Jesus Was No Socialist

Why are haunted houses never small or modest?

First Reading: Ecclesiastes 1: 2; 2: 21-23

Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities!  All things are vanity!Here is one who has labored with wisdom and knowledge and skill, and yet to another who has not labored over it, he must leave property. This also is vanity and a great evil.

For what profit comes to man from all the toil and anxiety of heart with which he has labored under the sun?

All his days sorrow and grief are his occupation; even at night his mind is not at rest.

This also is vanity.

Second Reading: Colossians 3: 1-5, 9-11

1 Therefore, if you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above; where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God:

2 Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth.

3 For you are dead; and your life is hid with Christ in God.

4 When Christ shall appear, who is your life, then you also shall appear with him in glory.

5 Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, lust, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is the service of idols.

9 Lie not one to another: stripping yourselves of the old man with his deeds,

10 And putting on the new, him who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of him that created him.

11 Where there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. But Christ is all, and in all.

Gospel: Luke 12: 13-21

13 And one of the multitude said to him: Master, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me.

14 But he said to him: Man, who hath appointed me judge, or divider, over you?

15 And he said to them: Take heed and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life doth not consist in the abundance of things which he possesseth.

16 And he spoke a similitude to them, saying: The land of a certain rich man brought forth plenty of fruits.

17 And he thought within himself, saying: What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?

18 And he said: This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and will build greater; and into them will I gather all things that are grown to me, and my goods.

19 And I will say to my soul: Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years take thy rest; eat, drink, make good cheer.

20 But God said to him: Thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of thee: and whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?

21 So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich towards God.

These mass readings for this Sunday amount to a clear rejection of the left-wing idea of “equity.” Justice, Ecclesiastes asserts, requires that a man keep what he has earned from his labour. Not just his physical labour, but also what he has earned from his wisdom, and knowledge, and care. No doubt it is legitimate for government to take some in return for services rendered. No doubt it makes sense to provide a “social safety net” as group insurance. But for a government to get into the business of wealth redistribution is, in the words of Ecclesiastes, “a great evil.” That should settle the matter.

If not, the Gospel conveys the same message. Someone comes to Jesus demanding that his brother divide their inheritance equally. And Jesus refuses.  So much for Marxist equity.

Jesus says “who hath appointed me judge over you?” This is odd, and commands our attention, because Jesus is the rightful judge of the deeds of all. No one has to appoint him. How is it he has no authority in this case?

Because there is no moral issue involved. In an inheritance, neither party has earned the money. Neither has a moral right to it. So it is an administrative issue, a matter for king or Caesar: what does the law say? 

Jesus then goes on to address the moral issue: demanding equity is the sin of covetousness. 

This is not to let the rich off the hook. This is not to praise the rich. As the second, epistolatory reading tells us, their pursuit of riches is idolatry.

I worked for some years in Toronto with and among the “mentally ill.” Some of the names of these street people might surprise you. You might recognize some of the family names. A striking proportion of the severely mentally ill come from prominent families. Few seem to emerge from wealthy families with psyches fully healthy and intact. Most large old houses are haunted, and have closets full of skeletons. We know this, as a folk truth.

Thoe who are rich are likely to be covetous; for those who are covetous are likely to grow rich. This is obvious on the simple and self-evident principle that when we try to get something, we are more likely to get it. The same will be true for those who strive for social prominence. They are almost inevitably idolators.

Mental illness is spiritual illness. Mental illness naturally comes of growing up in a family with values askew. And the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons, unto the third and fourth generation.

The rich are not to be praised or admired; at the same time, it is folly to envy the rich. 

Onward to the Marxist Paradise

 

Seen in the wild:

“Object is to make True Marxism - Not Russian Collectivism - Nor Chinese and North Korean Communism.”

So what is this “true Marxism,” that is not anything we have yet seen?

I assume it is the Marxist utopia: everyone does what they like and gets what they want.

That is a worthy goal. 

Moreover, we seem to be moving toward it. 

It is broadly the result of improving technology: we get more for less work. 

There is less hard manual labour than there ever was, work hours are shorter, and increasingly,  we have less boring, repetitive office labour.

The question is, how to hasten this process?

By eliminating “Marxism” as a political movement.

The free market and financial incentives are best at fostering improved technology.

Were the Nazis on the Left or on the Right?

 

Notorious right-winger

There is a battle online currently between people asserting that the Nazi Party was left-wing, and people asserting it was right-wing. The latter is, of course, the more conventional position.

The argument that it was left-wing, however, is obvious: the name of the party was the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” They claimed to be socialist. Surely the ball is in the court of those who say they were not.

