Marx criticizes Hegelian idealism because it argues that big ideas are the drivers of history, whereas Marx argues that it is human beings that drive history, specifically humans that are driven to action by material forces. If we say that Freedom or Liberty, or even that governments or specific leaders or companies, are the prime movers of events, we give power to abstract constructs that confuse the student of history and mystify the actual driving force behind every important event: humans working together to satisfy their material needs.
Marx connects this materialist critique to his ideas about alienation. We alienate humans from the fruits of their labor by attributing their good works to nonexistent constructs, giving the credit due to human beings (for revolutions and large building projects and the development of science/democracy) to Idea. If something was created by humans, we must give humans the credit, and celebrate what we can accomplish when we all work together. This is a celebration of humankind, and denigration of the practice of robbing man of his species essence and accomplishments by claiming that only states and governments and elites and ideas create great things. Humans, driven by their material needs, make history; this cooperation is part of what makes humans human! Consequently we go on to form big ideas and abstract concepts to help us understand this history, but ideas are the products of man, not man’s master. Of course the powerful elites and those who serve them use culture and ideology to convince us that we (the people) are not the drivers of history, thereby robbing humankind of one of its primal attributes. They want us to forget that all we need to accomplish great things is lots of human beings working side by side on a common goal.
Marx wishes to return our species essence to us by reminding us that we make history, we accomplish great things together. All these constructs that seem to have lives of their own, that appear to have autonomy and power over us, are actually just dead things that we have temporarily animated by lending them our species essence. If we remember that we can shape the future simply by working together on a common goal, we rob these constructs of their very life, and empower ourselves to create the change we want to see.
At the same time, Marx breathes life into capital many times, speaking of capital as if it is a living, breathing thing, or a monster, or blood sucking vampire, or a creature with an insatiable desire to grow itself. In his theory of alienation, capital (man’s invention) becomes man’s master while man becomes the slave. Capital turns man into a robot, a production machine, a surplus value generator. Capital has a personality and a reason for existing; it has goals and a mind of its own, and we are helpless under its power. Marx sees this as an empowering message because he argues that if we remember our power and work together, then we can overthrow capital and finally realize our potential.
But these two theories contradict one another. How can we claim that it is wrong to give credit to other constructs for moving events forward, while arguing that capital has a mind of its own, that we are slaves to our creation, and that capital’s desire to expand itself drives events? We must recall that capital itself is a construct that mystifies the processes of history: humans are the real movers. Therefore it isn’t capital that demands to expand itself, but human beings choosing to exploit others for profit. It isn’t capital that forces children into factories and lowers wages in order to extract more surplus value; it is humans who do these things, men who make these decisions. Capitalism is not wrecking the environment: humans are. Capitalism doesn’t alienate us from the fruits of our labor; human bosses, CEOs, managers, stockholders, consultants, consumers, marketers, etc. do. Therefore it isn’t capital we need to overthrow if we wish to create communism, but human action, human behavior, perhaps our own nature, we must overcome.
If we give credit to capital for doing so many things, we give credit to a non-existent figment of our collective imaginations. Might as well say that it is the idea of liberty that drives revolutions, rather than humans who wish for better material conditions. Marx seems guilty of the crime he lays at the feet of ideologues who want us to believe that constructs are actually running the show so that we don’t realize that when humans work together we achieve great things. This is the opposite though: Marx would rather not acknowledge that when humans work together (as exploiters must do to run large capitalist organizations) we can accomplish horrible things in the name of profit; easier to claim that these crimes are actually committed by capital, and we are powerless slaves who cannot escape the grasp of our own invention. Or that if we only could escape it’s grasp, we would finally be free to live in equality. But what are we really overthrowing but the behavior of humans with human brains? Marx’s argument depnds on the notion that there is an entity in control that can be overthrown. If we acknowledge there is no other entity, that we are the drivers of history, we find ourselves in a position where we must acknowledge that if we transition to communism we will still be the same humans, capable of the same greatness and horror. No matter where we go, there we are.
You might say that Marx is robbing mankind of part of its species-essence here, by alienating from man something which is fundamental to his nature: the desire to compete, to exploit, to hoard, to seek profit. Marx extracts those qualities from man and attributes them to an abstract, leaving man as a shell of his former self (in this case, it leaves in man only that which is good, and alienates all that is exploitative). This argument does not attempt to negate all the lovely attributes of man: his innate desire to love, to grow things, to cooperate, to help others, to build. We simply acknowledge that those rosy parts of our nature are not the only parts. To pretend otherwise is to ignore man as he really is, to take something from him that belongs to him by nature.
Marx would rather not admit that human nature has a dark side, or that profit motive and the desire to compete (maybe even exploit) might be hard-wired into us, because that casts doubt on the liklihood of us ever achieving communism (since we can’t help but exploit each other, to compete, to form factions, to seek advantage, to alienate those more vulnerable than ourselves). But if we blame capital and capitalism for this exploitation and alienation, then it becomes easier to believe that if we just overthrow capitalism, we will be free of this slavery, and humans can finally live in unity and harmony and equality and peace. It isn’t our own greed that makes this impossible; it is our invention, capital, holding us down, putting its heel on our throats. But if this turns out to be just another flavor of idealism, and greed is actually part of our nature, and we will exploit each other whether capital is abolished or not, it makes the revolution (and the violent action required to kickstart it) seem much less worthwhile. In this light communism appears a pale, utopian dream. As long as the utopia has humans in it, there will be a mixture of misery and joy, great deeds and lowly ones, kindness and greed, but never communism.
Marx is a materialist. But mustn’t a materialist reject Marx’s perspective on capital? If we can blame a construct like capital for the woes of mankind, then why not breathe life as well into the other big ideas of history like freedom and liberty, and hand them the credit for driving forward all the progress mankind has made in the past 300 years? Of course a materialist cannot accept this premise! Men did those things, and that makes men great. And so then we must admit that men did all the evil things we accuse capital of doing, and that makes men shitty. Materialism does not allow us to have one but not the other.
“Suicide is morally acceptable if the prolongation of one’s life would destroy one’s human dignity."
If we wish to understand and evaluate such an argument at a deep level, we might consider taking these steps:
1. Clarify crucial concepts or jargon that are pivotal to the argument.
In this case, an example would be “human dignity.” We should ask: what does it mean, where is it found, of what does it consist, how might one lose it, what does life look like if one loses it, etc.? Might there be disagreements about the definitions and uses of such a term? We must not take for granted that all people agree on a single definition for dignity.
2. Evaluate various claims made within the argument.
Is it true, for example, that suicide is consistent with human dignity? Can one actually lose her dignity, or is it something inalienable? If one can lose her dignity, is such a loss truly worse than choosing an early death? Under which specific circumstance can we call suicide “morally acceptable?”
3. Uncover the basic moral assumptions that operate in the background of the moral argument; they are unstated, but taken for granted.
If we argue, in this case, that suicide is right if it prevents certain bad consequences, we automatically assume that if an action leads to bad consequences it is wrong, and if it prevents them it is right. We also assume, but do not explicitly state, that we believe it is appropriate to morally evaluate the nature and timing of a person’s death. Is this a fair assumption, or are a person’s individual decisions regarding her own death so personal that they are outside the realm of ethics?
4. Map the internal structure of the larger moral theory which generates and supports the argument.
For example, it might appear at first blush that the argument regarding suicide is part of a larger moral theory which makes claims about the deontic status of certain actions, meaning their rightness or wrongness. It is right, the argument says, to take one’s life, under certain circumstances. This means our moral argument is part of a larger theory of right conduct: a system that tells us which actions are right or wrong.
However if we dig even deeper, we see that there is an even more basic moral theory operating beneath the surface, a foundational theory which supports and shapes the theory of right conduct. That deeper theory might go something like this: “happiness is the only intrinsically good thing in the world.” This is what is known as a theory of value: it tells us which things (or states of mind) are good or bad. This particular theory of value tells us that everything in the world, including one’s very life, is only good to the extent that it generates happiness, for oneself and for others. Upon that foundation, we construct a theory of right conduct: it is morally right, perhaps even our duty, to maximize that which is intrinsically good: happiness. Thus, it is morally acceptable to commit suicide, if by so doing we can create more happiness (for ourselves and our loved ones) than we could by clinging to life a bit longer.
A terminally ill person — who cannot rise from a bed, who is constantly in pain, who is completely dependent on others to help her perform even the most basic and personal human functions, who knows that each expensive day she spends in the hospital drags her family deeper into debt and closer to financial ruin, who has lost entirely her sense of human dignity (without which she feels utterly worthless and despondent) — might draw the conclusion that an early death will spare her family and herself much pain, and that this death, chosen intentionally by her, will restore to her some of the dignity she has lost, which will bring her much joy in her final hours, much more joy than she would feel if she allowed her life to continue. In this particular situation, she reasons, suicide is the only act that could maximize happiness for everyone involved. If this is true, suicide is not just morally acceptable, but also her duty. We see here a theory of value informing and shaping the deontic analysis of actions (theory of right conduct). Through this understanding of the structure of these underlying theories, we gain a clearer picture of a broader worldview at work, a worldview which likely shapes many of this person’s moral arguments.
Now, isn’t this more fun than simply arguing back and forth about morality?
Notes
Mark Timmons, Moral Theory: An Introduction (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002). ↩︎
Utilitarianism starts with a basic premise: every person on earth desires happiness.1 Since happiness/pleasure/well-being (I will use these all interchangeably) are universally desired for their own sakes (not desired as means to some other end, but desired for themselves), they must be intrinsically good, i.e. good for their own sakes, as opposed to instrumentally good.2 If we wish to live an ethical life then, we must aim our actions toward achieving that which is intrinsically good: happiness. This does not mean happiness for ourselves only, but also (more importantly) happiness for others. In fact, it is our moral duty to maximize well-being to the greatest extent possible. If we boil utilitarianism down to its simplest message, it might read: do as much good in the world as is humanly possible.3
Utilitarianism requires us all to look outward, and judge our actions based on how they impact the community of persons affected by our decisions. But often there is a conflict between what the individual desires and what would most benefit the community. In this case utilitarianism issues a direct challenge to the individual: if you desire an end that does not maximize general happiness, you are required to abandon your desire. This turns out to be a very strict standard indeed, one that may require us to make tremendous personal sacrifices for the good of others.
If utilitarianism is supposed to be our guide for living ethical lives, we must recognize right off the bat that most of the decisions we make throughout the day do not maximize general happiness. After all, by taking the time to write this essay, I am choosing not to use that time to serve food to the homeless. Does that mean it is unethical to write this essay, because by doing so I fail to maximize utility? Must I strive to meet the utilitarian standard in all my daily actions? This forceful version of utilitarianism seems to demand that we all become saints, constantly subverting our own desires for the benefit of others. If so, then is utilitarianism even feasible as an ethical theory? If the moral requirement is so strict that normal people are incapable of meeting the challenge, is the theory practical at all?
We all have busy lives full of persons and obligations which require our full attention. Our children, our parents, our spouses, our bosses, and our friends all (rightfully) make demands on our time, leaving us very little bandwidth with which to decipher what “the general happiness” means, let alone time and energy to maximize it. For many parents with young children and full-time jobs, it can feel impossible to do anything for the community while trying to juggle such a home life. Faced with such a complex and intractable dilemma, many people ignore completely the needs of the community, and focus instead on the daily demands of life.
We could attempt to justify such a lifestyle choice (from a utilitarian standpoint) by defining a busy parent’s ‘moral community’ in a narrow way: it includes only her family and friends and colleagues; everyone outside that circle is excluded from the community and therefore excluded from the utilitarian calculus. Does a person with such a narrow moral community live an ethical life? Is it ok to define one’s community so that it only includes those persons one is actually capable of serving while still living a “normal” life? Or must a person restructure her entire life in order to expand that moral community, i.e. tailor her whole existence around service to the wider world, even at the expense of her own family’s happiness?
Really I’m asking: whose happiness should we care most about? Jeremy Bentham answers: “the greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in question [is] the right and proper, and only right and proper and universally desirable, end of human action.”4 This is famously known as the Greatest Happiness Principle. J.S. Mill, a few years after Bentham, demands (in a statement which contradicts many other statements in Utilitarianism) that our moral standard be “not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.”5 Seems clear enough. But for the mother of young children, who has professional, familial, and domestic obligations coming out of her ears, this standard can easily comes off as impractical, useless, even meaningless.
Imagine there are three concentric circles:
The smallest circle contains only your family and closest loved one. The next circle contains all your friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and neighbors, your community, your network. The final circle includes larger populations of strangers, such as your city or perhaps even your whole country. Which of these circles are we to focus on, if we wish to live according to the utilitarian standard? If we dedicate our energies toward creating happiness for one of the circles, we use up time and energy that cannot be spent spreading happiness to the other circles, so a choice must be made. But which is the most ethical option?
If I dedicate myself fully to building the best possible life for my children, wife, and parents (my smallest circle), I will certainly do a lot of good; but such a choice requires that I neglect, to a large extent, the wider world. An afternoon spent playing with my children is an afternoon not spent working at the local food bank; a weekend trip to Arizona with my father requires money that can not be donated to a more worthy cause. Do I truly meet the utilitarian standard if I pour most of my love, care, energy, wealth, and spare time into my family, but largely ignore the happiness of the wider world? Though the happiness within my home will be maximized, and my children more likely to grow up well-adjusted and emotionally stable (compared to children who are neglected), my dedication to the ‘greatest happiness principle’ is questionable at best.
If instead I dedicate my life to spreading well-being to the largest possible number of persons (the outer circles), I might accomplish truly great things!… but at a cost. Those who make such a choice – tireless activists for the poor, traveling community organizers, dedicated and focused union leaders, political dissidents – often make huge sacrifices in the personal sphere in order to fulfill the utilitarian ethic, an ethic which they believe requires them to serve the wider world. Yes my children will be sad if I don’t return at night to tuck them in because I’m working late at the homeless shelter, but so many others will benefit from my actions. If I’m away repeatedly, over the course of many years, my children may develop neuroses and abandonment issues and anger, may grow to hate me, may even have tragic lives. But over those years I could improve the lives of thousands of people. Is this the ethically correct sacrifice: spread joy to the greatest number, at the expense of a few (who happen to be my children)?
