Ayn Rand's detractors as a most unimpressive, dishonest bunch

It isn't difficult to throw down the gauntlet against Ayn Rand's detractors (which includes a sub-group of intellectual swamp-dwellers I refer to as Rand-bashers -- very low-hanging fruit).

The gauntlet-throwing goes something like this: Make your case that Rand shouldn't be taken seriously to the faces of Ayn Rand Society scholars who can competently vet for accuracy the (almost uniformly ignorant but hubris-driven) negative critical characterizations of Rand's ideas. (That Rand detractors uniformly demonstrate by their behavior that they are less concerned with accuracy about Rand than with having an opinion about her, is compelling evidence of dishonesty on their part, all on its own, IMNSHO.)

So I'd issue this triple dog dare to any and all of Rand's detractors: follow J.S. Mill's advice and present your case to the most formidable representatives of the 'Randian' position you can find - those who (using Mill's terminology) present the case for Randian ideas in the most plausible and persuasive form (since Rand isn't around to defend herself ffs). Ayn Rand Society scholars fit that characterization as well as anyone. They have dual expertise - in academic philosophy and in Objectivism. The (blatantly dishonest) claim that Rand isn't taken seriously by "experts in philosophy" actually means the following if it is to be rendered in any way persuasive or plausible: Rand is not taken seriously by expert practitioners in philosophy who are not also experts in Rand's Objectivism. (Should this even come as a surprise, given Mill's very sage advice about having and testing opinions?)

And yet these "expert" critics would fall apart all too easily when thinkers with feet in both camps can all too readily "translate" this or that point in Rand into academia-speak. "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen do this all the time, like they did in their rebuttal to Nozick's "On the Randian Argument" (which Rand's usually-dishonest detractors cite as the final word on the subject). That's not to mention their "Aristotelianizing" of Rand in their essays in The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, and in the academy Aristotle is not exactly considered a lightweight. (The Dougs can manage very expertly to draw the parallels between these two thinkers; why can't everyone else?)

So just as soon as any Rand detractor is ready to engage in actual good-faith dialectic with the likes of Ayn Rand Society scholars (and not, like the lowlifes on /r/badphilosophy, picking on arguments made by Objectivists not so academically established, or arguments by the author of this here blog, say [bring it on, I triple dog dare you; all I ask for is intellectual honesty, is that too hard?]) -- only then would I be ready to take these entities seriously.

In Galt's Speech, Galt/Rand state: "Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute."

I've never encountered a Rand detractor who honestly considered the meaning and import of such statements in Rand's writings. Typically a Rand detractor will focus instead on mocking the statement "Existence exists." And a typical Rand detractor will simply concoct out of thin air the notion that for Rand, it's Rand who gets to define what "unbreached rationality" means (i.e., agreement with the philosophy of Ayn Rand -- so Prof. Hospers was failing to use his mind to the fullest when it came to disagreements with Rand? [Rand-detractor blanks out, as always]). But these folks don't, in any remotely credible way, get to ignore the totality of Rand's statements once they start pointing to this or that Rand quote to be a detractor about. Once they're committed to opining about Rand, they have to play by certain rules of intellectual integrity or GTFO. One of those rules is one extremely central and key to Rand's philosophy: context-keeping (a point in Rand's philosophy her detractors know absolutely zilch about, else they wouldn't be detractors - at least on this point - since of course there's no coherent case to be made against context-keeping). These context-keeping rules ethically compel one to consider the full context of Rand's statements, i.e., the full body of her work, and to do so in the utmost good faith and intellectual curiosity.

(And there's even free will here. Even such low-character individuals as Rand-bashers have it within themselves to be great, but it's up to them.)

And so, part of the body of Rand's public writings include an endorsement of Leonard Peikoff's 1976 course on her philosophy. In an open 1981 'Letter of Recommendation' she described Peikoff as eminently qualified to teach her philosophy - and anyone who knows all the surrounding history know that Rand couldn't remotely possibly give such an endorsement lightly. Anyway, if anyone is most curious and good-faithy about what Rand meant by the virtue of rationality, over and above the Galt passage, or whatever else one finds in the Ayn Rand Lexicon, one would - if diligent enough, and it shouldn't be hard - to find it spelled out in much detail in Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism (1983) and elsewhere. In that course, you get not only the Lexicon passages and the generalized statements about key & central concepts of epistemic/cognitive method like context, integration, and hierarchy in the 1976 course (adapted as Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991), a standard/reference text that any Rand scholar/commentator worth taking seriously would take seriously, which automatically excludes the likes of Heller and Duggan), but Peikoff goes indepth with many examples of how to respect context and hierarchy.

From the standpoint of "Rand Studies" it doesn't really matter in the slightest that Rand herself didn't provide this detailed content in such courses to fill in what she doesn't say in her writings; her endorsement of Peikoff as teacher of her ideas suffices to make him an indispensable source of Rand scholarship. (With the 1976 course there is no ambiguity about this whatsoever. While Understanding Objectivism did in fact come a year or so after her death, the 1976 course was authorized by Rand herself, and so it is kinda dishonest on its face for Rand's critics not to even acknowledge such material, yes? What else than some form of dishonesty or other - and intellectual laziness, complacency and hubris are forms of dishonesty - would explain this level of ignorance? How is it not willful, culpable ignorance given the 45 year stretch between that course and today no less? But the pattern holds up in the case of the absence of anything remotely resembling a serious critique of the Galt Speech, some 64 years after its publication no less. Surely a relevant error in Galt's speech - a real error, not a strawman that Rand's detractors typically if not always employ - would have pointed out by now? I can't even imagine what that would supposedly be. And when it comes to the quality of Understanding Objectivism even without Rand's being alive to vet it all the way, there are countless longtime students of Objectivism (the folks whose intellectual context the detractors have chosen - have bent over backwards in fact - to be ignorant of) who would nonetheless attest to its value for understanding "how to think like an Objectivist.")

My ultimate philosophical standard-setter is Aristotle, who (despite errors he committed) perfected the art of dialectic and I essentially rank philosophers in merit/importance based on how well they approximate this perfection. And when the editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (also willfully ignored by Rand's detractors) makes a big deal about "dialectic(s) as the art of context-keeping" I get most curious. Don't you, dear reader, get most curious to learn more? I mean, a dialectical sensibility would pretty much require one to get curious. (Prove me wrong.) As a historically contingent matter, as to my own intellectual context, I got into the study of philosophy via Rand - encountering her Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in my teens while still mainly a student of economics put me on the path to ethics and political philosophy (how have I done so far?) - but I certainly don't consider the be-all and end-all of philosophy (refer back to the first sentence in this paragraph). But I do consider Ayn Rand to be a very helpful litmus test for who really has a clue and about what. The very most intelligent philosophical people that I know of are those who know what to take seriously in Rand and how. (Note, it's not her polemics against the likes of Kant. For that, I'd throw down exactly the same gauntlet to Kant-detractors among Randians (and there are a lot of them...), to support their case that Kant is "the most evil man in mankind's history" (Rand's own words) to the faces of some selected group of Kant scholars who can vet the characterizations for accuracy and context, and best of luck with that. For more effective - and by necessity more detailed and lengthy - polemics, I like how Mises takes down socialism and the Marxoid variant in particular.

(BTW, I have now gone through the whole of the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx as I said earlier I would do as a condition of making further commentary on Marx/Marxism (as per Mill's advice, etc.). The only essay that is somewhat impressive in there is Ollmann's outline of Marx's dialectical method. And yet one of Ollmann's students - the aforementioned editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies - holds that such method has its roots in Aristotle and that Rand exemplifies it in the development of her philosophy [though not necessarily of her polemics against other thinkers; Hospers had similar opinions which he told Rand directly about and he kind of knew his stuff]. How does a Rand detractor honestly account for this? [I'm not holding my breath.] Now, the Oxford Handbooks series is a first-rate scholarship and research resource, and if the Marx one is as unimpressive overall as I found it to be, I don't see much if any future for Marx studies among honest first-rate scholars and thinkers. The scholars in the Marx Handbook are hardly dialectical over and above their preaching.  About the only thing I can see Marxism and not some other system of thought (dialectical or otherwise) having gotten correct which might explain its appeal to socialists is that laborers in capitalist society have historically had it tough - especially those with the least specialized skill sets and hence bargaining position - and that maybe there are ways of making things less miserable for such people. The utter pile of BS comes when it's capitalism specifically that these socialists blame for such conditions, and their avoidance of dialectic with capitalism's leading thinkers (especially Rand and Mises, but there are plenty of others who can identify what's bunk in Marx/Marxism) speaks volumes IMNSHO. That's all I have to say about that for now.)

