model tamil hot actress A Point of View 1

Monday, August 9, 2010

A Point of View 1
By Andy Cox 

 

 

A philosophy

 

Happiness is the vivid bloom

of lives lived in a rich loam.

Our humanity a humus for those to come,

but we too are the beneficiaries of

others amongst us or gone.

So, death is undone through life’s legacy,

ceaselessly so in our common soil,

our commonweal in which the passing of one

seemingly brings forth others.

- No reincarnation :

Only others informing us as we inform others -

from which we can pick precious purpose.

Dark weeds there may be amongst us

that would forswear our mutuality and leech,

as there are some who would set themselves apart

in manicured beds corrupted with sterile soil.

Neither acknowledges the give and take.

Yet it is our bonds that set us free -

knowing what binds us unbinds us.

And when one day, this becomes religion,

then may we find a capacity to rejoice

every time a bud opens

                                                                                        2002

                                                              

 

 It’s like this: For a good many years, my head has been a pot for a sort of intellectual stew, the ingredients of which have managed to retain their separate identities, even if they’ve become a little soggy over time. A splash of good wine has surely enhanced the flavour: (In vino veritas, no doubt). And many a good argument has provided the spice, adding nuance to the creation. I say creation, but, in fact, none of these ingredients is novel: One or two of these old roots have been around since antiquity. What interests me, however, is their interrelationship, the alluring possibility that they may, so to speak, enhance each other. Their integration into something bigger, a worldview if you like, is the thesis of this polemical exercise. Five of the larger entities in this stew, which I intend to slice apart, are:

These, I would contend, contribute to a fifth ingredient, namely:

But before I begin to ladle this out, there is something I feel which needs to be said: Man, I believe, is doomed to be a philosopher. No one bar those devoid of abstract thought can escape this fate. Beneath all the internalised trivia, beneath the layers of received knowledge that crowds one‘s mind, there lies a philosophical construction addressing the very nub of one’s existence, whether this is acknowledged or not, whether this construction is fashioned on the hard anvil of critical thought or represents merely a concatenation of conventional responses to the big questions of life. In other words, everyone has a worldview. In presenting my own, I am merely laying bare a philosophical construction that seems to make sense to me. To be honest, I am not unquestionably certain about it: It tilts in places and contains many a threadbare rivet. But it coheres sufficiently to satisfy my own need to understand the world around me.

 So here’s a taste of that intellectual stew: I have no idea at all why we are here on this earth, or, indeed why earth should be here in the first place. Any suggestion that our existence and that of the universe serve some purpose begs more than a few questions. What I think draws people into this sort of thinking is a deep-seated, almost reflexive, propensity for ogical thinking in which one phenomenon is explained by comparing it and drawing parallels with another. It seems to me that in our ordinary lives â€" when not engaged in philosophical discourse â€" we are sometimes implicitly informed by all manner of delusions, as well as truths, which we do not pause to consider, and which are extracted from the mud of our mundane existence, primarily, through the mechanism of ogy. Our ordinary world is the base from which we peregrinate on philosophical excursions. One might argue that this base itself occupies philosophical terrain. But the philosophical grounding of our everyday existence is necessarily implicit and ‘out of mind’: When we engage with the ordinary, we are rarely impelled towards philosophical reflection. Philosophy, in any case, competes with many other disciplines â€" psychology, biology, and economics, amongst others â€" in respect of our proclivity for abstraction. I am not suggesting that ogical thinking is without use: All I am suggesting is that if you scratch beneath many of the taken for granted notions that have taken up residence in  our minds, you may well come across ogies that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Sometimes one is not even aware that an ogy is being drawn, let alone that an ogical fallacy is committed in assuming somehow that the comparison proves something to be the case rather than merely suggests - usually in a graphic or picturesque manner -  how the phenomenon in question could be explained. Moreover, in some cases, the ogy is plainly flawed. Nothing exemplifies this better than certain arguments purporting to prove the existence of God. The Argument from Design, for example, has it that the order and beauty of the universe demonstrate that it must have been designed. Not only is the premise of this argument debatable - order and beauty are clearly not universally present and could be attributed rather to the eye of the beholder, but the conclusion is simply a non sequitur: It relies, of course, on an implicit ogy with, say, a craftsman creating a beautiful artefact - a  microcosmic event which is thought somehow to serve as a parallel for a macrocosmic event, the creation of the universe. But,

