Maverick Philosopher

R. P. Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

Top o' the Stack. Are they logically consistent?

The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Substack leader. In this entry I unpack what I consider to be a brilliant insight of Finkielkraut.

Alain Finkielkraut:

Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.

Marxism and Pelagianism

If Pelagianism is the false belief that man can save himself without help ab extra, then Marxism is a latter-day secularized form of Pelagianism. Among the central  pillars of Marxist and indeed all leftist delusion is the conceit that human beings are fundamentally good. The blood-drenched attempts at the remaking of humanity in the image of this destructive doctrine are the clearest proofs of its falsehood.

Marx and Work

Physical work is good for the soul if you are working for yourself and have time for other things. So I have long felt a certain sympathy for a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53):

 

. . . as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. 

 

With all due respect to talk show host Dennis Prager, Marx did not envisage a society in which people do no work, but one in which their work was non-alienating and fulfilling. If you have ever worked a factory job where you are required to perform a mindless repetitive task for low wages for eight or more hours per day, then you should be able to sympathize somewhat with Marx. But the sympathy is not likely to survive a clear recognition of the absurdity of what Marx is proposing above.

 

First of all, it is silly to say that "each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes." Could Saul Kripke have become a diplomat or a chauffeur or an auto mechanic if he wished? PeeWee Herman a furniture mover or Pope? Einstein a general? Patton a physicist? Woody Allen a bronco-buster? Evel Knievel a neurosurgeon?

 

And if Marx had actually done any 'cattle rearing,' he would have soon discovered that he couldn't be successful at it if he did it only once in a while when he wasn't in the mood for hunting, fishing, or writing Das Kapital.

 

So despite my sympathy, I judge that what we have above is utopian, reality-denying nonsense. Dangerous, murderous, leftist nonsense. Incoherence: dictatorship of the proletariat, classless society, worker's paradise. Cuba? North Korea? Communist China? Dictatorship of the dictator (Stalin, Mao, Fidel . . .). Classlessness by reduction of the people to one class, that of the impoverished and oppressed, lorded over by apparatchiks vastly UNEQUAL in power, perquisites, and pelf to those they lord over. So in the end two classes: oppressed and oppressors.

 

The incoherence of socialism in a nutshell: The achievement of the desired-for equality requires the suppression of dissidents and the inequality of the revolutionary vanguard who, once enjoying a taste of their unequal power, will never give it up, until the whole house of cards collapses as did the USSR.

 

But this leaves us with the problem of the millions of Americans who work repetitive, boring jobs for lousy pay. One thing that could be done that would drive up the pay scale is something that RINOs and 'liberals' refuse to do, namely, stop the influx of illegal aliens. RINOs want cheap labor while the 'liberals' want to alter the demographics of the nation so as to assure the permanent ascendancy of the Left. These two unsavory groups are in tacit cahoots.

 

To hell with them both. Not that they are equally bad. It is hard to beat the scumbaggery of a 'liberal' or leftist who delights in smearing his political opponents with such epithets as 'xenophobe' and 'racist.'  The typical RINO is either a useful idiot or someone who lacks the civil courage to stand up for what he knows is right. But at least he falls short of an all-out assault on the English language.

Against Marx

"The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, #11) No, the point is to understand it, and to understand it so well that one understands that it cannot be changed in any but metaphysically inessential and unimportant ways.

Marx at 200: Classical versus Cultural Marxism

Here

What is Cultural Marxism?

Despite the febrile complaints of some leftists, 'cultural Marxism' is a useful term that picks out a genuine cultural phenomenon. It is no myth. Nor is it an anti-Semitic or a racist 'dog whistle.'  It is alleged by leftists  to be an anti-Semitic conservative slur because the members of the Frankfurt School were mainly Jews, even Adorno.  Adorno's original name was not 'Theodor W. Adorno,' but 'Theodor Adorno Wiesengrund.'  

But what is cultural Marxism?

For Karl Marx, the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class conflict. In market societies the two main classes in conflict are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which stand to each other as oppressor and oppressed. This is not a conflict that can be mediated: it can be overcome only by the defeat of the oppressors. Herein lies an important difference between (classical) liberalism and Marxist leftism.ⁱ For the latter, politics is war, not a process of bargaining and accommodation on the basis of mutually accepted norms between parties with common interests and a desire to coexist peacefully. Cultural Marxism, retaining both the oppressor-oppressed motif and the belief in the intractability of the conflict, moves beyond classical or economic Marxism by widening the class of the oppressed to include blacks and other 'people of color,' women, male and female homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, Muslims, immigrants legal and illegal, and others deemed to be victims of oppression.

Correspondingly, cultural Marxism widens the class of oppressors to include potentially all whites, males, heterosexuals and religionists, Christians mainly, regardless of their economic status. Thus within the ambit of cultural Marxism, a working-class Southern white male heterosexual Christian ends up among the oppressors. Such are Hillary Clinton's deplorables and irredeemables, and those about whom Barack Obama said, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”ⁱⁱ

^{___________________________}

i cf. Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 17.

ii https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/14/barackobama.uselections2008. Read the sentence carefully. It makes no sense.

