Beyond his ideology

Species live in flocks and individual members are sustained by flock life. Cultures—full of admonitions to “love thy neighbor”—bolster genes in sustaining human “flocks.” Yet when circumstances demand, new “flock” structures are imagined and formed: from family to clan, to tribe, to polis, to nation, etc. Their transitions are often accompanied by upheavals that makes change chaotic.

Karl Marx (1818-83) lived during such a time in Europe when landed property, serving a small class of nobles, was transformed into capital accessible to a larger class of merchants, bankers and industrialists. Marx feared the “flock” would continue to suffer if one class dominating property was merely replaced by another, so he advocated communism wherein property would be owned by the “flock” as a whole.

Marx may have been naïve. He may have been wrong. But he wasn’t the monster Bradley Gitz portrays. He was a creative thinker within the mainstream of the Enlightenment. I believe it’s Gitz and his cadre of neoliberals advocating radical individualism who avow heresies to traditional cultural morality, who profess “love thyself,” rather than “love thy neighbor.” The “flock” policies of Democrats appear Marxist to Gitz only because both grasp what seems to escape him: Species live in flocks!

The real puzzle of our time is figuring out who and what constitutes “the flock” in an age of globalism. It’s an era calling for thinkers capable of imagining a global “flock”—philosophers who explore well beyond the narrow ideology serving Gitz’s class of corporate propertied.

DAVID SIXBEY

Flippin