we have since, Marx, really two questions…
One: is man going to “fix” himself via method like seeking old traditional means,
religion or reliance on other ism’s… so we hold that what is wrong, whatever that is,
with modern man can be fixed… we don’t need to overhaul or change our
basic fundamental selves…with a few tweaks, we can fix what is wrong with
the soul of man…the basics of human nature is good, we just need to make
some minor changes
two: the fundamentals of human beings is just wrong… and we cannot, cannot
by a few tweaks, fix human beings… we need to make a radical, readjustment
of what it means to be human to make human beings right…
Marx held the second view… that a few tweaks isn’t going to repair modern man,
we are irrevocable broken as human beings… and given the events of the last 200
years, the Holocaust, the two World Wars, the Cold war, the dropping of nuclear bombs,
the ever increasing disconnect of human beings from each other, seems to suggest
that Marx is right… that unless we remake, remodel what it means to be human,
we are simply rearranging the deck chairs of the sinking ship…
Conservatives hold that in the essential aspect of being human, human beings
are who they are and they are unable to change their basic nature…
it was Machiavelli who wrote that human beings are like Tigers who spots
cannot change…we are who we are at birth and we cannot change those “spots”
but we know from our own experience, that the human experience is full of changes…
we change when we from a toddler to a child and from a toddler to a pre-teen to
changes in a teenager and in changes from a teenager to an young adult to an adult…
at every step of human existence, we change… either from the experiences we
engage with or our simple growing older…
because I am now 62, I am a different person then I was at 52…
even though my circumstances hasn’t really changed much… I was working at
the same job, with having the same wife living in the same condo…
but I am now 62, a senior citizen, which changes everything because
I am that much closer to that “undiscovered country”…
my understanding that death isn’t some distant event… it is a’coming for me…
maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but at some point I will die…
and that understanding changes everything…
but the question lies in how my changes occurred…
where they fast and sudden, or did I gradually over time
change? clearly the answer is a gradually change over time…
but let us return to the question at hand…
are we in need of some tweaks to become better human beings or
are we as Marx and others saw, we must remake human beings completely?
I hold that it depends on the goal, the destination…what are we trying to do?
what is the point of existence?
and that decides what is the means we need to achieve to reach our goals…
in this problem of tweaks or entire remakes, lies much of the last 200 years
of philosophy, history, science, economics, and political theory…
the conservative that just tweaks, at most is what is needed,
whereas the liberal holds that more then tweaks, indeed wholesale
changes are needed in human beings to ‘‘right’’ the ship…
will tweaks solve the problem whereby people hold it is ok to
torture people if our ‘‘national defense’’ requires it?
no, to allow people to be tortured under any circumstances requires more
the just tweaks, it requires an entire rewrite of what it means to be human…
that is just one example of actions that lead us to think about whether we
need tweaks or an major overhaul to recover our being human…
if you think the answer to any question is to torture people, then
you need something more then just a tweak…
so the question that lies before us is this…
do we need just tweaks to recover us becoming human or
do we need a major overhaul of what it means to be human?
I am coming to the realization that making tweaks just isn’t enough to
return us to being human beings… that a major overhaul is necessary for
us to realize values that make us human… as allowing or justifying torture
isn’t a value that is human…and so I say, a major overhaul is necessary…
what say you?
Kropotkin