#70: Humanism, Socialism, and Cultures

Back in the 1990s, it was common to speak of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. While I certainly agree that such a clash exists, I prefer to think it a clash of “cultures,” rather than “civilizations.” And by a “culture,” I mean a population that shares a set of defining values and beliefs so strongly held as to make its members deny even the evidence of their senses rather than relinquish them. But, in addition, I think that framing the problem as a clash of two cultures is simplistic; in point of fact, there are three cultures involved.

Strictly speaking, “the West” should denote the culture we more precisely call “Judaeo-Christian,” but today’s West is actually more complex than that. Today’s West also includes a culture that was born much more recently in the European 17^th and 18^th centuries, the so-called “Age of Reason” or “Enlightenment”, and which was hijacked at the time of the French Revolution in 1789 into what was to morph eventually into Marx’s Communism and Lenin’s Socialism.

Yes, yes, I know that it is usually assumed that the Enlightenment was actually a progressive evolution of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but I would argue that this view swims against a tide of contrary evidence. As I have mentioned in several earlier posts, the two hundred years that preceded the French Revolution involved an ever increasing rejection of Judaeo-Christian culture, a rejection in favour of the doctrine known as “Humanism” in which tradition and revealed authority were to be replaced by human reason. In retrospect, while the philosophes, as the dilettantes of the 18^th c. called themselves, were on the flaky side, they were still democratic in their impulses. This ended with the Revolution. But the main point to make here is that a movement within a society that rejects everything about the culture within which it occurs cannot be called a “development” of that culture. If it is anything, it is a new culture attempting to replace the old one.

During the French Revolution, the aristocracy and middle class were subjected to mass murder, the Church and the Clergy were violently rejected, new forms of personal address were introduced, new uniforms were introduced, and even a new calendar was introduced. The intent was to utterly erase the prior culture, the ancien regime. This revolutionary expression of the Enlightenment continued to spawn more revolutions through the 19^th century and was finally given a pseudo-scientific form by Karl Marx in 1848 (The Communist Manifesto) and 1867 (Kapital).

While the emphasis on unaided human reason began with the burgeoning science of the early 17^th century, it was not until Marx’s work that “reason” was incarnated as “science,” albeit pseudo-science, when applied to social and political issues. It is in late 19^th century Socialism that we see clearly for the first time the new Post-Revolution culture. For a portrayal of this new bleak, colorless, textureless utopian dream, see Nicolai Chernyshevsky’s influential novel What Is To Be Done (1863); not coincidentally, Lenin gave his communist programme the same title in 1903 (14 years before the Bolshevik revolution of Oct 1917!).

It is illuminating to mirror the progress from roughly 1625 to 1789 with the progress from the February Revolution of 1917 to the October Revolution of that year. The February revolution was a genuine and spontaneous workers’ revolution with democratic objectives of self-governing “soviets” (workers’ councils). It lasted only until October, when it was forcibly hijacked by the Bolsheviks, who turned it quickly into a murderous dictatorship. Similarly, though over a far longer time span, the “humanist” revolution lasted until 1789, when it was hijacked by the Jacobins who set the pattern for the many subsequent bloody revolutions to follow.

The culture that developed from those beginnings thrived throughout the world in the bloody century that followed and is still among us in many superficially distinct variations. It is present in Russia, in China, in the EU, in South America, in Malaysia, and significantly in the U.S.A. and Canada.

From a strictly economic point of view, it’s defining ultimate objective is the eradication of ownership and of property; and its defining methodology is central state control over as much human functioning as it is possible to acquire. The conviction that underlies Socialism and from which everything else follows is that property is essentially and necessarily unjust. Thus, when people state that the objective of Socialism is the redistribution of wealth, they fail to see the ultimate objective. Redistribution of wealth is merely a stage in the progression towards the world in which there simply is no such thing as wealth at all, where there is no ownership. More on this below.

But there are additional culture defining beliefs of a non-economic kind that are not as familiar to us as those of economic Marxism. These are frequently specious, but are nonetheless held as strongly as religious articles of faith. They are also supported by politicians and their lackeys for their political utility.

I. One such is that “people are everywhere pretty much the same.”

This is intended to persuade people that cultural differences are nothing more serious than wearing different clothing. It is this thesis that was involved, for example, in the post WW II claim that the “vast majority” of Germans “knew nothing” of the atrocities being committed by only a few mad men at the top. And it is this thesis that was constantly expressed by G.W. Bush about the world’s Muslims. A closer look at the facts quickly reveals that the claim about the wartime Germans is patently false and that the claim about the world’s Muslims is equally so. Nonetheless, people of the Socialist persuasion cling to this belief even more than Conservatives cling to their guns and to their religion.

More important, however, is the utility of this belief in the ongoing effort to erase national boundaries. The nation-state, for the Socialist, is itself a form of ownership and is, therefore, inherently unfair. Having a boundary around your country indicates that the country is the property of the people who are citizens of that country and not the property of people who are not citizens. For the Socialist, this is prima facie unfair and unjust. Since “people are everywhere pretty much the same,” they have as much claim to any country as the ones who have fenced it off. Property is an unnatural limitation of access to goods, it is an arbitrary and artificial restriction, hence the current reluctance to secure America’s borders.

II. The second belief follows from the first. It is that there exists a single human “nature” and that we can know what it is.

