Is the West Fascist ? Oligarchic? Plutocratic?

[JustARandomPanda]

Starting a new thread (maybe 3rd time's the charm?) because I'm interested in seeing what other people think. I am outright asking the Mods/Stewards to be the Coaches/Referees in the sense that I want this thread to stay in Off-Topic and if any Mod/Steward see anything that starts spinning out of control move in swiftly and split and pit. That's what was agreed upon by the old Mod Teams with Sean himself and what he himself preferred be done to just pitting the whole thing.

 

 

*********************

 

I, for the moment at least, am not quite certain the West are true Fascist countries yet. I do think at the very least they're Oligarchic/Plutocratic.

 

My thinking has changed a lot over the years from when I was young and in college. Back then I was a typical "liberal". What I now think of as more correctly known as an Egalitarianist. Although lately modern liberals are reclaiming the term Progressive. Most likely because the Right has successfully transformed the term "liberal" into a moniker for scorn.

 

While I do not like the scorn and ridicule the Neocon Right often uses when talking about or at "liberals" I'm glad to see the term Progressive come to the fore again. If only because I'd rather see the term "Liberal" return to what it once meant in the very early 19th century.

 

 

BTW - the current "Right" is something I do not agree with either. That is I don't agree that they are "rightwing" nor do I see them as Conservative. I've only come to this conclusion after years spent studying it and looking at the origins of many strands of political thought and historical events. To me the current US Right are actually left-leaning. They tend to support ideals that had their origin in the French Revolution rather than strictly British traditions of Liberalism such as John Locke. Hence the support for a strong military, using military and corporate power to "bring the Rights of Man" (aka nation-building) to all the other nations of the world, etc. You can find that same ideology and enthusiasm in the rhetoric of supporters of the French Revolution.

 

2. Another reason which I might post about later is much of the above is greased by the Managerialisation of developed-countries' society. The Management class/staffs of middle and large businesses whose interests do not coincide with what's good for nations as a whole. To ask if the West has become Fascist ignores that whole other aspect. But from what I've been studying it's a huge part of why the US and Europe are "systems stupid" (check out the following book for a good intro) when it comes to government and markets.

 

 

3. Money. The domination of money and credit in nearly all aspects of modern societies arrangements introduces systemic weaknesses. Basically it makes society a 'monoculture' of money. Back when Western societies had multiple competing methods of getting things done - 'gift economies', trading services for services (no I'm not talking only about barter), etc it meant that financial booms and busts and speculation were limited to devastating a smaller segment of the population. Now that everything has been given over to the 'marketization' of exchanges between humans it can bring down entire societies. The spread of money has increased certain kinds of efficiency for decision-making but at the cost of resiliency.

 

There was a time when I thought under-developed nations's people were greatly disadvantaged by living on less than a dollar a day. Now I see it as a strength. Were these 3rd world societies to take on the sole method of exchange that the developed world does it would also be taking on the developed world's prone-ness to systemic financial risk and ruin that was not of their own making.

 

4. The above has occurred in government as well. Centralizing power in money and governing has increased the systemic risk to society as a whole. Just witness how two factions - the Tea Party Republicans and Obama democrats - are able to hold an entire nation hostage over arguments about how to treat debt and repayment of financial obligations. If there were serious multiple centers of power in the U.S. besides the duopoly of Wash. D.C. and Wall Street it would be much harder to pull shenanigans like this off.

 

 

Those are just a few of my current thoughts on the subject. I'm not convinced just yet that the West is fascist. For one thing I'm not sure the West will be able to pay for what it takes to maintain a Fascist regime for the long haul. Heck...it may not even be able to pay for it much longer in the short run either.

 

 

Curious to see what other people think.

 

 

I might repost my short blurb on this subject I put in my PPF simply to open it up for others comments.

 

 

Cheers.

Edited October 21, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[joeblast]

The way I see it, "modern liberals" can simply no longer cling to the term liberal, due to the perversion of the word liberal becoming plainly apparent - a modern Liberal is most certainly not a classical Liberal, in many regards its damn near the opposite. Progressives usurped the word a hundred years ago when the term "progressive" became a dirty word. Otherwise there would have been no need for them to discard the term and start calling themselves something else that was more palatable.

 

Agreed on conservative also getting bastardized.

 

Managerial and administrative bloat is a side effect of poor management. Or mismanagement, as the case may be.

 

Money has also been bastardized. The 16th Amendment is an abomination and should have never went into law, all it did was initiate the marginalization of congress, gave the government a blank check to spend whatever the hell it wanted to on whatever the hell it wanted, all at the expense of the integrity of the currency...and ultimately, well, go watch the mouse & rat vid MPG posted in the other thread.

 

Its a perversion of incentives.

 

There was no "holding the nation hostage" - we went over the "debt ceiling" back in May. This was all a preplanned, pre choreographed bullshit show. Obama and the Progressives want to simply do away with any semblance of spending restraint and continue relying every more heavily on currency manipulation to achieve their Utopian welfare state as a segue into an "equal piece" of the new one world - and the tea party repubs were about the only voice of reason saying "we cant spend into oblivion forever" - but good luck with that since most republicans are well enough on the Progressive bandwagon that we can basically say there are no more republicans or democrats any longer. We have Progressives and we have a handful that arent batshit crazy thinking the fed can spend over the sunset for the next 100 years. Although some Progressives, while batshit crazy, still have a bit of a ray of sunshine, like Alan Grayson's musings on the fed.

 

Anyway...this whole debt ceiling hoopla was all about the implementation of "Obamacare." Somehow people are terribly misinformed thinking its "free" or that it'll cut costs or be anything be a disaster in general. Nevermind the fact that Obamacare is unconstitutional on its face, just like a great many other things the government does. This legislation was designed to appease big business/pharma/insurance and further distort the already hopelessly distorted wreck our "pricing mechanism" currently is.

 

Speaking of which...the fed's "100 year charter" was up this year. We heard NOTHING about it. Nothing about it having been extended, renewed, "deemed to still be in existence" or anything of the sort. What's up with that? So long as the federal reserve exists, we are going to be mired in this mangrove swamp of behemoth government dictating itself and its own idea of "proper scope and authority of government."

