| Muck and Mystery Loitering With Intent |
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but wrong species. SIAW mistakes gross external characteristics for the whole of reality.
How about this for a radical new approach: why not leave religion to the religious (and the kind of blinkered liberals who get more upset about symbol than substance), and focus once again on the sources and forms of social division that can’t be chosen, from “race”, gender and sexual orientation to what used to be the chief concern of the left: class?hmmmm, class can't be chosen but religion can? I doubt that anyone raised in a religion would agree. They can choose not to practice and choose not to believe but they can't undo their past or force their families etc. to share their new beliefs. In many ways, in most places, religion is a far more determining issue than class. (Not to be confused with caste). Considering how quickly the babushkas were back in church after it became possible in the deformed republics of communistan this should be quite obvious. They continued to baptize their babies, like modern Marrano Jews, all during the grey decades.
But there are unchoosable causes of social division not mentioned. Temperament is one example discussed at length lately but there are many others. When looked at with any care the whole idea of chooseable difference is mistaken, a shirt tail relation of the dreary blank-slate thinking that caused so much misery in past decades.
Social division is guaranteed by such thinking since it fails to usefully treat the natural variability of humanity. Limiting thinking to select interest groups does not decrease social division, it increases it. Those who are not in the favored groups work to establish their own grievance group so that they can get treats handed to them as well. As noted in More Coopetition:
Similarly, the Marxist plan for distribution is a wonderfully cooperative, and detrimental, scheme. If needs are the basis upon which goods are allocated, it will pay each person to produce not goods but “needs.” It will pay people to move toward poverty, for only then will one's needs be maximized. Moreover, if others do not readily recognize these “needs,” it will pay those in “need” to exert efforts emphasizing the genuineness of their “needs.” Such cooperation on this score would produce not only universal poverty—society would be awash in nothing but “needs”—but also hostility among those who do not receive what they believe to be their due. Such an outcome is hardly a happy consequence for a cooperative society.Anything that is rewarded will draw practitioners as dung draws flies. This isn't a problem to be corrected it is a reality to be understood. A lobby for religious groups is a direct consequence of interest group politics, predictable and predicted long ago, a no brainer. It not only rewards the interest group, it rewards their political advocates and facilitators in the interest group business.
Social division is caused by social tinkering, social engineering. The natural and evolved human distrust of strangers and odd balls doesn't become social division without the support of government. To undo the divisions of the past government must withdraw from tinkering rather than seek to tinker more zealously. This won't happen, there are too many that share the SIAW desire to tinker, which is of course a natural human characteristic too.
Though we can't solve these problems it is useful to understand them since it then becomes clear that each difference spackled over by government force will create an opportunity for another to emerge. The best we can do is decline to amplify them and seek to develop an attitude of ridicule for those who so tastelessly engage in such practices, to point and laugh at those who commit these fashion crimes.
Perhaps the central defect of paleo-socialists and fellow travelers who embrace politicism like a theology of salvation to effect a heroic transformation of the human condition is that they don't like humans. They profess affection for humans in the abstract but are squicked out by real humans in their bewildering variety and incomprehensible enthusiasms. They are so mucky and mysterious that the martinet yearns to clean them up, to make them more uniform since it otherwise seems impossible to organize them.
It is, of course. MacLeod notes in The Strange Death of Socialist Scotland, after a brief lamentation for the SSP, that Robert Owen's experiences are still instructive:
Socialism, in its modern sense, was born in Scotland. Before Owen there were millennarians and utopians, prophets and putschists. After him there was A New View of Society. New Lanark is where it all began...It is an exaggeration to attribute innovation to Owen, humans have known how to do this since the beginning, but it is fair to say that this is so for politicists. His failures are even more instructive than his successes in many ways though the lessons fell on deaf ears.Owen's enlightened capitalism succeeded. His communist experiments, inspired by that success, failed. His syndicalist and mutualist union failed. He then threw his great energy and ability into the co-operative movement. This voluntary and everyday socialism was a global success.
The reason that cooperatives work is that they are self creating and hugely various. Everything that a politicist wishes to do, everything that social tinkerers wish to do, undermines useful cooperation. It is illuminating to observe that the same human propensities that result in social division also power cooperation. Cooperation doesn't need to be encouraged or forced, humans do it when allowed. But it can go too far and become predatory, do damage to other cooperatives, and so as MacLeod says:
Engels was [not] altogether wrong. We still need the commonwealth as well as the co-operative. If it were to re-examine its libertarian and radical roots, a socialism that began again in Scotland might yet have the last laugh.Undoing the poiticist society would make space for the cooperative society. The commonwealth would exist to damp competition between cooperatives when it became predatory and destructive. Fair competition - superior performance that resulted in the success of some and the demise of others - would not be constrained but dirty tricks would be shunned and discouraged.
UPDATE: A brief history of The end of the world
Paleo-socialists aren't, of course, the only ones with a theology of salvation to effect a heroic transformation of the human condition.
Millenarians tend to place history at a moment just before the decisive final showdown. The apocalyptic mind looks through the surface reality of the world and sees history's epic, true nature: “apocalypse” comes from the Greek word meaning to uncover, or disclose...The Raelians' claim to be atheists who belong to the secular world must come as no surprise to Mr Cohn, who has long detected patterns of religious apocalyptic thought in what is supposedly rational, secular belief. He has traced “egalitarian and communistic fantasies” to the ancient-world idea of an ideal state of nature, in which all men are genuinely equal and none is persecuted. As Mr Cohn has put it, “The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.”
Nicholas Campion, a British historian and astrologer, has expanded on Mr Cohn's ideas. In his book, “The Great Year”, Mr Campion draws parallels between the “scientific” historical materialism of Marx and the religious apocalyptic experience. Thus primitive communism is the Garden of Eden, the emergence of private property and the class system is the fall, the final gasps of capitalism are the last days, the proletariat are the chosen people and the socialist revolution is the second coming and the New Jerusalem...
Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall (economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final days (time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the green lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the standard happy ending...
So there you have it. The apocalypse is the locomotive of capitalism, the inspiration for revolutionary socialism, the bedrock of America's manifest destiny and the undeclared religion of all those pseudo-rationalists who, like The Economist, champion the progress of liberal democracy. Perhaps, deep down, there is something inside everyone which yearns for the New Jerusalem, a place where, as a beautiful bit of Revelation puts it:
God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.