Is Socialism Rooted in Envy?

Having toyed with this idea, I have concluded that it is a cheap shot. Socialism is no more rooted in envy than capitalism is rooted in greed. What one can say is that envy is the characteristic vice of socialists, just as greed is the characteristic vice of capitalists. But there is no need that a socialist or capitalist, as such, be vicious.

Suppose Sam’s motive for becoming a socialist is envy: he cannot stand it that some have much more than him. It does not follow that there are no good reasons for socialism. What follows is merely that none of those good reasons — assuming dubiously that there are some — played a motivating role within Sam’s psychic economy. Now suppose that Carl’s motive for advocating capitalism is greed: he has an inordinate desire to pile up loot for his own enjoyment. It does not follow that there are no good reasons for capitalism. What follows is merely that none of these good reasons — assuming correctly that there are some — played a motivating role within Carl’s psychic economy.

Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

The Financial Times reports on a piece of silliness from the Pope:

Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday condemned the “grave deviations and failures” of capitalism exposed by the financial crisis and issued a strong call for a “true world political authority” to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy.

One mistake the good Pontiff is making is to confuse capitalism and capitalists.  One who cannot see the difference may fallaciously conclude that the greed of some capitalists is rooted in capitalism.  Here is a post from a while back that counters the notion:

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Concision at War with Redundancy

One of my faults as a writer is that I am prolix. I almost wrote ‘excessively prolix,’ which would have illustrated the fault in question. Piling ‘excessively’ onto ‘prolix’ would not only have been unnecessary, but would also have suggested that one can be prolix in moderation. But wordiness is a vice, and vices should be extirpated, not moderated.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Reason’ Titles

We need a list of 'Reason' titles.  Here are three: You're the Reason I'm Livin; You're the Reason (I Don't Sleep at Night); Reason to Believe.  Last week or so I've been forcing myself to listen to Michael Jackson stuff to see if maybe, just maybe, I may have missed something of merit.  But it's just robotic crap compared to tunes of human meaning like these that can give a man pleasure from 8 to 80.  I can't imagine anyone but a freak relating to Jackson's "Bad" at the age of 80 even if he could relate to it at 8 or 18.

Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept

I had an excellent discussion with Mike Valle on a number of topics yesterday afternoon.  The following post exfoliates one of the themes of our discussion.

One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006)  is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)

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Whittaker Chambers on Beethoven

Whittaker Chambers (Witness, p. 19) on the Third Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:

. . . that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michaelangelo's vison of the creation.

Well, either the adagio movement of the 9th or the late piano sonatas, in particular, Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111. To my ear, those late compositions are unsurpassed in depth and beauty.

In these and a few other compositions of the great composers we achieve a glimpse of what music is capable of.  Just as one will never appreciate the possibilities of genuine philosophy by reading hacks such as Ayn Rand or positivist philistines (philosophistines?) such as David Stove, one will never appreciate the possibilities of great music and its power of speaking to what is deepest in us if one listens only to contemporary popular music.

Ideals

Not only do we fail to live up to the ideals we have, we fail to have the ideals we ought to have. There are two problems here, the first pertaining more to the will, the second more to the intellect, or rather to the faculty of moral discernment.  Let us consider the second problem.

It is not enough to have ideals, one must have the right ideals. This is why being idealistic, contrary to common opinion, is not always good. Idealism ran high among the members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schuetzstaffel (SS). The same is true of countless millions who became Communists in the 20th century: they sacrificed their 'bourgeois' careers and selfish interests to serve the Party.  (See Whittaker Chambers, Witness, required reading for anyone who would understand Communism.) But it would have been better had the members of these organizations been cynics and slackers. It is arguably better to have no ideals than to have the wrong ones.  Nazism and Communism brought unprecedented amounts of evil into the world on the backs of idealistic motives and good intentions.  Connected with this is the point that wanting to do good is not good enough: one must know what the good is and what one morally may and may not do to attain it.


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Linguistic Smuggling

Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchy, p. 72:

Only religious superstition or the folly of idealist metaphysics could encourage us to assume that nature will prove ultimately rational . . . .

Linguistic smuggling has all the advantages of theft over honest toil. The mere phrase 'religious superstition' smuggles in the proposition that all religion is superstition, while 'the folly of idealist metaphysics' insinuates the proposition that idealist metaphysics is foolish. Both propositions are false; but even if you disagree with me on that, you must agree that they cannot be assumed to be true.

A critical reader doesn't let himself be bullied by verbiage of the above sort. He unpacks the loaded phrases and tests their explosive power, if any.