The response on the left is apparently that they were lying. It was a trick to sucker in the working class.

This shows much disrespect for the working class. It also violates the current leftist principle that we must accept everyone’s self-identification. If an apparent man says they are a woman, we must accept this. If they want to be called indigenous and not Indian, we must accept indigenous as correct.

Marxists object that Nazis were not socialists, because socialism means collective control of the means of production, and the Nazis did not nationalize industries.

But ownership is not control.

What they did was change the legal definition of property, so that, while private individuals might technically own things, they did not control them. Everything was subject to the needs of the state. Control was in the hands of the state, including the ability to set wages, prices, levels of production, and dividends—removing the free market and the profit motive. It was socialism in all but a legalistic, technical sense, and then only if you accept only one of several definitions of socialism.

It is standard practice on the left, of course, to exclude any political tendency that differs from their own from their definition of socialism. Maoists insisted that the USSR was not socialist. The Stalinists insisted that Trotskyites were not true socialists. The Bernsteinists insisted that the Bolsheviks were not true socialists. Especially whenever socialism fails to produce desired results, the claim will always be that it was not true socialism.

Another counter-argument is that the Nazis were on the right because they were “nationalists.” This was not socialism, this was “national socialism.”

But if nationalism makes one right-wing, and internationalism makes one left-wing, then the British Empire was left-wing, while Mahatma Gandhi was a right-winger. The IRA was a right-wing organization; in Canada the NDP is right-wing; Washington and Jefferson were right-wingers, and George the Third was the leftist; and Kim Jong Un is on the far right. This defies the common understanding, and amounts to an idiosycratic use of the terms. Nationalism is perfectly orthodox as a part of some leftist ideology.

The modern North American understanding of the political distinction between “left” and “right,” although somewhat ahistorical, is that “left” means increasing the powers and responsibilities of the state and the collective, while “right” means reducing the size and scope of government in favour of the individual. On this scale, even if considered right-wing in their time and place, when “right” and “left” might have had different meanings, Nazism and Fascism stand on the extreme left in our terms.

Another common way to understand the distinction between left and right is that the right is conservative, that is, primarily concerned with conserving, keeping matters much a they have been. The left wants change. “Hope and change.” You know the thing.

By this standard, again, the Nazis were far left. They did not stand for preserving the Weimar Republic, the then-current sysem of government, nor yet for replacing it with the earlier form, the monarchy, that preceded it. They wanted a radical reimagining of society, of the entire world, of conventional morality, even the development of a new human species. They were “futurists.” “Tomorrow belongs to me.”

But the most telling argument that the Nazis were on the political left is that it is the established wisdom that they were on the far right. Here, as everywhere, the rule of thumb is that anything “everyone knows” is true is probably false.

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck is generally understood to be a man of the left. Of Mice and Men is commonly believed to be about the inequities of the capitalist system and the falsity of the American dream of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

Yet the novel can actually be read as a condemnation of Marxism.

The novel is commonly said to be about the Great Depression. This fits the Marxist narrative; the Great Depression is supposedly a failure of capitalism. But in fact, there is nothing in the novel that refers to it, or could not have happened at any time before or since. The West has always been full of itinerant laboring men, ranch hands: cowboys. Some say it has to do with the evils of property ownership; but nobody in the novel actually owns any property, and the prospect of ever owning any is presented as something that never really happens. Even “the boss,” Curley’s father, is not the owner of the ranch, but its manager. The situation is not capitalism, but precisely the situation in a Communist/socialist country.

Lennie’s and George’s well-laid plan, the plan of the title, that gangs agley, of owning a little farm and “living off the fat of the land” sounds suspiciously like Marx’s earthly utopia, in which work would always be voluntary. They are even to achieve it by something resembling a “five-year plan.” Involving Candy putting up a disproportionate share of the purchase price: from each according to his means. The rich must pay their “fair share.” And it is, in the end, only a fantasy, unattainable—the Marxist dream is a fantasy. Or rather, it is attainable only after death. It is a vision of the Christian heaven. This is the whole point of Lennie’s death at the end of the book: he gets to “cross the river,” and his life of soft fur is on the other side. This inverts Marxism, which rejects religion as “pie in the sky when you die.” Steinbeck is countering this, calling Marxism the opiate.

Curley’s wife has a fantasy similar to that of the two ranch hands, of being a showgirl or a Hollywood star. And what impresses her most about the idea is, she notes, that she would no longer have to pay for things. “When they had them previews, I could have went to them, and spoke in the radio, and it woulldna cost me a cent, cause I was in the pitcher.” A specifically socialist image, of no longer needing money. But her low-class speech and malapropisms makes it clear to the reader that her dream is improbable, especially in those early days of the “talkie.” She has been conned by men of a higher social class looking for some quick sex. 

