I was making fun of Hegel (heh).

Full disclosure: I’m not particularly impressed by Marx, but could be laboring under a delusion of Libertarian freedom;)

I agree that the rhetoric used in each is unique, but the substantive goals, socially, economically, and logically, aren’t particularly different from those used by the Athenian demagogues and aristocrats in turn. Basically… dialectic, whether describing Platos methods or Marx’s, suffers from the same defect. Philosophers that rely on it always always always end up believing that they’ve “proven” some universal categorical proposition via their deductive method without grasping that their subject (like natural science) only lends itself to the conditional and general claims of logically inductive systems.

Thus because abtract concepts like “value”, “society”, “good”, “equality”, &etc. are particularly and subjectively understood, and possess conventional meanings that vary across time and culture, one can never in practice rely on much in the way of universal declarations for core premises… tautologies, sure. Mathematics in general, sure. Politics? God? Social mores? No way.

This is the difficulty in using statistics. If a proposition is a tautology (or axiomatic), then one shouldn’t need statistical support for a universal claim. If a proposition requires a premise only demonstrable via a statistical analysis of particular cases, then the conclusion is ALWAYS conditional and bounded, in which case it can’t be said to be universal. The same is true for the type of casual definitions that formed the basis of both The Rupublic, the Great Committee, and Marxist/Leninist reasoning.

Probably I’m just taking the problem too seriously….

Eberstadt says:
And it is hard to see how Beijing will be able to mitigate China’s escalating “bride deficit” through any deliberate policy actions for at least a generation (unless of course Beijing stumbles upon a method of manufacturing full-grown Chinese women on demand).

http://www.policyreview.org/feb04/eberstadt_print.html

Anyway, the substantial differences between 20th century Marxists and French Revolutionaries are quite a few. The French famously installed a goddess of Reason in Notre Dame, in a sort of bow to the Englightenment.

Marx, on the other hand, insisted, ” Philosophers have sought to know (understand)the world; the point, however, is to change it.”

With the emphasis on Will (over reason) and praxis, Marx, Trotsky, Lenin and the others are closer to Nietzsche than the French revolutionaries, who looked back towards Voltaire, Rousseau, etc.

Another big difference that comes in via the Dialectic is the certainty that one class (the workers) will eventually triumph. It is impossible for them not to. The unfolding of history will stop, and the worker’s paradise will be its final synthesis. The “Realm of Freedom” will replace the “Realm of Necessity” and there could never be a falling back. That all seems pretty substantively different from the views of the French revolutionaries.

One thing I hope we can agree on is that both of these movements were shot through with superstition. There is a sense in which they shared a teleology despite all the substantive differences. By my lights, Eric Voegelin best captured that shared teleology (shared by more than just these two phenomena) in his phrase, “Immanentizing the Eschaton”

All Best! Shoot low, they’re riding Shetlands!

Fichtean, not Hegelian. But I’ll just conceed anyhoo.

It’s unclear when I consider Trotsky, to know whether to apply Hegels ‘Werden’ in order to conceive “A” morphing into “not A”, or rather “Not A” werden into “A”. But regardless, despite a thesis that “A” cannot be “not A” and an antithesis that “A” is “not A”, the synthesis is a demonstration of why global capitalism is doomed. It’s an internal contradiction!

On the upside, now that females are of recognised value more will survive infanticide and hopefully balance out the equation over the next 20 or 30 years. Jonathan I doubt that the Chinese govt will grant rights of any kind, let alone those of self ownership.

An interesting aside, and total hearsay at that, I have a friend who regularly visits China for business (at least that is his story!) and he tells me that because of the shortage of women, men there are choosing to live in homosexual relationships. (Choosing might be too strong a word here – after all, what really is the choice?)

I like how this man thinks. Specially the subliminal part.

There is a lot more, but that is substance enough for a comment box.

And kidnapping women will be more attractive. However, the way to deal with it is to assign each individual’s ownership to himself and to punish kidnapping, not to pretend that people don’t have property value. Domestic animals are better protected than are wild animals, because it’s possible to own domestic animals and the owner has a strong incentive to protect the animal so as not to lose its value. That’s true for people too, especially if they own themselves.

i.e. Women will go to the guys with more to offer, and leave the guys who are jerks & losers, and given enough demographic pressure, any stigma of divorce would be dramatically lessened. ( at least statistically)

Are we seriously to consider their prediction that the USSR socio-political system wouldn’t work to be a deep insight? If so shouldn’t we give due credit to Aristophanes, who seems to have been making fun of the same socio-economic premises (and rhetoric) 2500 years ago. Ever since Plato wrote the Republic there’s been a succession of Utopic philosophies differing mainly in style while remaining substantively unchanged. How is Trotsky’s concept of “world revolution” substantively different from the French revolutions “Edict of Brotherhood”?

