# Is Communism a rationalist or a romantic ideology? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 22, 2010, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568 "2010-07-22T05:17:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/1 "2010-07-22T05:17:10Z")
In the ongoing [Fascism thread,](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=571217) **smiling bandit** made [this statement:](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=12709860#post12709860) > [@](#): > > The one big failing of Classical Liberals, or Conservatives today, is not what the Left thinks. We have always been called monsters, the living human nightmare, the utter evil. But it’s untrue and was never true. Only the Left could really be so, because onyl the Left was willing or able to completely abandon any form of limitation on its power. Conservativism may never be truly as good as it could be, or maybe morally should be depending on your view. But it does not produce monsters. You can only become a demon if you are certain you are an angel. You can only create Hell on Earth if you are willing to sacrifice it to create Heaven on Earth. And that was the ultimate goal of the Left, from the moment it tore free from its womb to shower France with blood in the Revolution and drown Europe in death under Napoleon, to the Fascist and Communist experiments. To which [I replied:](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12710418&postcount=143) > [@](#): > > :dubious: If you really see continuity between the French Revolution and both Communism **and** Fascism in the 20th Century . . . well, there’s something there but you’re **grossly** oversimplifying. > > See [“Which Civilisation?”](http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2001/which_civilisation) by Michael Lind, _Prospect,_ 10/25/01: > > > [@](#): > > > > On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another. > > > > Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette’s France, Atatork’s Turkey, Yeltsin’s Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison. > > > > Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a “rational” social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the “reasonableness” of Renaissance humanists and the “rationality” of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The “secular humanists” who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists). > > > > Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism. > > > > The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation. BTW, Lind is not alone in thinking rationalism vs. romanticism the fundamental difference between Communism and Fascism. Science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle – who happens to be that rarest of animals, a Pat-Buchananesque paleoconservative with a brain – drew that same distinction in his [Pournelle Chart.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_chart) Anyway, **smiling bandit** [replied:](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12710913&postcount=153) > [@](#): > > I do not simplify, but I do not write or claim to have written everything, either. > > I do not agree at all with the idea that Communism was rationalist. It claimed to be so, but I consider very much that it was a product of Romanticism. But that is because I consider the entire rationalist movement to have effectively died and been absorbed in weird ways into romantic thought. The Communists may have been less poetic and more in tune with precision machinery and modernist styles, but they were otherwise very Romantic and avoided its actual fact whereever possible. They were obsessed with symbols and mythmaking, falsifying hisory, and paying homage to the Will to Power in ideology if not in name. > > Honestly, while they claimed to be scientific, the plain fact is that the Communists are about as close to Rationalism as a rotting twinkie. Likewise, I agre the French Revolutionaries pretended to be Rationalists. But they were deeply Romantic in effect. No Rationalist would ever dedicate it as a Temple to Reason. Not wishing to further hijack the Fascism thread, I propose the question for debate in this one: Is Communism a rationalist or a romantic ideology? ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 5:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/2 "2010-07-22T05:42:03Z")
Romantic. As is true Capitalism. Neither can exist in their pure forms. At least not in the world as it is today (and I am hard pressed to imagine them working at all no matter how much you idealize society). Both are romantic ideals and their adherents, those who believe in their pure forms, are akin to religious fundamentalists. Each, left to themselves, have severe problems and produce horridly undesirable results. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/3 "2010-07-22T06:16:31Z")
It seems to me that even most rationalists would have enough evidence that, by induction, they could reason that having a single person in charge makes corruption quite likely, and thus make fascisim a losing proposition. If not, then the name rationalist is a misnomer. ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 6:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/4 "2010-07-22T06:50:46Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > Romantic. > > As is true Capitalism. Capitalism isn’t a political ideology, it’s an economic model based on privately capitalized assets. Communism is an attempt to distribute labor and reward equally. It fails because a small group of people eventually end up doing a greater share of the work without additional reward. The United States had many attempt at communal living which failed for this reason. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 8:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/5 "2010-07-22T08:58:08Z")