Doesn’t her experience here suggest the experience of the proletariat, offered promises of stardom and an easy life from the Marxist intellectuals generally? They, of course, were never going to be allowed the levels of power. They didn’t have the education for it, did they? That would be left to a “vanguard” of experts. It all amounts to a sordid rape.

Everyone in the book has such a fantasy, with the sole exception of Slim, the artist. Everyone is in denial of reality, in favour of some utopian fantasy. At one point, Candy literally puts his arm over his eyes so as not to see; George or Lennie pull their hat brims down. A secondary theme of the novel, taking place just outside of Soledad, “loneliness,” is the need for companionship. But they crave companionship primarily because they need someone else to believe in their fantasy, in order to convince themselves that it is real. This is why George needs Lennie, and why, with Lennie out of the fantasy, he immediately sees the dream of owning a farm as impossible. 

But conversely, and not to be missed, if someone seems to stand in the way of their fantasy, they spontaneously hate them. Lennie curses the dead puppy for dying, because this threatens his fantasy of tending rabbits on a farm. He feels no remorse for the puppy. Candy curses the girl Lennie has just killed, because her death threatens his fantasy of the farm. He seems to have no thought for her as a fellow human. Curley’s wife despises him because being married to him cannot be reconciled with her dream of becoming a movie star. Curley wants to fight any tall man, because they threaten his fantasy of being the alpha male.

This looks like an analysis of the dynamics of the communist movement, and leftist movements generally. They crave collectivism because they need it to confirm some fantasy which otherwise they as individuals would find hard to believe. Not just the fantasy of a work-free life of abundance on this Earth, living off “the fat of the land,” but fantasies of being a “master race,” or things like slavery being morally okay, abortion being morally okay, casual sex and walking out of marriages being okay. Leftism is a form of what psychologists call “denial.” Denial requires collectivism.

And this collectivism turns into discrimination, cruelty, violence and mass murder of anyone who stands, intentionally or inadvertently, in the way of the dream. Kulaks will be killed, or Jews, or priests, or Christians, or blacks, and so forth. The next big guy who shows up will be attacked. A puppy, or a lonely young girl, or a black man, will be scapegoated.

This is, in itself, perhaps a full explanation of human evil. The water snakes, with their periscope eyes, will just keep coming down the Salinas River.

At very least, if Steinbeck had set out deliberately to criticize socialism and leftism with a novel, he could not have done a better job of it.

The Growing Socialist Threat of Sanders

It is funny to watch a lot of commentators suddenly panicking at the prospect of Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee, including especially many on the left.

After all, he came reasonably close to becoming the nominee in 2016; he was the logical frontrunner for 2020 as soon as Clinton lost that time. How can they have only realized now that he is a “socialist”? How can it only be important now?

And not only is he suddenly discovered to be a socialist. It now turns out that he is, like Trump, another Russian plant. And he’s too old, and he’s hiding how bad his health is.

To some extent, every clearly established frontrunner draws fire. We just went through the taking down of Bloomberg by the other candidates. But Sanders, by comparison, is being taken down by the commentators and the backrooms. And Sanders ought to be already thoroughly vetted, since this is not his first run, and he has been the frontrunner before. It seems hysterical.

The fact that he is a socialist should not sound alarm bells for any Canadian or European. We have avowedly socialist candidates in contention all the time. The US system has checks and balances, as well, preventing any sudden political lurches. Sanders would have to get his initiatives passed by two houses of congress, then vetted by the Supreme Court as constitutional.

As for Russia backing him, it is hard to understand why it is news that Russia tries to influence American elections. After all, America tries to influence elections elsewhere all the time. Former president Obama openly endorsed Justin Trudeau during Canada’s recent federal election. It is hard to believe that only Russia interferes in the US. If the various foreign diplomatic corps and intelligence agencies are not always trying to influence elections anywhere for what they perceive as their interests, they’re not doing their job.

As to Sanders being too old, that concern is only significant if the alternative is Pete Buttigieg. Biden, Warren, Bloomberg, or Trump are almost the same age. 

An underlying and more reasonable concern might be that Sanders cannot win in the general election--because he is too far out of step with the average voter. That may be so; but by the same token, I thought Reagan was too far right to be elected. I thought the same of Stephen Harper. For the most part, people do not vote on ideology or even issues, but on their perception of the character of the candidate.

