Revisiting Marx’s Teleology
Careening towards the cliff of unmitigated environmental disaster could return us civilized folk to the moral clarity of noncivilized peoples.
For Marx, we humans as a species have a teleological destiny. That is to say, there is a pre-destined future towards which we are moving through time.
For him, that future was embedded in the groups of non-civilized peoples. It was located in the organizing principle that all of them had in common: essentially, ‘one for all and all for one’.
That is why Marx saw human history as an unfolding dialectical process. It began with a certain (moral) point and returned to that point, but with a different material character: the “communist” world to come would be one in which there was one, universal society governed by that ethic, but with the material — especially the technological — accoutrements that had been developed in the meantime.
Another way to look at non-civilized groups is to posit that for them the one overriding goal has always been physical survival. That has given them a certain moral clarity: whatever contributes to survival is a ‘good’; anything that might detract from it is a ‘bad’.
The unfolding environmental disaster that we humans are bringing upon this planet could return us to that ethic for determining our courses of action. Will such moral clarity arrive in time? I doubt that it will come in time to save civilization as we know it. Survivors will have it forced upon them.