(a)  It simply does not follow that what holds good in the microcosmic situation - namely that the artefact has self-evidently been made by someone - holds good in the macrocosmic situation, where one is confronted with an infinite universe. At most, one might allow that an inference is being made. But this requires comparability between these situations, which is simply not the case: In the microcosmic situation, the craftsman is responsible for just a limited number of products in a world of innumerable objects, including other craftsmen. The putative God in the macroscopic situation is deemed to have created everything on his own.

(b)  The ogy is thus flawed for that reason, but also because in the microcosmic situation, the craftsman produces the artefact from materials to hand, for example, wood. God, however, is believed by the religious apologist to create the  universe ex nihilo, from nothing.

For these and other reasons - such as attributing certain manifestations of order instead to evolutionary forces - The Argument from Design is totally unconvincing. But it is important to observe that it is basically the unwarranted drawing of conclusions on the basis of an ogy, as well as the flawed nature of the ogy, which undermine this argument. Moreover, as is the case with all philosophical arguments, there is a meaning problem which needs to be addressed even before the logic is questioned: What exactly do we mean when we say that God created everything ex nihilo? I would venture to suggest that the whole idea is incomprehensible, and that any attempt to clarify what is meant by this is likely to rely on yet more unwarranted inferences drawn from yet more flawed ogies. Simply stringing together a number of words in a grammatically correct sentence, as in ‘God created everything’, may create the illusion of meaning, but grammatically-generated meaning is no substitute for conceptual clarity. Anyway, such is the nature of ogical thinking, which pervades our language and reasoning.  Unsurprisingly, it characterizes much discussion on the dreaded subject of death.

Death is personal: To us in the West, it is something which can consume our inner lives as surely as it consumes the husks we call our bodies. It is the raison dêtre for so much in life, a rallying point, a border post of the everyday world. It is a concept shot through with powerful emotions: fear, anger, revulsion, sadness, love. And it too is something which is conceived in terms of ogies. Already I have unwittingly resorted to ogical thinking in my references to our inner lives and outer husks: I have evoked the ghost in the machine. I might also have suggested that death is like a sleep, adding the corollary that in the ’sleep of death, dreams may come’, that a life of sorts awaits us ’when we have shuffled off this mortal coil’.  But on what basis would I have arrived at this conclusion? The rub of the matter is that this belief is founded primarily on ogy, and that below it may lie a deeply entrenched fear of losing one’s ego, a fear that is particularly conditioned by the individualistic ethos of so-called advanced societies. I would like to propose instead that we calmly consider the alternative; namely, that there is no afterlife. I would like to suggest that when we die no heaven or hell awaits us, because, to put it simply, we shall no longer be. This being the case, we can have no cause to fear death, because it carries no implications for us beyond our complete annihilation. I am aware, of course, that, to someone like me, the product of a Catholic upbringing, a faint angst haunts this construction on death.  But this hardly detracts from the argument. It is surely preferable that the head and the heart should concur, but like an old married couple, these two faculties will not always see eye to eye.