As for Rand as the litmus test for intellectual honesty: maybe some other thinker(s) could be used as an example (I mean, how often is Aristotle lazily/dishonestly caricatured ffs?), but Rand is a good one: she's controversial, her political ideas are certainly opposed to that of the Academic Mainstream. (Supposedly it's the same with her ethics, but lo and behold, the Dougs were right on this decades ago and those in the academy with a clue are coming to the realization: Rand's egoism is a version of neo-Aristotelian eudaimonist virtue ethics (with of course rationality as spelled out in Rand/Peikoff's body of work being the primary virtue which explains the others - independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride). (Question: how does Rand's ethics - dialectically steelmanned of course - play off dialectically with and/or against Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment, itself the product of a comprehensive lifelong exercise in dialectic? And why the heck isn't Gewirth's book itself all the rage?)

And what I find, countless times without exception, is mostly politically-left Rand detractors (although the ones on the Right are hardly better), not just on internet forums but in the academy, being utterly, disgustingly un-dialectical in their treatment of Rand. And I use Rand as a litmus test because I figure if these academic creatures are willing to play as fast and loose with their characterizations of Rand as they do, and given that such ideas correctly grasped are as full of merit as Ayn Rand Society scholars maintain, I know with a certainty that these folks will go the extra mile to crap all over the best thinkers if those thinkers don't conform to their "progressive" ideas an MO.

And what has that "progressive" academic MO become in recent years? Well, the Amy Wax episode serves as an illustrative case.  Prof. Wax dared to say that the racial achievement gap might not be completely chalked up to systemic racism but rather that (objectively troubling) phenomena like the rate of single-parent families in the Black community arguably help to explain the achievement gap (and that a rigorous adoption of "bourgeois values" would go a long way to fix that problem). For speaking her mind thus, fellow Ivy League (University of Pennsylvania) students and faculty went apeshit, construing her arguments as 'white supremacist' and other such silliness, not bothering to give her a chance to defend herself against these charges in an honest dialectical fashion (and so they treated their determination of what her views were as the final determination - how is this not blatantly f'ing dishonest?), and signed letters calling in effect for her cancellation (her only protection being tenure, but we can forget about academic freedom without that protection, right?). Nothing remotely resembling an honest inquiry and exchange of ideas occurred at this Ivy League venue. (And when a Black professor, Brown's Glenn Loury, makes similar points that Wax did, guess what the "progressive" response to Loury is. Silence. A dishonest silence resulting from refusal to engage dialectically, and/or a refusal to know the most plausible and persuasive arguments from a given side. But at least Loury doesn't get smeared like Wax did. Guess why. His skin color. And that, too, is blatantly dishonest. Still, somehow these creatures don't consider it racist to ignore a Black scholar's research; I thought that was the essence of a racist behavior according to these creatures?) (Hot take: I think the Left is such an intellectual basket-case now, so dialectically inept and so useless for tracking truth, that its "Woke" narratives about systemic racism are the product of a failure of "progressive" social policy to close the achievement gap. They are doubling down on the dogma and refusal to have dialogue even with the likes of Prof. Loury. It's pathetic.)

(Also: the pattern of blatant dishonesty with Wax/Penn is repeated in how James Damore was canceled/fired by Google. Strawman, refuse dialogue, and cancel forthwith. And somehow even this ridiculous behavior has its defenders/rationalizers! In any case, this behavior within corporations and the ideology motivating has its origins in the Academy. If you challenge the ideology strongly enough, don't expect an honest response; expect being called a racist/sexist, denied lucrative opportunities, or - if you're Black - being ignored outright.)

And outside of exceptions (which prove the rule) like University of Chicago which make explicit a commitment to academic freedom, this kind of anti-Millian, dishonest-smear approach has become the "norm" in academia. And had these folks not been so thoroughly, blatantly dishonest in their approach to Rand, the litmust test case, I might have given these creatures the benefit of the doubt. I've since abandoned such hopes, short of a revolutionary overhaul of what the Academy has become (when it comes to politically-charged matters, at any rate).

So, to sum up, and once again: Rand's detractors don't deserve to be taken seriously in the slightest until they rise to the challenge of taking on Ayn Rand Society scholars, the editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and other such people that Mill would advise going to in order to actually understand that with which one supposedly disagrees. (I mean, who in their right mind believes that rationality-as-context-keeping as the primary virtue is something to disagree with? But what else is one to make of what Rand's detractors stubbornly-ignorantly say?) And given that for 60-some years now the Academy has failed to do the minimal Mill-recommended thing, speaks volumes about a politically-charged corruption of the Academy. A disgusting, despicable corruption that shows true colors when the chips are down.

I won't hold my breath. Dishonest people might well prefer going to the grave dishonest rather than admit a bad behavior they indulged in for years or decades on end. If honest dialogue is not what they're after, then it's a state of intellectual war; they are enemies of truth and inquiry. That the academy would subsidize and protect this blatant dishonesty (in Rand-detractors' case, for six decades and counting) calls for an accounting that won't piss off the American people in its avoidance of addressing the core problems and means by which the Academic Humanities and Social Sciences parasitize upon them (the American people). If they treat an Aristotelian thinker such as Rand like garbage, what garbage behaviors won't they engage in (and at taxpayer expense, etc.)?  When it comes to Rand (and capitalist thought generally), the "leading academic philosophy blogger," a tenured Law Professor at a top school no less, is dishonest garbage and I see no problem with calling him out for that. California taxpayer funds are used to financially support Duggan's blatantly dishonest trash under the guise of scholarship (and the scholars blurbing that book are similarly trash who bend over backward to ignore.

Perhaps I should come up with some sizable monetary bet, which I'd be guaranteed to win, to the effect that Rand's detractors will never rise to this challenge?

Being a Rand detractor (and I don't mean someone who disagrees with her polemical approach, else that would make Hospers a "detractor") is not an honest-and-informed option.  No honest informed person thinks that context-keeping wasn't of fundamental focus for Rand (whatever errors she committed), as inextricable from her entire way of thinking. Should I make that sizable monetary bet on whether a Rand detractor could identify and explain what Rand was onto with this context-keeping stuff (before even getting to any commentary or critique of Rand on this topic).  How does one reliably and integrally understand Rand's concept of self-interest without considering the entire context of her philosophy ffs? I mean, after all, Rand says the utmost achievement of one's values (a proxy for selfishness; agent-relative value) requires a mastery of the right sort of cognitive process (those much like Aristotle's, say), and hence why she bothered to venture into epistemology and method much more than she did in (e.g.) Galt's speech.

And it so happens that proper familiarity with ('correct grasp of') Rand's ideas usually results in a deep admiration for Rand whatever one's disagreements. You could just go and ask the aforementioned Society and Journal people yourself, or see Rand entries in this here blog.

So, how did the Academy become so populated with people so hubristically sure that Rand is a hack, lightweight, evil, etc. while never engaging in an honest dialectic with her defenders?  (This must surely be asked about any academic "philosophers" who unprofessionally bash or dismiss Rand. The existence of the Ayn Rand Society all on its own should put these "philosophers" dead to rights in their professional malpractice. J.S. Mill, following his own advice, wouldn't debase himself so.) Along the same lines, how did it become so populated with people who refuse to engage in honest dialectic with the likes of Prof. Loury? It's not just pathetic, it's ridiculous. But it's not like the meltdown of the (non-STEM) Academy is any secret these days; the only issue is arriving at a proper diagnosis. And we can arrive at such a diagnosis if we refer to such litmus-test cases as Rand and Loury (and many, many others...).  And the solution to this cause of the Meltdown is pretty simple: just be intellectually honest ffs, how hard can it be? Are you so wedded in your opinions to leftist/"progressive" ideology (now mutated into "wokism" and other such ideological framings foreign to the American mainstream and formulated by the "woke" one-sidedly without anything resembling an honest dialectic with that mainstream) that you refuse to have them challenged on a level field of play?

