Part 3  (From our archives)

By Chris Talbot, wsws.org

This is the conclusion of a three-part series comprising a lecture by WSWS correspondent Chris Talbot to meetings of the International Students for Social Equality in Britain. Part 1 was posted on June 17 and Part 2 on June 18.

Evolutionary Psychology versus Marxism

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]ow we turn to areas where there have apparently been conflicts between Darwinian biology and Marxism. Firstly we consider those scientists who claim that biology can be used to explain all social phenomena. This was a strong tendency in the 19^th century after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared.

Karl Marx

Here we link up to Marx’s comment in the footnote I cited at the start. Marx writes about what he calls “the abstract materialism of natural scientists.” He had in mind such figures as Ludwig Buchner, the German scientist who popularised atheism and a crude version of materialism. He attempted to apply concepts from natural science to history, of which he understood little. For Marx, social and ideological processes needed to be understood in terms of the “productive organs of man” and a materialist theory of history, and not by the application of abstract biological concepts.

Buchner was one of the first to apply Darwin’s theory to society, and by no means the most reactionary. There developed theories of society, often grouped under the heading of Social Darwinism and associated with Herbert Spencer and Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the founder of the eugenics movement. These views became popular in establishment circles towards the end of the 19^th and into the 20^th century. It was claimed that the ruling class had come to the top of society because it was biologically fitter and that the poorer specimens in the working class, who tended to breed faster, needed to have their numbers curtailed. Such noxious views were often associated with racism in the period of the rise of colonialism and were later espoused by the Nazis.

The application of biology to social science was opposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later Marxists and the broader socialist movement that developed in the wake of the Russian Revolution. It was generally accepted, even by those who were not Marxists, that society could not be crudely equated with the natural world, and that society has its own specific characteristics. You wouldn’t attempt to apply particle physics directly to analyze the molecular processes in the cell—why should you attempt to apply biological theories to society?

Since the 1970s there has been a revival of attempts to apply biology directly to social questions. First there was sociobiology and later Evolutionary Psychology came on the scene. Why did this discredited agenda re-emerge? That is a complex question, but fundamentally I think it can only be explained as a result of the decline in socialist consciousness in the period after World War II, particularly resulting from the betrayals of Stalinism [19].

This is not the subject of this talk, but it is important to note the considerable amount of ignorance concerning history and society among scientists in the field of Evolutionary Psychology, which probably exceeds that of Buchner and his contemporaries.

Consider the much publicised views of Steven Pinker. In The Blank Slate [20] he demonstrates his ignorance of Marx and Engels’ work. Pinker lumps them together with Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, holding them responsible for millions of deaths in the manner of a Cold War ideologist.

Pinker puts forward the view that much of social theory—and he includes Marxism in this—sees the human mind as a blank slate that can simply be moulded by society. This is a caricature of the views of Marx and Engels. They explained as early as 1845 that “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”

They rejected the idea that human society could be understood on the basis of abstract individual nature, but they never denied that some features of human behaviour could be inherited and even descended from our animal past. They insisted, however, that this was not the “essence” of the question. Engels’ unfinished draft, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man [21], is important in this respect. Engels clearly conceived of humans, with their distinctive use of tools, as evolving from apes by natural selection. Labour and also speech, argued Engels, gave an advantage to a large brain and consciousness in emerging man. He was perfectly clear about the biological basis of human behaviour, but when society emerged, “a new element” had come into being.

The 1970s saw the revival of abstract theories of “intelligence” and IQ testing. Most notoriously there were attempts to correlate IQ with race. These theories and their long history were completely dissected and demolished by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man [22], but they have had something of a revival with Pinker and others in the new guise of Evolutionary Psychology, responding no doubt to the wave of free market individualism that became widespread after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Pinker expounds a popular version of Evolutionary Psychology, claiming that “human nature” is made up of various psychological mechanisms or “mental organs” that evolved when humans were hunter-gatherers in the Pleistocene Period (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago). He claims that it is scientifically proven that there is:

The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent trade-off between equality and freedom [23].

It is also proven, he claims, that there is “primacy of family ties in all human societies”, that there is a “universality of dominance and violence across human societies” and that there exists “ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies.” [24]

Needless to say, when the methodology behind these “proven” assertions is taken apart, it is found to be as suspect as the earlier theories that Gould demolished. David J Buller, a Professor at Northern Illinois, goes through four fallacies of Evolutionary Psychology in January’s special Evolution edition of Scientific American. For example, evolutionary psychologists claim that there is a built-in difference between men and women in regard to jealousy. They argue that a higher proportion of men find sexual infidelity to be more distressing than emotional infidelity. Buller challenges this. He demonstrates that this view is based on surveys carried out in the United States. But in Germany only about a quarter of males find sexual infidelity worse than emotional infidelity.

Buller calls for an “accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution” [25]. He is not a Marxist, but we would agree with his conclusion that we should “abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself,” in the sense of the fixed “psychological mechanisms” espoused by popular Evolutionary Psychology.

Radical scientists generate confusion

Evolutionary psychology and its antecedent socio-biology were vigorously opposed by radical scientists, often calling themselves Marxists. Biologists like Richard Lewontin in the US and Steven Rose in the UK, as well as the US palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, were part of an organization called Science for the People. In 1975 they sent a letter to the New York Review of Books accusing socio-biology of fascistic tendencies redolent of the Nazis. Demonstrations were held and lectures interrupted. It was a hysterical response. The leading sociobiologist E. O. Wilson was one of the victims of their campaign. He had water poured over his head in a famous protest at one of his lectures. He was not a fascist at all, but a good natural scientist with very little understanding of human society. His specialism was social insects.

Science is necessarily a controversial business and the radical scientists raised many important biological questions on which I do not intend to comment. What I want to raise here are the questions that relate to Marxism. I believe that Lewontin, Rose and Gould put forward a distorted viewpoint that is contrary to Marx and Engels’ attitude to science. Their intervention has created a lot of confusion. Their approach to the question of science arose out of the radical politics they espoused. They were influenced by a form of Maoism, and by the ideas of the Frankfurt School that we have been giving some attention to on the World Socialist Web Site after attacks on us from this direction. Gould moved away from his earlier radical politics, but Lewontin and Rose still hold such views today.

Here is Richard Lewontin in his book, The Doctrine of DNA [26]:

Despite its claims to be above society, science, like the Church before it, is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and views of society at each historical epoch.

In his most recent book [27], co-authored with Richard Levins, we find science described as “a commoditized expression of liberal European capitalist masculinist interests and ideologies.” The last section of the book is a paean to what is called “Cuban socialist science”, contrasted to the “bourgeois” science in the western world.

Lewontin even goes so far as to say that the capitalist ideology of individuals competing with one another has predominated throughout science from the Scientific Revolution to the present day. In The Doctrine of DNA he writes:

This atomized view of society is matched by a new view of nature, the reductionist view . . . the individual bits and pieces, the atoms, molecules, cells and genes are the causes of the properties of the whole objects and must be separately studied . . .[28]

Perhaps there is a grain of truth here in that the mechanical outlook from the first most successful branch of science, physics, did tend to predominate throughout science, at least up to the first part of the 19^th century. When Marx complained about “abstract” materialists, he saw them as the degenerate outcome of this tradition. Engels explains in his writings on philosophy the limitations of the mechanical version of materialism that had developed in the Enlightenment. This was why the historical natural science of Darwin was of such importance to Marx and Engels.

However, taken for the whole of science under capitalism I think that Lewontin’s conception is false and it leads to a view, now very prevalent in the humanities, that objectivity in science is not possible.

Individual scientists hold all kinds of political and philosophical views, often reflecting their position in society as middle class academics. Many of them are pillars of the establishment. It is also true that, as Trotsky once explained [29], the ideological outlook of the capitalist class can influence the direction of science. This is especially so in the social sciences, where the need to justify current society means that little is accomplished. We can see that very clearly in economics. But Trotsky stressed that in the natural sciences:

the need to know nature is imposed upon men by their need to subordinate nature to themselves. Any digressions in this sphere from objective relationships, which are determined by the property of matter itself, are corrected by practical experience. [30]

The approach of Lewontin et al has had its concomitant in the history of science. Here there have emerged schools of thought such as the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) that have placed enormous weight on the social context in which science is carried out. This often has the result of making scientific knowledge appear to be entirely relative to particular classes or social groups, undermining all objectivity and challenging the materialist basis of scientific thought and the conception that science does reflect, to some degree of approximation, the world that exists outside human thoughts and sensations.

One example of this overwhelmingly ideological approach to science and scientists is to be found in the book The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, by Daniel Gasman, professor of history at CUNY [31]. It gave a one-sided biography of Ernst Haeckel, the 19^th century German biologist. Stephen Jay Gould was heavily influenced by this book.

Gasman attempted to:

trace certain key features of National Socialism back to the conception of science and to the social Darwinism of Ernst Haeckel, Germany’s most famous nineteenth-century biologist. [32]

By placing all emphasis on Haeckel’s social and political views and making him partly responsible for Nazism, there is no hope of making an objective assessment of the scientific contribution of this important scientist or of biology in general in that period. Many of the biologists of the late 19^th and early 20^th century were in favour of eugenics and many held views on race that we would find abhorrent. The rise of fascism in Germany can only be adequately dealt with by analyzing the economic and political developments of the 20^th century [33]. Fortunately, other biographies of Haeckel have recently appeared and it is possible to gain a more objective view of his scientific contribution [34].

It should be pointed out that once responsibility for Nazism is placed on Haeckel, it can be easily extended to Darwin himself. This is the view of historian Richard Weikart who has written a book entitled From Darwin to Hitler [35]. Here we have turned full circle. Weikart is a fellow of the Discovery Institute, the main centre for the propagation of Intelligent Design.

I hope that I have been able to show you something of the connections between Darwin and Marx and to see them both as central to the development of science in the 19^th century, which of necessity, had to take a historical standpoint in relation to both biology and society. I have also insisted that it is necessary to revive the approach to science in its wider social significance, that dates back to the Enlightenment, as an approach to nature and society that enables mankind to understand their laws, causes and mechanisms in order to change them.