Mahatma Gandhi faced this very question, and he chose to serve the widest circle. He was a famously neglectful father, but a saint to a nation.6 Gandhi’s work for the poor, disenfranchised, impoverished, victimized, and low-caste was the ultimate display of utilitarian action.7 He dedicated his entire life to helping the less fortunate; this included extensive travel, the founding of communes, organization of large-scale protests, hunger strikes, the construction of a political party, travel to foreign nations to negotiate with world leaders, and many other activities which demanded his full concentration and energies. In the end his sacrifices and selfless actions improved the lives of millions of people around the world,8 and his legacy continues to inspire people today. However his children felt acutely the sadness and anger that come from having an absent father. His oldest son Harilal, whose relationship with Gandhi was always strained, never forgave his father for the ill-treatment, and later became an alcoholic. It seems there is no way to dedicate our full selves to the service of our closest loved ones AND to the wider world; there will always be a sacrifice one way or the other, and so we must choose.
On the surface the ‘greatest happiness principle’ appears to teach us that the price of a few very sad and neglected children is a reasonable price to pay, if their sadness purchases happiness for thousands of others. But this feels intuitively wrong. How can I be expected to ignore the unfathomably deep love bond I share with my two children? To put it more generally, how can I be expected to care more for strangers than I do for my loved ones? The utilitarian principle seems to insist that if my mission in life is to maximize happiness, it would be absurdly unethical to give special weight to the happiness of two children over the happiness of the larger population. Mill is very clear that one must be “as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator” when it comes to moral questions.9 A truly disinterested spectator would never choose the well-being of her own child over the well-being of many children. But I am tempted to reply (from the gut) that if it is unethical to dedicate my time and service almost exclusively to my children at the expense of thousands of others, then I am content to live an unethical life. Is this my own selfishness at work? Is it nothing more than a self-serving desire to relish the innate, mammalian love bond I feel for my offspring? No there is more to it than that. I genuinely struggle to see the merit in a moral system that tells me it is unethical to love my children (I say love because real love requires time and dedication). I’m ready to state boldly (and obviously) that of course it is ethical to love our children! So how do we reconcile this with the greatest happiness principle?
To begin to answer this question, let’s hit this from another angle: if we universalized the duty to serve the widest circle at the expense of the inner circle, would that actually create a happier world? Imagine if humanity widely practiced such a morality. Many millions of children would wind up neglected and traumatized by parents who felt obligated to serve the world instead of care for their children. Whole generations of young people would carry around the anger, bitterness, resentment, and sense of abandonment that ill-treated children often carry. If this tipped the scales away from general happiness and toward general sadness, if this ended up creating a worse world, we will have failed in our utilitarian mission, even if we intended our actions to create a happier world (this assumes we judge the merit of actions based on actual results as opposed to intended results, which is a debatable question in utilitarian ethics). It seems good for the species if we instead give extra weight to the happiness of our children, and bad for the species to create a generation of persons who have never been taught how to love or how to build lasting relationships. A world of neglected children is a sadder and angrier world. So how can this possibly be the utilitarian standard, if the enactment of such a principle would bring more pain than happiness?
Clearly the greatest happiness principle must mean something besides “always serve the greatest number“. Either that, or the principle itself is false according to its own utilitarian standard, since its enactment would make the world worse-off. It is deliciously ironic that the Greatest Happiness Principle would, if enacted, fail to maximize happiness. It also goes without saying that such a principle would also be completely impractical in the real world, since most parents feel morally and evolutionarily driven to help their offspring flourish. A utilitarian could make a compelling argument that we more fully satisfy the utilitarian standard (we create a happier world) by spending lots of time serving the smallest of circles: our tiny, helpless babies. As Utilitarianism.com says: “As there are obviously good utilitarian reasons to want the next generation of people to grow up to be emotionally healthy and capable agents, there are thus good utilitarian reasons to endorse the social norms of parental care that help to promote this goal.”10
That all being said, there must be some part of the utilitarian standard which does indeed require us to serve people outside our inner circle. We showed above that if we universalized the duty to serve exclusively the outer circle, it would, in the end, likely fail the utilitarian standard, since it would create a worse-off world. Well the same is true if we universalize the duty to serve exclusively our inner circle. Such a principle would require us to maximize happiness for our loved ones and acquaintances, while allowing (or encouraging) us to feel complete indifference or even hatred for strangers, foreigners, the poor, and members of political parties which oppose our own. If we have no moral obligations whatsoever to persons outside our narrow inner circle of acquaintances, we adopt for ourselves an isolationist moral philosophy: my duty of care extends to my own property line, and no further. This state of affairs, which weakens community bonds and encourages a myopic and lonely outlook toward the wider world, sounds tragically like the actual world in which we live.
Clearly utilitarianism, if it is to be useful in this big, scary world, requires a bit of nuance in its application. Mill strives to make utilitarianism a workable and useful theory for every day morality, so he sometimes downplays our individual commitment to the greater good, and tells us we are free to follow our hearts most of the time. This allows us a lot of leeway, but reduces the utilitarian standard to something vague and amorphous, an ethical principle that refuses to state clearly what it requires of us. Are we allowed to substitute the greatest happiness principle for the “create whatever local happiness you feel like creating” principle?
The reality is that real humans do love their children and wish to serve the wider world. Perhaps the answer then is simple: try for a balance. We should give as much love as possible to our inner circles, and occasionally (if we can spare the time) do some work for the outer circle. This seems like a practical solution, but as a moral theory it is weak tea: you’ve got a bunch of love to give, so spread it around in whatever direction feels right. There is some power in the aphorism, “as long as you are loving somebody, you are doing the right thing,” but is this really what utilitarianism is supposed to boil down to?
This idea that at times it is morally right to serve our families, while at other times it is morally right to serve the community, delivers us to the conclusion that utilitarianism cannot be the sole guiding moral law in our lives. Since we are expected to know when it is appropriate to switch between one or the other circle, there must be a principle that we can follow to guide us to the ethically correct decision, a principle which will tell us when to serve our families and when to serve others. Importantly, this principle cannot be utilitarianism itself, because serving any of the circles seems to meet the utilitarian standard in one way or another. A pluralism of ethical theories will be needed to navigate this unending dilemma.
So it seems utilitarianism (at least as Mill and Bentham understood it) cannot properly serve as an end-all, be-all moral system; more lenses are needed if we wish to fully see and appreciate all the complexities of real life. In the meantime, I will love my children, work hard at my job, show love to my wife, and generally work to maximize happiness within my smallest circle of loved ones. Perhaps I sacrifice the Greatest Happiness Principle in order to adopt for my family an “Ethic of Care,” and maybe this is right, even if it means failing to maximize the happiness of the community (failing even to come close to that goal). The necessity, the urgency, the implacability of the love I feel for my children is something utilitarianism simply can’t resolve, unless it abandons (or severely limits) the Greatest Happiness Principle. If it refuses to abandon the principle, it is revealed to be fraudulent as an ethical theory. If it does abandon the principle, what is left of the moral theory besides: “do as much good as you feel like?”
Whenever I quote from Mill’s Utilitarianism (1863), I will cite the chapter/paragraph in the following format: Mill, Utilitarianism, II/2: “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded- namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.” ↩︎
In Mill, Utilitarianism, IV/8, the intrinsic goodness of happiness is a key feature of Mill’s famous ‘proof’ that utilitarianism is right: “…there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for. We have now, then, an answer to the question, of what sort of proof the principle of utility is susceptible. If the opinion which I have now stated is psychologically true- if human nature is so constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness, we can have no other proof, and we require no other, that these are the only things desirable. If so, happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality, since a part is included in the whole.” ↩︎
Russ Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 120. ↩︎
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Press, [1789] 1948), 1. ↩︎
See Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India (New York: Vintage Books, 2013) for a heart-breaking look at Gandhi the absentee (yet often still over-bearing) father. ↩︎
Gandhi was actually quite critical of utilitarianism the political philosophy. He saw the ‘greatest happiness principle’ as justification for majority rule and the exploitation of minorities (happiness and economic prosperity are generated for the majority, at the cost of poverty, disenfranchisement, and unceasing labor for the minority). Instead of the greatest happiness of the great number, Gandhi preferred the greatest happiness of all, a concept which he called Sarvodaya, a Sanskrit term meaning “Advancement of All”. Despite this critique of political utilitarianism, Gandhi’s personal actions typified the utilitarian ethic, which requires immense personal sacrifice as a means to generate as much happiness for others as possible. For an example of Gandhi’s critique of utilitarianism, see his article in Indian Opinion dated May 16, 1908, which appears in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India, 1999), Vol. 8, 316-319. ↩︎
This is a debatable point. However the debatability of this point might not have bothered Gandhi. The philosophical text which most excited Gandhi was Bhagavad Gita which instructs us to focus more on intentions than outcomes. Like utilitarians, we should aim to do as much good as possible in the world, but we should not allow ourselves to become emotionally invested in outcomes outside our control. God may not allow our plans to come to fruition, and we may even be forced to endure tragedy and heart-break and loss; but we must continue to strive for a better world no matter how many times we fail. This is the key to living an ethical life and flourishing personally. This message was very important to Gandhi, who encountered many failures and set-backs and unintended consequences during his long career. For example, despite Gandhi’s best intentions, his actions as an anti-colonial activist were an indirect cause of the horrible sectarian violence that erupted after the partitioning of India in 1947. So though Gandhi made tremendous sacrifices to improve the lives of his people, the actual short-term outcome for much of the Indian people was a mixed bag. There is a lesson here for utilitarians: though a person may sacrifice much in order to maximize happiness for the many, there is no guarantee that she will be successful at maximizing happiness. If we judge a person’s actions solely according to the actual outcomes they produce, we are forced to condemn a person who sacrifices everything in order to spread happiness to the masses but ultimately fails to increase the general happiness. This would mean that Gandhi was not acting ethically any time that his actions inadvertently led to more pain than happiness (any time he failed to maximize utility). But this feels intuitively incorrect, given the sacrifices Gandhi made in the service of so many persons, and given the limited knowledge all humans have about how our decisions will affect the future. TheGita teaches that if you have an honest intention to do good in the world, you work selflessly toward your goal, and you fail, you are still living ethically. Later utilitarian thinkers have distinguished between the actual utility of a certain action (the actual outcome), versus the expected utility of that action (the outcome we expect), which allows utilitarianism to shrug off some of its consequentialist tendencies: if we judge actions based on their expected utility rather than actual utility, we really shift from focusing on outcomes and instead focus on intentions. This brand of utilitarianism teaches: “as long as we truly intend our actions to maximize the happiness of others, our actions are ethical even if we ultimately fail in our goal”. Gandhi would not have called this concept ‘utilitarianism’, but would have instead called it the message of TheGita. Regardless of what he called it, this ethic formed the foundation of Gandhi’s philosophy of action. See: Uma Majmudar’s “Mahatma Gandhi and the Bhagavad Gita” on The American Vendantist website, published Dec. 6, 2014. If you want to explore the philosophy of TheGita further, read this essay. ↩︎
J.S. Mill teaches us that all humans desire happiness. It is therefore right and good that a person should maximize her own happiness, develop a full life rich with various pleasures and containing only minimal pains, invest in herself, experiment with life, flourish. Mill encourages us to pursue these goals through all the stages of our lives. At the same time, he suggests that we are also morally obligated to maximize happiness not just for ourselves but for others too. One’s personal happiness matters little when placed up against the general happiness of a community. So a person can only live ethically by maximizing that which is most good for humans: happiness. Taking this moral duty seriously means dedicating as much time as possible toward the promotion of otherpersons‘ happiness. But what if one’s personal road to happiness does not run parallel to a life spent serving others? In other words, when self-interest and the duty to be selfless conflict, which should win out? This may in fact be the most fundamental question in utilitarian ethics, but sadly Mill is very unclear on this issue.
When I think of “utilitarian ethics,” I imagine a system whose main focus is selfless, individual action which seeks to benefit others in some way. Such an ethical system should require certain kinds of selfless actions, provide a philosophical foundation to justify these actions, define their scope, and perhaps even incentivize persons to act.
By selfless, individual actions, I mean actions which:
A) individuals perform (as opposed to governments),
B) are carried out for the good of others (as opposed to for the good of the individual performing the action), and
C) may require varying degrees of personal sacrifice.
I call this an outward-facing, personal ethics. It strongly encourages, perhaps requires, that the agent promote the happiness of others. This is opposed to an inward-facing, hedonistic utilitarianism which encourages the agent to seek out and maximize her own happiness. Mill has much to say about the latter ethics and less (but not nothing) to say about the former. Does he take outward-facing, personal ethics seriously? If not, can we really call his ethics “ethics” at all?
Mill, who generally takes great pains to be clearly understood, muddles up this whole question to a surprising degree. No doubt, the question of where our duties to ourselves cease and where the duties to others begin is a sticky one. It’s a swamp, a quagmire, a tangled mess. It has flummoxed many a philosopher, and Mill is no exception. Whenever he ventures into the swamp, he immediately realizes the danger and backs right back out again as fast as he can. Before he does, he says just enough to leave the reader puzzled.
Chapter II of Utilitarianism is a fine example of this muddle. It contains some forceful and, at time, grandiose language about the importance of an outward-facing ethics. Self sacrifice for the good of others is “the highest virtue which can be found in man”.1 Actions are right in relation to how much happiness they produce2 (a clear injunction to maximize communal happiness). His emphasis on the importance of human dignity3 and his definition of a happy life4 are of course applicable to the individual focusing on her own happiness, but they could also be ethical calls to arms, demanding that we fight for the restoration of dignity to those who have lost it (through poverty, poor health, or unhappy circumstance), and to lessen the pains felt by those less fortunate than ourselves. He decrees: “I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.”5
Yet in the same chapter, Mill takes pains to water down this outward-facing, ethical duty. It is, after all, unreasonable to require the average person to put her own happiness on hold, to require that she set as her life-long goal the enhancement of communal happiness. “The great majority of good actions are intended not for the benefit of the world, but for that of individuals, of which the good of the world is made up; and the thoughts of the most virtuous man need not on these occasions travel beyond the particular persons concerned, except so far as is necessary to assure himself that in benefiting them he is not violating the rights, that is, the legitimate and authorised expectations, of any one else.”6 So we need not, it seems, concern ourselves with the happiness of individuals outside our tiny circle of self and loved ones. So long as we don’t violate the rights of others, we meet our moral obligation to them. Shortly after the “benevolent spectator” line, he demonstrates his skill at back-pedaling: “It is the business of ethics to tell us what are our duties, or by what test we may know them; but no system of ethics requires that the sole motive of all we do shall be a feeling of duty; on the contrary, ninety-nine hundredths of all our actions are done from other motives, and rightly so done, if the rule of duty does not condemn them.”7 So though he issues the moral injunction that we must be impartial when deciding whose happiness to promote (which could mean it is indeterminate as to whose happiness we must promote, or could imply that the combined happiness of many persons should always outweigh one’s personal happiness), he lets us off the hook immediately after by telling us that 99% of our actions are exempt from the injunction because these actions not part of the moral sphere. What seemed a few minutes ago to be a dynamic and insistent moral creed has now been diluted. The reader is left to question: what exactly is my moral duty? Is there a principle which tells me when it is appropriate to focus on myself and when I am obligated to do the opposite? Where does the moral sphere begin and end? Whose duty am I obligated to promote? Do I meet the utilitarian standard if I live a full and bountiful life that does not include selfless action toward the wider community, or is such a life actually unethical?