ADDENDUM: The Ayn Rand Society's Philosophical Studies series (3 volumes and counting, the fourth to be on the relation between Rand and Aristotle) contains back-and-forth between Objectivists and professional philosophers who don't identify as Objectivists but somehow found a way to take Rand seriously. Why can't everyone else (or at least those who hold an opinion on Rand) follow their lead? Ask enough questions like this and insistently enough, and Rand-detractors get cornered like the intellectual/ethical rats they are. (But to repeat, it's within them to do and be much better.)

ADDENDUM #2: Whereas the Understanding Objectivism course was only in expensive audio format for nearly 30 years (around $270 back in the day, and easily worth it), and as such was that much less accessible/available for scholarly research, the transcribed book version has been in print for 9 years and counting now. The existence of this material in book form has been made well-known by online Objectivists these past 9 years to anyone who will listen. This here gauntlet has been on the ground for 9 goddamn years and still the Rand-detractors won't lift a finger to be honest. Those Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies volumes are also now accumulating years of availability (although they're not quite as cheap as Understanding). The detractors pretend like none of this material exists. (Or maybe they just don't have a clue at all. Which is worse?) I've encountered countless Rand-detractors who, without a single exception, refuse to be honest and usually get nasty when challenged. That's a green light to induction about their character. I can't fathom what other conclusion one can rationally reach at this point. I've done the homework; I've provided abundant documentation/links in this blog post and others; I've contributed a journal article debunking a common lazy and undialectical caricature of Randian egoism; I know the lay of the land. And Rand-detractors are losers, end of story. They'd never accept the gauntlet-challenge; they are cowards such as they are. (But to repeat, it's within them to do and be much better.)

ADDENDUM #3: Readers familiar with this blog will already have some ideas about what I offer on the positive-proposal front. I envision an end of history (or some equivalent using other terminology) a defining or formal characteristic of which is dialectical method which means (among other things) universal steelmanning of ideas. (Mill and I believe Aristotle would approve!) What is dialectic (as to sorting through competing plausible opinions as distinct from context-keeping generally) than universal steelmanning? (And I speak here specifically of the intellectual aspect of an end of history; I'm making an educated guess that that this intellectual aspect will have ethical and aesthetic analogues.) And how distinct (in terms of referential extension) would universal steelmanning be, from more or less universal exposure of the citizenry to a formal Philosophical education (e.g., Philosophy for Children)? (The one rule I would institute for Philosophy for Children (P4C) is: Steelmanning Only. The rest is gravy.)  I really don't think it's too demanding (once the principles are made readily digestible by the citizenry) to do steelmanning-only or at least aspire to that standard. But I've also said that the (or merely "an"?) end of history would have an Aristotelian character, primarily because of the dialectical methodological example Aristotle set (whatever his errors). But such appellations and terminology don't matter nearly as much as the methdological practice itself. (Did I mention that such practice is perfectionistic?)  (Any dialectic constituting the 'end of history' must of necessity compare and contrast dialectic in the Aristotelian and Hegelian senses. It's not clear to me that Hegel claims to "supersede" Aristotelian dialectic so much as to incorporate it, with some 'dynamical' analysis of history as a process of ideas (small 'I' in Hegel's format?) coming to better and better fruition, through dialectic. So wouldn't Hegel say that no one can accord to ignore, dismiss, or - per the usual lowlife practice - strawman Rand's ideas about human perfection, i.e., intellectual perfectionism?  Strawmanning gets in the way of progress toward the end of history -- so let's aggressively marginalize strawmanning behavior accordingly....)

Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019)

From University of California Press - Yikes!

I've commented on Duggan before here, focusing mainly on an online summary-excerpt of Mean Girl, as well as here, showcasing how Duggan (contemptuously and dishonestly) responds to challenging inquiries about her work: she is a poison tree from which one cannot expect honest fruits.  Having now had the opportunity to see the entirety of Mean Girl, I can point to a number of facts about this book that objectively demolish her intellectual and scholarly credibility.

Duggan quite perfectly epitomizes a subspecies of creature I dub the Rand-basher.  I've never encountered an honorable Rand-basher, and no one ever, ever, ever, ever, ever will, for one simple reason: Rand-bashing is an inherently dishonorable activity given the degree of value in Rand's work.  I'll name a few telltale characteristics of the Rand-basher, but the fundamental underlying one explaining all the rest is: intellectual dishonesty.

Here are discreditable tactics Rand-bashers invariably engage in:

• Intellectual laziness, or forming opinions without having done one's homework
• Evasion of available evidence running contrary to their opinion; lack of any curiosity to discover such contrary evidence or opinion
• Strawman argumentation style; rejection of the principle of interpretive charity
• Refusal to have a meeting of minds with proponents of an opposing viewpoint, not just on matters of what views they actually hold, but why; neglecting to acknowledge or address the aspects of the opponents' worldview that the opponents consider most fundamental
• Exclusive focus on the weaker proponents of opposing viewpoints when stronger proponents are readily discoverable
• Selective and one-sided acknowledgment or recognition of data points, especially when plenty of other data points providing an alternative or opposing perspective are available
• Replacing substantive argument with any number of informal fallacies or slimy tactics including ad hominem, goalpost-shifting, appeal to or abuse of authority, insults, reckless smears, sneering/snideness, overall nasty tone, obvious bad faith

I begin the list above with reference to laziness, because to any actual expert in Rand's thought, laziness is the strikingly obvious if not defining feature of Duggan's so-called scholarship.  There is a now-sizable body of philosophically serious Rand-scholarship, going back decades, which I catalog in rather extensive detail here.  Duggan cites from or references pretty much none of what's listed there.  That's a serious red flag right there.

You might think that a putative scholar of Rand's thought, whose thesis is set out in a title like Mean Girl, would want to take some care to counter the community of scholars who don't share that opinion.  The fact that she makes pretty much no effort whatsoever to engage these scholars is a red flag that this putative scholarship shouldn't be taken seriously.

And it's not like Duggan doesn't consult and cite numerous sources in the endnotes and bibliography.  In fact - given that her main focus is on Rand's literary and cultural influence - she does include in the bibliography the three volumes edited by Mayhew (a member of the Ayn Rand Society's steering committee, and acknowledged among the community of Rand experts as an expert) on Rand's three major novels.  But not only does she not quote, reference, or cite any of these volumes or its several contributions in the main text or the endnotes, while quoting and citing all kinds of negative comments on these novels, there is no evidence whatsoever that she is seriously familiar with what is in these volumes.  (Just for instance, the Gotthelf and Salmieri contributions to the volume of essays on Atlas Shrugged, focused in particular on the Galt speech that is the philosophical centerpiece of the novel, are indispensable contributions for anyone not already familiar with their thematic content.  Indeed, there is really no indication whatsoever in Mean Girl that Duggan has any familiarity with the underlying philosophical structure of Objectivism.  In that regard, she is not an intellectually serious commentator.  Her "summary" of the Galt speech is all of one brief paragraph and conveys none of the philosophical fundamentals in any serious or insightful way beyond anything else she had already said in Mean Girl.)

The only notable additions to the bibliography of secondary sources besides the three edited by Mayhew, are the two volumes Sciabarra is involved in, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical and Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand.  Now, any expert on this stuff knows how thoroughly (well, exhaustively) researched Russian Radical is - its reference sources include all the Peikoff courses up through the Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (I'll get to Peikoff more in a moment, since doing so is downright unavoidable in this context) and lots of other taped material besides - and any expert in this arena is also aware that Sciabarra delves deep into those philosophical fundamentals, particularly Rand's philosophical method (something something "dialectic as the art of context-keeping"; for some details in this blog see here and here) within which all her specific positions/theses, formulations, and applications are inextricably embedded.  But Duggan's only mention of this book is as a source for early biographical Rand information (which would be in the first section of Russian Radical).  Her only mention of Feminist Interpretations is almost merely in passing and with superficial reference to only a couple of the pieces.