To answer the title question, it is an unstable compound of both, which is a large part of what makes it both so powerful (i.e., attractive as an ideology which can appeal strongly both to reason _and_ emotion) and so dangerous (liable to lead to disaster and factionalism, which, when communists actually get their hands on state power, leads to vicious purges). Fascism is also such a mixture, though a lot heavier on the Romanticism, and the Rationalism is largely confined to instrumental uses, such as organizing the bureaucracy of the death camps. The difference between communism and fascism, however, does not have much to do with this. The difference lies in their diametrically opposite view of the relative moral worth of human beings. The left, from revolutionary communists to democratic socialists and American so-called “liberals,” believes, at root, that all people are of equal fundamental worth, and equally deserving of respect, and of the good things in life. Most leftists can accept that people are unequal in terms of their abilities and character, but they do not think that that is relevant to what people deserve out of life. Just because you were lucky enough to be born, or made by life circumstances, into someone who is smart and industrious, it does not follow that you deserve more happiness than someone who was born, or made by circumstances, to be stupid and lazy. Also, from a leftist perspective, if people do evil things, it is not because they are inherently evil (or any more so than anyone else), but because evil circumstances forced them into it or warped their minds. To minimize the amount of evil that happens, society needs to be re-structured so that such circumstances arise as rarely as possible. Luckily (as most leftists believe) the sort of society in which this would be the case is precisely the sort of egalitarian society that leftists think is the most just anyway. If everyone has enough to meet their needs, and nobody has ostentatiously any more over and above what they need than anyone else does, then nobody will have ane reasons of either necessity or envy to try to take away the things that are needed by others. By contrast, the right, from Nazis to democratic conservatives and the American “center,” believe that some people are fundamentally more worthy than others, and deserving of more respect and more of the good things (and, usually, that some people, at the other end of the scale, are virtually worthless, and undeserving of anything good). The supposed basis of this inequality may be different in different versions of right-wing thinking. It might be race or nationality, it might be “family,” it might be intelligence, or industriousness (see **Magiver** ’s post above for an example of this sort of thinking), or courage (such as when we are told that wealthy businessmen or stock traders deserve their riches because they “take risks” that ordinary folk like miners and construction workers do not), or it might be just a matter of some people being born leaders, and some being born followers (and, of course, it is also often various combinations of these things, and probably others, in different proportions). However, whatever the basis for it, the fundamental idea is that some people inherently deserve admiration and reward more than others. From the right-wing perspective, evil happens either because some people are inherently evil (they cannot transcend their evil nature, so the only way to contain their evil is to imprison them or, if you are truly rational about it, kill them - this explains both Nazi death camps, and the Texas justice system), or else it happens because some people have got into the wrong place for them in the necessary social hierarchy. If a natural leader is (like, say Napoleon) is born into humble circumstances, or if a natural follower is born into power and privilege (like many incompetent hereditary monarchs seem to have been), bad things tend to happen unless and until they are reassigned to their proper level. In order to make such evil circumstances less likely, some more “liberal” right wingers (especially if they do not believe that race or family history are particularly important factors in determining moral worth), argue for maximizing equality of opportunity, so that the more talented, industrious, courageous or whatever will generally tend to rise to the level of power and privilege within the society that is appropriate for them, whereas the untalented, cowardly and slothful will sink to their own proper level. Despite some superficial similarities, this sort of right-wing egalitarianism (which only some segments of the right adhere to anyway) is very different in its aims and effects than is the left-wing egalitarianism (which is universal, and fundamental, on the left). Left-wing egalitarianism seeks equality of outcomes, with everybody, ideally, ending up with an equally good life in as far as that is humanly achievable (of course, leftists disagree enormously amongst themselves about the best way to reach this desirable situation, and, indeed, about how far it can truly be achieved). For right-wing egalitarianism, by contrast, equality of opportunity is a means to the end of creating a radically unequal society, that will be maximally stable and conflict free because it maximizes the chances that everyone will find their proper level within it. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 9:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/6 "2010-07-22T09:35:13Z")
> [@Magiver](#): > > Capitalism isn’t a political ideology, it’s an economic model based on privately capitalized assets. True. Thinking capitalism is a good economic system is a political ideology, however (as, indeed, is thinking it is a bad one). > [@Magiver](#): > > Communism is an attempt to distribute labor and reward equally. Well, maybe, but the equality of reward is _much_ more important to the communist than is the equality of the contribution of labor, which is little more than a sugaring of the pill for people who are not of an 100% communistic cast of mind yet. Right wingers perhaps find this hard to grasp, because it is fundamentally alien to their way of thinking and sense of values. For the true leftist, every person really deserves as much as anyone else, just in virtue of being a person. For rightists, everybody deserves different degrees of reward, according to what sort of person they are, and some may deserve little or nothing (although right wing thinkers disagree amongst themselves as to what makes someone more deserving: whether it is being more ‘Aryan,’ or more industrious, for instance). Of course, in practice, most people are to some degree torn between these two incompatible value systems, but someone with a truly communistic value system would not really mind if they found that they, because of their natural industriousness, they were doing all the work to support their naturally lazy comrades. Communists also tend to believe that different levels of industriousness, or whatever, are not really innate anyway, so that after a communistic system of equal reward all round has become established for a generation or so, so that everyone has been treated equally well for all their lives, then individual differences in industriousness will largely disappear. The problem with that, of course, is that there seems to be no guarantee that everyone will become equally, and at least moderately, industrious, rather than everyone becoming equally thoroughly lazy. