Communism?

I recently ran across a copy of the Communist Manifesto by Groucho Marx and Freddie Engels. It looked short enough—sort of a pamphlet—that I thought I might read it. It has a few nice quotes in it, but to me it is hardly the stirring document that is supposed to have inspired the hearts of millions of people. Despite its brevity, I am not sure I understood it. The basic point, I think, is that capitalism creates a “bourgeoisie” class of rich owners of corporations, which oppress the working class “proletariat,” who then inevitably rise up in revolution.

The fall of the USSR was not the failure of communism. The USSR was not a communist country. It was an oligarchy. The leaders pretended that they were communists but actually they were rich capitalists who used power to oppress the very working class they claimed to have liberated. The same thing occurred in China. Today, both countries are oligarchies that use capitalism to make a few people rich, sans most of the communist phraseology. The United States is also an oligarchy. A few rich people make the decisions, regardless of what the citizenry or even the market desires. President Obama recently said that two hundred rich people could determine the outcome of elections. This seemed very cynical to come from the mouth of a man who once exulted in the power of large numbers of people making small contributions, the man who said “Yes we can.” Republicans, of course, believe that this is not just the way it is, but is the way it ought to be. Mitt Romney is five hundred times as rich as I am, which to a Republican means I must be five hundred times as stupid, or lazy, or both. The old USSR, the new Russia, Maoist China, modern China, and the USA are all oligarchies. Oligarchs are the bourgeoisie, and everyone else is the proletariat. Marx and Engels adequately described European society of the early industrial revolution and modern American society, but the description also fits countries that pay lip service to Marx.

The most spectacular failure of the viewpoint of Marx and Engels is that oppressed people have not risen up consistently or for very long. The Occupy Movement, and the democracy movement in Hong Kong, both failed because most people wanted to get back to work, understandably afraid that revolt would make them lose their jobs. The Arab Spring has turned out to mostly be “give us a different dictator.” Corporations own us. Congress, doing the bidding of the rich, has already shown that they are willing to send the entire country into default if we do not do what rich people demand. Corporations own the government too.

The main reason that Marxism has failed is that it does not reflect the dynamics of biological or cultural evolution. Animal societies, including ours, are complex networks of oppression and altruism, which promote the individual genetic fitness of dominant individuals and their families. Marx and Engels were wrong in assuming that the proletariat would work for the good of its own group. (They were also wrong in assuming that family units and religion would disappear. They thought family and religion were economic structures, when in reality they are evolved and instinctual adaptations.)

True communism can work in small communities or tribes, such as Native American villages prior to European conquest or the early communities of the Christian church, but not on a national scale. Neither does free enterprise work on a national scale—and for the same reason: the bourgeoisie, whether in Russia or the USA, want to get money for themselves, regardless of the effects on society. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is not a hand of freedom but an oligarch fist.

Big corporations actually do their best to stifle free enterprise. Let me give you an example. Lots of people want to invest in renewable energy, such as wind and solar energy. People invest in the infrastructure necessary to generate their own electricity, which (if enough of them do it) saves the utilities the potentially huge cost of building new power plants. Sounds like free enterprise: people freely choose to do something that saves them money in the long run. But the Koch brothers do not like it, because it means that the utilities that get fossil fuels from them will not make as much money. So the Koch brothers have gotten state governments, including Oklahoma where I live, to tax solar and wind energy production (see this recent New York Times editorial). The Koch brothers want their enterprise to be free, but no one else’s.

Is there anything we can do? The only changes that have ever amounted to much are the slow ones that germinate and grow in the minds of people. The slow work of health education is largely responsible for the decline in smoking, from its 1965 peak in which 42 percent of American adults smoked (an average of 11.7 cigarettes per day) to its 2011 level, in which only 19 percent of adults smoke, an average of 3.4 cigarettes per day.

What I will do is to continue teaching my students what is right, even if it hurts corporate profits. I want my students to be healthy, even though the tobacco and processed-food corporations will lose profits if my students stop smoking and eat less processed food and less meat, and if they walk instead of driving as much. That is what I will keep doing. I will not hold my breath waiting for the proletariat to rise up.

Merry Christmas, comrade.

Thomas More's Solution, part two

In the previous essay, I described how the sixteenth-century Catholic scholar Sir Thomas More proposed (indirectly, through a fictitious traveler named Raphael Hythloday) a perfect, communistic society. But More went further than just describing the perfect society. He criticized European societies, including the England in which he lived.

European societies, More indicated, made common people suffer. More asked whether having someone on their knees before you make your knees hurt less. How can someone else’s pain lessen yours?

