When observing contemporary social phenomena—from family life to academia—they’ve historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
This is getting a little too politically charged for my liking, but cynicism does not imply skepticism, at least in the sense I intended. Now, Marxism is built on a set of social theories expressed largely in terms of self-interest or group self-interest, and Marxist scholars have gotten fairly inventive within that framework. The ideology wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as it has been if it wasn’t credible as social criticism, or if it didn’t speak to people skeptical of the status quo. So it does speak the language to some degree, and I probably should have been more accommodating of that in the grandparent.
But for me to call it open to skepticism, I’d have to see evidence that Marxist thinkers engaged in good-faith questioning of the theory’s own social and economic assumptions or at least engaged with skeptics on even ground, and of that I’ve seen very little. In fact, most strains of Marxism seem to actively discourage these lines of thinking—a tendency predictably most pronounced in Marxist political regimes, but which goes all the way back to Marx and Engels’ writings on ideology. False consciousness and related concepts offer a fully general alternative.
This is all true, but we’re comparing the rationality record between various creeds and not imagining how well one such creed would do in a vacuum.
E.g. something a bit like that description of “false consciousness” clearly does happen, not as to provide a convenient reason why capitalism must be the unseen Ultimate Evil, just as a matter of human nature—something psychosocial and fairly disturbing, else we why would see e.g. realistic/cynical poor workers voting against progressive tax. (I’m not arguing its virtues here, just pointing out that it’s obviously a big mid-term gain for lower class people who realistically expect little relative social mobility for their family.)
In Marxist theory, false consciousness is essentially a result of ideological control which the proletariat either do not know they are under or which they disregard with a view to their own POUM (probability/possibility of upward mobility). POUM or something like it is required in economics with its presumption of rational agency; otherwise wage laborers would be the conscious supporters of social relations antithetical to their own interests, violating that presumption.
=
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”—John Steinbeck
And yet ideologies saying e.g. that people in “nice” countries act in “enlightened self-interest”, and are generally special snowflakes that shouldn’t be stirred in their beautiful arrangements, are respected and highly popular. Clearly a dose of Marxist cynicism could serve as a good counterweight to such happy individualist fantasies. People—most of all people who want to be “normal”—are fucking delusional as to their immediate or long-term personal interest, that’s what Marxism is saying. Hell, that was what George Carlin often said too. (I don’t agree that a Marxist dictatorship should decide everyone’s best interest, I’m not a strawman commie.)
This is all true, but we’re comparing the rationality record between various creeds and not imagining how well one such creed would do in a vacuum.
Frankly, I’d rather not compare the rationality record between various unspecified creeds, at least here; that sort of thing has a way of taking over threads, and in its general form seems almost completely orthogonal to Catholic deconversion or anything related to it. This business about skepticism came up in the context of Marx’s proximity to traditional rationality of the Dawkins/Randi school, particularly in terms of approach to atheism, and that’s where I’d like to keep it.
Dawkins et al. seem to be skeptical in methodology: presented with a set of supernaturalist beliefs, their normal procedure is to look at the claimed evidence for them, look for replications or attempt to perform a replication if it’s convenient, and proceed to deprecate the beliefs in question when they predictably fail. They do tend to be fairly apolitical (Penn and Teller notwithstanding), and I’m not even sure what a proper extrapolation of this methodology to the social realm would look like, but I am pretty sure it wouldn’t start with a future history (sketchy though Marx’s is) or a complete theory of class interaction. And I’m also pretty sure most Marxists wouldn’t appreciate a Randi-style analysis of their own foundational beliefs.
This is getting a little too politically charged for my liking, but cynicism does not imply skepticism, at least in the sense I intended. Now, Marxism is built on a set of social theories expressed largely in terms of self-interest or group self-interest, and Marxist scholars have gotten fairly inventive within that framework. The ideology wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as it has been if it wasn’t credible as social criticism, or if it didn’t speak to people skeptical of the status quo. So it does speak the language to some degree, and I probably should have been more accommodating of that in the grandparent.
But for me to call it open to skepticism, I’d have to see evidence that Marxist thinkers engaged in good-faith questioning of the theory’s own social and economic assumptions or at least engaged with skeptics on even ground, and of that I’ve seen very little. In fact, most strains of Marxism seem to actively discourage these lines of thinking—a tendency predictably most pronounced in Marxist political regimes, but which goes all the way back to Marx and Engels’ writings on ideology. False consciousness and related concepts offer a fully general alternative.
This is all true, but we’re comparing the rationality record between various creeds and not imagining how well one such creed would do in a vacuum.
E.g. something a bit like that description of “false consciousness” clearly does happen, not as to provide a convenient reason why capitalism must be the unseen Ultimate Evil, just as a matter of human nature—something psychosocial and fairly disturbing, else we why would see e.g. realistic/cynical poor workers voting against progressive tax. (I’m not arguing its virtues here, just pointing out that it’s obviously a big mid-term gain for lower class people who realistically expect little relative social mobility for their family.)
=
And yet ideologies saying e.g. that people in “nice” countries act in “enlightened self-interest”, and are generally special snowflakes that shouldn’t be stirred in their beautiful arrangements, are respected and highly popular. Clearly a dose of Marxist cynicism could serve as a good counterweight to such happy individualist fantasies. People—most of all people who want to be “normal”—are fucking delusional as to their immediate or long-term personal interest, that’s what Marxism is saying. Hell, that was what George Carlin often said too. (I don’t agree that a Marxist dictatorship should decide everyone’s best interest, I’m not a strawman commie.)
Frankly, I’d rather not compare the rationality record between various unspecified creeds, at least here; that sort of thing has a way of taking over threads, and in its general form seems almost completely orthogonal to Catholic deconversion or anything related to it. This business about skepticism came up in the context of Marx’s proximity to traditional rationality of the Dawkins/Randi school, particularly in terms of approach to atheism, and that’s where I’d like to keep it.
Dawkins et al. seem to be skeptical in methodology: presented with a set of supernaturalist beliefs, their normal procedure is to look at the claimed evidence for them, look for replications or attempt to perform a replication if it’s convenient, and proceed to deprecate the beliefs in question when they predictably fail. They do tend to be fairly apolitical (Penn and Teller notwithstanding), and I’m not even sure what a proper extrapolation of this methodology to the social realm would look like, but I am pretty sure it wouldn’t start with a future history (sketchy though Marx’s is) or a complete theory of class interaction. And I’m also pretty sure most Marxists wouldn’t appreciate a Randi-style analysis of their own foundational beliefs.