Speaking of mere-in-passing mentions, Peikoff comes up in only two places.  The first is one brief paragraph as it relates to all the people Rand supposedly "alienated" thereby leaving "only" Peikoff around to inherit her estate.  (Amazingly enough, Duggan manages not to sink to the usual Rand-bashing low of mentioning that Rand accepted Social Security benefits in old age; usually the Rand-bashers do so in a gleeful "gotcha" manner as supposed proof of hypocrisy without bothering to mention or learn about her 1960s essay on government grants and scholarships.  Given the general pattern of dishonesty on Duggan's part, perhaps this was a lapse on her part so to speak, or perhaps I missed it.)  The other is an inclusion in a "Key Figures" section before the bibliography along with about 10 other people, with about 2 or 3 sentences provided for each.

Now, any serious scholar and expert on Rand knows about the importance of Leonard Peikoff to knowing what's what in Objectivism, including especially that stuff about method (context-keeping, integration, hierarchy, etc.).  To mention it for the umpteenth time, she give her very-high-bar-to-clear authorization and endorsement of the 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course, the most complete and definitive statement of her philosophy in her lifetime.  It's not like this and other courses (e.g, Understanding Objectivism) haven't been available, for free, on the Ayn Rand Institute website for some years now, or that Understanding hasn't been available in book form since 2012.  The book based on this course (which, not insignificantly, Peikoff considers the definitive statement of Objectivism) is Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991) (a.k.a. OPAR).  This isn't among the works listed in the bibliography.

One might think that critics of Rand, interested in getting it right, would be curious to see what a course or book titled Understanding Objectivism by Rand's most qualified student and endorsed teacher/interpreter, is all about.  But I have never once encountered the slightest curiosity from Rand-bashers in this regard when I've told them about it and that pretty much all serious long-time students of Objectivism attest to its importance.  Such a pattern of behavior falls under any number of the bullet points above.

Listed in the bibliography, meanwhile, is Slavoj Zizek's borderline-to-downright silly article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.  It's the only evidence that Duggan is so much aware that this journal exists.  (There are some not-so-silly articles that have appeared over the years in that journal, including this one.)  Now, if Duggan were a serious, honest, not-lazy scholar, she would have done her homework by inquiring into what besides Zizek appears in that journal.  There are, after all, plenty of pieces in there analyzing Rand from a literary and cultural perspective.

Duggan goes to great lengths in Mean Girl to portray Rand as having a contempt or disregard for "inferior" people, selectively and one-sidedly marshaling "evidence" to that effect (most if not all of it is slippery and snide insinuation based on assuming-the-worst readings of the original texts - this falls under the Strawman bullet-point above).  Given the mainly literary context in which Duggan is operating, she draws connections here between Rand and Nietzsche.  Now, a couple things Duggan says in connection with Nietzsche: First, he's among the 10 or so included in the "Key Figures" section; the first sentence under his name is, "The work of German philosopher Nietzsche has exerted a profound influence on Western intellectual history," and then mentions that Rand initially admired his critique of religion and Christian morality and his concept of the "Superman," before later rejecting him.  But guess who's not included in the "Key Figures" section: Aristotle.  Now, Duggan does mention at least a couple times in the main text that Rand was really big on Aristotle.  Perhaps the omission of Aristotle from the "Key Figures" section is just another piece of evidence of laziness and/or sloppiness on her part.

But there's also an awfully dubious claim Duggan makes in an endnote (ch.2, note 26) in connection to Nietzsche: "Rand was not a close reader of Nietzsche, but more of a fan, until she eschewed his influence...".  Now, in Wiley-Blackwell's Companion to Ayn Rand (Gotthelf and Salmieri, eds., 2016, included in my extensive cataloging of Rand scholarship linked above), Nietzsche scholar/expert Lester Hunt writes a chapter on Rand's relation to Nietzsche.  It begins by quoting Rand from author-information material she submitted ca. 1935 to the publisher of We the Living that Also Sprach Zarathustra was her "bible" and that she could never commit suicide as long as it exists.  Does that sound like someone who isn't a close reader of Nietzsche?  Or: how did she ever happen upon the "noble soul" aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil that she discusses in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead (which Duggan obliquely refers to in the same footnote quoted above), without doing some pretty close reading?  Not only was Duggan evidently too effing lazy to know about the Companion and its contents, but how can she keep her story straight that a not-close-reader would know about such an aphorism?  This is Duggan characteristically playing fast and loose with the facts.

Here's another point of evidence of Duggan's lack of thoroughness and care: she does quote numerous times from Rand's Journals (including a context-omitting discussion of Rand's early comments on the serial killer William Hickman, whom Duggan blatantly-dishonestly asserts in the book's Overview section was an initial basis for Rand's "ruthless 'heroes'"), but there is no mention anywhere in the book of Rand's Letters!  There's a shit-ton of material of interest in the Letters.  This has direct bearing on the quality of Mean Girl's "scholarship."  For instance, in the Overview section there are a couple or so sentences describing the main points of each of the chapters, accompanied by bullet-pointed key concepts or names for each chapter.  For chapter 2, covering roughly the 1930s and 1940s of Rand's life/work, one of the bullet points, in addition to ones like 'Marriage to Frank O'Connor,' 'Anthem,' and 'The Fountainhead', is 'Isabel Paterson.'  Now, for one thing, the mentions of Paterson in the chapter are pretty much in passing, conveying merely that she was the main mentor-figure to Rand in the '30s and '40s, and that she wrote a book titled The God of the Machine (1943).  Now, in the Letters, there are two sizable chapters containing Rand's correspondence with two key figures: Paterson and John Hospers.  (Hospers isn't mentioned in Mean Girl.  Suffice it to say that this well-respected professional philosopher, expert in aesthetics, and big fan of Atlas Shrugged didn't regard Rand as "mean," whatever criticisms he did have of her.)  One of Rand's letters in connection with Paterson was one praising The God of the Machine as the best book in political philosophy in 300 years and a decisive antidote to The Communist Manifesto.  Duggan declares somewhere in Mean Girl that Rand's understanding of capitalism and markets is fundamentally deficient, but it's safe to say that Rand's understanding aligns with that of God of the Machine.  It's also safe to say that Duggan is too lazy to have known about this, or what's in that book.  Also in the Letters is Rand's ca. 1980 letter of reference for Leonard Peikoff as eminently qualified to teach her ideas, although I doubt Duggan cares to know this or its relevance.

In her discussion of Atlas Shrugged, Duggan neglects to mention its theme ("the role of the mind in man's existence."  Gallingly, she makes reference to the novel's "civilizational theme" as echoing the one that "shapes Anthem."  About Anthem, Duggan manages to at least make reference to "individual initiative" and "innovation," and then says, "The civilizational framework and character descriptions in Anthem are inscribed in a pervasive hierarchy [this is the prose of a pretentious twit, BTW] of mental and physical ability that intertwines with racial, class, and moral differences in all Rand's fiction."  So even when she kind-of touches upon the role-of-the-mind theme running throughout Rand's work, she poisons it with a discussion of a supposedly "racial" makeup to Rand's heroes (which she does at numerous points throughout Mean Girl, it's pretty disgusting).

When she bothers to discuss Rand's nonfiction writings, she does the following:

It's evident that she didn't bother to go through Rand's 'Objectivist Newsletter/The Objectivist/Ayn Rand Letter' collections, but rather only the anthologized books.

Now, she shows familiarity with at least the first essay in For the New Intellectual (1961), but also in FTNI are the speeches from her novels introduced by explicit discussions of their themes, which as I've said Duggan neglects to show any deep familiarity with.  (Ask Rand-bashers what the theme of Atlas Shrugged is, without cheating, and they'd never properly guess it in a million years.  I know this from experience.)

When she discusses The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) anthology, the one essay she discusses is the "Racism" one.  Duggan used this as an opportunity to bring up in the usual smeary Rand-basher ways Rand's supposed views on "the erasure on indigenous peoples, restriction on immigration from more 'primitive' parts of the world, and the persistence of sharp racial inequality in the 'private' economic and social spheres [as] part and parcel of her system of rational morality, even as she opposed state-imposed racial (and sex) discrimination."  Actually, an honest scholar discussing what is part and parcel of Rand's system of rational morality would at the very least make mention of the general points of the lead essay in The Virtue of Selfishness, "The Objectivist Ethics."

