Race relations 2020 (Part 2)

Dear Ari, I reflected on your comments and have some additional comments to make; they are as follows: Your brief rebuttal reminds me of the words of Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister who was installed when Britain was at the height of its imperial power; reflecting of the revolutionary movements of the 1840s, he said, with great confidence and determination, "that commerce may go freely forth, leading civilization with one hand, and peace with the other, to render mankind happier, wiser, better...this is the dispensation of Providence." Truthfully, I don't think you fully read what I wrote about the protestors; I felt I was if anything a little bit too hard on them; I characterized them as ideologically unsound having no politics except to walk around with T-shirts that say, "I can't breathe." So, too, you decry any attempt at improving society through what you call "social engineering"; however, I call the methodological removal of superstition and ignorance from the population an example of social engineering. You suspect them of carrying out a left-wing anti-capitalist program, but you don't allow for a critique of capitalism, which I think is a deficiency in your argument. Historically the first truly non-secular country, America was founded upon idealism and the idea that happiness meant contentment for the greatest number of its citizens; however, the American dream of home ownership is a dream frequently out of reach for many and, in addition, the standard of living is in danger of falling due to an increase in social inequality; the leading philosophy of our Darwinian neoliberal world is that only the fittest should survive. Despite my initial misgivings as to their ideological unsoundness (or rather unformed-ness), I see these groups of people as legitimate critics of capitalism who reject an obvious dehumanization through the powers of the dominant classes and seek to overcome alienation from their social home through their protest activities. If I were to give these groups any advice, I would call on them to remember that it was not until Karl Marx altered his stance towards socialism from one of welcomeness to one of historical inevitability that Marx's politics became most disturbing to the bourgeoisie: like Hegel, Marx was an evolutionist from whom civilization evolved through a series of class societies. Each one of these class societies were progressive in spite of the injustice they imposed; this level of injustice acted as society's internal contradiction, both setting a barrier to further progress and empowering the forces for its further becoming; late capitalism was the last of these stages; and what Marx demonstrated, as E.J. Hobsbawm says, was that "capitalism too contained a set of internal contradictions that barred the way to further progress and at a certain point would plunge it into a crisis from which it would not emerge." In addition, Hobsbawm continues, "Marx argued that capitalism became its own grave-digger in that it fostered the growth an increasingly discontented proletariat, while the concentration of power into fewer and fewer hands made society increasingly vulnerable to be overthrown"; these protest movements may be seen as the continuation of the long war between the religious and the radicals that threaten to bring our social experiment to a close. Finally, I want to state my belief that philosophy will finally be able to engage in the production of empirical knowledge when it is no longer tied to the state; your type of thinking would never have allowed the Jews of Europe to emerge from their ghettos. I am very interested in your response to what I had to say, Best wishes, ABN