From a friend:

” But this strikes me as unsound or at least
unknowable.”
This strikes me as very true. As a Kantian, I think
History is going in a direction, I think, over time,
man is acting more and more in line with the
cetegorical imperative. But I don’t know that, indeed
I *can’t* know that, for the same Kantian reason I
can’t *know* that God exists (though I rationally
believe it). The concept of the whole of human
decisions throughout “History” is a concept beyond
human reason to fully understand the constituent parts
of. Humans can get a “glimpse” of it, and they can
get a glimpse of God, but they cannot *know* either
History, and still less God, through and through.
Therefore we never know the totality of those things
the way we can know the totality of Earth’s
gravitational constant.
Also, you are right to imply that Fukuyama does
not prove his point on that we are actually *at* the
“end.” I mean, in many ways democracy looked just as
“inevitable” in 1200, when the best parts of Western
Europe were the semi-democratic self-governing
town-cities (London, Geneva, Frankfurt, etc.). But if
you wrote a book about then end of History back then,
before the French Revolution and the Protestant
Reformation, you’d just be laughed off the continent.
This is why Fukuyama really isn’t a historian at
all. Historians prove things that are fully knowable
by human reason. Philosophers and theologians deal
with stuff beyond that, and even there they know the
difference between the argument for the right to life,
and the semi-arguments (rational, but still unable to
prove) for the existence of God. But Fukuyama seems
to want is both ways. He doesn’t want to be known of
as a philosopher or theologian, because he knows that
too many people thing those dudes are irrelevant (this
is unjust, but it does happen). So he kinda
masquerades as a historian or political scientist,
when he is not.
And you are also right that he doesn’t “get”
religion; he is also too gene centered in his
understanding of man, though you don’t get that
mistake of his in this post, and you seem to echo it a
bit.
Anyway, you dislike cats too much, they can be
nice.

Me: I’ve said this before: I actually like cats. Have owned several. Loved others as well. My only point is that dogs are a special class. Cats are nice pets. Dogs are our allies in the great battle to muddle through life. As I put it here , I believe in Canine Exceptionalism.