If you think that American communists don’t have an unusually strong intrinsic value of equality then I think you’re mistaken
My claim is that it’s not an intrinsic value—it’s the result of “instrumental convergence” between adherents of many different value systems, grounded in their shared conception of our present circumstances. If our circumstances were different, the conclusions would be too.
If, for instance, the United States had a robust social-democratic welfare state, most communists would be much less concerned with equality than they are now.
If it were instead some sort of agrarian yeoman-republic (certainly impossible now, but conceivable if early American history had gone very differently), then plausibly communists could instead take a mildly anti-egalitarian tack—inefficient small farmers frustrating the development of the productive forces and so on.
What you would never get, regardless of prevailing conditions, are communists who are also market fundamentalists.
If you think worldviews aren’t to a substantial extent about beliefs that I suspect we just mean different things by “worldviews”.
Really what I think is that beliefs can’t, in general, be cleanly separated from attitudes and concepts and mere habits of thought and so on—at the end of the day human cognition is what it is. But to the extent that there are distinguished object- and meta-levels, I think meta-level variation is the strongest driver of object-level variation between at least moderately educated people.
For instance, I would not call a bunch of the examples you gave “worldviews.”
Those were intended as characteristic beliefs that would pick out clearly recognizable clusters, not entire worldviews themselves. “Love Thy Neighbor” as a substitute for “Christianity”—except that I don’t have good names for the worldviews in question.
I’ve likely overestimated how salient the concrete-instrumentalist-(problem solver) vs. abstract-(scientific realist)-(theory builder) divide is for most people, but I think the two are clearly at least as different and understand each other at least as poorly as mainstream liberals and conservatives in the US.
My claim is that it’s not an intrinsic value—it’s the result of “instrumental convergence” between adherents of many different value systems, grounded in their shared conception of our present circumstances. If our circumstances were different, the conclusions would be too.
If, for instance, the United States had a robust social-democratic welfare state, most communists would be much less concerned with equality than they are now.
If it were instead some sort of agrarian yeoman-republic (certainly impossible now, but conceivable if early American history had gone very differently), then plausibly communists could instead take a mildly anti-egalitarian tack—inefficient small farmers frustrating the development of the productive forces and so on.
What you would never get, regardless of prevailing conditions, are communists who are also market fundamentalists.
Really what I think is that beliefs can’t, in general, be cleanly separated from attitudes and concepts and mere habits of thought and so on—at the end of the day human cognition is what it is. But to the extent that there are distinguished object- and meta-levels, I think meta-level variation is the strongest driver of object-level variation between at least moderately educated people.
Those were intended as characteristic beliefs that would pick out clearly recognizable clusters, not entire worldviews themselves. “Love Thy Neighbor” as a substitute for “Christianity”—except that I don’t have good names for the worldviews in question.
I’ve likely overestimated how salient the concrete-instrumentalist-(problem solver) vs. abstract-(scientific realist)-(theory builder) divide is for most people, but I think the two are clearly at least as different and understand each other at least as poorly as mainstream liberals and conservatives in the US.