Guest post: The ideas needed a little finessing

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The Three Anti-imperialists.

I’ve never understood people who worship Marx like a god and treat his writings like holy text. The philosophers and thinkers of the past had good ideas and bad ones. As I see it, the general rule is, the further back you go in time, the more surprising it is to find good ideas that hold up today — and the more credit is due to those who came up with them — and the more apt you are to find bad ones that didn’t hold up so well. Because that’s how knowledge is built: over time. So it seems weird to me that anyone would revere thinkers from centuries past beyond merely admiring them for what they did in the context of their time.

Like, say, Freud: amazing that he got people thinking about the human mind like that. Credit where it’s due in the context of his time and place. But the “Freudians” who take his nonsense literally today? Ridiculous!

Kant? Hume? Adam Smith? Great stuff! For their time. Even Darwin — even Einstein — they didn’t get everything right. Evolutionary biologists and quantum physicists get this. They take delight in showing where their fields have moved beyond their great founders’ texts. It’s a sign of how much those fields have grown.

Not so much with the Marxists, with their worldview seemingly set in amber. Is it just me who feels like they take his extremely out-of-date prescriptions for how the world should be organized far too literally? We tried applying a lot of Marx’s theories in the real world over the last one hundred years. Tens of millions of dead bodies later, it’s safe to say the ideas, radical as they were, and influential they have been, they needed a little finessing. They shouldn’t be taken at face value today.

It feels very religion-y, the Marx worship. The way even moderate Christians talk like the Bible is this great source of moral knowledge. In its day, two thousand years ago, the New Testament was radical, sure. Nowadays, we’ve built up a body of knowledge that cancels out a good three quarters or so of Jesus’s moral ideas.

I used to have lunch with a Muslim colleague every day, and one of the things that really surprised me was his inverse view of progress: that the world was perfect in Mohammed’s time, and the further we get from it as we move forward in time, the more corrupt the world becomes. His idea of progress was literally my idea of regress.

I sense the Marxists pine for a glorious past in the same vein.

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