An orthodox utilitarian might argue that since it is ethical to maximize that which is most good, and we can only fully maximize happiness if we help as many individuals as possible achieve it, we are ethically bound to adopt an outward-facing, personal utilitarianism, to maximize the greatest happiness for the greatest number. As for our own personal happiness: if we include in our utilitarian calculus the needs of others, our own happiness shrinks down in importance. It is no more than a single datum in the desirability equation, while the happiness of others weighs heavily on the scale. Such an ethic would require us to make daily sacrifices (both short-term and long-term) for the benefit of others. But Mill, who does not wish to upend our personal lives by injecting an unrealistic utilitarian standard into our every waking action, exempts from the utilitarian equation 99% of human action, leaving us free to structure our lives as we wish. As Mill put it, “there is a standard of altruism to which all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond it which is not obligatory, but meritorious.”8 So long as we don’t harm others through our daily actions, it seems we need call forth the standard of (outward-facing) utilitarianism only when we are faced with purely “moral” questions, which is not often.
In this way Mill’s utilitarianism provides us with guidance when we are faced with obvious moral dilemmas (should I cheat on an exam, should I refrain from telling a friend about harmful gossip, should I commit suicide, etc.). His utilitarianism instructs us, in these situations, to ask which option produces the greater net utility for all parties involved, and to pursue that option. In this narrow context, his system offers the individual a practical, outward-facing, moral philosophy. But what about questions about the broader structuring of a moral life: which career should I choose, how should I dedicate my time and resources, how generous should I be, etc.? In the non-stop chaos of daily life, it becomes easy to believe that these are not moral questions at all, but practical or economic questions (“I will choose the career which pays the most; I will dedicate my time to work, family, and hobbies; I will be as generous as possible within the confines of my own self-interest”). If utilitarianism does in fact require us to promote the happiness of others, these questions take on a deep moral significance. After all, every day I spend working on a job which pays me well but does not contribute to the general happiness is a day I cannot spend working toward a nobler goal; every minute I dedicate to water color painting is a minute not spent volunteering at a food bank; every dime I save for myself is a dime I cannot give to a hungry person. Mill does not necessarily want us to see these as moral questions at all; such questions are outside Mill’s sphere of morality altogether. But couldn’t we just as easily argue that an outward-facing utilitarian ethics will require an entire lifetime of selfless action, and that this ethics should rule over the 99% of actions Mill wishes to exempt from the moral sphere?
This indeterminacy as to where my obligation to serve myself ceases and my duty to serve others begins is one of the chief weaknesses in Mill’s ethical philosophy. We can easily find, in Mill, utilitarian justifications for pursuing our own gratification and the happiness of the broader community, without a penetrating analysis of how we should behave when these two goals conflict. Some critics of this utilitarian vagueness have suggested that we could simply justify any action with the claim that it promotes someone’s, anyone’s happiness in some way. D.G. Brown refers to this problem as the “deeper source of indeterminacy in what the Principle of Utility is.”9
Mill makes it clear that it is not only NOT wrong to pursue individual happiness, it is how we should live our lives. Our own happiness will naturally outweigh the happiness of the community 99% of the time, and Mill does not endeavor to develop a moral system which would require us to fight against this innate quality. So perhaps Mill isn’t much of a moralist, but more of a self-help author. He helps us refine our actions so that they aim toward, rather than against, our own happiness. This places his utilitarianism in the realm of personal development more than ethics. Mill wants us to believe that the principle of utility will not only guide us toward our own flourishing lives, but will also somehow motivate us to live virtuously. But for many persons, these are two completely separate (if not contradictory) goals. Since, for the individual, the utilitarian pursuit of happiness is really a theory of individual interest, it cannot act as the referee between our duty to serve others and our naked self-interest. For every statement Mill makes which demands that we focus on the general happiness of the community, he offers a contradictory statement which soothingly urges us not to worry about such lofty ideals, but to focus instead on building happy lives within our own household. Our duty to serve others (which in my opinion is one of the most crucial pieces of a utilitarian ethic) remains wishy-washy and ill-defined. Under Mill’s system, a person could dedicate her entire life to self-gratification, and at the end could claim, so long as she didn’t violate the rights of others, that she met the utilitarian standard. For me, this renders the system practically useless as an ethical system (though it may be worthwhile as a self-help doctrine). So while Mill’s principle of utility does offer us a guide for building a flourishing personal life, for seeking self-actualization, and for achieving a sense of peace and fulfillment after a life well-lived, I struggle to call any of this “ethics”.
Maybe I’m being a bit too harsh on Mill. I understand that he doesn’t advocate selfish behavior. It’s more that his system is incoherent. This incoherence leaves the individual free to do whatever feels right, and that’s why I don’t love calling this “ethics”. Maybe instead I should say it’s a very weak, watered-down ethics, one that permits a wide range of selfish behavior across an entire lifetime. It’s a system that sanctions the general ethics of the average American: focus strongly on family, but don’t feel obligated to develop a duty of care toward the community, unless doing so brings you pleasure. That ethical standard may be easy to meet, but it’s wreaking havoc on our planet, and (dare I say) might actually be unethical.
I want more from utilitarian ethics. I want a standard that is difficult to reach. I know the drawback: fewer people will reach it. But if ethics were as easy as “do whatever good you feel like doing in whatever direction feels right”, then it wouldn’t really be a field of study, it wouldn’t be something philosophers puzzle over. The art of loving oneself, loving one’s family and spouse, and cultivating hobbies is all important and worthwhile, don’t get me wrong. I just want more from an ethical system.
Whenever I quote from Mill’s Utilitarianism (1863), I will cite the chapter/paragraph in the following format: Mill, Utilitarianism, II/19. ↩︎
Mill, Utilitarianism, II/2: “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” ↩︎
Mill, Utilitarianism, II/6: “Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable: we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them.” ↩︎
Mill, Utilitarianism, II/14: “An existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.” ↩︎
Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), Part II: “It is not good that persons should be bound, by other people’s opinion, to do everything that they would deserve praise for doing. There is a standard of altruism to which all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond it which is not obligatory, but meritorious. It is incumbent on every one to restrain the pursuit of his personal objects within the limits consistent with the essential interests of others. What those limits are, it is the province of ethical science to determine; and to keep all individuals and aggregations of individuals within them, is the proper office of punishment and of moral blame. If in addition to fulfilling this obligation, persons make the good of others a direct object of disinterested exertions, postponing or sacrificing to it even innocent personal indulgences, they deserve gratitude and honour, and are fit objects of moral praise. So long as they are in no way compelled to this conduct by any external pressure, there cannot be too much of it; but a necessary condition is its spontaneity; since the notion of a happiness for all, procured by the self-sacrifice of each, if the abnegation is really felt to be a sacrifice, is a contradiction. Such spontaneity by no means excludes sympathetic encouragement; but the encouragement should take the form of making self-devotion pleasant, not that of making everything else painful. The object should be to stimulate services to humanity by their natural rewards; not to render the pursuit of our own good in any other manner impossible, by visiting it with the reproaches of other and of our own conscience. The proper office of those sanctions is to enforce upon every one, the conduct necessary to give all other persons their fair chance: conduct which chiefly consists in not doing them harm, and not impeding them in anything which without harming others does good to themselves.” In this light, our chief moral duty is simply not to do harm to others. ↩︎
D.G. Brown, “What is Mill’s Principle of Utility,” in Mill’s Utilitarianism: Critical Essays, ed. David Lyons (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997), 19-21. ↩︎
This is an easy to understand and down-to-earth introduction to the major ethical theories in western philosophy. The author does not use a professorial tone, but a conversational one, which is fitting of the subject matter. So much of ethics only make sense through discussion of concrete examples and counter-examples, and so it is helpful that the author talks things out in a more casual way, offering up understandable real-world examples along the way.
One distinct feature of this textbook is the author’s affinity for logic: he lays out tons of ethical arguments in the form of syllogisms (premise-conclusion form), and then critiques each argument to test its validity. It’s an interesting way to view ethical arguments, which in the real world are infrequently tested for logical validity. His objections to the various arguments and his defenses of them are often creative and thought-provoking. Sometimes the logical format works well with moral premises, but other times it feels oddly out of place, too strict a system for something as loosely-goosey, as slippery as human morality.
Sometimes the author, in a quest to poke holes in certain ethical theories that he seems not to agree with (such as ethical skepticism), resorts to straw-man arguments, intentionally using flawed premises (or premises that, while being easy to disprove, do not capture the full spirit of the philosophical argument at-hand) when stating the arguments he wishes to dismantle. He doesn’t do this too often, but it does stand out when he does. However, the author doesn’t talk down to the reader in any fashion. The reader is invited (required) to think critically about each of the moral arguments presented, and the author makes it clear that much more philosophical work needs to be done in all of the most controversial areas of ethics. Nowhere in the book does the author claim that there is an easy answer to difficult ethical questions or an open-and-shut case when it comes to challenging moral theories. This book is an excellent starting-off place for those who wish to do that philosophical work themselves, for those who want to walk the long and many-forked road of ethical contemplation.
Overall, the author is an even-handed referee, sorting strong arguments from flawed ones. Though I detect, despite his even-handed approach, that he embraces the theory that there are in fact objective moral truths. He spends the last couple chapters picking apart arguments that express skepticism of our ability to possess objective moral truth, and his efforts to damage skepticism are convincing though not unassailable. I walk away with a deeper uncertainty that moral truth is possible than I had before I read this. It seems that every moral rule (do not kill, do not torture, do not lie) comes with exceptions (it might be ok to kill if someone is threatening to harm your family, it might be ok to torture a terrorist if by doing so we can learn the whereabouts of a bomb that is about to detonate in a major urban area, it might be ok to lie to a Nazi officer who is seeking a family of Jewish refugees that are hiding in your basement). If there are no categorical reasons to follow any particular moral law, there may not in fact be objective moral truths. Perhaps every moral truth is subjective, based on the context of the situation, malleable. Or perhaps moral “laws” are actually just expressions of our emotions rather than objective laws (when we say “it is wrong to torture,” we actually mean “torture makes me mad, grrrrr!”). Or perhaps objective moral truth does exist, but it’s far more complicated than we realize.
This doesn’t mean there is no such thing as moral behavior in the real world (most of the time I decline to torture people), but only that perhaps morality itself is more of a human construct than many moralists would like to admit. As the author acknowledges repeatedly, there is much more work to be done on this question.
Various works by Plato: Charmides, Euthyphro, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, and Ion.
I read these all one after the other, so my head is all full of Socrates’ ancient voice. All of these dialogues show Socrates deep in conversation, challenging his friends and acquaintances in his usual insistent style. Though I too seek wisdom at the feet of the great teacher, I continue to walk away feeling uneasy whenever I drink deeply from the Socratic well.
Whenever Socrates offers up conflicting meanings of particular concepts: Charmides (temperance), Euthyphro (piety), Laches (courage), and Lysis (friendship), it seems that his main goal is to demonstrate that nobody really knows anything, or even worse, to demonstrate that those who believe they have gained knowledge are mistaken. But often all this amounts to is word-play rather than timeless wisdom. Sometimes Socrates seems to want to thoroughly confuse the conversation to such a degree that nobody is sure what is true any longer. His tactic reveals more confusion than it does truth, which may actually be Socrates’ aim.
I’ve written before about Socrates’ habit of using word-play to prove that the so-called experts are actually phonies, and that the average life of the average person is nowhere near as important or authentic or deep as the life of the philosopher. Though the quest for truth was clearly Socrates’ calling, it’s easy to see how his behavior might have annoyed his fellow citizens. He constantly questioned everyone he came into contact with. His questions often led the conversations down zany or even nonsensical paths, where words stop making sense and truth is flipped on its head. Once the victim is thoroughly confused and turned around by Socrates’ inquisition, Socrates can easily accomplish his over-arching goal: proving that people don’t know as much as they suppose.
(This is not to say that Socrates only critiques the ideas of others, and never proposes positive philosophies of his own. He certainly offers up a unique philosophy in the later dialogue Republic, and even in Euthyphro his question about pious acts – whether God loves pious acts because they are inherently right, or whether pious acts are right only because God loves them – has been a relevant question in the field of ethics for over two thousand years.)
It also doesn’t help that many of the characters in these so-called dialogues seem absolutely trusting and worshipful of everything Socrates says. So the format of the dialogue is subverted; Socrates’ logic, no matter how tortured, is rarely challenged in any substantial way. The characters that are supposed to critique, question, and counter-balance Socrates’ philosophy fail in these crucial tasks, and instead show themselves to be either pompous, one-dimensional buffoons (Euthyphro) or yes-men (Socrates’ companions in Lysis). This is fairly harmless in the low-stakes discussion about the nature of friendship, but takes a more troubling form when Socrates lectures on his political philosophy in Republic.
Menexenus has a unique format compared to the others: it’s a satire of political funeral speeches, such as the one delivered (just a generation before Socrates) by Pericles during the Peloponnesian War. Though it seems like Socrates wishes to ironically parody the Athenian tradition of giving funeral speeches (Menexenus mainly features Socrates giving a mock funeral oration), Socrates’ speech really doesn’t sound much different than a real funeral speech. In fact, Plato clearly had a knack for speech writing.
Ion is not so much a dialogue but a lecture that attempts to prove that poetry is delivered to man directly from the gods. It is pious Socrates, Socrates the teacher. His opponent Ion, the renowned performer of the poetry of Homer, has the air of a villain. He is vain and over-confident of his abilities (much like Euthyphro), the perfect target for our hero. So Socrates employs his usual tactic of trying to prove that his opponent knows nothing of that which he considers himself an expert. Ion is shown to be a phony: Socrates uses wordplay to prove that actors and performers do not actually possess an art, knowledge, or even a real skill. And though Socrates’ logic is (as usual) a bit wacky, Ion offers no competing ideas. Thus the format of the dialogue suggests this is an open and shut case by the end; Ion is rightly humiliated, and Socrates once again proves that only he understands real truth. The frustrating part for the reader is that Socrates’ argument leads to a bogus conclusion, and nobody is there to challenge it. Actors and performers do indeed practice an art form and possess a skill set. Socrates doesn’t believe this to be true because he’s got a chip in his shoulder about non-philosophers: anything of value besides Socrates’ own profession (philosopher) holds no value to Socrates, and so he relentlessly attacks any who have not chosen that path. No wonder he was widely detested.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat by Karl Kautsky
It was fascinating to read this critique of Lenin right after reading some of Lenin’s writings from the same exact time frame.
