I was just reading “The Right Nation“, a book about the rise of the American Right, and I came to a passage which said that American conservatives such as Ronald Reagan see the United States as a nation favored by God because of its democratic virtue, and those kinds of things, and that this is the reason why the US holds the position that it does. And supposedly, many Americans share this view.

I found this to be an alien way of understanding the world, and so I decided to take a look at my own world view, just to see what that was like. And I discovered that I’m more of a “Marxist” than I thought.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not longing for a time when the proletariat will overthrow their capitalist masters and seize control of the means of productions, and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat to let the bourgeois pigs stew in their own fat for a while. Because when push comes to shove, I kinda like capitalism. (As did, I suspect, Karl Marx himself — he does after all point out capitalism as the second highest form of social organization, if you don’t count socialism [and seriously, who does, these days?] — he just couldn’t stand to see all the injustice inherent in the system, and provided some, in my eyes, overly simplistic [or too complex, depending on how you see it] suggestions for how to improve it.) Sure, I want to reform capitalism and mess up the current laissez-faire paradigm in order to decrease the less positive effects of the system, but that’s about as far as it goes, and that’s more Eduard Bernstein than it is Marx.

No, where I am a Marxist is in that I am a Material Determinist; I believe that the material conditions of the world are the foundations and cause of (at least almost) all other social phenomena. The base, consisting of technology, ownership patterns, and such things, inevitably influences the rest of the world, or the superstructure, if you will. In this context, according to classical Marxism, democracy and liberalism becomes mere ideology — legal and social arrangements existing to legitimize and support the exploitative capitalist system. Religion, in the same way, takes on its famous opiate form, and becomes a mechanism intended to keep the exploited from demanding improvements here, now, by way of promising them a better life after their life is, effectively, over. (Naturally, this interpretation of religion is likely not applicable to all religions, but it does seem to fit the main three established organized religions Christianity (in most of its incarnations), Judaism, and Islam. I’m a little too out dim on Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as the rest of them, to say anything about those. Which is one of the reasons why I plan on taking a couple of years to study them, starting this autumn.)

So, in this sense, America is not special because it is favored by “God” (a concept I will get back to later, by the way), or any other deity, for that matter, but because it is formed by specific historical processes, and because it has an abundance of the most pivotal means of production of them all: Natural and other resources. In the same way, basically, that, say, Malawi is less prosperous because of its history as a colonial nation (to an wholly different extent than the US has a history as a colonial nation) and this fact’s effect on the country’s productive forces.

Anyhoo, this leads me on to the concept of a God, or any other kinds of supernatural creator entities. Because such an entity has no place within my world view. The idea that we are all created by a superior being — omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and the Ultimate Good Guy — is so alien to me, that I have problems envisioning what it must be like to believe in such a being. And if you enter into the equation that this entity is supposed to have any specific preferences as to how we live our lives, say, in regard to sexual habits (just to take a completely standard example), and that he regards some of his creations as inferior to others, just because they don’t conform to his will, is a ridiculous notion to me, especially when considering that he additionally gifted us with this thing the people who believe in it call “free will”. Because, if he (side note: I don’t really see God as having a gender, but religious people tend to call him “He”, and so I do that, too, because I don’t feel I have any right to make presumptions about the gender of an entity I don’t believe in — in short, few things annoy me more than confessed Atheists who refer to God as “She” ) uses the universe as a kind of experimental lab, where he uses human beings as rats in a maze, allowing people to make choices but then punishing them when their choices don’t please him, then even if I believed in him, he wouldn’t be worthy of my worship. I’d simply say, “It’s called noblesse oblige, motherfucker,” and go about my own business.

But if not from God, then from whence does morality come, you might ask. As did I, and I once again returned to J. S. Mill. Although indirectly. Because it struck me that many of the people who claim that God is the source of all morality are so self-righteous and so bigoted that they often hurt people who make lifestyle choices they don’t approve of. (Again, the issue of how religious people see homosexuals springs to mind. Is my subconscious trying to tell me something? :P ) And I thought, “Hmm, when people get hurt, that can’t be good, now can it?” There I had my starting point. If something harms another person, it is not a good thing. Naturally, this is a principle which, like all principles, must be approached pragmatically, because if it is exaggerated, or if “harm” is interpreted too broadly, everything becomes kinda bad. And then the principle becomes rather meaningless. But if you apply it reasonably, it should be a good rule of thumb as to what is good and what is bad, and I think.

In other words, the source of morality, in my world view, is not a god or other deity, but rather the reactions of other people. And myself, too, of course, but I’m pretty much in tune with Mill in his stance that anything an individual does that harms only him (yeah, Mill. People can harm Mill, but not anyone else :P ), he is fully entitled to do. (Okay, I have a moralist streak, too, no matter how liberal I am, and I also think that people have an obligation to help each other, and to save each other from themselves, if you know what I mean — it’s kind of a collective responsibility to support the individual responsibility.)

Phew. Good to get that out of my system; I couldn’t even concentrate on what I was doing. It’s probably flawed like Hell, and both inconsistent and illogical, but this is how I tick.

Another way in which I tick, by the way, is that I don’t proof read. Never. Not even on exams or term papers. Some of you probably knew this already, but if you didn’t, now you know why my blog is teeming with typos and grammatical errors. Also, I’m not very good at English grammar, really.