Biology has made enormous strides in the last decade and there has been some growth of interest in Darwin, despite the government’s educational policies. But I think that a renewed interest in the vast work of Marx and Engels is also essential, and the application of Marxist theory to build a socialist movement is most urgent, given the huge social issues we face—massive social inequality, poverty for much of the world, the growing impact from global warming, and now a massive recession with a future of unemployment and economic stagnation.

Concluded

Footnotes:

[19] See David North, “After the Demise of the USSR, The Struggle for Marxism and the Tasks of the Fourth International”, Fourth International, Vol 19, No 1, 1992.

[20] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, Allen Lane, London, 2002.

[21] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm

[22] Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Revised Edition), Penguin, London, 1997.

[23] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p 294.

[24] ibid.

[25] David J. Buller, Adapting Minds, MIT Press, London, 2005.

[26] Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, Penguin, London, 1993, p 9.

[27] Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2007, p 93.

[28] Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, p 12

[29] Leon Trotsky, Culture and Socialism,

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/cult-o23.shtml

[30] Leon Trotsky, Dialectical Materialism and Science, in Problems of Everyday Life, Pathfinder, New York, p 209. Also

http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/trotsky/1925/09/science.htm

[31] Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, Elsevier, New York, 1971.

[32] ibid, p ix.

[33] see David North, Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Holocaust: A critical review of Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, Labor Publications, 1997.

[34] Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life, Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008, and Sander Gliboff, HG Bronn, Ernst Haeckel, and the Origins of German Darwinism, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2008.

[35] Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004.

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Part 1 (From our archives)
By Chris Talbot, wsws.org

This is the first of a three-part series comprising a lecture by WSWS correspondent Chris Talbot to meetings of the International Students for Social Equality in Britain. Part 2 was posted on June 18 and Part 3 on June 19.

We have organised these meetings of the International Students for Social Equality in honour of Charles Darwin from a different standpoint from the many other bicentenary events. We want to bring out the connection between Darwin and that other great thinker of the mid-19^th century, Karl Marx.

The importance of Marx hits you when you take in the events of the last few months. We are now in a world economic crisis comparable to, if not more severe than, that of the 1930s, which will have a major effect on all of our futures. Current economic theory completely failed to predict this crisis. The economists cannot explain how it happened and have no answer to it [1]. In contrast, Karl Marx spent much of his life developing an economic analysis that explains the inherent instability of capitalism and provides a scientific basis for the development of the socialist working class movement.

Superficially, it may seem there is not much of a connection between Darwin, the retiring English gentleman, and Marx ,who along with Frederick Engels, was involved in revolutionary communist activity for most of his adult life. But Marx and Engels themselves immediately recognised the significance of Darwin’s theory when On the Origin of Species appeared 150 years ago. Engels wrote to Marx in 1859, just after he had read the first edition of Darwin’s book [2]:

Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done. Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect. One does, of course, have to put up with the crude English method.

The last sentence is a reservation that Engels and Marx held—only in private it must be stressed—regarding the methodological approach of Darwin. But throughout their lives they insisted on the importance of Darwin’s work. Teleology, meaning a divine purpose which was working itself out in nature, had been demolished.

Most importantly, Darwin’s theory could “demonstrate historical evolution in Nature.” Here was the most significant development in natural science in the 19^th century, the culmination of the revolution in science that began 200 years earlier. Science was at the core of the Enlightenment, the liberation from religious and dogmatic thought that had developed in the preceding century, the outlook of “Dare to Know” in Kant’s famous dictum.

However, the tremendous strides that science had made were largely in physics and chemistry and they did not really involve evolutionary development, or history. It is true that geology, a science that does involve history, had become established, and work in evolutionary biology had begun, but it was still lacking a scientific basis. Darwin had brought about a revolution in thought that would place biology alongside the other natural sciences. And at its core was an explanation of historical development in nature.

Marx and Engels were well aware that to develop a scientific outlook on society—which was the only way that the emerging movement of the working class could establish socialism—a historical approach was needed. When Marx wrote in 1861 on Darwin he stressed this [3]:

Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.

This historical approach is the essence of Marx’s method. It is derived from the dialectical approach of the great German philosopher Hegel, another product of the Enlightenment. By the mid-1840s, Marx and Engels had firmly established a materialist and scientific analysis of the historical development of human society, but throughout their lives they continued to develop this work, especially in Marx’s great contribution to the politically economy of capitalism.

In parenthesis it can be pointed out that there was something of a division of labour between them and it was Engels who tended to lead their studies in the natural sciences, as the 1859 letter shows. Even so, we now know from research done on the extensive libraries of Marx and Engels by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam [4] that Marx read widely in the natural sciences after 1870.

Most of you are familiar with the key mechanisms of Darwin’s historical theory of nature that is now regarded as central to the whole of biology. There are the two sides to it—Natural Selection and Modification by Descent. As Darwin explains himself in the first edition of On the Origin of Species [5]:

Can it, then, be thought improbable . . . that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations I shall call Natural Selection. (Chapter IV)

Several classes of facts . . . seem to me to proclaim so plainly, that the innumerable species, genera and families of organic beings, with which this world is peopled, have all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents, and have all been modified in the course of descent. (Chapter XIII).

Perhaps in parallel to presenting this core idea of Darwin’s theory, I can briefly set out Marx’s historical approach to society by quoting a footnote that Marx adds in Chapter 15, Section 1, in the first volume of Capital [6]:

Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.

I hope this quote establishes briefly the mechanism of social development understood by Marx and the central role played by labour, “the productive organs of man.” As Marx explains, the social relations of society—fundamentally class relations—and the ideology that flows from them are rooted in the process of production. I will add also the second part of this footnote, as it very much relates to the subject matter of this talk.

Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own specialty.

Marx took a scientific materialist position, particularly in relation to religion. I will come back to the question raised about abstract materialism in the last sentence.

A vast range of developments have been made in biology since Darwin’s day and the excerpts presented here are only intended to present the essential elements of his theory. But it must be stressed that the synthesis with genetics that took place in the 1930s and 1940s and then the discovery of DNA in the 1950s and the understanding of the biochemical basis of genes since then have only validated Darwin’s basic theory.

We could make the same point about Marx. The development of imperialism at the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century that led to two world wars and fascism has had to be extensively studied and explained from the Marxist standpoint. The 1917 Russian Revolution was a tremendous confirmation of Marx’s theory. It established the first workers’ state. The rise of Stalinism and the bureaucratic degeneration and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union called for extensive analysis, which our movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International has carried out.

The two great historical theories of the 19^th century, of Darwin and Marx—the pinnacle of Enlightenment thought—have fundamentally changed our understanding of the world. They were part of the development of science in its broadest form—the desire to comprehend the natural and social worlds in order to change them for the benefit of mankind.

Consider the letter from Darwin to Marx in 1873. Marx had sent him a copy ofCapital, and it is true, as cynical writers today such as Francis Wheen in his biography of Marx have pointed out, that Darwin’s copy only has the first 100 or so pages opened. But Darwin had a fiercely exclusive focus on his own specialized study and seldom strayed outside it. He wrote [7]:

Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of mankind.

This approach—to extend knowledge for the benefit of mankind—was taken for granted by both Marx and Darwin and was widely accepted by intellectuals and scientists in that period. I maintain it is possible to retain it today despite all kinds of arguments that it is naïve, or utopian, that it doesn’t take into account so-called human nature, and so on. The many attempts, stemming from the Frankfurt School of social theory and developed by poststructuralists and postmodernists in the last two or three decades, to deny the objective materialist basis of science and to pour scorn on the achievements of the Enlightenment do not diminish the fundamental importance of this approach to knowledge.

This is a vast subject area that is central to the development of a socialist movement in the twenty first century. In this talk I just want to focus on two contemporary Darwinian issues that relate to these many attempts to attack science.

Firstly, I want to look at how evolutionary science is actually viewed today and how it is being dealt with by the political and religious establishment. Secondly, I want to look at controversies that have arisen over the last three decades or so relating to Marx and Darwin and that have created much confusion in understanding the important relationship between these two great thinkers.

To be continued

Footnotes:

[1] See for example John Kay, “How economics lost sight of the real world,”Financial Times, April 21, 2009.

[2] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/letters/59_12_11.htm

[3] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/letters/61_01_16.htm

[4] http://www.iisg.nl/imes/mega-summ.php#iv-31

[5] cited in Sean B. Carroll, The Making of the Fittest, Quercus, London, 2008.

[6] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S1(footnote 4)

[7] cited in Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate, London, 1999.

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Editor’s Note: The following are Excerpts from The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, by Steven Pinker. The book can be acquired on Amazon.com. (Publication Date: October 4, 2011).  This is a fascinating read on many counts, but, no man and therefore no book is above politics and political prejudices and Pinker’s are a bit obvious. Considering the record accumulated by the United States in the last 25 years alone, it is hard to follow Pinker’s belief in humanity’s reliance on a lone superpower (guess which) capable and willing of enforcing a “long peace.”  As well, it should be noted that Pinker, however sympathetic to animals and their plight, and optimistic about the decline of overall violence, remains by and large a dominionist—which he halfway admits. In sum, brilliant as he is, Pinker seems to us a bit of a liberal in the way he looks at the world and its contradictions.—PG

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year
The author of The New York Times bestseller The Stuff of Thought offers a controversial history of violence.

 ___________________________________________________________________________

STEVEN PINKER
PREFACE

pages 36-40

Common chimpanzees live in communities of up to 150 individuals who occupy a distinct territory. As chimpanzees forage for the fruit and nuts that are unevenly distributed through the forest, they frequently split and coalesce into smaller groups ranging in size from one to fifteen. If one group encounters another group from a different community at the border between their territories, the interaction is always hostile. When the groups are evenly matched, they dispute the boundary in a noisy battle. The two sides bark, hoot, shake branches, throw objects, and charge at each other for half an hour or more, until one side, usually the smaller one, skulks away.

