Socialism Vs. Capitalism

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HondurasKeiser

Re: Socialism Vs. Capitalism

Post by HondurasKeiser »

Falco Knotwise wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 9:28 pm
Josh wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:44 pm
Falco Knotwise wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:36 pm My thoughts: that is because while liberalism does protect the private realm, yet it also forces all tradition into the private realm, making it of very little effect in the public realm which is simultaneously a severe fracturing of the spiritual life, imo.
This is an excellent point, FK (and nice to see you posting here again). One of the contentions of the New Polity crowd is that Christianity and its practice should very much exist in the public sphere, not the private sphere, and indeed should be a rather loud witness against the commercial, governmental, academic, etc. institutions of the day.
Great to hear from you again as well, Josh. Never heard of New Polity before. I went to newpolity.com to look around and have already found some very interesting articles.

This one here talks about how Pope Pius XI discussed the individualist/collectivist problem. What gets lost is the whole former social structure which he defined as "solidarity." I find this perspective very interesting.

https://newpolity.com/blog/capitalism-p ... -socialism
I found the essay particularly enjoyable when I read it. Another you may like is whether Christians ought to use the stock market.

Joey the Ox, who lurks but no longer posts, is a fan of New Polity as well.
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HondurasKeiser

Re: Socialism Vs. Capitalism

Post by HondurasKeiser »

Ken wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:54 pm
Falco Knotwise wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:36 pm
temporal1 wrote: Sat May 13, 2023 11:47 am For a time, this was an interesting discussion.
I found this article interesting:
I say ... in full awareness of, and deeply appreciative of, how the principles of classical liberal economics are far more conducive to liberty, the rule of law, economic prosperity, and the preservation of the private realm and of civil society, than is the current economic alternative, that is, socialism, and its enlargement of the administrative state. (Yet) it remains the case that conserving the principles of liberal capitalism is conserving principles that were intended, after all, to destroy tradition, and this is something with which conservatives must grapple.
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/05/88837/

My thoughts: that is because while liberalism does protect the private realm, yet it also forces all tradition into the private realm, making it of very little effect in the public realm which is simultaneously a severe fracturing of the spiritual life, imo.

Individualism protects the rights of the individual against the community. One atheist in a class of 30 is offended by Christian prayer .... out goes prayer. The heck with the community. The individual's rights must be preserved!

It is very destructive of tradition -- at least in the public sphere. I don't see how there's any denying that.
Liberalism doesn't force tradition into the private realm. It simply says that in society with separation of church and state and free exercise of religion, the government should not be in the business of coercing religious practices or endorsing specific religions. So, in your example of school prayer, children have always been free to pray in schools. That was never at issue. There are student-organized prayers and bible studies at the school where I teach. It is perfectly fine and no one objects or has legal grounds to object. The only issue was coerced government-led school prayer. Or the government endorsement of a specific prayer.
I think you just described the privatization process that Falco notes. Honestly, it’s not a controversial idea that Liberalism denudes the public square of lived, organic traditions. Thinkers left, right and center have been noting this for as least as long as Tocqueville.
Ken wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:54 pm Other than that, liberal society is full of traditions and there is nothing about liberalism that is opposed to tradition. Visit any secular liberal country in Europe and you will find that they are jam-packed with all manner of tradition: music, language, literature, food, art, architecture, dance, holidays, festivals, etc.
It’s generally either kitschy and for sale, a celebration of something other than native European (think Senegalese music and food fair) or a relic of pre-liberal Europe when people understood what their music, art and architecture meant in the context of the over-arching narrative of their civilization. See what the plans for burned-out Notre Dame are to get an idea of how liberal, secular Europe handles traditions.
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Ken
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Re: Socialism Vs. Capitalism

Post by Ken »

HondurasKeiser wrote: Wed Jul 05, 2023 12:05 am
Ken wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:54 pm
Falco Knotwise wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:36 pm

I found this article interesting:



https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/05/88837/

My thoughts: that is because while liberalism does protect the private realm, yet it also forces all tradition into the private realm, making it of very little effect in the public realm which is simultaneously a severe fracturing of the spiritual life, imo.

