Humanities Crash Course Week 36: Revolutions

Three radically different approaches to remaking society.

When social arrangements become untenable, people look for change. It can happen gradually — or all at once. Ideas determine how change happens, and week 36 of the humanities crash course had me exploring four classic texts that drove social change.

I’d already read two of them, but revisited them anyway. Another was unfamiliar, but clearly important. The fourth I knew only from reputation, and long dreaded. My dread was merited. Let’s dive in!

Readings

Gioia recommended four revolutionary texts while issuing a disclaimer:

All the works assigned during these 52 weeks are read to stir up our thinking, not to propagandize or impose compliance.

All four have been highly influential, but I suspect he wrote the disclaimer with one particularly in mind. The texts were:

• The U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776)

• The U.S. Constitution (1789)

• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft

• The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Guess which one I think is the odd one out? Let’s take them in chronologically.

The Declaration of Independence presents the American colonists’ justifications for seceding from Great Britain. It starts with a justification for issuing a justification at all:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The document then lists grievances: how the King failed to live up to his end of the social contract. But before doing so, a long paragraph stipulates axiomatic principles. The most famous is its opening line:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Much hinges on the meaning of the capitalized words: Creator, Rights, Life, Liberty, and Happiness. The Declaration doesn’t go there; it assumes the audience would understand. Educated Enlightenment thinkers likely would.

That’s a thread running through all four texts: they must be evaluated by their impact and by considering the context they addressed. The Declaration explicitly sets the context: Britain did us wrong; we want out.

On to the next logical step. Once independent, the new society needed rules. Enter the Constitution of the United States.

It’s the rare exciting legal document: the former colonists — now founders — laid down rules for a new Republic. They stipulated three distinct yet interrelated governance entities: the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

The branches seemed carefully designed to balance not just each other but also to resolve the perennial tension between freedom and control to enable emergent behavior. The founders even included rules to amend the rules. Systems thinkers avant la lettre!

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a revolutionary document of a different nature. Wollstonecraft was a proto-feminist writing in the time of the French Revolution and its ensuing upheavals.

She observed that (non-physical) differences between women and men are due less to inherent characteristics than in their different educations. Women should be educated on par with men — and not just for their benefit, but for society’s well-being as a whole.

We take this idea for granted today. But again, we must read these texts considering their original context. The Vindication must’ve been electrifying in its time: Wollstonecraft had a large impact on subsequent feminists.

And now we come to what I consider the problematic document, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. Commissioned by the Communist League, a small radical group, it’s become one of the world’s most influential political documents.

The Manifesto laid down Marx and Engels’s worldview. They understood human history as a sequence of struggles between oppressors and oppressed. This distinction manifested in different forms over time, but the Manifesto focused on the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, and the proletariat, or workers they employed.

Marx and Engels reduced the relationship between social classes to exploitation and conflict, leaving no room for cooperation through mutual interest. Given this reductive worldview, they called for proletarians to overthrow the bourgeoisie and take control of society. Among other things, they called for eradicating private property (which they clarified to mean society’s productive assets and not personal possessions.)

In effect, control of factories, land, and capital would be transferred to the state. Once this happened, the distinction between classes would vanish. Of course, the bourgeoisie wouldn’t give up willingly, so Marx and Engels prescribed (and advocated) violent revolution, which they saw as inevitable.

Again, context matters. The Manifesto appeared at a time of great suffering wrought by industrialization: child labor, unsustainable working hours, exploitative wages, etc. Marx and Engels’s program sought to wipe the slate clean and start over under more just conditions. One can see the appeal: they were addressing real injustices and promising alluring solutions with flair.

But we know how these ideas play out. In practice, societies that adopted this worldview often produced some of the most oppressive regimes in history. Rather than freeing people, they entrenched new forms of exploitation.

Audiovisual

Music: Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Alison Krauss, and Ralph Stanley. I’d heard bluegrass before, but was only familiar with Krauss’s work with Robert Plant. As usual, Apple Music’s artist essentials proved… essential.

Arts: Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer.

Wrestlers (1899) by Thomas Eakins, via Wikimedia

I’ve paid less attention to many of the painters recommended during this third stage of the course. Nothing this week changed that. I was most familiar with O’Keeffe, but have always thought her work overrated.