Kautsky buys into the Leninist idea that socialist transformation is inevitable. But unlike Lenin he emphasizes (in a somewhat convoluted fashion) that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Lenin was eager to abandon democracy the very moment his party seized power, and this is really the basis of Kautsky’s scathing critique of Lenin’s tactics.
In his own way, Kautsky supports bourgeoisie democracy because it lays the groundwork for (what he perceives to be) the inevitable proletarian revolution, and allows the workers to voice their grievances and form workers parties (capitalism generally comes with liberty and freedom of speech). He believes that if capitalism continues to grow, the disenfranchised proletariat must grow with it, and so capitalism will inevitably create communism, as Marx argued. The working poor will grossly outnumber the wealthy, and so they will eventually vote their way into power. Kautsky assumes that the workers in a democracy, once given the power, will unanimously demand socialism. And so he’s not so different from Lenin, in that he believes that class interest motivates all decisions (also known as vulgar materialism). Like Lenin he has an idealistic image of a united working class all sharing the same demands and motivations, without disagreements or deviations within the ranks. This is not how real politics works, which makes the idealism of Kautsky and Lenin appear particularly quaint (and in Lenin’s case, dangerously naive). Though Lenin and Kautsky subscribe to the same brand of idealism, they disagree on the timeframe: Kautsky prefers the slow and even development of socialism over time; Lenin demands a violent and immediate revolution (any who refuse to come along with his plan must be purged).
So Kautsky and Lenin both share the same end goal, only that Lenin was too hasty to get there. What is really at the heart of this disagreement over the timeframe of the revolution is a more critical disagreement about democracy. Democracy is a crucial feature in Kautsky’s imagined revolution, and in his imagined communist society that follows that revolution. To take it even further, Kautsky believes that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Without democracy the whole plan will decay into dictatorship. In this regard he was proven right by Lenin. The Bolsheviks’ first move was the dismantling of democracy, including democracy among the workers (many of whom dissented or belonged to different parties from the Bolsheviks). By the time the Bolshevik transition to power was complete, real socialism (read: equality between all classes) was dead in Russia: Lenin’s party (read: the new ruling class) controlled all facets of government, culture, and society, while the teeming masses were disenfranchised to such an extent that they were completely unable to openly voice grievances. The Bolsheviks’ so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” was just a dictatorship, not socialism.
So Kautsky is right in the sense that socialism without democracy decays rapidly into dictatorship or single party rule. However Katusky isn’t particularly clear about how democracy will inevitably lead to socialism. While Lenin squashed democracy in order to preserve his party’s power, Kautsky sees democracy as the pathway to real socialism. But this will only happen if the vast majority demand socialism, and agree on what “socialism” should mean. Lenin rightly understood that this isn’t really feasible. The democratic electorate simply cannot come together on such a large and ambiguous goal, if all citizens are allowed to vote and speak freely. And so Lenin and his small cohort of true believers staged a sudden coup rather than allowing the masses to vote him into power (which he knew they would never do), and then once in charge he destroyed all vestiges of democracy in his rise to absolute power. Was this a cynical attempt to hold onto power, or did he truly believe that by eliminating democracy he would one day create real socialism? Answer: who cares. His method led to totalitarianism, so it was wrong (call me a consequentialist if you like). It was the wrong method both for creating socialism and for governing in general.
Lenin understood, unlike Kautsky, that democracy is more likely to kill socialism than birth it, because factions within workers parties and disagreements between large swaths of the population create deadlock and stalemate and thin margins for change. Generally the most revolutionary outcomes a democracy can hope for are the sort of liberal, incremental, compromise-focused changes that we typically see in parliamentary governments. Kautsky ignores the reality of pluralism, to the detriment of his political philosophy. People hold different opinions and see the world through unique lenses, and this is true even within workers parties and unions. This is a natural facet of humanity, and cannot be ignored. It is a fantasy to imagine that something as intricate as a socialist economy could ever be democratically planned and administered, or that the entire population could even be made to agree that socialism is the correct path, or even be made to agree on one single definition of socialism. Democracy is far too messy and inefficient and factional for that. There will always be disagreements and innovations and challenges to the status quo, and economic factors alone will never be the sole drivers of human behavior. This is why democracy does work well with capitalism, which is also sloppy and unplanned and competitive. Pluralism is one of the driving forces of capitalism, which (like the gene pool) is strengthened by diversity. Lenin understood all of this well, and so (as a hater of diversity) sought to prevent any who opposed him from exercising any democratic power whatsoever. Lenin couldn’t allow factions or even small disagreements to flourish within the party, so he dictated to the party members (and therefore to the people of Russia) exactly what they needed to believe. The result certainly was not capitalism, but it also certainly was not socialism.
So allowing real democracy is unlikely to lead to socialism, but snuffing out democracy only leads to dictatorship and totalitarianism. Socialism fails when it’s undemocratic, and it fails when it’s democratic. I fear that the message here is that socialism is impossible.
Main Currents of Marxism, Volume 2: The Golden Age by Leszek Kołakowski
This book is a masterpiece of philosophical summary and deep-diving analysis. Kolakowski has an uncanny ability to break down and explain even the most complex philosophical arguments in a clear and concise manner. At times he plays the part of omniscient referee, diligently sorting the good ideas from the flawed ones. But never does he simply tell us that a writer’s theory is wrong; instead he identifies the holes in it and pries them open, exposes them to the light, lets the reader decide what to think.
In this book his main target is Leninism, a philosophical tradition absolutely bursting with contradiction and double-talk. Kolakowski’s even-handed tone and mind-bogglingly high level of erudition suggest that he did not intend to write a polemic against Leninism. But in the end Kolakowski’s even-handed philosophical critique of Leninism amounts to a withering indictment of Lenin’s method, his philosophical rigor, his honesty, and his contradictory actions once in power. Lenin is revealed to be a boor, a liar, a tyrant, a power-hungry despot. Kolakowski does not draw these conclusions explicitly, but instead allows the reader to do so. Perhaps Kolakowski is a masterful propagandist who possesses the ability to incept these opinions into the reader’s brain, but I don’t really believe that. Instead he just exposes various thinkers’ theories to the light, that’s all. This doesn’t mean Kolakowski is a constant critic; his analysis is so much more subtle and productive than that. If a theory has enough qualities to withstand the author’s scrutiny, it comes out stronger for it in the end. Kolakowski analyzes many Marxist ideas and traditions throughout his magnum opus, and a good portion of them – those based on sound reasoning, honest argumentation, and deep philosophical reflection – show their quality under Kolakowski’s scrutiny. It just turns out that when we shine this same light on Lenin’s theories, they wither, crack, and fall apart. They are revealed to be hollow and decrepit. (Oh dang I’m being too polemical again).
Kolakowski sees Lenin’s dismantling of Soviet democracy as the original sin of Bolshevism. Lenin’s critique of bourgeois democracy hinged on the notion that modern democracy is a sham: the propertied classes (who overwhelmingly benefit from capitalism and bourgeois law) trick the exploited masses into believing they are sovereign in order to pacify them and prevent revolution, though in reality the workers are largely disenfranchised. In other words, the masses are led by our culture, media, and propaganda (all of which is shaped by the ruling class) to believe in freedom, democracy, individualism, and the sanctity of private property, but all of that is a veil over their eyes that prevents them from noticing that they are slaves. This sentiment, borrowed wholesale from Marx, is compelling in itself. Here’s the sad irony: once in power Lenin banned all democratic expression (including dissent from the proletarians he claimed to speak for), imprisoned his political adversaries, and disallowed any political party but his own. A man who rose to power by arguing that only communism could bring authentic democracy to the masses turned out to be a despot who was so desperate to hold on to power that he fully and permanently disenfranchised the masses. To make it worse, while doing so he claimed that the new Soviet system was a more authentic form of democracy than a parliamentary system could ever be. Kolakowski punishes Lenin for this betrayal of his own principles, simply by laying out the actual actions Lenin took once in power. Turns out that listing Lenin’s achievements is enough to reveal his naked opportunism and staggering hypocrisy.
Kolakowski’s main argument, if one must be identified, is that Bolshevism did not deteriorate into totalitarianism because of Stalin (as is often argued, especially by Lenin sympathizers), but instead because totalitarianism was baked into Lenin’s philosophy from the start, despite all the noises he made about wanting to create a better democracy. Before he was even in power, Lenin fantasized about liquidating all his political opponents, using violent coercion to keep all dissenters in line, and dictating to the masses what was and was not in their best interest. He desired to create a new permanent elite (the communist party officials), but dressed it up as if he was actually abolishing all elites forever, as if his new elite would better represent the masses than could parliamentary democracy. Lenin described in detail his dream of conducting mass confiscations of all private land and surplus (see Lenin’s State and Revolution), and imagined that the bulk of the people would not only celebrate these actions but assist in the mass thievery. In reality, Lenin’s first economic policy of requisitioning “surplus” grain from peasants (or what the requisitioners considered to be surplus) led to widespread mistrust of Lenin’s new state, as well as bribery and coercion. The people did not want to give up their product to the state, and the officials in charge of snatching the goods were highly susceptible to bribes. Their only carrot for making the people obey was threat of force, and use of Lenin’s massive police state infrastructure. Meanwhile all political activity that did not “further the socialist revolution” was anathematized.
This was not Stalinism, but Lenin’s original ideas and policies, the tactics that he used when he (Lenin) was in charge. Modern lovers of Lenin argue that he truly fought for the good of the people, and that after his death it was Stalin who corrupted his ideas and policies, warping them into a totalitarian, violently repressive, hyper-bureaucratic police state. But Lenin was the true founder of Soviet totalitarianism. Kolakowski lays this bare without becoming overly angry in the process (something I would struggle with). In the end, his critique of Lenin is devastating, yet really he lets most of Lenin’s ill-conceived ideas and shameful policies speak for themselves.
What is to be Done? and State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin
Having read a few of Lenin’s writings now, I can say with confidence that I don’t enjoy his written work. He is absolutely humorless in his tone, harsh and reproachful toward anyone who even very subtly disagrees with him, and uncompromising in his particular vision of how a revolutionary party must behave and the goals they must fight for. He believes he is the lone defender of the Truth; anyone who has even the slightest variance of opinion is a liar, fraud, chauvinist, opportunist, or traitor. There is no room for compromise, no point in discussing alternative views, no patience for philosophical objections to his worldview, no time to hear warnings of the dangers that lurk in his political program. In other words, he is insufferable.
He points his intense beam of hatred not just toward the obvious targets (capitalists, politicians, the czar), but also toward his fellow socialists who object to his heavy-handed and dictatorial approach to party management, and even toward workers who don’t conform to his narrow outlook. Reading Lenin, one gets the impression that he would gladly banish from the party (or perhaps from life itself) all those who don’t agree with him on every single point, including proletarians who refuse to convert (though he claims to fight for and speak for the working class). Pluralism is his enemy, which of course makes him the enemy of humanity as it really is: contradictory, sloppy, confused, slow to act, apathetic, open to various arguments from different parties, agnostic. Lenin is a utopian: he believes that one man is capable of unlocking the one single universal Truth that renders all other opinions invalid for all time, and wishes all humans to either conform to his plan or vanish. Only those who show dogmatic adherence to Lenin’s program get to be included in the citizenry, in his revolution, in his definition of “the people.” I have little patience for this kind of approach to politics. Even if he claims to fight for the lowest classes, he is actually an enemy of mankind. Real humans, with all their flaws, can never thrive under a system that requires a hive-mind mentality, requires us to shun anyone and everyone who disagrees with the Founder. Despite Lenin’s best intentions, the party and governmental machinery he hopes to construct will only become the perfect vehicle for totalitarian dictatorship. Lenin himself may not have intended that, but he was so vain and so convinced of the perfection of his own ideas, that he was deaf to this criticism.
For these reasons, I find myself feeling absolutely repulsed and disgusted whenever I read his writing. I want to dismantle his philosophy, shine a harsh light on all its flaws, flay it in the public square and leave it bleeding on the pavement. Why do I care? Because there are those today who still believe Lenin’s philosophy holds the key to solving the major problems of our time: wealth inequality, climate change, etc. Though I still believe that Marxism has much to teach us about our world, and perhaps (when combined with liberal democracy) can even provide us with a workable approach toward addressing problems like climate change, I firmly believe Leninism is a dead end.
Of course, Lenin would say that my opinion here is driven entirely by my class status (I suppose he’d say I’m petty bourgeoisie). But that cop-out argument is the exact reason I detest his arguments: he can’t stomach philosophical critique of his outlook, so he side-steps it by automatically invalidating all criticism by claiming it is driven by class interest. When someone raises a valid question, he slaps him down and calls him an opportunist, as if all objectors are agents for the ruling class. Personally, I fear totalitarianism and understand the value of civil rights, which is why I raised objections to Plato’s Republic. Were those objections class-driven, or perhaps driven by a genuine distaste for dictatorship?
Lenin’s early writings are dictatorial in their approach to party politics, demanding either obedience or expulsion from the party. The society he later founded exhibited these same features on a much grander scale: demanding society-wide obedience to the party, or banishment/death. The inevitable slide into totalitarianism is all right there in his writings, nakedly apparent to anyone who stops to think about what he is actually saying. Lenin claims to speak for the worker, but he only speaks for himself and his cohort of zealots (and opportunists who will ride his coattails to power). That all being said, I think it is imperative we study his work, lest we forget how easily dictatorial thinking can slip into ideology that claims to be selfless, that pretends to serve the long-suffering masses, that promises to build a better world. Just another utopian with a thinly-concealed thirst for power, a desire to be God and remake the world according to his whim. I’ll have more to say about this guy later.
The Iliad by Homer
After reading a bunch of Plato, I felt like it was finally time to tackle this classic of the ancient world. Afterall Homer’s work plays an out-sized role in Plato’s Republic; it is the main target of Socrates’ program of censorship. I can understand why: Socrates wishes for the warriors in his polis to be fearless in the face of death, absolutely selfless in their submission to the will of the state, and incapable of pity or mercy or really any unmanly emotion. Therefore literature in the polis must not portray either soldiers, kings, or gods showing any of those negative (banned) attributes. But in the Iliad, a poem that was legendary even by Plato’s time (Socrates state in Republic that Homer was the poet who educated Greece), soldiers openly discuss their fears about death, the king’s authority is challenged by his subordinates, the childish gods bicker with each other and act in a petty and insolent fashion, and Achilles (the deadliest soldier in the army) whines and weeps and complains constantly about his sorry lot in life. He even sits out of the battle like a coward, all because he is so angry at the king for confiscating his favorite slave woman. While these situations push the drama forward and make the story so much more interesting, Plato can’t allow any of this in his polis. They insinuate that the heroes, the kings we are supposed to obey, and the god we are supposed to worship are all just a bunch of whiny, fearful, petty, contradictory jerks. In other words, they act like real people, and Plato can’t allow that because he is attempting to build something that resembles the Ideal. He can’t have his humans acting like humans! So Homer’s gotta go.