The battles are examples of the aggressive displays that are common among animals.  Once thought to be rituals that settle disputes without bloodshed for the good of the species, they are now understood as displays of strength and resolve that allow the weaker side to concede when the outcome of a fight is a foregone conclusion and going through with it would only risk injury to both.  When two animals are evenly matched, the show of force may escalate to serious fighting, and one or both can get injured or killed. Battles between groups of chimpanzees, however, do not escalate into serious fighting, and anthropologists once believed that the species was essentially peaceful.

pages 40-42 

page 43

page 45 

Cannibalism has long been treated as the quintessence of primitive savagery, and in reaction many anthropologists used to dismiss reports of cannibalism as blood libels by neighboring tribes. But forensic archaeology has recently shown that cannibalism was widespread in human prehistory. The evidence includes human bones that bear human teethmarks or that had been cracked and cooked like those of animals and thrown out in the kitchen trash. Some of the butchered bones date back 800,000 years, to the time when Homo heidelbergensis, a common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, first appears on the evolutionary stage. Traces of human blood proteins have also been found in cooking pots and in ancient human excrement. Cannibalism may have been so common in prehistory as to have affected our evolution: our genomes contain genes that appear to be defenses against the prion diseases transmitted by cannibalism.

page 52 

So by this measure too, states are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.

pages 54-56

The Andaman Islanders of the Indian Ocean are recorded as having an annual death rate of 20 per 100,000, well below the average for nonstate peoples (which exceeds 500 per 100,000).  But they are known to be among the fiercest hunter-gatherer groups left on earth. Following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, a worried humanitarian group flew over to the islands in a helicopter and were relieved to be met with a fusillade of arrows and spears, signs that the Andamanese had not been wiped out. Two years later a pair of Indian fishers fell into a drunken sleep, and their boat drifted ashore on one of the islands. They were immediately slain, and the helicopter sent to retrieve their bodies was also met with a shower of arrows. 

page 67-68 (Middle Ages)

page 69

pages 71-73 

pages 77-78

page 99

page 104

The decline of violence in the American West lagged that in the East by two centuries and spanned the famous 1890 announcement of the closing of the American frontier, which symbolically marked the end of anarchy in the US.

page 106 

page 109

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds [in the 1960s] would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times. But this decivilizing process was magnified by a trend that had been gathering momentum throughout the 20th century. The sociologist Cas Wouters, a translator and intellectual heir of Elias, has argued that after the European Civilizing Process had run its course, it was superseded by an informalizing process. The Civilizing Process had been a flow of norms and manners from the upper classes downward. But as Western countries became more democratic, the upper classes became increasingly discredited as moral paragons, and hierarchies of taste and manners were leveled.

page 128

page 132-134

Of course no historical change takes place in a single thunderclap, and humanist currents flowed for centuries before and after the Enlightenment and in part of the world other than the West. But in INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS, the historian Lynn Hunt notes that human rights have been conspicuously affirmed at two moments in history. One was the end of the 18th century, which saw the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. The other was the midpoint of the 20th century, which saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, followed by a cascade of Rights Revolutions in the ensuing decades.

pages 144-148

page 150 capital punishment 

On average fifty years elapsed between the last execution in a country and the year that it formally abolished capital punishment.

pages 153-161 slavery 

pages 168-174   Whence the humanitarian revolution?

But the life-was-cheap hypothesis also has some problems. Many of the more affluent states of their day, such as the Roman Empire, were hotbeds of sadism, and today harsh punishments like amputations and stonings may be found among the wealthy oil-exporting nations of the Middle East. .. 

One technology that did show a precocious increase in productivity before the Industrial Revolution was book production.

pages 175   the rise of empathy and the regard for human life 

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing. As we shall see in chapter 9, though people in all cultures can react sympathetically to kin, friends, and babies, they tend to hold back when it comes to larger circles of neighbors, strangers, foreigners, and other sentient beings. In his book THE EXPANDING CIRCLE, the philosopher Peter Singer has argued that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as they value their own. An interesting question is what inflated the empathy circle. And a good candidate is the expansion of literacy. 

Whether or not novels in general, or epistolary novels in particular, were the critical genre in expanding empathy, the explosion of reading may have contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution by getting people into the habit of straying from their parochial vantage points. And it may have contributed in a second way: by creating a hothouse for new ideas about moral values and the social order.

pages 178-180

I am prepared to take this line of explanation a step further. The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

page 184-186

Civilization and Enlightenment need not be alternatives in explaining declines of violence. In some periods, tacit norms of empathy, self-control, and cooperation may take the lead, and rationally articulated principles of equality, nonviolence, and human rights may follow, In other periods, it may go in the other direction.

page 186

page 290 

The researchers concluded that Kant got it right three out of three times: democracy favors peace, trade favors peace, and membership in intergovernmental organizations favors peace.

page 313

No one found much romance in the frumpy institutions of the Civilizing Process, namely a competent government and police force and a dependable infrastructure for trade and commerce. Yet history suggests that these institutions are necessary for the reduction of chronic violence, which is a prerequisite to every other social good.

pages 326-332 

page 343 

page 345

page 349 

page 355 

One of the reasons chimpanzees, unlike other primates, engage in cooperative raidings is that the females, rather than the males, disperse from the troop at sexual maturity, so the males in a troop tend to be related. 

page 356 

page 363  Islam

page 366

The results confirm that most Islamic states will not become secular liberal democracies anytime soon.

page 367

Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.

page 368   Sharia

Some will try to muddle through the oxymoron of a Sharia democracy.

page 368

This leaves three reasonably foreseeable dangers to the New Peace:  nuclear terrorism, the regime in Iran, and climate change.

page 372 Pakistan

page 374

pages 379-382

Though people have lost none of their taste for consuming simulated and voluntary violence, they have engineered social life to place the most tempting kinds of real-life violence off-limits. It is part of a current in which Western culture has been extending its distaste for violence farther and farther down the magnitude scale. The postwar revulsion against forms of violence that kill by the millions and thousands, such as war and genocide, has spread to forms that kill by the hundreds, tens, and single digits, such as rioting, lynching, and hate crimes. It has extended from killing to other forms of harm such as rape, assault, battering, and intimidation. It has spread to vulnerable classes of victims that in earlier eras fell outside the circle of protection, such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. The ban on dodgeball is a weathervane for these winds of change.

page 394

page 395 

page 396

page 399 

page 405

page 406

If I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate.

page 418

 

Finally, postpartum depression is only loosely tied to measured hormonal imbalances, suggesting that it is not a malfunction but a design feature.

page 423-424

Like the nuclear taboo, the human life taboo is in general a very good thing. Consider this memoir from a man whose family was migrating with a group of settlers from California to Oregon in 1846. During their journey they came across an abandoned eight-year-old Native American girl, who was starving, naked, and covered with sores. 

page 425 

page 427

page 430-431

page 432

Another gestalt shift came from Rousseau, who replaced the Christian notion of original sin with the romantic notion of original innocence. 

pages 433-434  Abused children helped by  animal welfarists

page 442-443 

In another decade, the facetious treatment of bullying in the CALVIN AND HOBBES cartoon may become as offensive as the spank-the-wife coffee ads from the 1950s are to us today. 

Indeed, in some ways the effort to protect children against violence has begun to overshoot its target and is veering into the realm of sacrament and taboo.

page 444 

The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase.

pages 454-474   Animal rights and the decline of cruelty to animals

Let me tell you about the worst thing I have ever done. In 1975, as a twenty-year-old sophomore, I got a summer job as a research assistant in an animal behavior lab. One evening the professor gave me an assignment. Among the rats in the lab was a runt that could not participate in the ongoing studies, so he wanted to use it to try out a new experiment. The first step was to train the rat in what was called a temporal avoidance conditioning procedure. The floor of a Skinner box was hooked up to a shock generator, and a timer that would shock the animal every six seconds unless it pressed a lever, which would give it a ten-second reprieve. Rats catch on quickly and press the lever every eight or nine seconds, postponing the shock indefinitely. All I had to do was throw the rat in the box, start the timers, and go home for the night. When I arrived back at the lab early the next morning, I would find a fully conditioned rat.

But that was not what looked back at me when I opened the box in the morning. The rat had a grotesque crook in its spine and was shivering uncontrollably. Within a few seconds, it jumped with a start. It was nowhere near the lever. I realized that the rat had not learned to press the lever and had spent the night being shocked every six seconds. When I reached in to rescue it, I found it cold to the touch. I rushed it to the veterinarian two floors down, but it was too late, and the rat died an hour later. I had tortured an animal to death.

Any scientist will also confirm that attitudes among scientists themselves have changed. Recent surveys have shown that animal researchers, virtually without exception, believe that laboratory animals feel pain. Today a scientist who was indifferent to the welfare of laboratory animals would be treated by his or her peers with contempt. 

When we think of indifference to animal welfare, we tend to conjure up images of scientific laboratories and factory farms. But callousness toward animals is by no means modern. In the course of human history it has been the default. (The industrialization of death and suffering are however modern.—Eds.)

Killing animals to eat their flesh is a part of the human condition. Our ancestors have been hunting, butchering, and probably cooking meat for at least two million years, and our mouths, teeth, and digestive tracts are specialized for a diet that includes meat. The fatty acids and complete protein in meat enabled the evolution of our metabolically expensive brains, and the availability of meat contributed to the evolution of human sociality. The jackpot of a felled animal gave our ancestors something of value to share or trade and set the stage for reciprocity and cooperation, because a lucky hunter with more meat than he could consume on the spot had a reason to share it, with the expectation that he would be the beneficiary when fortunes reversed. And the complementary contributions of hunted meat from men and gathered plants from women created synergies that bonded men and women for reasons other than the obvious ones. Meat also provided men with an efficient way to invest in their offspring, further strengthening family ties.

The ecological importance of meat over evolutionary time left its mark in the psychological importance of meat in human lives. Meat tastes good, and eating it makes people happy. Many traditional cultures have a word for meat hunger, and the arrival of a hunter with a carcass was an occasion for village-wide rejoicing. Successful hunters are esteemed and have better sex lives, sometimes by dint of their prestige, sometimes by explicit exchanges of the carnal for the carnal. And in most cultures, a meal does not count as a feast unless meat is served.

  Roast Turtle

            Ingredients:

                    One turtle

                      One campfire:

           Directions:

                     Put a turtle on his back on the fire.

