Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism

France was the capital of the Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century intellectual movement spearheaded by writers who called themselves philosphes. They had waged a campaign of relentless criticism of the church and revealed religion, which their leader Voltaire called "The infamous thing." The crusade was so effective that by 1778, when an eighty-three year old Voltaire returned to Paris after decades away, he was received like a "victorious general," as Peter Gray describes it. The Jesuit order had been suppressed, and various indicators showed a decline in devotion among the public. The effects were most profound in the ranks of the articulate and the highborn. "Frank atheism was still comparatively rare, but among the enlightened scholars, writers, and gentlemen who set the intellectual fashions of the later eighteenth century, frank Christianity even rarer," writes historian E. J. Hobsbawm.

The decline of faith was fueled by a rise of science, but not all who lost faith became scientific. "Fashionable women kept books on science on their dressing tables, and, like Mme. de Pompadour, had their portraits painted with squares and telescopes at their feet," say the Durants. Nonetheless, "a thousand superstitions survived side by side with the rising Enlightenment." The same Mme. de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress, frequented a fortune-teller who read the future in coffee grounds. Other leading figures of he court did the same.

Like Voltaire, those who were neither Christians nor atheists usually were deists. Deism affirmed the existence of God, or better, of some "supreme being," or "eternal cause," but denied the legitimacy of the church and and the authority of Scripture. What separated deists from atheists was a need to explain creation or a fear of the moral consequences of a godless world.

Deism enjoyed its apotheosis in the French Revolution with the replacement of he Christian calendar with one in which the days, months and seasons were renamed for plants and animals and types of weather. But this transformation like other innovations such as changing the name of the Cathedral of Notre Dame to the Temple of Reason, did not last long; for it served only to illustrate the depth of he human impulse to religion. Diderot, whose Encyclopedie was the flagship of the Enlightenment, confessed that he could not watch religious processions "without tears coming to my eyes."

Most anthropologists agree that religion is a universal; they have yet to discover a civilization of logical positivists. As the eminent scholar Edward O. Wilson said in his acceptance speech upon receiving the 1999 Humanist of he Year award:

Accordingly, the Enlightenment's discrediting of Christianity left Europe in the early nineteenth centuryy hungering for a new faith. Robert Owen's movement with its church-like "halls of science" aimed to fill the need, but he was unable to fashion a coherent doctrine. Had socialism remained eh work of such fanciful souls as he, it would have been as marginal as humanism, pacifism, ethical culturalism, vegetarianism and so many other goodhearted but feckless theories.

Engels and Marx, however, succeeded in recasting socialism into a compelling religious faith, and their socialism absorbed or eclipsed all others. Attlee, for example, claimed in The Labour Party in Perspective that his thinking was rooted in Owen and Christianity rather than in Marx, but like Moliere's bourgeois gentilhomme who had been "speaking prose without knowing it," Attlee's idiom reverberated with Marxist concepts. He spoke of class struggle, historical materialism, the supersession of socioeconomic systems in response to technological change and the like. Nothing akin can be found in Owen or the Gospels.

Marxism made socialism a religion by reducing all history and all problems to a single main drama. "Communism is the riddle of history solved," said Marx. Solving he riddle meant not only comprehending the past but foreseeing the future. It "transferred the centre of gravity of the argument for socialism from its rationality or desirability to its historic inevitability," said Hobsbawm, giving it "its most formidable intellectual weapon." In truth, the claim of inevitability was not an intellectual weapon but a religious one. It had no logical weight but great psychological power, paralleling Engels' boyhood faith of Pietism, which embodied a doctrine of predestination.

Nor was this the only way that socialism echoed revelation. It linked mankind's salvation to a downtrodden class, combining the Old Testament's notion of a chosen people with the New Testament's prophecy that the meek shall inherit the earth. Like the Bible, it's historical narrative was a tale of redemption that divided time into three epochs: a distant past of primitive content, a present of suffering and struggle, and a future of harmony and bliss. By investing history with a purpose, socialism evoked passions that other political philosophies could not stir. As the American socialist intellectual Irving Howe put it,

Most socialists would deny that their creed is religious in character. Did not Marx say that religion is an opiate? But many have given evidence of the religious quality of their belief. Michael Harrington, a fallen-away product of Jesuit education who became the preeminent American socialist of his generation, once wrote: "I consider myself to be - in Max Weber's phrase - 'religiously musical' even though I do not believe in God... I am... a 'religious nature without religion.' a pious man of deep faith, but not in the supernatural." A Harrington disciple, sociologist Norman Birnbaum, has been more blunt. "Socialism in all its forms," he writes, "was itself a religion of redemption."

