[MD] Babylonian intellectuals

[David Thomas]

On 7/23/10 3:17 PM, "David Buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> It would be more appropriate to compare FDR to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.
> Wilson was President a generation earlier than all these other leaders, during
> WWI.

I have no problem adding FDR to the list. The point that Goldberg tries to
make is that Wilson was a forerunner of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.  They
borrowed and adapted some of the philosophies and policies he implement
during and after WWI. He says:

"Governmental "experimentation," the watchword of pragmatic liberals such as
Dewey and Wilson, to FDR was the social analogue to evolutionary adaption.
Constitutional democracy, as the founder understood it, was a momentary
phase in this progression."

Marx's theory placed capitalism as the evolutionary step before socialism.
His theory also claimed that cultures that weren't at the capitalist step
were too far behind, would never catch up, and should be eliminated.

What happened is after Darwin's theory of evolution became widely known is
that many thinkers, particularly political thinkers, came to the conclusion
that if evolution is true than surely we can apply this science to humans.
The sooner the better. The problem is that applying a new theory (a very
limited and partially understood one even now) of the biological level to
the social level has and continues to be fraught with unintended and often
tragic consequences. Something developers of pragmatism should have been
aware of.  For instance, social engineering though planning, zoning, and
building codes whatever goods they achieved have been directly linked to the
unintended consequences of urban sprawl, homelessness, the lack of
affordable housing and many other similar current problems worldwide.

Dave