Many other millennia-old practices are thoroughly indifferent to animal suffering. Fishhooks and harpoons go back to the stone age, and even fishnets kill by slow suffocation. Bits, whips, spurs, yokes, and heavy loads made life miserable for beasts of burden, especially those who spent their days pushing rive shafts in dark mills and pumping stations. Any reader of MOBY DICK knows about the age-old cruelties of whaling. And then there were the blood sports that we saw in chapters 3 and 4, such as head-butting a cat nailed to a post, clubbing a pig, baiting a bear, and watching a cat burn to death.

Some of the early expressions of a genuinely ethical concern for animals took place in the Renaissance. Europeans had become curious about vegetarianism when reports came back from India of entire nations that lived without meat. Several writers, including Erasmus and Montaigne, condemned the mistreatment of animals in hunting and butchery, and one of them, Leonardo da Vinci, became a vegetarian himself.

Whether you call it animal liberation, animal rights, animal welfare, or the animal movement, the decades since 1975 in Western culture have seen a growing intolerance of violence toward animals. Changes are visible in at least half a dozen ways.

Another conspicuous change is the outlawing of blood sports. I have already mentioned that since 2005 the British aristocracy has had to retire its bugles and bloodhounds [NOT TRUE], and in 2008 Louisiana became the last American state to ban cockfights, a sport that had been popular throughout the world for centuries. Like many prohibited vices, the practice continues, particularly among immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia, but it has long been in decline in the US and has been outlawed in many other countries as well.

Hunting is another pastime that has been in decline. Whether it is from compassion for Bambi or an association with Elmer Fudd, fewer Americans shoot animals for fun. Figure 7-26 shows the declining proportion of Americans in the past three decades who have told the General Social Survey that either they or their spouses hunts.  Other statistics show that the average age of hunters is steadily creeping upward.

Should You Be a Vegetarian? Millions of Americans are going Meatless.‘

Changing the practices of the food industry is a collective action dilemma, in which individuals are tempted to shirk from private sacrifices that have marginal effects on aggregate welfare.

Will our 22nd-century descendants be as horrified that we ate meat as we are that our ancestors kept slaves?

One impediment is meat hunger and the social pleasures that go with the consumption of meat. Though traditional Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains prove that a meatless society is possible, the 3 percent market share of vegetarian diets in the US shows that we are very far from a tipping point. While gathering the data for this chapter, I was excited to stumble upon a 2004 Pew Research poll in which 13 percent of the respondents were vegetarians. Upon reading the fine print, I discovered that it was a poll of supporters of the presidential candidacy of Howard Dean, the left-wing governor of Vermont. That means that even among the crunchiest granolas in Ben-and-Jerry land, 87 percent still eat meat.

These imponderables, I suspect, prevent the animal rights movement from duplicating the trajectory of the other Rights Revolutions exactly. But for now the location of the finish line is beside the point. There are many opportunities in which enormous suffering by animals can be reduced at a small cost to humans. Given the recent changes in sensibilities, it is certain that the lives of animals will continue to improve.

¶

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The Meek and the Militant 

Chapter 3
Marxism and Religion  
Compared

The Charge that Marxism is a Religion

One religious response to Marxism has been that Marxism itself is a religion. By saying this, religionists seek to blunt Marxism’s attack on religion with a ‘you’re another’ argument: if religious belief is intellectually reprehensible, then you’re a sinner too! It is also a charge made by secular liberals who would dismiss Marxism as being as obsolete for an educated man as religion is.

This description of Marxism, however, far from being sophisticated modern understanding, is merely an updating of the comment on atheism by the Parisian intellectuals of the 1840s, who, says Engels, ‘could conceive a man without religion only as a monster, and used to say to us: ‘Donc, l’atheisme c’est votre religion!’ (On Religion, p. 239). To say that atheism is itself a religion is manifestly a mere playing with words. In the sense of the popularly accepted use of ‘religion’ as a belief in a God or gods – or in the broader definition of religion by the anthropologist Tylor that religion is ‘a belief in spirits’ – atheism is of course a denial of religion. The paradox is achieved by implying another definition of religion such as ‘coherent world outlook’. But this is to disregard the atheist claim that religion is a world outlook that makes use of fantasy.

Something else is implied by those who say that Marxism is really a religion: that Marxism is, as it charges religion with being, a self-deception and a dogma to be accepted on faith and on authority. Although the acceptance of authority as proof without verification is especially characteristic of religion and is most widely practised where religion dominates the thought of the time, it is, to be sure, not confined to religion. For instance, the classical authority of Galen was accepted by medieval medicine without an attempt to prove or disprove by experimentation what he had to say. It may be well, therefore, to examine the charge that Marxism is a religion more closely, especially since it is given colour by the Stalinist perversion of Marxism. We can do so conveniently by examining the comments of Niebuhr, one of the chief exponents of this view of Marxism, in his introduction to Marx and Engels on Religion. [1]

As proof for his assertion that Marx in his fervour and dogmatism was unwittingly transformed from ‘an empirical observer into a religious prophet’, Niebuhr quotes from Marx’s youthful The Holy Family:

There is no need of any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit, and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism.

‘Marx … pretends to draw self-evident deductions,’ Niebuhr comments

from the mere presupposition of metaphysical materialism … One can only regard this passage, and similar passages, as the ladders on which the empirical critic of the status quo climbed up to the heaven and haven of a new world religion… Marx, as an empiricist, would have been just another learned man. As an apocalyptic dogmatist, he became the founder of a new religion, whose writing would be quoted as parts of a new sacred canon.

Niebuhr’s comment is based on an egregious misreading of the text. Marx is not concerned with stating ‘all the propositions, dear to a revolutionary and apocalyptic idealist’ (p.xi) as if they were ‘self-evident deductions from his materialistic philosophy and therefore needed no proof. He is stating the propositions held by the French materialistic social philosophers such as Condillac and Helvetius and asserting that they led historically to the Utopian socialism of Robert Owen and others. He introduces the passage quoted by Niebuhr with the statement that ‘the other branch of French materialism [the branch of Condillac and Helvetius that had its origin in Locke as opposed to the branch that had its origin in Descartes and led to natural science] leads direct to socialism and communism’ [2] and states immediately after the passage in question: ‘This and similar propositions are to be found almost literally even in the oldest French materialists. This is not the place to assess them’ (On Religion, pp.x-xi).

It is evident from the statement ‘This is not the place to assess them’ that Marx is not presenting these propositions as his own and does not necessarily agree with them. As a matter of fact, in his Theses on Feuerbach, contained in the book which Niebuhr is introducing, Marx makes clear his differences with them:

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example). The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice! (p.70)

In short, the older non-dialectical materialism did not see the historical process in which people collectively seek to answer social questions only when these questions are thrust upon them. In this historical process human activity is both the product of social development and a cause of social development. In transforming its social environment, humanity transforms itself, but its transformation of society is limited by historical conditions, in the first place the level and power of the productive forces. Superior individuals cannot rise so high above their society as to make it realize an ideal plan of their devising.

Just as Niebuhr is mistaken in assigning the beliefs of the French materialists to Marx, so is he mistaken in calling him an empiricist who gave up his empiricism to construct a religious dogma. Empiricism as a philosophical outlook is opposed to rationalism, setting experience up against reason as the source of knowledge. Experience, thought Marx and Engels, is the test of theory, but it is not the sole source of knowledge. The ‘empirical, inductive method, exalting mere experience,’ says Engels (p.175), again in a selection in the book which Niebuhr is introducing, ‘treats thought with sovereign disdain and really has gone to the furthest extreme in emptiness of thought.’ ‘It is not the extravagant theorising of the philosophy of nature’ which is ‘the surest path from natural science to mysticism’ but ‘the shallowest empiricism that spurns all theory and distrusts all thought’ (p.186).

As George Novack phrases it,

The Marxist theory of knowledge accepted … the empirical contention that all the contents of knowledge are derived from sense experience and the rationalist counterclaim that its forms were provided by the understanding … The two factors, each of which had been the basis for independent and antagonistic philosophies, were transformed into interrelated aspects of a single process … Experience gave birth to reflection whose results fructified and directed further experience. This conceptually enriched experience in turn corrected, tested, and amplified the results of reasoning – and so on, in a never ending spiral. [3]

Experience and reason, induction and deduction, engage in a constant interaction, engendering the dialectic of human thought that reflects the dialectic of nature and society.

Not only does Niebuhr see Marx as an empiricist who unconsciously departed from empiricism; he also sees him as an anti-Hegelian who is unconsciously entrammeled in Hegel’s dialectical mode of thought: ‘the anti-Hegelian materialist speaks in terms of Hegelian dialectic to project a materialistic version of an even more traditional religious apocalypse (p.xiii). But Marx was very conscious of his indebtedness to Hegel and ‘openly avowed’ himself to be ‘the pupil of that mighty thinker’. At the same time he differentiated his dialectic from that of Hegel:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel … the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. . . The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. (Reader, pp.98-9)

Despite Marx’s claim to have found and salvaged the rational kernel within the shell of Hegel’s mysticism, his dialecticism has often been attacked as sheer Hegelian mumbo-jumbo. Dühring, the contemporary of Marx and Engels whose name continues to live only because Engels devoted a book to replying to him, said of Marx’s discussion of the factors leading to capitalism’s destruction: ‘Hegel’s first negation is the idea of the fall from grace, which is taken from catechism, and his second is the idea of a higher unity leading to redemption. The logic of facts can hardly be based on this nonsensical analogy borrowed from the religious sphere.’

To this Engels replied that ‘it is … a pure distortion of the facts by Herr Dühring, when he declares that … Marx wants anyone to allow himself to be convinced of the necessity of the common ownership of land and capital … on the basis of the negation of the negation.’ [4] The passage whose Hegelian terminology gave offence to Dühring was merely the summation of Marx’s previous close analysis of capitalism’s origin and development and of the forces within that will destroy it, as capitalism had destroyed the feudalistic mode of production. It is incumbent upon someone who disagrees with Marx to seek to refute that analysis, not to dismiss the summation of it with the statement that it is ‘based’ on a ‘nonsensical analogy borrowed from the religious sphere’, an analogy which the critic himself has conjured up.

