I know it's been a long while since I posted at the Blog. I have been on FB, where at least I have about 70 followers. But, I posted this at FB just now and thought it belonged in a more accessible in the future location:
I do agree with Paul Campos here. We so easily idealize aspects of the past, and it can be a very dangerous thing--and nearly always reactionary. It is why I wrote the controversial ending to my alternative history novel. We should applaud our technological advances among those of us fortunate enough to be able to use those technological advances to protect and sustain us. Beyond that, the fight remains what it was for so long before us, which is creating a society where all may benefit in a relatively equal way.
Though Campos would likely want to get off the train I am about to get on, his post helps me have a moment to say the following:
The older I get, the more I understand the need for a Communist Horizon, as we simply cannot rely on Sky Gods any longer, and if we are, we are already in deep trouble. Michael Harrington, in perhaps his least read book, The Politics at God's Funeral (1985), tried to warn us we must live, theologically and politically, with a philosophical uncertainty if we are to try to move beyond killing each other. It is not because we are substituting the Communist Horizon for the Sky Gods. It is because we need to have the Communist Horizon as a literary and political aesthetic, which by the word "aesthetic" I mean to recognize the following proposition:
The more technologically advanced our society becomes, the more we as individuals are interdependent upon each other's good will and support. It is not to completely throw out competition or capitalism. That is itself a type of utopia which the 20th Century should have taught us can be mass deadly in its operation. It is, however, to have a softer aesthetic which allows for give-and-take in good faith, and to reform or recreate systems which avoid the also mass deadly consequences from an ideology extolling competition and capitalism to a level where moral and communal oriented judgments are demoted, distorted, or lost.