According to the academics, men everywhere can be expected to 1) want the same things, and 2) to be rational in the ways they go about getting what they want. Economists seem to be particularly fond of this one. It is this kind of belief that underlies Obama’s foreign policy towards Iran: there is no problem that cannot be solved by sitting down with the other party and reasoning together. You tell me what you want, I tell you what I want, and we can cut a reasonable deal. We’ve been seeing how successful a foundation for a foreign policy this particular belief is.

III. A third one follows from the first two and is actually an inheritance from Socrates, that evil is only a matter of factual error, of ignorance and poor reasoning. This belief is quite important because it exists at the fault line between Enlightenment Humanism and its bastard child, Socialism.

The Humanist thinks that since we are all after the same things and reason demonstrates that being law abiding maximizes our chances of having those things, the person who does evil must be making a mistake, an error, either about what he really wants or how to get it. Thus evil is reduced to logic and epistemology.

This particular belief highlights just how distinct the Humanist culture is from the Judaeo-Christian one. For the latter, evil is real, for the former it is not real, it is a remediable error (or physiologically based insanity). For the new culture, there is no such thing as sanely and intentionally doing evil, but for the old there was and is.

As I said, this belief reveals one of the junctures of Enlightenment Humanism and Socialism. When an Enlightenment Humanist encountered disagreement, he responded “let us reason together” (giving the divine line an ironic new use). But when the Jacobin and his revolutionary successors encountered disagreement, they responded by saying “let me change your mind,” and they meant that quite literally. They would change your mind, for example, by killing you. Or, in a move pioneered by the Bolsheviks that has been copied by dictators ever since, they “re-educated” you by sending you to one of their special psychiatric institution. Once incarcerated there, they changed your mind through torture, through chemical means, or through systematic conditioning.

Whether the current Socialist offers to “reason” with you or to “change your mind” depends on how totalitarian the Socialism is. Reasoning and belief-conditioning are two different things. Lenin and his criminal psychopath thugs perfected the techniques of belief and attitude control that were to be used by other totalitarian states throughout the 20^th century and are currently in use today. In our Socialist democracies, however, we have developed the habit in recent years of forcing people with attitudes we do not like to take “sensitivity training” of various kinds. I don’t mean to equate the degrees involved, but only the kinds of state remedy. These remedies are still the genuine Socialist remedies, albeit at the level of a not yet fully mature Socialism.

It is perhaps no accident that the life of Pavlov of conditioning fame spanned the revolutionary period in Russia, he died in 1936. I have no doubt that his theories and research influenced the underlying view of the Soviets on human nature. While the 18^th century led to the doctrine in Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) that the core of the self is a rigid pure reasoner, the Pavlovian view was that human nature is extremely plastic and susceptible of moulding. This was certainly a view consistent with Bolshevik methods and objectives.

CONCLUSION

The problem that this history presents us today is that the modern Socialist is conflicted in his view of human nature, he cannot decide whether he is a Humanist or a Bolshevik. We see this in his approaches to both penal and foreign policy.

For the Humanist, the criminal should not be punished, being either mistaken or insane. In either case, punishment is not the proper response. But reasoning with criminals has been proven empirically to be ineffective and treating all criminals as insane is equally unacceptable. Living in a moderate Socialism, the Humanist also cannot stomach the methods of the “mind changers” of Lubyanka Prison. Yet, the Humanist’s culture is such that he cannot accept the only other alternative, that criminals are evil people, of which the implication is the intuitively satisfying one that they should be punished.

The humanist cannot abandon his belief despite its history of inadequacy – this is a clear indication of a culture defining belief.

And where foreign policy is concerned, the implications of the modern Socialist’s inner conflict are even more dangerous.

His defining conviction is that all people are like himself, just looking for a good deal. He cannot accept the possibility that there might be both leaders and populations who simply do not care about the same things he cares about, who, for example, prefer glorious death to a pleasant evening at the pub. He cannot accept the possibility that human plasticity is so extreme that whole populations can be created who are not at all like himself, who do not want what he wants, and who are not rational in the Enlightenment sense.

Thus possibly his biggest mistake comes in failing to understand in foreign policy what his Socialist forebears understood for domestic policy: namely the almost unlimited plasticity of human beings. The Catholic church seemed to understand this as early as the 16^th century: St. Francis Xavier wrote “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” Lenin and his Bolsheviks knew even more techniques for assuring that they created true-believing little Bolshies (and, of course, the rest they killed or sent to the Gulag).

Our biggest foreign policy puzzle and problem lies in the assumption of “innocent” non-combatant casualties. The belief is that Kim Jong Il’s population consists of innocent people just like us, that the inhabitants of Gaza are innocent people just like us, that the citizens of Iran are just like us, and we’re loath to hurt people “just like us.” That is, the assumption that the enemy is “just like us” in effect turns the enemy into hostages by means of which our actions are constrained.

The problem is that, barring the Socialist culture defining beliefs, it is quite plain that the Japanese of WW II were not at all just like us, nor were the Germans. For that matter, the North Koreans are not, the Iranians are not, nor are the Gazans. And the reason they are not is that they have been moulded by their governments to degrees that a modern Socialist simply cannot accept.

What is so odd is that he accepts the plasticity of human beings often when he is excusing criminal behaviour, but not when he is facing deranged hostile hordes. In the latter case, he fantasizes that they are actually just like himself.

A culture that is based on non-adaptive defining beliefs is a culture we ought to lose as soon as the possibility presents itself.