As for my thoughts on the Iliad: I’m glad I read it. The language is beautifully crafted and bursting with delicious similes. Many of these similes reference wild animals, nature, and farm life. These provide a closer look into what actual Greek life was like during Homer’s time (approx. 400 years before Plato). Here are a couple examples:
Like flies swarming around shepherds’ pens in spring, when pails fill up with milk, so the Achaeans, a huge long-haired host, marched out onto that plain against the Trojans, eager to destroy them. Just as goatherds sort out with ease the wandering beasts, all mixed up in the pasture, so through all the army, the leaders organized the troops for battle
He was like a lion slightly hurt by a shepherd guarding his sheep flock out in the wilds, when it jumps the wall into the pen. But he’s not killed it. The wound rouses the beast’s strength. The shepherd can’t keep the charging lion from his sheep, who, left unguarded, panic. Huddled in a mass, they crowd in on one another. So the lion, in his hot rage, leaps over the wide sheep-fold wall. That’s how strong Diomedes went to fight the Trojans in his angry fury.
Aren’t those fun! Honestly though, the plot of this poem is a bit thin. Reading about how the battle went back and forth and back and forth, over and over, and this guy slayed that guy and on and on, it started to feel like I was reading a written account of an Ancient Greek football game, every play written out in epic poem style. In other words it got a bit dull (try describing a football game, play by play, and see if you can keep it interesting). The poem is also surprisingly violent, full of graphic descriptions of slaughter and atrocities. The main characters are all mass murderers, many of them openly reveling in the bloodbath. They have absolutely no problem with slavery, pillage, desecration of their enemies’ corpses, and wholesale butchery. As a fan of history, I appreciate how this draws the reader back to a bygone era, revealing the warped psychology of the Ancient Greek warrior-nobility.
But in the end, I much preferred the Histories of Herodotus to the Iliad. Both are beautifully written, but Herodotus delivers so much more plot and insight into the cultures of the world, so much more varied and deep perspective on he goings-on of man. Homer’s work only gives us a single perspective: those of the warrior-nobility. Homer is blind to the plight of slaves and common soldiers, completely uninterested in the perspective of those who might view the rape and pillage of a city as gross injustices. He’s a man of his time. Herodotus offers up something that feels, at least to me, more timeless.
The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato by Karl Popper
I’m not sure if I was just naturally disinclined to disagree with Plato’s political philosophy, or whether instead Karl Popper incepted the dislike of Plato into my brain. I feel like I probably would have disagreed with Plato no matter what (Plato is a totalitarian idealist after all), but Karl Popper gave me all the tools to turn my vague discomfort into sharpened arguments. I’m sure that a fan of Plato would tell me that it’s an awful blunder to read Popper’s scorching critique of Plato side by side with Republic. Shouldn’t I let Republic stand on its own merit without allowing a critic to tear it apart before I’ve even had a chance to enjoy it? Look, I want to give Plato a chance and all, but I’m so very glad I read Popper’s work, so glad. I am fully under his sway, I’m captivated. I lapped up his critiques like a hungry puppy! Frankly he nails it. He pinpoints exactly what is wrong with idealistic totalitarian thinking. I am so excited to read part two, where he tackles Marxism. I imagine he has much to say about philosophy’s other most famous idealist (yes I know Marx was a materialist, but I also believe he was deeply idealistic in his prophesies about the future, his opinions on human nature, and his belief that class is the ultimate defining feature on one’s life). Popper is a philosopher of science, which means he cares very deeply about scientific method, and about only using the word ‘science’ to describe actual science (not pseudo-science). For example, after reading Popper one realizes how laughable is the notion that a revolution – where so many factors all change at once – can ever be ‘scientific.’ Yet in Marxism there is a belief that if we apply the scientific tools of Marxism, we can not only orchestrate a socialist revolution, but then scientifically engineer a society that can maintain communism and radical democracy. Popper might not flatly argue that the goal itself is impossible, but only that it is absurd to imagine that any part of that chaotic process would be handled ‘scientifically.’ Popper also rejects the notion that history has patterns that, once understood, allow us to predict future historical patterns. Therefore Plato’s theory of history (that history started with the ideal Forms and degenerated over time, but if we make certain changes to society we can return to the ideal that was lost) is hogwash, as is Marx’s prophesy that eliminating capitalism will usher in an era of communism. Anyhoo, I loved this book. I haven’t read an author I agree with more than Popper in a while; I can feel his influence shaping my long-term thinking about philosophy, science, and politics.
Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics by Joli Jensen
This book is a treasure trove! Though I am not a true academic, I not-so-secretly wish I was one, and this book spoke directly to me. Here are some of the nuggets of wisdom I picked up:
Write for 15 minutes per day no matter what. If all you feel is frustration and lack of creativity, write about that. The act of writing will expunge those negative feelings and bring you closer to resolving them.
Close the door to distractions. You have to be willing to shut the rest of the world out for a brief time every day so that you can give your writing the full focus it deserves.
Aim for craftsmanship, not performance for others. You do not need to impress anyone, and your work need not be a timeless masterpiece. Think like a carpenter learning to construct a great rocking chair. It may take many iterations, and each time he learns from his mistakes and makes subtle (or drastic) adjustments to his design, process, and execution. The goal is not to create the world’s greatest rocking chair, a chair that belongs in a museum or on an alter. The goal is to improve steadily, to work on your chops, to gain experience. With this attitude always at front of mind, the pressure of performance dissipates and writing becomes fun and relaxing, a release valve for built-up tension and intellectual backlog, an activity we look forward to.
Save productive minutes for this work, don’t wait til you’re depleted. If you are most productive in the morning, spend 15 minutes writing during that time. You can spare 15 minutes. Don’t wait until midnight, when your brain is shutting down. Write when you are fresh and most productive.
First read "Pascal's Wager" here, specifically Section 233. This is an excerpt from a larger work, Penseés, written by Blaise Pascal (published posthumously in 1670), and translated in 1931 by W.F. Trotter. All the quotations below are from Section 233 of the above work.
Blaise Pascal attempts to use reason to persuade us to choose faith in God: he supposes that any reasonable person would choose to wager in favor of faith. Yet the way he states his famous wager – that when we wager in favor of belief we sacrifice nothing and gain everything – ignores the real sacrifice one must make in order to turn away from agnosticism and accept as true the far-fetched myths of monotheistic religion: one’s reason. So he hopes our reason will lead us to embrace faith, which requires that we give up our reason.
Pascal’s main argument takes the form of a wager: we must bet that God exists because we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. As Pascal puts it: “Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked… Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that He is.” The potential penalty for failing to believe is either eternal torture in Hell or soul death (Pascal does not explicitly say this, though it is implicit in his wager: if all were automatically granted heavenly eternal life after death, there would be no need for faith, and no need for the wager), while the sacrifice for choosing faith is negligible. Since our eternal souls are potentially at risk, and it costs us so little to wager in favor of faith, and we have so much to gain (eternal life) if Christianity proves true, any reasonable person must choose belief in God; reason leads us directly to faith.
Yet Pascal acknowledges that reason is the very thing we must sacrifice in order to embrace faith: “when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life…” So in order to accept the wager we must give up reason, but also we give up nothing. Pascal never acknowledges how momentous this sacrifice really is. Reason may well be an agnostic’s most cherished tool, the defining feature of his personality, the very thing that separates man from beast. Pascal argues that we must give it up, yet he misunderstands what this actually means to someone who cherishes it so dearly: he argues that giving up reason is the equivalent of giving up nothing. Speaking to the agnostic, Pascal says, “at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.” Pascal, himself a philosopher (this is what astounds me) thinks that when we abandon reason we sacrifice nothing of importance, a mere trifle. The truth is this: asking a science-loving agnostic to give up his reason is like asking a religious fanatic to abandon his faith: it is asking someone to abandon what is most precious to him, what defines him; it is the very lens through which one views his world. For an agnostic, reason is not nothing, it is everything.
Pascal bolsters the power of his wager with a moral argument, which is also designed to persuade the reasonable person: faith increases one’s moral goodness, and so it is good even if God turns out not to be real. A believer, through her faith, transforms herself from a sinner ruled by her passions into a new person who is “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful.” Simply by becoming Christian, one becomes a better person. In fact, abatement of one’s passions is a backdoor to faith: “Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured… it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks.” So by faith we avoid Hell, become better people, and escape the grip of our passions; by escaping the grip of our passions (our stumbling blocks) we can achieve faith and thereby avoid Hell. It’s such a simple process, a perfect circle.
These arguments are riddled with weaknesses. First, Pascal does not actually offer any arguments in favor of God’s existence. Instead he begins by simply assuming that Hell is a likely penalty for non-belief. Pascal never offers proof that this outcome is likely, but accepts it a priori. One could just as easily make up another scenario that is just as likely (“unless one believes that stars are fireflies trapped in a giant black net, one will be transformed into a firefly upon his death”), and then apply Pascal’s wager to that new scenario (“to avoid this outcome we all better wager that the stars are fireflies”). This objection becomes clearer when we apply it to a competing religion such as Islam: Pascal’s logic demands that we also wager that the Koran is the revealed word of God, since that scenario is just as likely (or just as far-fetched) as the Christian myth of Christ’s divinity. So which religion do we wager on? Must we choose Christianity simply because Pascal did? He offers no logical reason for why we should wager on one religion over another. Second, Pascal’s wager plays on one’s fear and self-interest as motivators (choose faith to avoid Hell), which taints the moral argument. How will faith make us more selfless if we choose faith for selfish reasons; or honest/sincere if we pretend to believe when we don’t really; or humble if we think that simply by making the correct wager we become worthy of eternal salvation; or steadfast if, cringing, we embrace faith only out of fear of pain? Pascal’s argument doesn’t create a path away from selfishness, but instead embraces selfishness as the ultimate faith-maker. Pascal’s moral argument disintegrates further when we acknowledge that Christians are in fact ruled by the passions. They might express their passions in uniquely Christian ways (perhaps via ecstatic communication with God, or hatred toward sinners, or religious wars and pogroms, or glorious imaginings of the endless pleasures in store for us once we finally reach Heaven), but the passions still run the show. Pascal argues that passion is the “stumbling-block” that keeps agnostics out of Heaven, but Christianity has no problem with passion, as long as the passion exhibited aligns with church dogma; the true stumbling-block – the thing that prevents agnostics from embracing faith – is reason.
While Pascal thinks that reason (which to him means a clear-eyed approach to his wager) will lead one to faith, reason is actually a one-way ticket away from faith. Asking tough questions – for example, why a perfectly-good God would allow evil to flourish in the world, or why God never reveals Himself, or why good people must go to Hell, or why stories in the Bible (such as the creation myth) do not stack up against more recent scientific evidence – only damages faith. When we ask these questions of religion, the end result is not typically an enhanced level of faith. The best way to enhance one’s faith is to avoid asking these questions to begin with, i.e. to allow one’s power of reason to wither so that faith can replace it.
As the philosopher Louise Antony pointed out1, religion itself is only too aware of the dangers posed by reason. In Catholic school Antony was taught as a young girl that “the questions had been put into my head by the devil, and that, indeed, the whole world had been mined with dangerous ideas, ideas that could threaten my faith if I indulged them” (Antony, 142). What a convenient way to do away with difficult questions, as well as any scientific theory that contradicts scripture (such as the theory of natural selection): simply claim that the devil planted these questions/theories to trick us so we wind up in Hell. Many religious myths center around the lesson that humans should face severe punishment for seeking knowledge. Antony recounts that in these myths, “Prometheus is sentenced to eternal torment, Pandora releases pain and sadness into the world, and Adam and Eve, with all their descendants, must toil and suffer” (Antony, 151). Whenever humans attempt to use reason to understand the mysteries of the universe, God punishes them for their insolence. Knowledge and reason belong only to God; when man first attempted to possess these things, that was Original Sin. All this mythologizing makes sense: religion does not want us to use our reason because reason destroys faith. These myths are no more than cheap tactics and expedients that attempt to deprive man of his faculties so he remains completely in the dark and at the mercy of church dogma, fearing so much for his own salvation that he is willing to accept Pascal’s fear-based wager: spend your life pretending to believe something your reason tells you isn’t true, in order to avoid an outcome your reason tells you won’t come to pass.
What is ironic about all this is that Pascal attempts to use reason to convince us that we should abandon reason, that reason is the enemy. He states his argument in such a way as to appeal to a reasoning and self-interested mind. But the end result of all his arguing is that we, atheists and agnostics, must abandon our beloved reason in order to save our immortal souls. He offers a reasoned argument that demands we reject reason. He wants to put reason on a kamikaze mission, hoping that by implementing reason he can destroy reason.
Our reason, our senses, our instincts, our scientific observations, and our knowledge of the inherent contradictions baked into the Christian story of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God shout at us that there is something wrong, something obviously untrue, about Christian doctrine. The dogma appears to us as a whole series of lies and contradictions wrapped up and presented to us as a black or white choice: choose the lies and save your soul, or choose reason and perish. But since Pascal attempts to use reason itself to convince us to go along with his wager, in essence he asks us to use reason just one final time: following Pascal’s line of reasoning should be thelast time in our livesthat we use reason. He threads a needle, hoping that our reason can simultaneously produce faith and convince us never to use our reason again; going forward our quest for truth must be guided solely by faith. Reason, if applied more broadly than Pascal intends, corrupts faith; reason shines so brightly that it can reveal all the cracks and flaws in religious dogma. Therefore once we have made the wager, we must never think too hard about it (or about science or religion) again. Once reason delivers us to faith, its purpose is served; we must leave reason at the dock, cast off the lines, and sail away with faith toward eternity and immortal life, never to return. Or perhaps more aptly: we should be like Lot abandoning Sodom (reason); if we look back even once, we (and our faith) will die.