Individualism protects the rights of the individual against the community. One atheist in a class of 30 is offended by Christian prayer .... out goes prayer. The heck with the community. The individual's rights must be preserved!

It is very destructive of tradition -- at least in the public sphere. I don't see how there's any denying that.
Liberalism doesn't force tradition into the private realm. It simply says that in society with separation of church and state and free exercise of religion, the government should not be in the business of coercing religious practices or endorsing specific religions. So, in your example of school prayer, children have always been free to pray in schools. That was never at issue. There are student-organized prayers and bible studies at the school where I teach. It is perfectly fine and no one objects or has legal grounds to object. The only issue was coerced government-led school prayer. Or the government endorsement of a specific prayer.
I think you just described the privatization process that Falco notes. Honestly, it’s not a controversial idea that Liberalism denudes the public square of lived, organic traditions. Thinkers left, right and center have been noting this for as least as long as Tocqueville.
Ken wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:54 pm Other than that, liberal society is full of traditions and there is nothing about liberalism that is opposed to tradition. Visit any secular liberal country in Europe and you will find that they are jam-packed with all manner of tradition: music, language, literature, food, art, architecture, dance, holidays, festivals, etc.
It’s generally either kitschy and for sale, a celebration of something other than native European (think Senegalese music and food fair) or a relic of pre-liberal Europe when people understood what their music, art and architecture meant in the context of the over-arching narrative of their civilization. See what the plans for burned-out Notre Dame are to get an idea of how liberal, secular Europe handles traditions.
I'm not sure that 'kitschiness' is any particular measure of merit or lack of it. A whole lot of religious practice and custom would fail on those grounds too. Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, for example, is full of endless kitsch. Yet Conservatives seem to gravitate to it. And there are plenty of cultural practices in every culture that are serious and not kitschy.

Strauss name-drops a handful of the greatest writers of the past half millennia and seems to that current scholars and writers aren't up to their standards. Well, few are. But in point of fact, the number of novels and other works of literature has been steadily increasing over time and is far higher today than it was in the 19th or 18th centuries. Because there are far fewer gatekeepers. There is plenty of culture out there. Endless quantities of it. Yes people probably do less reading and especially less poetry than in the past. But that is more due to technology (movies, TV, internet, radio, recorded music, etc.) than to liberalism. If you were living in 1850 your ONLY cultural access was books, poetry, and music if you made it in your home, yourself. And perhaps the odd live concert if you were wealthy enough to attend the symphony or opera. And art only if you were wealthy or visited a museum. Today? Obviously there are far more things competing for our attention.
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Falco Knotwise

Re: Socialism Vs. Capitalism

Post by Falco Knotwise »

Josh wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:44 pm
Falco Knotwise wrote: Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:36 pm My thoughts: that is because while liberalism does protect the private realm, yet it also forces all tradition into the private realm, making it of very little effect in the public realm which is simultaneously a severe fracturing of the spiritual life, imo.
This is an excellent point, FK (and nice to see you posting here again). One of the contentions of the New Polity crowd is that Christianity and its practice should very much exist in the public sphere, not the private sphere, and indeed should be a rather loud witness against the commercial, governmental, academic, etc. institutions of the day.
Do you have any recommended websites as a good introduction to the New Polity crowd other than newpolity.com?

From what I can make out New Polity seems to be a collaborative effort between Scott Hahn and fellow scholars to put their recent insights into action. (They have been in collaboration for years.) I'm currently reading "It is Right and Just" by Scott Hahn, really an excellent book, but it's been out for years and I'm playing catch-up. In it, he refers to the works of a few independent scholars for some of the insights he uses, and I see that these very same scholars are listed among those on the board of editors at the website.