Dialectics is not a magical incantation that has only to be uttered to produce an irrefutable truth. By using what Marx called scornfully ‘wooden trichotomies,’ [5] one can ‘prove’ anything – that is to say, nothing – arriving at any ‘synthesis’ one wishes by choosing the right ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’. But the same is true of the syllogism. For instance, in the syllogism ‘All clergymen are persons of towering intellect; the Reverend Dimwit is a clergyman; therefore, the Reverend Dimwit is a person of towering intellect’, the conclusion follows from the premises, but that does not make it correct. The laws of logic, whether those of Aristotelian or of dialectical logic, are of little use if concrete reality is disregarded. Nevertheless, although no systems of logic are foolproof, training in dialectical thinking, like training in Aristotelian logic, over which it is a great advance, is of value. Aristotelian logic thinks in fixed categories: if all A is B and all B is C, then all A is C. But dialectics observes A, B, and C as they are in the process of changing so that it may cease to be true that all A are B or that all B are C.

For this reason dialectical thinking requires a higher degree of concreteness and comes closer to approaching the reality which is in a constant state of flux. Although conscious study is of value, dialectical thinking may, as is true of Aristotelian logic, be used by those who have not studied it: any cook knows that the addition of salt beyond a given point makes a decided qualitative difference. As Engels put it, ‘Men thought dialectically long before they knew what dialectics was, just as they spoke prose long before the term prose existed’ (Reader, p.137).

Far from being mere mumbo-jumbo, dialectical materialism, says the historian of science Loren R. Graham, has produced among the scientists in the Soviet Union a philosophy of science that ‘is an impressive intellectual achievement’ and ‘has no competitors among modern systems of thought’. They have been able to produce this achievement, he says, ‘in sharp contrast to other Soviet intellectual efforts’, because the repressive regime had for its own purposes to relax its controls over science after the interference with it under Stalin, with the consequence that the best minds went into scientific fields and because the esoteric character of their discussion as they sought to grapple with the implications of new scientific theories such as quantum theory and relativity further served as a defence against censorship. Although dialectical materialism ‘would never predict the result of a specific experiment’ Graham is convinced that ‘in certain cases’ dialectical materialism helped scientists ‘to arrive at views that won them international recognition among their foreign colleagues’. [6] It helped them in arriving at these views by the orientation it gave them.

The theories at which these scientists arrived are not to be refuted by characterizing the scientists as dogmatists, as Niebuhr characterizes Marx. They can only be refuted by examining their scientific reasoning and observing how well they stand the test of experience. So too with Marx’s theory of proletarian revolution. Critics like Niebuhr have spoken of it disparagingly as an apocalyptic dogma. But is not the 20th century indeed the epoch of wars and revolutions that Lenin characterized it as being? At the beginning of the century bourgeois thinkers were imbued with the idea of uninterrupted progress within the existing social system. Revolutionary Marxists warned of impending catastrophes. Which were correct? Could anyone have envisaged more cataclysmic happenings than the enormous bloodshed of two world wars, the ravages of the great depression, the extermination programme of fascism, the threat of nuclear annihilation?

But, the Niebuhrs say, Marx spoke of the inevitability of socialism. Socialism has not triumphed in the advanced capitalist countries, as he predicted. Are not the Marxists like the Christians, who have waited for two millennia for the Second Coming? If the Christians are waiting for Godot, are not the Marxists waiting for Lefty?

In reply, it may be said that ‘Lefty’ (social revolution) did come – in Russia, China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, and other countries. That the revolution was delayed in advanced capitalist countries and came first to backward countries created unforeseen difficulties. But Marxism, far from being the ‘immutable dogma’ that Niebuhr says it is (p.viii), realizes more than any other doctrine that theory has to be constantly corrected to take account of a changing reality. ‘We do not in any way,’ said Lenin, ‘regard Marx’s theory as something final and inviolable, we are convinced, on the contrary, that it only laid the cornerstone of the science which socialists must push further in all directions, if they do not wish to be left behind by life.’ [7]

So too Trotsky wrote on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of The Communist Manifesto that, although no other book can ‘even distantly be compared with the Communist Manifesto,’ this

does not imply that, after ninety years of unprecedented development of productive forces and vast social struggles, the Manifesto needs neither corrections nor additions … Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with idol worship. Programs and prognoses are tested and corrected in the light of experience, which is the supreme criterion of reason. The Manifesto, too, requires corrections and additions. However, as is evidenced by historical experience itself, these corrections and additions can be successfully made only by proceeding in accord with the method which forms the basis of the Manifesto itself. [8]

‘Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with idol worship.’ Marxism has no sacred books to be consulted as Nostradamus or the Bible are consulted for predictions of what will happen.

Prognosis outlines only the definite and ascertainable trends of the development. But along with these trends a different order of forces and tendencies operate, which at a certain moment begin to predominate. All those who seek exact predictions of concrete events should consult the astrologists. Marxist prognosis aids only in orientation. [9]

The great Marxist theoreticians, observing when a dialectical change, ‘a different order of forces and tendencies’, has made itself manifest, have applied Marxist method to develop Marxist doctrine: witness Lenin’s theory of imperialism and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. The consequence has been that, although Marxists have made many mistakes, the best of them have been far better oriented than bourgeois observers, who have pooh-poohed Marxism in ‘good times’, when they have declared that capitalism has solved its problems, and have warned against the dangers of Marxism in ‘bad times’. It may also be said that revolutionary Marxists do not wait for ‘Lefty’. They believe, as Marx said, that the liberation of the proletariat is the task of the proletariat itself, not that of a messiah who will appear at some future date. They seek to educate the working class in the course of its struggle concerning the need for a new social order that will be built by it in virtue of its position in capitalism. When Marx spoke of the inevitability of socialism, he did not mean that it will come as a gift from above but that, since one’s outlook on life is shaped by material conditions, the working class will eventually be driven by the conditions of capitalism in decline to search for and find the way to build a new society through its abolition. Even if one cannot make exact predictions of concrete events, there is every reason to hold to this general, long-range perspective, which provides the guidelines for strategic orientation. Yet one must also add that Engels spoke of the choice for humanity as being ‘socialism or barbarism’. It must be admitted that the immense destruction capable of being wrought by existing nuclear weapons makes the possibility of barbarism far more real that it was in Engels’ day if the pressing problems of human society are not soon solved. Those who would dismiss Engels’ words as ‘apocalyptic dogma’ are blinding themselves to reality.
 

Marxism vs. Stalinist Scholasticism

Niebuhr is entirely wrong when he says that the ‘dogmatic atrophy’ of Marxism is ‘not a corruption’ of it. He is, however, right when he speaks of the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin having been made into a ‘sacred canon’ by the ‘priest-kings’ (p.xiv) of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. But this is a perversion of Marxism, not a continuation of it. Just as it is foreign to the spirit of Marxism, which regards the entire universe as being in the process of change, to consider itself to be an ‘immutable dogma’, so it is foreign to it to engage in a scholastic citation of authority.

Lenin described how Marx had been canonized by the Social-Democrats, who in doing so robbed him of his revolutionary essence. After the death of great revolutionists, he wrote,

attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. [10]

Ironically, this is what happened to Lenin himself at the hands of the conservative Stalinist bureaucracy. Lenin, wrote Trotsky, ‘was “only” a man of genius, and nothing human was alien to him, therein included the capacity to make mistakes’. [11] Stalin, however, made Lenin out to be a god so that he himself might be proclaimed the son of god.

This perversion of Marxism can be best explained by the use of the Marxist method itself. ‘Just as original Christianity, as it was spreading into pagan countries,’ says Isaac Deutscher, Stalin’s Marxist biographer,

absorbed elements of pagan beliefs and rites and blended them with its own ideas, so now Marxism, the product of western European thought, was absorbing elements of the Byzantine tradition, so deeply ingrained in Russia, and of the Greek Orthodox style … The abstract tenets of Marxism could exist, in their purity, in the brains of intellectual revolutionaries, especially those who had lived as exiles in western Europe. Now, after the doctrine had really been transplanted to Russia and come to dominate the outlook of a great nation, it could not but, in its turn, assimilate itself to that nation’s spiritual climate, to its traditions, customs, and habits. [12]

The reaction to the revolution caused by the failure of other revolutions in Europe and the pressure of world imperialism upon a backward country produced a specially privileged bureaucracy, which revived the ‘traditions, customs, and habits’ that had been repressed by the revolution. The ‘deification of Stalin’, as Trotsky said, expressed this bureaucracy’s need of ‘an inviolable arbiter, a first consul if not an emperor’. [13] The reaction was aided greatly by the physical destruction in the 1930s of large numbers of revolutionists in whose brains the tenets of Marxism had existed.

Leninism was thus replaced by Stalinism.

It was perhaps natural that the triumvir [Stalin] who had spent his formative years in a Greek Orthodox seminary should become the foremost agent of that change … He presented Lenin’s doctrine, which was essentially sociological and experimental, as a series of rigid canons and flat strategic and tactical recipes for mankind’s salvation … He supported every contention of his with a quotation from Lenin, sometimes irrelevant and sometimes torn out of the context, in the same way that the medieval scholastic sought sanction for his speculations in the holy writ. [14]

In China, where the Communist party was educated in Stalinism, a similar deification of Mao took place. The masses of China were urged by Lin Biao, Mao’s heir-designate, in his introduction to Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the famous ‘little red book’ which became the New Testament in China, to ‘study Chairman Mao’s writings, follow his teachings, act according to his instructions and be his good fighters’ [15], as the masses had been urged by Paul to follow the teachings of Christ and to be his soldiers in the good fight. ‘In order really to master Mao Tse-tung’s thought,’ Lin added, ‘it is essential to study many of Chairman Mao’s basic concepts over and over again, and it is best to memorize important statements and study and apply them repeatedly. The newspapers should regularly carry quotations from Chairman Mao relevant to current issues for readers to study and apply.’ Lin himself, however, apparently did not memorize the statements of Mao sufficiently assiduously – or perhaps he mastered Mao’s thought all too well – for he is said by the regime to have been killed in a plane crash while seeking to escape China after having led an unsuccessful struggle against the Chairman.