 

Instead of Occupy Wall St, it should have been "Occupy the Federal Reserve"

[zerostao]

if progressive is a 'dirty word' what would its opposite> regressive be considered?

buts what with labels? the 'tea party' right doesnt care much for republicans either.as you point out

and sure, why not just default and say fuck it all anyways? let the chips fall where they may

but they aint gonna fall in any way that you might be thinking, most likely, everything just further widens the gap of disparity.

this is the game going on. the richest of the rich just quite dont have enuff yet for their taste.

constitution? you arnt serious are you? that old obsolete document hasnt been in effect in ages.

and soon enuff that progessive magna carta will be overturned.

there are two kinds of people in this world, those who own it and then there is all the rest, mostly those who work

for the ones who own it. the middle class is the problem becoz they dont have any clue of which of those 2

groups that they belong to. and as the middle class tries to hold onto status quo they keep diminishing and will continue to diminish until they reach bottom. luckily i am part of the aristocracy, ok poor aristocracy, but at least i aint slaving for peanuts

or visiting any doctors.

while the middle class is being concerned about any crumbs being handed to the poor, the rich are robbing the middle class blind. its always about mis-direction. in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.

wake up, the rich cannot possibly gain anything from the poor, guess who the rich are gaming? the nearly rich, that is who, the poor dont invest into bubbles, the middle class does.

[Yulaw]

First define "the West"

 

Speaking only of the USA from this point on

 

To be fascist you need to have a Fascism which is defined as a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

We do not have this in the USA and the proof is in the recent government shutdown we jsut had which was caused by disagreement between branches of government that that cannot happen in a fascist state

 

I do not think that the US is an oligarchy which is a government by a few, especially by a small faction of persons or families and although it is a few by comparison to the population it is still a lot of people and their families tend to not be part of the government in most cases

 

Now you may be onto something with a plutocracy but I still do not think it is a plutocracy even though the majority of those in political power are millionaires or better. I think it is more of a government that caters to the wealthy which of course could be used as a point to prove it is in fact a plutocracy. However I do not think the wealthy control it completely just yet so I am still not convinced it is a true plutocracy just yet

 

[JustARandomPanda]

First define "the West"

 

 

Any country that traces back to the history of ancient Greece and Rome and Papal rule via Christianity. For example, I don't include India as part of "the West" even though it was ruled by Britain for many, many years. Papal rule never extended to India. Or at least I don't think it did. Indians already have their own rich tradition, laws and institutions that co-existed with Greece and Rome and Christianity and that remain to this day.

 

My definition also includes countries most don't typically think of when thinking of "the West" (likely because they're not as rich as Europe or N.A. typically has been). For example I'd add Brazil and Bolivia in "the West" because of their historic ties and institutions with Spain - which to the best of my knowledge most people include Spain as part of "the West" rather than "the East" or "Oriental".

 

Likewise I do not include Egypt as part of the West even though it fell under Greek aristocratic and later Roman rule. It's people maintained a distinct culture and it's institutions have ties to Islam.

Edited October 21, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[Brian]

I'll share more thoughts later, Panda, on why you correctly observe a seemingly bizarre mixture of fascism, oligarchy and plutocracy, but a brief comment for now on egalitarianism.

 

It is my opinion that Progressivism is a false egalitarianism and that this cognitive dissonance (one of several within the ideology) lies at the heart of many of the implementation failures through history (whether called communism, socialism, utopianism, egalitarianism, intentionalism or whatever). The problem is that the principles are simultaneously based on the struggle between "classes" and the denial of those classes.

 

Marx & Engels maintained, as you know, that all of the world's problems trace back to the struggle of the haves to suppress the have-nots but their solution simply redrew the class lines to be party leaders and the masses. Alinsky modified that to three classes -- the haves, the have-nots and the have-some-want-mores -- and posited that the first were the enemy, the second were cannon fodder and the third were to be manipulated into voluntarily becoming the second (and therefore more fodder in the struggle to overthrow the first). His solution, though, also relied on a shifting of class definitions rather than an elimination of them -- the new resultant classes being the community organizers and masses. The pattern repeats itself in other examples.

 

The concept of class warfare is deeply engrained in the philosophy, rhetoric and tactics of the Progressives even though they honestly believe themselves to be egalitarian in nature. Combine this inconsistency with an intentional dismissal of natural disparities in ambition & abilities and you have a recipe for the Animal Farm "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others" scenario.

 

It isn't that the intentions of the average Progressive are ignoble -- they are generally very noble! The problem is that they are internally inconsistent and neglect the reality of human nature.

 

My wife is a bleeding-heart mental-health social-worker and I stopped discussing the topic with her long ago after she told me that, yes, every example has ended badly but it is such a good idea that we have to keep trying.

[JustARandomPanda]

Whom is this Alinsky you are referring to Brian? I do not recognize this name and I have honestly tried to be widely read on many themes in politics, society and cultures, etc.

 

 

P.s. I literally laughed over the "have-some-want-mores"

 

Ah desires! What would humans be without you? All egos seemingly want the same things. LOL

Edited October 21, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[Brian]

Saul Alinsky was a sociologist at the University of Chicago who did a first-hand study of Al Capone and later wrote a couple of very interesting books -- Reveille of Radicals and Rules for Radicals in the 50s & 60s, respectively. Both Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton studied him (Obama taught his methods) and groups like SDS, the Weather Underground and ACORN have Alinskyite origins.

[Marblehead]

I'll share more thoughts later, ...

A comment from a thought I had while reading your post.

 

One of the very few criticisms Albert Camus had of Fred Nietzsche's philosophy was that, after declaring the death of God he failed to give the people an alternative. Seems that people need a power greater than themselves. That is why dictatorships and the like are still alive and well. Seems that the sheep need a shepard, no matter how harsh that shepard is.

[Apech]

Another US centred thread about politics! American politics is so warped that you don't actually have a left wing ... the democrats would be right wing in Europe. The term Fascism is banded about in such a way that it has become synonymous with any system people don't like. And communism is completely misunderstood. In many European countries there are communists in the national assembly and they often run large local authorities successfully within a capitalist system. The same goes for Marxists and Anarcho-Syndicalists. Having a range of political philosophies makes a huge difference - or has done historically. However and I think this is the main point nowadays all ideologies and ideas about social organisation have been subsumed by global market capitalism which is actually highly successful in marketing itself as the ideal solution to peoples needs while actually being the very thing we don't need. But values in education and in the general consciousness from the media and so on have been so captured that we have more or less a zero alternative mono-culture which presents itself with liberal trappings of tolerance and so on but is actually highly intolerant of any other system or culture. It wants to wipe out other possible ways of living. This is not the old fashioned totalitarianism of the 20 century its something else ... its what two world wars and a cold war threw up for us to digest. It wants conflict to gain power but it doesn't want the kind of conflict which threatens its stranglehold on our lives - so it teeters from little war to little war but makes sure it does not get out of hand or break out into any kind of revolutionary movement. I don't think we have much choice about this and as cultivators we have work within the system 'in the world but not of the world'.