Though profoundly personal, death is a social phenomenon as well: On a small scale, there are the bereaved, of course, who not only feel the loss, but whose lives are more or less, subtly or significantly, altered. These effects may cascade far and wide. For example, a death may loosen ties, or bring people together, and this may influence the pattern of affiliations and interactions of the generations that follow. Macrocosmically too, death is something with which society as a whole has to contend. I’m not referring here to, say, the preoccupation of various organs of the state with morbidity indices and the implications these may have on governmental spending. I am referring rather to a more profound way in which society is taken up with the phenomenon of death: to the fact that death is something which is ‘culturally mediated’. Without getting into a debate about the nature of culture â€" it has variously been construed as comprising the symbolic and acquired aspects of society, as something distinct from nature, as something distinct from the social structure, as something akin to ideology, or as a way of life â€" in the present context this phrase relates to a societal resource which is drawn upon to bestow meaning on what is in a certain sense a unintelligible event, and provide the rituals with which order and ordinariness are re-established. Death, particularly when it is unexpected and dramatic, is often extraordinary in various ways, and has the potential to thoroughly trivialize the construct we know as society. We see this manifested sometimes in a phase of withdrawal and detachment in someone who is actually dying. And death, of course, takes one beyond the reach of society. Thus, society needs to assert itself â€" via culture - by countering the bewildering sense of life being insignificant, goals and ambitions being pointless, and norms being irrelevant, which may potentially also accompany the experience of bereavement. This is something which is proactively addressed during the socialization process, when how one is to live in general, rather than how one should cope with death in particular, is the focus of attention. As far as society is concerned, what is not needed is that individuals grow up believing that, as there is no point to life, they  may as well take whatever they want from life, and act however they please, regardless of the consequences. Society could just not operate as an aggregation of nihilistic egoists.  In other words, society abhors anomie, much as nature abhors a vacuum. If one chose to talk of society in some reified sense as having a separate existence, one might say that, if its constituent members did not to some extent subscribe to a set of shared beliefs and values, then the fabric of society might itself unravel. Returning to the subject of bereavement, one could say that if, because of the death of someone close to them, individuals were left feeling that life was of no importance or that nothing was worth pursuing, then they might not be able to adequately fulfil their social roles, and this too could have all sorts of repercussions for others; not just emotionally unsettling the latter.  When a death occurs, individuals need to feel that, in some sense, ‘life goes on’. The comfort and support provided by friends reinforces this message, and subliminally impresses on the bereaved that they continue to belong within a network of other social beings. The colloquial expression about someone’s world falling apart in the aftermath of a death often sums up the experience of bereavement. When culture is deployed to hold that world together, it is chiefly one particular component of culture that is tasked with this, and that component is known as religion

Now, I’m not suggesting that religion necessarily comes into play when someone dies. But this certainly seems to happen most of the time and in nearly all societies. Religion is, of course, the principal (though by no means exclusive) sponsor of the notion that we somehow survive death. Moreover, religion generally-speaking also declares that what happens to us after death is determined by the manner in which we conduct ourselves in life. There can be little doubt that in promoting such ideas, religion serves society well by immunising individuals against anomic tendencies in the face of death. Its priests and preachers, mullahs and rabbis have for centuries officiated over the rituals of death, and comforted the bereaved with promises of paradise. However, there is much more to the relationship between religion and society than that: For one thing, in most cases, the former generally serves to facilitate mass conformity to most societal norms through pushing an ethical agenda, the bottom line of which â€" at least in the Abrahamaic religions - is that if you are good you go to heaven and if you are bad you go to hell. Moreover, religion and the state are institutionally enmeshed in various ways in most countries: In theocracies, they are practically indistinguishable. In the West, religion may have retired to the back benches, yet it still manages to insinuate itself to various degrees in the political life of countries, sometimes in a moderating way. Even in avowedly atheistic states, a sort of quasi-religion fills the breach with absurdities like Kim Jong-il of North Korea assuming a god-like status. Thus religion has played a role in adding a sacred aspect to the profane business of running the state. It is also hard to deny that for many, many people, religion is a balm, a consolation, an ‘opiate’, and, as such, takes some of the pressure off the state, which might otherwise have to contend with unmanageable levels of social unrest. In fact, one of the ironies of modern history is that it has often been in the afore-mentioned atheistic states, erstwhile or existent, where consolation has perhaps been mostly keenly sought, that religion of a more conventional character has flourished fungal-like in the shadows. Why religion should be an opiate is not hard to see: When life is unrelentingly grim, as it is for the vast majority of people all over the world, and denies them significant political or social leverage to effect a change in their circumstances, then it makes sense for these people to console themselves with the thought that at least after death, there will be some redress, some righting of wrongs. Psychologically too, such a thought also addresses the lack of self-esteem which so often accompanies poverty, relative or otherwise: That it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle probably plays well to most of the religious-inclined poor of many a teeming barrio. And in fostering an otherworldly orientation, religion can have an enervating effect upon political activity, particularly in conservative societies where religion and the state work closely together.

