In thread "[PEN-L] economics and sociology" JKS wrote:
> My 10 yr old son asked me yesterday, What kind of scientist
> was Karl Marx? We had been talking about Galileo, Newton,
> etc. And German idealism ("They sort of believe the world
> is like the Matrix, right, Dad?") (He made me insert the
> word "like" into that sentence just now.) I toild him the
> question about Marx was a good hard question, and after
> some reflection the best approximate answer was that he was
> a social scientist whose interests ranged across all the
> disciplines in social science as wel call them today, and
> some. We have a strange household.
My 9-year-old girl has been gently introduced to Marx through her own
developing idea of "fairness." (I don't particularly care what label
Marx is given, "scientist" or "not." As to children, labels are tools to
a direct goal.)
"Fair" is transformed continually with each age... but, as she is
defining it for herself at the moment. I'll stick with a positivist spin
on what fair means.
In terms of the actual explanation of Marx as a person (or influence),
the first real explanation I offered involved a globe and the bombing of
a place that a few of her friends in her class that happened to be from
the country bombed.
The globe spinning and pointing out Iraq didn't really register, nor
talk of oil reserves, nor power and influence... But oppression did. (I
didn't use that word, but she grasped it.)
My fave story about Karl's personal life involve his attempts to explain
to his girls what he was writing about all the time for newspapers.
Politics. Eleanor talked about "dad talks" about Poland and Ireland --
and her own understanding of the "unfairness" of it. ("The poor Poles.")
In the end, that is really what it comes down to: Why do some children
grow up with privilege and others do not? I could tell she thought about
it.
We are all born into a world not of our own making... so who made it
this way? And who keeps it this way?
I hope she keeps thinking about it.
Economists help answer the latter. Marx dealt with the former. Answering
the latter without the former is a real desolate place to be for a
kid... (you end up with something like postmodernism -- endless nervous
chatter, signifying nothing.)
Ken.
--
Psychoanalysis, under the guise of curing people of mental
ailments, has been essentially a movement that replicates
itself and whose central purpose is to replicate itself.
Or as I once put it, it produces more converts than cures.
-- Frederick Crews
UCB Globetrotter, 1999
