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Two good pieces on Slate today; one about sociologist/philosopher William Graham Sumner and one about apocalyptic campaign ads. I’ll tackle the latter first.

It’s a good list, but I disagree with the claim that “when candidates get desperate, they try to scare you.” Was Nixon really desperate in 1968, or Johnson in 1964? Scaring people is always an effective tactic, whether they’re desperate or not. All attack ads either try to frighten or ridicule, and those that ridicule usually carry an undercurrent of frightening, as the idea of such a buffoon as the target of the ad taking office is scary by implication.

By the way, it didn’t make the list, but in my opinion the best political attack ad ever is this one, from Nixon’s 1968 campaign against Hubert Humphrey:

That ad is purely visceral. There’s not even any language in it until the very end, which is as it should be. The effective advertisement must appeal to instincts and base, gut feelings, not sophisticated reasoning. Trippy and weird as it is, this ad is psychologically effective.

On to the second piece, about William Sumner. His anti-socialist, “leave the rich people alone” philosophy sounds to me pretty similar to the ideas of his contemporary, Herbert Spencer. And it seems that Sumner was who coined the phrase “the Forgotten Man”, which, as my readers will know, has formed the theme of many a ham-fisted Jon McNaughton painting.

So, I skimmed some of the Sumner essay “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other” that the Slate article talks about. I confess, I could only skim because it was quite dull; most of the ideas in it are old hat by now, but it’s important to remember that they must have seemed novel at the time.

Sumner begins the essay by complaining:

We constantly read and hear discussions of social topics in which the existence of social classes is assumed as a simple fact. “The poor,” “the weak,” “the laborers,” are expressions which are used as if they had exact and well-understood definition. Discussions are made to bear upon the assumed rights, wrongs, and misfortunes of certain social classes…

He does not like the phrase “the poor man” one bit:

There is no possible definition of “a poor man.”.. The “poor man” is an elastic term, under which any number of social fallacies may be hidden.

And then:

There is an old ecclesiastical prejudice in favor of the poor and against the rich.  In days when men acted by ecclesiastical rules these prejudices produced waste of capital, and helped mightily to replunge Europe into barbarism. The prejudices are not yet dead, but they survive in our society as ludicrous contradictions and inconsistencies. One thing must be granted to the rich: they are good-natured. Perhaps they do not recognize themselves, for a rich man is even harder to define than a poor one. It is not uncommon to hear a clergyman utter from the pulpit all the old prejudice in favor of the poor and against the rich, while asking the rich to do something for the poor; and the rich comply, without apparently having their feelings hurt at all by the invidious comparison.

Well, if I were rich, people could denounce me as much and as viciously as they damn well-pleased and I wouldn’t complain.

But beyond that, it’s like Paul Graham wrote:

Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by “free.” Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by “exist.

Same problem here. Sumner gets bogged down trying to define things, or show that they can’t be defined, in order to make some point; and it all becomes nearly meaningless.

I’ll try to read more of this essay, but right now my eyes are glazed over. Sumner’s writing is like Ayn Rand’s without any of the animating passion.

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Slate has an article about a guy named Neal Stephenson calling for more Utopian, less Dystopian, science-fiction. The idea is that people need to be more optimistic about the future in order to be motivated to invent things.

I’ll comment on that anon, but first a language lesson. Quoth Wikipedia:

The word [Utopia] comes from the Greek: οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”) and means “no place”. The English homophone eutopia, derived from the Greek εὖ (“good” or “well”) and τόπος (“place”), means “good place”. This, due to the identical pronunciation of “utopia” and “eutopia”, gives rise to a double meaning.

So, when Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia, he was making a sort of pun in the title. Now you know. And “dys” is apparently Greek for “bad”, so when they say that, they’re really dyssing something. (Sorry.) I like these double-meanings, but people have kind of forgotten about that nuance. (It’s like the subtleties of language are being lost. Someone should write a dystopian novel about that.)

The problem is that most Utopian fiction is boring. There’s nothing interesting about a place where there are no problems. (Which is, in a sense, a problem. Someone should write a dystopian novel about that, too.) Even worse, it comes across as somebody preaching to you about what they think society ought to be like. I have enough of that as it is.

Also, would-be inventors can be forgiven for fearing that even their most brilliant efforts will be all to the bad. May I present Alfred Nobel and Robert Oppenheimer?

