Into the Sunset

I have examined liberalism in this blog, and recently I have mentioned socialism. I should mention that, while a diluted and increasingly warped form of liberalism still exists in modern life (in the West), socialism is but a forlorn looking phantom compared to its old self.

If you are reading this in the US, you may perhaps think that socialism still exists in the UK, or at least in Europe. I cannot speak for continental Europe, but here in the UK socialism is like a small church with a dwindling congregation. There may be some earnest discussion among believers during the coffee morning, but the church roof is leaking and, with the grassroots gone, there is neither the money nor the expertise to fix it.

In fact, if it wasn't for its virulent atheism, British socialism would probably look like the Church of England, also mired in unfashionability and irrelevance.

As it is, both of them can walk hand in hand into the sunset together. Considering that they both sprang from the same root, it would perhaps be a fitting end.

And as conservatism is also a tired ideology preaching in an equally empty and drafty chapel, then maybe they can make it a threesome.

The rule of law

"The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. The decline in the desire for individual liberty has not been so sharp as I would have predicted six years ago, when the war was starting, but still there has been a decline. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a hearing is growing. It is given currency by intellectuals who confuse the issue by not distinguishing between democratic opposition and open rebellion, and it is reflected in our growing indifference to tyranny and injustice abroad. And even those who declare themselves to be in favour of freedom of opinion generally drop their claim when it is their own adversaries who are being prosecuted."

George Orwell, 1945, 'Freedom of the Park'.

Moral Socialism

As Orwell has implied in the quote I posted before, the concept of Socialism, as a moral good, has more to do with religion than politics.

Indeed, these days politics has more to do with religion than politics. This is possibly due to the decline of Christianity in the West. People turn to something else to believe in, and believe in fervently. Hence politics becoming more fundamentalist and less debatable.

The first political Socialists were Protestant Christians in the English Civil War. The first communists were the Anabaptists in Germany in 1534.

The dream of a classless society, of an end to scarcity, of justice for all, is the same as the dream of the Kingdom of Heaven, or Nirvana. It is a profoundly human dream that has been with us since the beginning of history - we are social animals who wish to rise forever from the pain of nature's limits and social strife.

Paradoxically, within that dream of a classless society is the dream of the collective, of brotherhood (or sisterhood) and the bonding with other humans that, as social creatures, we crave. Bonding requires more than friendship. It requires 'being', a sense of being in a group, like a baby in a womb.

Which brings us to Nationalism. Again, like Socialism (and all the other 'isms') it is a moral, rather than political force. It arouses the passions and inspires sacrifice and martyrdom, among other things.

Clausewitz said that war is politics in another form.

Politics is religion in another form. It all stems from the passions. Reason is used in its arguments, but it is not reason that inspires rallies and demonstrations, and it is not reason that holds a political or religious group together as a band of believers.

Schopenhauer believed that humans were motivated by primal urges, and that Reason was just the clothing used to cover our naked passions when out in public.

He was right.

Socialism

"Some apologists try to excuse Marxism by saying that it has "never had a chance". This is far from the truth. Marxism and the Marxist parties have had dozens of chances. In Russia, a Marxist party took power. Within a short time it abandoned Socialism; if not in words, at any rate in the effect of its actions. In most European nations there were during the last months of the first world war and the years immediately thereafter, social crises which left a wide-open door for the Marxist parties: without exception they proved unable to take and hold power. In a large number of countries–Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, England, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France–the reformist Marxist parties have administered the governments, and have uniformly failed to introduce Socialism or make any genuine step towards Socialism.... These parties have, in practice, at every historical test–and there have been many–either failed Socialism or abandoned it. This is the fact which neither the bitterest foe nor the most ardent friend of Socialism can erase. This fact does not, as some think, prove anything about the moral quality of the Socialist ideal. But it does constitute unblinkable evidence that, whatever its moral quality, Socialism is not going to come."

 George Orwell, 'James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution'.