Harrington may not have made as clean a break with the supernatural as he liked to believe. To be sure, Marxism contained no gods or angels, yet it had its own mystical elements. It claimed that human behavior was determined by abstract, exterior forces: people do what they do not for the reasons they think, but because of the mode and the means of production and the class structure. To compound the mystery, Marx and Engels did not believe that the forces they described governed their own actions, but they did not explain why they were exempt.

Nonetheless, Marxism's departure from empiricism was less glaring that that of revealed religions and did not prove fatal to its claim of being scientific. Marx and Engels were pioneers in applying the terminology of science to human behavior. The term "science" had only come fully into vogue in the early nineteenth century, replacing the older "natural philosophy," and it carried a powerful cachet. Every day science was finding explanations for things that had long seemed inexplicable, so Marxism's claim to have broken the code of history did not seem implausible.

Before Marx, Robert Owen always characterized his activities as scientific (as did Saint Simon, Fourier and the other utopian socialists), and the claim was valid. Owen hit upon the idea of socialism and then set about to test it by creating experimental communities. Such experimentation is the very essence of the scientific method. Owen strayed from science only at he point that he chose to ignore his results rather than reconsider his hypothesis. Engels and Marx replaced experimental socialism with prophetic socialism, and claimed thereby to have progressed from utopia to science.

Thus, part of the power of Marxism was its ability to feed religious hunger while flattering the sense of being wiser than those who gave themselves over to unearthly faiths. In addition, the structure of of rewards proffered by socialism was so much more appealing than in the biblical religions. Foe one thing, you did not have to die to enjoy them. Ernest Belford Bax, the most voluble of the founders of British Marxism, wrote a book titled The Religion of Socialism that that reprised the young Hesse:

The same ecstatic tone reverberated in Trotsky's forecast that under socialism the average person would exhibit the talents of a Beethoven or a Goethe, and in Harrington's vision of "an utterly new society in which some of eh most fundamental limitations of human existence have been transcended... [W]ork will no longer be necessary... The sentence decreed in the Garden of Eden will have been served."

The biblical account of Adam and Eve's fall explained the hardships of life. It also portrayed mankind's capacity for evil as well as good, suggesting that we might ameliorate the hardship by cultivating our better natures. As Harrington's bold promise suggests, socialism made things easier. Not only did it vow to deliver the goods in this world rather than the next, but it asked little in return. At the most, you had to support the revolution. At the least, you had to do nothing, since the ineluctable historical forces would bring about socialism anyway. In either case you did not have to worship or obey. You did not have to make sacrifices or give charity. You did not have to confess or repent or encounter that tragic sense of life that is the lot of those who embrace a nonsecular religion. No doubt, many or most of those drawn to socialism felt some sense of humane idealism, but its demands were deflected onto society as a whole.

If this is what made he religion of socialism so attractive, it also explains what made it so destructive .Religion is ubiquitous, reaching far back into the human dawn: prehistoric cave drawings depict what appear to be mythical figures. But early ideas about he cosmos reflected little that we would recognize as moral content, as the bawdy shenanigans of the Greek deities illustrate. The Bible changed this. And the advent of the Bible was only a part of a global transformation that historian Herbert J. Muller places around the sixth century B.C., with the rise of Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Conficianism and Taoism, as well as the culmination of he prophetic movement in Judaism. These faiths, he says,

From then on, the world's major faiths connected some theory of the nature of the world wit ha moral code. Two and a half millennia later, the religion of socialism sundered that connection. What was different about it was not he absence of God, since Buddhism and Confucianism also have no God, but rather the absence of good and evil and right and wrong. This opened the doors to he terrible deeds that were done in the name of socialism.

