Bush's first term at the administration's hostility to science, reflected in its stance on climate change and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. We were astonished during President George W. We scratch our heads about America's gun laws. Outsiders, even admirers, have often wondered how the most globalized country in the world ― a continent inhabited by people from every land ― can be so irrationally insular on some issues. This is what appeared to happen in the last Indian election, and the election in the United States of President Barack Obama was also plainly a supremely rational moment.īut reason does not seem to be getting much of a hearing during the current health-care debate in the U.S. But no one should think that debate in democracies is always based on reason, or that democracy necessarily makes people more rational. When you don't like a government, you can turn the rascals out without overthrowing the whole system.Ĭhange can be made in an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, way. Their legitimacy depends on their ability to deliver economic growth through state-managed capitalism.ĭemocracies, of course, allow people to use their reason to make choices based on the evidence of their own eyes. So, in the political sphere, reason has trumped both faith in an unattainable goal and self-delusion about the consequences of its pursuit.Īuthoritarian party-states, such as China and Vietnam, survive, but not through commitment to communism. In his magisterial book ``The Rise and Fall of Communism," Archie Brown notes how travel abroad opened Mikhail Gorbachev's eyes to the failure of the system that he had lived under all his life. The more that Russians, Poles, Czechs, and others saw of the life-style in the Western democracies, the more they questioned their own system. The second application of Groucho's question was that citizens of most Communist countries soon learned that the loss of freedom that they suffered was not compensated by greater prosperity or a higher quality of life. It would be interesting to know how many of those at Beijing's Central Party School ― the party's main educational institute ― believe that the Chinese state is about to wither away, or ever will. First, your own eyes and your reason would surely tell you before long that the communist idyll ― the withering away of the state and the triumph over need ― would never come.Ĭommunism, like the horizon, was always just beyond reach. Groucho posed two insuperable problems for the ``whateverists" of communism. He was known as a ``whateverist." The party and people should faithfully follow whatever Mao instructed them to do. The designated successor to Mao Zedong in China, Hua Guofeng, raised this attitude to an art form. Reality was whatever the ruling party said it was. You had to accept what you were told the world was like. It didn't matter what you could see with your own eyes. ``Who are you going to believe," Groucho once asked, ``me, or your own eyes?" For hundreds of millions of citizens in Communist-run countries in the 20th century, the ``me" in the question was a dictator or oligarchy ruling with totalitarian or authoritarian powers. One of his jokes goes to the heart of the failure of the ideology ― the dogmatic religion ― inflicted on our poor world by his namesake, Karl. LONDON ― Groucho Marx has always been my favorite Marxist.
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