They Don’t Mean Realism When They Say It

I’ve heard enough fallacious fawning over the Communist Party of China about how it allegedly was instrumental to building China up into an economic rival to the United States. Like hell! It should be if it has such a large population and such a rich cultural heritage that enables it to face challenges. The worst part is that people who think that is the credit due to the Communist Party think they can thus bypass all moral philosophy.

The following are the six parts of an essay by Bao Tong, a former top Communist Party official, that attempts to debunk the idea that the Communist Party should be kept in power now because of its contribution to the economy:

1. Why China Had to Reform
2. A Pivotal Moment for China
3. ‘Two Faces’ of Deng Xiaoping
4. China’s Economy ‘No Miracle’
5. China ‘in Political Dead End’
6. Party Interests ‘Drive China’

Is a party to be thanked for merely surviving? I think not. It hardly takes a tyranny for China to be prosperous, but any who like things the way they are now will also have to reckon with the question of what welfare is. Because there is no such thing as ought without faith and philosophy, to dispense with these is to default to the unrestrained evils of the human condition – namely, a brutish existence whose value we can rightly question.

After all, survival is nothing unless something endows it with worth, just as a pen is nothing unless there’s something to write. Realism is no realism at all when, at the basic level, its creed is that survival is a must. Whose survival, and for what? It’s entirely circular to say at this point that the question must be avoided for the sake of survival. You can then choose either to assess the thing rationally or to obey your juvenile emotional demands for a circular pleasure: only you can make that choice.