Only skimming here but I'd ask first whether, beyond the biological level (and perhaps not even completely there), there is any such actual thing thing as humanity properly so called.
Contemporary liberals in the near social-democratic FDR sense (if there are any) and also neoliberals (of whom there are far too many) all speak warmly of humanity as already completely achieved through a supernaturally given set of rights which, per them, self-evidently suffice to mandate and sustain society, and which guarantee the essentially extrasocial reality of the Precious Individual who will free us all through her irresistible creativity (entrepreneurship or expressive dance or fingerpainting or pop music or martial arts or drag-racing or That Special Smile or whatever). Don't we, on the contrary, regard humanity as a kind of project that may or may not be realized in history. One implication of this is that there are and can be no fully realized individual human beings at present, only a set of damaged and continually changing partial humans who will probably die without ever fully coming to be in any liberal sense. The task is above all to rationalize the material basis in order to create optimum conditions for species development, knowing that the species and nature itself will surely come to an end one day. Maybe this is not possible. People as we know them are inherently both social and selfish--and are mostly never completely either or much of anything else in the long run. We face at best an optimization exercise. Is this worth what now appears to be a near-impossible effort? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#3765): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/3765 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78393403/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
