Socialism, ethics, and humanity (II)

(First in series here)

So socialism demands a fundamental change in the way the world is run, the establishment of which will be costly and will inevitably go beyond the current boundaries of political acceptability. People might therefore reasonably not want to sign up for it. Indeed this is the case. Most of the time, most people are not socialists. What will cause a fundamental shift here are not arguments but material circumstances: there is a lot of truth in the saying that any society is only one meal from revolution.

Admitting this much oughtn't to make us think that it is not important that we are able to provide reasons for being socialists. Quite apart from it not generally being a good idea to commit yourself to a cause without a good reason, that way lies the path of cultists and Justin Beiber fans, the extent to which socialist politics is able to take advantage of material circumstances depends on their being a critical mass of convinced socialists with the capacity to intervene in society and politics. The alternative to socialists being able to do this is, ultimately, what Marx and Engels called 'the mutual ruination of the contending classes', and penultimately what Luxemberg called 'barbarism'. This matters, then.

I've suggested that capitalism is inimical to human flourishing. This looks like a good reason to want to do away with it. In particular, it is inimical to human flourishing because - leaving aside the poverty and environmental degradation it has brought in its wake (I think, most of the time, we can just about imagine a capitalism without these) it prevents us individually and collectively from realising our positive capacities. It robs us of control of our own lives and destinies, and crucially of control of our own creative abilities. This, one might imagine, is more than enough reason to get rid of it, at least given the availability of an alternative lacking these faults (which, almost by definition, is what we mean by 'socialism').

This is, in very brief outline, an ethical case for socialism. Much of the Left is wary of ethics because it confuses it with moralism (which Marx rightly condemned, tending to call it simply 'morality'). Yet ethics, by which I mean an account - however implicit and untheorised - of human flourishing and how it might be achieved is unavoidable. We may as well be conscious and critical in formulating our ethics. Howewver from the point of view of many leftists, there is a lot more wrong with the position I've described than the venial sin of being ethical. It is, I claim, committed to a view of human nature.

Talk of human nature is, in some circles, slightly less respectable than necrophilia. So why burden ourselves with it? Simply because the question "why is not being in conscious control of one's capacity to work creatively inimical to human flourishing?" demands an answer. If that answer is to be one which isn't unacceptably subjective - "I just feel it is, that's all" or "It is for me, that's all I'm saying", making socialism a matter of taste, the political equivalent of adding the milk before the tea - then it needs to be potentially subject to public scrutiny. On the other hand, if we're not to be led off on an infinite regress of 'why' questions, we also want the answer to be a stopping point, or at least point to one. The answer "Because that's just the kind of things we are" fares well in both respects. We can test it, through attending to the universality of certain experiences within a given society, or - more carefully, the universality minus explicable apparent counter-examples of certain experiences. And somebody who asks "why" in response to it simply hasn't understood it.

Human nature has a bad press on the Left. No doubt because of the recent unfortunate episode called 'postmodernism' and the persistence of a certain kind of libertarian anthropology especially amongst the younger, more activist-orientated, left there is a suspicion that any concept of the human is inherently oppressive. The word "essentialist" often gets wheeled out here. Essentialism is a Bad Thing. It is, nonetheless, not entirely clear why admitting that water essentially contains one oxygen atom per molecule places one on the wide road to fascism. But perhaps it is being essentialist about ourselves that is a Bad Thing. Well, it is undoubtedly the case that ideas about human nature have been used to reinforce sexism, homophobia, racism, and numerous other oppressive and hierarchical doctrines. It simply doesn't follow that the thought that there is something common to human beings, or even to all human beings in a certain form of society, is itself culpable. Nor does believing in human nature commit one to the idea that human nature is static. In actual fact, it is deeply plausible that certain of a biological features are (to use another Bad Word) transhistorical, along with such characteristics as language use. Still, much changes about what it is to be human. We develop new wants and capacities as the societies in which we are formed themselves develop. It is simply confused to think that this presents a problem for the claim that there is any such thing as human nature. To say that something changes is not to say that it doesn't exist. If it did not exist, there would be nothing to change. Needless to say, it follows from this that we shouldn't assume that human nature is reducible to the biological.

Fine, but how do we tell if something jars with our nature, that in virtue of the kind of things we are it is incompatible with our flourishing? The process is drawn out, fragmentary, and draws on our nature (again) as experiencing and social beings. I catch a glimpse of what it is to be happier than I usually am, in a sense of the word "happy" that isn't simply a matter of fun but of a deeper contentment: perhaps in performing some craftwork or reading a poem, or through a relationship or tending a garden, I notice something that is missing in the rest of my life. I notice an agency, a capacity to relate to other people, a creativity and capacity for conscious directed projects that does not get used during the working day. Talking to others I notice that they feel the same. The process is negative, based on contrasts with partial hints of something better. It is an important part of the Left's task to collect and articulate these contrasts.

This is sketchy in the extreme, written hurriedly and compacting into a blogpost what would take a book to even begin to argue adequately (what, for example, are our 'positive' capacities, and how do we identify them?). But the position is recognisably continuous with Marx's thoughts in the 1844 Manuscript 'On Alienated Labour', read as part of an ethical tradition going back to Aristotle. It has a lot to commend it. What it's deeper implications are, and how we might communicate them, are another matter altogether.