I suspect the real problem is not that Sanders is a socialist, or a Russian plant, or anything else, but the shock among the commentariat at realizing they are no longer in control even of the left. They had decided that Sanders would not be the nominee, had already taken ruthless measures to make this so, and neither the voters nor the dice have fallen in their favour.

Now Sanders is going to win the nomination at least. He will take over the party, if not the White House, and he will have reason to bear grudges and to clean house.

Individualism vs. Community

Nuremberg shows its community spirit.

I think my leftist friend Xerxes has hit upon something in his latest column: the essential difference between the modern North American left and right. He speaks of joining his church choir as a transcendent experience:

“We have stopped being a collection of individuals, and have become a collective organism. A single mind. And in a sense, a single body – we even have to breathe as one, line by line.

We transcend our individuality. And it feels wonderful.”

And he concludes:

“Worship also attempts to connect with the most transcendent reality of all – merging with the divine.

Granted, not everyone in a choir will reason that singing derives from a universal desire for transcendence. But they all know intuitively they’re part of a community.”

And that's probably the key to it all. To a leftist, this sense of losing the individual in community is a self-evident good. After all, it transcends “selfishness.” So it partakes of the divine. The group is divine.

But any rightist reads that first sentence with horror, and thinks of the tight coordination of the Nazi Nuremberg rallies or the North Korean mass choreographed displays in sports stadia. The solidarity bred by a choir? Like Jack's choir boys in Lord of the Flies? Community is the danger; individualism is what partakes of the divine. 

Pyongyang shows its community spirit.

And I am here to explain why the left is wrong and the right is right.

Individualism is no more “selfish” than community. Every community, by definition, excludes as well as includes. Not all sentient beings are members, or we would not refer to a community. If, then, the members of that community seek their own mutual interests, they are corporately acting as selfishly as any individual would be who did the same acting alone. So selfishness is unrelated to individualism. Either a group or an individual can act either selfishly or unselfishly.

At the same time, individualism means taking responsibility. If you surrender that moral responsibility to a community, and defer to their judgement, you are waiving any ability to act morally. You are, on the other hand, perfectly able to act immorally: if you do something immoral as a member of a group, you are still individually responsible. You cannot say you were “only following orders.” But if, conversely, you help the poor only because you see others doing it, or because it improves your social position, it is no longer a moral act. 

Jonestown shows its community spirit.

This is why “Community,” losing your individuality in the group, is in fact traditionally considered one of the great temptations to sin. “The world, the flesh, and the devil.” Following the social consensus, the community, is “the world.” First named.

Community was the whole idea behind Fascism. That's what the symbol of the fasces was meant to represent. And, of course, community was also the whole idea behind Communism, as the name declares. It was the community of the day who put Jesus to death. A sense of community is, in turn, the underlying essence of all racism, all discrimination, all prejudice. It is the reaction to one "not in our group."  Communitarianism has produced the worst human evils in history.

Community is indeed a human need, or at least a natural human want. Just like food and sex. Accordingly, we legitimately seek community. There is nothing wrong with that. But we do not idolize it, any more than we should food or sex. Bad things then quickly happen.

The important thing is that, when we seek community, we seek it on the basis of morality; we seek to belong only to groups engaged in moral behaviour. And retain our individual judgement.

Selma shows its community spirit.

Solidarity Forever

Marx Brother?

I am a Democratic Socialist.

I might not have known that, had I not watched an interview last night with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congressional candidate who just scored an upset win in the NY Democratic primary. She identified herself as a Democratic Socialist, and, when asked by Stephen Colbert what that means, said it meant three things: everyone should have access to health care, regardless of income; everyone should have access to post-secondary education, regardless of income; and everyone should have a roof over their heads, regardless of income.

I wholeheartedly agree with all three of those assertions, and never knew they had anything to do with socialism. Milton Friedman, too, felt that post-secondary education should be at no cost to the student: an obvious matter of equality of opportunity. Richard Nixon was the first to attempt universal health care in the US. It is the right in Canada, notably Hugh Segal, who are advocating a Guaranteed Annual Income. As to the very idea of a “social safety net”―you can trace that back to that wild-eyed radical, Bismark. A Marxist friend of mine claims that Marx himself was opposed to welfare.

There seems to be some sort of miscommunication here. If this is what Democratic Socialism is, we are all or almost all Democratic Socialists. Except possibly for the Marxists. What we disagree about is only what we can afford, and how most efficiently to achieve it. Surely I am missing something here?

I think Ocasio-Cortez must be deliberately falsifying her position, rather than expressing ignorance. There are obvious issues like abortion, free speech, and freedom of religion, that really do divide the contemporary right and left, which she does not mention.