[JustARandomPanda]

Another US centred thread about politics!

 

It need not be - nor did I intend for it to be U.S. centric.

 

I don't live in Europe or South America so it would not be fair for me to start opining about the state of affairs in those countries or how plutocratic or fascist or insert-ideology-here they might have become. The only one I can comment for sure about is the one I live in. Comment on other continents would be due to reports from abroad. Likely the same for most of the other posters so far in this thread.

 

 

But by all means...South Americans, Germans, Brits, Irish, NZ and Aussies please join in. If it goes off into discussing Europe or South American or Australia or whatever so much the better.

 

My idea was to investigate if what I'm seeing around me lines up with the rhetoric - whether foreign or home-grown.

Edited October 21, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[JustARandomPanda]

A comment from a thought I had while reading your post.

 

One of the very few criticisms Albert Camus had of Fred Nietzsche's philosophy was that, after declaring the death of God he failed to give the people an alternative. Seems that people need a power greater than themselves. That is why dictatorships and the like are still alive and well. Seems that the sheep need a shepard, no matter how harsh that shepard is.

 

 

Interesting comment. I've never read Camus unfortunately although I know he was influential in Europe and I think the U.S. during the late 50s and 60s.

 

I thought you might like the following blog post from John Michael Greer. Especially since it's talking about religion.

 

 

BTW - it's JMG's position that the true "religion" of the West whether "right" or "left", progressive, socialist or conservative, mercantilist, atheist, christian, etc - all bow down to the almighty civil religion of Progress. In more ways than one I'm inclined to agree he may be right.

 

Anyway...enjoy!

 

 

 

 

The Renewal of Religion

The new religious sensibility I’ve sketched out here in several posts already, and will be discussing in more detail as we proceed, has implications that go well beyond the sphere assigned to religion in most contemporary industrial societies. One of the most significant of those implications is precisely the idea that religion, in any sense, will have an important impact on the future in the first place.

 

One of the standard tropes of the contemporary faith in progress, after all, insists that religion is an outworn relic sure to be tipped into history’s compost heap sometime very soon. By “religion,” of course, those who make this claim inevitably mean “theist religion,” or more precisely “any religion other than mine”—the civil religion of progress is of course supposed to be exempt from that fate, since its believers insist that it’s not a religion at all.

This sort of insistence is actually quite common in religious life. C.S. Lewis notes in one of his books that really devout people rarely talk about religion as such; instead, they talk about God. To ordinary, sincere, unreflective believers, “religion” means the odd things that other people believe; in their eyes, their own beliefs are simply the truth, obvious to anyone with plain common sense. It’s for this reason that many languages have no word for religion as such, even though they’re fully stocked with terms for deities, prayers, rituals, temples, and the other paraphernalia of what we in the West call religion; it’s by and large only those societies that have had to confront religious pluralism repeatedly in its most challenging forms that have, or need, a label for the overall category to which these things belong.

The imminent disappearance of all (other) religion that has featured so heavily in rationalist rhetoric for the last century and a half or so thus fills roughly the same role in their faith as the Second Coming in Christianity: the point at which the Church Militant morphs into the Church Triumphant. So far, at least to the best of my knowledge, nobody in the atheist scene has yet proclaimed the date by which Reason will triumph over Superstition—the initial capitals, again, tell you when an abstraction has turned into a mythic figure—but it’s probably just a matter of time before some rationalist equivalent of Harold Camping gladdens the heart of the faithful by giving them a date on which to pin their hopes.

If the evidence of history is anything to go by, though, those hopes are misplaced. As discussed in an earlier post, the rationalist revolt against religion that’s been so large a factor in Western culture over the last few centuries is far less unique than its publicists like to think. Some such movement rises in every literate civilization in which the art of writing escapes from the control of the priesthood, and a significant secular literate class emerges. In ancient Egypt, that started around 1500 BCE, in China, around 750 BCE; in India and Greece alike, around 600 BCE; in what Spengler called the Magian culture, the cauldron of competing Middle Eastern monotheisms that finally came under the rule of Islam, about 900 CE. The equivalent point in the history of the West was reached around 1650.

If you know your way around the history of Western rationalism from 1650 to the present, furthermore, you can track the same patterns straight through these other eras. Each movement began with attempts at constructive criticism of religious traditions no one dreamed of rejecting entirely, and moved step by step toward an absolute rejection of the traditional faith in one way or another: by replacing it with a rationalized creed stripped of traditional symbolism and theology, as Akhenaten and the Buddha did; by dismissing religion as a habit appropriate to the uneducated, as Confucius and Aristotle did; by denouncing it as evil, as Lucretius did and today’s “angry atheists” do—there aren’t that many changes available, and the rationalist movements of the past have rung them all at one time or another.

Each rationalist movement found an audience early on by offering conclusive answers to questions that had perplexed earlier thinkers, and blossomed in its middle years by combining practical successes in whatever fields mattered most to their society, with a coherent and reasonable worldview that many people found more appealing than the traditional faith. It’s the aftermath, though, that’s relevant here. Down through the centuries, only a minority of people have ever found rationalism satisfactory as a working philosophy of life; the majority can sometimes be bullied or shamed into accepting it for a time, but such tactics don’t have a long shelf life, and commonly backfire on those who use them.

Thus the rationalist war against traditional religion in ancient Greek and Roman society succeeded in crippling the old faith in the gods of Olympus, only to leave the field wide open to religions that were less vulnerable to the favorite arguments of classical rationalism: first the mystery cults, then a flurry of imported religions from the East, among which Christianity and Islam eventually triumphed. That’s one of the two most common ways for an era of rationalism to terminate itself with extreme prejudice. The other is the straightforward transformation of a rationalist movement into a religion—consider the way that Buddhism, which started off as a rational protest against the riotous complexity of traditional Hindu religion, ended up replacing Hinduism’s scores of gods with an equally numerous collection of bodhisattvas, to whom offerings, mantras, prayers, and so on were thereafter directed.

