metonymy4u

… what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and people–each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature–are therefore shot wholesale nowadays.
             -Hesse

Hesse was one of the great critics of modernity. Others included Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger and Rorty. They all, I think, owe a great debt to Rousseau for opposing Hobbesian liberalism on the grounds that it tends to weaken hope. Nietzsche saw the ghastly results of a Hobbesian liberal protectorate and decided that he would rather die than live without the hope of the romantic spirit. Kant spoke of the hope of autonomy, Kierkegaard of inwardness, Heidegger of being, and Rorty of love. What did Marx hope for? A stateless community in which inequality could once again become the source of human prosperity, rather than the thing which most needed to be controlled by the state. The problem was that Marx’s hope was for revolution: an up-by-the-roots replacement of all that we knew and understood. Suddenly, a new earthly Eden. But it never happened. Why? I think because people, real existing flesh and blood people, are far too afraid of losing what little they have. Much more strategic, it seems to me, is John Rawls’ model, in which Hobbesian liberalism is tempered by Marxist idealism. The question is: how do we preserve inequality and make it the basis of true prosperity? (That is, not the cynical, wanton and false inequality-prosperity of the GOP?). Or to put it another way: how do we build a society that capitalizes on natural inequalities, but is at the same time solidly and unequivocally to the advantage of the least equal in the community? I believe that only by following this sort of heuristic will we ever be able to find that balance between private irony and public hope which was Marx’s great legacy to the world.