Consul wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 4:29 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 9:08 pmConsul wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 7:13 pm
Leftists share an affinity for
egalitarianism. (But they don't all share the same opinion regarding
the kinds and degrees of egalitarianism.)
That's nominal, though. In practice, they don't believe in equality, but in inequality (as in "equity") and in elitism (as in the elite Marxists get to dictate to everybody else). That, too, is characteristic of all Socialisms.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
(So say the pigs in George Orwell's
Animal Farm.)
The communists created their own privileged nobility.
People often don't practice what they preach, but it is not true that
all socialists (including social democrats) are just pseudo-egalitarians who actually practice the opposite of what they preach.
One might wish to believe there were exceptions. Except we don't know of a single such case. In every real-world case in history, Socialism has turned to a devastated economy and piles of corpses. No exceptions. So only when Socialism is not the dominant economic or political strategy in a place is any measure of it even tolerable. And there's a serious doubt that it's ever functional, let alone ideal, even then.
For example, socialized medicine, even in a basically democratic polity like the UK or Canada, bankrupts the medical system. Public schooling turns into a propaganda factory. Social welfare turns out to be beset by freeloaders. And so on. Every socialized program turns out to be more expensive and less efficient than it ought to be, and ultimately unsustainable. That's a serious problem for any Socialist. But I never hear them talk about their own 100% record of failure.
(Note that
"the label 'egalitarian' does not necessarily indicate that the doctrine so called holds that it is desirable that people's condition be made the same in any respect or that people ought to be treated the same in any respect. An egalitarian might rather be one who maintains that people ought to be treated as equals—as possessing equal fundamental worth and dignity and as equally morally considerable." –
SEP: Egalitarianism)
Two problems, though. One is that in real life, equity is completely impossible. It never exists, anywhere. The other is that given secularism, there's no rational explanation of why we owe it to each other even to regard each other as
theoretically equal, even if we admit that, in practice, it remains impossible to actualize.
In what way can a female, black, youthful, able-bodied homosexual be made the equal of a fat, male, Chinese, elderly, disabled heterosexual? What's the recipe for getting that done? And then, what's the rationale that explains why it is incumbent upon our society to try to make the Chinese man the "equal" of the black girl?
Or if we mean that they are, in some value sense, each other's "equals in value," to whom or what is that value delivered, and why should we assume that they have the same value to that?
Generally speaking…
"Equity is another name for just dealing, and must not be confused with equality. While it is tautologous to say that treating people equitably is just, it is certainly not tautologous, although some think it true, to say that it is just to treat them equally."
(Scruton, Roger. The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought. 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. pp. 219-20)
This is also impossible, for obvious reasons listed above. There is no way to explain what's "equitable" in forcing the black girl to suffer some sort of "equivalent" inhibitions to the Chinese man. What's "just" about crippling or limiting her potential in some way, in order to make sure he doesn't feel bad?
However, there are different kinds of equality; and equity qua social justice or fairness is socialistically associated with equality of outcome/result, the realization of which often requires an inegalitarian "positive discrimination" aka "affirmative action" (as affirmed by the Woke Left's DEI ideology).
Right. Which means force of some kind. The black girl must be excluded, denied access, inhibited, discriminated against in some way, so that some standard of "equity" we can't even agree on is "satisfied" that we have hammered her enough, or bestowed so many unearned privileges on him that our personal estimation of "equity" has been met. But we have absolutely no metric for determining what that point is, or what is just another form of inequity.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 9:08 pmConsul wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 7:13 pmAll Leftists believe in
meliorism at least, i.e. that things can get better, that the human condition can be improved through concerted effort, that existential and moral progress is possible.
Yes, they do. And they tend not to believe in any importance to the fallibility of human nature, either. They see it as remediable by way of social structures. And they never stop to explain how it happens in the first place, except to blame it, rather vaguely, on "social forces" of some kind. But "social forces" are human actions. So they're just deflecting, in that case, and not really answering the question of how such social evils can ever come about among socially-'meliorable' human beings.
Realistic leftists/socialists don't confuse improvability with perfectibility.
Wait. That doesn't answer the fundamental question. The real question is how any faults or "evils," if we can use that word, ever come to exist when people are all essentially good in the first place. They say "society": but society is composed of nothing by good and meliorable human beings, allegedly: so whence this social maladjustment that is alleged to be producing all the problems? Why is a group of supposedly sociable, morally-well-arranged not either properly sociable or morally well-arranged when they combine into a society? And why do they need any amelioration, when they're already good people?
The progressive belief that the conditio humana can be improved a lot through changes of socioeconomic circumstances is not a delusion!