The Age of Reason currently moving into its twilight years, in other words, is not quite as unique as its contemporary publicists like to think. Rather, it’s one example of a recurring feature in the history of human civilization. Ages of Reason usually begin as literate civilizations finish the drawn-out process of emerging from their feudal stage, last varying lengths of time, and then wind down. Again, the examples cited earlier are worth recalling: the rationalist movement of the Egyptian New Kingdom ended in 1340 BCE with the restoration of the traditional faith under Horemheb; that of China ended with the coming of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE; that of India faded out amid a renewal of religious philosophy well before 500 CE; that of Greece and Rome ceased to be a living force around the beginning of the Christian era; that of the Muslim world ended around 1200 CE.

In each case, what followed was what Oswald Spengler called the Second Religiosity—a renewal of religion fostered by an alliance between intellectuals convinced that rationalism had failed, and the masses that had never really accepted rationalism in the first place. The coming of the Second Religiosity doesn’t always mean the end of rationalism itself, though this can happen if the backlash is savage enough. What it means is that rationalism is no longer the dominant cultural force it normally is during an Age of Reason, and settles down to become one intellectual option among many others.

What forms a Second Religiosity might take in the contemporary Western world is a fascinating issue, and one that deserves (and will get) a post of its own. The point I’d like to explore this week is that the idea of a rebirth of religion focusing on an ecological sensibility is not original to me. It actually came in for quite a bit of discussion in the late 1970s, in the circle of green intellectuals that formed around Gregory Bateson, Stewart Brand, and The Whole Earth Catalog. The idea was that the only thing that would really galvanize people into making changes for the sake of an ecologically sane and survivable future was the emergence of an eco-religion that would call forth from its believers the commitment, and indeed the fanaticism, that the transformation would require.

Nor was this just empty talk. I know of several attempts to launch such a religion, and at least one effort to provide it with a set of sacred scriptures. All of them fizzled, and for a very good reason.

To make sense of that reason, a bit of a tangent will be useful here, and so I’d like to glance at a somewhat different attempt to borrow the rhetoric and imagery of religion for secular ends, the Charter for Compassion launched by pop-religion author Karen Armstrong a few years back, which is being marketed by the TED Foundation just now under the slogan “The best idea humanity has ever had.” Those of my readers who know their way around today’s yuppie culture will doubtless not be surprised by the self-satisfied tone of the slogan, but it’s the dubious thinking that follows that I want to point up here.

Armstrong starts by claiming that “The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions,” which is quite simply not true. All religions? There are many in which compassion falls in the middling or minor rank of virtues, and quite a few that don’t value compassion at all. All ethical traditions? Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, widely considered the most influential work on ethics in the Western tradition, doesn’t even mention the concept, and many other ancient, medieval, and modern ethical systems give it less than central billing. All spiritual traditions? That vague and mightily misused word “spirituality” stands for a great many things, many of which have nothing to do with compassion or any other moral virtue.

An earlier post in this sequence talked about the monumental confusions that pop up when values get confused with facts, and this is a good example. Armstrong pretty clearly wants to insist that everyone should put compassion at the center of their religious, ethical, and spiritual lives, but in a society that disparages values, it’s easier to push such an argument using claims of fact—even when, as here, those claims don’t happen to be true. Mind you, Armstrong’s charter also finesses the inevitable conflict between the virtue she favors and other virtues that have at least as good a claim to central status, but that’s a subject for another day.

The deeper falsification I want to address here is contained in the passage already cited, though it pops up elsewhere in the Charter as well: “We therefore call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion” is another example. What’s being said here, in so many words, is that a moral virtue either is, or ought to be, at the core of religion: that religion, in other words, is basically a system of ethics dressed up in some set of more or less ornate mythological drag. That’s a very popular view these days, especially among the liberal intelligentsia from which Armstrong and the TED Foundation draw most of their audiences, and some form of it nearly always becomes a commonplace in ages of rationalism, but it’s still a falsification.

It so happens that a large minority of human beings—up to a third, depending on the survey—report having at least one experience, at some point in their lives, that appears to involve contact with a disembodied intelligent being. Many of these experiences are spontaneous; others seem to be fostered by religious practices such as prayer, meditation, and ritual. Any number of causes have been proposed for these experiences, but I’d like to ask my readers to set aside the issue of causation for the moment and pay attention to the raw data of experience. There’s a crucial difference between the question “Does x happen?” and the question “Why does x happen?”—a difference of basic logical categories—and it’s a fruitful source of confusion and error to confuse them.

Whether they are caused by autohypnosis, undiagnosed schizophrenia, archetypes of the collective unconscious, the real existence of gods and spirits, or something else, these experiences happen to a great many people, they have done so as far back as records go, and religion is the traditional human response to them. If nobody had ever had the experience of encountering a god, an angel, a saint, an ancestor, a totem spirit, or what have you, it’s probably safe to say that we would not have religions. Human beings under ordinary conditions encounter two kinds or, if you will, worlds of experience: one that’s composed of things that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched, which we might as well call the biosphere, and one composed of things that can be thought, felt, willed, and imagined, which we can call the noosphere (from Greek nous, “mind”). The core theory held by religions everywhere is that there is a third world, which we can call the theosphere, and that this is what breaks through into human consciousness in religious experience.

It’s important not to make this very broad concept more precise than the data permit, or to assume more agreement among religious traditions than actually exists. The idea of a theosphere—a kind, mode, or world of human experience that appears to be inhabited by disembodied intelligences—is very nearly the only common ground you’ll find, and attempts to hammer the wildly diverse religious experiences of different individuals and cultures into a common tradition inevitably tell you more about the person or people doing the hammering than they do about the raw material being hammered. In particular, the role played by moral virtue in human relationships with the theosphere and its apparent denizens varies drastically from one tradition to another. There are plenty of religious traditions in which ethics play no role at all, and moral thought is assigned to some other sphere of life, while even among those religions that do include moral teaching, there’s no consensus on which virtues are central. In any case, it’s the relationship to the theosphere that matters, and the moral dimension is there to support the relationship.

This is pretty much the explanation you can expect to get, by the way, if you ask ordinary, sincere, unreflective believers in a theist religion what their religious life is about. They’ll normally use the standard terminology of their tradition—your ordinary churchgoing American Protestant, for example, will likely tell you that it’s about getting right with Jesus, your ordinary Shinto parishioner in Japan will explain that it’s about a proper relationship with the kami, and so on through the diversity of the world’s faiths—but the principle is the same. If morals come into the discussion, the role assigned to them is a subordinate one: the Protestant, for example, will likely explain that following the moral teachings of the Bible is one part of getting right with Jesus, not the other way around.