The same vice marks her treatment of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967).  Instead of demonstrating real and serious familiarity with the lead essay, "What is Capitalism?", she focuses instead (for a short paragraph) on the essay "The Wreckage of the Consensus," only to mention  Rand's positive reference to Reagan's speech nominating Goldwater in '64 "as a promising new direction for electoral politics - a new direction her influence helped to shape."  Big whoop.  What's really the meat and bones is what's in the lead essay.  For one thing, Rand gives her definition of capitalism there.  Duggan doesn't mention this definition anywhere, although she provides her own in the Glossary.

If all the laziness and sloppiness weren't in evidence enough, her discussion of The Romantic Manifesto (1969/1971), a work one might reasonably think is crucial to grasping Rand's literary aesthetic, is all of one sentence.

This is growing tiresome.  It's all too obvious that Duggan doesn't possess the intellectual/philosophical wherewithal to provide an insightful analysis of Rand's philosophy.  She leaves out way too many crucial sources that would shed a positive light on, and foster understanding of, Rand.  The length of the book is all of about 100 pages, and many topics are covered all to briefly to provide much if any useful information for serious inquirers.  A book accomplishing that task would have to be considerably longer than this, and there are already numerous books on Rand out there that provide way more value than this one does.  If there were constraints on publishing length limiting this to 100 or so pages, on that basis alone it is perhaps better that it not be published at all.  Or, if one were to assign Rand to a scholar in some academic 'Brief Introductions' series without butchering the subject, I can think of many - even relatively mediocre ones - who are way more qualified than Duggan.  No serious expert on Rand's thought can possibly think this book meets even minimum quality standards.  The dishonest title, if nothing else, is a dead giveaway that it's nothing more than a hatchet-job rather than a minimally decent attempt at being fair, objective, enlightening, or anything of the sort.  Its only use is as a foil case contra serious Rand scholarship and a lesson in how not to be taken seriously (which is the only point in going through the trouble of making this post).  I'll link again to another post demonstrating what high-quality Rand scholarship looks like.

In this post I haven't done much to show what Duggan actually does say about Rand in Mean Girl, but I've already discussed the gist of that in the post linked at the beginning of this one, and there's plenty there to show just how shoddy her work is - along with that second link revealing the level of intellectual and moral character behind this work.  Along with fundamental dishonesty, her other main character flaw, along with so many other leftists and "progressives," is hubris.

I'm going to close by removing any possible remaining doubts about Duggan's honesty and credibility.  The key context of Duggan's hatchet-job is that, like most Rand-bashers, and most of the very worst and nastiest of them, she is a leftist/anti-capitalist.  The very same dishonest tactics these creatures use to recklessly attack and smear Rand are used likewise to attack and smear capitalism.  If the following isn't the last nail in the coffin as far as Duggan's (and their) credibility goes, I don't know what is.

In the preface, Duggan asserts (as does the typical nasty leftist) that "From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal [i.e., more or less capitalist] politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world.  The political climate Ayn Rand celebrated - the reign of brutal capitalism - intensified."  Now, aside from the rather ludicrous claim that Rand's philosophy in its actual neo-Aristotelian essentials has even so much as come close to exerting its proper neo-Aristotelian influence on the culture (as in, what actually would take place if everyone absorbed and practiced the principles espoused in Galt's speech and OPAR), the factual claim about expanding global inequality is false and can only be the product of a reckless and willful ignorance of the data.

The only serious question remaining at this point is how someone like Duggan and her ilk (this includes all the ignorant fools - willing if not eager dupes - who positively blurbed this trash) could have ended up with the positions in the academy that they occupy, filling publications and student's heads with garbage.  It is precisely because of entities like these that the academy has taken the widely-loathed, ever-leftward and therefore ever-inbred and pro-dishonesty path of recent years.  Upon comprehensive exposure of their blatant dishonesty, I recommend sardonic ridicule as the next appropriate course of action.  Is it really too much to ask that these creeps clean up their act?

Commerce and philosophy

"I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person." -Apology

An excerpt from Ezra Klein's new book, Why We're Polarized, explains how social media (which are commercial ventures) contribute to political polarization.  They cater to people's sense of their identity.  A flavor of Klein's excerpt (which is worth reading in its whole):

To post that article on Facebook is to make a statement about who you are, who your group is, and, just as important, who is excluded.
In political media, identity is affirmed and activated with slightly more oblique headlines. But the underlying dynamic is the same: This public figure that you and everyone in your group loathe said something awful. This poll came out saying you and your group are going to win or, better yet, that your out-group is going to lose. This slashing column explains why you’re right about everything and why your opponents are wrong.
[...]
When I entered journalism, the term of art for pieces infused with perspective was “opinion journalism.” The point of the work was to convey an opinion. Nowadays, I think a lot of it is closer to “identity journalism” — the effect of the work, given the social channels through which it’s consumed, is to reinforce an identity.
But an identity, once adopted, is harder to change than an opinion. An identity that binds you into a community you care about is costly and painful to abandon, and the mind will go to great lengths to avoid abandoning it. So the more media people see that encourages them to think of themselves as part of a group, and the more they publicly proclaim — through sharing and liking and following and subscribing — that they are part of a group, the deeper that identity roots and the more resistant the underlying views become to change.

The bad online social dynamics that result from this are all well-known and widely loathed by now, but it got this way because it was profitable for the social-media companies to form their algorithms in this direction.  It is, in other words, what the market demands, and they're meeting that demand.

In an intellectually bankrupt culture, the natural result is the highly-polarized toxicity.  (For reasons I've given time and time again, a very large share of the blame for this goes to what I now term a structural dishonesty in the intellectual culture of leftism; the only question for me is whether this structural dishonesty is subtle, or whether it is blatantly obvious.)  (Other examples of structural dishonesty would be authoritarian regimes, such as those in China and Iran, that censor and punish dissenting voices.  No question in these cases how blatantly obvious the dishonesty is.)

The point I'll jump right to: Commerce is neither good nor bad, per se.  It is how well-ordered the commerce is, vis-a-vis the needs and care of the soul.  I'm not really saying anything new here, but I think social media toxicity and polarization are explained by the principle involved.  Social media algorithms are directed toward user pleasure or utility, but the dollar - the bottom line - does not discriminate between the higher and lower pleasures.  A pleasure that is triggered by having one's prejudices reaffirmed is a lower - base and ignoble - pleasure.  A pleasure related to the perfection of one's intellectual capacity is a higher pleasure.

For example: if you spend all of your cable news viewing time only on Fox News, or only on CNN, you get your political-identitarian preferences satisfied, and the companies'/advertisers' bottom lines get served, but the effects are blatantly toxic.  (I regard MSDNC as a lower level (akin to the sewer if the other two are the gutter) of 'news and opinion' presentation entirely - pleasurable to the toxic/twitterized/AOC left, and repulsive to just about anyone else.)  If, on the other hand, your interest is in dialectic - of obtaining the widest story or context or breadth of opinion or input - then you'll divide your time between these sources as well as plenty of other diversified non-cable-news sources.

J.S. Mill not only famously distinguished between the higher and lower pleasures - captured in his famous phrase "Better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" - but (and this is part of the wider context with which this higher/lower distinction has to be dialectically integrated) he also said of opinion polarization:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form. (On Liberty)

Not only is this essentially a formulation of the Dennett/Rapoport Rules a century-plus in advance, it's also a principle I hope over time, with thorough-enough research, to be able to exemplify in my own philosophic practice.  Tying these points together with a figure much-smeared in blatant defiance of Mill/Dennett/Rapoport, Ayn Rand, let's have a look at what Rand has to say about money (a point where she seems to be especially smeared by her enemies if not sometimes or often merely innocently misunderstood by others):

So you think that money is the root of all evil? . . . Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? [...] 