Cinema: I’m still on a Herzog bender. This week, I watched his first feature with Klaus Kinski, AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972).

Kinski plays Lope de Aguirre, a Spanish conquistador who leads a mutiny while floating down the Amazon in search for El Dorado. Death and madness follow.

Besides his performance, I was blown away by the soundtrack, including Popol Vuh’s music and the choice to make arrows completely silent. Coupled with the setting, it’s powerful cinema. My 13-year-old son was upset that (spoiler!) Aguirre didn’t get his comeuppance. (But didn’t he?)

Reflections

This week, I’ll likely antagonize some of my friends who have internalized a Marxist worldview, perhaps unwittingly. One needn’t be a Communist to believe social relations boil down to power struggles between oppressors and oppressed or use explicitly Marxist language. (E.g., the ubiquitous phrase “late-stage capitalism.”)

Reality is never as simple as populists make it out. But simplistic takes are often the ones that gain traction. If nothing else, Marx and Engels were brilliant rhetoricians. The oppressor-oppressed distinction keeps gaining adherents long after we moved on from “dark satanic mills.” Their ideology’s moral clarity and promise of liberation are its primary draws.

But as a Latin American, I’ve witnessed firsthand the suffering and destruction wrought by revolutionaries who, inspired by Marxism, believed they could set the world to rights in one blow. Invariably, their “new” orders merely replaced one set of tyrants with another while irreparably breaking things. As I’ve said many times before, you can’t violate Gall’s law.

The U.S. Constitution was developed by pragmatists — whose necks had been literally on the line — through a process of grueling compromise. The result was imperfect, but at least it included means for continual improvement. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman also argued for generative social change emphasizing mutual benefit.

In contrast, the Communist Manifesto is the product of thinkers far removed from the realities of governance, yet presented as a definitive prescription based on a definitive read of history. And their prescription is explicitly violent. Symbiosis is not on offer: for Marx and Engels, only the complete obliteration of the opposition will do.

Supporters often justify these ideas — despite real-world evidence — by stating (rightly) that they’ve never been implemented as intended. But this is as much the fault of the ideas as of the tyrants who’ve used them to exploit millions. The vision is ultimately unrealizable.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Marx and Engels’s work is vast; I’ve only sampled this one document. But what a document! — remarkable for its oversimplifications, reductivism, and hostility. And even though it addressed cruel and unjust conditions, it wrought more suffering than the ills it sought to cure.

As a catalyst of social change, the Communist Manifesto is driven by a different spirit than the Dhammapada and the Christian Gospels, which I read earlier this year. Instead of prescribing better living through personal and social development, cooperation, and compassion, it channels (justifiable) grievance into perpetual conflict. Jesus said, “you will know them by their fruits.” Marxism’s fruits have been bitter indeed.

Notes on Note-taking

Believe it or not, my original reaction to the Communist Manifesto was even stronger than what you read above. While passionate, my first take lacked nuance. (Ironically, since that’s part of what I disliked about the Manifesto.)

So I asked ChatGPT to steelman my essay. I fed it an initial draft, asking where it fell short. Its replies helped tone down my rhetorical flourishes and ground the critique. As always, I asked ChatGPT to not rewrite my copy. Instead, I wanted bullet points for proposed improvements and corrections.

Eventually, I issued the following prompt:

Here’s the complete essay. Please help me see this through the lens of someone who might not be entirely aware of Marx and Engel’s ideas, but is nonetheless attracted to Marxism (perhaps unwittingly.) I don’t want to necessarily convince them, but I also don’t want this piece to be easily refuted. What could I improve?

[… essay]

This led to a series tweaks. The result is not as vitriolic as my initial version, which will certainly make it less “viral.” But I think it’s more fair, and it helped me correct misunderstandings I had when reading the text. (Influenced perhaps by my strong bias against this ideology.)

Of course, someone who knows more about Marxism will still find objections with my take. But I’ve learned more through this dialogue with ChatGPT than if I’d just read the text and kept my opinions to myself.

Up Next

Gioia suggests Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice — a relief after this week’s heavy reading.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!