| This question <68|68> overall <68|70> Hans: <66|73>. |
| Question 88: Why did God create something as imperfect as nature and humans? (And what does this have to do with the topic at hand?) Compare chapter 1 in Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. |
| [69] Hans: Theology, teleology, and human progress. Rhese [68] says God made the world imperfect so that people can develop their abilities and character. |
| Marx was an atheist. He didn't think the world was created by anyone. Nevertheless, he had the strong belief that improvement was possible, that a better society without exploitation was a possibility and a worth while goal. |
| If you look at the laws of physics alone, you would not think that the world was on a path towards improvement. On the contrary, the laws of entropy say that the physical state of the world is headed towards more and more overall disorder. Therefore it is legitimate to ask: is there something in the world which nevertheless allows improvement or even pushes towards improvement? |
| Some Marxists have a teleological view: they think that the future good society of socialism or communism exerts such a strong causal pull so that history will inevitably converge towards it. The rulers in the Soviet-Union type socialist countries acted like this: they thought they were the most advanced element of history, and all they had to do was wait until the rest of history has caught up with them. As you know, it didn't happen this way. (Note that the word “teleology” is not the same as “theology.”) |
| This teleological view is a distortion of Marxism. Marxists, like most realists, don't believe that causality can pull. Causality can only push on the basis of what is already there. But you can find elements in Marxism which explain why there has been definite progress in human history, and which give us at least hope, although by far not certainty, that this progress will continue. |
| One of these principles is immanent critique. This simply means that those things which are bad will eventually self-destruct due to their own contradictions. Marx uses immanent critique all the time as a research method: find the inner contradictions of things, because this can tell you how the things will develop. |
| Another principle is not explicitly mentioned in Marx, but the critical realist Bhaskar pointed it out: dialectical universalizability. This simply means that those things which are good will spread around because they are useful not just in one specific situation but they are useful more generally. For instance, the human race has been developing because it is part of human nature to help each other; humans solve problems in such a way that the solutions not only benefit one particular individual, but benefit everyone in a similar situation than that individual. |
| The capitalist view (the invisible hand) holds that the world is driven forward by selfish competition. The Marxist view holds that selfish competition is contradictory, because a fight against your brothers and sisters is ultimately a fight against yourself. These contradictions will eventually bring this system down. Solidarity and love, on the other hand, are the way forward, and they are the reason why mankind got as far as they did already. |
| There is hope, but there is no certainty. Marxists say: our future will either be socialism or barbarism. |
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