The End of the End of History

The introducer, unnamed, welcomes the second of the annual Oakeshott Lectures to the Sheldonian. The spirit of the series, he says, is robust argument. Tonight: Curtis Yarvin, political philosopher and computer scientist, who writes on many subjects including monarchy, which he asked to have mentioned. The title is the end of the end of history. After the lecture he will be joined by the historian David Starkey. (The captions say Starky. He is David Starkey.)

What follows is Yarvin’s argument, then Starkey’s, then a last exchange. It is reported here as argument, not as a conclusion.

The end of the end of history

In 1989 a utopian empire collapsed. It ran out of gas. Yarvin recommends a new book on the Soviet fall; the captions render the author as Zubach, likely Zubov. The book, as he describes it, strips mythology. Gorbachev was a convinced Leninist trying to restore the proper nature of the system, not to abandon the ideas that made it. When he tried to reform it, it fell apart. Its successes, in retrospect, were ordinary history, an ordinary empire, an ordinary dynasty. From inside it was messianic.

Francis Fukuyama then announced that history had ended for us, and that liberal democracy was the remaining universal system. The Soviets had felt the same about theirs. The reason for believing, Yarvin says, was an old one: might makes right. You looked at something victorious and inferred that it was true. Fast-forward to 2025. Everything we own is made in China. We look at what China can do and say we cannot. That is the Soviet looking at a Western calculator. Today the object is an iPhone we could sort of make for three thousand dollars. The West is behind. The Cold War, in this telling, was two competing progressive empires, closer cousins than the fight with Nazi Germany, governed from 1917 to 1989 by convergence theory. One progressive empire collapsed. History does not end. Genghis Khan thought he was the end of history too.

Democracy as two words

“Democracy,” he says, means legitimacy. The DPRK is three euphemisms in one name, and a monarchy. The United Kingdom has a king; he would not call it a kingdom any more than he would call the DPRK a democracy. Aristotle’s three forms are monarchy, oligarchy, democracy. The word “democracy” is used for two of them. To one audience it means meritocracy — Michael Young’s word, self-congratulatory, but we know the referent. To another it means populism, rule of the masses. The two hate each other. He reminds a certain kind of interlocutor of the New Yorker cartoon: passengers voting to fly the plane.

After Boss Tweed, elite reformers — people who had read Mill and then looked at Tammany — decided they needed a new Platonic guardian class. Academia was an alpine lake. Politics was a sewer. Pipe the lake into the sewer. They forgot the valve. Politics polluted the university.

Normal science under stress

COVID, in this lecture, is offered as a picture of the meritocracy under stress. The lab-leak question he sets aside as immaterial to his charge. What happened, he says, was what Kuhn would have called normal science: stamp-collecting. Government’s job was to protect the public from dangerous viruses; the virologist’s grant incentive was to study dangerous viruses. After SARS-1, a genuine zoonosis, gain-of-function became a good proposal. He names EcoHealth Alliance, which had been a Wildlife Trust founded by Gerald Durrell to rescue animals in Jersey — “we need to talk about Kevin.” Nothing useful came of the work, he says. The person who succeeded Fauci is a flu man. His career, Yarvin says, was the resurrection of the 1918 virus from Alaskan permafrost.

He runs the same pattern on NATO’s eastward expansion: diplomatic gain-of-function. George Kennan warned. William Burns warned. A promise was made and broken. The result, in his account, is a war. In education he offers Mississippi, which dumped decades of progressive reading theory and moved up the rankings. The alpine lake, again, was not a filter for truth.

The populist critique, he says, misses something. It is not only that the masses are dumb. The physical power of the demos has decayed. Five hundred years ago London apprentices could start killing foreign merchants. Charles I, in a note Yarvin says he wrote shortly before he was killed, complained that Parliament sat in London and was intimidated by the mob. The gilets jaunes he describes as people waving cargo-cult paddles, clearing a strip in the jungle in the hope the planes will land. Gay marriage lost election after election, then the Court declared it, then it became popular. Public opinion, in this sequence, is not the ultimate cause.

Both systems are exhausted. In 1985, even the Soviet dissidents wanted to fix the place, not end it. Grain harvests, not the fall. If you want to see the longer argument, go back centuries. Edward Coke (he says Cook, spelled Ko) does “bad history”: Magna Carta as if it had been remembered for two hundred and fifty years, Saxon liberties against the Norman yoke — coup historiography, against a Tudor royal prerogative the Tudors themselves recognized as the exception.

Accountable monarchy

The third form is monarchy, the default of history and of organizations that work: Apple, China, armies, restaurants. What the corporate form discovered, he says, is accountable monarchy. The board does not run the company; it asks whether the CEO is doing the job. The New York Times he calls a fifth-generation hereditary monarchy: A shares held by the descendants of Adolph Ochs, B shares the rest. Compare MBS, chosen in a related way. Go to the subway in Chongqing and the subway in New York.

Trump, for now, he calls better than the alternative. We lack a capable demos and a capable aristos. Monarchy has a wide range of outcomes; North Korea is a thing. When you are in a hole you have to climb.

The eater and the cook

Starkey answers as a historian of England, not as a disciple. The West, he says, has lapsed into a neoplatonic government of experts. Britain has 444 quangos; SAGE in the pandemic is the obvious case. Aristotle’s point, which Yarvin underplayed, is that the judge of the meal is the eater, not the cook. Modernity, in Starkey’s account, was invented in late-seventeenth-century England. He cites an American-Israeli historian the captions render as Joel Mockchia — Joel Mokyr — on freedom of debate. The great hall at Greenwich, same architect as the moment, stands against Louis XIV. England wins; France loses. Science went wrong when it ceased to be honest debate. China he calls a flash in the pan, waste, slogan language.

Henry VIII said he stood highest in Parliament. Only Parliament could have brought the Reformation. There was respect for property. Yarvin and Starkey argue over whether Tudor parliaments were managed spectacles or real ones, and over 1660–1688 as a royal republic, a mixed government, a constitutional rather than ceremonial monarchy. Fukuyama, Starkey says, assumed a universal human. Mill, on Ireland, wanted a good stout despotism, as in India. A Senate colleague, asked whether a speech had ever changed a vote, could not recall an instance. From the 1860s the mass ballot and party discipline kill debate. Burke’s little platoons — self-government below the high political level — give way to bureaucracy and welfare. The Cabinet Office dates to 1916. Waving a monarchical wand will not revive what remains.

China, Starkey says, is a Mandarinate; the party is the old thing again. Disraeli warned. Blair sent power to the quangos and reversed law and politics: the rule of law became the rule of lawyers. The pearls — he comes from the pearls — resist woke and vote Reform. He has confidence in that rebellion. Elon Musk and the breaking of Twitter’s monopoly broke the storm; Starkey sets Duchamp’s porcelain at one end of a long twentieth century and Musk’s at the other. 1688 remains, for him, the royal republic.

Farage and Thorough

Yarvin’s last word is practical. If Farage is effective he will have to act monarchical. The knot of procedure will not be cut by a parliament of hacks. The level of power he names is Strafford’s Thorough, exercised over the quango bureaucracy. He does not know if the country is still capable of it. He hopes it is.

The introducer asks the room to thank them.