Pascal knows reason isn’t nothing. That’s why he uses it as his primary tool in his attempt to argue we should abandon it forever. Pascal tells us that any reasonable person should wager in favor of faith, but in reality Pascal doesn’t actually wish for us to use the full power of our reason, because that would cause us to question and ultimately reject church dogma. If we wish to truly respect reason, then our duty is to fully embrace our power of reason, regardless of the consequences to our faith. That being said, though Pascal discounts the importance of (and perhaps misunderstands the point of) reason, he surely understands the mind of Man. Fear and self-interest are great motivators in this big, scary world; Pascal gets this, and so crafts a wager that appears rational on the surface but really just plays on our deepest fears. Wouldn’t most people choose the expedient answer (the answer that pacifies our fears and doesn’t demand that we think too hard), rather than the answer that requires us to embark on the arduous journey to the summit of reason (which might alienate us from our community, and lead us to the conclusions that there is no loving God watching over us, no purpose to the universe, no salvation awaiting us)? Yes, Pascal might employ sketchy reasoning, but he certainly understands what makes people tick.
Notes
The following quotations are from “For the Love of Reason” by Louise M. Antony, from Philosophers without God: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise Antony (Oxford University Press, 2010), which was reprinted in John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer, eds., Introduction to Philosophy : Classical and Contemporary Readings, Seventh Edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
In The Apology, Socrates comes off as a nearly mythical figure. He is the heroic truth-seeker who dedicates his life to exposing ignorance, corruption, and self-righteous hypocrisy; the prophet chosen by a god to enlighten and provoke the people of his city; the philosopher who asks hard questions and refuses to accept easy answers; the martyr who is willing to die for the cause. This is an inspirational story, but it misses something about Socrates’ approach to philosophy that helps to explain one of his main limitations: his personal commitment to unmask and embarrass anyone who claimed to possess wisdom. This practice, which he repeated often throughout his long career, was not only detrimental to his standing in the city, but also largely unproductive as a philosophic endeavor because it failed to bring Socrates much closer to discovering the wisdom he claimed to seek. It also helps explain why the people of Athens grew so exasperated with him.
In his own retelling, he set out at a young age on a lifelong quest to seek out any man who “was thought to be wise by many other people, and especially by himself,” so that Socrates might publicly interrogate him, and in so doing prove to the man and the surrounding crowd that the man “thought himself wise without being so”1. In order to demonstrate to the crowd that the man was less wise than he believed, Socrates would often sow confusion in the conversation, purposelessly attempting to confound the person he was questioning.2 Though Socrates did often achieve his goal of demonstrating that the man was more ignorant than he let on, the unfortunate side effect was that Socrates (to his “dismay and alarm”) made enemies everywhere he went. His uncouth behavior earned him “much hostility of a very vexing and trying sort.”
So the cost was high in this quest for philosophic truth. The problem was that though he claimed to seek truth itself, in practice his agenda was to humiliate “those who think themselves wise but are not.” His goal was not to answer hard questions, but simply to prove that anyone who claimed to know an answer was a fool.3 This reveals a certain arrogance about Socrates: as he fought tirelessly to prove that politicians, lawyers, poets, and even common laborers were, in a certain sense, frauds because they failed to acknowledge their ignorance on certain philosophical matters, Socrates meanwhile strengthened his own deeply-held belief that only he possessed true moral courage: the courage to admit that he knew nothing. In this way he could think very highly of himself and his powers as a philosopher without ever having to take up the much more challenging task of seeking actual answers to the tough questions. Afterall, if one asserts forcefully that he knows nothing (as Socrates did), it gets one off the hook from having to provide answers; instead one can spend all his time trying to prove that everyone else also knows nothing. In a sense it’s as if he set out to prove that true knowledge is impossible, that the best a human can hope for is an honest confession of his own ignorance, and that any who believes he or she has cultivated something of value deserves public scorn.
This is a low standard when it comes to philosophic knowledge, and as a civic philosophy it certainly does not make for a thriving city. A city depends on large groups of citizens cultivating and putting to good use diverse sets of skills and know-how; the city values those skills and considers them worthwhile and necessary. But Socrates believed such knowledge was a mirage, such success was hollow; the only life worth living was a life spent engaged in philosophical inquiry. He openly looked down on the beliefs, priorities, moral courage, and accomplishments of his peers, even going to far as to suggest that their unique successes were not even “real.” For example, when speaking about a champion at the Olympics, he asserted that “that victor brings you only the appearance of success, whereas I bring you the reality.” It is simply untrue that one who has trained his whole life and reached the pinnacle of his profession does not represent “real” success. There are many kinds of success, and one is not objectively more real than another – a philosopher should acknowledge that.
How is it helpful, or wise, to denigrate all professions except one’s own, to declare that everyone who has honed a craft or gained hard-earned knowledge has wasted his time and effort, that his success is all an illusion, that the only way to demonstrate “real” success is to live life exactly as Socrates lived it? Socrates failed to understand the inherent value of pluralism when it came to skills, knowledge, and perspectives, allowing himself to develop a myopic opinion of what “real” success looks like. The various and interweaving skills of the population are what made Athens what it was. No doubt most members of the jury had spent their own lives cultivating their own diverse sets of skills, skills that those jury members likely valued quite highly. In this light, Socrates’ courageous truth-telling probably came off as pretty insulting to the average Athenian who worked hard and cared about his career, family, and hobbies. (Likewise Plato failed to appreciate the importance of pluralism in his political philosophy, but that’s a topic for another essay).
We need to be able to live in the world. The world is not all just a mirage that can be destroyed simply by declaring that nothing is real; nor is it truthful to blithely declare that philosophic knowledge is the only knowledge that truly matters. If one wishes to be a philosopher, he or she should seek answers rather than merely critique anyone who values something in life besides philosophy. It is no surprise – due to his belief that his own esoteric quest was the only way of life that could possess any objective value – that Socrates neglected his own family and their needs. As he put it, “That I am, in fact, just the sort of of gift that God would send to our city, you may recognize from this: it would not seem to be in human nature for me to have neglected all my own affairs, and put up with the neglect of my family for all these years, but constantly minded your interests, by visiting each of you in private like a father or an older brother, urging you to be concerned about goodness.” It is likely that he considered the role of father far less important (less worthy, less “real”) than the role of god-appointed unmasker of ignorance; indeed he was actually trying to teach others how to be “concerned about goodness” by neglecting his own family. For Socrates it was both worthwhile and good to be a wandering philosopher, just as it would have been less good to be a committed father and husband. This is a statement not about objective value, but about what Socrates the man valued.
A true philosopher must be able to comprehend that many other things besides philosophy objectively matter just as much as philosophy, including a lawyer’s knowledge of the law, a poet’s skill with language, a mother’s ability to calm her child, and (a skill Socrates would probably mock, but one he seemed not to possess) the social skills necessary to live in a city without constantly making enemies. Socrates certainly possessed philosophic wisdom, but lacked a certain social wisdom. Is one objectively more important (more “good”) than the other, if we have to live in the world? Can one search for truth without constantly embarrassing one’s peers in the process? Can a philosopher work to uncover deeper truths while accepting that other humans value other endeavors just as highly as the philosopher values his own quest, and that those other endeavors might actually be just as “good” as his own? Or must the philosopher become so bogged down by his own self-importance that he makes it his mission to make enemies out of the whole world? If one truly seeks wisdom, valuing pluralism and diversity of opinion in this complex world is a great place to start.
Notes
I use the translation of Plato’s Apology by David Gallop, appearing in John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer, eds., Introduction to Philosophy : Classical and Contemporary Readings, Seventh Edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). All quotations above are from Apology.
Socrates himself never wrote down his own ideas nor kept records of his conversations. Therefore our only real record of the Socrates’ achievements are the dialogues of Plato, wherein the character “Socrates” often attempts to prove that a so-called wise person is actually quite ignorant. In dialogues such as Charmenides, Laches, and Euthyphro (just to name a few), the conversation ends in confusion, the only conclusion reached that nobody seems to know anything. These early dialogues might be a more accurate representation of the Socrates’ actual conversational method, since they were written when Plato was younger and still under the sway of his teacher. But ultimately we don’t really know how much of the character “Socrates” is a realistic portrayal of the actual man, and how much is Plato’s creative imagination.
This is certainly not true of every Socratic dialogue. In Republic and Phaedo, Socrates offers extended positive arguments about the formation of an ideal society, the nature of reality, the afterlife, etc. It is possible though that by the time Plato was writing these dialogues, he was no longer interested in portraying Socrates as he truly was, but instead began using “Socrates” as a mouthpiece for Plato’s own theories. If we take Apology to be a fairly accurate picture of how the real Socrates described his mission in life, then I think it’s fair to say that one of his main goals was to prove that anyone who claimed to know an answer was a fool.
In May 2021 I picked up An Introduction to Political Philosophy by Jonathan Wolff in a book box. Reading that book was like sampling heroin: I was addicted immediately, my brain permanently altered. Twenty years ago I majored in history, but I only ever took one philosophy class, and no political philosophy classes. I didn’t realize until I read this book what a lost opportunity that was. Since reading that book, I’ve read philosophy almost exclusively, and have developed a strong desire to pursue it academically, to study it to the hilt, to become a philosopher myself. For now I consider myself an undergrad. I have so very much to learn, and I’m restraining my urge to write tons of half baked blog posts based on the scanty information I’ve gleaned over the past two years. My job for now is to read and read and read some more, pausing only to process what I’m reading, take notes, think, and build a research library. My particular area of interest is Marxism, specifically to address the question of whether Marxism is at all a useful tool for solving the major problems of our time, such as income inequality and environmental degradation. But before I can form any opinions on that question (or any other), I need to acquire some background knowledge.
Background knowledge I need to acquire:
The long chain of Western philosophical texts and major ideas that span from the Ancients to today: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Russell, etc., and the political philosophers as well. Also formal logic, philosophy of law, and studies of democracy, liberalism, anarchism, conservatism, and progressivism.
The major socialist and Marxists thinkers that span from the early 19th century to today: Precursors to Marx, Karl Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs, Marcuse, Althusser, Habermas, etc. I must study all the threads of Marxism before I undertake to analyze, critique, or judge the tradition.
Modern interpretations of Marxism: humanist, feminist, ecological, democratic, etc. How are they different from older traditions, and what do they have to say about the older traditions? What problems do these new interpretations attempt to solve? Any successes?
Style guides for academic work, argumentative best practices for works of philosophy.
The history of Marxist and non Marxist revolutions that have occurred during the last 300 years. What forces motivated them, what worked and what failed, what parties and ideologies came to the fore, what were the results?
Goals:
Study the history of western philosophy to the fullest extent possible. My goal is not to become an absolute master of the full spectrum of western philosophy, but to develop a foundational knowledge upon which I can build a more specific area of expertise.
Develop a masterful understanding of the history of Marxist ideas from the beginning to the present, including all the tentacles of this labyrinthine tradition, and where the tradition stands today. This is the critical background information. Along the way, write practice essays on whichever topics catch my fancy.
Develop specialties within the Marxist tradition, and compose a larger work (a thesis?) that pertains to that specialty. Specialty 1: Leninism and Trotskyism (the intricacies of the philosophy, how it has been applied around the world, why it has failed to achieve its goals, whether it is useful today). Specialty 2: (unknown at this time).
Develop a foundational knowledge of the international history of revolutions, from the French Revolution to today.
Construct a thorough and well organized research database that I can tap for various writing projects.
Build toward a synthesis that combines the lessons learned from a long study of Marxism (including an understanding of the weaknesses of the philosophy and the ways it has failed) and wields them against the intransigent problems of today. In other words, find a way to adapt and modernize Marxism, find and fix the weaknesses, and assess whether the tradition has anything to offer against our current problems, or whether it is a philosophical dead end.
Progress so far:
I’ve read a some of the foundational works of Marxism and well as some critical commentary on Marxism (including works by Thomas Sowell, David Harvey, and a compilation edited by Terrell Carver. Mostly I’ve focused on Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky for now, but intend to keep traveling chronologically through the history of Marxism. I consider this a modest start. See my Currently Reading page for titles. I’ve only read these works once, so my understanding of them is that of a student newly exposed to a plethora of difficult and stimulating ideas. Based on this limited first reading, I have started to formulate some embryonic responses which in intend to develop further as I read and re-read these challenging works.
My readings of classic texts from Western philosophy is even more limited. So far I’ve read Plato’s Republic, Crito, Apology, and Phaedo, and well as Karl Popper’s damning commentary on Republic. I’ve listened to a couple survey courses on Audible as well, but that’s about it. My knowledge of philosophy, especially outside the realm of political philosophy, is very limited. I’m signed up to take an Intro to Philosophy course in the autumn.
Following the advice of Umberto Eco in How to Write a Thesis, I’ve started a revamp of the research database I’ve been building over the past two years. I am starting to create “index cards” on the app Trello to document my readings and ideas, so that I can organize them use them repeatedly for various writing projects. This will also help me understand better what I actually want to say down the road.
I have developed some very preliminary hypotheses, namely this:
Marx's critique of capitalism, though slightly dated, still has much to teach us about modern capitalism, and has applicability especially in the face of growing income inequality and climate catastrophe. At the very least it is useful as a set of analytical tools that helps us understand the world in which we live. That being said, his prophesies about the future revolutionary collapse of capitalism and abolition of alienation appear both idealistic and far-fetched, very different from the materialist, scientific criticism of capitalism that he developed over the course of multiple decades and presented so forcefully in Capital. So to summarize: Marx’s critique useful, Marx’s prophesies not so much.
Later, Vladimir Lenin mistook Marx's prophesies as scientific proofs, and so dismissed all critics of Bolshevism as opportunists, liars, frauds, charlatans, and traitors. Armed with the certainty of a religious martyr (and a certain blindness in regards to the weaknesses and contradictions of his own philosophy), he sought to engineer a utopia via authoritarian tactics, paving the way for all the debauchery and mass murder that defined the Stalin era. One of the key mistakes in Lenin’s approach was his cavalier dismissal of liberal democracy as "bourgeoisie democracy,” and his preference instead for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would somehow eliminate all classes, purge out all the capitalist elements (and capitalist people), and then finally dissolve their own dictatorship; the state itself would disintegrate into nothing. And so, through violence and the complete annulment of civil liberties, he would establish mankind's communist utopia.
From his safe haven in London, Lenin argued that the very concept of civil liberties was a sham; all the hard-fought progress mankind had made toward the sanctification of democracy was recast as a grand conspiracy perpetrated against the workers by the propertied classes. Therefore it was in the working class’s best interest to abolish civil liberties in order to accomplish their singular goal: the destruction of all classes and the state (Lenin assumes this is the singular goal of all good and honest proletarians). This was a vulgarization of Marxism. Marx understood that the world is a complex place, and his analysis is filled with endless caveats, disclaimers, and footnotes that demonstrate that he did not believe there were any easy or simple solutions to the world's problems, and neither was it useful to categorically blame the world's problems on one single class. Lenin, on the other hand, has no problem pointing out who the enemies are. He paints a grotesque portrait of human history wherein the bad guys (elites, liberals, intellectuals, capitalists, and even the middle class) cheat and swindle the good guys (the workers) out of their rightful inheritance: a world where no man possesses any power over any other man. Counterintuitively, in order to usher in this perfectly egalitarian world, we must first conduct a violent purge of any who disagree with this interpretation, a holocaust of all "bad guys." In other words, if we just murder enough people, we can finally have our utopia.
