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.
(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)
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)
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).
"
equity: The proportional distribution of desirable outcomes across groups. Sometimes confused with equality, equity refers to outcomes while equality connotes equal treatment. More directly, equity is when an individual’s race, gender, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, etc. do not determine their educational, economic, social, or political opportunities."
—"Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Glossary." University of Pittsburgh, Office for Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion:
https://www.diversity.pitt.edu/educatio ... n-glossary
"
equity: the situation in which all people or groups are given access to the correct number and types of resources for them so as to achieve equal results; differs from equality, which focuses on the equal distribution of resources rather than equal results"
—ABC’s of Social Justice: A Glossary of Working Language for Socially Conscious Conversation." Department of Inclusion & Multicultural Engagement, Lewis & Clark College:
https://college.lclark.edu/live/files/1 ... al-justice [PDF]
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. They are aware that homo sapiens is not by nature a species of angels or saints; but they also know that we are not by nature a hopeless species of devils either. The progressive belief that the
conditio humana can be improved a lot through changes of socioeconomic circumstances is not a delusion!
Yes…
"Socialists regard humans as essentially social creatures, their capacities and behaviour being shaped more by nurture than by nature, and particularly by creative labour. Their propensity for cooperation, sociability and rationality means that the prospects for personal growth and social development are considerable."
(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. 7th ed. London: Red Globe/Macmillan, 2021. p. 56)
Richard Rorty even declared that…
"[T]here is no such thing as human nature, for human beings make themselves up as they go along. They create themselves, as poets create poems. There is no such thing as the nature of the state or the nature of society to be understood—there is only a historical sequence of relatively successful and relatively unsuccessful attempts to achieve some combination of order and justice."
(Rorty, Richard. "Democracy and Philosophy." 2007. Reprinted in What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics, edited by W. P. Malecki and Chris Voparil, 34-48. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. p. 44)
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 9:08 pmConsul wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 7:13 pmThe postmodernist Woke Left may be accused of disvaluing "reason, science, logic", but not the Left
as a whole.
Which "Left" is ardently supportive of any of the three?
Counterquestion: Which (non-/pre-postmodern) Left is ardently
unsupportive of any of the three?
Socialism isn't inherently irrationalistic. Was Marx or is Marxism part of the Counter-Enlightenment?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 9:08 pmConsul wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 7:13 pmLeft-liberals wouldn't be liberals if they discarded individualism and individual rights. (What they do reject is antisocial egoism.)
They're NOT liberals. They're "liberals" by self-proclamation only. In practice, instead of in propaganda, they all subordinate or reject the individual in favour of the collective. That's definitional in Socialism.
In communism, but not in the liberal, moderate socialism called social democracy (let alone in social liberalism).
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.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 9:08 pmConsul wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 7:13 pm
On the other hand, the radical New Left of the 1960s/70s valued and strove for the liberation of the individual from collectivist authoritarianism.
That's how they talked. But in practice, they were also heavily influenced by things like the Frankfurt School, and quickly generated all sorts of Socialist "solutions," from the famed Port Huron Manifesto to the communes, the Black Panthers, and so on. The sixties were individualist only in regard to private morality; in regard to politics, they aimed at collectivist solutions, in many cases.
("The private is political!" is a New Left slogan.)
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). Generally…
"[N]eo-Marxists were usually at odds with, and sometimes profoundly repelled by, the Bolshevik model of orthodox communism."
(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. 7th ed. London: Red Globe/Macmillan, 2021. p. 93)
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?
On the other hand, it is true that the Woke (Identitarian/Minoritarian) Left's social ontology is group-centered.
"Social groups are not entities that exist apart from individuals, but neither are they merely arbitrary classifications of individuals according to attributes which are external to or accidental to their identities. Admitting the reality of social groups does not commit one to reifying collectivities, as some might argue. Group meanings partially constitute people's identities in terms of the cultural forms, social situation, and history that group members know as theirs, because these meanings have been either forced upon them or forged by them or both (…). Groups are real not as substances, but as forms of social relations (…).
Moral theorists and political philosophers tend to elide social groups more often with associations than with aggregates (…). By an association I mean a formally organized institution, such as a club, corporation, political party, church, college, or union. Unlike the aggregate model of groups, the association model recognizes that groups are defined by specific practices and forms of association. Nevertheless it shares a problem with the aggregate model. The aggregate model conceives the individual as prior to the collective, because it reduces the social group to a mere set of attributes attached to individuals. The association model also implicitly conceives the individual as ontologically prior to the collective, as making up, or constituting, groups.
A contract model of social relations is appropriate for conceiving associations, but not groups. Individuals constitute associations, they come together as already formed persons and set them up, establishing rules, positions, and offices. The relationship of persons to associations is usually voluntary, and even when it is not, the person has nevertheless usually entered the association. The person is prior to the association also in that the person's identity and sense of self are usually regarded as prior to and relatively independent of association membership.
Groups, on the other hand, constitute individuals. A person's particular sense of history, affinity, and separateness, even the person's mode of reasoning, evaluating, and expressing feeling, are constituted partly by her or his group affinities. This does not mean that persons have no individual styles, or are unable to transcend or reject a group identity. Nor does it preclude persons from having many aspects that are independent of these group identities.
The social ontology underlying many contemporary theories of justice, I pointed out in the last chapter, is methodologically individualist or atomist. It presumes that the individual is ontologically prior to the social. This individualist social ontology usually goes together with a normative conception of the self as independent. The authentic self is autonomous, unified, free, and self-made, standing apart from history and affiliations, choosing its life plan entirely for itself.
One of the main contributions of poststructuralist philosophy has been to expose as illusory this metaphysic of a unified self-making subjectivity, which posits the subject as an autonomous origin or an underlying substance to which attributes of gender, nationality, family role, intellectual disposition, and so on might attach. Conceiving the subject in this fashion implies conceiving consciousness as outside of and prior to language and the context of social interaction, which the subject enters. Several currents of recent philosophy challenge this deeply held Cartesian assumption. Lacanian psychoanalysis, for example, and the social and philosophical theory influenced by it, conceive the self as an achievement of linguistic positioning that is always contextualized in concrete relations with other persons, with their mixed identities (…). The self is a product of social processes, not their origin."
(Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. pp. 44-5)