 However, religion and its relationship with society are changing all the time: In some parts of the world, religion is in retreat; in other parts, it is resurgent. What is more, its consoling function is sometimes belied by a proclivity for politicisation, as is evidenced by liberation theology in Latin America or the activities of various Islamic movements. But other social and economic developments obviously cloud the picture too: Page though a Sunday supplement and there’s a chance you’ll come across the odd picture of destitute people in some third world country huddled beneath an advertising hoarding extolling deluxe objects of desire; an image symbolising something that’s becoming more and more apparent, which is that, today, more conspicuously than ever, material wealth is promoted despite being beyond the reach of so many. Materialism has become a sort of quasi-religion too; it’s Episcopalian priests being those louche style gurus whose parishioners are the readers of glossies and it’s more fundamentalist ministers those glaze â€"eyed corporate leaders intoning the mantra: ‘Greed is good’. What’s more, the gospel of the market - relentless advertising - now penetrates the sanctuary of the home more profoundly than ever, subtly mind-forming each up and coming generation via television and other mass media. Consequently, aspirations rise, and when these are thwarted, anger results. This anger may find expression in a variety of ways, from mere self-seeking criminality to various types of political action; nationalist liberation struggles, terrorism, trade union activity and protests, to name but a few. And in some cases it feeds into political action by religious groups; vide my reference to liberation theology and Islamic movements. Even so, religious dissent of this sort still retains its otherworldly point of reference. In fact, there are more than a few religious groups around wanting to impose a revanchist ‘otherworldly’ agenda on this world, whether by bloody force or the use of mass media.

