Socialism, Christianism and humanism

[lozenge]

@coffee I move the socialism topic here.

@coffee

And there are rogue scientists who arm the ignorant masses with doubt (E.g., Fred and Russell Seitz, and Fred Singer) as their articles would appear in business journals whose readers were all about free-markets and no government intervention. During the Reagan administration, it was frowned upon to mention acid rain just as George W, Bush didn’t want to hear about global warming. Think tanks like the CATO institute paid these scientists to publish misleading articles.

I think climate change is a difficulty for free-market theorists, it is a big new horse on which to ride for communists and socialists.

After the poor working class (they killed by millions), after the poor minorities (they destroyed inner cities and banlieues), now poor Nature. If we follow communist and socialist plans on economy at a global scale, literally billions of people will die, and it will not save Nature, because it is in undeveloped economies where pollution and destruction of nature is the most serious.

@coffee

Think tanks like the CATO institute paid these scientists to publish misleading articles.

I don’t buy in the way this sentence is worded.

That big companies pay scientists to protect their interests, this is a fact, and the examples are extremely numerous, apparently especially in the US, where there is kind of a free-market, at least more than in France.

But the Cato Institute is another thing, they develop and intellectual framework, you cannot confuse everything.

[lozenge]

I am not a fond of the Cato Institute. Closed to Milton Friedman, I deem they tend to boil down everything to economics. In their line of thought, economics can solve everything (foreign policy, immigration, … and you just added the example of climate). Of course not.

Well, they are economists, so… as we say in French they “prêchent pour leur paroisse”.

This is what happens when we don’t infringe free-market theory on a larger philosophical framework, which is Secular Humanism.

From what I just checked rapidly, Cato apparently may have decided from 2019 to replace their “Center for the Study of Science” with a more climate-encompassing project called “Human Progress” (I mentioned in a post in this thread above).

[write4u]

@lozenge

This is what happens when we don’t infringe free-market theory on a larger philosophical framework, which is Secular Humanism.

OK, lets ask, “how does nature do it”?

AFAIK, there is no free market in nature. Should that tell us something?

[lozenge]

@write4u

OK, lets ask, “how does nature do it”?

Personally not fond of hunter-gatherers way of life.

If we followed nature, most of us would probably not even be there, because bacterias and other viruses who have been killed us and/or our mothers before we were even born.

[lozenge]

I can not but point the contradiction of pleading for following Nature while using the Internet (which consumes huge amounts of energy) and a laptop.

I know you will make “yes but we can still develop a critic of our system, even in our system” kind of argument. But still.

It’s like the communist/socialist critics of “bourgeois capitalism” made everyday all day by “bourgeois” who own private appartments and other properties and put their children in private schools, and have “habitus” of typical “bourgeois”. Not mentioning that they tend to be in reality quite selfish and materialist (in the common sense of the term).

To me they are just yesterday’s Clergy.

Personnally I try to develop a framework for myself which allows me to be coherent in both my actions and my words.

[write4u]

[quote=“lozenge, post:104, topic:10549”]
Personally not fond of hunter-gatherers way of life.

But that is not what I am talking about.
The point is to avoid free unrestricted cutting down 1000 year old “mother trees” in our forests, lest you upset perhaps as much as an acre of naturally balanced ecology controlled by that parent.

The point is to utilize natural **renewable ** resources to inflict the least impact on the ecology that brought us here to begin with. There is no “free” trade in nature, Everything is contributing to the ecology, not destroying it.
That is what humans do in the cause of “free trade”.

[lozenge]

@write4u

Everything is contributing to the ecology, not destroying it.

No. Bacterias, viruses, predatory animals kill without an inch of pity. I don’t like naive idealism of Nature.

[write4u]

@lozenge

No. Bacterias, viruses, predatory animals kill without an inch of pity. I don’t like naive idealism of Nature.

Nor do I.
You forgot to include man as the most dangerous predator who kills his own kind and his environment. This is why we are in the midst of the 6th extinction event.

Yes indeed, nature doesn’t care. That is why today there is a balance of all the currently “surviving organisms” that contribute in some way to the ecology.

btw. You may be interested to know that your micro-biome contains more bacteria than human cells. We could not live without our symbiont bacteria.

[lozenge]

@write4u

You forgot to include man as the most dangerous predator who kills his own kind and his environment. This is why we are in the midst of the 6th extinction event.

You never saw animals of the same species kill one another?
Animals of different species killing one another?

@write4u

We could not live without our symbiont bacteria.

Well, you were saying that humans are predators, so you could re-consider your own way of thinking in the light of this argument

[write4u]

[quote=“lozenge, post:109, topic:10549, full:true”]

[quote=“write4u, post:108, topic:10549”]
You forgot to include man as the most dangerous predator who kills his own kind and his environment. This is why we are in the midst of the 6th extinction event.

You never saw animals of the same species kill one another?
Animals of different species killing one another?

Black Widow spider kills the male after mating. It is an early dose of calories to the growing eggs.

[quote=“write4u, post:108, topic:10549”]
We could not live without our symbiont bacteria.

Well, you were saying that humans are predators, so you could re-consider your >own way of thinking in light of this argument

No, humans are able to alter their environment and thereby affect entire regions on Earth.

Just imagine that in about 200 years we have pumped billions of years worth of sequestered oil out of the earth and returned it into our atmosphere.
This is an unnatural way of distributing resources and today we are experiencing the effects of our greed and folly.

[lozenge]

@write4u

No, humans are able to alter their environment and thereby affect entire regions on earth.