The only way to make an interesting Utopian story that I can see is to have some external threat appear in the Utopia, and destroy it. It’s best if the threat is from the present-day of the writer of the story. (This is kind of the plot of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia, Limited, in which a bunch of Englishmen show up and ruin a Utopian island.) And even this is pretty heavy-handed as a satirical technique.

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In Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, the Devil at one point says:

“When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs, from the first settlements on? […] I am merely an honest American like yourself — and of the best descent — for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don’t like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours.”

It’s a very interesting story, for it is very patriotic–jingoistic, even–but it doesn’t deny the unpleasant parts of American history, either.

I was reminded of this on hearing the recent controversy over Rick Santorum’s comment that Satan “has his sights on… a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. [sic] There is no one else to go after other than the United States“.

First of all, as I said before, I’m not a religious person. And also, I have no intention of voting for Rick Santorum. I do not plan to vote for any Republican candidate, and even if I did, Santorum would be my third choice out of the current field of four. So, I am not defending him here.

However, it doesn’t quite make sense to me why this is such a big deal. I mean, it is a (in my opinion, regrettable) fact that this country is not going to elect a President who does not publicly profess to be a Christian anytime soon. We have had Presidents who were not very religious in the past, of course, but nobody knew it then, because they kept it to themselves. Personally, I think this is a sub-optimal state of affairs, but there’s no point in denying it.

So, given that, and given that the Bible talks about this “Satan” figure rather a lot, why should anybody be surprised to hear Santorum talking about him? I mean, if you believe in the Bible, as Christians are supposed to do, it seems like you’ll probably end up believing in Satan, too. Now, I know some Christians regard him as an actual guy with horns who is out there somewhere, and some think of him more as a symbolic character representing “Evil”. It seems to me that Santorum’s comments could be read either way, as well. Why is everyone so surprised? Did people actually not realize what Santorum believes before now?

So, with that said, I personally don’t care for what he says in this speech at all, and it has very little to do with the Satan bit, and almost everything to do with deeper, philosophical issues. Again, it’s interesting to contrast the ideas in The Devil and Daniel Webster with Santorum’s remarks. Here’s part of Daniel Webster’s big speech from Benét’s  story:

[Webster] talked of the early days of America and the men who had made those days… He admitted all the wrong that had ever been done. But he showed how, out of the wrong and the right, the suffering and the starvations, something new had come. And everybody had played a part in it, even the traitors.

Santorum:

[Satan] didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has [sic] so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

Like I said, both the story and Santorum’s speech are basically advancing nationalistic viewpoints, and yet Benét’s story has a much more optimistic–dare I say it, “progressive”–theme to it, whereas Santorum’s is a dark vision of decadence. I just think that’s kind of interesting. Of course, Benét wrote that in 1937–maybe he would be firmly in the Santorum camp if he were around today. Who knows?

Nationalist conservatives nowadays are very reluctant to entertain the notion of wrongdoing in the early days of the country. It’s curious–I think their narrative requires that everything be wonderful until the damned liberals showed up.

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On his show today, Rush Limbaugh was talking about James Taranto’s interview with Jeffrey Bell in the WSJ.  Bell’s argument is that “social conservatism” is very useful for winning elections for Republicans. He, and Taranto and Limbaugh, all seem to feel that this is a novel idea. It sounds to me like he’s just reiterated Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas?, except without the part about how, once elected, Republicans immediately go back to pursuing their economic agenda.  But in fairness, as I haven’t read Bell’s book, I don’t want to dismiss his work.

So, what is this “social conservatism”, anyway? Well, I guess it’s opposition to abortion, contraception, homosexuality, agnosticism, atheism and so on. Bell defines it broadly as opposition to the sexual revolution. And, in the Taranto interview, he elaborates:

Mr. Bell notes that social conservatism is largely a working-class phenomenon: “Middle America does have more children than elite America, and they vote socially conservative, even though they might not necessarily be behaving that way in their personal life. They may be overwhelmed by the sexual revolution and its cultural impacts.”Mr. Bell squares that circle by arguing that social conservatism is “aspirational” and “driven by a sense in Middle America that the kind of cultural atmosphere we have, the kind of incentives, the example set by government, is something that has to be pushed back against.” [Italics mine]

Since Bell’s whole book is about social conservatism, this seems surprisingly vague. Maybe he’s just saving up the real “nuts-and-bolts” description of social conservatism for his book–you don’t want to give away the big plot twist on the posters, after all. Still, it’s kind of weird.

