No, seriously. While Francis Fukuyama may have declared its end due to an emergent liberal hegemony in the intellectual sphere, history is officially ending because a lot of people just don’t believe it anymore. Or, at least that is how they act. Western culture with its cannibalistic tendency, has become, once again, unmoored and may not have the capacity to regain its composure. A belief in history, however difficult to absorb, is necessary to stem this descent.
Its contrary is also true: namely, that an assurance in the betterment held by the future is also disappearing. More ghosts for the attic.
The inevitability of dominance in the future held by western exceptionalists was shattered by the piercings of terrorism and its response. The failure was the exceptionalism since that led to rigidification that could not accommodate the burgeoning realities of demographics: the South, or the Third World, or whatever category that you lumpen the proletariat into was younger and more ready to adapt and bear the burden of tomorrow.