The Frankfurt School is fundamentally post-modernist in its approach, and I reject its ideas that the truth has more to do with domination and less to do with objective reality.
Ultimately, human nature derives from evolutionary biology, which in turn comes from fundamental aspects of game theory. That's why, if we contact aliens, I don't think they'll be as alien as some imagine: their society will be driven by the same fundamental generic imperatives that constrain our own and should be recognizable. We're primates, not pure energy beings that we can reprogram at will.
> Are not changed men the product of changed circumstances?
And changed circumstances also arise from changed men, all the way back to homo erectus. Human nature is mutable: genes and culture co-evolve, but with time lags far longer than a few generations that utopian social engineers imagine. Human nature does change over long time scales, but for our purposes, it's immutable.
Might some alternative organization of society do a better job matching our immutable-on-short-time-scales human nature to our technological environment? Sure: it's conceivable. But there's no reason to suppose that the particular forms of societal reorganization that utopians advocate fall into this category.
Historical evidence, on the contrary, suggests that collectivist societies are actually further from the optimum than our present structure, which we arrived at through millennia of trial-and-error and free choice. It's a unique kind of hubris to imagine that you can do better than the distributed choices of billions over centuries.
You're right: sociologists have "looked into" societal reorganization. So have biologists. When we listen to the biologists, we get elegant theories that make sense of both our observations and our failures to remake societies for the better. When we listen to the sociologists, we get the holodomor.
>We're primates, not pure energy beings that we can reprogram at will.
Nobody doubts this; my point is that our current mode of production has a very strong effect on how we go about our daily lives and the attitudes that it influences; we have overcome "human nature" in many circumstances, but that's irrelevant because it's clear that the way people behave is to do with how they are raised, what kind of attitudes are imbued in them; for Marx labour is not merely something that people do, but it's something that we do which makes us human; thus the changed characterstic of labour, which comes in through the base of society influences the superstructure. I don't know why you seem to be clinging so much to the idea that human nature is as we see it now; Fromm notes for example that "human nature" has changed, such as the arising of the general desire for fame that has only been seen since the 14th century. Yet many would say this is human nature. Do you not think that historical analysis is important here? Socioligists have more of a place to describe exactly what human nature is rather than biologists and the empiricists whose only data is restricted to what they can see here and now. This is too narrow.
>collectivist societies
Communism is the epitome of individualism, the free association of people. All society hitherto is collectivist by definition, man is not an island, he is formed and forms everything around him in the effort to make it non-alienated.
>which we arrived at through millennia of trial-and-error and free choice.
No. Capitalism is no more a natural phenomenon than the Russian revolution's spurred State socialism was. Look at the enclosure in Western Europe and the laws which led up to it, the functioning of the State and how its function has changed. Your idea that we are simply in a natural point which has not been forced in any way, that capitalism is the highest form of development, ignores that history is not linear, and that systems win because people push them. Capitalism comes in to the world 'soaked in blood' as Marx puts it.
>When we listen to the sociologists, we get the holodomor.
Analysis of our society does not bad economic planning and/or genocidal killing make. When we listen to sociologists we also get revolutionary Catalonia and universal health care in the civilised countries.
Ultimately, human nature derives from evolutionary biology, which in turn comes from fundamental aspects of game theory. That's why, if we contact aliens, I don't think they'll be as alien as some imagine: their society will be driven by the same fundamental generic imperatives that constrain our own and should be recognizable. We're primates, not pure energy beings that we can reprogram at will.
> Are not changed men the product of changed circumstances?
And changed circumstances also arise from changed men, all the way back to homo erectus. Human nature is mutable: genes and culture co-evolve, but with time lags far longer than a few generations that utopian social engineers imagine. Human nature does change over long time scales, but for our purposes, it's immutable.
Might some alternative organization of society do a better job matching our immutable-on-short-time-scales human nature to our technological environment? Sure: it's conceivable. But there's no reason to suppose that the particular forms of societal reorganization that utopians advocate fall into this category.
Historical evidence, on the contrary, suggests that collectivist societies are actually further from the optimum than our present structure, which we arrived at through millennia of trial-and-error and free choice. It's a unique kind of hubris to imagine that you can do better than the distributed choices of billions over centuries.
You're right: sociologists have "looked into" societal reorganization. So have biologists. When we listen to the biologists, we get elegant theories that make sense of both our observations and our failures to remake societies for the better. When we listen to the sociologists, we get the holodomor.
> To "human nature" I say firmly: human society.
We are not blank slates.
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