More described the people of Utopia as doing things that would even today draw sharp criticism from conservatives. People voted for their church leaders and there were even a few female priests (something that even today the Catholic Church does not do). Utopia had state-sanctioned euthanasia. Adultery was punished but divorce permitted, thus removing the need for lawyers. (More was a lawyer.) More even admired Utopian courtship. Before marriage, the affianced partners got to look at each other naked so that they would know what they are getting.

War was unknown in Utopia. How did the Utopians manage this? They offered rewards to people from enemy nations who would betray the enemy.

More said that the Utopians were originally pagans but embraced Christianity. However, they banished any Christians who were intolerant of other viewpoints.

Above all, Utopia was a communist society, just like early Christian communities described in the second chapter of Acts. “Though no man owns anything, yet every man is rich.” And yet the rich in England, said More, were not as happy as any of the Utopians. Many sins die when money dies, said More. Wherever people starve, he said, the rich have full barns. He said that it was better “…to be rid of innumerable cares and troubles than to be besieged with great riches.” In England, wealth was measured by how much discomfort it causes to others. He described the love of wealth as a “hell-hound” that “creeps into men’s hearts…”

More has the fictitious Raphael Hythloday criticize sixteenth-century England in these words: “For what justice is this, that a rich…userer [banker]…or to be brief, any one of those who either do nothing at all, or else something that is not very necessary to the commonwealth, should have a pleasant and wealthy living, either in idleness, or in unnecessary business, when meanwhile poor laborers, carters, ironsmiths, carpenters, and plowmen, by such great and continual toil, as beasts of burden are scarce able to sustain, and again such necessary toil that without it no commonwealth would be able to continue and endure one year, yet get so hard and poor a living and live so wretched and miserable a life that the state and condition of the laboring beasts may seem much better and more comfortable? [That was one sentence, but a powerful one.—HA] For they [the animals] are not put to such continual labor, nor is there living much worse; yea, for them it is much pleasanter, for they take no thought in the meantime for the future. But these ignorant, poor wretches [humans] are now tormented with barren and unfruitful labor, and the remembrance of their poor, indigent, and beggarly old age kills them off. For their daily wage is so little that it will not suffice for the same day, much less yield any overplus that may daily be laid up for the relief of old age.”

Of course, More could simply say, “Oh, Raphael said that; I just wrote down his words.” Take that, Harry.

To summarize, More (through Hythloday) is saying, Rich people do very little that is valuable to the nation as a whole, while the poor work as hard as they can, doing jobs that are necessary for the survival of our nation, under conditions that would be considered abusive to animals, and cannot even earn a living wage, much less save up for retirement. The only thing missing from this statement to make it applicable almost five hundred years after it was written is that today the rich people accuse the poor of being lazy. Or at least, in Mitt Romney’s case, 47 percent of them. Today, as in 1516, bankers play around with other people’s money and lose a lot of it, woopsie, and still receive million-dollar bonuses.

I realize that there is likely to be no way that natural selection, whether biological or cultural, could produce a sustainable state of communism. More’s Utopia is a fantasy land easily invasible (I think that’s a word) by selfish people. But it might work on a small scale. More, after all, based his Utopia on vague stories he had heard about Native American tribes. My Cherokee ancestors really did hold all their land in common. More even located Utopia in a vaguely American geographical location.

If you have a better idea, leave a comment. Let’s talk.

Thomas More's Solution, part one

In the previous essay, I explained that we are heading toward a nation and world in which rich people do little work, and poor people are desperate. What can we do to prevent this? The only solution just might be communism.

I do not mean Marxist communism. Marx’s ideas have been demonstrated to be wrong. And both Leninist and Maoist communism failed. One important reason that they failed is that they were not really communism. They were simply oppression. Stalin and Mao lived in luxury. The only thing Marxist about them is that they should have quoted Groucho Marx and said that they would refuse to join any club that would have them as members.

No, the kind of communism that I refer to was described by one of the most famous Catholic scholars of all time: Sir Thomas More (St. Thomas More to you Catholics). You have heard of him. He was the scholar who would not consent to Henry VIII divorcing Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Ann Boleyn. Fat King Harry would not just leave More alone in the silence that he maintained on the subject, but had him beheaded. You can learn about this story by watching the best movie ever made, A Man for All Seasons. The Paul Scofield version is infinitely better than the Charleton Heston version.

Catholics have not generally (except for some Liberation Theologians) been associated with communism. Nor, before Pope Francis, were they likely to criticize rich capitalists. But wait till you hear this.

