Comment on DM in IT today...

[Qwerty Dvorak]

Just wondering what you all make of this comment, made by John Gray in the "Opinions & Analysis" section of the Irish Times today, in an article entitled "The atheist delusion":

Nazi "scientific racism" and Soviet "dialectical materialism" reduced the unfathomable complexity of human lives to the deadly simplicity of a scientific formula.

Thoughts?

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ How further from the truth could such statement be?

[As much as I'm NOT a fan of dialectics, it is NOT reductionist.]

[Hit The North]

Well, if you believe that the empirically observed universe exists alongside spiritual entities such as gods, angels, demons and souls, then any philosophy which dispenses with those spiritual entities is bound to appear more simplistic.

Equating "scientific racism" with dialectical materialism is obviously mistaken, whatever you think about DM. At the most obvious level, it's not clear that "scientific racism" requires the absence of religious illusion, anyway.

The fact that John Gray (whoever he is) believes that human lives are unfathomably complex in the first place, only demonstrates his own inner confusion about what's happening in the world around him.

I don't think we should be taking any lessons from him.

[Hit The North]

^^^ How further from the truth could such statement be?

[As much as I'm NOT a fan of dialectics, it is NOT reductionist.]

Given that you expend much effort in exposing reductionist errors in Marxist theory and yet realize that the dialectic method is not reductionist, but, on the contrary, an attempt to overcome one-sided, reductionist positions, I wonder what your objection to the dialectic is?