It is worth contrasting the injunctions of Lin on the rote memorization of Mao with those of Lenin on learning about communism. If the study of communism, said Lenin, speaking to a congress of the Russian Young Communist League in 1920

consisted in imbibing what is contained in communist books and pamphlets, we might all too easily obtain communist text-jugglers or braggarts, and this would very often cause us harm and damage, because such people, having learned by rote what is contained in communist books and pamphlets would be incapable of combining this knowledge, and would be unable to act in the way communism really demands … It would be a mistake to think that it is enough to imbibe communist slogans, the conclusions of communist science, without acquiring the sum total of knowledge of which communism itself is a consequence … You can become a Communist only by enriching your mind with the knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind … You must not only assimilate this knowledge, you must assimilate it critically. (Reader, pp.42-4)

Paul urged the study of the sayings and parables of Christ, rejecting the study of the heathen philosophers, including the Platonists and the Stoics to whom early Christianity was indebted; the Maoists urged the study of ‘the little red book’, outlawing the study of Shakespeare, whom Marx read every year, and of Pushkin, who was Lenin’s favourite author. Not so Lenin.

The successors of Stalin and Mao, intent on further modernizing their countries, found that the primitive worship of Stalin and Mao did not suit their purposes. The rigid dogmas were too much of a dead weight in the drive to meet the new needs of their societies. As Deutscher said of the contradictory process taking place in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin, ‘Through the forcible modernization of the structure of society Stalinism had worked toward its own undoing and had prepared the ground for the return of classical Marxism.’ [16] A halting and hesitant reformation has taken place. If, however, the ‘cult of personality’ has been denounced and the era of infallible popes is gone, there remains in power an episcopate, with its own kind of modified authoritarianism and dogmatism, to be overthrown.
 

The Spirit of Marxism and that of Early Christianity

Although the dogmatism of religion and its reverence for authority are alien to Marxism, there is, as Engels observed, a significant resemblance between the spirit animating Marxist revolutionists and that animating the early Christians.

The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement … Both are persecuted and baited, their adherents are despised and made the objects of exclusive laws, the former as enemies of the human race, the latter as enemies of the state, enemies of religion, the family, social order. And in spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, irresistibly ahead. (On Religion, p.316)

This spirit is far different from the predominant spirit of modern Christianity. More than a century and a quarter ago, Thomas Carlyle bewailed the emptiness of feeling of his age. But, observed Engels, ‘This emptiness and shallowness, this “lack of soul”, this irreligion and this “atheism” have their basis in religion itself.’ ‘So long … as the belief in this distant phantom [God] is strong and living, so long does man in his roundabout way arrive at some kind of content.’ But, with the crumbling of religious belief, ‘hollowness and lack of content’ have become prevalent and ‘will continue so long as mankind does not understand that the Being which it has honoured as God, was his own not yet understood Being’ (Reader, pp.234-35). This has proved to be entirely true.

In the service of humanity, Marxists display the same fervour and self-sacrifice that the early Christians displayed in the service of God. Although humanity is a product of nature, humanity is the highest value for itself. As Marx said, ‘The criticism of religion ends in the teaching that man is the highest being for man, it ends, that is, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, forsaken, contemptible being forced into servitude.’ [17]

So did the 21-year-old Trotsky write at the beginning of the 20th century, ‘If I were one of the celestial bodies, I would look with complete detachment upon this miserable ball of dust and dirt … But I am a man. World history which to you, dispassionate gobbler of science, to you, book-keeper of eternity, seems only a negligible moment in the balance of time, is to me everything! As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future.’ The fighter for the future, he went on, often finds that he is subjected to a ‘collective Torquemada’, a Holy Inquisition intent on defending the sacred status quo. But, although he may be momentarily crushed, he rises again and ‘as passionate, as full of faith and as militant as ever, confidently knocks at the gate of history’. [18]

The word ‘faith’ here should not mislead us: it is not the same as religious faith. Religious faith has the sense of one of the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary’s definitions of ‘faith’: ‘firm or unquestioning belief in something for which there is no proof. The faith of which Trotsky speaks has the sense of another of the Webster’s definitions of the word: ‘something that is believed or adhered to, especially with strong conviction’. The religionist says ‘I believe because I accept the holiness of a book or the authoritativeness of a church’; the Marxist says ‘I believe and accept wholeheartedly this outlook on life because I am rationally convinced by it.’ It is true, however, that the revolutionary Marxist believed with the same strength of feeling and readiness for self-sacrifice as the early Christians. Almost forty years after the youthful Trotsky wrote his greeting to the 20th century, the Trotsky who had experienced titanic events, had become an outcast with a few followers rejected by most countries of the world after having been the leader of a great nation, and had seen his children die before him, the victims directly or indirectly of the blows levelled at him, while he himself had been subjected to a campaign of calumny unprecedented in its scope, wrote his testament in the belief that he might die shortly. He speaks in it of his ‘happiness’ in having been ‘a fighter for the cause of socialism’, of which he had said two years before, ‘to participate in this movement with open eyes and with an intense will – only this can give the highest moral satisfaction to a thinking being.’ [19]

If I were to begin all over again, I would … try to avoid making this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and consequently an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth … This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion. [20]

Trotsky, to be sure, was a person of exceptional strength of character. But it remains true that most avowed Christians today do not have the inner strength that characterizes the revolutionary Marxist. As Trotsky himself wrote of the pre-war Bolsheviks, implicitly comparing them to the early Christians, who sustained martyrdom as their master had done at Calvary,

Whoever joined an organization knew that prison followed by exile awaited him within the next few months … The professional revolutionists believed what they taught. They could have had no other incentive for taking the road to Calvary. Solidarity under persecution was no empty word, and it was augmented by contempt for cowardice and desertion … The young men and young women who devoted themselves entirely to the revolutionary movement, without demanding anything in return, were not the worst representatives of their generation. The order of ‘professional revolutionists’ could not suffer by comparison with any other social group. [21]

To believe what one teaches and to act accordingly despite personal hardships – this is the source of great strength. It is a quality that seems so strange to many today that they regard the possessors of it as religious fanatics. But it does not make Marxism a religion.

 

Top of the page

Chapter 4

 

Notes

1. For a devastating critique of a recent book purporting to show that Marxism is a religion, James H. Billington’s Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, see Peter Singer, Revolution and Religion, New York Review of Books, 6 November 1980, pp. 51-4.

2. Writing in 1844, Marx is referring to a communism that antedates the scientific socialism he was shortly to enunciate in the Communist Manifesto. So Engels writes:

To our three social reformers [‘the three great Utopians’: St Simon, Fourier, and Owen, ‘who worked out his proposals … in direct relation to French materialism’] the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these [French materialist] philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust and, therefore, finds its way to the dust hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. (Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, pp.70-71)

3. George Novack, Empiricism and Its Evolution: A Marxist View, (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), pp.83-4.

4. Quoted by Engels in Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, (New York: International Publishers, 1939), p.142.

5. Karl Marx, Selected Works, vol.1 (New York: International Publishers, n.d.), p.28.

6. Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, (New York: Knopf, 1972), pp.430, 6.

7. Quoted in preface to Marx, Selected Works, I, xviii.

8. The Age of Permanent Revolution; A Trotsky Anthology, ed. Isaac Deutscher, (New York: Dell 1964), p.290.

9. Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism, (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 4942), p.175.

10. V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), pp.9-10.

11. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, (New York: Simon Jand Schuster, 1937), III, 355.

12. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), p.269.

13. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1937), p.277.

14. Deutscher, Stalin, pp.271-2.

15. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966).

16. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940, (New York: Random House, 1963), p.521.

17. Quoted by George Novack, Humanism and Socialism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p.136.

18. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, (New York: Random House, 1965), p.54.

19. Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours, (New York: Merit Publishers, 1969), p.39.

20. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, pp.479-80.

21. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence (New York: Stein and Day, 1967), p.54.

 

 

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By Eric Schechter

INTRODUCTION.

NOTE: This essay is a work in progress and the author is making frequent changes and additions worth your attention. Please visit his personal site at
http://leftymathprof.wordpress.com/ for any revisions.
________________________________________________________________________________ 

ABOVE IS Dürer’s 1498 illustration of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Conquest, War, Famine, and Death, described in Revelation 6:1-8. It seems appropriate for our present time: Life as we know it is ending. Soon we must choose between a vastly different and better life, and no life at all.  

We are now under attack by many “horsemen”: unemployment, theft, hunger, cruelty, war, plutocracy, exploitation, madness — and more recently ecocide, which adds a time limit to our torment. These many afflictions cannot be addressed separately, for they all feed one another, and they all originate from a common source, a philosophy of separateness that has gained legitimacy and has become prevalent in our society.

To halt any of these ongoing crises would require an enormous change in our political, economic, technological, and communication systems. But those systems are firmly in the mindless grip of the plutocracy, which perpetuates the status quo and will not permit real reforms. And the status quo actually means things getting worse for all of us outside the plutocracy:

Sweatshop exploitation and poverty will grow, as unshared mechanization continues. Wars will worsen, as people learn more ways to make weapons. The oil-based economy cannot outlast the oil. And if ecocide continues much further, all of us — including the plutocracy — will perish.

And some people think the solution lies in small, localized government. An excellent case for that was made by Peter Gelderloos: only big government can make war and oppress people en masse. But the Jim Crow laws of the southern USA showed that local government, too, can oppress people, and might be stopped from doing so only by big government.

human nature itself.  This will amount to a cultural* and spiritual revolution of empathy and solidarity. Far more than just a change of government, this change in our lives will be greater than any since the development of agriculture ten thousand years ago. Nothing less will enable our survival, but such a change will bring us far more than survival — it will end not only ecocide, but also war, unemployment, exploitation, etc. — it will remake the world entirely.

The change begins with you talking to your friends. But it will be difficult, because so many people are deluded (don’t know) or alienated (don’t care). All we can do is to keep talking with people, and hope for the best. I’ll explain the situation as well as I’ve understood it, though I’ll also explain that no one has it all figured out (not even me).

The Shift, The Great Turning, and Transition as names. Some people would like to read their religions into the great change — e.g., some think it’s what Jesus really had in mind; some see it as a fulfillment of the Native American prophecies about Rainbow Warriors; and I can see in it some elements of Buddhism, too. I also see in it elements of democratic socialism and anarchism, but I am reluctant to use those labels — they are misunderstood too severely by too much of our society.

