The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order

And, in a nutshell, things are worse than you thought. Fukuyama has collected research from dozens of different sciences to expose western social problems. He points out that the "period from roughly the mid-1960s...was marked by...seriously deteriorating" (p 4) crime and family breakdown. Social bonds and morals collapsed. The fact is: "The family has diminished in importance in virtually all modernizing societies" (p 37). Fertility rates have plunged also. The consequences for those nations whose populations will begin to dwindle dramatically in the next twenty years is unknowable. But, at the least, there will be likely crippling problems associated with taking care of vast numbers of nonworking, ailing seniors. Will any welfare state survive without a broad base of young workers to support the elderly? And another thing: the welfare state has not managed to end the underclass. In Great Britain and the United States there are pockets of poor, illegitimate children who grow into criminals. A child is 200% more likely to end up in prison if not raised by his two biological parents. A troubling book, raising more questions than answers.

This is an important book for readers who are interested in how our cultural landscape has shifted in the last three decades and what the future holds for us. Mr. Fukuyama is the premiere writer in American today when it comes to articulating the big picture and offering unique and provocative viewpoints. "The Great Disruption" is further evidence of that fact. Many Americans fail to appreicate the incredible social changes that have taken place since 1960 and Fukuyama pinpoints the prime culprit - a radical change in gender relations. Changes in the economy and the government are big enough but when you're talking about the way that families are raised and how men and women relate to each other - social mores that have lasted for thousands of years - you're talking about a seismic social shift. This revolution, which Fukuyama traces to the birth control pill, has led to serious social issues - teen pregancy, single-parent families, crime, low trust in government, and more. This is not a completely unique thesis but Fukuyama explains it in far more depth than any other recent author. Furthermore, Fukuyama reports that this "Great Dispruption" is mellowing and he uses the encouraging statistical data of the last five years as evidence. The author sites mankind's fundamental need for order as the catalyst for this social pause. What he leaves out, however, is a vision of what our country will look like ten or twenty years from now because of this development. Will these statistic trends level off? Will they reverse themselves? And if so, completely? Or is this just the eye of a storm waiting to churn again? This, I suppose, is left to the intellect of the reader. Nevertheless, this book is a must-read.

Here are a couple of excerpts from an essay I posted on this book. Contact me if you would like to hear more. I was re-reading Francis Fukuyama's "The Great Disruption" on the airplane the other day, when the pilot came on to the speaker to announce that we were headed into "turbulence" near our Denver destination. (The next day, the storms to which he referred were the lead headline in the local newspaper.) He requested that all passengers return immediately to their seats and fasten their safety belts.I glanced in the direction of the bathrooms, expecting to see people retreat unhappily from the queues to their seats. Instead, nobody moved from the aisle. On the contrary, additional people stood up and joined the lines. The pilot repeated his warning, this time more sternly, and still the queue for the lavatory did not diminish.What I observed was a classic illustration of a central thesis of Fukuyama's new book. I was witnessing the dramatic breakdown of hierarchical authority that has taken place since the mid-1960s. . .if after reading "The Great Disruption" you do not find yourself bringing it up in conversation with your friends, then you need to make some new friends who have more intellectual curiosity.

In a world of propaganda and hype, Francis Fukuyama has crafted an elegant, brief synthesis of theory and practical reality which does more to explain what's going on than all the Right and Left pundits combined. Detached without being haughty, Fukuyama sticks with objective reality and calls trends by their real names, without rhetorical device or manipulative effort.

The Great Disruption is a wonderfully apolitical look at the rather disconcerting changes that have taken place in the social structure of western civilization during the last third of the twentieth century. Francis Fukuyama does this by examining the recent changes in social norms and values in western civilization as a whole, including the course they have taken in other countries, as well as in the United States. He lucidly examines the underlying causes for these changes, and compares them with those observed in other cultures as well as those that have taken place due to earlier social disruptions throughout the history of Western civilization. It is of special interest to those of us who grew up in the times prior to the disruption, when social norms tended to support individual happiness by stressing the more communitarian aspects of culture such as family, religion, and reciprocal employer/employee relations. For many of us, the world has become a cold, lonley place.Fukuyama does NOT take sides in the culture war except insofar as to acknowledge changes that have come about, or are in the process of taking place. He does make judgments about the adaptability of some of the changes and their likelihood of remaining in their present form over the long haul. It is of particular interest to note that he does not attribute the various disruptions in social norms to politics per se, but rather to natural reactions of individuals to the changes in their environment wrought by the new technologies that have come to dominate western culture. These include the wide dissemination of information, increases in longevity and the shift from a society based on manual labor to one based on intellect. The politics on either side, from the feminists and the sexual liberationists on the left to the religionists on the right were not seminal in either creating or delaying these changes, and in fact, Fukuyama seems to be arguing that human nature will be the final arbiter of the form that social norms will finally take. In short, neither side will ultimately win the culture war, but then, neither side will lose either. The left will be happy to learn that the liberation of women is a natural phenomena and cannot be reversed. The right will be happy to learn that Fukuyama sees no clear, realistic alternative to traditional families (nuclear or extended), and that over time the rather devastating changes in family structure wrought by the change in status of women will certainly be modified, (as indeed is slowly happening now) not because of political arguments, but because human nature, the key to all social interaction, will demand it. The first half of the book reads more easily than the second half because it deals with actual real life societal changes and their causes. The second half deals more heavily with socioeconomic theory and is a good deal more work, but rewarding if you have the will to sti