How Much Socialism is There in Cultural Marxism?

It is a mistake to confuse 'classical' Marxism with cultural Marxism.

The former is characterized by the labor theory of economic value; the call for the abolition of private property; collective ownership of the means of production, i.e., socialism in the strict sense of the term; historical materialism (HISTOMAT) and dialectical materialism (DIAMAT); belief in objective truth (see V. I. Lenin); the Hegel-inspired belief that history is being driven in a definite direction by an in-built nisus towards a secular eschaton*, in the case of Marx & Co., the dictatorship of the proletariat and the classless society . . . You know the drill.

But as Paul Gottfried points out, cultural Marxism is a horse of a different color. In particular, it is not usefully or reasonably labelled socialist. Gottfried's insights (in this article) need to be taken on board, not that I agree with everything the man says elsewhere.

____________________

*A really deep understanding of secular eschatology such as we find it in Marx requires a critical retrieval of Christian eschatology. Please forgive my 'critical retrieval.' Back in old Boston town, in the early-to-mid-seventies, I was a bit of a Continental philosopher. I sipped a little of the Leftist Kool-Aid, but never got drunk on it, despite all the Habermas, Horkheimer, and Adorno I read. Gott sei dank! 

Perhaps I can thank Heidegger for saving me. My intense occupation with his writings and his Seinsfrage drove me back to Aquinas for the onto-theological approach to Being and to Frege and the boys for the logical approach.

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The Essence of Cultural Marxism: No Truth, Only Power

Rod Dreher:

There it is, reader. There is the “cultural Marxism” that you hear so much about, and that so many on the left deny. It is in the Marxist principle that there is no such thing as truth; there is only power.

Lenin understood this well. This is the meaning of his famous dictum, “Who, whom?”  In Lenin’s view, co-existence with capitalism was not possible. The only question was whether or not the communists will smash the capitalists first, or the other way around. One way of interpreting this is to say that the moral value of an action depends on who is doing it to whom.

This is why it is pointless for us conservatives and old-school liberals to stand around identifying contradictions and hypocrisies in how the progressives behave. They don’t care! They aren’t trying to apply universal standards of justice. They believe that “universal standards of justice” is a cant phrase to disguise white heterosexist patriarchal supremacy. They believe that justice is achieving power for their group, and therefore disempowering other groups. This is why it’s not racist, in their view, to favor non-whites over whites in the distribution of power. This is why they don’t consider it unfair to discriminate against men, heterosexuals, and other out-groups.

The third paragraph is exactly right. Why did it take me so long fully to appreciate this? To accuse leftists of double standards as I have done and as many conservative do is to fail to understand that they don't accept our standards and values. 

They will use things like “dialogue” as a tactic to serve the long-term strategy of acquiring total power. Resisting them on liberal grounds is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. The neoreactionaries have seen this clearly, while conservatives like me, who can’t quite let go of old-fashioned liberalism, have resisted it.

I have resisted it because I really would like to live in a world where we can negotiate our differences while allowing individuals and groups maximum autonomy in the private sphere. I want to be left alone, and want to leave others alone. This, I fear, is a pipe dream. Absent a shared cultural ethos, I can’t see how this is possible. I hate to say it — seriously, I do — but I think that today’s conservatives (including me) are going to end up as neoreactionaries, just as today’s old-school liberals are going to end up as progressives, because the forces pulling us to these extremes are stronger than any centrism.

Unfortunately, our politics is becoming increasingly 'centrifugal.' In the "widening gyre," "the centre cannot hold." (Yeats) Rod is right: many of us conservatives are moving in the neoreactionary direction. You could say that we are becoming 'radicalized' by the insanity of our leftist enemies.

Why then is Dreher so bloody hard on Trump, when he is all we've got? In a war you have to take sides. Push has come to shove, and shove may come to shoot. So you'd better be ready. Trump stands with the NRA and the NRA with Trump. And as Dreher is aware, you don't bring a knife to a gunfight.

Read it all.

Addendum (5/6)  Dreher is wrong when he says that the denial of truth is a Marxist principle. It is not. It is a culturally Marxist principle. Marx fancies his dialectical materialism a science. Marx, Engels, and Lenin are not precursors of post-modernism. So it is wrong for Dreher to suggest in the second paragraph quoted above that  V. I. Lenin denies objective truth. On the contrary, he upholds the objectivity of truth in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

Addendum (5/7) Edward comments:

I don’t entirely agree. In The Communist Manifesto section II the authors consider the objection that there are certain eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice etc ‘that are common to all states of society’, but Communism abolishes all such eternal truths.

Their reply concedes the objection, or rather denies the existence of any ‘eternal truth’ except the historical existence of class antagonisms ‘that assumed different forms at different epochs’. The commonality of these forms is simply ‘the exploitation of one part of society by the other’. These common forms, i.e. the supposed eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice etc, will completely vanish with the total disappearance of class distinctions.