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/7 "2010-07-22T14:02:07Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > Romantic. > > As is true Capitalism. > > Neither can exist in their pure forms. At least not in the world as it is today (and I am hard pressed to imagine them working at all no matter how much you idealize society). > > Both are romantic ideals and their adherents, those who believe in their pure forms, are akin to religious fundamentalists. > > Each, left to themselves, have severe problems and produce horridly undesirable results. The word “romantic,” as Lind is using it in the article linked in the OP, means something very different from how you are using it; it refers to a specific cultural-intellectual tradition in modern Western history. See [Romanticism.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism) Romanticism in that sense is no older than the 18th Century, though the idea of “romantic love” goes back at least to the 14th. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/8 "2010-07-22T14:06:11Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > It seems to me that even most rationalists would have enough evidence that, by induction, they could reason that having a single person in charge makes corruption quite likely, and thus make fascisim a losing proposition. > > If not, then the name rationalist is a misnomer. “Rationalism” is, again, a name for a specific intellectual-cultural tradition, and a name that does not imply that rationalists **are rational,** but only that they **believe in** the goodness and power of rationality as they understand it. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/9 "2010-07-22T15:08:03Z")
Your arguement is a no true scotsman defense. Communists thought they were being rationalist. Most communist leaders were intellectuals who disdained religion and superstition as irrational. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that they were just replacing one god with another and were as rational as the average moonie. They had the same irrational attachments as everyone else and they were not vulcans but just as emotional as everyone else. If communism was not a rationalist ideology, there has never bee a rationalist ideology. The mistake is confusing there idealism with romanticism. They could be very romantic sounding about communism because they thought they were being so rational about the perfect world which would inevitably follow. ---
**Author:** ![sqweels](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f19dbf/32.png) [@sqweels](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sqweels)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/10 "2010-07-22T21:08:56Z")
Why are there so many threads discussing communism and socialism these days? :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/11 "2010-07-22T21:45:39Z")
> [@sqweels](#): > > Why are there so many threads discussing communism and socialism these days? :dubious: Only as many as the market can bear… ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/12 "2010-07-22T22:05:43Z")
> [@sqweels](#): > > Why are there so many threads discussing communism and socialism these days? :dubious: :o Oh, you know how it goes. It starts out as simple little get-together, you all have a few too many, one guys pipes up that he knows where to score some meth and some hookers, another guy sees a copy of _Das Kapital_ on the shelf, and then things just kinda spiral out of control . . . :eek: Look, we all gotta get our story straight: This girl was never here, **puddleglum** was home watching TV the whole time, and nobody knows **anything** about what happened to the bourgeois class. Got it?! ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2010, 5:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/13 "2010-07-23T05:09:28Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > > [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > > > Romantic. > > > > As is true Capitalism. > > > > Neither can exist in their pure forms. At least not in the world as it is today (and I am hard pressed to imagine them working at all no matter how much you idealize society). > > > > Both are romantic ideals and their adherents, those who believe in their pure forms, are akin to religious fundamentalists. > > > > Each, left to themselves, have severe problems and produce horridly undesirable results. > > The word “romantic,” as Lind is using it in the article linked in the OP, means something very different from how you are using it; it refers to a specific cultural-intellectual tradition in modern Western history. See [Romanticism.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism) Romanticism in that sense is no older than the 18th Century, though the idea of “romantic love” goes back at least to the 14th. Huh? From your cite: > [@](#): > > Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism. Sounds to me like **Whack-a-Mole** is using the word in exactly that sense. How do you mean it? ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2010, 6:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/14 "2010-07-23T06:27:01Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > Well, maybe, but the equality of reward is _much_ more important to the communist than is the equality of the contribution of labor, which is little more than a sugaring of the pill for people who are not of an 100% communistic cast of mind yet. Right wingers perhaps find this hard to grasp, because it is fundamentally alien to their way of thinking and sense of values. And this is why it fails every single time it’s tried. If people aren’t compensated for their efforts they move on. Anybody who has studied history or economics understands this because there is a historical track record of economic failure with communism. It doesn’t work. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2010, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/15 "2010-07-23T15:23:53Z")
Romantic. It seeks to create an ideal that is not based on empirical evidence. It attempts to create a new type of human being, ignoring the actual nature of human beings, as a biological species. There might have been a time, when Behavioralism had some credibility, that it could have been called rational, but that time has long past. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2010, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/16 "2010-07-25T01:15:09Z")