One of them, William T Cavanaugh, is the author of The Myth of Religious Violence, which explodes the founding myth of modern secularism. (The myth is what justifies the privatization of religion.)

The so-called Wars of Religion were in fact the wars of the emerging nation states against the older empire A great portion of those who fought that war were mercenaries in the pay of the emerging nation states against the old order with its ecclesiastical institutions.

If it really was a war of religions, why were members of Protestants and Catholics often fighting on the same side against other Protestants and Catholics?

The myth was designed to make the ecclesiastical institutions responsible for all the violence of the so-called "Wars of Religion" and so to force them into the private sphere.

Also, Catholics and a variety of Protestant sects dwelt together for two centuries in America before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. There were no "wars of religion" between the sects in those years.

So, that myth has been finally exploded. What Cavanaugh reveals about the myth is accepted even by scholars who continue to defend Liberalism and secularism.

Here's one example by the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/ ... th-secular

Note: he doesn't deny there was violence often committed in the name of religion, and he recommends doing penance for such past occurrences, but the myth that religion is somehow more peculiarly prone to violence than "enlightened secularism" is finished.

"It is Right and Just" is about how the Enlightenment concept of "religion" as we understand it today was invented to justify the secular relegation of religion to the private sphere. The original meaning of religion was a kind of virtue that is necessary for a healthy society.

All in all these are all very interesting new insights to say the least.
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PetrChelcicky

Re: Socialism Vs. Capitalism

Post by PetrChelcicky »

Ken maintains that "there is nothing about liberalism that is opposed to tradition."
But yes, there is. This is obvious in the fight between liberal teachers and parents about parents' rights in education.
Parents have a natural wish to make their children part of their community and win them over for the common tradtion and for following the common, traditional expectations (role behaviour).
Now I understand that state schools have to navigate between different parents with different traditions.I also think that the individual teacher must have some leeway to express his personal opinions. And of course, if a child at some age starts to protest against parents' influence, the teacher may support it.
But the teachers' unions seem to follow a different model in which individual children should make personal decisions at the earliest age possible in order to forecome any parental influence. Which leads to the idea that six to ten year olds are asked to decide if they are male or female, hetero- or homosexual.
The victims of "school prayer bans" have been poor working class protestant/evangelical parents who - unlike working class urban Catholics - had
no opportunity to send their children to community schools but had to take whatever the state offered them. (Of course someone should have taught them to organisze their own schools, Hutterite-like, but there was nobody to do this, and liberal teachers were definitely the least to do this.)
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PetrChelcicky

Re: Socialism Vs. Capitalism

Post by PetrChelcicky »

Just reconsidering.
i think that my central objection is the following: Modern liberals (as different from Lord Acton etc.) tend to blur the distinction between force and influence. They don't so much protect us against force - they are more occupied with persuading us that we must be protected against "influences". See the modern trend of the state to protect us agains "disinformation" or " Russian influence" etc., which of course ends up in censorship, insofar reverting all progresses made by classical liberalism (and defended by libertarians).
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PetrChelcicky

Re: Socialism Vs. Capitalism

Post by PetrChelcicky »

And tradition is per definitonem influence (of the older generation on the younger generation). And there's a liberal suspicion against "influence". Or at least "foreign influence" - liberal schools of thought have their own tradtions and ways of nfluence, but it seems that they never apply their suspicion to themselves.
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Ken
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Re: Socialism Vs. Capitalism

Post by Ken »