This is a large topic, Ed. But I would insist that on a charitable reading of Marx, he is not a relativist about truth.  He may be setting the stage  for POMO, but he himself is not a POMO man. On the page before the page about Freedom and Justice (p. 102 in my Pelican paperback) we are told that man's consciousness, his ideas, views, and conceptions "changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life." Marx is asserting this as TRUE and is exempting it from the changes in material existence. He is not countenancing the possibility that a change in material and social conditions could bring it about that his version of materialism is false.  The Commie Manifesto is littered with assertions like these, assertions that are intended to be TRUE.  Old Karl is trying to get at the TRUTH about the human condition.

To your reply that ‘Marx fancies his dialectical materialism a science’. Correct, but dialectical materialism is the science of class antagonism. That is the only ‘eternal truth’. All the rest, i.e. Freedom, Justice are simply a form that class antagonism takes at different epochs.

No, not the only eternal truth. What about the one I gave above? And all the others, e.g., the one about religion being an opiate, the sigh of the oppressed creature, which implies that there is no God and no soul and no post-mortem existence, that these are all fictions that keep people from achieving happiness here on earth?

Surely Marx would not say that God existed in Medieval times but does not exist today.  He would say that God never existed.

Note also that it cannot be an 'eternal truth' that there will always be class struggle, but that until the classless society is achieved history is the history of class struggle. 

After reading the Manifesto, I am thinking about the various ‘No True Scotsman/Marxist’ apologetics for Marxism that we see from time to time. E.g. Marxist/Leninism not true Marxism, Pol Pot not true Marxism, Cuba Venezuela etc.  It seems to me that previous brutalist regimes have interpreted the Manifesto pretty well. Look at its 10 points carefully. Abolition of private property, justified on the grounds that for the proletariat (read ‘99%’), there is no property at all, and that it is the property of the bourgeoisie (read ‘1%’) that must be seized. Bringing the means of production, communication and transport into the hands of ‘the State’. Centralisation of credit by means of a national bank etc etc. 

Right. The hard Left is Communist in inspiration.  The bastards never give up. One has to read the Manifesto to know what they are up to, and what we are up against.

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Jordan Peterson on Why Marxism is So Attractive

A six-minute video. Peterson makes a very important point starting around 4:10 on the transmutation of Marxism. It is taking a new strategic tack, which no one really envisioned, namely, taking over mid-level bureaucracies everywhere, school boards being one sort of mid-level bureaucracy.

If you voted for Hillary, you aided and abetted this destructive tendency. If you voted for Trump, you did something to thwart it.

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Mike Valle at Big Sticks

Mike Valle and I got together the other day at the premier cigar lounge in the East Valley, Big Sticks, to discuss Grundlagen des Marxismus-Leninismus, chapter 1, Der Philosophische Materialismus.  Mike has read the entire stomping 800+ page tome.  It is an outstanding manual of Soviet scholasticism.   Originally written in Russian and published in 1960, near the height of the Cold War, it appeared in German in the same year in Dietz Verlag, Berlin.  Mike acquired two copies and kindly gave me one.

I had him pose with the cigar store Indian for the following shot.  No day without political incorrectness, as I always say.  And that reminds me of the  Seinfeld "Cigar Store Indian" episode. TRIGGER WARNING!  This smokin' excerpt may cause snowflake meltdown.

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Michael Walzer on Religion

At least one lefty gets religion.

Actually, the preceding sentence is ambiguous.  The thought is that at least one leftist understands that religion has far deeper roots in human nature than a typical leftist analysis can expose, let alone eradicate.  The following quotation borrowed from the weblog of  Keith Burgess-Jackson:

The left has always had difficulty recognizing the power of religion. Aren’t all religions the ideological tools of the ruling class? And aren’t all millenialist and messianic uprisings the ideologically distorted response of subaltern groups to material oppression? Religious zealotry is a superstructural phenomenon and can only be explained by reference to the economic base. These ancient convictions are particularly obfuscating today. Parvez Ahmed, a Florida professor who is fully cognizant of the “scourge” of Boko Haram, provides a typical example in a recent blog [sic]. He argues that “much of the violence [committed] in the name of Islam is less motivated by faith and more so by poverty and desperation.” Similarly, Kathleen Cavanaugh from the National University of Ireland, writing on the Dissent website, insists that “the violent and oppressive actions [of ISIS] have little to do with religion per se,” but rather are “underpinned” by material interests. But is this right? Why don’t poverty, desperation, and material interests produce a leftist rather than an Islamist mobilization? In fact, the religious revival, not only among Muslims but around the world, among Jews and Christians, Hindus and Buddhists, has enlisted supporters from all social classes, and the driving motive of revivalist activity seems, incredibly, to be religious faith (Fawaz Gerges’s Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy provides ample evidence of religion’s power).

(Michael Walzer, "Islamism and the Left," Dissent 62 [winter 2015]: 107-17, at 112-3 [brackets in original])

Although Walzer has a better understanding of human nature than most lefties, he betrays his residual leftism by his use of 'incredibly' in the last sentence above.