But, of course, there is a major philosophical flaw with religion which affects its credibility, and that is â€" as has already been suggested â€" that it is premised on spurious ogies. One might wonder whether religion can nevertheless survive a convincing refutation of this ogical reasoning. I do not believe it can. To me, these ogies are central to any religious apology. That such reasoning should be deployed at all demonstrates the poverty of this apology. You don’t deploy ogical thinking to prove the existence of tables and chairs (I fear for the physical safety of philosophers who doubt such things); you do when seeking to prove the existence of a putative entity that cannot otherwise convincingly be shown to exist. Furthermore, what is unseen can only be apprehended through, or with reference to, what is seen. Of course, there are other categories of proof advanced by those wanting to show that God exists. But I think that the ogical argument is crucial because, in the absence of direct empirical evidence of his existence, ogy ‘informs’ the substantive picture we have of God. Whether viewed as an ancient with a beard and flowing robes, a powerful uber-warrior wielding an axe, a gigantic bird, or some nebulous power, God has been described by likening him to observable phenomena. In short, by deploying ogy. And since the ogy fails as proof, the entire deck of cards that is religion comes crashing down, along with the card setting out the religious premise of an afterlife. When this begins to dawn on people, then, of course, the contribution of religion to social order will begin to decline. There are other problems with religion too; many of them are psychological as opposed to philosophical in nature. Take, for example, the peculiar and somewhat hypocritical attitude religions exhibit towards the ‘sins of the flesh’: Although they may object that they are concerned rather with less sense-bound feelings, such as joy and despair, ultimately religions implicitly acknowledge the hedonistic principle that human beings are driven by the need to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. (This I would regard as ancillary to the most profound need driving us: the desire for happiness). The extremes of such experiences, after all, are supposedly afforded by heaven and hell respectively. Even if it is argued that these are states of mind or ‘planes of existence’ rather than physical locations, heaven and hell are seen as conditions that happen to and are imposed upon people, to which people react in ways which bear comparison with reactions to pleasurable and painful stimuli. Yet this all sits rather uncomfortably with the puritanical disapproval evinced by most religions â€" particularly those in the Abrahamaic tradition â€" of any display of a life-affirming sexuality outside strict social boundaries. Thus we find certain Muslim fundamentalists self-righteously demanding the lash, or even the bullet, for women transgressing the rigid mores of their societies. In the same breath, they will wax rhapsodic at the prospect of eternal orgiastic rutting in paradise in the company of seventy two virgins should they lose their lives whilst attempting to butcher innocents in some squalid Middle Eastern marketplace or in the anonymous streets of some Western city. (More recently, there have been unconfirmed reports from Iraq â€" that bastion of Western-sponsored freedomâ€" that religious militias have taken to gluing the anuses of , gay, bisexual and transgender people, and then giving them a drink causing diarrhoea, which results in a horrible death). Whilst these barbaric acts may not be in accord with the Quoran â€" somewhat hypocritically, religiously-minded people tend not to be too bound by their holy books â€" and owe more to the backward-looking societies in which it they occur, the point of view informing them is nevertheless a religious one, and mainstream Muslims would well to consider what succour they give to these deranged fanatics  (Not so long ago, for example, we witnessed the Karzai regime in Afghanistan introducing legislation effectively legitimising rape within marriage in order to appease conservatives within that benighted country). Christianity is no less hypocritical. Witness the spectacle of millionaire preachers in the American Biblebelt surrounded by their business managers and power-dressing spouses, spluttering about hellfire and damnation only to be found with their pants down being pleasured by some vacuous young congregationalist. Or have a look at all of those dreary Catholic priests with a furtive craving for altar boys, intoning their baleful sermons on the evils of masturbation. The more vehemently religion proscribes; the more sordid-seeming are the infractions that inevitably follow. However, it is not just in matters sexual that religion casts an angst-laden pall over everything. In all sorts of ways, religion, I would contend is a sort of neurosis that weighs heavily on the human soul. Verily, it is the ‘sigh of the oppressed creature’, as Marx so eloquently put it. It engenders a sense of dread, a hesitancy, about living life to the full and without reservation. One might even construe the story the Garden of Eden in which God forbade Adam and Eve from eating the fruits of the apple tree as some sort of parable admonishing people against indulgence and extolling restraint instead. No wonder that the rise of consumerism in Western societies since the war has closely tracked the fall in religious observance.    

