Political Identity As If People And Other Living Things Mattered

Someone has asked me why I'm always going on about people being considered as objects, so I'll go into this again.

It was about a decade ago, shortly after I went online and started visiting leftish websites, reading, sometimes in horror, some of the things that I read there.

One day, reading a comment by an old-line lefty who I guess was about my age, to the effect that science had proven free will is a myth, I realized that was a belief which was fundamentally destructive of anything that can usefully be considered to constitute liberalism.   If people are merely objects then there is nothing wrong with treating them unequally, in terms of usefulness, of exploiting them for any and all purposes.   If people are held to be merely objects then the only rule which will prevail is what stronger people in any situation can get away with doing to them.  People will be subjected to the same legal and social rules that have governed peoples' use of animals and plants.  That is unless something higher than objectification and utility is forced on those who are reluctantly required to treat them as more than that.

I suppose  another thing that led to that moment of clarity came from being exposed to more porn than I'd ever seen in my prior three-plus decades in the gay community.   Which explains my presumed apostasy on that issue as well.

There is something seriously wrong with an analysis of political identity which would allow someone allegedly on the left to maintain positions that are identical in their effect on living beings to those of Nazis and fascists.   I have heard people held to be on the far left who have not only denied the mass murders, attempted genocides and slave labor under various "leftist" governments, on some occasions I've heard such "leftists" admit those but excuse them as having served some kind of progress.   As reasonable a lefty as  the late, lamented Alexander Cockburn  excused Stalin as not being as bad as Hitler because you could serve in the Red Army while being Jewish.   I'm not aware of him ever going over the "Jewish Doctors Plot",  Stalin's last paranoid attempt at genocide, cut short only by his death. Even the Soviet government had to publish an exoneration of Jewish doctors on that one, several years before Khrushchev's denunciation of the decades of murders by Stalin.  That famous speech was delivered much to the horror of so many Marxists in the West who had spent those decades denying that those were happening.   Why that, alone, didn't discredit them as much as the revelation of the Nazis massive war crimes did his apologists strikes me as being a crucial issue in why liberalism has failed for so long.  I believe that there is a lot about how we need to change things to be learned in that history.

Marxism  and its various sects as the final destiny on the ray pointing left from the political center has always been an ideologically fraudulent ruse, useful to both the Marxists and the far right, damaging mostly to those who legitimately hold that position.   The fraudulence is based in the fact that both Marxists and fascists hold the same basic ideology that people are objects.  From that position their entire, real world, political identity unfolds.   Both will make some kind of weird, quasi-mystical pronouncements about "the people" in terms of nationality or as a mass but only as a physical force of nature which might be diverted in this or that direction,  Expending many individuals within that mass to accomplish their ends is seen as a good, which also turn out to be not all that different when it's goal is a dictatorship of "the people" or rule by a centralized power.   Marxists who hold that the tens of millions of murders BY MARXISTS, under Stalin or Mao somehow serve a more important purpose have a vision of the ultimate goal that isn't much different from what was supposed to happen after the German nation ruled the world.   In what is, I'm sure, an extremely controversial but entirely supportable point,  it wasn't much different from what Charles Darwin seems to have imagined would happen when the "weaker members" including entire races of the human species were killed by the stronger.   Only, in his case, since it was Brits he imagined among the evolutionary winners, nice polite people are required to ignore he said the same thing.

My proposal is to judge political identity based on the extent to which people are not held to be objects but to be, as the American philosopher Paul Weiss once said, " a locus of rights".    But, also controversially,  I reject the attempt to do that in secular terms because I have seen how the concept of people as the equal holders of real, inherent rights has fared under atheist regimes of thought.  I have absolutely no faith that a secular view of people will ever continue to hold that concept as an absolute reality, anymore.  Not after witnessing the left's decisively and damnably mild reaction to the revelation of the crimes of Stalin, Mao and their client states during my lifetime on the left.  I won't ignore that failure out of some alleged "higher purpose".

Secularism should be the sole preserve of a democratic government of the wonderfully diverse individual people who make up its only legitimate basis. That requirement is a requirement of equality as well as efficiently removing some potential areas of contention from the mechanisms of government.   Secularism isn't, itself, some kind of spiritual goal and ideal.   It cannot and will not ever be a legitimate requirement for human beings.  The People are the only legitimate source of government.   But it is a fundamental denial of the humanity of those people to deny their spiritual and, yes,  RELIGIOUS identities.  It would be as legitimate to deny the genders, races, nationalities and sexual identities of people, the other categories that have wisely been acknowledged by some of the best and most idealistically democratic laws we have ever adopted.   If religious liberals self-censor their words, as has so frequently happened on the left in the face of atheist coercion, their political purpose is subverted.  When those who enforce the suppression of religious thought are the kind of materialists who hold that people are objects with little to no individual importance and that the masses are a force of nature, all important, then the left will find itself impotently supporting the most anti-liberal of ideas and policies and even some of the greatest mass murderers in history.   The people murdered by Stalin  and Mao are as dead as those murdered by the Nazis and the Rios Montt junta in Guatamala.   There was a reason that the fascists in Central America targeted religious liberals.

If you're going to insist on a line of political identity, the resulting body counts  of different ideological positions are a far more legitimate factor in placing people on it than the economic babbling of theoreticians.  We, on the real left, have got nothing in common with people who make excuses for the mass murders of Mao or Stalin.  We never did, we will never be credible as long as we allow them to pretend we do.   Maybe refusing to go along with that criminal negligence will get them to reconsider.   It did me.

UPDATE:   A perceptive reader has pointed out that the title ironically refers to people as "things". I'll have to admit you got me.  When I came up with it I was thinking of the old poster about war being unhealthy for people and other living things as well as the subtitle of Small is Beautiful "economics as if people mattered".   I'll try to be less artsy and more accurate, at least till I forget this lesson.