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

A strawman version of Rand - e.g., this one in "the world's most popular philosophy [sic] blog" - would excise Rand's praise for money-making from the philosophic context in which it is embedded.  The context is indicated in part by the "see also" cross-references in the "money" link I've provided and quoted from, and is contained in full in the whole of the Lexicon - the virtue of rationality most fundamentally, and the virtue of productiveness more proximately.  I once encountered an online Rand-basher who quoted from the "money speech" (excerpted above) the following one line: "The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality."  (To treat this quotation in isolation from the wider context of Rand's work is par for the course for Rand-bashers.)  The strawman version hyperlinked above (also par for that loathsome course, and which also implicitly if not explicitly recklessly smears the Ayn Rand Society scholars (e.g.) as "imbeciles") characterizes Rand's ethics as being a money-grubbing one in stark contrast to Nietzsche's evident disdain for market values.  But Rand's philosophy was consistent between Atlas Shrugged (where one finds the "money speech") and her earlier novel The Fountainhead.  John Galt and Howard Roark are each in their own way Rand's concretized-in-art ideal men.  And as is well-known to readers of The Fountainhead, Roark was committed so much to his own creative vision that he turned down a major commission, resulting (for the time being) in his firm shutting its doors.  The wealthiest character in the novel, Gail Wynand, is a foil to the heroic Roark, a man ultimately destroyed by having pandered to the mob/his "livelihood."

Put another way: Roark (and by implication her other heroic figures) regarded money-making as virtuous as long as it was virtuous, i.e., expressed the higher nature and possibilities of humans, including creative independence and integrity.  Rand's commitment to such noble ideals, as against the base, is made explicit in her discussion of that "noble soul" passage from Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil Aphorism 287) with which she originally planned to introduce The Fountainhead and then reintroduced/discussed in its 25th anniversary edition.  The Randian hero is a lover of self in the Aristotelian sense (for Aristotle, the "noble soul" is the great-souled or magnanimous man), a connection that a leading Nietzsche translator and interpreter, Walter Kaufmann, drew in his editor's footnote to Aphorism 287.

Which is to say, to neatly tie the various themes of this post together, that to combat social media toxicity in particular and commercial crassness in general, the market participants could do considerably better to aspire to the ideals espoused by Aristotle, Nietzsche and Rand - and to aspire to greater virtue/nobility/wisdom/understanding/dialectic/etc. generally (as with Socrates, Mill, Rapoport and Dennett).

What quality Rand scholarship looks like

I've just had the pleasure of reading the first chapter of Volume Three of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies Series, Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand's Political Philosophy (2019).  It is by Darryl Wright (one of the members of the Society's steering committee), and is titled, "The Place of the Non-Initiation of Force Principle in Ayn Rand's Philosophy."  It is available as a free sample at the book's website.

(Polemical paragraph...)
It puts all the Rand-bashing hackery ranging from sloppy to reckless out there in a very different light.  Rand-bashing (as distinct from fair and honest criticism, which I anticipate in the later chapters of this book; the bashing basically characterizes Rand as a cruel hack herself who appeals only to pimply adolescents) is all blatantly dishonest, every last bit of it, and every Rand-basher qua such, without exception, is a blankety-blank lowlife.  Here is just one recent example of it at reddit's badphilosophy subreddit, a forum which purports to highlight and ridicule the myriad examples of usually-amateurish thinkers and ideas falling afoul of respectable and serious philosophical practice (supposedly Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are egregious offenders in addition to Rand).  The blankety-blanks at the askphilosophy and main philosophy (sic) subreddits are little better when it comes to Rand.  (Reddit as a whole is toxic/leftist/structurally dishonest in its political aspect; its upvote/downvote model - itself structurally dishonest - is a lower-pleasure-indulging popularity contest rather than a truth-seeking mechanism.) There is no excusing said behavior given all the scholarship that's been available for decades now from professional philosophers/scholars demonstrating that Rand can be understood adequately by competent and careful interpreters, and the bashers will be judged accordingly in the eyes of history.  They have obstructed progress on the wider consideration of crucial neo-Aristotelian philosophical themes (as are in evidence in Wright's article, Den Uyl and Rasmussen's work, Tara Smith's book, Sciabarra's work, etc.).  Speaking of which, Volume Four of the Society's series, in preparation, is specifically focused on Rand's comparative relation to Aristotle, the man whom no one but philosophically ignorant STEM-lords and whatnot dare to bash (and whom, as the man said of his teacher Plato, not even the wicked have the right to praise).

One of the virtues of Wright's article is to situate Rand's thought within certain themes and controversies in philosophy as they've been traditionally approached.  It is particularly memorable how Wright masterfully summarizes (and it is only a summary or condensation) Rand's epistemology or theory of proper cognitive functioning - which, as any serious student of Objectivism knows, makes fundamental reference to the role of hierarchy and context in knowledge-formation.  I like his reference not just to concept-formation but concept-maintenance, an active ongoing process that incorporates new information.  It had always struck me as a bit odd how Rand and Objectivists would speak of the formation part without explicitly referencing the maintenance part.  Bashers might say that this is an example of Objectivists' being sloppy and incomplete, but the Objectivists (most of them, usually) are implicitly if not explicitly intellectual perfectionists doing the best with what time and resources they've got, no thanks to the so-called professional mainstream.

An example of where Wright ties themes in Objectivism to 'mainstream' disputes occurs on p. 38, footnote 26, where he brings up the familiar notion of observation being "theory-laden."  He ties this to the 'Objectivism-speak' about the "prior context of general knowledge that guides the assimilation of the evidence."  Another fine example of Wrights tying-in of themes is his characterization of Rand's concept of knowledge as awareness (Rand uses the phrase "mental grasp") as distinct from 'justified true belief.'  I remember back in the day (the previous century most likely, probably on Jimmy Wales' MDOP) first being introduced to the interpretation of Rand's conception of knowledge as awareness, and it had always struck me as very plausible or correct given the difficulties that arise with the traditional 'justified true belief' formulations.  It strikes me as one point on which epistemologists might take a helpful cue from Rand/Objectivists/Peikoff.  (Wright more than once references lecture 1 of Peikoff's Induction in Physics and Philosophy course, a lecture which also made a favorable impression on me.)

Wright raises an example of an item of genuine knowledge as follows:

"A concept classifies together a potentially unlimited class of the referents to which it applies, and an inductive generalization similarly purports to identify the attributes of or relations among an unlimited set of particular instances. For instance, a statement such as “The human body absorbs vitamin D from sunlight” condenses a wide body of (ultimately perceptual) evidence and applies to an unlimited number of cases past, present, and future." (p. 35)

“The human body absorbs vitamin D from sunlight” is as incontrovertible an item of knowledge as any, which should tell you right off that skeptics are in the weeds and shouldn't be taken seriously.  The only issue of real concern is the how for arriving at/validating such an item of knowledge, which is a yuuuuge topic but . . . well, to apply the principle of induction here I'm going to go to the Series page at UPitt Press's website, click on the Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology (2013) link, go down to the sample link at the same location I found the Wright piece's sample link at the Foundations of a Free Society link, and voila, Gotthelf's article, "Ayn Rand’s Theory of Concepts: Rethinking Abstraction and Essence."  See?  Induction works.

One word to note in Wright's paragraph above - one that caught my attention when Peikoff used it in one of the early lectures of his Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand course - is the word "condenses."  What conceptual knowledge/awareness does is to condense the vast range of perceptual observations/awareness, with higher-order abstractions or also what Rand terms abstraction from abstraction, condensing the more rudimentary concepts into broader classifications and ultimately into organized theories or sciences or episteme.  This condensation-function of concepts is referenced directly by Rand with her discussion of unit-economy.  I apply the principle of unit-economy a lot in my postings when I provide contextualizing hyperlinks so that all the content doesn't have to be reproduced in one blog post (since blog posts can get long enough as it is...).  They serve more as a file-folder (using Rand's imagery) to reference as the need arises.  (It helps to organize one's mental contents really well, in order to make the recall function that much more useful/effective.)  It's a very nice principle to have induced and to apply, since contextualization of bold and controversial-sounding claims (e.g., Rand-bashers qua such invariably are scum) is fucking great.

