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 马克思说的步人后尘. |
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马克思说的步人后尘. -- Anonymous - (1230 Byte) 2006-8-05 周六, 上午11:12 (905 reads) |
nunia
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作者：nunia 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Baran-Wallerstein 修正主異救不了現代馬克思主義．經典馬克思主義者必然崇尚美國二百多年至今日漸強大的國家體制。
This is the main conclusion in Lee Harris "The Intellectual origins of America-bashing'
I name it the intellectual tragedy of the right.
The concept of a right side of history is derived from Marxism, and it
is founded on the belief that there is a forward advance toward a
socialist future that can be resisted, but not ultimately defeated. But
does anyone believe this anymore? Does anyone take seriously the claim
that the present state of affairs will be set aside and a wholly new
order of things implemented in its place, and that such a transformation
of the world will happen as a matter of course?
And, finally, if in fact there are those who believe such a thing, what
is the status of this belief? Is it a realistic assessment of the
objective conditions of the present world order, or is it merely wishful
thinking?
Marx's political realism
THE IMPORTANCE OF these questions should be obvious to anyone familiar
with the thought of Marx. Marx's uniqueness as a thinker of the left is
his absolute commitment to the principles of political realism. This is
the view that any political energy that is put into what is clearly a
hopeless cause is a waste. Utopianism is not only impractical; it is an
obstacle to obtaining socialism's true objective, since it diverts badly
needed resources away from the pursuit of viable goals, wasting them
instead on the pursuit of political fantasies.
The concept of fantasy as a political category assumed its central place
in Marxist thought in The Communist Manifesto, where Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels used it as the distinguishing mark of their own brand
of socialism: It was this that condemned all previous forms of socialism
to the realm of vague dreams and good intentions, and which gave Marxism
the claim to be a "scientific" form of socialism.
Marx's use of the term "scientific" in this text has often been
criticized. But, in his defense, it should be remembered that the German
Wissenschaft describes a far wider category than the English "science."
It means what we know as opposed to what we merely opine, or feel, or
imagine; the objective as opposed to the subjective; realistic thinking
as opposed to impractical daydreaming. And it is in this last sense that
Marx and Engels use it: For the opposite of the scientific is none other
than the utopian.
This is the basis of Marx's condemnation of all forms of utopian
socialism, the essence of which is the enormous gap between the
"fantastic pictures of future society" the utopian socialist dreams of
achieving, on one hand, and any realistic assessment of the objective
conditions of the actual social order on the other.
This concept of fantasy as "fantastic pictures" inside the head of
impractical daydreamers is a classic theme of German Romantic literature
and is perhaps most closely identified with the characters of E.T.A.
Hoffman's stories, such as Kapellmeister Kreisler. The fantasist, in
this literature, is a character type: He lives in his own dream world
and can manage only the most tenuous relationship to the real world
around him. But, unlike the character type of the absent-minded
professor, the Romantic fantasist is not content to putter around in his
own world. Instead, he is forever insisting that his world is the real
one, and in the process of doing this, he reduces the real world around
him, and the people in it, to an elaborate stage setting for the
enactment of his own private fantasies.
Marx and Engels's wholesale condemnation of all previous socialism as
utopian fantasy is the fundamental innovation of their own work. It is
the basis of their claim to be taken seriously, not merely by
Hoffmanesque daydreamers, but by men of practical judgment and shrewd
common sense. To fail to make this distinction, or to fail to stay on
the right side of this distinction once it has been made, is to cease to
be a Marxist and to fall back into mere Traumerei.
This demarcation line arose because Marx believed that he had grasped
something that no previous utopian socialist had even suspected. He
believed that he had shown that socialism was inevitable and that it
would come about through certain ironclad laws of history -- laws that
Marx believed were revealed through the study of the very nature of
capitalism. Socialism, in short, would not come about because a handful
of daydreamers had wished for it, or because pious moralists had urged
it, but because the unavoidable breakdown of the capitalist system would
force the turn to socialism upon those societies that, prior to this
breakdown, had been organized along capitalist lines.
Schematically the scenario went something like this:
* The capitalists would begin to suffer from a falling rate of profit.
* The workers would therefore be "immiserized"; they would become poorer
as the capitalists struggled to keep their own heads above water.
* The poverty of the workers would drive them to overthrow the
capitalist system -- their poverty, not their ideals.
