Socialism and Virtue
A former student has sent me the following note, exercise, and friend’s response:
The note:
“Not sure if you may have seen this exercise floating around the internet…but my friend’s rebuttal was so good I had to share the exercise and his comment. I am curious [about] your thoughts…if you could spare a moment.”
The exercise:
“Professor Is (Not?) a Genius
“An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said, 'OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan.' All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
“After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
“As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D. No one was happy. When the third test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame, and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
“All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
“Could not be any simpler than that.”
The friend’s response:
“Where there is no compassion for the unfortunates and no accounting for luck, there will be a savage race to wealth. The classmates who understood the material and didn't see the value in helping the others understand the material deserved the failing grades they all got.”
My own response:
I like the intellectual exercise you sent, though I doubt it is a true story. But it makes a good point, and I think a true one, about the hopelessness of the socialist theory as a substitute for individual responsibility.
As for your friend’s comment, it is true that compassion for unfortunates is essential to civilization. However, it is essential as a virtue, to be sought individually and to be culturally taught, recognized, and admired. But though such virtue must influence human law, it cannot be secured by law or forced through a political system or dictated from above.
Virtue is called virtue (from vir, meaning "man") partly because it is to be practiced by an individual human being. When individuals surrender to the state their responsibility for acting virtuously, they will cease to be virtuous and the state will redefine virtue to serve its own interests. (Think 1984 and Brave New World, or German National Socialism and Soviet Russia.)
Any theory that purports to substitute a forced system of virtue for individual responsibility for virtue is denying what the founding fathers of the United States knew well--that is, the limits of human perfectibility. This is why Marx and all his offshoots are whistling in the wind and why all Marxist regimes sink into utterly un-virtuous dictatorships.
The real danger is tyranny wearing the clothes of virtue. Without logic and trained reason, people can be manipulated into believing that in the name of the good they should renounce their freedom to be good or bad. What that leads to, over and over again, and inevitably, is bad.
As a nation we are precariously teetering on the brink of such a delusion now, and I hope that the majority of Americans will bethink themselves and return to the wisdom of the best of their ancestors before they sell their individual liberties and responsibilities to buy a false vision of utopia. The word utopia means “no place” for a good reason.
The note:
“Not sure if you may have seen this exercise floating around the internet…but my friend’s rebuttal was so good I had to share the exercise and his comment. I am curious [about] your thoughts…if you could spare a moment.”
The exercise:
“Professor Is (Not?) a Genius
“An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said, 'OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan.' All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
“After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
“As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D. No one was happy. When the third test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame, and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
“All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
“Could not be any simpler than that.”
The friend’s response:
“Where there is no compassion for the unfortunates and no accounting for luck, there will be a savage race to wealth. The classmates who understood the material and didn't see the value in helping the others understand the material deserved the failing grades they all got.”
My own response:
I like the intellectual exercise you sent, though I doubt it is a true story. But it makes a good point, and I think a true one, about the hopelessness of the socialist theory as a substitute for individual responsibility.
As for your friend’s comment, it is true that compassion for unfortunates is essential to civilization. However, it is essential as a virtue, to be sought individually and to be culturally taught, recognized, and admired. But though such virtue must influence human law, it cannot be secured by law or forced through a political system or dictated from above.
Virtue is called virtue (from vir, meaning "man") partly because it is to be practiced by an individual human being. When individuals surrender to the state their responsibility for acting virtuously, they will cease to be virtuous and the state will redefine virtue to serve its own interests. (Think 1984 and Brave New World, or German National Socialism and Soviet Russia.)
Any theory that purports to substitute a forced system of virtue for individual responsibility for virtue is denying what the founding fathers of the United States knew well--that is, the limits of human perfectibility. This is why Marx and all his offshoots are whistling in the wind and why all Marxist regimes sink into utterly un-virtuous dictatorships.
The real danger is tyranny wearing the clothes of virtue. Without logic and trained reason, people can be manipulated into believing that in the name of the good they should renounce their freedom to be good or bad. What that leads to, over and over again, and inevitably, is bad.
As a nation we are precariously teetering on the brink of such a delusion now, and I hope that the majority of Americans will bethink themselves and return to the wisdom of the best of their ancestors before they sell their individual liberties and responsibilities to buy a false vision of utopia. The word utopia means “no place” for a good reason.
posted by G.Rap | 8:18 PM
4 Comments:
Yes, exactly. Because the Soviet Union's despotism has nothing to do with its history: not its takeover by a putschist vanguard party, not it economic backwardness, not the absence of a tradition of top-down governance, not the trauma of WWI, nor any of the other factors historians have analyzed.
No, it was none of those things that led it into tyranny. Instead, as the economic professor's example shows, it was a simple universal. Grades tends to F's under classroom communism. Therefore all Communist regimes become despotic. QED.
The irony in Anon's comment is well taken in the sense that it is not wise to ignore the complexities of history in accounting for bad government. However, neither has Anon addressed my main point about virtue. His list of what went wrong in Russia is well taken, but in the context it is a straw man argument unless he takes up the question of governmental vs. individual responsibility for virtue.
The 19th-century philosophical and political debates that profoundly influenced the 20th-century disasters of National Socialism and Communism clearly reveal a passion for forcing man into a new mold from the top down, and the heroes of the time were the individually virtuous who stood against tyranny until the nation most devoted to individual liberty came (too slowly, as we know, but came) to their rescue.
Because the Soviet Union's despotism has nothing to do with its history: not its takeover by a putschist vanguard party, not it economic backwardness, not the absence of a tradition of top-down governance, not the trauma of WWI, nor any of the other factors historians have analyzed.
Yet all communist countries followed a similar trajectory into despotism as the Soviet Union without sharing Russia's history--Cuba, Communist Czechoslovakia, North Korea all despotic regimes with little in common aside from being communist and having no regard for human rights.
Here's a quick exercise for those enamored of Marxism and Communism:
Did the people of East Germany fare better than those of West Germany? Why not, if they shared the same history? Are the people of North Korea better off than the people of South Korea? Why not if they also share the same history?
And keep in mind those who signed the Declaration of Independence were also a "putschist vanguard party," yet things turned out quite differently. There was something about communism that ruined everything it touched. The Czech writer Karel Capek (a pre-WW2 anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, that is to say a democratic humanist) believed Communism could be diagnosed as "pathological negativism."
Here is a link to his 1924 article "Why I am not a Communist": http://capek.misto.cz/english/communist.html
Western Marxists and communist apologists would do well to actually meet people who survived that flawed philosophy.
--Mike B.
Sarkasmos ad absurdum, Anon? Your epicheirema,though in jest, suffers from excessive abridgement. Back to the sorites drawing board. QT.
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