Thursday, January 19, 2006
I found this post of interest, given I am old enough to remember being taught that the triumph of socialism was "inevitable":
The Leftists of the generations of Beatrice Webb, Eric Hobsbawn, Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy and even Joan Robinson actually believed in "scientific socialism" and seriously debated such issues as the correct calculation of the surplus value of labor and the role of money in Communism. The Marxism of that era was regarded as a potentially exact science, capable of accurately predicting social trends and even human behavior. It was treated seriously. As late as the 1970s, Chairman Mao's Little Red Book was regarded as a scientific guide to action in the same sense that a trigonometry textbook contained formulas for the solution of angles, given the sides of a triangle.
Of course, this begs the question: what movements/ideas that we consider "inevitable" today will prove not to be quite so "inevitable" over time. A lot of people think it "inevitable" that Spanish will become in America what French is in Canada: a coequal official language. Maybe. What if the United States gets serious about assimilating immigrants again and/or Hispanic immigrants get serious about assimilating despite all the policies which encourage them not to do so?
There is a story about a woman whose husband hit a deer on the highway. She told a friend: "If my son hit it, he would have been driving recklessly. Had my daughter hit it, she would have been driving carelessly. Since he hit it, the accident was unavoidable."
The word "inevitable," like the word "unavoidable," is all too often a way to derail thoughtful discussion about the impact of our choices in the here and now will have on the future.
|posted by Jim on 1:05 PM|
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