What is interesting here is that, once you accept the initial premise
about the falling rate of profit, the rest does indeed follow
realistically. Now, this does not mean that it follows necessarily or
according to an ironclad scientific law; but it certainly conveys what
any reasonable person would take as the most probable outcome of a
hypothetical failure of capitalism.
For Marx it is absolutely essential that revolutionary activities be
justifiable on realistic premises. If they cannot be, then they are
actions that cannot possibly have a real political objective -- and
therefore, their only value can be the private emotional or spiritual
satisfaction of the people carrying out this pseudo-political action.
So in order for revolutionary activity to have a chance of succeeding,
there is an unavoidable precondition: The workers must have become much
poorer over time. Furthermore, there had to be not merely an increase of
poverty, but a conviction on the part of the workers that their material
circumstances would only get worse, and not better -- and this would
require genuine misery.
This is the immiserization thesis of Marx. And it is central to
revolutionary Marxism, since if capitalism produces no widespread
misery, then it also produces no fatal internal contradiction: If
everyone is getting better off through capitalism, who will dream of
struggling to overthrow it? Only genuine misery on the part of the
workers would be sufficient to overturn the whole apparatus of the
capitalist state, simply because, as Marx insisted, the capitalist class
could not be realistically expected to relinquish control of the state
apparatus and, with it, the monopoly of force. In this, Marx was
absolutely correct. No capitalist society has ever willingly liquidated
itself, and it is utopian to think that any ever will. Therefore, in
order to achieve the goal of socialism, nothing short of a complete
revolution would do; and this means, in point of fact, a full-fledged
civil war not just within one society, but across the globe. Without
this catastrophic upheaval, capitalism would remain completely in co
ntrol of the social order and all socialist schemes would be reduced to
pipe dreams.
The immiserization thesis, therefore, is critical to Marx, for without
it there would be no objective conditions in response to which workers
might be driven to overthrow the capitalist system. If the workers were
becoming better off with time, then why jump into an utterly untested
and highly speculative economic scheme? Especially when even socialists
themselves were bitterly divided over what such a scheme would be like
in actual practice. Indeed, Marx never committed himself to offering a
single suggestion about how socialism would actually function in the
real world.
Immiserization goes global
BY THE TWENTIETH CENTURY the immiserization thesis was already beginning
to look shaky. Empirical evidence, drawn either by impressionistic
observation or systematic statistical studies, began to suggest that
there was something wrong with the classical version of the thesis, and
an attempt was made to save it by redefining immiserization to mean not
an absolute increase in misery, but merely a relative one. This gloss
allowed a vast increase in empirical plausibility, since it accepted the
fact that the workers were indeed getting better off under the
capitalist system but went on to argue that they were not getting better
off at the same rate as the capitalists.
The problem with this revision lay not in its economic premises, but its
political ones. Could one realistically believe that workers would
overthrow an economic system that was continually improving their own
lot, simply because that of the capitalist class was improving at a
marginally better rate? Certainly, the workers might envy the
capitalists; but such emotions simply could not supply the gigantic
impetus required to overthrow a structure as massive as the capitalist
system. Before the workers of a capitalist society could unite, they had
to feel that they had literally nothing to lose -- nothing to lose but
their proverbial chains. For if they had homes and cars and boats and
RVs to lose as well, then it became quite another matter.
In short, the relative immiserization thesis was simply not the stuff
that drives people to the barricades. At most it could fuel the
gradualist reforms of the evolutionary ideal of socialism -- a position
identified with Eduard Bernstein.
The post-World War II period demolished the last traces of the classical
immiserization thesis. Workers in the most advanced capitalist countries
were prosperous by any standard imaginable, either absolute or relative;
and what is even more important, they felt themselves to be well off,
and believed that the future would only make them and their children
even better off than they had been in the past. This was a deadly blow
to the immiserization thesis and hence to Marxism. For the failure of
the immiserization thesis is in fact the failure of classical Marxism.
If there is no misery, there is no revolution; and if there is no
revolution, there is no socialism. Q.E.D. Socialism goes back once more
to being merely a utopian fantasy.
Yet those who still claim to derive their heritage from Marx are mostly
unwilling to acknowledge that their political aims are merely utopian,
not scientific. How is that possible?