To be sure, terrible deeds have also been done in the name of he traditional religions. One can cite the Crusades, the Inquisition, the World Trade Center and more. The idea of ultimate salvation - religious or secular - can be used to justify many things. Religious zealots have rationalized their depredations by selective interpretations of holy texts, finding authority for attacks against outsiders or coreligionists whom they deem wayward. But in doing so they also ignore or suppress core elements of their creeds that address moral commands to the believer himself, constraining his actions. Socialism, in contrast, lacks any internal code of conduct to limit what its believers might do. The socialist narrative turned history into a morality play without the morality. No wonder, then, that its balance sheet looks so much worse. In about three centuries the Crusades claimed two million lives; Pol Pot snuffed out roughly the same number in a mere three years. Regimes calling themselves socialist have murdered more than one hundred million people since 1917. The toll of the crimes by observant Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists or Hindus pales in comparison.

By no means al socialists were killers or amoral. Many were sincere humanitarians; mostly these were the adherents of democratic socialism. But democratic socialism turned out to be a contradiction in terms, for where socialists proceeded democratically, the found themselves on a trajectory that took them further and further from socialism. Long before Lenin, socialist thinkers had anticipated the problem. The imaginary utopias of Plato, Moore, Campanella and Edward Bellamy, whose 1887 novel, Looking Backward, was the most popular socialist book in American history, all relied on coercion, as did the plans of The Conspiracy of Equals. Only once did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it.

What is fundamentally required required from government is a stable legal and business environment and a court system that is efficient and free of corruption, and a provision for the common defense.

The legal system should recognize and protect the concept that different people will contribute to the society in proportion to their differing cultural and educational backgrounds, and that the society is dynamic and ever changing through time. No such thing as "affirmative action", but ALWAYS 'equal opportunity'.

Government should not try to categorize individuals by race or socioeconimic status.

"Safety nets" which invariably require theft to function will ALWAYS corrupt the legitimacy of the government. Socialism is based on the fiction that democracy justifies theft. Nothing justifies theft, and certainly the fact that you have the largest gang does not justify theft.

If you justify theft on the basis of numbers, others will justify it on the basis of need, or on the basis of cleverness.

Here's the odd thing: meddling in the name of creating or encouraging a "stable society" or a "safety net" or "social justice" will never provide any of these things. It will only result in the creation of a clsss of rulers and a class of the ruled- and that will lead to resentment and instability that can only be controlled by guns.

If people acting as individuals, not through government, treat each other with dignity and respect, and allow each other to go about their business without envy and resentment, and if they LEARN from each other, then the result will be peace and prosperity.

In other words, peace and prosperity are the natural results of the kind of life conservatives think we should live.

Peace and prosperity, stable society, social justice, these just CAN'T be delivered by governments.. They are the results of the way people live their lives.

Yep, I've got all of Sowell's books that you've mentioned. Arguably one of America's great thinkers.

Agreed. I post a link to his essay, A Childish Letter whenever I see anyone post a story about a school letter writing campaign or a story that asks school children what they think about some important issue.

His Culture trio is also excellent and worthwhile.

Yes. I've read Race and Culture and have Conquests and Cultures on the table in front of me. One of these days, I'll get to it...

Sorrythat I hadn't noticed your previous postings of Muravchik's work

No problem. Free Republic contains so much information that its easy to miss something like that. If you had posted your article on a different day, I might have missed it.

- and I agree - that last paragraph alone IS worth the price of the book.

What I really like about it is that it states that, almost as an axiom, socialism requires coercion and cannot exist within the context of democracy. I tend to post it whenever the theme of socialists being undemocratic thugs comes up.

Muravshik really intrigued me with the notion that only in the last few millenia has mankind's religious outlook included a moral dimension, incorporating a moral code. This is the common thread running through all the world's great religious and philosophical systems. Another common thread is mankind's propensity for manipulating that moral code for their own ends.

You might find this essay on ancient law codes interesting. It talks about what makes the Biblical laws different from other law codes of the day.

At the end of the day, the essential nature of the conflict remains the same. It's the millienia-old struggle between those who believe that they have the right to dictate the terms of existence to eveyone else, and those of us who believe that no such right exists. Once again, that struggle is coming to a head, another watershed of human history. What's at stake is more than most of care to recognize - the potential for a fall of humanity into a thousand years or more of slaughter, slavery, brutality and darkness that'll make the worst of the Dark Ages seem tame.