As usual, my opinion is that everything begins to make a lot more sense if instead of “social conservatism”, you insert the word “nationalism”. I hope talk about this more thoroughly later this week, but the short version is that I have come to believe that “nationalism” covers far more than just jingoism; it pretty much accounts for all the things that are typically labeled “social conservatism”.

Anyway though, for now, let’s just focus on Bell’s point, which is that this is a winning strategy for the Republicans. Of course, he’s right. I think we can all agree on that. He even makes a point very close to one I made awhile back about the Democrats being willing to trade extending the Bush tax-cuts for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. So, he’s basically right in his assessment of how this dynamic works.

Where I think he’s wrong is when he implies that “the Left” is “imposing” social liberalism on people. Forgive me, but I don’t quite see it. “Liberalism” is derived from the Latin word for “free”. Liberalism is about freedom. Is it possible to impose freedom? Maybe, but it’s an odd way of putting it. You could say the Founders “imposed” freedom from the Proclamation of 1763 on the colonies, but it sounds strange.

Since what the social liberals are arguing for are things like “freedom for gays to serve in the military” and “freedom to use contraception”, I don’t quite understand why you would choose to couch this as “imposing” it. You could argue that perhaps these are freedoms that people ought not to have. I happen to disagree with that, but it’s an argument you could make, because it is widely agreed there are some things that people are not free to do. But that is different than saying these ideas are being “imposed” upon people.

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“I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth.”–Janeane Garofalo.

As long as I can remember, I have been a pessimist. I have justified it to myself on the grounds that if one expects the worst, one will never be disappointed. However, I can’t pretend that it’s a wholly rational impulse. Quite the contrary, it seems to be an instinct.

More than just pessimism, what I have is a kind of superstition about being confident. I always have this feeling that if you get confident, you’re asking for karmic payback. It’s like the idea of hubrisin Greek tragedy–I feel like you’re tempting the Gods (metaphorically speaking–I don’t believe in the ancient Greek Gods) when you get to feeling good about yourself.

Some people are always cheery and expecting the best. I’m not sure who’s in the majority, but I suspect it’s the optimists.

Not that everybody is all optimistic or all pessimistic. I have a friend who is always pessimistic about her favorite sports teams, but is in general a fairly optimistic person. I like to think I’m pretty realistic about stuff I have no control over, but anything I’m actually doing myself I feel sure I’ll screw up.

Incidentally, I think pessimism is what enables me to read old-time conservative writers like Spengler and Nock. Despite being opposed to their politics, I recognize in them a gloominess that I can relate to. We all feel that the world is going to hell, even though we have different reasons. Spengler felt it was because of decadent liberalism, Nock was upset because he thought the State had too much power, and I think it’s because people are unable to resolve their differences through education and intelligence, but we all would agree that things are bad.

How about you? Do you feel that “a sunny disposish will always see you through“, or do you feel, as I do, that if your spirits are soaring, it means only that they will hit the ground with more force?

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Mark Steyn, conservative pundit, writes in National Review:

“The Left endlessly trumpets its ’empathy.’ President Obama, for example, has said that what he looks for in his judges is ‘the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.’ As he told his pro-abortion pals at Planned Parenthood, ‘we need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.’ Empathy, empathy, empathy: You barely heard the word outside clinical circles until the liberals decided it was one of those accessories no self-proclaimed caring progressive should be without.

Indeed, flaunting their empathy is what got Eugene Robinson and many others their Pulitzers — Robinson describes his newspaper column as ‘a license to feel.’ Yet he’s entirely incapable of imagining how it must feel for a parent to experience within the same day both new life and death — or even to understand that the inability to imagine being in that situation ought to prompt a little circumspection.

The Left’s much-vaunted powers of empathy routinely fail when confronted by those who do not agree with them politically.”

Almost three years ago,  in my first post on this blog, I asserted that “Republicans lack empathy” and continued:

“[I]f you are a Republican, you probably are thinking: ‘Oh, yeah? Well, then why did Democrats oppose overthrowing Saddam, whereas Republicans supported it? Where’s the empathy for all those poor people he oppressed?’ Or: ‘What about having empathy for the working-class and wealthy people the Democrats want to make pay for social programs?’ Or: ‘What about empathy for all those aborted babies?’ Then you dismiss this blog altogether.