Lenin pulled the lever so hard toward the “idealism” direction that his Marxism, once rooted in a scientific analysis of “the now,” lost touch with reality and forgot what real people are like. In his writings, Lenin seemed to expect the workers to all think with one mind and fight ceaselessly for one singular goal, as if the real life proletariat was capable of embodying the ideal Form of “proletariat” that existed in Lenin’s mind. Lenin's ideal proletariat is incapable of pluralism; they have no differing opinions on matters of economics, government, or human morality. Instead they exhibit a hive mind mentality, and dream only of accomplishing Lenin's own goal: the establishment of perfect communism. These ideal workers will joyfully limit democracy in order to expand it, they will violently seize full dictatorial power in order to one day voluntarily dissolve their own power, and they will nullify civil liberties in order to create a more egalitarian society. At best, these contradictions render Lenin's theories incoherent; at worst, they provide a ready-made philosophical justification for totalitarian government.
Lenin's vision of "the people" is highly idealistic. Those who agree with Lenin are “the people” and “the masses.” Those who do not agree - perhaps those who disdain violence in general, or wish to shield their families from war, or voice alternative political/philosophical opinions, or oppose revolution on religious/nationalist/constitutional grounds, or believe that Lenin's narrow road to utopia might contain some potentially catastrophic flaws, or simply hold a different interpretation of Marxism - are not "the people." Since only those who agree with Lenin count as people, many millions of proletarians (the group Lenin claims to speak for) who dissent to Lenin's program will need to be dealt with if the revolution is going to proceed. This will mean mass disenfranchisement, exile, imprisonment, and murder of proletarians. In this way Lenin reveals that, regardless of his claims to the contrary, he cares less about one's class status than about one's agreement with his program. In other words, his version of the "proletarian" dictatorship isn't actually FOR proletarians; it's actually only for people who agree with Lenin. It's a classic one party state - the only thing that matters to the party is that you agree with the party. Agreement with Lenin is the sole real criterion for citizenship; all who dissent must be purged. Thus, "the people" is transformed into "those who agree with the party," which is how Lenin can technically argue that his state is the first state in human history that actually serves "the people" - all persons who aren't part of "the people" are made to vanish entirely.
And so Lenin's new idealistic Marxism predictably dissolved into a totalitarian nightmare; permanent single party rule instead of worker democracy, a new ruling elite instead of a classless society, a totalitarian bureaucracy instead of a dissolved state. It was all right there in his writings, clear as day, before he and his clique ever grabbed the reins of power. Today most people blame the disaster of Soviet totalitarianism on Stalin, but Lenin provided it with philosophical grounding, and certainly got the ball rolling during the brief few years he wielded power.
There must be a way to preserve what is great about Marxism while discarding what is disastrous in Leninism. Most importantly, a synthesis between democracy and socialism must occur if Marxist philosophy is to outlive the revolutionary disasters of the 20th century. We have to drop the notion that a dictatorial “vanguard party” can ever violently establish a classless society, without themselves devolving into a new ruling elite. Without democracy and civil liberties, Marxism presents a recipe for dystopia. But really this assertion demands that we either abandon Marxism altogether (which I do not wish to do), or find a way to combine Marxism with liberalism, without destroying the essence of either.
I believe Marxism may still have a role to play in helping us solve our most intransigent problems, but only if real democracy (not the sham “revolutionary democracy” Lenin promises) plays a key role in the process. Perhaps this amounts to no more than progressivism, or perhaps it will mean more than that. I’m not even close to convinced that it’s possible for humans to transcend capitalism entirely; perhaps progressive capitalism is the closest thing humans will ever achieve to communism, while still preserving democracy. But is modern day progressive capitalism a powerful enough tool in the fight against (capitalism-induced) climate catastrophe? And to question this from another angle, does progressivism actually even lead to increased democratic control over the economy, if the end-result of progressivism is government takeover of industry? If the government is currently run by elites, than transferring ownership of key industries into elite hands doesn't sound particularly democratic either? Is there actually a way to create a more democratic economy, without simply giving in to laissez faire capitalism (which seems to be leading mankind toward climate disaster)?
I’d like to explore ways that we can use Marxism (in one form or another) to address the big problems of our time, but I intend to stay focused at all times on the way humans really are in the real world, and keep idealism out of my analysis. I believe that anyone who promises a utopia and a permanent end to human suffering (especially if this goal can only be attained through violence and repression) is either misguided or a cynical, power-hungry opportunist. But I also don't believe that liberal democracy holds all the keys either. No system is perfect, and costs must be weighed at every turn.
Ok so that’s my rough hypothesis, as it stands today.
“Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people–this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism. Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then ‘the state… ceases to exist’, and ‘it becomes possible to speak of freedom’. Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever.”
The quote above does not sit right with me. I’ve been developing a hunch, or perhaps it’s better to call it a question: can democracy ever realistically thrive under a communist regime? Lenin, quoted above, promises that communism and democracy will support and reenforce one another, that both will thrive together. He argues that by limiting democracy (disenfranchising the “oppressors”) we can eventually create a fuller democracy than any the world has yet seen. But I remain skeptical that a fuller democracy can ever realistically blossom within a communist society, despite Lenin’s promises. Lately I’ve been reading Lenin (State and Revolution and What is to be Done), Trotsky (History of the Russian Revolution), Richard Pipes (The Russian Revolution), Kolakowski (Main Currents of Marxism), Karl Popper (The Open Society and its Enemies), and some Plato too. These writers have greatly influenced my thoughts on this subject. Here’s the way I see it at this moment:
Lenin (and Marx to a certain extent) promise that the coming era of communism will usher in a much more complete democracy than what is possible under capitalism. Yet in order to reach that goal, Lenin openly argues that democracy (for the exploiters and oppressors, and their allies) will need to be curtailed. This appears to be a strange and contradictory argument: we can only expand democracy by limiting it. Personally I get stuck on this point, even if I agree with much of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Lenin’s reasoning sounds so much like some Orwellian parody of totalitarian logic (we can only have freedom if we all become slaves, we can only eliminate the state if we usher in a dictatorship), that my mind struggles to accept its validity. Something here isn’t right.
How can we expect democracy to expand if the first step toward expanding it is the disenfranchisement of “the exploiters”? Afterall, who are these “exploiters?” Such a vague and malleable term, easily abused and manipulated in the hands of a revolutionary tribunal. We must go even further than asking how we will define exploiter, and ask who will decide the definition? This is not a semantic question; the answer to my question will determine who loses their right to participate in this so-called expanded democracy. It’s easy to picture the exploiters as some small cohort of Wall St. fat cats and billionaires, the top echelon of the 1%. To Lenin, these are obviously the “bad guys,” those most responsible for income inequality and exploitation, the first on Lenin’s list of citizens to be purged from the voter rolls (perhaps purged from life itself). But I think any revolutionary party would find that many, many more people than just the top 1% will need to be disenfranchised before the revolution can proceed.
So who is to be robbed of political power? I think the answer would turn out to be: whoever stands in the way of the revolutionary party’s agenda. Realistically, it wouldn’t only be the top tier capitalists who stand in the way of revolution, but also the millions of citizens who align philosophically and ideologically with conservatism, i.e. anyone who believes we should not overthrow capitalism, any one who values the concept of private property. Lenin’s program is so extreme, many left-leaning liberals (who might, in different circumstances, support a progressive government) would flock to conservatism’s banners if private property itself (the concept) was threatened. If democracy were allowed, Lenin’s agenda would face serious, united opposition. To complicate things further, a significant portion of these dissenters would likely be workers.
How can a revolutionary party tolerate these dissenters, if the primary goal is to instigate revolution? I believe the revolutionaries would feel the need to persecute these conservatives regardless of their class status, meaning that working class conservatives (many of whom would certainly resist a communist revolution) would need to be disenfranchised, despite their proletarian status. Whether or not these people are correct for opposing revolution is beyond the scope of this essay. All I mean to say here is that not only the “fat cats” will be disenfranchised, but also many lower-class proletarians as well. This truth uncovers a flaw in Lenin’s materialist logic: economic forces cannot be the sole driver of human action if so many proletarians oppose communist policies. In the real world, it forced Lenin to admit (through his actions) that this corollary is true: Lenin and his Bolshevik Party did not actually fight for benefit of the working class; instead they fought only for the benefit of those who ideologically agreed with Lenin’s philosophy and Bolshevik policies. Essentially Lenin was offered a choice that amounts to the ultimate test of his philosophical integrity: a) allow all proletarians to vote on government policy, thereby sacrificing his communist dream at the altar of proletarian democracy, or b) hold onto power all costs, which entails labelling all dissenting proletarians as class traitors and terrorizing/purging them via a network of informants, secret police, and concentration camps. Of course he chose B, and set the stage for Stalin’s later perfection of the method.
What else could Lenin mean by “exploiters and oppressors” besides those who oppose the revolution? If a large bloc of proletarian conservatives stood in the way of revolution, Lenin would either be forced to purge them from the revolutionary party, or accept that when these citizens vote they will vote against communism, which will likely doom the whole revolutionary effort. Lenin imagined in his pre-revolution writings that it would be easy to identify who deserves to be purged (basically all non-proletarians). In other words, he had a failure of imagination when picturing in his mind his beloved proletariat (or perhaps he idealized them). Either way, he failed to notice that many, many proletarians opposed the Bolsheviks. Thus upon his assumption of power in Russia, he was faced with an unexpected backlash from his own constituency.
And so, predictably, he purged dissident workers right alongside dissenters from other classes. This embarrassingly reveals that class is actually not the most important defining category for Lenin; what he actually cares about even more than class is orthodox agreement with his own political views. Any who can’t meet that standard must be disenfranchised – regardless of class – otherwise the revolution will fail. So the revolution cannot proceed without massive disenfranchisement across all the classes, a disenfranchisement based solely on political beliefs, not on class status.
Thus the quote at the top of this article is proven false. Under Lenin’s revolutionary program, classes do not disappear. The new ruling elite are not proletarians as Lenin promised, but Party Men. One’s class status is determined by one’s obedience to the government and affiliation with the party that rules it. The quote above is also false in its assertion that a truly complete democracy can be realized under (Lenin’s) communism. Lenin’s program can only be implemented if all who disagree with it are labelled as “oppressors” and disenfranchised. How could the disenfranchisement of all citizens who hold ideas contrary to those of the ruling revolutionary party really be the first logical step toward expanding democracy? And how can Lenin claim to rank proletarian status as the ultimate defining feature of his ideal citizen if he does not have a plan for how to deal with proletarians who disagree with him?
If we assume, as Lenin did, that all proletarians will unanimously agree with Leninism, then the question of whether or not to purge proletarians who disagree with Leninism becomes a non-issue. But by doing so, we imagine a world that does not exist today and, given the realities of life in a pluralistic world, is unlikely ever to occur. Though that doesn’t stop utopian thinkers like Lenin from imagining that the proletariat is capable, as if they were one singular body, of absolute unity of thought and purpose, of hive-mind behavior. Perhaps if economic and social circumstances in the USA degraded to such a horrendous extent (as they had in Russia during WWI and after the February Revolution) that a majority of Americans were going on strike, marching in the streets, and demanding urgent and dramatic changes, then Leninist parties might be able to claim large-scale buy-in by the workers. But even then, there would still be workers who believe that parliamentary democracy is the most feasible solution to the country’s problems, and many others who rally to right-wing banners, and many others that would consider themselves progressive while refusing to reject the concept of private property (these types also reject the Bolshevik’s violent methods in favor of constitutional, legislative reforms). This was all true of the Russian proletariat in 1917. In other words, the only way to assume that Lenin wouldn’t need to fight against, disenfranchise, silence, and persecute members of the working class is to assume that all members of this enormous and diverse class are capable of rejecting all but one economic-political theory, of fighting for one singular economic goal (at the expense of all other goals). Humanity doesn’t work like that, not ever.
Pluralism in political thought must be acknowledged by any political theory who wishes to do more than construct utopias in his mind. There are countless reasons why many proletarians, despite sharing with the Bolsheviks a sincere desire to improve the lives of the poor, would reject Leninism entirely. Many proletarians are religious people who might fear losing their freedom to worship, while many others are parents who may oppose revolution simply for the sake of maintaining a peaceful world for their children, while others are patriots who would remain loyal to their countries and therefore oppose an international communist revolution, and others still are modern constitution-loving liberals who consider incremental change to be the ideal way to reform capitalism. Turns out there are many reasons why a proletarian might oppose revolution, and many reasons why their class status might not be the most important motivator behind their ethical and political decisions.
Lenin assumes in a cavalier fashion that the dissenters will be a tiny minority, and all of them complicit in the evil doings of capitalism (i.e. they’re bad guys, and there aren’t a lot of them, so we don’t need to feel bad purging them. In fact, once we purge them, we can finally have the communist society that we, the good guys, all secretly long for). And so when Lenin claims that class status is the most important defining factor in a human’s life, the factor that determines one’s inner-most desires, the factor that determines whether one gets a voice in the new society, he is constructing an “ideal” version of the proletariat, a perfect version. When Lenin discovered that this ideal proletariat did not really exist, he determined that must never allow democracy to fall into the hands of the workers.
So either:
Proletarian status matters more than anything else, in which case the revolutionaries would need to allow proletarian dissenters (conservatives and liberals) to vote, and Lenin’s vision of revolution will likely fail, since class status does not directly determine one’s political beliefs, and the whole body of workers hold so many conflicting opinion about economics, revolution, democracy, politics, religion, etc.;
Or orthodox adherence to the revolutionary party’s goals matter most, which will mean Lenin will be forced to disenfranchise many proletarians, which will reveal the lie behind Lenin’s claim that under communism democracy will be in the hands of proletarians – in fact it will actually be in the hands only of those who agree with Lenin.
Neither scenario gives us a situation where a communist revolution ushers in fuller democracy, or for that matter a democracy in the hands of the proletariat.