That’s the thing that rationalist attempts to construct or manipulate religion for some secular purpose always miss, and it explains why such attempts reliably fail. The atheists who point out that it’s not necessary to worship a deity to lead an ethical life, even a life of heroic virtue, are quite correct; the religious person whose object of reverence expects moral behavior may have an additional incentive to ethical living, but no doubt the atheists can come up with an additional incentive or two of their own. It’s religious experience, the personal sense of contact with a realm of being that transcends the ordinary affairs of material and mental life, that’s the missing element; without it, you’re left with yet another set of moral preachments that appeal only to those who already agree with them.

This is what guarantees that Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion will presently slide into oblivion, following a trajectory marked out well in advance by dozens of equally well-meant and equally ineffectual efforts. How many people even remember these days, for example, that nearly all of the world’s major powers actually sat down in 1928 and signed a treaty to end war forever? The Kellogg-Briand Pact failed because the nations that needed to be restrained by it weren’t willing to accept its strictures, while the nations that were enthusiastic about it weren’t planning to invade anybody in the first place. In the same way, the people who sign the Charter for Compassion, if they really intend to guide their behavior by its precepts, are exactly the ones who don’t need it in the first place, while people who see no value in compassion either won’t sign or won’t let a signature on a document restrain them from doing exactly what they want, however uncompassionate that happens to be.

That’s also what happened to the efforts of green thinkers in the 1970s either to manufacture a green religion, or to manipulate existing religions into following a green agenda. The only people who were interested were those who didn’t need it—those who were already trying to follow ecologically sound lifestyles for other reasons. The theosphere wasn’t brought into the project, or even consulted about it, and so the only source of passionate commitment that could have made the project more than a daydream of Sausalito intellectuals went by the boards. So, in due time, did the project.

What makes the involvement of what I’ve called the theosphere essential to any such program is that the emotional and intellectual energies set in motion by religious experience very often trump all other human motivations. When people step outside the ordinary limits of human behavior in any direction, for good or ill, if love or hate toward another person isn’t the motivating factor, very often what drives them is religious in nature—not ethical, mind you, but the nonrational commitment of the whole self toward an ideal that comes out of religious experience. Every rationalist movement throughout history has embraced the theory that all this can be dispensed with, and should be dispensed with, in order to make a society that makes rational sense; every rationalist movement finally collapsed in frustration and disarray when it turned out that the theory doesn’t work, and a society that makes rational sense won’t function in the real world because, ultimately, human beings don’t make rational sense.

The collapse of the rationalist agenda is thus one of the forces that launches the Second Religiosity. Another is the simple fact that most people never do accept the rationalist agenda, and as polemics against traditional religion from rationalist sources become more extreme, the backlash mentioned earlier becomes a potent and ultimately unstoppable force. Still, there may be more to it than that.

Without getting into the various arguments, religious and antireligious, about just exactly what reality might lie behind what I’ve called the theosphere, it’s probably fair to say that this reality isn’t a passive screen onto which individuals or societies can project whatever fantasies they happen to prefer. What comes out of the theosphere, in the modest religious experiences of ordinary believers as well as the world-shaking visions of great prophets, changes from one era to another according to a logic (or illogic) all its own, and such changes correspond closely to what I’ve described in earlier posts as shifts in religious sensibility. In the weeks to come, we’ll talk about what that might imply.

Edited October 21, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[Yulaw]

Any country that traces back to the history of ancient Greece and Rome and Papal rule via Christianity. For example, I don't include India as part of "the West" even though it was ruled by Britain for many, many years. Papal rule never extended to India. Or at least I don't think it did. Indians already have their own rich tradition, laws and institutions that co-existed with Greece and Rome and Christianity and that remain to this day.

 

My definition also includes countries most don't typically think of when thinking of "the West" (likely because they're not as rich as Europe or N.A. typically has been). For example I'd add Brazil and Bolivia in "the West" because of their historic ties and institutions with Spain - which to the best of my knowledge most people include Spain as part of "the West" rather than "the East" or "Oriental".

 

Likewise I do not include Egypt as part of the West even though it fell under Greek aristocratic and later Roman rule. It's people maintained a distinct culture and it's institutions have ties to Islam.

 

Thank you

 

But with that as a definition all bets are off, to many countries, cultures and governments to categorize them into one group

[Thunder_Gooch]

We live in a fascist plutocratic oligarchy.

Fascism: a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government: very harsh control or authority


Oligarchy: a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes

Plutocracy: a country that is ruled by the richest people

[JustARandomPanda]

Here's one more JMG blog-post.

I think Marblehead will find it particularly interesting - especially since Nietzsche is part of JMG's subject. Also ties into some of the themes of this thread. And it'd likely be the one I'd point to in my disagreement with Yulaw in his asserting there are too many countries and cultures for examining any trends in "the West". But then...he announced in his first post he isn't convinced about the topic under discussion anyway - not much left to say when one explains why one disagrees with the topic being discussed.



Anyhoo...

Cheers!

The Scheduled Death of God



There's a mordant irony in the fact that a society as fixated on the future as ours is should have so much trouble thinking clearly about it. Partly, to be sure, that difficulty unfolds from the sheer speed of social and technological change in the age of cheap abundant energy that’s now coming to an end, but there’s more to it than that.




In the civil religions of the modern world, the future functions as a surrogate for heaven and hell alike, the place where the wicked will finally get the walloping they deserve and the good will be granted the promised benefits that the present never quite gets around to providing them. What Nietzsche called the death of God—in less colorful language, the fading out of living religious belief as a significant force in public life—left people across the Western world flailing for something to backstop the sense of moral order in the cosmos they once derived from religious faith. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a great many of them found what they wanted in one or another civil religion that projected some version of utopia onto the future.




It’s crucial not to underestimate the emotional force of the resulting beliefs. The future of perpetual betterment promised by the faith in progress, and the utopia on the far side of cataclysm promised with equal fervor by the faith in apocalypse, are no less important to their believers than heaven is to the ordinary Christian, and for exactly the same reason. Every human society has its own conception of the order of the cosmos; the distinctive concept of cosmic order that became central to the societies of Europe and the European diaspora envisioned a moral order that could be understood, down to the fine details, by human beings. Since everyday life pretty clearly fails to follow such an order, there had to be some offstage location where everything would balance out, whether that location took the form of heaven, humanity’s future among the stars, a future society of equality and justice, or what have you. Discard that imagined place and, for a great many people in the Western world, the cosmos ceases to have any order or meaning at all.




