As we all savor the progress of the human-faced emperor-presumptive,
a beacon of firm informed reason criss-crossing the scar tissue of
the sad Old Worlds, it occurs to me my attack on the libertarian option
needs another installment.
This time -- j'accuse citizen Orwell.
My case is brief: I'll just put this essay into evidence. Among other things, it's a retrospect on the genesis of the Cold War favorite Darkness at Noon. This earthworm of a line is what hooked me up:
"[Koestler's] hedonism... leads him to think of the Earthly Paradise as desirable. Perhaps, however, whether desirable or not, it isn't possible.Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure"
Gotta love that postwar English understated stiff-upper-lip melodramatic utterly banal sense of la condition humaine. Those three "perhaps" clauses gout out like gobbets of yellow whizz from a squeezed cheese dog. Then he ends with this cheap toy from his cracker-jack box, this tinny poli-sci koan: "All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure."
Is that an echo of Tolstoy on family life? Tolstoy went on to shed some light on the varieties of familial happiness and unhappiness, but Georgie boy leaves it as an exercise.
What Georgie does make clear is that he doesn't think Koestler is pessimistic enough. Koestler actually thinks human happiness might be... possible! Not now, of course. Not any time soon. Not in any way we can at present imagine. But somehow, sometime, maybe. Georgie, however, wants to exclude the prospect entirely.
Sergeant-at-arms, please escort Georgie to the Man's dancing class to learn the peppermint twist. I sentence him to eternal twistin' -- twistin' the dark away.
Answering gimcrack koan with gimcrack koan: counting the justice of history one soul's fate at a time, leads to a mind puddle.
Comments (8)
Motion granted: Orwell's life experience, late colonialist/hard racism lifespan timing, and sour personality made him an a priori pessimist.
But what dent does that put in the libertarian socialist argument, which turns more on Chomsky (and Gandhi and MLK) than on Orwell, no?
Plain (capitalist) libertarianism is a delusion and a self-cancellation, no argument, no doubt.
But I rise to ask again what the socialist version tramples upon. It remains unclear to me, despite your excellent Orwell points.
Are you suggesting that all who insist on the Declaration of the Rights of [Hu]Man[s] as a litmus test of every collective step are letting pessimistic pig-headedness and/or mere shortsightedness wreck the future? "Surrender yourself to the Force, Luke?"
Posted by Michael Dawson | July 25, 2008 8:04 PM
Posted on July 25, 2008 20:04
michael d
"Are you suggesting that all who insist on the Declaration of the Rights of [Hu]Man[s] as a litmus test of every collective step are letting pessimistic pig-headedness and/or mere shortsightedness wreck the future?"
no
they can't block the path of CLIO's
agent class
not even ten million chomsky's could
the self ---and i do mean self---
gratifying image of
these left libertarian none suchers
making a heroic stand for enlightnment rights
like the spartans at the narrows
blocking
the forces of leventine despotism....
ahh the class gods are laffing
Posted by op | July 25, 2008 10:36 PM
Posted on July 25, 2008 22:36
"perhaps"
the thrust of libertarianism
and socialism
are in sharp contradiction
"perhaps"
the task of class liberation
and the dilemma of its likely aweful means can't be resolved
the cojoining of the two words
only hightens their conflict
Posted by op | July 25, 2008 10:45 PM
Posted on July 25, 2008 22:45
Op-san, sensei, I'm a hardcore materialist, so I hope I'm under no more than minor illusions about either the room for us talking monkeys to choose our course or the importance of even the great Chomsky. But, small as it is, room does exist, and political philosophy does matter.
And I remain unclear about why you think the act of clarifying and stating what one wants to aim for commits one to being obtuse or obstructionist about the almost always messy, warped, inadequate, sometimes ugly means of actually taking real steps forward.
Chomsky criticizes the Bolsheviks from the left, not the right. He would not have opposed the October Revolution. He supported the FMLN in 1980, FSLN the whole while, Chavez today, etc., etc. I'm pretty sure he'd be happy to see prole mobs knocking some heads in this market-totalitarian shithouse, too. All in all, I know of no case where NC's libertarian socialism stopped him from strongly taking the right side, in fact. Do you?
And do you consider the statement that all humans possess the right to life, maximum liberty, and an equal shot at happiness to be mere pablum? I consider it a core bit of strongly realistic social scientific observation. I'd even go so far as to say that Bolshevik/CP inattention to its reality is one of the two main reasons Socialism v.1.x was doomed to implosion (the other reason being "First World" attacks).
Properly thought out, Libertarianism (the practical maximization of individual chances at joy) is Socialism (collective planning for the same thing), and vice versa.
But wanting that doesn't oblige one to protest everything short of it. An aim is not a shot.
Posted by Michael Dawson | July 26, 2008 3:37 PM
Posted on July 26, 2008 15:37
md
i'm not in the least bit
happy with my presentation so far
all your points need careful address
i'll try to deepen my position
in further posts
Posted by op | July 26, 2008 11:22 PM
Posted on July 26, 2008 23:22
But all happy families are the same.
Posted by IOZ | July 27, 2008 11:44 AM
Posted on July 27, 2008 11:44
IOZ -- I've always wondered whether Tolstoy didn't get that backwards, actually.
Posted by MJS | July 27, 2008 9:50 PM
Posted on July 27, 2008 21:50
father smiff
sly as usual
introduces the premise of Nab's Ada
Posted by op | July 28, 2008 2:53 PM
Posted on July 28, 2008 14:53