I have argued that in claiming we somehow survive death and that how we live our lives determines what this ‘afterlife’ is to be, religion does society a service insofar as it provides ready-made answers in regard to the meaning of life and reinforces socially acceptable behaviour. However, this contribution cannot be a necessary condition for ensuring that people do not adopt deviant or anti-social lifestyles. For, in truth, many people who reject the notion of an afterlife still manage to stay on the right side of the law. Many people are also atheists, and although the two notions are not conceptually equivalent, non-survivalism and atheism would seem to go hand in hand (Interestingly, both stand opposed to positions that are profoundly informed by ogical thinking. Moreover, the respective notions against which they are opposed; namely, belief in an afterlife and in God; are likewise linked: What’s the point in believing in a God if there is no afterlife? I should add, by the way, that although religion and atheism stand opposed to one another, there is one thing that they do agree upon, which is that man is a merest speck set against an inconceivably powerful force. For atheists, this force is the cosmos, and most atheists have a capacity for profound awe when contemplating the fact that mankind could disappear in an instant were some cosmic catastrophe to befall us, such as that which hypothetically occurred billions of years ago when Earth and the planet Theia collided â€" thereby creating the moon and hence the conditions propitiously conducive to life. Religionists are unable to countenance the nihilistic import of such a possibility, preferring instead to place their hopes in a benevolent God and a blissful afterlife, projecting an anthropomorphic fantasy - ‘God created everything in seven days’ â€" onto the vast indifferent canvass of the universe). So something else must account for the fact that this sizeable constituency of non-survivalists and atheists by and large lead ordinary unremarkable lives within the law. The unremarkable truth, of course, is that like everyone, those holding these positions undergo a socialization process as they grow up, resulting in them internalizing the norms and values of the society in which they live. Any religious rationale for these norms and values is either never ‘taken on board’, or is discarded later in life â€" though it must be said that some ostensible non-survivalists and atheists may subconsciously entertain some notion of an afterlife, as this is so deeply embedded in popular culture and may through a process of cultural osmosis come to find a niche within the most rational of minds. Some, of course, may retain religious baggage from childhood. Notwithstanding that, one is still tempted to argue that â€" because their adherence to societal norms and values is not underpinned by a powerful irrationality - those who eschew the essentially religious notion of an afterlife have a subtly different relationship to society. Consider, for example, the probability that, because society has no sacred character for them, atheists and their ilk are unlikely to regard themselves as a chosen people and may be  more disposed to humanistic and inclusive attitudes vis-à-vis other social groups.  It may also be no accident that, since the dawn of capitalism, many of the more radical figures have been atheists or agnostics. It certainly surprised me to learn from Richard Dawkins excellent book, ‘The god delusion’, that many, if not most, of the founding fathers of the American Republic were atheists and/or secularists. Secularism, or the belief that religion or religious institutions should play no part in the governance of society, has often trailed along behind full-blooded atheism. It owes much to the supercession of feudalism â€" in which religion played a major and overt role â€" by capitalism. That development was accompanied by an increasing compartmentalisation of society, and secularists merely insisted that religion confine itself to the compartment labelled ‘religion’.  Secularism does not necessarily entail a rejection of religion.

This, of course, begs a question: Given that society has evolved and consequently its complex relationship with religion has evolved too, is it not possible to have a society which did not depend on religion to shore up its ideological architecture, which could sit easily with both atheistic and non-survivalist views simply because it did not rely on the wrath of god or the prospect of eternal damnation insofar as the conflicts and tensions inherent in present day society no longer existed. I believe that it is, and this brings me to the third of the ingredients found in my intellectual stew.

The idea, often facetiously dismissed as utopian, of a society founded on the principle of common ownership has an ancient pedigree: Sir Thomas More coined the word, Utopia, in his book published in 1516, tendentiously depicting (as he meant thereby to draw attention to some of the evils of his own society) life on a mythical island south of the equator where private property did not exist. But elements of utopian thought can be traced back far earlier to Plato and others, and the notion of an ideal commonwealth has found fictional expression in the work of many writers, from Bacon, Campanella, and Harrington, to Morris, Hertzka, and Wells. The idea and ideal of common ownership specifically has also informed actual events in history â€" witness the Diggers in 17c England, or the various experiments in building communistic communities, such as those Robert Owen. Moreover â€" and this is often overlooked â€" for most of mankind’s existence, society has managed to get by without private property, bar the odd loin cloth, trinket, or flint axe intended for personal use. Marx argued that humans lived in a state of primitive communism for aeons prior to the advent of classical ancient societies where production came to be largely carried out by chattel slave labour.

