Ideas Are Like GMO Corn

Nathan Rinne posted someone’s response to my article on the Marxist categories underpinning “the devil made me do it” theology.

Below is a scatter-shot of thoughts in response to the contention that my use of the term “Marxist” was not technically accurate.

Yes, yes, “radical egalitarianism” was around before Marx (French Revolution, anyone?). But Marx played a colossal role in packaging it and shaping the direction that philosophy took in the 20th (and now, 21st) century.

Before Marx, Radical Egalitarianism was an ideology. Since Marx, it’s become a religion.

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Allow me to first state that I agree that “Radical Lutheranism isn’t Communism.” However, in my armchair observations (having not defended an academic thesis on the subject, much less done the reading that this would require), there are certain ways of parsing the world that are shared in common. But of course I’m not saying that the “Radical Lutherans” all hide hammer-and-sickle necklaces under their collars.

That would be like saying that rock-candy and cupcake frosting are the same dessert because they both have sugar as their base. “No, no,” swells the confectioner. “For the sugar in the rock-candy is dissolved, where in the frosting it is finely powdered, and each has many other ingredients not-in-common besides.”

And yet, fascinatingly, for the dentist’s purposes this is a distinction without a difference.

Point is, in my last post I’m not equating “RL” and communism any more than rock-candy and cupcake frosting. I’m merely noting that certain (“Marxist”) presuppositions lead in certain directions; just as starting with a sugar base means you’re cooking something that will rot your teeth out. Where things go from there will depend upon how you handle the power-oppression=morality dynamic; or what you do with the sugar. After that, things can go many different directions depending upon what other intellectual commitments you bring along; or what you add to the sugar.

Anyway, below is the response I left in the comments section over at Nathan’s (or, tried to — I have a hard time getting com-boxes to work, go figure). Hopefully it’s helpful to someone.

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He notes he is an “unhelpful purist,” and in light of that label everything he notes is very fair, and very correct, in a technical sort of way.

But this is where the academics miss something important: their brainy theories and high-concept ideas don’t flow into the public mind in the pristine form in which they have conceived it. The public thinks in “common” categories, not in the categories of the trained and educated intellectual.

Marxism as articulated by both Marx and Lenin is impressively amoral and almost entirely obsessed with economics, relegating such things as morality, and even ‘power’ as such as ‘epiphenomena’ which appear and take men merely because of the economic system that all, both capitalist and worker, are enslaved to.

And yet the public does not share the categories of persons belonging to the intellectual and ruling circles, so you inevitably see these ideas being parsed according to the easy-to-handle common categories of “right” and “wrong” — so basic a child could do it.

Incidentally, this does not mean that the public is stupid. This phenomenon also happens when a “high-concept” idea floats from one intellectual discipline to the next, such as a philosopher speaking to an engineer, or vice-versa. Again, there are certain categories (ways of organizing knowledge and concepts) that are anything but universal. Philosophers like to pretend that their ideas can be held and perpetually maintained in a just-so way, but this is no more true than genetically modified DNA can, once sown in a field of crops, be contained in its own little plot. It will spread, and it will be adapted in an endless chain of interbreeding.

So, sure, in the abstract world of ivory-tower thought, Marxism has nothing to do with power-oppression as an axis of morality. But as it seeped into the public it necessarily changed to adapt to the public’s categories, which caused the way it is articulated (and even subconsciously understood) to shift. Look at the Marxists of our day, such as Bernie Sanders and AOC, who are unmistakable moralists when it comes to the power-oppression axis. You can ascribe another name to it (such as “the Adorno/Marcuse reworking of Marxism”), and that may be a useful distinction in an academic sense. But at some point these names get out of hand and, for our purposes in the public, it’s a distinction without a difference.

Said another way: some distinctions are best left to the “unhelpful purists,” but are unwieldy and pointless (and too long for Twitter to boot) for the general public. Precision comes at the cost of time and attention; the latter two are in short supply, so sometimes “close enough” has to be good enough.

Thus, for my purposes I am content with colloquialism and shorthand.