Why is it "incredible" that people should have religious faith?  Only a benighted leftist, soulless and superficial all the way down, bereft of understanding of human nature, could think that human beings could be satisfied by a merely material life.  Religion answers to real needs of real people, the need for meaning, for example. Some meaning can be supplied by non-exploitative, mutually beneficial social interaction. But not ultimate meaning, meaning in the face of death.  To put it cryptically, an "existing individual" (Kierkegaard)  standing alone before God and eternity is no Marxian Gattungswesen.

Whether any religion can supply ultimate needs for sense and purpose and transcendence is of course a very different question.  Suppose that no religion can.  It would be a mistake to conclude that the needs are not real.  It would be even more of a mistake to conclude that something as paltry as the utopias envisaged by Marxists could satisfy religious needs.  Supplying everyone with a overabundance of natural goodies will never sate the human spirit.  But it takes spirit to understand this point.

Leftists, and atheists generally, typically  have a cartoon-like (mis)understanding of religion.

No higher religion is about providing natural goodies  by supernatural means, goodies  that cannot be had by natural means.   Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can only think in material terms and only believe in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament in which we find ourselves in  this life.  What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives.  It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable.  We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder.  We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don't have and wouldn't satisfy us even if we had it.  We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived.  It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse.  It is not just that our hearts are cold; our hearts are foul.  You say none of this applies to you?  Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave.  You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.

Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil.  No physical technology and no socio-political restructuring can do what religion tries to do.  Suppose a technology is developed that actually reverses the processes of aging and keeps us all alive indefinitely.  This is pure fantasy, of course, given the manifold contingencies of the world (nuclear and biological warfare, terrorism, natural disasters, etc.); but just suppose.  Our spiritual and moral predicament would remain as deeply fouled-up as it has always been and religion would remain in business.

It helps to study history.  The Communists slaughtered 100 million 'cows' in the 20th century alone.  But where's the beef?

It could be like this.  All religions are false; none can deliver what they promise.  Naturalism is true: reality is exhausted by the space-time system.  You are not unreasonable if you believe this.  But I say you are unreasonable if you think that technologies derived from the sciences of nature can deliver what religions have promised, or any socio-political re-arrangement can.

As long as there are human beings there will be religion.  The only way I can imagine religion withering away is if humanity allows itself to be gradually replaced by soulless robots.  But in that case it will not be that the promises of religion are fulfilled by science; it would be that no one would be around having religious needs.

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What Explains the Left's Toleration of Militant Islam?

From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, and its opposition to gender equality.

So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam?  The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that they long to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?

1. One point of similarity between radical leftists and Islamists is that both are totalitarians. As David Horowitz writes in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery, 2004) , "Both movements are totalitarian in their desire to extend the revolutionary law into the sphere of private life, and both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand." (p. 124)

2. Horowitz points to another similarity when he writes, "The radical Islamist believes that by conquering nations and instituting sharia, he can redeem the world for Allah. The socialist’s faith is in using state power and violent means to eliminate private property and thereby usher in the millenium." (129)

Perhaps we could say that the utopianism of the Left is a quasi-religion with a sort of secular eschatology. The leftist dreams of an eschaton ushered in by human effort alone, a millenial state that could be described as pie-in-the-future as opposed to pie-in-the-sky. When this millenial state is achieved, religion in its traditional form will disappear. Its narcotic satisfactions will no longer be in demand. Religion is the "sigh of the oppressed creature," (Marx) a sigh that arises within a contingent socioeconomic arrangement that can be overturned. When it is overturned, religion will disappear.

3. This allows us to explain why the secular radical does not take seriously the religious pathology of radical Islam. "The secular radical believes that religion itself is merely an expression of real-world misery, for which capitalist property is ultimately responsible." (129) The overthrow of capitalist America will eliminate the need for religion. This "will liberate Islamic fanatics from the need to be Islamic and fanatic." (130)

Building on Horowitz’s point, I would say the leftist in his naïveté  fails to grasp that religion, however we finally resolve the question of its validity or lack thereof, is deeply rooted in human nature. As Schopenhauer points out, man is a metaphysical animal, and religion is one expression of the metaphysical urge.  Every temple, church, and mosque is evidence of man's being an animal metaphysicum.   As such, religion is not a merely contingent expression of a contingent misery produced by a contingent state of society. On the contrary, as grounded in human nature, religion answers to a misery, sense of abandonment, and need for meaning essential to the human predicament as such, a predicament the amelioration of which cannot be brought about by any merely human effort, whether individual or collective. Whether or not religion can deliver what it promises, it answers to real and ineradicable human needs for meaning and purpose, needs that only a utopian could imagine being satisfied in a state of society brought about by human effort alone.

In their dangerous naïveté, leftists thinks that they can use radical Islam to help destroy the capitalist USA, and, once that is accomplished, radical Islam will ‘wither away.’ But they will ‘wither away’ before Islamo-fanaticism does. They think they can use genuine fascist theocracy to defeat the ‘fascist theocracy’ of the USA. They are deluding themselves.

