On the other hand, it would be unreasonable to blame Marx for the negative factors in the so-called socialist countries fifty or a hundred years after his death. But maybe he had given too little thought to the people who would be the administrators of communist society. There will probably never be a ‘promised land.’ Mankind will always create new problems to fight about.”
“I’m sure it will.”
“And there we bring down the curtain on Marx, Sophie.”
“Hey, wait a minute! Didn’t you say something about justice only existing among equals?”
“No, it was Scrooge who said that.”
“How do you know what he said?”
“Oh well—you and I have the same author. In actual fact we are more closely linked to each other than we would appear to the casual observer.”
“Your wretched irony again!”
“Double, Sophie, that was double irony.”
“But back to justice. You said that Marx thought capitalism was an unjust form of society. How would you define a just society?”
“A moral philosopher called John Rawls attempted to say something about it with the following example: Imagine you were a member of a distinguished council whose task it was to make all the laws for a future society.”
“I wouldn’t mind at all being on that council.”
“They are obliged to consider absolutely every detail, because as soon as they reach an agreement—and everybody has signed the laws—they will all drop dead.”
“Oh . . .”
“But they will immediately come to life again in the society they have legislated for. The point is that they have no idea which position they will have in society.”
“Ah, I see.”
“That society would be a just society. It would have arisen among equals.”
“Men and women!”
“That goes without saying. None of them knew whether they would wake up as men or women. Since the odds are fifty-fifty, society would be just as attractive for women as for men.”
“It sounds promising.”
“So tell me, was the Europe of Karl Marx a society like that?”
“Absolutely not!”
“But do you by any chance know of such a society today?”
“Hm ... that’s a good question.”
“Think about it. But for now there will be no more about Marx.”
“Excuse me?”
“Next chapter!”
Darwin
…a ship sailing through life with a cargo of genes…
Hilde was awakened on Sunday morning by a loud bump. It was the ring binder falling on the floor. She had been lying in bed reading about Sophie and Alber-to’s conversation on Marx and had fallen asleep. The reading lamp by the bed had been on all night.
The green glowing digits on her desk alarm clock showed 8:59.
She had been dreaming about huge factories and polluted cities; a little girl sitting at a street corner selling matches—well-dressed people in long coats passing by without as much as a glance.
When Hilde sat up in bed she remembered the legislators who were to wake up in a society they themselves had created. Hilde was glad she had woken up in Bjer-kely, at any rate.
Would she have dared to wake up in Norway without knowing whereabouts in Norway she would wake up?
But it was not only a question of where she would wake up. Could she not just as easily have woken up in a different age? In the Middle Ages, for instance—or in the Stone Age ten or twenty thousand years ago? Hilde tried to imagine herself sitting at the entrance to a cave, scraping an animal hide, perhaps.
What could it have been like to be a fifteen-year-old girl before there was anything called a culture? How would she have thought? Could she have had thoughts at all?
Hilde pulled on a sweater, heaved the ring binder onto the bed and settled down to read the next chapter.
Alberto had just said “Next chapter!” when somebody knocked on the door of the major’s cabin.
“We don’t have any choice, do we?” said Sophie.
“No, I suppose we don’t,” said Alberto.
On the step outside stood a very old man with long white hair and a beard. He held a staff in one hand, and in the other a board on which was painted a picture of a boat The boat was crowded with all kinds of animals. “And who is this elderly gentleman?” asked Alberto.
“My name is Noah.”
“I guessed as much.”
“Your oldest ancestor, my son. But it is probably no longer fashionable to recognize one’s ancestors.”
“What is that in your hand?” asked Sophie.
“This is a picture of all the animals that were saved from the Flood. Here, my daughter, it is for you.”
Sophie took the large board.
“Well, I’d better go home and tend the grapevines,” the old man said, and giving a little jump, he clicked his heels together in the air and skipped merrily away into the woods in the manner peculiar to very old men now and then.
Sophie and Alberto went inside and sat down again. Sophie began to look at the picture, but before she had a chance to study it, Alberto took it from her with an authoritative grasp.
“We’ll concentrate on the broad outlines first.”
“Okay, okay.”
“I forgot to mention that Marx lived the last 34 years of his life in London. He moved there in 1849 and died in 1883. All that time Charles Darwin was living just outside London. He died in 1882 and was buried with great pomp and ceremony in Westminster Abbey as one of England’s distinguished sons. So Marx and Darwin’s paths crossed, but not only in time and space. Marx wanted to dedicate the English edition of his greatest work, Capital, to Darwin, but Darwin declined the honor. When Marx died the year after Darwin, his friend Friedrich En-gels said: As Darwin discovered the theory of organic evolution, so Marx discovered the theory of mankind’s historical evolution.”
“I see.”
“Another great thinker who was to link his work to Darwin was the psychologist Sigmund Freud. He also lived his last years in London. Freud said that both Darwin’s theory of evolution and his own psychoanalysis had resulted in an affront to mankind’s naive egoism.”
“That was a lot of names at one time. Are we talking about Marx, Darwin, or Freud?”
“In a broader sense we can talk about a naturalistic current from the middle of the nineteenth century until quite far into our own. By ‘naturalistic’ we mean a sense of reality that accepts no other reality than nature and the sensory world. A naturalist therefore also considers mankind to be part of nature. A naturalistic scientist will exclusively rely on natural phenomena—not on either rationalistic suppositions or any form of divine revelation.”
“And that applies to Marx, Darwin, and Freud?”
“Absolutely. The key words from the middle of the last century were nature, environment, history, evolution, and growth. Marx had pointed out that human ideologies were a product of the basis of society. Darwin showed that mankind was the result of a slow biological evolution, and Freud’s studies of the unconscious revealed that people’s actions were often the result of ‘animal’ urges or instincts.”