The trouble is that these responses come from a flawed understanding of empathy. Empathy does not imply compassion, or mercy, or charity. It is merely the ability to think like someone else, to put oneself in someone else’s position, to assume their values and beliefs. One need not maintain them forever. I can imagine, for example, what it was like for Saddam to be executed. I imagine that being executed was unpleasant. Yet merely comprehending this fact does not mean I object to Saddam being executed.

However, both of the typical responses I outlined above stem from the erroneous belief that empathy implies kindness and compassion. Empathy may frequently result in such things, but it need not always.”

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After the Industrial Revolution, people began to wonder if there wasn’t something that could be done about all the poor working people around. Some people thought it was cruel that humans should suffer so; other people thought it ruined the look of things for all the non-poor people. But the point is that people decided that perhaps something ought to be done about all this poverty–usually something in the way of redistributing wealth somehow. Most of these people ended up being called “Socialists”. These Socialists then organized to try to take political power.


Take the case of Germany. In the late 1800s, Otto von Bismarck was facing a political threat from the socialists. So, what did he do? According to Wikipedia—which is, of course, not a valid source, but I shall use it anyway—he “introduced old age pensions, accident insurance, medical care and unemployment insurance.”

He did this to thwart the Socialists, and it seems he succeeded. Nevertheless, if the point of socialism really is to improve life for the poor workers, it would appear that this was actually a victory for socialism. Maybe it wasn’t everything they had hoped for, but it was better than what they had had before. 

Does this make Bismarck a socialist? Before answering, notice the similarity to the case of Theodore Roosevelt recently under discussion on this blog. In broad strokes, it seems to me that both the circumstances and the policies of Roosevelt and Bismarck are practically identical. 

The Socialists were against Bismarck the whole time, and this is certainly a major piece of evidence against his Socialism. Indeed, the fact that the Socialists and T.R. disliked one another was how the John Nichols Nation article exonerated him of Socialism.

Bismarck and Roosevelt both professed to be totally against the Socialists. But of course, they could have been lying. Politicians often say things like “I am not a crook!” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” when these things are not true.

And unlike those lies, where some actual objective evidence can prove them to be lying, in this case the question is purely a matter of what is in their minds. No one but Bismarck and Roosevelt can tell for sure what they really thought of socialism.

Of course, even if they both secretly thought that socialism was the best thing that could happen to the world, they probably didn’t secretly belong to a Socialist party. Thus, there can be no smoking gun to prove that they were Socialists.

All that they can be judged on are their actions. In both cases, their actions served to weaken the political faction called “Socialists”. However, they might also be said to have advanced the political philosophy called “socialism”. The only way to prevent the Socialists from getting power was to give them some of what they wanted. Bismarck himself is supposed to have said “Politics is the art of the possible.”

Actually, that isn’t the only way to prevent socialists getting power. There is also the General Pinochet way, which is to kill them. Pinochet may have been the most anti-socialist politician in the history of the world, because he took his economic policy from the Libertarians and his police policy from the Fascists. 

Pinochet is useful because he is the very model of an anti-Socialist. Bismarck and Roosevelt clearly both fall short of the Pinochet standard. True, they frowned upon–even regarded as illegal–the actions of August Bebel and Eugene Debs, respectively, but unlike Pinochet did with his Socialists, they did not actively work to eradicate their policies. They did not implement them either, but rather they compromised with them.

If you deal in absolutes, like American Icons Darth Vader and Ayn Rand did, then Bismarck and Roosevelt are both socialists, because they compromised with socialism and thus must be forever designated “Socialists”. Any compromise is evil, in this view.

On the other hand, if you don’t do that, you’d have to conclude that they were at most moderate socialists, and maybe that they weren’t socialists at all, but were just put in a difficult position. And you’d probably say they handled it fairly well, all things considered.

The conclusion I reach is that they both were moderately friendly towards the socialist philosophy, but not the Socialist party. What does this ultimately mean? Well, to begin with, it suggests the possibility, horrifying to some, that there may have been something in that socialism stuff.


