Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "LastWeekTonight"
channel.
-
6
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
@Indicteronomy Perfectly true -- modulo only the fact that Marxism is basically Victorian-era demands that the workers get all the goodies of upper-middle-class Christian society.
Some Chinese leader lately, I think it may have been Deng Xiao-Ping his good self, threw up his hands in despair at the notion "Bastard peasant Taoism is going to end up being the belief system of the masses."
I.e. we are not going to succeed in imposing this European system on China; we are the waves but they are the ocean depths...
I think this is highly likely. Confucianism for the bureaucracy, Taoism for the masses, and varities of Marxism, none of them taken very seriously, for the educated elite.
The interesting question is, will we come up with anything better? Different, even?
It seems pretty clear to me that the West has rejected Marxism on simple epistemological grounds. Neverthless that division -- varieties of idealism for the educated, technocracy for the operators, and every dopey thing imaginable for the masses -- is pretty much where we are today, isn't it?
Can't we do better somehow?
2
-
@Indicteronomy
Nothing the matter with Taoism. It just seems to me to be a lot of happy-go-lucky Let-It-Be. With upturned corners at the edges of the roofs.
Critiques of Marxism include that there can be no such thing as a science of history; or that it's a Bad Thing given what soi disant followers have done; or the wonderful Yeah, that's right, and I'm glad I'm on the winning side.
My own is the wry "There are only two things wrong with dialectical materialism, the dialectic and the materialism. The dialectic is mysitcal hooey, belief in fairies, nonsense; the materialism is Victorian-era magnets-and-billiard-balls physics."
I think of this as an epistemological attack in that I'm claiming that both knowledge about it all, e.g. the silly dialectic, and the information needed for it to work in its own terms, are nil. Not there. Nonsense.
Maybe I should just call it my Brutalist Attack. Can you get more brutal than there being only two things wrong about two things?
Cheers,
-dlj.
E.O. Wilson did a wonderful piece on the dialectic back around WWI, and it gets reprinted from time to time. I think I last saw it quite oddly, tucked away in the back of a paperback edition of "To The Finland Station." In it he has Marx fumbling around in his study, trying to leave to go to a meeting. "Jenny, Jenny, Where has the dialectic gone? I put it right here. Did you move it while you were dusting. I need it. I need it. Everybody's waiting for me at the coffee house..." and so on.
2
-
2
-
2
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1