> [@Spoke](#): > > > [@BrainGlutton](#): > > > > > [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > > > > > Romantic. > > > > > > As is true Capitalism. > > > > > > Neither can exist in their pure forms. At least not in the world as it is today (and I am hard pressed to imagine them working at all no matter how much you idealize society). > > > > > > Both are romantic ideals and their adherents, those who believe in their pure forms, are akin to religious fundamentalists. > > > > > > Each, left to themselves, have severe problems and produce horridly undesirable results. > > > > The word “romantic,” as Lind is using it in the article linked in the OP, means something very different from how you are using it; it refers to a specific cultural-intellectual tradition in modern Western history. See [Romanticism.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism) Romanticism in that sense is no older than the 18th Century, though the idea of “romantic love” goes back at least to the 14th. > > Huh? From your cite: > > > [@](#): > > > > Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism. > > Sounds to me like **Whack-a-Mole** is using the word in exactly that sense. How do you mean it? No. **Whack-a-Mole** says both Communism and capitalism “are romantic ideals and their adherents, those who believe in their pure forms, are akin to religious fundamentalists.” He is mistaken in assuming that every ideal-arguably-detached-from-reality is a by definition a **romantic** ideal; there is more than one kind. Rationalism, whether Voltaire’s or Marx’ or Ayn Rand’s, does not emphasize “intuition, imagination, and feeling.” ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2010, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/17 "2010-07-25T01:18:06Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Romantic. It seeks to create an ideal that is not based on empirical evidence. It attempts to create a new type of human being, ignoring the actual nature of human beings, as a biological species. There might have been a time, when Behavioralism had some credibility, that it could have been called rational, but that time has long past. Once again, that might not be a **scientific** attitude, but it is still a **rationalist** one as distinct from a romantic one. Kind’s position in the analysis is – at least, strongly implies – that the humanists are the ones with the proper scientific attitude on their side. Bertrand Russell posits a similar schema in _A History of Western Philosophy._ ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2010, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/18 "2010-07-25T01:49:41Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > > [@John\_Mace](#): > > > > Romantic. It seeks to create an ideal that is not based on empirical evidence. It attempts to create a new type of human being, ignoring the actual nature of human beings, as a biological species. There might have been a time, when Behavioralism had some credibility, that it could have been called rational, but that time has long past. > > Once again, that might not be a **scientific** attitude, but it is still a **rationalist** one as distinct from a romantic one. Kind’s position in the analysis is – at least, strongly implies – that the humanists are the ones with the proper scientific attitude on their side. Bertrand Russell posits a similar schema in _A History of Western Philosophy._ No. It is imagining a world that not only doesn’t exist, but can’t exist. It’s based on wishful thinking, not empirical observation or even deductive reasoning. It’s a fiction. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2010, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/19 "2010-07-25T01:55:04Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > > [@BrainGlutton](#): > > > > > [@John\_Mace](#): > > > > > > Romantic. It seeks to create an ideal that is not based on empirical evidence. It attempts to create a new type of human being, ignoring the actual nature of human beings, as a biological species. There might have been a time, when Behavioralism had some credibility, that it could have been called rational, but that time has long past. > > > > Once again, that might not be a **scientific** attitude, but it is still a **rationalist** one as distinct from a romantic one. Kind’s position in the analysis is – at least, strongly implies – that the humanists are the ones with the proper scientific attitude on their side. Bertrand Russell posits a similar schema in _A History of Western Philosophy._ > > No. It is imagining a world that not only doesn’t exist, but can’t exist. It’s based on wishful thinking, not empirical observation or even deductive reasoning. It’s a fiction. There is more than one kind of fiction and “romantic” does not encompass them all. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2010, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-communism-a-rationalist-or-a-romantic-ideology/547568/20 "2010-07-25T02:32:36Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > > [@John\_Mace](#): > > > > > [@BrainGlutton](#): > > > > > > > [@John\_Mace](#): > > > > > > > > Romantic. It seeks to create an ideal that is not based on empirical evidence. It attempts to create a new type of human being, ignoring the actual nature of human beings, as a biological species. There might have been a time, when Behavioralism had some credibility, that it could have been called rational, but that time has long past. > > > > > > Once again, that might not be a **scientific** attitude, but it is still a **rationalist** one as distinct from a romantic one. Kind’s position in the analysis is – at least, strongly implies – that the humanists are the ones with the proper scientific attitude on their side. Bertrand Russell posits a similar schema in _A History of Western Philosophy._ > > > > No. It is imagining a world that not only doesn’t exist, but can’t exist. It’s based on wishful thinking, not empirical observation or even deductive reasoning. It’s a fiction. > > There is more than one kind of fiction and “romantic” does not encompass them all. And the other things I mentioned were why it’s “romantic” fiction. Hey, what’s with this new function where the original quotes are preserved in the quote? I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not.