I found myself in a discussion about historical materialism where I ended up saying something along the lines of “scientific progress helps us to build more ethical societies because it enables us to see through the injustices of race, religion, and capitalism.” I was kind of firing from the hip, but I couldn’t think of anything better to say. My conversation partner asked me if I thought you could do a scientific experiment or analysis on a moral problem, and I was frankly stumped.
I know we aren’t supposed to think in moral categories, but I sense every one of us thinks, and correct me if I’m wrong, that capitalism is wrong and communism is right morally speaking. With that in mind, as contradictions are resolved per historical materialism and as different peoples have socialist revolutions within their societies, do these societies become more moral in any sense?
Yeah morality is a tricky subject.
One the one hand, I’ve never seen any convincing argument that morality is in any way objective when seen from a purely areligious material viewpoint. You can always argue things like murder and rape are morally wrong, but someone can easily just say “no it’s not” and you have no real argument besides invoking some religious or idealist postulates.
On the other hand, any one of us seeing some atrocity such as a child being abused or a mass attack on civilians will certainly trigger something inside of you that registers the event as morally wrong. The vast majority of people from all societies and times in history see these same groups of acts as morally abhorrent to a certain extent. This could just be some built in feature of humans’ biology and basal social instincts that consider these acts right or wrong, but that implies morality is just some lower level animal instinct to survive and that these acts, when looked at through a logical scientific lens, have no significance other than how it affects society and future events. Right and wrong are no longer real things but just what someone likes and doesn’t like. The idea of a child being murdered but no one knowing about it or caring meaning that the event has no real significance doesn’t sit well with me though, logically or emotionally, and I doubt it does to others either.
This is really kind of a non answer, but I think it gives a really good glimpse into why so many people who understand Marxism or are part of the proletariat or who otherwise should “know better” than to indulge in capitalist societal constructs still have strong moral and even religious convictions that have no basis in dialectical materialism. Many people aren’t religious because they fell for some state sponsored scheme of social control, but because there is much more to being human and living than just applying scientific social theory to your life. Religious and moral structures provide things that I personally believe humans, not being unfeeling robots but highly developed versions of irrational animals, can’t fill in other ways. At least not for a long, long time; possibly until fully formed world communism has been establish, and even then I’m not super sure.
To end this barely coherent rant, MLs would do well to understand that people will stubbornly cling to moral and religious structures because people can only be so rational without losing a distinctly obvious but indescribable part of being human. We all feel morality, and can’t properly ascribe it a material basis, but nevertheless should engage with it with others as it has proven a powerful tool in the struggle to ultimately establish a post capitalist society.