Happy Birthday, Georg Hegel
It’s the birthday of German philosopher and theologian Georg Hegel, best known for his observation that human societies evolve via a clash of opposite viewpoints, called dialectics. He theorized that each conflict of contraries results in something new which then itself winds up getting opposed—so on to infinity.
Hegel believed that the most important duality was that of master and slave, or business owner and worker, aka bourgeois and proletariat, which became the inspiration for the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels in the mid-19th Century. (FWIW, if you want to read the original writings of philosophers, I urge you to start anywhere but Hegel. If I hadn’t had a good professor for the course I took on the man, I would have been totally lost.)
OK, Is there a point of relevance here? If so, it lies in our interest in where human evolution is taking us at this point. In particular, we fear that it may be on its way to taking a nasty turn for the worse, based on opposing forces that are both physical and political in nature. I.e., humankind may be up against the wall because it ran into (and past) the limits of the Earth to support life, which are imposed solely by physics and chemistry.
But perhaps the set of opposites that is most important in determining the outcome of all this is the battle between those who care about the future of our civilization and those who don’t. Weird though it may appear, there is a huge group of people on this planet whose life’s purpose is enjoying materialistic pleasures and amassing enormous sums of wealth, via business practices that are clearly destroying the world around them. They are opposed, fortunately, by those of us who see a broader responsibility to protect the quality of life for our children and grandchildren.
As is the case with all dialectics, these opposing forces are almost perfectly balanced. For example, we have states in the US adopting renewable portfolio standards, at the same time as we have other states yielding to extreme legal and political pressure and getting rid of theirs. We have Big Energy pushing for more oil drilling, and we have 200,000 groups (and steadily growing) dedicated to environmental and social justice.
For every vector acting to send our society off a cliff, there is another one desperately trying to hold it back.
It’s really anybody’s ballgame.
Craig,
You wrote:
” Weird though it may appear, there is a huge group of people on this planet whose life’s purpose is enjoying materialistic pleasures and amassing enormous sums of wealth, via business practices that are clearly destroying the world around them.”
Quite true. One thing that often goes unnoticed is that those individuals would actually be better of if they were less wealthy. I am reminded of a General Motors executive who took a private plane to Washington to beg for a financial bailout. He asserted that for security reasons, he could not travel via commercial airlines. So, these multimillionaires and billionaires cannot even live normal lives. They have to be on guard at all times to protect their safety and the safety of their families.
The children of the extremely wealthy can never be sure of the motives of people who are friendly with them or want to marry them. They always have to fear that the “common people” are after them only for money. They have little choice but to attend private schools which are protected by armed guards. Either that, or they have to learn from private tutors.
It seems strange that even though the exceedingly wealthy would probably be better off with less, they still seek more and more wealth.