I'm not conflating the two other than to make an allegorical point about the natural desire for fair or equitable outcomes in a world where that is impossible. Christianity addresses it through salvation and the left through the inevitable fall of capitalism and the coming utopia.

@wolfhnd nope.

One does it by holding out the promise of a reward for loving God and your ‘brother’ - a choice, the second by force.

Yes I was sure you had been

In some ways I like to reduce Christian philosophy to something very akin to Buddhism. A rejection of the instinctual life which can be read as devotion to, climbing the dominance hierarchy, accumulation of wealth, physical pleasure, or earthly concerns. Theologically they are of course nothing alike.

At the individual level they both may offer useful instruction but in terms of organizing a social structure I'm not so sure.

@wolfhnd

I'm only passingly familiar with Buddhism, but I do sort of get the comparison, maybe. Both understand that existing in the human environment is a horrifying reality, and both provide tools for avoiding the inward identity of cog in the cultural machine.

Organizing social structure? Yeah, I'm clueless...

Nice reply.

When I say Christian ethos of equality I'm referring to "it's more difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle (or night gate). It doesn't propose earthly but spiritual equality which seem in the light of it's eschatological narrative what does the earthly matter anyway? As I said there is a strain of the same attitude in the leftist. Their morality simply replaced heaven with the socialist paradise and the end times with Marx's certainty that capitalism was doomed.

@wolfhnd 1. Spiritual equality only under the condition of being saved, which is a religious/moral condition. Marxism has nothing of the kind.
2. To be fair to Marx, his opinion that Capitalism is doomed did not rest on faith, but on a strictly economic analysis (maybe a wrong one, but still). Cultural Marxism, on the other hand, rests on no foundation at all; it is purely a swindle. Cultural Marxists were not so much fanatics as crooks.

@UlrichArbes

Spiritual equality in that salvation is open to anyone. Mind you I'm not talking about the later manifestations such as Catholicism or Protestantism. The story of the thief on the cross next to Jesus illustrating that the price of admission was simple, straightforward and requires minimal effort and no prior status. Similarly the price of admission into the left is a profession of faith in the ideology not demonstrative outcomes of actual behavior.

I wasn't conflating Marxism with leftism beyond the belief that capitalism is flawed and unable to meet the left's moral objectives.

@wolfhnd The attitude of the thief on the cross was actually quite spectacular under the circumstances and could be considered proof of a true and genuine change of heart. Joining the Left is not comparable, since it is proof of stupidity, moral shallowness and/or conformism.

I´d say the Left in its present state is even worse than you believe. They do not care about the perceived injustices of Capitalism as an economic system any more -Bernie is atypical!-, they are only interested in identity politics for freaks and the dregs of society (whom Marx/Engels called the "Lumpenproletariat", so old-fashioned Marxism would be a cut above that).

@UlrichArbes

Not much to argue with there although by position is that you can see in Marx's personal life his true motivations. You have to see how an ideology manifests itself in the real world to know it.
Like the current social justice cult Marx gets around to hating everyone. And like the current misfits it isn't the injustices of capitalism that motivated Marx but the emotional appeal of what Rousseau would have called noble savagery. To be free of the smothering restraints of bourgeoisie proprieties. The worst are like mass shooters and hate existence itself but the average member of the social justice cult, like the adolescent cults of the sixties, are rebeling against civilization itself. Multiculturalism and tribalism is just one expression of that.

@wolfhnd I believe that, as far as historical consequences go, Marx caused more damage than possibly any other person in history. That said, I am inclined to think his excuses are somewhat better than those of postmodern Leftists. Your comment on their psychology is excellent.

1. I think there is any number of extremely one-sided geniuses whose personal life was unimpressive and the less said about it, the better. I wouldn´t really condemn Marx on this count.

2. Compared to our SJWs, Marx was way more coherent, and as to Rousseau, he disagreed with him in the decisive respect: Marx was 100% in favour of technological progress, Rousseau nearly 100% against.

3. As to the SJWs, I am in perfect agreement with your statement that they hate existence at worst and civilization at best. I happen to have coined a name for that attitude: I call them Acosmics. Their favouring all kind of misfits is the most obvious symptom; Acosmism is their psychical disease. There is also a third, functional aspect to it, which helps explain their successes, which is Bioleninism, a term coined by the Historian Spandrell. The idea of Bioleninism is that if you build your political strategy around cripples and outcasts, you will have extremely loyal followers, because they have no one else to turn to and can especially not rely on their own resources.

Edit: Weird. Engine seemingly ate the first 2 digits under 2.). 100% became 0.

@UlrichArbes

Thanks for the thoughtful comments.

I will try to develop my theory on what I see as a direct line of temperament from Rousseau, to the French Revolution, to Marx that is more convincing. In psychology terms I would tentatively say it is a lack of consciousness. I'm not sure that it really captures the ideal well however.

This would only be intersubjectivity: Not good enough.

Objectivity demands a specific viewpoint; namely a viewpoint that is completely impartial, not to say disinterested.

One of the "purposes" of multiculturalism is to prevent that shared objective. It ties in with the rejection of grand narratives by post modernists. It's only a contradictory argument if you understand that a naturalistic, subjective, conceptualization of morality is dependent on the tabula rasa view of human nature. The universal nature of emotional states is a strong argument against that position.

The social constructist or what radicals call social Darwinism, or cultural determinism and reject is oddly at odds with the insistence on group identities. They at once embrace and reject sexual and ethnic identity. It is what happens when a cult goes wild and escapes it's philosophical foundations. What the post modernists and Marxists were rejecting was the Western concept of universal natural law. From that we get cultural, ethnic, and sexual identity as being subjective, built on a tabula rasa view of human nature which implies but doesn't specifically address social construction as the source of identity. That creates the question of where, or how the subjective cultural identity arose. If the process isn't social Darwinism and there is no "objective" human nature the answer that they offer is it's about power dynamics. It's a rabbit hole because you then have to ask where did power dynamics come from if there is no definable "human nature".

What I think they are really proposing is the noble savage view. For the Marxist that means that the workers are closer to the natural state of perfection than management. For the post modernist it is an excuse to ignore traditional morality. I'm both cases it's an appeal to the emotive and the concept of emotional intelligence. Ironically it isn't that far off of the the rights view of an invisible hand, natural law, and economic Darwinism. Political ideologies it turns out are deeply rooted in emotional appeal. The slight variation in genetic personality dispositions accounting for which side of the divide people fall. That's not to say social indoctrination doesn't play a role but it is confusing and messy. At the extreme ends, say the religious right and the functional leftist you find people who are think strategists meaning that away from the middle personality traits behaviorally converge. There remains however significant differences in how group selection functions. You will have strong group selection of as you suggest morality is a shared ethnocentrism in a religious society and much less group selection if morality as the left seems it as the brotherhood of man and little or no ethnocentrism. This illustrates the conflict between conscientious personalities and open personalities. They both however see human nature through rose colored glasses.

My position is that civilization is necessarily very "unnatural" and incompatible with our evolved instincts. Group selection causes civilization to be eusocial. Primarily at least in the beginning driven by the production and defense of resources. The "noble savage" will in that environment be selected against. The problem of course is that emotionally or instinctually we are all "savages" and not particularly noble .