My concern, however, is with advanced communism. If ever an idea had ‘arrived’ and merited serious attention it is this, particularly now that humanity stands on the brink of an ecological abyss of unfathomable depths for which global capitalism, through acts of omission or commission, can justifiably be blamed. So, how to begin laying out this notion? Perhaps one needs to initially look at what is being proposed: In a nutshell, advanced communist society would operate on a world-wide basis in accordance with that old Marxist dictum, ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. As such, it would bear no resemblance to extant and extinct ‘state capitalist’ states, ludicrously and cynically claiming to be ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’. It would be a democracy in the truest sense of the word, and would be established on the basis of a majority choosing to have it - most certainly not imposed by revolutionary vanguards. States and the geographical limits of their administrative operations â€" national borders - would no longer exist. Freedom of expression would be completely unfettered, and the only socially sanctioned limitations on behaviour being those intended to deter actions demonstrably causing harm to others. No longer straitjacketed by the need to make a profit, production would be undertaken on the basis of need and in a wholly rational manner: Manufacturing processes that might have deleterious environmental effects or pose unacceptable risks, for example, would not be considered, and every effort would be made to ensure that safe alternatives were used instead. People would contribute to the production of goods and services as and how they wished. That is to say, work would be both voluntary and co-operative - there would no longer exist competition between workers, companies and countries. And people would have free access to the fruits of human labour. In other words, neither money nor barter would play a role: If people needed something, they would simply go along to their local distribution facility and take it without having to hand over something in exchange. Sophisticated stock control measures would ensure that needs were anticipated as far as possible by flagging up potential shortfalls. The production of the items in question would then be undertaken in a wholly rational and planned way. Where an actual shortfall did exist then rational strategies such as considering alternatives, rationing, reserving, utilizing different manufacturing processes, importing from further afield, or simply making do without would be deployed. There is no need to suppose that people would in some way abuse the system: Why should they when goods and services were freely available? In any case, it is reasonable to suppose that a wholly different mindset would prevail in this new society; one that would be altogether more socially responsive, humane, tolerant and far less sullied by egotism and greed. Property being held in common, there would no longer exist the immense armies of personnel and the bloated resource-depleting structures dedicated to upholding property rights or access to resources inside and outside each state as obtains at present: I am talking here of the police and the military, the entire justice system, the prisons, the arms industry, the myriad agencies involved in administering property rights and claims, etcetera. Correspondingly, untold millions around the world would no longer be drawn to a life of crime or end up incarcerated because of this career move. The raison d’être for crime, war, terrorism, industrial strife, and internecine conflict, amongst other hideous stressors characteristic of the modern world would simply not exist. People would be able to travel and settle where they wished, but, as the current economic and political conditions driving people to uproot and seek refuge in other parts of the world would no longer obtain, mass migration (Not to mention the attendant angst and resentment in host populations) is unlikely to occur â€" except in the event of some catastrophic natural disaster. Education would be radically different from what it is today: Being both free and non-compulsory, it is to be expected that those seeking to further their education would do so joyously. The grim discipline-orientated schools of today, which seek to mould kids into industry and business fodder, would become a thing of the past. For once, art would genuinely be for art’s sake, not cynically foisted on a passive populace as a means of turning a quick buck. Quality, in other words, would be the watchword in all creative activity, from architecture and landscaping to music, theatre, film, and writing. Technological innovation, no longer fettered by patents or invested interests, would accelerate, albeit in a controlled, socially responsible way, and many of the more onerous tasks that need undertaking could be systematically automated. Medical research in particular (especially in areas that are currently under-researched â€" for example, tropical medicine â€" because there is less of a financial incentive to do so) would be prioritized in order to rid humanity of the misery of disease  and illness as far as possible. Moreover, it would be conducted in an open, coordinated manner, not in the fragmented fashion that it is today, with numerous research groups jealously guarding their discoveries for ‘commercial reasons’.  In this respect, and so many others, the establishment of world communism â€" or socialism â€" would utterly transform the way we live. Life would simply be incomparably more relaxed, enjoyable, fulfilling, and happy. Practically all of the so-called today’s ‘evils’ â€" if one might revert to pulpit language for an instance â€" would just disappear: war, ethnic cleansing, vandalism, robbery, prostitution, ography, drug pushing, protection rackets, nepotism, corruption, repression, the cynical manipulation of minds for financial gain, people trafficking, slavery, mass hunger, poverty, unemployment, environmental destruction, the wastage of resources, the deliberate creation of soulless and ugly human environments, to name just some. And the reason for this is simply that each and every one of these phenomena has it’s origin in or is sustained by the current social dispensation, by the manner in which society is organized today. Money, in other words, is what these evils are all about. When humanity eventually chooses to embrace communism, then truly it shall have crossed a threshold between barbarism and civilisation.