Residing in their utopian Wolkenskukuheim -- a wonderful word I found in Schopenhauer translatable as 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' -- radical leftists are wrong about religion, wrong about human nature, wrong about the terrorist threat, wrong about the ‘fascist theocracy’ of conservatives, wrong about economics; in short, they are wrong about reality.

Leftists  are delusional reality-deniers.  Now that they are in our government, we are in grave danger.  I sincerely hope that people do not need a 'nuclear event' to wake them up.  Political Correctness can get you killed.

Michael Valle on Marxism-Leninism

Our friend Mike provides us with an accurate overview of this pernicious Weltanshauung and rightly points out that it is by no means dead but (as I would put it) enjoys a healthy afterlife in those leftist seminaries called universities, but not only there:

I am convinced that ML [Marxism-Leninism] is alive and well in spite of the death of the Soviet Union.  It has assumed new forms, discarded some ideas, taken some new ones on, but its spirit is healthy.  Its spirit is essentially a collectivist one that does the following:  It affirms that Man is infinitely malleable rather than limited by his nature, it denigrates individualism for the sake of collectivism, it de-emphasizes personal responsibility by making our behavior depend on things outside of our control, it relatives truth and morality by making them functions of group membership, it corrodes liberty for the sake of equality of results, it advocates the silencing of political opponents, and it is virulently anti-American (and anti-Israel, for that matter).

Many characteristics of ML are present in vibrant abundance among a large number of political movements, particularly its hatred of capitalism and its emphasis on ‘imperialism.’  These political movements include the environmentalist movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the sustainability movement, the social justice movement, the social equity movement, the discipline of Sociology, nearly any academic discipline with the word “Studies” in it, and so on and on.  ‘Political Correctness’ is a phrase that we rightfully use disparagingly to refer to any number of aggressively Leftist movements and tendencies that threaten the value of liberty.

 

Or, as I like to say, PC comes from the CP.  Valle goes on to ask why Marxist-Leninist ideas retain their appeal and concludes with four important truths:

 

You may well reject my path, but what is most important is that you do not abandon these four beliefs:  There is objective truth, there is an objective morality to which you are bound, human freedom is real, and we must all be held personally morally accountable for our actions.  These four beliefs will inoculate anyone against the twin poisons of collectivism and postmodernism.

The Politics of Impassibility

This just over the transom:

 

I hope you don’t mind my seeking your help on an issue related to the history of philosophy. I and a few friends are have a disagreement re: the origin of belief in divine apatheia.

 

In Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective, Justo Gonzalez discusses the political motivations behind the origin and development of the concept. His claim is that belief in divine impassibility merely reflects the desire for permanence (of power) on the part of the ruling class so that Athenian politics is responsible for the philosophical development of the belief, a projection onto God of the political aspirations of the elite.

 

The question of how apatheia got adopted/revised by Christians isn’t so much my concern at this point (as legitimate a question as it is). I’m interested in Gonzalez’s history and whether and to what extent he’s right in supposing apatheia was a projection onto the divine being of the political aspirations for the permanence of the city and its ruling class.

 

Does that ring true with your understanding? Thoughts?

 

Well, if it serves my political interests to believe that p, that leaves open the question whether p is true or false.  Suppose I am a member of the royal court.  Then it would serve my earthly interests if the masses were to believe that the king rules by divine right.  But one cannot show that the king does not rule by divine right by showing that the interests of the ruling class are served by that belief's being widespread.

 

So there are two logically independent questions.  Does the holding of a belief serve interests?  Is the belief true?  To say that the questions are logically independent is to say that both an affirmative and a negative answer to the first is consistent with both an affrmative and a negative answer to the second.

 

If God exists, then he is either impassible or not.   This question cannot be decided by showing, assuming that it could be shown, that widespread belief that God is impassible would help legitimate the dominance of the ruling class. (I am having a hard time imagining how such an abstruse doctrine could get a grip on the popular mind.  Does Joe Sixpack think about such things?)

 

The bolded thesis supra is a 'weasel' thesis.  Gonzalez does not state unambiguously that the impassibility doctrine is nothing other than an expression of class interests, and therefore either false or unsupportable by reasons.  But that is probably what he means.

 

If that is what he means, then  he is guilty of the logical/epistemological error of confusing the holding of a belief with the propositional content of a belief.  It is a concern of the sociology of knowledge to study the incidence of beliefs as states of people, their causes and effects and modes of transmission.  But the evaluation of belief contents as to truth, falsehood, consistency, inconsistency, rationality, etc., does not belong to the sociology of knowledge.

 

There is nothing new about the move Gonzalez appears to be making.  It's old hat.  It is the  standard Marxist rubbish of reducing belief systems to systems of ideology in the service of class interests.  But if all is ideology in the service of class interests, then so is the system of Marxist beliefs.  In which case it is a self-vitiating system of beliefs if not outright self-refuting.