PetrChelcicky wrote: Sun Jul 16, 2023 4:45 am Ken maintains that "there is nothing about liberalism that is opposed to tradition."
But yes, there is. This is obvious in the fight between liberal teachers and parents about parents' rights in education.
Parents have a natural wish to make their children part of their community and win them over for the common tradtion and for following the common, traditional expectations (role behaviour).
Now I understand that state schools have to navigate between different parents with different traditions.I also think that the individual teacher must have some leeway to express his personal opinions. And of course, if a child at some age starts to protest against parents' influence, the teacher may support it.
But the teachers' unions seem to follow a different model in which individual children should make personal decisions at the earliest age possible in order to forecome any parental influence. Which leads to the idea that six to ten year olds are asked to decide if they are male or female, hetero- or homosexual.
The victims of "school prayer bans" have been poor working class protestant/evangelical parents who - unlike working class urban Catholics - had
no opportunity to send their children to community schools but had to take whatever the state offered them. (Of course someone should have taught them to organisze their own schools, Hutterite-like, but there was nobody to do this, and liberal teachers were definitely the least to do this.)
You seem to have some serious misunderstandings of American education but I guess that isn't surprising given that you live in Germany. What "parent's rights movement are you talking about? The Mom's for Liberty crowd who are basically a front for the Republican party and who seem to do little else but ban books and seek to promote racist and white supremacist messaging?

Yes, parents should be more involved in their children's education. Every teacher would agree with that. From participating in things like textbook review committees to volunteering in the schools. What specific rights do you think parents should have that they don't have now? The right to review all curriculum and curriculum materials in advance? Do you have any idea how far back that would set education and how much more boring and unengaging it would make classrooms? It would completely eliminate the dynamic and creative nature of teaching and force teachers to adhere to what are often decades-old textbooks.

Also, teacher's unions have nothing to do with any of this. Most of these fights are happening in the south where there is no public sector collective bargaining in education. I think there are 19 "right-to-work" states, mainly in the south, that do have collective bargaining in education. Teachers can still join unions if they want to in states like Texas. Unions are not actually banned. But without the right of collective bargaining they have no power to do anything and mostly just do things like lobby the state legislature for things like better health and retirement benefits, more funding for education, etc. So teachers unions have virtually no power in roughly half the country. And in the other half? If you actually look at collective bargaining agreements you will find that they have nothing to do with teaching LGBT rights, or anything to do with curriculum frankly. They are all about salaries, benefits, work hours, sick leave, family leave, required duties, seniority procedures in the event of layoffs, etc. Most every school district posts their collective bargaining agreements on their web site. They are public documents and you can go read them if you want. You won't find anything about teaching sexuality.

And as for "victims of school prayer bans?" Again, you don't seem to understand the history of American public education. in the 19th Century American public schools were essentially Protestant schools. Run by Protestant school boards who hired Protestant teachers and who infused the dominant Protestant ethos into public education. That is the main reason why more recent Catholic immigrants from countries like Italy, Poland, and Ireland in the late 19th Century chose to create their own Catholic schools. It was because the existing public schools were essentially Protestant and in much of the country the teachers, administrators, school boards, and communities believed that one purpose of public education was to convert Catholic children of questionable loyalty into good Protestant Americans. The only way for Catholic immigrant parents to avoid that was to create their own parallel school system.

Protestants did not need their own private religious schools because the public schools themselves were essentially Protestant. Although elite Protestant prep schools did exist, largely in the Northeast, to educate the children of the American elite. They were mostly Episcopal and run in the mold of the fancy British boarding schools that educated the children of British elites.

Regarding school prayer, the Supreme Court ruled that organized official school prayer violates the establishment clause of the Constitution in 1962 in the case of Engel v. Vitale. The case was brought by Jewish parents (led by Jewish parent Steven I. Engel) https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/ar ... l-v-vitale who argued that the state should not impose a one-size-fits-all Protestant-authored prayer on children of many different faiths. Nevertheless, children have always been free to pray all they want in school and always have been. School prayer has never been banned from the public schools and students are even free to lead their own prayer groups and always have been. The only thing that was banned was government-led prayer. Student-led religious groups have existed at every school I have ever attended or taught at and yes, they lead prayers. For example, every school I have taught at in TX and WA has had an FCA chapter: https://www.fca.org/ If your children attend public schools in the US they are free to pray all they want.