There might be several reasons advanced for this, but certainly one of
them is Paul Baran. A Polish born American economist and a Marxist,
Baran is the author of The Political Economy of Growth (Monthly Review
Press, 1957). In it, for the first time in Marxist literature, Baran
propounded a causal connection between the prosperity of the advanced
capitalist countries and the impoverishment of the Third World. It was
no longer the case, as it was for Marx, that poverty -- as well as
idiocy -- was the natural condition of man living in an agricultural
mode of production. Rather, poverty had been introduced into the Third
World by the capitalist system. The colonies no longer served the
purpose of consuming overstocked inventories, but were now the positive
victims of capitalism.
What needs to be stressed here is that, prior to Baran, no Marxist had
ever suspected that capitalism was the cause of the poverty of the rest
of the world. Not only had Marx and Engels failed to notice this
momentous fact, but neither had any of their followers. Yet this
omission was certainly not due to Marx's lack of knowledge about, or
interest in, the question of European colonies. In his writing on India,
Marx shows himself under no illusions concerning the brutal and
mercenary nature of British rule. He is also aware of the "misery and
degradation" effected by the impact of British industry's "devastating
effects" on India. Yet all of this is considered by Marx to be a
dialectical necessity; that is to say, these effects were the
unavoidable precondition of India's progress and advance -- an example
of the "creative destruction" that Schumpeter spoke of as the essence of
capitalist dynamics. Or, as Marx put it in On Colonialism: "[T]he
English bourgeoisie.., will neither emancipate nor materially mend the
social condition of the mass of the [Indian] people... but... what they
will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both" the
emancipation and the mending of this social condition.
The radical nature of Baran's reformulation of Marxist doctrine is
obscured by an understandable tendency to confuse Baran's theory with
Lenin's earlier theory of imperialism. In fact, the two have nothing in
common. Lenin's theory had evolved in order to explain the continuing
survival of capitalism into the early twentieth century, and hence the
delay of the coming of socialism. In Lenin's view, imperialism is not
the cause of Third World immiserization, but rather a stopgap means of
postponing immiserization in the capitalist countries themselves. It is
the capitalist countries' way of keeping their own work force relatively
prosperous -- and hence politically placid -- by selling surplus goods
into captive colonial markets. It is not a way of exploiting, much less
impoverishing, these colonies. It was rather a way "to bribe the upper
strata of the proletariat, and ... to ... strengthen opportunism," as
Lenin put it in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
(International Publishers, 1933).
This gives us the proper perspective from which to judge the
revolutionary quality of Baran's reformulation. For, in essence, what
Baran has done is to globalize the traditional doctrine of
immiserization so that, instead of applying to the workers of the
advanced capitalist countries, it now came to apply to the entire
population of those countries that have not achieved advanced
capitalism: It was the rest of the world that was being impoverished by
capitalism, not the workers of the advanced countries.
Baran's global immiserization thesis, after its initial launch, was
taken up by other Marxists, but it was nowhere given a more elaborate
intellectual foundation than in Immanuel Wallerstein's monumental study
The Modern World-System (Academic Press, 1974), which was essentially a
fleshing out in greater historical and statistical detail of Baran's
thesis. Hence, for the sake of convenience, I will call the global
immiserization thesis the Baran-Wallerstein revision.
America as "root cause"
WHAT I NOW would like to consider is not the thesis itself, but the role
that this thesis played in bolstering and revitalizing late
twentieth-century Marxism. For it is here that we find the intellectual
origins of the international phenomenon of America-bashing. If there is
any element of genuine seriousness in this movement -- if, indeed, it
aspires to be an objective and realistic assessment of the relationship
of America to the rest of the world -- then that element of seriousness
is to be found in the global immiserization thesis: America has gotten
rich by making other countries poor.
Furthermore, this is no less true of those who, like Chomsky, have
focused on what is seen as American military aggression against the rest
of the world, for this aggression is understood as having its "root
cause" in America's systematic exploitation of the remainder of the
human race. If American exploitation did not create misery, it would not
need to use military force. It is the global immiserization thesis that
makes the use of force an indispensable tool of American foreign policy
and that is responsible, according to this view, for turning America
into a terrorist state. This explains the absolute centrality of the
global immiserization thesis in the creation of the specter of America
now haunting so much of our world.