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Michael Valle on Marxism-Leninism and Islamism

There are four new philosophical-political posts at Mike Valle's infrequently updated weblog that I recommend. Start with Marxism-Leninism and Islamism and scroll up. Excerpts with some comments of mine:

One thing that people got wrong with the communists, and they get wrong with the  Islamists, is that they think that people can’t really believe this stuff.  They think these people think that they are acting from these ideas, but they are really reacting to oppressive conditions, and these crazy ideological ideas  are only an indirect way of expressing their frustration with their  conditions.

[Scott Atran, anthropologist, seems to maintain this absurd view as I report in Does Anyone Really Believe in the Muslim Paradise?]

What Bochenski argues for communism, I also  argue for Islamism:  Yes, they really do believe this stuff, and we  insult not only reality but those very people themselves by suggesting  that we know more than they do about their own motivations.  Yes, an  Islamist does, in fact, believe that Allah will reward him for his  violent martyrdom.  He believes it in the marrow of his bones.  Not only that—he will believe it even if he is no longer oppressed, lives in a  big house, has a great job, has a university education, and the rest of  it.  Throwing money at Islamists does not kill ideology.  Ideology is  more powerful than wealth.  Just as with communist terrorists, the  Islamist terrorists are quite frequently well-educated and, by the  standards of history, not particularly oppressed.  They are ideologues.

Mike is on the money.  What's the best test for belief?  Action!  By their fruits shall ye know them.  What people believe is manifested by their actions in the context of their verbal avowals.  People who think that Communists and Islamists don't really believe what they say they believe are probably just engaging in psychological projection:  "I can't believe this stuff, so you can't either."

But the fact that I can't bring myself to believe in, or even entertain with hospitality, any such nonsense as a classless society or the dictatorship of the proletariat or post-mortem dalliance with 72 black-eyed virgins as recompense for piloting jumbo jets into trade towers, or that the USA is permeated with 'institutionalized racism'  -- cuts no ice.  People believe the damndest things and they prove it by their behavior, and the fact that other people can't 'process'  this at face value means nothing.  People really do believe this crap.

 

We all seek a transcendental meaning to our lives, except for those few of us who live as animals.  National Socialism, Communism, and Islamism  give people that meaning, and having such a meaning is, for many people, far more important than material comforts and wealth.  I think this is  fine, as long as one’s transcendental purpose isn’t murderously evil, of course.

 

Mike here touches upon the problem of misplaced idealism.

It is not enough to have ideals, one must have the right ideals. This is why being idealistic, contrary to common opinion, is not always good. Idealism ran high among the members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schuetzstaffel (SS). The same is true of countless millions who became Communists in the 20th century: they sacrificed their 'bourgeois' careers and selfish interests to serve the Party.  (See Whittaker Chambers, Witness, required reading for anyone who would understand Communism.) But it would have been better had the members of these organizations been cynics and slackers. It is arguably better to have no ideals than to have the wrong ones.  Nazism and Communism brought unprecedented amounts of evil into the world on the backs of idealistic motives and good intentions.  Connected with this is the point that wanting to do good is not good enough: one must know what the good is and what one morally may and may not do to attain it.

 

It is therefore a grotesque error, one that libs and lefties have a soft spot for, to suppose that being idealistic is good in and of itself.  The question must follow: idealistic in respect of which ideals?  No doubt John Lennon in his silly ditty "Imagine" expressed lofty ideals; but his ideals are the utopian ideals of the Left, and we know where they lead.  It is not good to be idealistic sans phrase; one must be idealistic in respect of the right ideals.  Only then can we say that being idealistic is better than being a common schlep who serves only his own interests.

Bochenski was right about communism.  Too many are still in denial or ignorance of the destructive and evil nature of communism (as were so many of my professors), just as too many are hopelessly naïve about the power of Islamist ideology (as are so many “intellectuals”).

I would add the following.  Communism is not dead.  it lives on in those leftist seminaries called colleges and universities.  To understand the Left and its political correctness, you must study the history of Communism.  As I have said more than once:  PC comes from the CP!

A related point is that Islamism is shaping up to be the Communism of the 21st century.  Which is another reason to study Communism.

 

Related articles

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Islam is a Radical Threat to Free Speech

The IQ Taboo and the Truth-Intolerant Left

The Left is dangerous for a number of reasons with its disregard for truth being high on the list.  For the Left it is the 'narrative' that counts, the 'script,' the 'story,' whether true of false, that supports their agenda. An agenda is a list of things to do, and for an activist, Lenin's question, What is to be done? trumps the question, What is the case?  Paraphrasing Karl Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, the point for a leftist is to change the world, not understand it.  See here: "Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kömmt drauf an, sie zu verändern."  "The philosophers have only variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it."  (my trans.) 

The leftist's aim is the realization of 'progressive' ideals, and if the truth stands in the way, then so much the worse for it.  Inconvenient truths are not confronted and subjected to examination; their messengers are attacked and denounced.

For concrete instances I refer you to Jason Richwine, Can We talk About IQ?  Excerpt:

So when Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard University, speculated  in 2005 that women might be naturally less gifted in math and science, the  intense backlash contributed to his ouster.

