Most every culture has this notion of stages of history. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is what I will hopefully be forgiven for calling the myth of Eden. The Greeks had it. The Hindus had it. The Chinese had it.
In some prehistoric, now inaccessible period, everyone was honest. People did good work, paid their debts, and lived tranquilly with one another from birth to death.
In my view, all modern Fundamentalisms derive from a similar myth, namely that back THEN, all the devotees of their faith were pure, nice, kind, devout: BETTER. To return to the Fundamentals is to return to this state. Yet all modern fundamentalisms, when analyzed, are at variance with what little we know about such periods. They are at odds with the universal patterns of history and human life. We see no perfection today, and it is hard to imagine it really existed back then. What we see ample evidence of, on the contrary, is relatively pedestrian exploits getting turned into myths. Rosa Parks becomes someone who INTENDED to spark a civil rights movement, when in fact she was just tired, stubborn, and wanted to stay just where she was, come hell or high water.
Socialism is a sort of inverted myth. It projects into the future the same sort of paradise, with the difference that it does not go to the trouble of learning about the past and facts of human life in building the myth. Somehow, the Marxist Fundamentalists believe, a brighter future can be brought into being simply by destroying everything that they think is bad. It’s been tried. As common sense would have predicted, it didn’t work. There is no Worker’s Paradise in Cuba, there wasn’t in the Soviet Union, and little but horror in China, until ideological deviants started them on the path from pure totalitarianism to a Fascist oligarchy. Since their government plays favorite with “private” enterprise, and pursues consciously national policies, we might even term their system Mercantilist. Their investment here is intended to get our “specie”–money–there. Then they want to knock us off our throne in the currency world.
Be that as it may, I wonder, though. Consider ancient China. They were not densely populated, and they seem largely to have worked their whole lives in the fields, with periodic ritual punctuations, and then died. Let us suppose that our souls are not in fact equivalent to that biological structure called the brain. Given available scientific evidence, this is an eminently tenable hypothesis.
They lived their lives, then died, then lived similar “lives” in the afterworld, making their religions congruent with reality. They did not know to be unhappy or to reject their lives, since they knew no different. “There is no greater curse than desire”, wrote Lao Tzu some 2,500 years ago. Could that be as good as it gets?
On one level yes, on another no. Yes, because we won’t change the facts of life and death any time soon, if ever, and the reality is that the contentments of good work, good rest, and good company is quite sufficient for most normal demands for happiness.
No, because it seems to me that globalization and the advent of science have enabled the possibility of collating the shared knowledges of not just cultures which exist today, but many past cultures, such that we can do better.
Now, Socialists talk about designing better societies. What they have in mind is scientists in lab coats, doing experiments on rats, which is to say “the People”. They do the thinking, then their ideas are imposed by force.
What I have in mind is GOOD IDEAS, that are ADOPTED willingly by people who see their value. This is how organic, qualitatively rich change comes about. And it is quite possible to see good things in our future, if we are able to hold off those demented souls who want to destroy us. First, they commit moral suicide, then like people who commit actual suicide, they want to bring others with them.
Nothing is certain but change, but one can always still hope for the best, expect the worst, and muddle on in that state of confusion and mystery which our lot here.