Yesterday, as I tried to keep three or four different Twitter controversies de jour straight, a random thought entered my mind: we are all Marxists.
Allow me to explain, especially to those for whom Marxism is a dirty word (I do not count myself in that category). One of the best classes I took in college was one on the Philosophy of Science, which sharpened my thinking on both that particular discipline and, more generally, on how humans approach knowledge. One of the first problems we approached was delineation: how to separate science from pseudo-science, a category for those knowledge arts that cloak themselves in scientific terms and pretensions without actually possessing true scientific credibility. It’s a long and fairly complex topic, but one of the markers of true science seems to be (to an extent, kinda sorta) falsifiability. That is to say, true scientific inquiry will always have scenarios under which it would be possible to definitively prove itself wrong, even if those never become a reality. Marxism is a key example of pseudoscience, because the nature of its system is such that it can never be disproven – it will twist and mutate itself around any given set of evidence to emerge stronger. Put another way, even if there were conditions that would seem to disprove Marxism, a good Marxist would not only say those factors did not, they would claim that in fact those very factors proved something important about how Marxism works.
Reading over people’s comments on various controversies made it very apparent to me that we are intellectual heirs of Marxism in the way that we approach new data. In particular, our attitudes toward pieces of data that serve to make us uncomfortable are very telling. Yesterday there was a swirl of controversy over a few items. One was the unfortunate occurrence of yet another school shooting, this time in Oregon. Another came in the form of this article in the Washington Post, which makes the claim – that on its surface would seem uncontroversial – that women who come from homes with married fathers, and enter into stable marriages themselves, are less likely to face violence and abuse.
I choose these two examples because they seem to present an interesting contrast which helps to illuminate my claim that we are all Marxists. Every time a mass shooting occurs in this country, there’s a rapid, knee jerk back and forth between gun control advocates (of which, full disclosure, I am one) and people who abhor gun control. That robust debate usually looks like this: “GUNS”. “NUH UH”. “GUNS”. “NUH UH”. What strikes me about participants in both sides of this debate is how stridently they press their claims. Both sides stake out ground that says: it does not matter what the particulars of this shooting are – it conforms to our narrative that (choose one – guns are bad; or guns are always good, more guns please).
I was especially surprised to see the tidal wave of fury that greeted that Washington Post piece. (Granted, some of the outrage seemed to stem from the original headlines and presentations, but that’s like judging a film on its trailer). The shrill dismissiveness which came from the progressive corner of my Twitter feed keyed me on to something: these people are not actually interested in engaging with information, digesting it, and then making informed opinions about it. Anything that seems to suggest that maybe pure autonomy has its down sides gets slapped with the label slut shaming, and marched over in the quest for a new tomorrow. I’ve long pondered over the connections between Marxism and feminism (there are a great many, I think, something I’ll elaborate on someday, maybe), and here’s a big one: each has a grand schema that must explain all events. For Marxism it is class struggle, the engine of history; for feminists it is patriarchy. Both of these schema have a great deal of insight and explanatory power to them, and do in fact help us understand our world (side note: I consider myself to some extent both a feminist and a Marxist). However, both have the severe limitation that grand narratives bring: an unwillingness to examine information on a case by case basis and give it an honest reading, rather than cram it into existing schema.
Feminism, it seems to me (perhaps ironically, given its Marxist tendencies) has utterly failed of late to critique the laissez faire nature of sex and partnership that has happened in the wake of the sexual revolution (that most capitalistic, bourgeois rebellion). Because certain strands of feminism (the ones dominant on Twitter) demand that personal autonomy be viewed as an unfettered good, feminists have failed to understand the sinister machinations wrought by the “market” of sexual exchange; how the current climate benefits men at the expense of women; and how correctives rooted in personal choice fail in the face of this exploitation.
Instead at every turn there is dismissiveness of pieces of knowledge that fail to conform. To continue with this example, radical feminists and social conservatives, different as some of their core convictions might be, seem to have enough in common that building bridges might be beneficial. But both sides remain convinced of the nefariousness of their “enemies”, and so outside a few oddball figures (Ross Douhat comes to mind), those potentially fruitful avenues remain unexplored.
All this talk of uncompromisingness reminds me: we are all Marxists in another, perhaps deeper sense. In his brilliant book The Four Cultures of the West, John W. O’Malley posits a profound (but, to his credit, by no means all explanatory) quadratic schema to understanding Western culture. To his mind, there are four basic types in Western Civilization: The Prophet, The Academic, The Humanist, and The Artist. Not surprisingly, Karl Marx is a prime example of the first type, The Prophet (atheism nothwithstanding). The Prophet seeks to enact social change through radical proscriptives which have their origin in the mind or system of The Prophet. Such a figure then necessarily enters society in order to divide, to separate the sheep from the goats, and sweep away the crust that covers society’s soul.
Sound familiar? This is the world of the Internet, which has increasingly become less and less interested in understanding culture, and more interested in dividing it between good and evil. Whether liberal or conservative, people on the Internet have increasingly become wrapped up in a spirit of judging, of dividing true believers from false prophets from infidels. This is the sense in which we are Marxist, then: we have crossed over from being interested in understanding culture to being convinced that we must change it in sweeping ways.
There is a goodness to these impulses, of course. As a type two, my Academic probing sometimes isolates me too much from the emotions involved in the real world – I forget that change can be necessary, that intellect without will is paralyzed. At certain great times in history, the world really is changed by prophetic figures: Luther, Marx, MLK. What worries me is the excess of one type we seem to have cultivated. I see little of the careful nature of the Academic in current, Twitterpated approaches to cultural events. The cycle is: event – outrage – backlash – new event. The harried pace leaves little space for the reflection necessary in the true work of understanding culture. Let’s not even think about the neglected space of The Humanist in this society, where compromise and common good are verboten.
There is a time and season for everything. In the face of complex conversations, we’re best served by answers that reflect that complexity. The Marxist tendency to boil down multi-layered conversations to a single talking (or shouting) needs balance from parties ready to wade into the murky swamps of human culture. So let’s all be a little less Marxist this week. It’s vitally necessary that we do so – of that you will never convince me otherwise.
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