What is our
evidence that it's
not a delusion? That we don't
want it to be a delusion? That it sounds nice, optimistic and humane if we
say such a thing? Or that history gives us some evidence that would give us some reason to think that's true?
Where has this "progressive belief that the
conditio humana can be improved" been realized, so that we may marvel?
Richard Rorty even declared that…
"[T]here is no such thing as human nature, for human beings make themselves up as they go along.
Then why did they "make themselves up" so badly? How did we get gulags, re-education camps and Auschwitz from good and ameliorable human beings "making themselves up"? Where did that evil come from?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 9:08 pm
Which "Left" is ardently supportive of any of the three?
Counterquestion: Which (non-/pre-postmodern) Left is ardently
unsupportive of any of the three?
Well, you could answer the question before posing the counterquestion, of course. But the truth is that the fact that they have to ditch science, logic and reason has come recently to the Left: but it's because the hopes of what they call "crude Marxism" turned out to be dusty if science, logic, history and rationality were regarded as reliable at all. Hence, the Postmodern critiques that emphasize this are testament from the Marxists themselves to the rational, historical and scientific failure of original Marxism.
Was Marx or is Marxism part of the Counter-Enlightenment?
Marx was a fraud. Not only did he not "enlighten" anyone, his thinking has proved to be a Stygian mess. He was no economist, and none of the theories he tried to sell as "scientific" were in any way scientific in actuality. He was an ideologue and a secular prophet, a self-professed genius, whose chief personal project seems to have been to obtain a free ride. But for some inexplicable reason, the Left loves the guy.
...social democracy...
There's no such thing. For the Left, "social" means "the people," and the only "people" who count are the Socialists. Thus, there's no "democracy," because people have no power not to be Socialists or to choose anything that is not Socialism. So that's just a nonsense term, like "new antique."
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 9:08 pmNazis are not on the "right." They're "National Socialists." That means they subordinate the individual to the national collective, such as the Aryan "nation." Communists, by contrast, are "international socialists." But the family resemblance is strong in regards to their mutual contempt for the individual and their preference for groupthink.
The horseshoe model of political ideologies comes to mind, where the two extremes—the far-left and the far-right—are close to one another. However, its name notwithstanding, national socialism is doubtless
right-extremism.
No, Fascism is Left. It's Socialism. Libertarianism, individualism, genuine democracy, conservatism, classical liberalism...these are on the right.
There have always been both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian/libertarian tendencies in the Left; and there were many Stalin, Mao, or Castro fans in the Sixties Left. But the Frankfurt School, particularly its first generation (most of whose members were Jewish), rejects both communist and fascist authoritarianism (totalitarianism).
Not close to true. The Frankfurt School was a Communist-reclamation project, essentially. When classical or "crude" Marxism, oriented as it was to "class conflict" could not longer be seen as anything but a historical failure, since nearly every thing Marx had predicted turned out not to be the case, The FS attempted to save Marxism by reorienting it to a cluster of other "oppressed" minorities by way of race, sex, sexuality and so on. But the goal was the same: Marxist revolution, so the magical force of History could dialectically "progress."
"[N]eo-Marxists were usually at odds with, and sometimes profoundly repelled by, the Bolshevik model of orthodox communism."
At odds with, yes: repelled by, no. Orthodox Communism is a universal failure. Even the Neo-Marxists had to accept that. But they tried to save the theory by their bait-and-switch move. See James Lindsay, "Race Marxism."
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 9:08 pmThe Woke left has no more than a nominal interest in individuals at all. Everything it advocates seems framed in terms of the social, from "systems of oppression" and "systemic racism" to "social engineering" and "social justice." Other than sharing the 60s radicals loose view of personal morality, they have almost no interest in the individual or his rights.
Isn't their fight for the right to gender self-determination (through self-identification) a fight for an individual right?
No. It's a fight for
group pre-eminence. The individual is of no interest to Socialism, except as a token of the group. That's why they define every individual by his/her race, class, sexuality, disability, fatness, etc., and treat those as socially-determinative of what every individual is. That's how, for example, the can accuse Larry Elder of being "the black face of white privilege," or other blacks of failing to be "an authentic black voice." What else could Joe Biden mean when he said "If they don't vote for me, they ain't black." He couldn't have meant their faces, their genetics, their histories, their culture, or anything else, but that there is a "black" political posture, and those who take exception to it as individuals are to be rejected even as incidental members of their own group.
They stereotype and lock in everyone according to the Socialist ideologues' own conception of class/race/sex/sexuality essentialism. If you're outside of that essentialist conception they impose, if you are a rejector of their Socialist group, if you're an individual, if you're not like the others they expect, then
you just don't count. Nothing could be more evident from their rhetoric. You are not "the People," as Mao said; you're "against the People."