Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Oct 30, 2023 12:51 pm
I read Nietzsche and liked it (though that was ages ago) but as it happens I often found that quoting Nietzsche is a red flag in left-wing thinker.
Eh, I liked The Gay Science. Nietzsche is preposterously anti-Christian, and yet, at the same time he clings to some presuppositions of Christianity more tenaciously than any thinker I've ever seen.
Since the father of CS was gay, does that mean Computer Science was the real Gay Science all along?
Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Oct 30, 2023 12:51 pm
As for Heidegger, I'm a bit surprised... left-wing distrust of tech is usually associated with the whole body of environmental thought and as far as I can see never references Heidegger at all. Or any philosopher in any case.
I think this is your lack of experience. New Left thinking generally is saturated with Heidegger. Social theorists tend to be constructivists who don't believe in uninterpreted nature. IIRC this was an accessible example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wCY9SqyVoo
Basically, all the arguments that engagement with tech enfeebles us spiritually come from Heidegger. Our "relationship with screens" is not directly related to environmentalism. Heidegger argued that technology causes the forgetting of Being. By Being, he's not talking about an idealist conception, which he also thinks hastens its forgetting. He's talking about just pre-theoretically "being there" in an existential sense. This "being there" is destroyed by our engagement with technology. The greatness of blindly devoting your life to a genocidal maniac, apparently, is that it's fully compatible with "being there".
Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Oct 30, 2023 12:51 pm
I think left-wing thought would be immensely improved by acceptating that Marx's thought was fair for its day and then moving on to new and better things.
I wish I could do without Marx, but apparently, there are large masses of very smart people who are lost when reasoning about material systems unless you explain to them in excruciating detail, for example, why the profit motive creates class conflict. This is the kind of thing Marx does.
Humans are naturally cynical, but all their cynicism is reserved for the foreigners beyond the wall. It's very counterintuitive for them to understand that the people screwing them over might be the friendly faces who are not even plotting against them.
To understand reality, you have to forget about intentions and think of objects as counters in a board game. Very few thinkers are able to scale up this caliber of abstraction to the level of a society. Marx is one of them. He's also one of the purest exponents of progressivism in the history of thought. A lot of today's theoretically sophisticated "progressives" are global conservatives or indigenous Nazis. Some of them have stopped identifying as "leftist" altogether.
Plus, a lot of arguments against Marxism are bogus:
1. Marx is authoritarian: Only if you count revolutionary force as "authoritarian". His communist utopia is indistinguishable from anarchism.
2. Marxism is a religion: People like Bertrand Russell had a point when they were referring to the rise of Leninism. Outside that context, there are no arguments for this position. We don't even have a Marxist International, only various conspiracy theory internationals. Bertrand Russell engaged with Marxist arguments so closely that, to his horror, he'd be called a Marxist these days. He didn't realize just how far humans can stray from factual reality when they don't have to contend with Marxist arguments. Nowadays, it's almost like Non-Marxism has become a religion. Either way, I don't support bigotry against any religion, Marxism or Non-Marxism.
3. Marx believes that labor creates value: Capitalist theorists like Adam Smith argue that capitalism benefits everyone ASSUMING that labor creates value. Marx says that the fact that labor doesn't create value under capitalism undermines its legitimacy as a system. He thinks labor SHOULD create value. He calls the society where labor creates value "communism". A communist society is one where Adam Smith's argument for a new economic system that benefits everyone would actually hold.
No other progressive thinker I know of handles social issues with Marx's comprehensive scope at this level of sophistication through material analysis. Generalizing Marxist thinking really helps conceptualize social progress in novel cases. I'd argue that AI is one example.