In his 1516 book Utopia, Thomas More described a fictitious land in which life was perfect, something that More said he wished more than hoped for. This book is where the term “utopia” came from, and it could mean either “good place” or “noplace” depending on which Greek derivation you chose. More meant it both ways. More put his opinions into the mouth of the fictitious Raphael Hythloday, rather than to publish them as his own opinion. That way More could claim that he was simply reporting what this man told him about Utopia and what this man said about England. Below, when I refer to what More said, I mean that he said them through Hythloday.

Utopia was a city in which every man has abundance. More modeled the city of Utopia after the Biblical city foursquare but also after Marco Polo’s Hangzhou, with wide streets, bridges and canals. As in Plato’s utopia, nobody locked their doors. At the time, England had 15-hour workdays, from 5 am to 8 pm, but in More’s Utopia they only worked six hours (this is still more than they worked in Oz). Despite such short workdays, all the necessary work got done because nobody was idle—there were no monks or nobles sitting around and consuming resources while producing nothing of value. Only the essentials were produced, nothing superfluous. The recreation of the Utopian people was learning at home. And there were socially-imposed population limits. If a family had too many kids they had to leave Utopia. Everything was free at the markets since nobody took more than he needed. Hospitals were ample and clean, with isolation wards to prevent contagion. They all ate together in cafeterias, because they loved to eat good food together rather than bad food at home. Even in hospitals, women nursed their own children (unlike B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two). Everyone needed permission to travel, but if a visitor stayed more than a day, he had to work where he was visiting. Nobody had much privacy in More’s Utopia (this sounds like Cuba to me). There was no bank credit, only public credit. Gold had no value to them, unlike iron, air, water, and earth, which are useful. In Utopia, diamonds were for kids to play with. Foreign ambassadors would come wearing a lot of gold, and were mistaken for fools. More pointed out that in England someone with the wits of an ass could rule good people because he had gold. More pointed out that Plato and Francis Bacon also said gold is worthless. Why should anyone admire gold, opined More. Everyone can enjoy the sun and stars for free! Why should anyone admire wool? A sheep once wore it. The counterfeit jewel looks the same as the real one. The Utopians did not wear fancy clothes. With fancy clothes, said More, you “do doubly err,” thinking your clothes are better (which is mere convention) and thinking yourself better for wearing them.

In the next essay, I will continue describing Thomas More’s view of a perfect society, and which might be the only society that can allow the world to avoid massive future crisis.

What Would You Do About…

Note: I am posting a new Darwin video on my YouTube channel StanEvolve. It is not showing up on the main channel page, but if you click on videos, you will find it. It is called Charles Darwin and airplanes. It is about the difference between science and religion.

Note: I am now on Twitter @StanEvolve.

In the previous post, I asked for your input of ideas for this blog. Due to a Blogger website error, you may have missed that posting. If you missed it, take a look at it. I really want to know your input.

But I will also be asking your advice about specific situations. To start: please let me know what you think I should do in the situation I describe below.

I wrote a book review for the National Center for Science Education, which was read by a long-term prisoner in California. He wrote a letter to me, laboriously and carefully and intelligently. We began exchanging letters about evolution. He shared some of his questions and observations, and told me about some conversations he had with his fellow prisoners. I could not send any of my books—prisoners cannot receive hardcover books—but I printed out my summary of the Origin of Species for him, as well as the PDF file of Life of Earth.

I began to notice in his letters that he was dedicated to communism. I suggested to him that communism failed in part because it made incorrect assumptions about human nature (capitalism also makes mistakes, but not the same ones). He wrote back and said he was familiar with the Lysenko story (click here for the Wikipedia summary), but that The Great Stalin and The Great Mao were not responsible for the collapse of communism: it was the fault of infiltrators. He was not angry at anything I said, nor am I at anything he said, and our correspondence will probably continue.

But it is clear to me that he is a fundamentalist communist as unaffected by evidence as any fundamentalist creationist. Fundamentalist faith deflects all contrary evidence by making special accommodations; for example, creationists may say that God nudged the organisms around in the Flood to make the fossils end up in an evolutionary order.

So, what would you suggest that I do? Should I mention to my correspondent that he is using the same patterns of thought that fundamentalist creationists use? My inclination is to simply not discuss such matters any further with my correspondent; I am sure other topics will come up from time to time. But if you think I should write to him about it, let me know—and let me know how—in the comment box.

I look forward to your input on this and other things, and your responses to one another, rather than just waiting for it to happen. I have learned much of what I know by simply listening to others. I have the habit of walking right up to clusters of colleagues and just listening. Sometimes I tell them that I just want to listen and learn. Sometimes it is gossip (which, according to some studies, is nearly always good gossip rather than malicious gossip), sometimes it is major scientific or political insights. In fact, I have learned some things from the intelligent prisoner with whom I correspond.