The Baran-Wallerstein revision of the classical immiserization thesis
into its global context was far better adapted to fix what was wrong in
Marxist theory than the revisionist notion of relative immiserization
discussed above. For, as we have seen, what was needed was real misery,
and not merely comparative misery, since without such misery there would
be no breakdown of capitalism: no civil war, no revolution, no
socialism. And who can doubt that great real misery exists in the Third
World?
In addition to providing a new and previously untapped source of misery,
the Baran-Wallerstein revision provided several other benefits. For
example, there was no longer any difficulty in accepting the
astonishingly high level of prosperity achieved by the work force of the
advanced capitalist countries -- indeed, it was now even possible to
arraign the workers of these countries alongside of the capitalists for
whom they labored -- or, rather, more precisely, with whom they
collaborated in order to exploit both the material resources and the
cheap labor of the Third World. In the new configuration, both the
workers and the capitalists of the advanced countries became the
oppressor class, while it was the general population of the less
advanced countries that became the oppressed -- including, curiously
enough, even the rulers of these countries, who often, to the untutored
eye, seemed remarkably like oppressors themselves.
With this demystification of the capitalist working class came an end to
even a feigned enthusiasm among Marxists for solidarity with the
hopelessly middle-class aspirations of the American blue-collar work
force. The Baran-Wallerstein revision offered an exotic new object of
sympathy -- namely, the comfortably distant and abstract Third World
victims of the capitalist world system.
Perhaps most important, the Baran-Wallerstein revision also neatly
solved the most pressing dilemma that worker prosperity in advanced
capitalist countries bequeathed to classical Marxism: the absolute lack
of revolutionary spirit among these workers -- the very workers, it must
be remembered, who were originally cast in the critical role of world
revolutionaries. In the new theoretical configuration, this problem no
longer mattered simply because the workers of the capitalist countries
no longer mattered.
Hence the appeal of the global immiserization thesis: The
Baran-Wallerstein revision neatly obviates all the most outstanding
objections to the classical Marxist theory. This leaves two questions
unanswered: Is it true? And even if it is true, does it save Marxism?
Whether the immiserization thesis is true or not is simply too complex a
topic to deal with here. Indeed, for the sake of the present argument, I
am willing to assume that it is absolutely true -- truer than anything
has ever been true before. For what I want to concentrate on is the
question of whether the Baran-Wallerstein revision is consistent with
Marxism's claim to represent a realistic political agenda as opposed to
a mere utopian fantasy. And the short answer is that, no matter how true
the global immiserization thesis might be, it does not save the
Baran-Wallerstein revision of Marxism from being condemned as utopian
fantasy - and condemned not by my standards or yours, but by those of
Marx and Engels.
This is because the original immiserization thesis was set within the
context of a class war within a society -- an actual civil war between
different classes of one and the same society, and not between different
nations on different continents. This makes an enormous difference, for
it is not at all unreasonable to think that a revolutionary movement
could succeed, by means of a violent and bloody civil war, in gaining
the monopoly of force within a capitalist society, and thus be able to
dictate terms to the routed capitalists, if any survived.
But this is an utterly different scenario from one in which the most
advanced capitalist societies have a monopoly of force -- and brutally
effective force -- at their disposal. For in this case it is absurd to
think that the exploited Third World countries could possibly be able to
alter the world order by even a hair, provided the advanced capitalist
societies were intent on not being altered.
What could they do to us?
9-11 calling
THE ANSWER TO THIS question, according to many of those who accept the
global immiserization thesis, came on 9-11. Noam Chomsky, perhaps
America's most celebrated proponent of the Baran-Wallerstein thesis,
expressed this idea in the immediate aftermath. Here, for the first
time, the world had witnessed the oppressed finally striking a blow
against the oppressor -- a politically immature blow, perhaps,
comparable to the taking of the Bastille by the Parisian mob in its
furious disregard of all laws of humanity, but still an act equally
world-historical in its significance: the dawn of a new revolutionary era.
This judgment can make sense only in the context of the
Baran-Wallerstein thesis. For if 9-11 was in fact a realistic blow
against the advanced capitalist countries -- or even just the most
advanced -- then here was an escape from the utopian deadlock of the
global immiserization thesis. Here was a way that the overthrow of world
capitalism could be made a viable historical outcome once again, and not
merely the fantastic delusions of a sect. This explains the otherwise
baffling valorization of 9-11 on the part of the left -- by which I mean
the enormous world-historical significance that they have been prepared
to attribute to al Qaeda's act of terror.