The problem is that most people take morality for granted and don't understand how much damage has been done to the foundation. One of the biggest dangers I see is that we are moving from a culture that valued humility to a culture that one that values bravado and "cool" (which, in essence, means emotional detachment and apathy -- being emotionally cold). And restraint and self-control are no longer valued by a society that wants to "just do it". What people don't seem to realize is that without humility, empanty, and restraint, we will become the sort of adult children depicted in pagan mythology.

So what are some constructive ways of resolving this extreme difference of opinions?

There are none. You cannot engage in any sort of reasonable debate with those whose final arguments devolve to the gun and the gulag. Socialism, despite its efforts to create the 'New Man', has ever and always relied upon coercion to maintain itself. Where experimental socialist/utopian communities such as Robert Owens' did not prevent their members from walking away, they all failed without exception - because people simply walked away when the problems arising out of the collision with socialist ideals and human nature became irreconcilable. As Muravchik said in the introduction to his book," If you build it, they will leave."

We're very close to fighting the next American Civil War over this and many other issues. Think long and carefully about your position once this starts. Fence sitters tend to catch fire from both sides.

"Our country has flirted with laissez faire capitalism in the past, but it has its own problems. Government restrictions and oversights (anti-trust and labor laws) were introduced, ostensibly to prevent people from being exploited by companies. Are we doomed to trade one master for another? Or is there a path where we really do own ourselves, indentured neither to the extremely wealthy or to the politburo?"

One goal of Socialism is to compel citizens to view "government" as being more important than the people themselves.

Thus, a Socialist will see "government" as the answer to every problem. In fact, the most important thing to a Socialist is the government (and ideology).

Suffice it to say that such a centralized mindset has yet to survive and thrive for any decent length of time.

On the other hand, free people view the world from a different perspective. When they walk outside and see that their fields need to be plowed, they don't ask "what government subsidy or program will plow my fields". Instead, they take it upon themselves to actually do the work. Not only does this view foster de-centralization, but it is also more productive even at the macro-level (you work harder for your own rewards than for rewards that are shared amongst others - especially those who didn't do any of your work).

Centralization is a big stick. You can make a mighty military as well as grand public works projects with a centralized government, however, a big stick is not always capable of supporting itself (e.g. making a profit, increasing productivity every year, et al). Moreover, a big stick isn't known for its intelligence. Knowing what each individuals needs (in order to be motivated to work for maximum productivity) is NOT the specialty of Centralization.

Maybe we need a big stick in our arsenal. Perhaps some level of Centralization is required, but the more one moves in that direction, the more one flirts with instability and inevitable collapse. Japan's banks have been insolvent for over a decade. France and Germany have over 10% unemployment. Sweden is on the edge of default. Argentina did default. Brazil is on the brink. Venezuala is rioting even tonight, and those are the PROSPEROUS examples. Zimbabwe and North Korea make up the lower tier of Centralized failures.

Yet it is alluring. The Siren Song of Socialism is that you get something for nothing. Hey, just pass a law and the world becomes a better place, goes the mantra. Raise some taxes and start some new government programs and all will be fine, cry the politicians.

And yet it will always fail.

Coulson, pardon my intrusion, and no disrespect intended, but in my opinion your entire premise is based on a couple of labels that represent constructs ... socialism and capitalism.

I suggest that your entire premise is flawed and that the actual premise is much more basic than that.

It is simply freedom vs. compulsion.

That is why the fight is so basic. That is why the divergence grows so wide. That is why noumenon (IMHO) related to you that there are no methods to reconcile the two issues. There never have been.

A system that promotes and protect the liberty of individuals to exercise unalienable rights and acrue to themselves the rewards of that exercise while allowing the freedom to help others is what America is all about. This emplies several critical things:

The existence of unalienable rights themselves, that do not derive from any man-made construct. They come from, as the founders themselves declared, the Creator.
A moral code that allows individuals to govern their own exercise of those unalienable rights. And that moral code derives from the same source as the rights themselvs.
A free will choice on the part of the people to freely adopt the moral code and live in such a manner so as to not infringe on the rights of others. Those who violate the rights of others suffer consequences of said violation.