I don’t think Lenin would be ready to admit that he ranks “orthodox acceptance of his ideals” higher in importance than class status. He avoids facing this question by instead simply believing that all proletarians are capable of relentlessly pursuing the same political and economic goals; any who oppose these goals must necessarily be in a different class (the oppressive classes), or are perhaps just brainwashed puppets of the oppressive classes (and so must be purged for the common good). True proletarians are incapable of supporting capitalism, representative democracy, or incremental reform on their merits alone. So any proletarians who do support these things must not be true proletarians. In this way Lenin can claim to rank class status first in importance: he defines one’s class not according to one’s material conditions but according to whether that person agrees with Lenin’s views. One simply cannot be a proletarian unless one agrees with Lenin.
I don’t believe all of this was conscious for Lenin; he really does seem to believe that “true proletarians” will all support his personal political goals. Like a Platonic idealist, Lenin appears to believe in a sort of divine category called “proletarian.” All who fall into this category share the same goals, beliefs, desires, and dreams. If given the opportunity, they will prioritize the needs of their class above all other priorities, including religious, familial, national, and of course political. All we need to do is cleanse society of the poisonous residue of capitalism, and the true proletarians can finally come together and achieve their full communist potential. Therefore, according to this idealist-Marxist logic, the proletarians will never fight amongst themselves or disenfranchise one another because they will all agree on the efficacy of disenfranchising the oppressors (and it will be obvious who those people are). The elimination of inequality, exploitation, and profit-motive is the dream of every hard-working proletarian. In fact, Lenin extends this “theory of forms” to all the classes: not just proletarians but also capitalists and middle class people all think a certain way. They are predictable in their ideologies and desires, likely to act a certain way according to their class status. Therefore a figure like Lenin, who can see into everyone’s minds and hearts with the clarity of a god (much like Plato’s philosopher kings who alone understand the nature of the divine Forms), can steer large populations of people according to his almost divine will, and shape society along those hard and unbreakable class divisions.
Or so Lenin might have imagined it.
And then beyond that, I struggle with the question of how, assuming a communist society is able to survive this dictatorial phase of the revolution, democracy can be maintained under communism. Remember, Lenin openly admits that democracy will be curtailed to a certain extent during the revolution, but the second part of his prophesy is that after the revolution, once communism is established, democracy will expand to an even greater level than was possible before the revolution (this promise is made throughout State and Revolution). So Lenin’s promise for post-revolutionary democracy is even grander than his promise about the revolutionary proletariat persecuting the exploiters: he promises that communism will allow us to build “a democracy without any exceptions whatever.” But my intuition tells me that Lenin’s party-driven communism can only thrive if democracy is limited for good, and that the promise of an expanded democracy under communism is a misguided promise that can never be fulfilled.
Democracy cannot expand under communism because that would allow those opposed to communism to dismantle it, simply by exercising their right to vote (or voting representatives into office who will oppose communism). And even after the revolution, when capitalism has been dismantled and relegated to the dustbin of history (assuming it is even possible to do so), there will still always be citizens who wish to try new things, innovate, and challenge the ruling cultural and governmental paradigm. This will be true even if (especially if) communism is in place. Voters who wish to experiment with capitalism, question whether communism is the best method for running an economy, or desire the freedom to practice profit-seeking activities, might vote for policies that undermine communism. And since communism can only be maintained if capitalism is absolutely disallowed from seeping into the system, this sort of “chipping away” would destroy the entire communist effort. Only by purging from the voter rolls those who dissent can communism be maintained (or by disallowing voting altogether, as so many actual communist regimes have done). This of course can be done, but it certainly will not lead to an expansion of democracy. In fact, if this democracy can only allow those who agree with the communist party to vote, this really isn’t a democracy at all; it’s single party rule.
Entropy is the enemy of communism. Communism can only be maintained if the society is united in favor of it, or if those who oppose it are disenfranchised and prevented from practicing capitalism. Every time a free market is allowed to blossom under the communist regime, it weakens communism. But experimentation and profit seeking seem to be natural human behaviors. In any society there will be those who wish to challenge authority, experiment with activities that are banned, or simply try new things. Sometimes these behaviors are driven by profit-motive, but other times those who undertake these risks do so despite the fact that even if they succeed there will be little personal gain (picture Galileo experimenting with physics under the watchful gaze of the authoritarian Catholic church). No matter what social, cultural, or economic system is installed, there will always be humans ready to challenge it. Therefore communists will constantly need to fight entropy to maintain the communist vacuum (i.e. they will constantly need to prevent anyone with ideas that oppose or undermine communism from practicing or voicing those ideas, or voting at all in the “expanded” democracy). Only by eliminating dissenters can communism be maintained, as dissent only introduces cracks and flaws into the system. But if it can only be maintained by purging dissenters and maintaining single party rule, that means democracy is opposed to communism.
The communist tribunal in charge of determining who will be disenfranchised will have some tough questions to wrestle with: shall we allow free-thinkers to speak and act as they please, even if their ideas might undermine communism? Should we allow their ideas into the public forum, where others might debate the ideas or even build upon them? Or do we need to follow Plato (in The Republic) and ban dangerous ideas in order to maintain the purity of the people (to keep people in their ideal categories)? Do we need to disenfranchise or purge any who seem naturally inclined toward profit seeking? Or do we allow any and all to vote, even if the citizenry votes for economic liberalism? How can communism be preserved if regular citizens are allowed to question it, to convince others that it is worthwhile, to allow more income-inequality into society for the sake of upward mobility and innovation, and to accrue wealth and speak publicly about the merits of the profit motive? Either democracy or communism will need to give way.
Perhaps, one could argue, experimentation of this sort is not part of human nature and that it can be expunged if we change the cultural and material forces, if we engineer an ideal society. Perhaps under communism the people will be so content and well-fed, so fulfilled and self-actualized, so full of species-essence, that there will be no need to experiment with the profit motive ever again. All members of society can live their lives in peace, blissfully content with the eternal and unchanging status quo (and so communism would make conservatives of us all). Again, this is just Platonic thought lurking behind the facade of Marxism: the citizens of the ideal polis will all be perfectly content in their categories for all time; the polis will provide all citizens with everything they need to thrive and to fulfill their respective roles in the collective. Who in his right mind would fight or even dissent against the ideal polis (except perhaps one of those nasty exploiters we discussed earlier, but they’re all gone now). Ah Plato, that great enemy of democracy, shows up in the strangest places. Lenin promises democracy, but secretly, quietly, he whispers: why do we even need democracy, since under communism everyone will agree? And so communism will be Lenin’s ideal polis, where justice will be defined as a man fulfilling his role in society without complaint, and where innovation will become unnecessary because perfection has already been achieved. We can even do away with voting because unanimous consent among the entire citizenry will reign. Once communism is established we can arrest all change. There will be no dissent, so there will be no need of democracy or the state. We will all live like brothers and sisters, just as Plato’s guardians would live, if they truly all believed they were gold-souled.
So during the revolution we will need to limit democracy in order to dethrone the bad guys. Then after the revolution, democracy will only be granted to those who agree with the ruling party. Lenin believes this will be just about everyone who is left. Because he believes this, he prophesies that democracy and the state itself will wither away since there will be no need of them (who needs a state, or voting, or politics for that matter, if we all live in eternal peace, agreement, and brotherhood). It’s obvious by now that I consider this prophesy to be an overly optimistic statement of faith. All dissenters will lose their rights to vote (or their lives), and only through severe limitation of the electorate can Lenin be proven true: all voting citizens will agree that communism is the best and most glorious goal for society to pursue because in the end only party members are allowed to vote (and even party members can be easily purged if they disagree with the head man). Or to put it another way: kill everyone who disagrees with us, and we can finally live in a world where everyone agrees on everything (or pretends to agree, out of fear of the purge).
I don’t claim to know the hearts and minds of other men and women. All I can really know is my own mind, and even that can be slippery. So I’m not trying to build some grand theory about human nature. This essay is about the insolubility of democracy in a communist society. I do not consider this question solved for me, nor is my mind made up. In fact I am eager to be convinced otherwise! I ask: can we establish a society with more social and economic equality AND expanded democracy? More work to be done on this front. I’ll note that I do not wish to assassinate Marxism at this time, but only Lenin’s claims about democracy. I hold Marx’s critique of capitalism in the highest regard; he cuts right to the core of what is wrong with capitalism (just as Plato did to democracy). But though Plato, Marx, and Lenin were all expert critics, their proposed solutions were extreme and far-fetched, so I challenge them. Despite their genius and the raw power of their analyses, I challenge them. I reject the parts of their philosophies that endanger democracy, even if I fear where capitalism is taking us. If anything I want to distill the best and most useful parts of Marxism (not so much Platonism), and discover ways to apply those Marxist ideas today, to contribute toward solutions to the pressing problems of our time. But I fear the uncertainty, danger, and authoritarianism of open revolution, and I do not wish to throw democracy in the trash can in the name of overly optimistic experimentation. I worry that Marxism creates too slippery a slope toward authoritarianism.
I should note that I am writing this in the USA, where we currently have a representative democracy. Flawed as it is, it is still a democratic state, which sets a high bar for any revolutionary party hoping to overthrow the current system. Whatever new system they establish would need to include more and better democracy than what we have now, otherwise it will be tough to recruit enough Americans (liberty-minded and democracy-loving as they are) to join the revolution. If I was instead writing from a country with little or no legitimate democracy, or a country still mired in feudalism or facing widespread famine and deprivation or crushed under an imperialist regime, then perhaps the Leninist proposal would carry more wide-spread appeal. Afterall, any democracy would be better than none, and at least the Leninists promise some democracy. But if Marxists can’t find a revolutionary model that appeals to Americans (which will likely mean maintaining high levels of liberty and democracy), then they guarantee that the American people will fight valiantly against the revolution. So either democracy, economics, politics, and culture have to degrade considerably in the USA, or Leninists need to come up with a plan that actually appeals to citizens in a modern democracy, otherwise Leninism is a dead-end in America (and the entire western world I’d wager). Or perhaps Lenin would argue that all citizens of modern-day America are “oppressors” who deserve to be purged by the world-wide proletariat. He might get some support for that one.
Addendum: Review of Karl Kautsky’s Dictatorship of the Proletariat:
Kautsky buys into the Leninist idea that socialist transformation is inevitable. But unlike Lenin he emphasizes (in a somewhat convoluted fashion) that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Lenin was eager to abandon democracy the very moment his party seized power, and this is really the basis of Kautsky’s scathing critique of Lenin’s tactics.
In his own way, Kautsky supports bourgeoisie democracy because it lays the groundwork for (what he perceives to be) the inevitable proletarian revolution, and allows the workers to voice their grievances and form workers parties (capitalism generally comes with liberty and freedom of speech). He believes that if capitalism continues to grow, the disenfranchised proletariat must grow with it, and so capitalism will inevitably create communism, as Marx argued. The working poor will grossly outnumber the wealthy, and so they will eventually vote their way into power. Kautsky assumes that the workers in a democracy, once given the power, will unanimously demand socialism. And so he’s not so different from Lenin, in that he believes that class interest motivates all decisions (also known as vulgar materialism). Like Lenin he has an idealistic image of a united working class all sharing the same demands and motivations, without disagreements or deviations within the ranks. This is not how real politics works, which makes the idealism of Kautsky and Lenin appear particularly quaint (and in Lenin’s case, dangerously naive). Though Lenin and Kautsky subscribe to the same brand of idealism, they disagree on the timeframe: Kautsky prefers the slow and even development of socialism over time; Lenin demands a violent and immediate revolution (any who refuse to come along with his plan must be purged).
So Kautsky and Lenin both share the same end goal, only that Lenin was too hasty to get there. What is really at the heart of this disagreement over the timeframe of the revolution is a more critical disagreement about democracy. Democracy is a crucial feature in Kautsky’s imagined revolution, and in his imagined communist society that follows that revolution. To take it even further, Kautsky believes that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Without democracy the whole plan will decay into dictatorship. In this regard he was proven right by Lenin. The Bolsheviks’ first move was the dismantling of democracy, including democracy among the workers (many of whom dissented or belonged to different parties from the Bolsheviks). By the time the Bolshevik transition to power was complete, real socialism (read: equality between all classes) was dead in Russia: Lenin’s party (read: the new ruling class) controlled all facets of government, culture, and society, while the teeming masses were disenfranchised, impoverished, and completely unable to openly voice grievances. The Bolsheviks’ so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” was just a dictatorship, not socialism.
So Kautsky is right in the sense that socialism without democracy decays rapidly into dictatorship or single party rule. However Katusky isn’t particularly clear about how democracy will inevitably lead to socialism. While Lenin squashed democracy in order to preserve his party’s power, Kautsky sees democracy as the pathway to real socialism. But this will only happen if the vast majority demand socialism, and agree on what “socialism” should mean. Lenin rightly understood that this isn’t really feasible. The democratic electorate simply cannot come together on such a large and ambiguous goal, if all citizens are allowed to vote and speak freely. And so Lenin and his small cohort of true believers staged a sudden coup rather than allowing the masses to vote him into (which he knew they would never do), and then once in charge he destroyed all vestiges of democracy in his rise to absolute power. Was this a cynical attempt to hold onto power, or did he truly believe that by eliminating democracy he would one day create real socialism? Answer: who cares. His method led to totalitarianism, so it was wrong. It was the wrong method both for creating socialism and for governing in general (call me a consequentialist if you like).
Lenin understood, unlike Kautsky, that democracy is more likely to kill socialism than birth it, because factions within workers parties and disagreements between large swaths of the population create deadlock and stalemate and thin margins for change. Generally the most revolutionary outcomes a democracy can hope for are the sort of liberal, incremental, compromise-focused changes that we typically see in parliamentary governments. Kautsky ignores the reality of pluralism: people hold different opinions and see the world through unique lenses, and this is true even within workers parties and unions. This is a natural facet of humanity, and cannot be ignored. It is a fantasy to imagine that something as intricate as a socialist economy could ever be democratically planned and administered, or that the entire population could even be made to agree that socialism is the correct path, or even be made to agree on one single definition of socialism. Democracy is far too messy and inefficient and factional for that. There will always be disagreement and innovation and challenges to the status quo, and economic factors alone will never be the sole driver of human behavior. This is why democracy does work well with capitalism, which is also sloppy and unplanned and competitive. Pluralism is one of the driving forces of capitalism, which (like the gene pool) is strengthened by diversity. Lenin understood all of this well, and so (as a hater of diversity) sought to prevent any who opposed him from exercising any democratic power whatsoever. Lenin couldn’t allow factions or even small disagreements to flourish within the party, so he dictated to the party members (and therefore to the people of Russia) exactly what they needed to believe. The result certainly was not capitalism, but it also certainly was not socialism.
So allowing real democracy is unlikely to lead to socialism, but snuffing out democracy only leads to dictatorship and totalitarianism. Socialism fails when it’s undemocratic, and it fails when it’s democratic. I fear that the message here is that socialism is impossible.