But was 9-11 truly world-historical in the precise sense required to
sustain the Baran-Wallerstein revision? For 9-11 to be world-historical
in this sense, it would have to contain within it the seeds of a
gigantic shift in the order of things: something on the scale of the
decline and collapse of capitalist America and with it the final
realization of the socialist realm.
But this investment of world-historical significance to 9-11 is simply
wishful thinking on the part of the left. It is an effort to transform
the demented acts of a group of fantasists into the vanguard of the
world revolution. Because if there is to be a world revolution at all
there has to be a vanguard of that revolution, an agent whose actions
are such as to represent a threat to the capacity of the capitalist
system simply to survive. This means that it is not enough to injure it;
it is not enough to wound or madden it; it is not enough to rouse it to
rage - the agent must kill it, too. He must be capable of overthrowing
the hegemonic power at the center of the capitalist world system.
But this is absolutely implausible. Any realistic assessment of any
possible scenario will inevitably conclude that nothing that al Qaeda
can do can cause the collapse of America and the capitalist system. The
worse eventuality in the long run would be that America would be forced
to break its hallowed ideal of universal tolerance, in order to make an
exception of those who fit the racial profiling of an al Qaeda
terrorist. It is ridiculous to think that if al Qaeda continued to
attack us such measures would not be taken. They would be forced upon
the government by the people (and anyone who thinks that the supposed
cultural hegemony of the left might stop this populist fury is deluded).
In other words, the only effect on America of a continuation of
September 11-style attacks would be an increasingly repressive state
apparatus domestically and a populist home front demand for increasingly
severe retaliation against those nations supporting or hiding
terrorists. But neither one of these reactions would seriously undermine
the strength of the United States -- indeed, it is quite evident that
further attacks would continue to unite the overwhelming majority of the
American population, creating an irresistible "general will" to
eradicate terrorism by any means necessary, including the most brutal
and ruthless.
But this condition, let us recall, is precisely the opposite of the
objective political conditions that, according to Marx, must be present
capitalism to be overthrown. For classical Marxism demands, quite
realistically, a state that is literally being torn apart by internal
dissension. Revolution, in short, requires a full-fledged civil war
within the capitalist social order itself, since nothing short of this
can possibly achieve the goal that the revolution is seeking. Hence,
9-11-style attacks that serve only to strengthen the already
considerable solidarity between classes in the United States are, from
the perspective of classical Marxism, fatally flawed. For such attacks
not only fail to further any revolutionary aims; they actually make the
revolution less probable. A society of 300 million individuals whose
bumper stickers say "United We Stand" is not a breeding ground for
revolutionary activity. Nor is it a society that can be easily
intimidated into mending its ways, even if we make the assumption that
its ways need mending.
But if the result of 9-11 was to strengthen the political unity of the
United States, then 9-11 was definitely not world-historical. The
unspeakable human horror of 9-11 should not blind us to the ghastly
triviality of the motive and the inevitable nullity of the aftermath.
The temptation of fantasy ideology
THE BARAN-WALLERSTEIN revision or Marxism does provide a new global
reformulation of the immiserization thesis. But the locus of this
misery, the Third World, does not and cannot provide an adequate
objective foundation for a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist
system. Rather, this foundation can be provided only by a majority of
the workers in the advanced capitalist countries themselves; but, as we
have seen, the effect of 9-11 on the working class of the United States
was not one conducive to the overthrow and demise of capitalism. On the
contrary, nowhere was the desire to retaliate against the terrorists
more powerfully visceral than among the working class of the United
States. The overwhelming majority of its members instantly responded
with collective and spontaneous expression of solidarity with other
Americans and expressions of outrage against those who had planned and
carried out the attack, as well as those who attempted to palliate it.