It was precisely against this sense of moral order, though, that Nietzsche declared war. Like any good general, he sent his forces into action along several routes at once; the assault relevant to our theme was aimed at the belief that the arithmetic of morality would finally add up in some other place or time. He rejected the idea of a utopian world of past or future just as forcefully as he did the concept of heaven itself. That’s one of the things his doctrine of eternal return was intended to do: by revisioning the past and the future as endless repetition, Nietzsche did his level best to block any attempt to make the past or the future fill the role once filled by heaven.




Here, though, he overplayed his hand. Strictly speaking, a cycle of eternal return is just as imaginary as any golden age in the distant past, or for that matter the glorious future come the Revolution when we will all eat strawberries and cream. In a philosophy that presents itself as a Yes-saying to life exactly as it is, his reliance on a theory of time just as unprovable as those he assaulted was a massive problem. Nietzsche’s madness, and the resolute effort on the part of most European intellectuals of the time not to think about any of the issues he tried to raise, left this point among many others hanging in the air. Decades passed before another German thinker tackled the same challenge with better results. His name, as I think most of my regular readers have guessed by now, was Oswald Spengler.




Spengler was in his own way as eccentric a figure as Nietzsche, though it was a more stereotypically German eccentricity than Nietzsche’s fey Dionysian aestheticism. A cold, methodical, solitary man, he spent his entire working life as a schoolteacher, and all his spare time—he never married—with his nose in a polymath’s banquet of books from every corner of scholarship. Old Kingdom Egyptian theology, traditional Chinese landscape design, the history of the medieval Russian church, the philosophical schools of ancient India, the latest discoveries in early twentieth century physics: all these and more were grist for his highly adaptable mill. In 1914, as the impending fall of the British empire was sweeping Europe into a vortex of war, he started work on the first volume of The Decline of the West; it appeared in 1918, and the second volume followed it in 1922.




The books became immediate bestsellers in German and several other languages—this despite a world-class collective temper tantrum on the part of professional historians. Logos, one of the most prestigious German scholarly journals of the time, ran an entire special issue on him, in which historians engaged in a frenzy of nitpicking about Spengler’s historical claims. (Spengler, unperturbed, read the issue, doublechecked his facts, released a new edition of his book with corrections, and pointed out that none of the nitpicking addressed any of the major points of his book; he was right, too.) One study of the furore around Spengler noted more than 400 publications, most of them hostile, discussing The Decline of the West in the decade of the 1920s alone.




Interest in Spengler’s work peaked in the 1920s and 1930s and faded out after the Second World War; some of the leading figures of the "Beat generation" used to sit around a table reading The Decline of the West out loud, and a few other figures of the 1950s drew on his ideas, but thereafter silence closed in. There’s an ironic contrast here to Nietzsche, who provided Spengler with so many of his basic insights; Nietzsche’s work was almost completely unknown during his life and became a massive cultural presence after his death; with Spengler, the sequence ran the other way around.




The central reason why Spengler was so fiercely if inconclusively attacked by historians in his own time, and so comprehensively ignored since then, is the same reason why he’s relevant to the present theme. At the core of his work stood the same habit of morphological thinking I discussed in an earlier post in this sequence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who launched the study of comparative morphology in the life sciences in the eighteenth century, remained a massive cultural presence in the Germany of Spengler’s time, and so it came naturally to Spengler to line up the great civilizations of history side by side and compare their histories, in the same way that a biologist might compare a dolphin’s flipper to a bat’s wing, to see the common patterns of deep structure that underlie the surface differences.




Such comparisons are surprisingly unfashionable in modern historical studies. Most other fields of study rely on comparisons as a matter of course: the astronomer compares one nebula to another, just as the literary critic compares one experimental novel to another, and in both fields it’s widely accepted that such comparisons are the most important way to get past irrelevancies to an understanding of what’s really going on. There are historical works that compare, say, one revolution to others, or one feudal system to another, but these days they’re in the minority. More often, historians consider the events of some period in the past by themselves, without placing them in the context of comparable periods or events, and either restrict themselves to storytelling or propose assorted theories about the causes of those events—theories that can never be put to the test, because it’s all but impossible to test a hypothesis when you’re limited to a sample size of one.




The difficulty with a morphological approach to history is precisely that a sample size of more than one turns up patterns that next to nobody in the modern industrial world wants to think about. By placing past civilizations side by side with that of the modern industrial West, Spengler found that all the great historical changes that our society sees as uniquely its own have exact equivalents in older societies. Each society emerges out of chaos as a decentralized feudal society, with a warrior aristocracy and an epic poetry so similar that an enterprising bard could have recited the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh in an Anglo-Saxon meadhall without anyone present sensing the least incongruity. Each then experiences corresponding shifts in social organization: the meadhalls and their equivalents give way to castles, the castles to fortified towns, the towns to cities, and then a few of the cities outgrow all the others and become the centers in which the last stages of the society’s creative life are worked out.




Meanwhile, in the political sphere, feudal aristocrats become subject to kings, who are displaced by oligarchies of the urban rich, and these latter eventually fall before what Spengler calls Caesarism, the emergence of charismatic leaders who attract a following from the urban masses and use that strength to seize power from the corrupt institutions of an oligarchic state. Traditional religions rich in myth give way to rationalist philosophies as each society settles on the intellectual projects that will define its legacy to the future—for example, logical method in the classical world, and natural science in ours. Out of the diverse background of folk crafts and performances, each culture selects the set of art forms that will become the focus of its creative life, and these evolve in ever more distinctive ways; Gilgamesh and Beowulf could just as well have swapped swords and fought each other’s monsters, for example, but the briefest glance at plays from ancient Greece, India, China, and the Western world shows a wholly different dramatic and aesthetic language at work in each.




All this might have been forgiven Spengler, but the next step in the comparison passes into territory that makes most people in the modern West acutely uncomfortable. Spengler argued that the creative potential of every culture is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Sooner or later, everything worth bothering with that can be done with Greek sculpture, Chinese porcelain, Western oil painting, or any other creative art has been done; sooner or later, the same exhaustion occurs in every other dimension of a culture’s life—its philosophies, its political forms, you name it. At that point, in the terms that Spengler used, a culture turns into a civilization, and its focus shifts from creating new forms to sorting through the products of its creative centuries, choosing a selection of political, intellectual, religious, artistic, and social patterns that will be sustainable over the long term, and repeating those thereafter in much the same way that a classical orchestra in the modern West picks and chooses out of the same repertoire of standard composers and works.




