Damien Broderick wrote:
>I'll spoil the surprise, because it's so salutary. J. D. was a committed
>and brilliant Marxist (like his equally brilliant and far-seeing
>technophile compatriot J. B. S. Haldane).
And then, Michael Butler wrote:
>Yep, and Bernal Spheres were supposed to be collectives, IIRC. Hey,
>_Wells_ was a major Fabian.
This shouldnn't surprise us at all, given when Bernal was writing. The
Soviet Union was new, the Bolsheviks were engaging in agressive and effective
cultural "outreach" to intellectuals in the West and the horrors of Stalin
lay in the future. One is hard-pressed to find an intellectual in the West
in the 1920s who wasn't at least willing to give the Soviet Union the benefit
of the doubt in the 1920s. The idea that the then-recent bloodbath of the
first World War was the result of "capitalism" was also accepted widely
among Western intellectuals of those times. The dialectic (irony intended)
that eventually brought forth the renaissance in thought about liberty and
economic freedom that produced Hayek also lay in the future at this time.
It was an age of innocence and naivete.
Greg Burch gregburch@gregburch.net
GBurch1@aol.com - gburch@lockeliddell.com
Attorney::Vice President, Extropy Institute
http://www.gregburch.net
http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"We never stop investigating. We are never
satisfied that we know enough to get by.
Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest
survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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