OUR COMPREHENSION IS SUBJECTIVE

To work together, we will need a better understanding of our differences. War, ecocide, unemployment, etc., are part of objective reality, but our understanding of those crises is unavoidably subjective: We all have different perceptions of what is going on, and why. And that subjectivity is not well understood by many of us in the USA. Our culture is still heavily influenced by the “Age of Reason” or “Age of Enlightenment”: philosophers tried to apply Isaac Newton’s style of reasoning to all subjects. But neurophysiologists and linguists are now realizing that the paradigm of physics applies only to the objects that physics studies — i.e., simple, dead things.

For instance, consider a shooting. On the surface, it appears to be an objective, concrete fact of physics: a bullet from one man’s gun enters the other man’s body. But how we feel about the event, how we react to it, depends on its significance:

Was it self-defense? murder? part of a justified war? part of an unjustified war?

For questions of this sort, answers cannot be objective and absolute. Any answers can only be formulated in terms of the models and frames and vocabulary through which we have learned to interpret the world. We all have different models — for instance, different people may subscribe to different theories about what constitutes a war, or about which wars are justified. These models are limited by our language, among other things, and different nations have different languages. We humans can only understand reality through models — but any model of reality, being merely an explanation in words, is simpler than reality and therefore must be somewhat unrealistic.

Any word is only a model, and it may mean different things to different people. The dictionary may give an official definition of the word “war,” but that doesn’t make it right in any absolute sense: Perhaps a slightly different definition — one that we haven’t thought of yet — would yield a more helpful way of understanding our world.

Here is an example of that: If you get caught up in the question of whether or not a certain person is a “terrorist,” it might never occur to you to ask how the word “terrorist” came to have its present meaning. What assumptions are implicit in that usage? Whose purposes are served by dividing “terrorists” from “non-terrorists” in that particular fashion? How does the word differ from “freedom fighter,” “resistance,” or “militarist”? I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I feel the word “terrorist” is being used in a way that distorts our perception of reality in a way that is detrimental to the goals and values I believe in. Whenever I hear anyone using that word, I ask them to restate their idea using other words.

We humans are not very imaginative, and it is seldom that any of us discovers or invents a new way of seeing things, a new word or concept, a new model or part of a model. The models presented in a college course in philosophy may not be sufficient for the needs of our present world, and at any rate most of us have never taken such a course. And our corporate communications media offer us only a very narrow range of interpretations of events — more about that in the next section.

Because we humans can only see reality through our imperfect models, we can be sure that none of us (not even me) is seeing things exactly as they are. Nevertheless, despite the incompleteness of our knowledge, we have a duty to act upon whatever we are reasonably certain of. And yet, the more we act on our beliefs, the more we feel committed to them, and the more readily we blind ourselves to other views. Thus, one of our duties is to constantly struggle for self-awareness, to be aware of our feeling of commitment and how it may be biasing us. We are less objective than most of us realize. Chris Mooney wrote:

… when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers. Our “reasoning” is a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases. They include “confirmation bias,” in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and “disconfirmation bias,” in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

Modern technology is making it increasingly easy for us to live in an echo chamber, to mainly have conversations with people who already agree with us (see Bill Bishop and Eli Pariser on this). We all have different trusted sources for what we believe to be factual information and meaningful models, and our trust cannot be won through debate. (Nevertheless, I will recommend my own favorite sources: Alternet, Common Dreams, and Democracy Now!.)

No one has a complete answer to all the world’s problems. Not even me. For instance, consider the most important question of all:

How can we all learn to live together in peace?

“if only everyone would listen to my answer, we’d have peace!”

It would be nice to find a magic phrase that would switch on a light in people’s heads, and then they’d tell their friends, who would then tell their friends, and so on, and by next morning the whole world would be enlightened. But none of us has found that phrase yet. Even Buddha and Jesus never found a way to spread their teachings to everyone. (And I haven’t found a way to get everyone to read this essay — but if you like it, please recommend it to other people!)

to them more. The knowledge that we are all seeking includes an understanding of each other, and that can only be found in conversation; perhaps that is the most important kind of action. And a new vision is always longer and more difficult to explain than the status quo; we must struggle to find the words. We must dig deeper than mere issues and policies — we must become aware of our own values, and the values of those around us. Be patient in conversation — after all,

what is obvious to one person is not obvious to another,

and even that fact is not obvious to some people! Mary Doria Russell said

“Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between ‘that doesn’t make sense’ and ‘I don’t understand.’.”

DELUSION (everything you know is wrong)

The science fiction film THE MATRIX is primarily entertainment, but the premise with which it begins is a great metaphor for our era. In the world depicted by the film, nearly all of humanity is asleep, and plugged into a great computer that — for purposes of its own — manufactures a shared dreamed reality. That dream is called “The Matrix” by the few people who are awake and rebelling against the computer. Early in the film, a young sleeper called “Neo” takes the red pill and is thereby awakened, and it is a tremendously wrenching experience: the real world is vastly different from the dream.

Somewhat analogously, most of the “common knowledge” of most people in our own society is wrong. We are surrounded by misconceptions.

Some misconceptions are intentional. For instance, we now know that:

• for many years the cigarette companies knew but denied that research had proven that cigarettes were carcinogenic.
• the Jessica Lynch rescue story was a complete fabrication.
• the “errors” in the story of the death of Bin Laden cannot have been accidental.
• when Bush, Cheney, et al. said that they had indisputable proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they knew quite well that their only “evidence” was false testimony extracted by torture.

Some misconceptions are unintentional — i.e., our newscasters and some of our other public figures may simply be passing along their own erroneous beliefs. They may dismiss and omit other ideas because they honestly believe those other ideas to be false or nonsensical.

• In Neo’s world, the dreaming is altogether involuntary. But in our own world, the sleepers are collaborators in perpetuating the delusion, and so it has been called the consensus trance by some activists. Many of our sleepers are in denial, and do not want to be awakened, both because awakening would confront them with problems that are too great and terrifying, and because awakening would set them apart from their friends. They would rather believe that “everything is fine.”
• Our consensus trance alters history. For instance, many people in our society still believe that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War II to a close sooner, that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident actually happened, and that Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction. The mainstream media makes major omissions.
• More subtly, but perhaps more importantly, our consensus trance misdirects our interpretation of the significance of events — i.e., the models through which we interpret the subjective parts of reality, as discussed in the previous section. In more detail:

Our corporate communications media are consolidated into ever fewer hands, particularly ever since the Powell Memorandum in 1971. Thus the media offer us only a very narrow range of interpretations of events, and only a very narrow range of models of how we might understand our lives, how we might relate to each other, and how we might choose to live.

For instance, the following assumptions are often implicit in the way that both news stories and entertainment stories are presented to us:

• our soldiers have only fought in wars that were unavoidable and noble.

Have you accepted those assumptions without being consciously aware of them? They are as invisible, unnoticed, and unquestioned as the air we breathe. A chief strength of the grand deception is its misdirection. As Thomas Pynchon said,

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

At right is a diagram from Daniel C. Hallin’s 1986 book, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. Hallin described three categories of concepts:

• the intermediate zone of “legitimate controversy” contains those issues that the newscasters actually consider to be worth discussing.

Perhaps even more important than the media, the marketplace itself habituates us to seeing everything in our lives in terms of the marketplace.

RESOURCE EXHAUSTION AND ECOCIDE

Our way of life is dependent on resources that are disappearing, much faster than most people realize.

We need major retooling of all our technologies: solar and wind power, mass transportation, bio-recyclable everything. That cannot be done instantly — it will require some research and development, which we should now be encouraging through subsidies. But nothing like that is going on right now. Unfortunately, the corporate media are paying little attention to the problems involved, the major corporations are actively denying that any change is needed in their present methods of reaping big profits, and our government has been captured by those corporations because winning elections requires expensive advertisements.

suburbia. How will we manage when the price of gasoline climbs higher? The demand for gas is climbing: now India and China are getting cars too. The world is now reaching peak oil: The easy-to-get oil is nearly all gone; we’re turning to the hard-to-get oil and to other risky energy sources such as nuclear power plants. This is resulting in environmental disasters.

And our entire ecosphere — including our food, water, and air — is being destroyed by global warming. This is controversial: Most scientists say global warming is real, but most conservative politicians say it’s a hoax. Whose “facts” are you going to trust? Personally, I trust the scientists, but I doubt that I’m going to change anyone’s mind about this. And I see many reasons for disbelief.

Perhaps the biggest reason is political. Naomi Klein has explained that if global warming is accepted as real, then it will require public policies contrary to everything the political right wing believes about the proper role of government in society.

Here are some other reasons that some people deny global warming:

• Big oil and other beneficiaries of the status quo have hired people to spread disinformation.
• Some people claim that we will adapt to the new environment. Perhaps they have not understood how slowly evolution works. Or perhaps they envision moving us all, along with our farms and factories, into airtight underground bunkers for the next million years. I don’t think we have the time and resources to do that.
• Each part of The Matrix reinforces the other parts: “If warming were a real threat, wouldn’t the government be doing something about it?”

Another obstacle to understanding stems from the fact that we evolved as hunter-gatherers in a world that changed only slowly, in a mathematically linear fashion — i.e., changes were mostly at a constant rate, so the graph is a straight line. That is the only kind of change we can understand on a visceral level. It is only on an abstract level, if at all, that we can understand the mathematical nonlinearities in global warming:

• Delay effects: Even after we reduce or stop carbon emissions, our past carbon emissions will continue to warm the planet.
• * Indeed, when the melting of Greenland’s glaciers lowers the salinity of the nearby parts of the ocean a bit more, the North Atlantic Current may halt, resulting in the sudden arrival of an ICE AGE in Europe (as in the film The Day After Tomorrow). And that would be devastating for the rest of the world too, since all the national economies have become deeply interdependent. But it would only mean a redistribution, not a reduction, of the heat within the ecosphere. It would do nothing to alleviate the long-term problem of the planet’s overheating trend, which would reach Europe within a few more years even without the North Atlantic Current.
  Inhomogeneity (unevenness and irregularity): Even while the average temperature — over the entire planet and the entire year — is rising, some places* may get colder for a while, especially during the winter. Climatologists, exasperated at trying to explain this, have accepted the euphemism of climate change.