As that last example suggests, furthermore, Spengler didn’t place the transition from Western culture to its subsequent civilization at some conveniently far point in the future. According to his chronology, that transition began in the nineteenth century and would be complete by 2100 or so. The traditional art forms of the Western world would reach the end of the line, devolving into empty formalism or staying on in mummified form, the way classical music is preserved today; political ideologies would turn into empty slogans providing an increasingly sparse wardrobe to cover the naked quest for power; Western science, having long since exhausted the low-hanging fruit in every field, would wind down into a repetition of existing knowledge, and most forms of technology would stagnate, while a few technological fields capable of yielding grandiose prestige projects would continue to be developed for a while; rationalism would be preserved in intellectual circles, while popular religious movements riddled with superstition would rule the mental life of the bulk of the population. Progress in any Western sense of the word would be over forever, for future cultures would choose their own directions in which to develop, as different from ours as ours is from the traditional Chinese or the Mayans.




Spengler didn’t leave these projections of the future in abstract form; he turned them into detailed predictions about the near future, and those predictions have by and large turned out to be correct. He was wrong in thinking that Germany would become an imperial state that would unite the Western world the way Rome united the classical world, the kingdom of Qin united China, and so on, though it’s fair to say that Germany’s two efforts to fill that role came uncomfortably close to succeeding. Other than that, his aim has proved remarkably good.




He argued, for example, that the only artistic forms that could have any vitality in 20th century Europe and America would take their inspiration from other, non-Western cultures. Popular music, which was dominated by African-derived jazz in the first half of the century and African-derived rock thereafter, is only one of many examples. As for politics, he suggested that the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be dominated by a struggle pitting charismatic national dictators against a globalized oligarchy of high finance lightly concealed under a mask of democracy, a struggle that the financiers would eventually lose. Though the jury’s still out on the final outcome, the struggle itself is splashed over the news on a daily basis.




All these events took place in other times and places, and will take place in future societies, each in its own way. What distinguishes contemporary Western society from earlier urban civilizations, according to Spengler’s view, is not that it’s "more advanced," "more progressive"—every society goes in a different direction, and proceeds along that route until the same law of diminishing returns cuts in—but simply that it happened to take mastery of physical matter and energy as its special project, and in the process stumbled across the buried carbon we’re burning so extravagantly just now. It’s hard to think of any historical vision less flattering to the inherited egotism of the modern industrial West; it deprives us of our imagined role as the cutting edge of humanity in its grand upward march toward the stars, and plops us back down to earth as just one civilization among many, rising and falling along with the rest.




It’s in this way that Spengler proved to be Nietzsche’s heir. Where Nietzsche tried to challenge the imaginary utopia at the end of history with an equally imaginary vision of eternal return, Spengler offered a vision that was not imaginary, but rather rested on a foundation of historical fact. Where Nietzsche’s abandonment of a moral order to the cosmos left him staring into an abyss in which order and meaning vanished once and for all, Spengler presented an alternative vision of cosmic order in which morality is not a guiding principle, but simply a cultural form, human-invented, that came and went with the tides of history. Life was as much Spengler’s banner as it was Nietzsche’s, life in the full biological sense of the word, unreasoning, demanding, and resistant to change over less than geological time scales; the difference was that Nietzsche saw life as the abyss, while Spengler used it to found his sense of an ordered universe and ultimately his values as well.




It’s among the richest ironies of Spengler’s project that among the things that he relativized and set in a historic context was Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche liked to imagine himself as a figure of destiny, poised at the turning point of the ages—this was admittedly a common occupational disease of nineteenth-century philosophers. Spengler noted his debts to Nietzsche repeatedly in The Decline of the West, but kept a sense of perspective the older man lacked; in the table of historical parallels that finishes the first volume of Spengler’s book, Nietzsche has become one more symptom of the late, "Winter" phase of Western culture, one of many figures participating in the final disintegration of traditional religious thought at the hands of skeptical intellectuals proposing new systems of philosophical ethics.




When Nietzsche announced the death of God, in other words, he was filling a role familiar in other ages, announcing an event that occurs on schedule in the life of each culture. The Greek historian Plutarch had announced the death of Pan some eighteen centuries earlier, around the time that the classical world was settling firmly into the end-state of civilization; the people of ancient Crete, perhaps recalling some similar event even further back, used to scandalize Greek tourists by showing them the grave of Zeus. Every literate urban society, Spengler argued, followed the same trajectory from an original folk religion rich in myths, through the rise of intellectual theology, the birth of rationalism, the gradual dissolution of the religious worldview into rational materialism, and then the gradual disintegration of rational materialism into a radical skepticism that ends by dissolving itself; thereafter ethical philosophies for the intellectuals and resurgent folk religion for the masses provide the enduring themes for the civilization to come.




It’s a stark vision, especially painful to those who have been raised to see the most recent phases of that process in our own culture as the heralds of the bright new era of history presupposed by the Joachimist shape of time, or the initial shockwaves of the imminent apocalypse presupposed by its Augustinian rival. Defenders of these latter viewpoints have accordingly developed standard ways of countering Spengler’s challenge—or, more precisely, defenders of both have settled on the same way of doing so. We’ll discuss their argument, and place it in its own wider context, in next week’s post.

 

 

 

In Westeros lingo: Winter is coming.

Edited October 22, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[Marblehead]

I thought you might like the following blog post from John Michael Greer. Especially since it's talking about religion.

Mr. Greer has thought about that subject much more that I have. Hehehe. But yes, I found the article to be in agreement with my understandings.

[Marblehead]

In Westeros lingo: Winter is coming.

Yes, winter is coming. I am already in my winter so I won't be effected much.

 

I have never read Spengler but the article contained a flow that I can accept.

 

The rise and fall of civilizations is an ongoing theme in the life of the human animal. That is why I see nothing really dramatic about the ongoing fall of Western, and especially American, civilization.

 

Regardless of how we label the form of government America or the Western world has, America no longer has a lead role as the best model of a morally "right" nation. (Never has been, really, but many made it appear as such.)