Two years later, when famed scientist James Watson noted the low average IQ scores of sub-Saharan Africans, he was forced to resign from  his lab, taking his Nobel Prize with him.

When a Harvard law student was discovered in 2010 to have suggested in a private email that the black-white IQ gap might have a genetic  component, the dean publicly condemned her amid a campus-wide outcry. Only  profuse apologies seem to have saved her career.

When a leftist looks at the world, he does not see it as it is, but as he wants it to be.  He sees it through the distorting lenses of his ideals.  A central ideal for leftists is equality.  And not in any such merely formal sense as equality under the law or equality of opportunity.  The leftist aims at material equality: equality of outcome both socially and economically, equality in point of power and pelf.  But the leftist goes beyond even this.  He thinks that no inequalities are natural, and therefore that any inequalities that manifest themselves must be due to some form of oppression or 'racism.'  But because this is demonstrably false, the leftist must demonize the messengers of such politically incorrect messages or even suggestions as that the black-white IQ gap might have a genetic component.

This truth-indifferent and reality-denying attitude of the leftist leaves the conservative dumbfounded.  For he stands on the terra firma of a reality logically and ontologically and epistemologically antecedent  to anyone's wishes and hopes and dreams.  For the conservative, it is self-evident that first we have to get the world right, understand it, before any truly ameliorative praxis can commence.  It is not that the conservative lacks ideals; it is rather that he  believes, rightly, that they must be grounded in what is possible, where the really possible, in turn, is grounded in what is actual.  (See Can What is Impossible for Us to Achieve be an Ideal for Us?) And so the conservative might reply to the activist, parodying Marx, as follows:

You lefties have only variously screwed up the world; the point, however, is to understand it so that you don't screw it up any further.

There is a paradox at the heart of the radically egalitarian position of the leftist.  He wants equality, and will do anything to enforce it, including denying the truth (and in consequence  reality) and violating  the liberties of individuals.  But to enforce equality he must possess and retain power vastly unequal to the power of those he would 'equalize.'  He must go totalitarian.  But then the quest for liberation ends in enslavement.  This paradox is explained in Money, Power, and Equality. 

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Makers and Takers: "You Didn't Build That!" Revisited

Robert Paul Wolff writes,

Every one of us comes into the world endowed with a material and cultural inheritance that we have not earned and can never justify.  There are no "takers" and "makers" in our society.  All of the takers are makers, and all of the makers are takers.  And quite often those who start out with, or end up with, the most stuff have worked considerably less industriously than those who start out and end up with the least.

It is this fact that constitutes the real justification for Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program slogan:  "From each according to his ability;  to each according to his need."

The first sentence expresses a conjunction of two claims.  The first is perfectly obvious.  I did not earn my good eyesight or any of the material and cultural benefits that accrued to me upon birth.  The same is true of all of us.  The second claim, however, is not obvious.  The claim that I can never "justify" unearned benefits presupposes that they need justification.  It is not at all clear that unearned benefits need justification, or even what 'justification' in this context means.   It is true that I didn't do anything to deserve my good eyesight, my intelligence, my being born in Southern California, etc.  But  I have a right to my  natural and cultural endowments despite my not having earned them.  It is my right to my two eyes that makes it wrong for the state to take one of my eyes and 'redistribute' it to a sightless person.

Wolff's first sentence, being a conjunction of a truth and what is arguably a falsehood is itself arguably a falsehood.  However his argument proceeds, it will be arguably unsound.

As for the second and third sentences, it is trivially true that all takers are makers, and vice versa.  Charles Manson is a maker and Bill Gates is a taker.  But no substantive juice can be squeezed from a trivial truth such as this.  In particular, one cannot validly infer from it the socialist "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need." 

Nor can the utility of the taker-maker distinction be impugned by hammering on the trivial truth.  To put it mildly, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are much more makers than takers, whereas Manson is much more a taker than a maker.

Wolff is essentially just reiterating the Obama "You didn't build that!" riff, to which I respond:

1. It is true that we have all been helped by others and that no one's success is wholly a matter of his own effort.  "No man is an island."  No one pulls himself  up by his own bootstraps.    But of course no conservative denies this.  Not even libertarians deny it.  What Obama is doing is setting up a straw man that he can easily knock down.  He imputes a ridiculous view to the conservative/libertarian and then makes the obvious point that the ridiculous view is ridiculous.Wolff is doing the same thing.

2. Not everyone is lucky enough to have great teachers, but most of us have had some good teachers along the way. Sure.  But there is no necessary connection to Big Government.  I went to private schools: elementary, high school, college, and graduate school.  And my teaching jobs were all at private schools.  Obama falsely assumes that only government can provide education.  That is not only a false assumption but a mendacious one as well.  Obama is certainly aware that there are alternatives to public education such as home-schooling and private schools.  There is also autodidacticism: Eric Hoffer, the 'longshoreman philosopher,' didn't even go to elementary school.  A relative taught him to read when he was very young but beyond that he is totally self-taught. Of
course, he is a rare exception.

