this article<\/a> about political Buddhism and civil war in Sri Lanka; it can get just as ugly under Buddhism as under any other -ism.)<\/p>\nWe then pondered the notion that Communism, in its pure state as envisioned by Marx, might not be much different that what we imagine of a community living according to our sanitized version of Buddhist ideals. Communism, as it actually manifest itself in the 20th Century, in the end was very non-communal. It depended upon big, harsh authoritarian structures and was either brought down eventually (as in Russia), or had to co-opt the western capitalist notions that Marx originally set his vision in opposition to. As such, China is now beginning to get rich, but it’s not getting any more communal. <\/p>\n
So, as often happens at Socrates Cafe, the discussion topic did some morphing of its own. The main question then became, just what system would work to govern human beings humanely and yet effectively, in the world such as it is. We took some stabs at a vision of a good, well-governed society; a society whose “collective” (i.e., its government) would provide many protections and benefits to its people, and would provide and defend their individual rights and freedoms as much as possible, while also promoting their prosperity and material security. It soon became clear that such a system, if realized (or to the degree realized), might not be a function of its own clever design. Instead, such a situation would largely reflect the people themselves, their unspoken values and social agreements, and the underlying environmental conditions that they faced. And, to jump to an even more sophisticated level — on the dynamics and changes over time amidst those elements. <\/p>\n
So we pondered the question of just what makes large groups of people more or less cooperative, more or less communal versus individualistic, and more or less equal versus “hierachial” (i.e., willing to reward some as “super-stars” or “super-achievers”, and banish others as “super-villans” or “super-failures”). We mulled over various historical examples — Sweden, the Roman Empire, and an island culture that got along quite peaceably and was very egalitarian, until a strange (to them) bottle was dropped onto the island and dissention broke out over who would control it. We also pondered primate studies, which can exhibit a wide variety of things; you can find monkey cultures that are warlike and heirarchial, and those that are egalitarian and peaceable. And sometimes the researchers document a change from one mode to another, often citing the hopeful transition from the former to the latter state. I brought up the genetic viewpoint, i.e. that perhaps the high failure rate of human political systems in avoiding war and unfair distribution of resources reflected what was bred into our simian ancestors over many eons. And yet, under certain conditions, they themselves can find a kinder and gentler mode of being. So, can we figure out just what causes this “phase shift”, and somehow set it loose amidst our species?<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the SC group ran out of time and energy on this point. Perhaps even the best minds in the world can’t go much further. But, as one of the world’s not-nearly-best minds, I’d like to end this review by throwing in another puzzling thought. I’m going to take the conservative viewpoint, or something of a “conservative” viewpoint. And that goes as follows: even if we COULD figure out a way that everyone in a nation or society could live in a state of peace, humility, mutual respect, sustainability, rough equality and non-aggression, by enforcing some set of meta-conditions that allowed this status to be maintained amidst millions of humans, would we really want it? <\/p>\n
First off, there have been visionaries who have tried to achieve this status; but in doing so, they find that some people just don’t fit their mold, and have to be discarded from the “new utopia”. And this discarding process can be very, very cruel. And second, even if you could somehow achieve this state without harsh “cleansing” tactics, you would need to “dumb down” the things about humanity that has fostered its greatest achievements. Without competition, without distinctions, without the threat of failure and downfall, the world would (arguably) be more poor and grey and threadbare. The institutions of free markets and super-star worship and greed make the world, on-average, a much richer place. And even though the benefits of such a world are not fairly distributed, even the worse off do better than they would in the egalitarian poor land. E.g., why do people from egalitarian Cuba seek to come to rich but unjust America?<\/p>\n
Well … I’ll leave that theory (and that’s all I’m saying about it right here; I’m not saying that it’s indubitably true) for discussion on another night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At last night\u2019s Socrates Caf\u00e9 session in Montclair, we talked about government. The kick-off question regarded China \u2013 why did China embrace Communism in the 20th century, given all the cruelties that resulted in Maoist times? Why hadn\u2019t the Chinese people embraced a governing system which more fully integrated the values of the Confucian, Taoist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1403"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1403"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1405,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1403\/revisions\/1405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}