For those who are persuaded by the Baran-Wallerstein thesis, 9-11
represents a classic temptation. It is the temptation that every fantasy
ideology offers to those who become caught up in it -- the temptation to
replace serious thought and analysis, fidelity to the facts and
scrupulous objectivity, with the worst kind of wishful thinking. The
attempt to cast 9-11 as a second taking of the Bastille simply overlooks
what is most critical about both of these events, namely, that the
Bastille was a symbol of oppression to the masses of French men and
women who first overthrew it and then tore it down, brick by brick. And
while it is true that the Bastille had become the stuff of fantasy,
thanks to the pre-1789 "horrors of the Bastille" literature, it was
still a fantasy that worked potently on the minds of the Parisian mob
and hence provided the objective political conditions necessary to
undermine the Bourbon state. But the fantasy embodied in 9-II, far from
weakening the American political order, strengthened i t immeasurably,
while the only mobs that were motivated by the enactment of this fantasy
were those inhabiting the Arab streets -- a population pathetically
unable to control even the most elementary aspects of its own political
destiny, and hence scarcely the material out of which a realistically
minded revolutionary could hope to fashion an instrument of
world-historical transformation. These people are badly miscast in the
role of the vanguard of the world revolution.
And what can we say about those in the West, allegedly acting within the
tradition of Marxist thought, who encourage such spectacularly utopian
flights of fantasy?
The Baran-Wallerstein thesis cannot save Marxism; and, in fact, it is a
betrayal of what is genuinely valid in Marx -- namely, the insistence
that any realistic hope of a world-historical transformation from one
stage of social organization to a more humane one can come only if men
and women do not yield to the temptation of fantasy ideology, even --
and, indeed, especially -- when it is a fantasy ideology dressed up to
look like Marxism.
Instead, the Baran-Wallerstein thesis has sadly come to provide merely a
theoretical justification for the most irrational and infantile forms of
America-bashing. There is nothing Marxist about this. On the contrary,
according to Marx, it was the duty of the non-utopian socialist, prior
to the advent of genuine socialism, to support whatever state happened
to represent the most fully developed and consistently carried out form
of capitalism; and, indeed, it was his duty to defend it against the
irrational onslaughts of those reactionary and backward forces that
tried to thwart its development. In fact, this was a duty that Marx took
upon himself, and nowhere more clearly than in his defense of the United
States against the Confederacy in the Civil War. Only in this case he
was defending capitalism against a fantasy ideology that, unlike that of
radical Islam, wished to roll back the clock a mere handful of
centuries, not several millennia.
Those who, speaking in Marx's name, try to defend the fantasy ideology
embodied in 9-II are betraying everything that Marx represented. They
are replacing his hard-nosed insistence on realism with a self-indulgent
flight into sheer fantasy, just as they are abandoning his strenuous
commitment to pursuit of a higher stage of social organization in order
to glorify the feudal regimes that the world has long since condemned to
Marx's own celebrated trash bin of history.
America-bashing has sadly come to be "the opium of the intellectual," to
use the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Marx in order to characterize
those who followed the latter into the twentieth century. And like opium
it produces vivid and fantastic dreams.
This is an intellectual tragedy. The Marxist left, whatever else one
might say about it, has traditionally offered a valuable perspective
from which even the greatest conservative thinkers have learned --
including Schumpeter and Thomas Sowell. But if it cannot rid itself of
its current penchant for fantasy ideology of the worst type, not only
will it be incapable of serving this purpose; it will become worse than
useless. It will become a justification for a return to that state of
barbarism mankind has spent millennia struggling to transcend -- a
struggle that no one felt more keenly than Marx himself. For the essence
of utopianism, according to Marx, is the refusal to acknowledge just how
much suffering and pain every upward step of man's ascent inflicts upon
those who are taking it, and instead to dream that there are easier ways
of getting there. There are not, and it is helpful to no party to
pretend that there are. To argue that the great inequalities of wealth
now existing between the advanced capital ist countries and the Third
World can be cured by outbreaks of frenzied and irrational
America-bashing is not only utopian; it is immoral.
The left, if it is not to condemn itself to become a fantasy ideology,
must reconcile itself not only with the reality of America, but with its
dialectical necessity -- America is the sine qua non of any future
progress that mankind can make, no matter what direction that progress
may take.
The belief that mankind's progress, by any conceivable standard of
measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the
destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion.
Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical process
-- whatever these laws may be -- must dictate a proportionate respect
for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability and
prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally decisive
in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To
ignore these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian
fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but of a
disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to
understand the nature of a moral principle better than to believe that
it is capable of enforcing itself.
It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect it.
And if it cannot find these, it will perish.
作者：nunia 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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