There is also the question whether the federal government has any legitimate role to play in education even if one  grants (as I do) that state and local governments have a role to play.  It is simply nonsense, though in keeping with his Big Government agenda, for Obama to suggest that we need the federal government to provide education.  It is also important to  point out that the federal
Department of Education, first set up in the '60s, has presided over a dramatic decline in the quality of education in the U. S.  But that is a huge separate topic.

3. With respect to roads and bridges and infrastructure generally, it is ridiculous to suggest that these products of collective effort are all due to the federal government or even to state and local government.  Obama is confusing the products of collective effort with the products of government effort.  It is a silly non sequitur to think that because I cannot do something by myself that I need government to help me do it.    One can work with others without the intrusion of government.  He is also confusing infrastructure with public infrastructure.  The first is a genus, the second a species thereof. 

4. How did the Internet begin?  This from a libertarian site:  "The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network."  So the role of the federal government in the genesis of the Internet cannot be denied.

But what do we mean by 'Internet'?  Those huge interconnected mainframes?  That is the main chunk of Internet infrastructure.  But don't forget the peripherals.  For the blogger to use that infrastructure he first of all needs a personal computer (PC).  Did Big Government provides us with PCs?  No.  It was guys like Jobs and Wozniak tinkering in the garage.  It was private companies like IBM.  And let's not forget that it was in the USA and not in Red China or the Soviet Union or North Korea that PCs were developed.  Would Jobs and Wozniak and Gates have been motivated to do their hard creative work in a state without a free economy?  Did any commie state provide its citizens with PCs?  No, but it did
provide them with crappy cars like the Trabant and the Yugo.  Germans are great engineers.  But Communism so hobbled East Germany that the Trabant was the result.

How do you hook up the PC to the Internet?  Via the phone line.  (Telephony, by the way, was not developed by the government.  Remember Alexander Graham Bell and his associates?)  To convert digital information into analog information  transmissible via phone lines and back again you need a modulator-demodulator, a modem.  Who gave us the modem?  Government functionaries?  Al Gore?  Was Obama the mama of the modem?  Nope.  Dennis C. Hayes invented the PC modem in 1977.  In the private sector.

Back in the day we operated from the  C prompt using DOS commands.  That was before the GUI: graphical user interface.  Who invented that?  Credit goes to a number of people working for Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft.  All in the private sector.

And then there is Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).  Who invented that and with it the World Wide Web (WWW)?  Tim Berners-Lee in the private sector.    The WWW is not the same as the
Internet.  The WWW is a huge collection of interconnected hypertext documents accessible via the Internet.   The government did not give us the WWW.

Returning now to the blog that I built.  I built the blog, but I didn't build the Typepad platform that hosts the blog. Did Al Bore or any other government functionary give us Typepad or Blogger? No.  That too is in the private sector.

And then there are the search engines.  Did the government give us Google?

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Muslim and Marxist

Muslim: There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet.  Marxist: There is no God and Marx is his prophet.  (This is not a MavPhil original, but I cannot recall where I found this witticism.)

Marxist Utopianism Illustrated by a Passage from The German Ideology

Here is a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53):

. . . as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.  

With all due respect to Dennis Prager, Marx did not envisage a society in which people do no work, but one in which their work was non-alienating and fulfilling.  If you have ever worked a factory job where you are required to perfom a mindless repetitive task for low wages for eight or more hours per day, then you should be able to sympathize somewhat with Marx.  But the sympathy is not likely to survive a clear recogntion of the absurdity of what Marx is proposing above. 

First of all, it is is silly to say that "each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes."  Could Saul Kripke have become a diplomat or a chaffeur or an auto mechanic if he wished?  PeeWee Herman a furniture mover or Pope?  Woody Allen a bronco-buster?  Evel Knievel a neurosurgeon?  And if Marx has actually done any 'cattle rearing,' he would have soon discovered that he couldn't be successful at it if he did it once in a while when he wasn't in the mood for hunting, fishing, or writing Das Kapital.

Utopian, reality-denying nonsense.  Dangerous, murderous  nonsense.  Incoherence: dictatorship of the proletariat, classless society, worker's paradise.  Cuba?  North Korea?  Communist China?  Dictatorship of the dictator (Stalin, Mao, Fidel . . .).  Classlessness by reduction of all to one class, that of the impoverished and oppressed.

Haiku Commentary on Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach

The Marxist Nowhere Man
Attempts to change
What he does not understand.

Marx and Kierkegaard and Buddha: Comparative Notes

Karl Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach protested that the philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways, when the point is to change it. (Die Philosophen haben die Welt verschieden interpretiert; aber es kommt darauf an, sie zu veraendern.) His century-mate, Soren Kierkegaard, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, but sharing Marx’s disdain for mere theory, might have said that the point was to change oneself, to become oneself. Both thinkers were anti-contemplative and anti-speculative, but in such wildly divergent ways! The social activist Marx denied interiority by trying to merge the individual into his species-being (Gattungswesen) while the existentialist Kierkegaard fetishized interiority: “Truth is subjectivity” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript).