This has never happened before. The Ethics Alarms post on teaching communism attracted a modest number of comments (only 9 when you subtract my kibitzing), but five of them, by Ethics Alarms stalwarts JutGory, Steve-O-in-NJ, Extradimensional Cephalopod, Chris Marschner and Steve Witherspoon, rate Comment of the Day status. I’m posting them together (you can also go straight to the post itself, here, and find the whole conversation) for clarity and convenience, and also because I’m afraid if I post them individually a new visitor might think that I have died….

First up, Extradimensional Cephalopod:

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There is no excuse for any kind of indoctrination. Existentialist epistemology provides a bright line between education and indoctrination.

Here is how to teach about communism without indoctrination:

“Here is what happened in these communist countries: the communications, the policies, the statistics, the conflicts, et cetera. Here is how we obtained this information. Some people say there are alternative inferences we could draw about the past based on the raw data in the present; here are some of the arguments about which inferences are more likely. Write a short essay on how people drew their various conclusions about historical events from the evidence available.

“As for communism itself, some people say that the principles of communism are inherently dysfunctional for running a society, and here is their reasoning for concluding this, both in the abstract and based on the historical events we discussed earlier. Others say that communism could still work in theory. They draw different conclusions from the historical events, saying that communist principles did not contribute to the downfall of communist countries. Write a short essay on how people drew their various conclusions about the causes of the collapse of communist countries from the evidence available.

Any proponent of the feasibility of a political ideology is asked answer an indefinitely long series of questions in the form of “how would your society handle X situation?”, because any real such society would have to answer those questions in real life, and before we go through the effort of overhauling everything people like to make sure the new society has plans for how to deal with the situations it creates. The plans the ideology provides must be convincing–they must be solutions whose outcomes people would consider both desirable and probable, otherwise people will dismiss the ideology as incomplete at best and irredeemably flawed at worst. Write a long essay on some situations communism might have to deal with, the results you predict from those situations, and the various opinions people might have about the results. At least one of those situations must involve experts making a mistake, and at least one must involve people breaking rules. ”

This approach is infinitely more rewarding for society than simply telling people that an idea is good or bad, and that’s just off the top of my head.

By the way, having spoken with communists, I find that despite providing good descriptions of the problems of capitalism, communism fails to provide any answers beyond “tell everyone about communism and then we’ll all get together and confiscate the property of the rich, and we’ll share it fairly.” I am disappointed that communists don’t seem inclined to remedy this critical lack of foresight.

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Here is JutGory:

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