Re: vortex-digest Digest V2005 #161

[John Robertson]

I have been a lurker for years now and have enjoyed the discussions 
very much. I am an innumerate linguist, unprepared to comment on much 
of the technical details of these discussions. I would, however, like 
to emerge from my years of lurking to comment (of topic) on Jed's 
statement:

snip
"Throughout history, capitalists have sacrificed millions of lives and 
their own futures time after time with stupid, self-destructive 
behavior. This is human nature. Capitalism is the most efficient way to 
allocate money and resources, but it does not promote morality or human 
decency any more than communism does. It is an amoral economic system. 
Engineering is the most efficient way to build machinery, and it is 
equally amoral. It works just as well whether you build lifesaving 
machinery or instruments to torture people with."
and snip

The question of morality is an interesting one. English has three 
terms: moral, immoral, amoral. Taken by themselves the words have a 
positive, negative and neutral connotation. The referents to which the 
words might attach, however, are another issue. What was immoral for 
Stalin's Communism, might have been fine and dandy for Roosevelt's 
democracy, and vice versa. The real question is if there is a basis for 
determining morality independent of Stalin's communist culture or 
Roosevelt's capitalist culture. There seems to be an overwhelming if 
not universal sense, for example, that incest is neither moral, nor 
amoral -- Egyptian and Incan  practice of marriage (kings and queens) 
not withstanding. In general, we humans have a hard time believing that 
wanton murder for selfish and personal gain is acceptable behavior. 
These may well be examples of behavior that the majority of the human 
race might describe using "immoral" (whatever the term for 
"unacceptable behavior").

However, since there is so much gray area in determining behavior that 
is moral, immoral, or amoral, I have to believe that it is impossible 
to persuade anyone with fixed beliefs to change. Therefore, I doubt 
that this will persuade Jed: (a) It is harder to dismiss communism as 
an economic system from communism an ideo-political system than it is 
to separate capitalism as an economic system from capitalism as a 
political system. It is fair to say, I  believe, that capitalism, past 
and present, encompasses more diversity of political systems than 
communism ever did. (b) If we are to believe the The Black Book of 
Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression  (by St�phane Courtois, Nicolas 
Werth, Jean-Louis Pann�, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek ...), the 
behavior engendered by Communism in the 20th Century was directly and 
indirectly responsible for the deaths of from 80 to 100 million people. 
I find such wanton, selfish killing immoral. I may be wrong, but I do 
not believe that as many people who suffered in Jed's thrall of 
capitalism in the same century were killed for the same wanton, selfish 
reasons. One might argue that the flourishing of technology helped more 
people under capitalism than it did under Communism.

It is probably fair to say that what we believe is what we are willing 
to act on. What we choose to believe really does matter to our future 
and more importantly, to the future of others as well. The data seem to 
argue that communism -- a belief system that prompted wanton, selfish 
destruction of human beings -- is hardly amoral.