the general populace moves to the middle. I believe the class was aware of Cheng Cheng’s “machiavellian” actions and actively voted against them. Cheng Cheng I believe also had something like this hypothesis in mind when he brought up heavily Lou Lei’s history of violence and tried to play that against him in the political arena. I believe the final scene of the election also played a big role in the documentary. Barring terrible government or perceived disaster of some sort I believe that many voters are just looking for something to sell to them that the current state is okay, because with change there will be increased uncomfortable uncertainty, especially in a very new democracy, and the gifts that Lou Lei brought out for the class before the vote was that indicator to the class that his tenure as class monitor wasn’t that bad and potentially there was something to lose when voting for another candidate. It may be possible that this feeling goes back deeper into Chinese history and culture to the time of dynasty rule. There, it was only common for an Emperor to lose support if there was a natural disaster or some other sign from a higher power that the current ruler was not fit for the position.

Lerner’s piece The Grocer and the Chief offers a glimpse of the modernization of the non western world. What distinguishes this story from the same modernization of the west is that traditional values are were more present during the modernizing transition in the east than they were in the west. Here in the beginning of Lerner’s piece the Chief or head of the, then pre-modernized, village of Balgat is said to hold most close to him steadfast personal/moral values of “obedience, courage, and loyalty” and disperse them to his constituents. In the west, traditional moral values such as those aforementioned had already started to be contested, starting with the more radical parts of the enlightenment, the revolutions of America and France and then culminating, albeit after much of the modernizing had already occurred, with the first world war. Lerner being of the west comes in with an attitude that denounces the significance of the old world core values that the unmodernized village exhibits and operates by. By doing this he does not notice what the village is leaving behind in its modernization. While the village is evolving, every aspect of its evolution isn’t necessarily positive. By using the yardstick of the Western timeline Lerner reduces the Modernization of Baglat into the simplest terms of binary which decreases the amount and level of insight and analysis that can be undergone relating to the phenomenon.

In the dying Russians a problem surfaces that has confronted both political scientists and journalists for decades, the problem of not being able to provide a concrete answer to an interesting phenomenon. In hard sciences I feel as if there are fewer outlets/materials to pull from/smaller margin for the acceptance of pseudo answers just based on the facts and data at hand mixed with historical trends/interpretations.

I feel as if the conclusion drawn from what information was at hand was barely a quasi response to the question of why Russians are dying at alarming rates. in this case it seems like the question should be left unanswered and in a liminal space of active speculation.

Here we see a crossover of journalism and political science and I believe in this instance the intermingling was detrimental to it being a good piece of either. As a piece of political science the need to have catchy punchlines, the readiness to fill the unquestioned minds of millions of Russions, and need for memorable conclusions derailed the piece from being as judgemental, scrutinizing and thorough/scientific in its finding. Additionally as a peice of journalism, the piece fails to stay current and brings in too much background history and cultural analysis of previous time periods to be fitting in the pages of a frequent publication dealing with news.

In Against School, a main tenet of Gatto’s argument is that the current public schooling system in the United states and elsewhere is stunting the growth of students in mass numbers and delaying their exit from or keeping them perpetually in childhood. I disagree with him on this point. The qualities that Gatto associates with the stunted growth he speaks of, that of strict obedience, the consumption of unneeded products to fill emotional crevices created by a lack of real human connections, and the compartmentalization of people into different levels of class, intelligence, and worth, among others, are really that of adults who have had their childlike qualities of curiosity, empathy, industry and need for connection stripped from them due to having to work in a system that does not reward such characteristics.

As for Gatto’s claims on the use of public schooling to create a mass of similarly educated people making them easier to rule over. I would agree that there is truth to this and argue that it is integral in keeping our current American way of government and our economy functioning at the “Neo-Liberal” status quo. If every citizen had read heaps of political philosophy there would be too much contention over how we should govern our country, and no one who would want to work in a factory job.

As for a solution to Gatto’s problem of the stunting of children’s mental growth, if he really wants the mass creation of educated intellectual powerhouses, homeschooling would be a laughable fix. The parents of the poster child who will stay a perpetual adolescent due to public schooling are likely to have been put into the same box as the child by the school system years before, making them inadequate to confer what the child needs onto him. If one really wishes to create a mass of educated men and women that believe in their ability to obtain pawer and enact change let them read works like Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and have a teacher weather adequate in their position or not, work through how the innate nature of humans brought us to our current world order, and then let them choose for themselves a path of resistance or Ressentiment.