This is the basis for our free society. No other basis will do, or indeed, can do. The "buy-in" comes with the moral code ...

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love thye neighbor as thyself. etc.

Simply stated, we as a people either buy into that code, and do so freely ... or we will lose our freedom. It is a natural law.

A wise man once said when asked why his people were so thrifty, united and lived in such harmony ...

I teach the people correct principles and they govern themselves.

John Adams, when speaking specifically of America and its constitution, which he had a strong hand in helping develop, said the following ...

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."- John Adams, Oct. 11, 1798

This is the sum of the whole matter and again, in the end, simply boils down to freedom vs. compulsion.

Fregards.

Jeff

PS - Here are some more of my thougts on this same matter if you are so inclined.

The Crisis and Mortal Threat to American Liberty

Before Marx, Robert Owen always characterized his activities as scientific (as did Saint Simon, Fourier and the other utopian socialists), and the claim was valid. Owen hit upon the idea of socialism and then set about to test it by creating experimental communities. Such experimentation is the very essence of the scientific method. Owen strayed from science only at he point that he chose to ignore his results rather than reconsider his hypothesis.

And thereby he demonstrated how relentlessly unscientific socialism really is. Owen’s experimental communities – like those of John Humphrey Noyes in upstate New York (the Oneida Colony) and certain experiments in Massachusetts, such as Fruitlands – simply did not work: Because there was no disadvantage to any member of the community who simply chose not to work, but simply to live off the labor of others. Pretty soon the supply of labor inexorably diminished, and along with it, the production of necessary goods.

Socialism relentlessly drills down to consumption, the distribution of goods. Absent coercion (i.e., forced labor, aka slavery), it does not appear to have any particular rational plan with regard to how those goods get produced, the supply side. By destroying incentives to production, socialism winds up with rising demand for “free” goods that are not “free” to produce in the first place. The result is a declining supply of goods.

Owen’s hypothesis left out one indispensable dynamic: human nature. And that is the reason that socialism does not work. JMHO FWIW

Great post, Noumenon. Thank you!

Thanks for the kind words, folks. The final paragraphs of Muravchik's epilogue to Heaven On Earth are perhaps the clearest take on the failures and eh ultimate evil inherent in the ideas that are the foundation of socialism. There is no more destructive, no more murderous, no more evil world view than that of the utopians who would refashion Man in the image of their ideals. Wel lover a hundred million souls were fed to the bonfire of socialist vanity. Hundreds of millions more had the lights of their hearts, minds and souls extinguished; hundreds of millions more lived lives of servitude and impoverishment.

Given the stark, unyielding quality of the evidence provided by the historical record, socialism and its outcomes could only be embraced by the willfully ignorant, the evil or the insane. Although we hope and pray for a peaceful resolution to this millenia-old conflict, deep down, we know that that is simply not possible. We can only preapre ourselves and our children for the reckoning that's coming.

"By using a graduated income tax, we ensure that the majority of the burden will fall on those who can best bear it. Each pays according to what they can afford."

A graduated income tax is perhaps fair in theory but in practice it is still the average joe who ends up paying for most of the governments largess because the rich always find ways to hide their income. Secondly what are you going to base a graduated income tax on, income? If you do that you simply prevent anyone else from becoming rich by increasing their income. Socialism is only fair to the lazy and the ruling elitists. It is not fair at all to those of us who have to pay for someone elses' education and then can't afford to pay for our own children's education. It is not fair to those of us who pay for prescription drugs for retired people who are worth 100X what we are. ETC.

If you love socialism so much why don't you go live in Canada or Europe rather than trying to force it on the rest of us?

In a Republic such as ours, I question how anyone could be driven to socialism when it is not in the perview of government to offer anything to an individual or group not mandated by the Constitution. Unless of course we have been going down that road for decades, perhaps even centuries, and the people have been taught socialism by osmosis, or "it fell out of the sky" concept.

Hunger, homelessness, poverty, suffering, etc etc will be ongoing as long as there is man and earth. Government mandated solutions will work at the expense of others, but the good book tells us we are all individually responsible for our brother, and those who choose to care for others as they do for themselves, will reap the reward.

Otherwise, there is no reward and governments have attempted to replace the God of the universe and his established plan. An arrogantly bold and futile attempt.

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