And by the way, if you think that there is any religious purpose to be served by forcing students to recite a bland, generic, government-authored prayer every single morning for 12 years of their lives along with the pledge of allegiance (and Texas state pledge if you live in Texas) then you have never been in a HS classroom watching bored kids mouth the pledge of allegiance every single morning. Nothing will trivialize and devalue actual prayer more than forcing kids to recite some mundane government-authored prayer against their will every single morning.
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Robert
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Re: Socialism Vs. Capitalism

Post by Robert »

I thought this was very well done. Long watch, but a lot of things explained and laid out well. What they point out as America and Americanism is more Capitalism(individualism) vs Communism(collectivism/Marxism).

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HondurasKeiser

Re: Socialism Vs. Capitalism

Post by HondurasKeiser »

Ken wrote: Wed Jul 05, 2023 1:36 am I'm not sure that 'kitschiness' is any particular measure of merit or lack of it. A whole lot of religious practice and custom would fail on those grounds too. Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, for example, is full of endless kitsch. Yet Conservatives seem to gravitate to it. And there are plenty of cultural practices in every culture that are serious and not kitschy.

Strauss name-drops a handful of the greatest writers of the past half millennia and seems to that current scholars and writers aren't up to their standards. Well, few are. But in point of fact, the number of novels and other works of literature has been steadily increasing over time and is far higher today than it was in the 19th or 18th centuries. Because there are far fewer gatekeepers. There is plenty of culture out there. Endless quantities of it. Yes people probably do less reading and especially less poetry than in the past. But that is more due to technology (movies, TV, internet, radio, recorded music, etc.) than to liberalism. If you were living in 1850 your ONLY cultural access was books, poetry, and music if you made it in your home, yourself. And perhaps the odd live concert if you were wealthy enough to attend the symphony or opera. And art only if you were wealthy or visited a museum. Today? Obviously there are far more things competing for our attention.
Ken, I've been wanting to come back to this conversation for a while now because it, "Liberalism", is probably one of the topics I've been most interested in for the past few years.

I should be clear, I agree with you that we in the West produce a lot of cultural content as you well noted. However, books, television, movies, etc. are not themselves traditions and patterns of being across generations. Rather, they are artefacts that a culture produces at a given moment that both give us a glimpse as to what that culture most values and act either as reinforcers or destroyers of cultural traditions that themselves exist as a kind of "living out of the cultural values". Liberalism as a system of thought and political arrangement is, at it's core and in it's purest, bent on the liberation of the individual from all prior and unconsented-to restraint. Tradition, by contrast, seeks to constrain the individual and community in pursuit of something higher.

I should note, I am not saying that all tradition is an un-alloyed good or that all individual freedom is an unmitigated evil. Rather, I simply would like to point out that Liberalism and Tradition are generally at cross-purposes. Clearly, tradition and liberalism exist side-by-side in our current civilization and they have now for close to 400 years. The effect of Liberalism on traditions though is to make them highly attenuated and entirely voluntaristic; in a way sapping them of their meaning and mystery in any corporate sense and giving a feeling of the artificial at the individual level. That is to say, any tradition that I live by now has been chosen by me (and my wife) and I can choose to set it aside at any time. Any meaning that exists in the tradition is meaning that I've imbued it with, as opposed to my Church or community or culture across the ages. In that I am actively making the tradition mine and deciding how to practice it, I have emptied it of any mystery.

I'd be curious as to your thoughts on this, Ken.

As a side-note: We can debate the Kitchy-ness of modern Europe. My sense though of when I have spent time there is one of deep sadness (my own). There is beauty and majesty at every turn in terms of the art and architecture but it seems wholly other to the way people live their lives. The cathedrals are mostly empty; massive, beautiful monuments to a long-dead way of being. They exist now, not to perform a teleological function in service to a culture-wide tradition; but to raise revenue off the backs of tourists. That's sad and dare I say kitchy, to me.
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