It should be pointed out that Wright's article situates Rand's principle of the non-initiation of force within her broader philosophical theory, i.e., it contextualizes it for purposes of what follows in the book.  The whole point of Rand's having formulated an epistemological theory (explicated in fuller detail in Peikoff's works, most importantly OPAR) is a practical one: in order for a human being to flourish most effectively, the human must exercise the conceptual/knowing faculty most effectively, for which the human requires a systematic guide for operating, i.e., for organizing mental contents.
This has something to do with the principle of dialectic, what Sciabarra identifies in fundamental terms as the art of context keeping, which has fundamentally to do with mental integration, which fundamentally guides the principle of the wikipedia hyperlinking format as I'm sure Wales was well aware of.  I mean, heck, Wales' introduction to Objectivism was the Lexicon.  Note also that Rand's description of the fundamentality of philosophy in human cognition is exactly-correctly reflected in the hierarchical fundamentality of philosophy in wikipedia's hyperlink structure.  So to recap: Wales induces an organizing principle from the Lexicon, applies it to the now-widely-used wikipedia, proves Rand right about philosophy's fundamentality, and the Rand-bashers have what to stand on, exactly?  Zilch.  Well, they do have a point (by accident) about her polemics (most notably her Kant ones), but they're way bigger offenders themselves in that regard, so they still lose.

As one might have induced from the above, the above organizes and condenses a lot of principles into a few paragraphs, buttressed by the presumptively-knowledge-expanding function of internet hyperlinking.  (In the internet age, what's the Rand-bashers' excuse, or the excuse for blatantly ignorant opinion-formation generally?)  The perfectionistic/perfective condensing habit takes cultivation and effort to form and maintain, and that effort is one of focusing one's mind, and it is this act of focus that is the irreducible fundamental element of human volition or free will.  As I'm sure Wright explains in full detail in his next chapter in Foundations for a Free Society, "Force and the Mind," and as Peikoff explains in detail in lecture 8 ("The Evil of the Initiation of Force") of his Objectivism Through Induction course, physical force is antithetical to this volitional knowledge-formation-and-maintenance process.

Force is the partly or wholly successful attempt to substitute the free and independent judgment of a person's mind/intellect with someone else's, and that is antithetical to the cognitive requirement of objectivity, i.e., of the necessary processing of mental contents for knowledge and decision-making in the service of one's life/flourishing.  (Rand introduces this point in the language of objectivity or of the objective/intrinsic/subjective triad in her essay, "What is Capitalism?" of which no one has even attempted a rebuttal in 50+ years, it's that definitive and final in the essentials.)  Rand uses the term "physical force" to emphasize that it is a physical action that severs the relation between the victim's (free) thoughts and (coerced) actions - the closest thing to an actual real-world duality or opposition between the mental and the physical, if you will.  See also my recent posting, "The core libertarian principle explained" for more.

To wrap up: now that this post has provided a flavor of what quality, clue-having Rand scholarship and Randian method looks like, we can safely flush the willfully clueless Rand-bashers down the toilet and safely give serious Rand scholars the attention and consideration they (and Rand) deserve.  (2019's other "scholarly," university-published (yikes) Rand book, leftist scumbag Lisa Duggan's Mean Girl, provides the definitive contrast case, right down to the blatantly dishonest smear that is its title.  [The gullible ignoramuses in the comments section of a new video with Scumbag Duggan, in which they slime and smear Rand as a sociopath and her admirers as gullible ignoramuses, without showing the least bit of effort at rudimentary fairness and mutual/empathetic understanding - it's like they go out of their way and bend over backwards not to make such an effort - should take a good, hard look at themselves.])  Both the (abnormal) bashers and the (normal) critics tend to say things about how Rand just isn't rigorous or systematic enough in her writings to be taken seriously as a philosopher (or as a world-historically great or important philosopher at least on the level of, say, a Rousseau or a Marx if not a Spinoza or Nietzsche), but the case of Wright and others shows that anyone who studies the relevant materials carefully can identify and explain the rigor and systematicity in Rand's thought.

[Addendum: I've mentioned/link a number of Peikoff's courses but the one that any serious student or reputable scholar of Objectivism needs to be familiar with, just on the basis of its name alone if nothing else, is his Understanding Objectivism one (also in book form).]

[Addendum #2: re Rand's anti-Kant polemics referenced above (and again now), I will at some point address what appears to be an unacceptable part of the ethical theory as he presented it - though not really a part of neo-Kantian ethical theories I've been exposed to, just as with his infamous argument against lying to protect the innocent from a prospective murderer (as distinct from a duly contextualized virtue of honesty that rationally compels taking deceptive measures to protect the innocent from the murderously wicked). What would be unacceptable is that Kant appears to hold the view that continuing life in an indefinitely miserable state rather than committing suicide is the morally preferable option.  That's what Rand gleans from the one passage of his that she ever quotes at any length (from the Groundwork, and which is contained in her "Kant" Lexicon entry just again linked - "It is a duty to preserve one's life..."), about the man who is miserable but continues on out of a sense of duty.  Alternative and perhaps overly charitable readings of the passage are that he's merely applying the otherwise helpful inclination/duty distinction ("duty" meaning the morally obligatory recognized by the actor as such, grounded in Kant's theory in the Categorical Imperative(s) [about which Rand is unacceptably silent all the while she bashes him]).  The Aristotelian virtuous person/character is one for whom virtuous action and desire are harmoniously integrated, where (employing Susan Wolf's terminology as applied to life's meaning) subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness (or perhaps the noble or fine or kalos).  Why not say that remaining alive but miserable, or truth-tellingly exposing the innocent to the murderously wicked, is to treat one's own or the innocent's humanity merely as a means to a theoretical abstraction?  Or, is Kantian ethical method (re: e.g., respecting humanity as an end-in-itself) an empty formalism as some critics have claimed, unless supplemented or contextualized by things other ethical theories consider important?  [Note: I need to study Parfit's impressive-looking synthesis of Kantian with other ethical theories, although a maximally impressive theory would incorporate virtue ethics, of which Aristotle is the most prominent/influential exponent.]  That being said, see my "Core libertarian principle explained" link where principles widely recognized as 'Kantian' or 'deontological' are employed, although in a context that's foundationally Aristotelian/eudaimonist.  [General note about standards for effective polemics, especially philosophical ones: They should follow those Dennett/Rapoport Rules as a matter of habit, which implies that characterization of X should rise to the standard of what seasoned scholars of X accept as accurate (which is how so many anti-Rand polemics can be dismissed from the get-go; the proper standard there might be, "Would Darryl Wright or other Ayn Rand Society scholars or Leonard Peikoff take it seriously?"), and they should be done at enough length to uproot all the assumptions that lead to a complex theory worth polemicizing against.  I've pointed to Mises' polemics against Marxism/DiaMat as an example of how to do polemics, and while they meet the length requirement, I'll have to look at how his characterizations hold up after I go through the high-paywalled Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx published last year.  But he is quoting directly from Marx's condensation/summary statement of historical materialism in the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy....]]

Loathsome leftist loser Leiter & Co.'s "black book of capitalism"

Note that the so-called black book of capitalism the leftists imagine there to be is a reaction to the damning evidence (namely, 100 million dead and millions brutalized/demoralized) presented in the Black Book of Communism.

I've taken the loathsome Leiter to task before on his anticapitalist/leftist intellectual sloth, his one-sided cherry-picking of the evidence,  etc.  But this just about takes the cake.  As against all the data available at ourworldindata.org, Leiter cherry-picks this one article about suicide rates in the USA as evidence of capitalism (i.e., the system of private property, if you can suspend disbelief for long enough to imagine some causal connection) - or the global neoliberal juggernaut, if you will - making life simply unbearable for ever more people.

I mean, why now, all of a sudden, did capitalism get around to upping the despair/suicide rates?  Globalization and/or automation outsourced their jobs and so it's capitalism's fault that the mostly-public, mostly-Demo-rat-run education (sic) system was too piss-poor to prepare people for the transition?  You basically are in mindless doubling-down territory if you try to keep up a leftist narrative.  You'll notice that the 3.5% unemployment rate gets no mention, capitalism gets no credit for that.  The number just isn't all that important; by definition . . . let me try to mimic leftist thought processes here for a moment, and tell me if you haven't seen it a thousand times . . . the unemployment rate only includes eligible labor force, those seeking work vs, those who have work, which excludes those who've given up perhaps in hopelessness and despair which is due to the private ownership of the means of production because . . . this is where it gets really tricky and I don't claim to know where it might go from here.  One thing's for sure, if they didn't choose to learn from Mises and Rand and the 100 million killed by Reds when they had ample opportunity to do so, then they're probably never going to learn.