I am by no means claiming that all will be perfect under communism: It is reasonable to suppose that after resolving to embrace communism, humanity will have to live with an assortment of ‘transitional problems’ for several decades before things begin to run smoothly. And, of course, the vexed question of the relationship between the individual and society will continue to demand attention. When discussing this relationship, political theorists sometimes refer to the notion of a ‘Social Contract’. To be literal-minded about it, this is, of course, a fiction, another instance of mistaken ogical thinking in which the individual and society are deemed to have a quasi-legal relationship with each party having obligations to the other, or in which society is formed after individuals enter into contracts with each other concerning the nature of the society. Strictly-speaking, as an ogy, this depiction fails: there is no ogical court or presiding judge (unless God in heaven fits this description â€" but then would he sanction some of the heinous societies in existence today, one has to ask â€" rhetorically) to rule on supposed breaches of this contract, and it is nonsensical to construe such a contract as having been negotiated at a given point in time, following which the individual was obliged to behave within the constraints laid down. Of course, what the notion of a Social Contract is actually trying to convey is that individuals derive all sorts of benefits from belonging to a society, but to do so requires them to act within certain constraints, and contribute towards society as well. However, what society affords the individual and the extent to which the latter may comply with social norms are variable. In other words, we have to consider the nature of the society in question when looking at this relationship. Tensions at the interface between the individual and society are perhaps inevitable: One or other may be compromised in all sorts of social arrangements. At one extreme, we may find ourselves living in a laissez-faire jungle where little or no social restraint is placed on individuals in their pursuit of wealth or hedonistic lifestyles, where law and order is minimally or corruptly applied, where a ‘dog-eats-dog’ ethos presides, and where little heed is paid to the social ramifications â€" be they the ruthless sequestration of what had been commonly held resources, the oppression of the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable, pollution and environmental depredation, the creation of antipathetic, violent, and often politically illiterate subcultures, or garish and architecturally discordant urban environments. Such a society lacks any sense of communality. Yet much the same can be said for the dystopian extreme where society lords it over the individual, crushing any flowering of individualism, demanding conformity and total allegiance. This nightmarishly fascistic model of society rests upon an all-powerful state. Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, disparate elements of both models seem to co-exist in many contemporary societies; China being the most noteworthy example. Communism, on the other hand, whilst not likely to wholly eliminate the tension between the individual and society, is surely the only form of society able to radically reduce such tension as it would facilitate the greatest possible individual liberty within a socially harmonious framework.

People who have never entertained the idea of communism before commonly respond with incredulity as soon as they become acquainted with it. Perhaps this is understandable: It is a profoundly revolutionary idea that calls into question many deeply embedded assumptions about man and society. However, the reader may care to consider the following list of points, which, though far from being exhaustive, ought to demonstrate that communism is indeed a feasible proposition, and that the arguments in its favour are actually highly complex. When doing so, it should be borne in mind that what I mean by capitalism is the currently universal economic system in which goods and services are produced primarily in order to be sold for a profit (what is known as commodity production), whether by the state or by private companies, and in which money, wages, and property, amongst other features, are to be found. Capitalism can either assume the form of state capitalism or private/laissez faire capitalism â€" or, indeed, anything in between. There is no such thing as state socialism or communism.

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