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ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   Edited 3yr ago   40505 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Every capitalist in the world would be more than happy to embrace socialism in a post-scarcity world. There's no practical difference between prince and pauper in a world like that. I'm aggressively right-wing and if we were actually in Paradise I would not care.

Ascending past all restraint and limitation isn't left or right-wing. Whether you imagine it as an angelic idle life in Heaven, or uploading yourself to the Great Machine, or being cared for by robots in your eternal nursing home, everyone yearns to be free of the human condition. It's one of the few dreams I'd call universal.

It's one of the few dreams I'd call universal.

Well...

Certainly I acknowledge that the vast majority of people, of any political persuasion, if asked if they would like to live in Paradise (whatever we ultimately mean by that term), would answer "yes". The main historical debate has been over whether such a condition was possible, and that debate has been quite vociferous. The most forceful exposition of the view that mankind is inherently flawed and incapable of transcending his limitations is of course found in Christianity. Christians too dream of utopia, but of course since we know that the Kingdom of God is fiction, the Christian position is tantamount to the claim that utopia is impossible and not worth striving for in actuality.

Even still, it cannot be called a universal dream. Orwell's Can Socialists Be Happy? provides some hints in this direction:

A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create. A Catholic writer said recently that Utopias are now technically feasible and that in consequence how to avoid Utopia had become a serious problem. We cannot write this off as merely a silly remark. For one of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world.

I don't think Nietzsche would have wanted to live in Paradise either. Although, in his typical style, he approaches the issue only obliquely; it's more of an ethos that has to be absorbed from reading his entire corpus, rather than an issue he tackles directly in any one place.

Christians too dream of utopia, but of course since we know that the Kingdom of God is fiction, the Christian position is tantamount to the claim that utopia is impossible and not worth striving for in actuality.

This technically violates the rule against consensus-building--"we know" is too strong. More subtly, I know "Christians" (in the sense that they identify with Christianity while doubting the metaphysics of it) who see the Kingdom of God as unattainable but worth striving for as an ideal, so you need to be careful about making assertions regarding what "we" know, as well as what the "Christian position" is.

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