by nemo on November 15, 2008
The Darwin debate and the left
On Intelligent Design and the Left
Cats, Dogs and Creationism
By JEAN BRICMONT
“The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.”
–Karl Marx (Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right).
Jean Bricmont reviews the MR book on ID. I have commented on the book several times here, before and after receiving a copy.
The left is stuck on nineteenth century materialism, and lives in a Darwinian limbo. I have no problem with attempted ‘material’ explanation, or rather, ‘naturalistic’ ones, but the theory of natural selection is a failure, so back to the drawing board. This book put out by Monthly Review fails to acknowledge a single critique of Darwin’s theory whatsoever and is therefore not a serious book, i.e. a piece of Darwin propaganda. John Bellamy Foster should know better as the co-author of Marx/s Ecology with its historical account of Marx’s early skepticism about natural selection.
by nemo on November 8, 2008
From Darwiniana, Reverse gear dialectic….
In the middle of all the pundit comparisons to the era of FDR and the great depression, it is forgotten that that period had a behind the scenes driver in the surging left, the second to third Internationale, what to say of Boshevism soon to be Stalinism. The contemporary scene has nothing of the kind, except the echo of now failed leftist ideologies.
Public discussion of socialism ought to be a constant in liberal societies. Instead it has been so discredited by its Marxist hijackers that public discussion of issues suffers.
Lenin’s Tomb links to an historical materialism conference, with all the usual recombinations of jargon and refuted, or challenged theory.
These statements are not knee-jerk left bashing, merely the observation that there is no real left in our time-frame. The fall of communism should have led to a thorough critique of what went wrong, and yet still almost thirty years later Marxism chugs along, blocking a new left, and taking up the energy needed for a defining left.
by nemo on November 2, 2008
One of the components of Marxism that led to much of its later confusion can be seen in Marx’s rejection of ethical idealism, a strain of Marx’s thinking that is too often disguised and unaddressed, and which invariably takes its idealistic fans by surprise, if it enters consciousness at all.
The grounds for all of this, beginning with Hegel, are complex, but finally stem from an inability to really grapple with the transcendental idealism of Kant.
From Sidney Hook’s From Hegel To Marx, Columbia, 1994, p.47
Rejection of Abstract Ethical Idealism
Opposition to the excesses of rabid individualism, however, comes not only from social realists but even more often from ethical idealists. Indeed it is in this latter form that it is most vocal and emphatic. What age has not heard a cry for justice in the name of Christ, Kant or some other ethical prophet? When has not someone’s conscience, someone’s devotion to things invisible led to conflict with the social order? And yet both Hegel and Marx regarded abstract ethical idealism, whether it have its roots in Christ, Rousseau or Kant, as Utopian and unreasonable-as even more dangerous than any philosophy of social atomism. It involved the same denial of the priority of the group over the individual; the same acceptance of the natural rights, or conscience, ethics which lies at the basis of philo¬sophical anarchism. Because it endangered the stability of the state, Hegel stamped it as a revolutionary doctrine; because it hampered militant class activity, Marx condemned it as Incipiently counter-revolutionary.