Socialists would say that this is so, and that things would have turned out even better for Bismarck and Roosevelt if they had only had the guts to go “Full Socialist”, instead of these puny half-measures. Others would say instead that this proves the triumph of “centrism” and compromise.

In the end it’s difficult to really people under terms like “socialist” or “capitalist”. As the character Kreia says in the game Knights of the Old Republic II, when asked if she is a Jedi or a Sith: “such titles allow you to break the galaxy into light and dark. Categorize it. Perhaps I am neither, and I hold both as what they are: pieces of a whole.”


NOTES

Much of the information in this post concerning Pinochet and Bismarck is based on my reading of Niall Ferguson’s book The Ascent of Money.

Apologies for the fonts being messed up on this post. I’m not sure what happened there.

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This post is going to be a little different from what I normally do. Usually, when writing about history especially, I try to research things very carefully before I post them. This time, however, I can’t really do that because what I want to talk about is so complex a subject it would take me a whole career’s worth of work to be sure of everything.

Instead, I’m just going to use the facts I already know, and give my opinion on this subject as an amateur student of history. If you find errors, please point them out to me in the comments. I realize I’m risking making an idiot out of myself, but in my (again, amateurish) reading, I’ve come to have one or two ideas. Obviously, if I find any information in the future which contradicts what I say here, I shall correct it ASAP.

Now then, let’s talk about the Soviet Union. Conservatives I know frequently point to it as what happens when “leftism” runs amok. Are they right?

First of all, as some readers may know, I try to ignore the right-left spectrum and examine politics using the framework of Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Materialism.  But where does the Soviet Union fit in to this model?

Let me begin by saying that Karl Marx’s theory was anti-nationalistic and, in the sense I mean it, anti-materialistic. While it is true Marx called his philosophy a “materialist conception of history”, what I mean by “anti-materialist” is that he opposed the concentration of material wealth through greedy, capitalistic means. He sought rather to redistribute material wealth to improve people’s lives. As he and Engels wrote in The German Ideology:

“[A]s soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” 

And as they wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

“The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got…

National differences, and antagonisms between peoples, are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.”

This mixture of anti-greed and anti-nationalism immediately put his philosophy at a strategic disadvantage, for it was forced to combat both of these forces at once. However, it was fundamentally a cosmopolitan, universalist endeavor, to improve life for people the world over. This was the motivating idea even after Marxism had taken over Russia and formed the Soviet Union. The anthem “The Internationale” signified this, as did the slogan “Workers of the World, unite!”

But then something very interesting happened. In the 1920s, Mussolini was getting lots of attention for his system of “fascism”. As Jonah Goldberg (among others) pointed out in one of those rare correct observations that make him such a frustrating writer, Mussolini had dreamed up fascism when he noticed that appealing to nationalism made it more popular than adhering to the usual internationalist tendencies.

I don’t think this escaped Stalin for one minute. He noticed what Mussolini was doing and began to imitate him. Fascism swept Europe in the ’30s, and the Soviet Union was not spared, though it tried to seem as if it had been.

It was Stalin, then, who fundamentally destroyed any meaning Communism may have had; by changing it into more of a Russian-nationalist movement. By shifting the nature of the State to what was essentially an ultra-collectivist form of what we might today call “fascism”, Stalin rendered it a mere exercise in the pursuit of Power, without real philosophical significance. It was not quite an ultranationalist movement, given Marx’s foundation, but nor was it an international movement. After Stalin took power, it was similar to many of the other governments in Europe at the time, but unlike Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, its leader was not even “honest” about its true nature.

(It was for these Nationalist reasons, also, that Leon Trotsky was exiled from the party. Trotsky remained a committed Internationalist kind of Marxist, and hence had no place in Stalin’s Government.)

This led to all sorts of confusion, especially in the way of liberal intellectuals feeling a need to defend (or deny) certain actions taken by the Soviet Union despite the fact that it really wasn’t on their side.

Nationalists will claim I am only saying this to excuse the cosmopolitans from responsibility, to claim that they do not deserve blame for the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. They will claim that I am using a tautological reasoning system whereby all people who do bad things are automatically, by the fact itself, nationalists.

Well, I have deliberately tried not to do this. There were genuinely internationalist communists who committed atrocities. And the Communist system seems to lead almost inevitably to authoritarian systems of government, whatever Marx may have intended. And those sorts of systems usually lead to atrocities, no matter who is in charge.