My point is that the question of “when” isn’t the same as the question of “why”. Nor is the answer to the former question as it relates to the demise of a given political system other than a unique collection of incompletely known variables we generally cobble together after the fact to explain the obvious. But as to the latter question… it takes no great insight to expect certain premises to lead to an outcome that has been the rule without exception in history.

Likewise, I think it’d be very unwise to think that Russia’s territorial integrity is necessarily related to it’s demographics. A very small elite controls Russia’s nuclear arsenal, and as long as it is in the US’s interest for that stockpile to remain off the world blackmarket we will go to very great lengths to make sure Russias rulers are given no reason to stop cooperating.

The down side of using zero-sum game theory to hasten the end of the Soviet era is the fact that Moscow is itself in a position today to demand of the world the same zero sum existence. Do any of us doubt that had Hitler had the means at hand to predicate the continued existence of the world upon his own that he’d have hestitated? Do any of us believe that Israel would show mercy were it’s enemies to succeed in it’s destruction?

Before rushing to draw too many conclusions from the most recent demographic projections, it’s perhaps worth considering these latest estimates with those that were in vogue a generation ago… in the 1970′s, say. This would allow perspective and forestall pacing too much faith in a “science” that has been so fantastically inaccurate in the past. “Destiny” implies unalterability, and this has yet to turn out to be supported by world events or history, especially in demographics (or economics). (Perhaps we’re living in a Soviet “workers paradise” and just don’t know it? Probably not.)

In addition, it would be a miracle if the assumptions that are taken axiomatic in order to provide the foundations upon with these projections are based turned out to be as certain as the statisticians seem to believe. If history teaches it’s student anything, it is that he should be wary of forgetting his disipline cannot, by definition, be empirical or rigorous. And that history is never more than a prologue. For every academic that made accurate predictions 40 years ago, I feel very safe in pointing out that there were 100 more who were completely wrong in most respects. The irony of tenure is that in insulates the incompetent from ever having to acknowledge they were wrong or be held accountable (or even to stop teaching falsehood).

If we forget the 100 fools in order to honor the single “genius” in retrospect, then it is we who are the true fools for mistaking accident for intent. Multiply this by a thousand intellectuals and academics constantly publishing, and like the one in a billion Shakespere-typing monkey, one or two nearly ALWAYS have guessed correctly. It should occur to us that the trick isn’t identifying the correct guess in hindsight, but rather before the comedy or tragedy our “genius” predicts has actually come to pass.

As an example of what I’m speaking of… here’s a link to a CIA analysist’s prediction in 1997 of what happened in 9/11/01:

http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/97unclass/failure.html

The author seems to have been a genuine oracle. But wait. Consider all the “Intelligence” analysis in 1997, hundereds of thousands of pages written by hundreds of Phd’s and “experts”. Should we have had the foresight to see that the above analysis was the correct one in 2000?

This said, there’s any number of trends and policy to be derived from demographics studies. But without more specific detail, I don’t think we should accept their arguments conclusions without more consideration.

Only if we have worldwide stagnation in medical technology (which we very well could, courtesy of National Health Care). Otherwise, we should easily have a working anti-aging treatment by 2050.

Maybe some of those countries where a higher population has a more immediate need for such treatments will eschew controls and limitations and invite researchers to come in and play with stem cells to their hearts’ content.

Anyway, if that sort of technology comes onstage, a high average age might turn into an advantage; all of the vigor of youth plus lots of experience.

“In India, women are a commodity…. sure maybe not in Bangalore where they take IT and customer service jobs from deserving Americans but elsewhere in suburban India parents who have female children now “sell” them to the highest bidder – no longer does the bride’s family provide the dowry!”

This bodes well for the future. Parents who think they might get money out of the deal will be more likely to want baby girls. Maybe if the overshoot the mark, in 20 years they’ll have a glut of women. Stay tuned.