Just imagine that in about 200 years we have pumped billions of years worth of sequestered oil out of the earth and returned it into our atmosphere.
This is an unnatural way of distributing resources and today we are experiencing the effects of our greed and folly.

No, people are far better off today than in the 1960s and before, and this is even more true for people in developing countries.

There are many species that are reappering. Shimmering mole spotted for the first time in nearly 100 years in South Africa

[write4u]

@lozenge

There are many species that are reappering. Shimmering mole spotted for the first time in nearly 100 years in South Africa

Yes, underground organisms and animals will most likely survive, but it appears to be blind.
I won’t guarantee a long survival time.

[lozenge]

In my understanding, Romanticism and Communism are two heirs of (institutionalized) Christianism, born on its ashes.

Christianism was the framework to justify monarchy, the two going hand-in-hand (see “divine right of kings”, see the knights). But I think Communism was inspired by institutionalized Christianism (the clergy, the Church, the Bible, the mass, the tithe, the confessional, the sanctification, the fresco, the monastery[1], etc.), more than by monarchy.

Romanticism pursued the mystic/philosophical aspect of Christianism.
Communism pursued the hierarchical/organizational aspect of Christianism.

Here is the main timeline, concerning the 18th and 19th centuries. I did not develop yet the 20th century one (I guess it will go along the lines of DNA discovery, invention of the Internet, hippie movement, first humanist association, etc.). Will develop and post it later.

Romanticism () and Communism () started and crystalized after the rise of Secularism (), and rode on the waves of Progress ().

• Treatise on Tolerance (1763), Voltaire

→ Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts (1751), Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert

Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1776-1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The People’s Tribune or Human Rights Defender” (1794), Graccus Babeuf

→ Invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney (1793)

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818), Lord Byron

The Voyage to Icaria (1842), Étienne Cabet

→ Invention of the sewing machine by Elias Howe’s (1846)

The Flowers of Evil (1857), Charles Baudelaire

Le Capital, tome I (1867), Karl Marl

• “God is Dead” The Gay Science (1882), Friedrich Nietzsche

[1] One whole post, or thread, could be dedicated to the features of Communism presenting similarities with institutionalized Catholicism

[lozenge]

Together, they replaced Christianism to counteract Classical Liberal (communism) Secular Humanism (romanticism).

[lozenge]

• “God is Dead” The Gay Science (1882), Friedrich Nietzsche

→ The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), Frederic Winslow Taylor

Surrealist Manifesto (1924), André Breton

General Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions (1926), Pierre Besnard

→ “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” (1953), Francis Crick, James D. Watson

On the Road (1957), Jack Kerouac

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 1960

→ Invention of the Interface Message Processor (IMP) by the Massachusetts-based company Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) (1969)

Pearl (1971), Janis Joplin

The Ecology of Freedom (1982), Murray Bookchin

• Center for Inquiry (1991), Paul Kurtz

[lozenge]

The Communists did not want people to have access to actual equality, through “capitalism”. They reintroduced and reinforced hierarchies and power struggles between groups of people (of course under the promess of a perfect egalitarian land, aka paradise).

The Romantics did not want people to have access to a certain form of objective knowledge, through modern science, and a certain form of happiness, through utilitarianism/hedonism. They reintroduced and reinforced subjectivism, mysticism, and the ennoblement of suffering.

Together, they replaced Christianism to counteract the bourgeois ethics (or Classical Liberal Secular Humanism) of seeking individual happiness (based on life and health) and individual freedom (based on life and intellectual/psychological autonomy).

[lozenge]

I think it is not a coincidence that Communism was developed in France which, for geographical reasons, was at the crossroads of Catholicism (closed to Spain, Portugal, Italy, and a Catholic country itself) and Liberalism (England, Netherlands).

Communism being, IMO, a secularization of (institutionalized) Catholicism with modern ideas (Liberalism).

I sign-off.

[morgankane01]

I think that you mix communist ideas and the soviet system.

You cannot judge the communist ideals, even disagreeing with them, with the Leninist version.

In time, the first come from very far. Your knowledge of the history of communism as an ideal seems lacking.

[Levellers - Wikipedia]

[History of communism - Wikipedia]

[lozenge]

Leninism is an important form of Marxism, like it or not.

It is not me who say it, it’s communist themselves:

Vladimir Ilitch Oulianov (1870-1924), de son pseudonyme le plus connu Lénine , est l’une des figures phares du marxisme au 20e siècle. Il est à la fois un théoricien marxiste majeur, un des plus efficaces organisateurs du mouvement ouvrier, et l’un des principaux dirigeants de la Révolution russe, première révolution prolétarienne à obtenir une victoire à l’échelle d’un pays, bien que celle-ci ait très vite dégénéré en régime bureaucratique.

Lénine

I take Communism as encompassing both the early forms of Communism (Robespierre, etc.) and the later forms (Lenin, etc.).

Many Communists in the 1950s, even until very late, supported Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, even Stalinism? Why now suddenly “it is not Communism”?

Maybe that makes you feel uncomfortable, but deal with it.

[morgankane01]

Robespierre was not a communist. The idea that he could be one is absurd.

I never denied that Leninism is an important doctrine among communist ones.

And there is gap between the theoretical writings of Lenin and what he did when in power.

And i precise that if i believe that class struggle exists, i am not an orthodox Marxist as i don’t believe in the inevitability of the proletarian revolution, as i reject the idea of the dictature of proletariat.

Incidentally, Marx is not the first one to formulate the idea of the class struggle.

[Class conflict - Wikipedia]