[Apech]

Yes, winter is coming. I am already in my winter so I won't be effected much.

 

I have never read Spengler but the article contained a flow that I can accept.

 

The rise and fall of civilizations is an ongoing theme in the life of the human animal. That is why I see nothing really dramatic about the ongoing fall of Western, and especially American, civilization.

 

Regardless of how we label the form of government America or the Western world has, America no longer has a lead role as the best model of a morally "right" nation. (Never has been, really, but many made it appear as such.)

 

 

You yanks are so gloomy. I grew up in a country which had lost its world power status and it became an obsession with the politicos. Decades of introspection and gloom. All completely unnecessary. To be honest the US may have lost its own self-image as the 'good guy' but it has not its world status ... and I think that is still unchallenged ... believe it or not. There has never been any form of democracy which did not amount to 'the few' dictating to the 'many'. What distinguishes the 'west' is that as individuals we have rights under law and essentially we are left alone with a lot of personal freedom. Neither of these apply in Fascist states ... so no the west is not fascist.

 

The problem with the west and the world is the lack of a viable alternative to status quo ... and this in itself is tired and lacks any ambition for making things better. In the past in the 19 and 20 century different ideologies battled to prove that they had the answer to life's problems ... they didn't but the most successful of them is the one we have ... don't waste time trying to define it in terms of the old politics ... define it by highlighting the alternative to what we have ...

[Marblehead]

Oh Apech, let me bitch about my government and institutions if I want to. Hehehe.

 

Yes "Great" Britian had already lost its place in the present before you and I were born.

 

But I will disagree with you in that I believe that the US is becoming a fascist state. Not like Germany in the 1930's but still.

 

Yes, the US is still a Superpower. It is also over 17 trillion dollars in debt. And China holds, what?, 3 trillion of that debt? And my government is still giving other countries billions of dollars annually to be friendly toward us.

[Apech]

Oh Apech, let me bitch about my government and institutions if I want to. Hehehe.

 

Yes "Great" Britian had already lost its place in the present before you and I were born.

 

But I will disagree with you in that I believe that the US is becoming a fascist state. Not like Germany in the 1930's but still.

 

Yes, the US is still a Superpower. It is also over 17 trillion dollars in debt. And China holds, what?, 3 trillion of that debt? And my government is still giving other countries billions of dollars annually to be friendly toward us.

 

 

I think if true fascism took over you'd get a real shock and realise that what you have is nothing like that.

 

debt is irrelevant ... the British Empire in all its pomp was (nearly) always in debt ... China is still an inward looking culture and I believe will so remain.

[Brian]

As I see it... (I've never tried to put this in words before so we'll see how it goes!)

 

Societies, governments or politics (however you want to phrase it) are really about energy and the control thereof, and there are two fundamental approaches -- internal control & external control.

 

Let me back up a moment, though. In any sort of model for an "energy system," there exists a ground state (or more than one) and a potential gradient. Often there exist, or can be created, regions of relative stability in which the first & second derivatives of the gradient are near-zero. Think of a river, for instance: there will be relatively flat spots where the current drops and the water runs still and deep, and other spots where the gradient is steep and whitewater develops. A waterfall is a discontinuity. We can build dams to create lakes where they didn't exist, and we can use that dam to extract energy in another form. We can also use wells & pumps to inject another form of energy into the system and raise the gravitational potential if we wish. One might say that, left to "nature," water will find its way to a location of least potential, but this is only true when only gravitational energy is considered (the sun, in conjunction with gravity, gives us evaporation and thunderstorms, for instance, and the Earth itself lifts water to high mountain springs to start the cycle all over again...)

 

So, humanity's "natural state" is one of low potential energy -- individuals or families living as subsistence-level scavengers. Anything "above" that is the result of intentional and cooperative energy management to raise the potential and allow for more efficient "energy harvesting" (if you will...)

 

There are only two basic societal paths -- internal control and external control. All forms of government follow one of those paths. The path of internal control relies on the individual to exert responsible control over his or her own personal energy, to voluntarily use some of that energy for the betterment of the community and to respect the other individuals' choices concerning the management of their own personal energy. The path of external control relies on the community to exert responsible control over the personal energy of the individuals as a collective, specifies the manner & extent to which that energy will be used for the betterment of the community and does not trust the individual to make responsible choices concerning the management of their own personal energy.

 

As with any energetic system, there is a constant struggle against entropy, and the higher the potential is raised the greater the effort needed to maintain it. The internal path requires cultivating the individual as a responsible & powerful governance mechanism while the external path requires cultivating an external agent to fulfill that role.

 

Each path has several diverging & converging loops, and each has an idealized "peak" which is inherently unstable -- in part because humans are imperfect.

 

I'll let the reader ponder a bit about how particular examples of government around the world and throughout history fit along these two paths and along the potential gradients...

 

EDIT: As a side note, the loops along a path often cross each other, and often cross loops from the other path, sometimes seeming to run along together for a while.

Edited October 22, 2013 by Brian

[Marblehead]

Hey Apech, I think you are becoming a pretty good pacifist. Acceptance of 'what is'.

 

 

Hi Brian. Not bad at all. So the bottom line is ...?

[JustARandomPanda]

People may dispute if the West has become Fascist, Oligarchic, Plutocratic or some other kind of society. The reason I'm interested in hearing about this topic is that I believe there's a lot of truth to the saying:

 

 

History may not repeat itself but it often rhymes.

 

 

Which is why I don't expect any kind of 'fascism' of today in the West to look like the Fascism of Mussolini or the 3rd Reich.

Edited October 23, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[joeblast]

and that's why I view bickering over textbook definitions of any of these is a fruitless endeavor - when it encompasses many aspects of it, and you will never have reality match up to the "textbook definition"...what good exactly is that textbook definition aside from a loose and general reference?

 

so it makes no sense to argue about the US missing a tiny component or two from the textbook definition of fascism. it has enough components to qualify.

[Apech]

and that's why I view bickering over textbook definitions of any of these is a fruitless endeavor - when it encompasses many aspects of it, and you will never have reality match up to the "textbook definition"...what good exactly is that textbook definition aside from a loose and general reference?

 

so it makes no sense to argue about the US missing a tiny component or two from the textbook definition of fascism. it has enough components to qualify.

 

 

I live in the country that had a fascist regime until 1974 and I know many people who lived under this government ... what we have now is nothing like what fascism actually was like. That's not a text book definition its just an observation.