Shouldn't these nitwits just stick to the climate-change-discredits-capitalism narrative?  It's a lot less difficult to keep a plausible story straight there - that is, until you dialectically/contextually/hierarchically, if you will (considering both presuppositions and implications, etc.) bring in the role of future tech (AI, etc.), in which case it looks like the leftists are losers there, too.  Yes, indeed, the age of the neoliberal global juggernaut has brought with it one of the greatest things the world has yet seen - the Internet - and it is true, despite the benefits of all that, despite all the raw data/info it makes available to your average inquirer, it hasn't resulted in  particularly improved integrators of data on average across the population.

If anything, given the tendencies of the left-run education (sic) institutions - the case of Leiter being representative of the intellectual rot smugly trying to pass as sophisticated and superior - it has produced inferior information-integrators.  What else is the notoriously toxic twitter sewer but a bunch of inferior info-integrators sucking each others dicks (or using mouth on whatever of each others' genitalia) and imagining Trump/America to be racist and everything is getting worse because of capitalism stuff.  No, it couldn't be because the education (sic) system is failing to meet expectations, it gets a C-minus or so in the cognitive-skills-value-added dept. despite all the extra dough poured in there, and the taxpayers' patience is wearing thin (advantage: Trump/GOP).  No, the thing for the (loathsome) leftist and twitter spittler to do is to double down and blame capitalism (private property), somehow.

But getting back to the real world here: the primary causal factor in human affairs, if you examine it thoroughly and carefully, is the mental and intellectual, with material production value-added a subordinate causal consequence (i.e., historical materialism is conceptually untrue).  And something something the fundamental role of philosophy in human intellectual life (and implications for educating children [a proven success wherever tried] as well as everyone else who's eligible in the ways of philosophic inquiry), a point I've been making a lot over the course of this blog (see, e.g., the 'Intro' link, "Better Living Through Philosophy, in broad outline," at the top of this blog posting).

And it'd sure be damn nice if the leftist losers would stop smearing Ayn Rand at every opportunity and actually make an effort to grasp her point (about, e.g., "the role of the mind in man's existence").  The "best" that the academic left has come up with these days is a hit-and-run smear piece by the intellectual thug Scumbag Lisa Duggan, saying that Rand's point is something about being a "mean girl" - that this "mean girl" thing is more centrally and fundamentally connected to Rand's worldview than (say) the role of the mind in human existence or the Benevolent Universe Premise or heroic sense of life.  Nope, it's not about any of that; it's about Rand having this chip on her shoulder about those folks who proclaim that man's life is the state's to dispose of; this makes her the mean one here, you see.

The loser-left argues against capitalism pretty much as, well, as dishonestly as it argues against its various lame caricatures of Rand.  There pretty much had to be a convergence of both methods and subject matter here (and to a lesser extent this applies to the left's non-response to Mises), since Rand made the fundamental-level identification about the role of the mind/reason/intellect in the capitalistic production process and how that had to lead to the huge advances in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (and the founding of America the nation, as Rand is quick to point out is pivotal to human progress pace the ignorant anti-America leftists smears).  As long as the left refuses to engage reality and/or Rand on this point - about the effectiveness of capitalism at bringing out elite intellectual contributions of economic producers (and this may have something to do with yet another interesting cognitive principle Rand identified: unit-economy) - they will continue to fail in their smear campaigns.  If they engage Rand/reality on this fundamental point (no thanks to the likes of Scumbag Duggan or Comrade Leiter, who actively destructively interfere with doing so), it will be a win-win.

Huemer vs. history of philosophy

three philosophers

Re Prof. Huemer's attack on "the history of philosophy" (as he describes it therein; 'Against History') and in particular his (grounds for) saying, "Please don't be an Aristotelian."

As per the previous post I'm transferring over from what is addendum/digression there to main body here:
===

Obviously he's not aware, for instance, of state of the art interpretations from the likes of David Charles and Allen Gotthelf that a final cause or telos is irreducible to the other causes and associated with this idea is that the final cause achieves a good (so we're in normative/value-theory territory, not the realm of mechanics, physics, chemistry, or unevaluative(?) biology).  And more generally, from the standpoint of a perfectionistic methodology: if we learn nothing else from the history of philosophy, and if we're good learners, we glean from the study of the past greats just what about their thinking styles made them first-rate thinkers with such lasting influence (such as Aristotle has in ethics, specifically with the recently-revived virtue-ethical tradition - duh).

And if we're really perfectionistic we should be able to devise methods by which to reliably and accurately rank-order the great thinkers on a scale of greatness (be it in cardinal or ordinal terms).  By any good measurement system Aristotle comes out pretty much well ahead of the competition in virtue of a monumental body of writings (and lost dialogues likened by some of the ancient wisdom-lovers to rivers of gold to Plato's silver).

(By virtue of her identification of the principle of ordinal rankings in terms of teleological measurement, as well as the identifications made throughout the rest of the Ayn Rand Lexicon, does(n't) Rand rank pretty high on the scale of overall philosophical greatness?  By parity of reasoning, if indeed Rand along with the other giants of the history of philosophy - all by repute and nearly all in fact first-rate minds - each had their own well-edited and cross-referenced Lexicon demonstrating with great effectiveness what first-rate minds they pretty much all are, wouldn't that increase people's interest in doing philosophy?  Huemer seems to short-change this possibility or something, in which case I suggest he get more dialectical/thorough in reasoning through what value things like history of philosophy provide.)

Also, I've explained in my book (namely in the most-important second chapter, 'Aristotelianism') that I'm an Aristotelian in terms of a tradition of thought defined by certain fundamentals but not beholden to all of Aristotle's arguments (as he himself would have wanted it, duh).  And fundamental to his very-impressive-results-getting intellectual enterprise was his philosophic method, which the scholar writing about Aristotle in the Oxford Handbook identifies with dialectic.

But the dialectical method should be treated most fundamentally, not merely as a matter of consulting, giving a fair hearing to, etc., the varied learned and reasoned-sounding opinions, weighing them and deciding on a best explanation; it is most fundamentally the art of context-keeping, for which Huemer can consult Sciabarra's Total Freedom, where Aristotle is treated as the fountainhead of this methodological tradition while its being formulated in terms of Sciabarra's art-of-context-keeping fundamentals (and in terms of the proper application of "both-and" reasoning to competing and partial claims to the truth, in addition to the proper "either-or" reasoning involved).  So far as I know, no one's presented any good reason to doubt Sciabarra's thesis, not even the ultra-wisdom-loving Prof. Huemer.  Also not widely known: for Rand, her concept of mental integration is, well, integral to her concept of context(-keeping).  And that is integral to her concept of hierarchy of thought.  (A proper approach to hierarchy would help inform us on if-then style hypotheticals that philosophers to pose; what are not just the implications of the if-clause but the presuppositions?  Like, "if the Aristotelian end of history as defined in UP's book were to eventuate, then...".  Like, for instance, would UP's book have to have been written first?  Is it a realistic hypothetical in the first place?  That kinda shit you should get stoned and think through very carefully and thoroughly.

Darn it, I lost a certain train of thought here, for which I blame the weed.  Oh wait, now I remember: I supersede 'Aristotelian' and 'dialectic' in the sense that I identify my methods in terms of a principle of intellectual perfectionism, which means (among other things) doing the activity of philosophy as close to perfectly as one feasibly can, but also learning a bunch of shit (for which don't ever trust AOCs under 30) and also possibly fanatical attention to (hopefully the most crucially relevant, philosophically essential) detail.  Like Aristotle, Aquinas and/or Rand, for instance?  (Also, I think with a probability approaching 100% that a Hegel Dictionary of the sort built by, who was it, Solomon in the 1980s perhaps or Houlgate ca. 2000?), might be part of a whole revived "understanding Hegel" effort that may actually pay off for once, but idk.  Just call it the Hegel Lexicon and voila, we've got a volume 2 in a much-anticipated-by-me series.  I just get a bit of a kick out of inductively identifying tantalizing principles like that one there.)

[Background music/soundtrack to the foregoing: Pink Floyd favorites, a listing of which is available]