Many people in our society will take warming seriously only after it becomes blatantly obvious, without the use of scientific models and measuring instruments. But by then it will be too late. They are like the man who fell off the top of a 100-story building, and who said, as he passed the 50th floor, “hmm, no serious problem so far.”

I view warming as a MUCH MORE URGENT problem than most climate scientists have wanted to say publicly, because they don’t want to look like sensationalists or alarmists. Climate scientists keep revising their models upward, and yet they still keep getting surprised by changes outpacing their models. (It makes me wonder if even some of the climate scientists, not being mathematicians, have failed to fully grasp the significance of exponential growth.) Scientists warn us that if we don’t soon halt the present trends, we will get into “runaway warming.” I don’t know why they’re describing things that way — we ALREADY have “runaway warming”!! Stopping it is going to be difficult.

earthquakes too. Wet places will get wetter; dry places, drier. Arable land and sources of fresh water are diminishing. If any of us survive the resulting resource wars, those few will perish in a general collapse of the ecosystem by the time the planet’s average temperature has risen by 6°C / 10°F (at the latest).

Unlike most of my fellow eco-activists, I do not believe that the answer is simply for us to get ourselves back to the garden. I think it’s already too late for that — the damage that has already been done is so great that, left to itself, it will kill us all through the delay effects. Our only hope is to use science-fictionish geo-engineering to make further artificial changes in the climate and the ecosystem, but this time to help Gaia — e.g., float trillions of tiny mirrors in the sky, or design a new microbe to transform the ocean, or something like that. But it must be planned carefully — as we’ve heard in so many apocalyptic science fiction movies, “we’ll only get one shot at this.” And it must be done soon, for with each passing day the problem becomes worse while the resources available for dealing with it become fewer. And it must be planned and carried out by a worldwide consortium of scientists who are not in the employ of for-profit contractors — we’ve already seen that “the market” cannot be entrusted with the health of the planet.

We need a re-tooling of all our technology, and that will require cooperation on a huge scale. But that will not happen as long as our society’s movers and shakers continue to be motivated solely by profit. Indeed, the widespread philosophy of separateness leads “entrepreneurs” to privatize and plunder the commons, rather than protect it. So re-tooling will require revolutionary change in our socio-economic system.

PERPETUAL WAR

far away, so it’s easy to forget what a hell we’re making of other people’s lives. (It’s the “third world war” — i.e., a war upon the third world.) But I can argue against our wars on selfish grounds too: Our wars are bankrupting us while making us less safe.

WAR IS A LIE. (That includes our proxy wars — e.g., the occupation and apartheid in Palestine that our taxes pay for.) Our nation was founded on genocidal theft. And have you noticed that the USA’s military “humanitarian interventions” occur only in countries that are commercially valuable — e.g., countries that have oil, or countries that sit on a major oil pipeline route?

But actually the callous brutality of the US military, then and now, rivals that of the Nazis. We’ve got our own list of war crimes, which I won’t bother to recount here.

Like Obama, I’m “not opposed to all wars, just stupid wars,” but apparently he finds fewer of them to be stupid than I do. I’m not certain whether World War II falls into that category. But at any rate, whether or not the USA had a good reason for entering World War II, the public was not given a good reason.

Why did the USA enter World War II? It wasn’t primarily to fight the Nazis, though the history has been repainted that way. Indeed, until shortly before the USA’s entry into the war, American feelings were mixed: fight against the Germans, fight against the Russians, or stay out of it altogether. Indeed, many Americans felt more closely allied with the capitalist Germans than with the socialist Russians. Franklin Roosevelt wanted to enter the war on the side of the Allies, and so he goaded the Japanese in various ways — aiding Japan’s enemies, conducting naval maneuvers near Japan, setting up an economic embargo of Japan — until Japan finally was provoked into attacking, giving FDR the excuse he was looking for.

When Truman nuked Japan, the excuse given was that this would bring the war to a close more quickly, and thus save many lives. That was not true. Through the indirect diplomatic channels that they had to use, the Japanese had already asked to surrender. They stopped short of unconditional surrender — they asked that their emperor be permitted to continue to live, as a powerless figurehead. But Truman used that exception as an excuse. Apparently his real reason for wanting to nuke two Japanese cities was to demonstrate his new weapon to Stalin.

But I truly believe that the wars would end if more people knew the truth about them. You and I and other working people have more in common with the peasants we’ve been bombing than with the fat cats in Washington and Wall Street who profit from the wars.

(Many people in our society are reluctant to believe that our own political “leaders” could lie to us about such matters. Let me just remind you that we are not a different species from Hitler and other tyrants.)

(Despite their lies, I cannot be sure about the motivations of the makers of war. Perhaps they are psychopaths who enjoy killing large numbers of people — or perhaps they are misguided but well-intentioned people who really do believe they are working for some noble cause that justifies their lies. However, my preference is for democracy, not rule by an elite that keeps secrets from us and claims to know what is best for us.)

Some of the U.S. military’s current actions make no sense whatsoever — I cannot even imagine lies that would justify them.

• The use of depleted uranium in weapons — which will permanently raise the frequency of birth defects in a nation that we are supposedly “liberating” — shows a psychopathic lack of concern about the well being of others.

Or maybe it’s just stupidity? In any case, through these actions and others the US government has forfeited any claim to legitimacy.

Oh, and let’s not forget that a moment of madness or error could produce nuclear war and end the whole world. (Indeed, it would have happened in 1983 if Stanislav Petrov had followed orders!) Fortunately, of all the nations that have ever had nuclear weapons, so far only one has ever been insane enough to use those weapons against humans.

Many people have been persuaded that 9/11 somehow justifies, or even necessitates, one or more of our current wars. But I draw just the opposite conclusion. Indeed, we are told the 19 hijackers were armed only with cheap box-cutters and determination — no nukes, tasers, etc. And even if we bomb their country and several neighboring countries back to the stone age, they’ll still be able to get their hands on box-cutters or other cheap, low-tech weapons. Thus, our wars do nothing to prevent future attacks like that of 9/11/01.

In fact, our wars are making us less safe. Our so-called “smart bombs” aren’t actually smart — they’re killing far more noncombatants than enemies, and so we’re making new enemies faster than we kill old ones. Every innocent bystander who we deprive of a home, a limb, or a loved one thereby gains a reason to pick up a box-cutter. Moreover, it will just get worse — it becomes ever easier for a few angry people to find ways to make terrible weapons, as knowledge continues to grow and spread. I expect that germ warfare soon will be cheap and easy, and it will not be preventable through surveillance. As long as a few people hate us, they will find ways to hurt us.

Evidently, we must stop giving other people reasons to hate us. Bush’s claim that “they hate us for our freedoms” was a lot of nonsense. History did not begin on 9/11/01. The attacks of that day, if not an inside job, were blowback — i.e., retaliation for past crimes by our military-industrial complex. For many years, while most Americans weren’t paying attention, we’ve permitted our government to prop up dictators and overthrow democracies whenever that has served the interests of a few large multinational corporations that have befriended a few politicians. We need to stop that sh*t.

“Kill them all. God will know which ones are his.”

We’re not making any friends that way. People don’t drop bombs on their friends.

I want people to be free, but that means I accept the possibility that they may do something I don’t like. I hope to reduce the likelihood of that, not through control — which is both unethical and unreliable — but through friendship. Only friendship can make us safe.

I wear a big conspicuous peace symbol, everywhere I go. I keep hoping that it will become a fad, a fashion, that nearly everyone will start doing it. That hasn’t happened yet, but I’ll continue wearing it and hoping. For me the symbol has come to represent far more than just the ending of bombs and bullets. Wars will continue as long as a few people can profit from them, and as long as people see their own interests as separate from the interests of other people. The ending of that attitude, and the spread of a worldwide caring community, is what I now see in the symbol.

JOBS AND THE DEFICIT HOAX

(The photo at right shows a bread and soup line from the first great depression.)

Lately there’s been a lot of noise about the deficit, and very little understanding. But any honest economist will tell you that during this time of high unemployment, increased stimulus spending, not a balanced budget, should be our primary concern, if we want to preserve our economic system. That may surprise some people, and needs to be explained:

An economy should not be viewed simply as a “zero-sum game,” an unchanging pie that is to be divided. Rather, it is an organism that is always changing and moving, and the sum is rarely zero. While the economy is healthy, it produces more than it consumes, and so people can pay taxes and the government can pay down some of its debt.

solve each other if our distribution system were more rational. Likewise, homeless people not far from empty houses. We have increased poverty, and in some places increased hunger.

Clearly, if we wish to preserve our current economic system, the most urgent task is to get people working again.

Lakoff says — and I agree — that many of them don’t really care about ending the depression or even understanding it. They’re giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy friends who helped get them elected, and then using the resulting increased deficit as an excuse for austerity measures that they wanted to impose anyway, because of their philosophies of elitism and/or separateness, both discussed elsewhere in this essay.

They claim that tax breaks for the rich will stimulate the economy, but that claim is simply false, as a study of our economic history easily reveals. Trickle-down economics doesn’t work. The market, growing ever more “efficient,” permits ever fewer crumbs to fall.

For instance, right now the government could be hiring people to build public transportation systems and to install solar panels. After enough people regain employment, the economy will get moving at its proper speed, and then we can resume balancing the budget and paying off the debt.

(Fans of the New Deal have made a hero of FDR, who is perhaps the only president to have ever helped the middle class in a big way. But we cannot be sure where FDR’s loyalties really were. In his time, the labor movement was quite strong, and without the New Deal there might have been a socialist revolution. In other words, he used a little bit of socialism to bail out capitalism and to prevent a greater amount of socialism.)

ERIC SCHECHTER is a searcher of answers to the current global crisis.  His philosophy comprises “born-again eco-anarcho-socialist-Buddhist” aspects, plus “Imagine” AND “Internationale.”

Version 5.43 by Eric Schechter 2011 June 26. Underlined magenta phrases are links. Your feedback is welcome. There is also a much shorter version.
Summary: Increasing war, unemployment, sweatshops, ecocide, extinction — only an enormous cultural revolution can save us.
Jump to sections: Intro • Subjectivity • Delusion • Ecocide • War • Jobs • Robots • Plutocracy • Elitism • Alienation • Awakening

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