Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
For anyone who has outgrown callow immaturity, Mayor Zohar Mamdani’s inaugural address was an astonishing indulgence of juvenile fantasy, and an unintended satire of that red century of heinous collectivist misery and slaughter across the globe.
Many factors have contributed to this bizarre outcome of an unaccomplished socialist rich-kid getting elected mayor of the center of international capitalism: Secularism, failing schools, too much leisure, trashy video games, dysfunctional families, bad nutrition, lack of exercise, and toxic materialism. But as always, bad ideas that ignore the reality of a flawed human nature and its “passions and interests,” account for the persistence of collectivism. As Immanual Kant said, “From the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can be made.”
But since Kant’s days, Enlightenment materialist rationalism has dismissed such notions of spiritual reality, and humanity’s fallen nature and existential imperfections. The success of science and technology provided powerful evidence of improvement in human physical existence, which convinced many people that religion was a mere superstition used to explain life in the absence of science.
This development, however, ignored that we still had no truly scientific answers for explaining human beings––their motives, minds, emotions, knowledge, imagination, higher emotions, creativity, and consciousness that no animal can experience. What we do have is scientism, which uses elements of real science like numerical data and technical jargon that to the careless appear to be science, but lack science’s reproducibility.
The most destructive scientism has been Marxism. In Marx’s time, Marxists considered it a science: But today it’s barely even Scientism, which set the table for communism and socialism, its socialite little brother. Marxism took from real science the dubious goal of endless progress and utopian ambitions for improvement, which discarded the historical Judeo-Christian acknowledgement of the tragic vision that “The doer suffers,” as Aeschylus said. Instead, Marxism promoted the juvenile notion that happiness was now our destiny, if only the superstitious people of faith could be educated out of their irrational beliefs, and the wicked greedy capitalists could accept Marx’s collectivism.
Marxism sprang from these ideas as a “solution” to the problems of political strife, inequality, and oppressive power. As such, it was considered not a political philosophy, but a science–one that was utopian and promised continuing improvement of society and human life. As Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral, “Just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, so did Marx discover the laws of human history.”
But Marxism also preached that mankind and sociey can, like Christians, be “born anew,” and be improved by a superior elite’s control over social, political, and economic institutions that can deliver perfect equality and justice for all––“heaven on earth.”
The ultimate practical aim of Marx’s revolution is to seize control of the means of production, so as to shape the economic order away from a free-market economy and private ownership to a state-owned and, centralized technocratic management of “experts” unaccountable to the market or the workers and other citizens.
That transformation is the purpose of the “new man”––to create workers suited like bees to follow orders joyfully, without complaint, like new-born Christians following the gospel of Christ, only without the sacrament of confession. But the Marxist “new man,” according to Trotsky, was marketed with fantastical possibilities in the earthly fallen world of Christianity’s “born again sinners.”
This new man, Trotsky said,
“will make it his goal . . . to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman . . . Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, more subtle . . . The average human type will rise to the heights of a Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. And beyond this ridge, other peaks will emerge.”
“Has Christianity,” Jesuit Cardinal Henri de Lubac wondered, “ever asked such an abdication of the mind? On which side are the miracles more unbelievable?” And is Trotsky’s fever dreams how a genuine scientist talks?
The assumption behind these ideas is that society is fatally flawed and irredeemably unjust, allowing privileged minorities to dominate resources and oppress the masses, thwarting the “heaven on earth” that collectivism could create. Moreover, no amount of progress or improvement satisfies the Marxist critics, who require a state of constant oppression to justify their acquisition of ever-increasing control of power. Perfection becomes the eternal enemy of the good.
Hence the constant, clichéd complaints and assaults on Western Civilization and its alleged flaws. So the indictment goes: Western technology, and science, and their bastard child industrialism have ravaged the earth and exterminated whole peoples, and created global warming that threatens to destroy the human race along with all other life. Radical individualism––or what Mamdani calls “the frigidity of rugged individualism”––has reduced Westerners to insignificant atoms, bereft of the nurturing ties of more organic communities, or as Mamdani put it, “the warmth of collectivism.”
Moreover, the allegedly unique Western sins of imperialism and colonialism have wiped out or deformed more authentic and life-affirming native cultures, reducing their rich diversity to a debased Western model based on capitalist consumerism, frenetic acquisition, a “disenchantment of nature,” a racist fear of the dark “other,” the repression of natural impulse, and a neurotic obsession with power embodied in high-tech weaponry.
The “lonely crowds” of the West in their polluted, crowded, crime-ridden “air-conditioned nightmares” are riven with anxiety and angst, trapped as they are in the soul-killing “cash nexus,” and subjected to the wasteland of popular culture and the machinations of advertisers and political hucksters. Besotted with trashy movies, fascist podcasts and web sites, and television shows distracted by gadgets and toys, numbed by drugs and shopping, their fears and anxieties manipulated by political and economic hegemons, modern Westerners stumble thrßough lives of “quiet desperation,” ignorant of the richer, more fulfilling, more “natural” lives their ancestors once lived before the Western disease began its malignant spread through history.
Finally, this tenentious catalogue of civilizational failure, for more than a century has filled our schools’ curricula and culture both high-brow and low. But it serves an important purpose for the Left to offer an alternative superior to free-market capitalism, one allegedly more humane and virtuous in its care for the “poor” and “oppressed”––of whom, we Americans have the fewest than every country in the world.
Consider also the historical fact that the “warmth of collectivism,” as Mayor Mamdani put it, has actually been a bonfire of collectivism’s continuing utter failures, and has been one of history’s worst enemies of freedom and human rights, costing the lives of millions of people. This pursuit of the perfect has been the enemy of the good. The “crooked timber” of Mayor Mamdani will do no better at creating Marx’s impossible utopia.