Those who wish to point to the Soviet union as a failure of the “left-wing” may still do so, for it was a cosmopolitan idea that gave it philosophical power. However, in the event, it was a failure largely because of its susceptibility to being taken over by nationalistic forces.

What if there hadn’t been any nationalist shift? What if Trotsky had gotten rid of Stalin? Would it have been a Heaven on Earth, as some people desperately wanted it to be? Very unlikely. It is clear that the allocation of resources under the Communist system was very flawed. This would have been a problem, sooner or later, no matter who was running the show. Might there have been fewer casualties resulting from the Soviet Union’s actions? Possibly so.

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A week ago, I posted about Oscar Wilde’s essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and the vision proposed therein of a society in which people were freed from poverty (and property) to express themselves to the best of their artistic and intellectual potential.

While I do not see how abolishing private property would help matters even slightly, I think that Wilde’s overall goal here was laudable. It is for these same reasons that I support government poverty-relief efforts, which I think nowadays qualifies me as a socialist, at least in the minds of some.

However, there is an alternative viewpoint–the idea that facing challenges and hardship is what inspires people to excellence. As Scott Adams wrote in a post I’ve linked to before:

“I’ve noticed that creativity so often springs from hardship or pain that I wonder if it’s a precondition. That would make sense from an evolution perspective. Humans don’t need to come up with new ideas when everything is running smoothly.”

Thus, attempts to stimulate the creative people by providing them with support will backfire, leading to mental as well as physical laziness. (Similar ideas are considered in the famous Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World.)

It’s quite possible, but I do not believe this is really how the artistically or intellectually-inclined mind works. (Kindly suspend disbelief long enough to suppose that I have some inkling what such minds are like.) It is true that hardship can have a stimulative effect, but I think that, when all immediate material needs are met, people automatically start concerning themselves with more abstract problems.

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I have never actually read an entire work by Oscar Wilde. I’ve read quotes of his, like everyone has, but never an entire piece by him. So, I decided to fix that and so I read his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism recently.

It’s an excellent work, and somewhat depressingly, seems but for a few topical references like it could have been written yesterday.  Granted, it is very idealistic, perhaps even naïve, in the ease with which he forecasts creating a socialist Utopia, but the problems he identifies are quite familiar.

It is curious to compare Wilde’s line of thinking about the importance of alleviating poverty to free people for artistic endeavors, and the use of welfare today. For instance, I understand that Britain has been undergoing welfare reform similar to that implemented in this country by President Clinton. The emphasis in these reforms is placed on increasing incentives to work, and ensuring that those on welfare take jobs.

I am not sure what Wilde would think of this. This passage from his essay, in particular, springs to mind:

“I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours. Humanity has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals. But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.”

(As George Orwell pointed out in his review of this essay, in the 20th century Socialists did just this.)

The point of welfare reform is to see to it that welfare is a stop-gap measure to help people out while they try to go back to work. That’s not the goal Wilde had when he looked at poverty. Not that I wish to imply he’s right. He was an idealistic, dreamer/poet. And he’s been dead for over a century. It may very well be that the people reforming welfare have a better idea of how a modern society ought to work than Wilde did.

Wilde wanted people to be free to exercise their minds and imaginations; to be freed from the pain of poverty to use their minds. He wanted to cultivate an artistic and intellectual society through socialism; and more specifically, the abolition of private property.

But, of course, we know better nowadays. The abolition of private property does not usher forth a Utopia, it only destroys incentives. The part of Wilde’s essay in which he warns “If the Socialism is Authoritarian… then the last state of man will be worse than the first” is, ironically, a description of the Soviet Union thirty years before it was created.  Clearly, if nothing else, socialists utterly failed at the implementation phase. At worst, their plans were inherently flawed.

So, as I see it, there are two facts that emerge from this essay. Firstly, it seems, in my opinion, to describe problems which are still visible in the world at present. Secondly, it proposes solutions which we, knowing what Wilde could not, recognize as either impractical or not solutions at all.

Which leaves only the questions: are the problems outlined by Wilde still present in modern society and if so, what other solutions are there?

P.S. It may also interest readers to compare the ideas in Wilde’s essay with those espoused by the bygone authors discussed in this post.