A key indicator of how perfective a society is, is how important the typical subject matter is in the popular culture and media (including cable news media and the internet).
Concretization question: How important is the typical subject matter on Glenn Greenwald and Glenn Beck's (call 'em "The Glenns" for convenience) columns/programs, as compared with (i.e., contrasted to) the rest of the media? How about Noam Chomsky? Whatever else you think of him, the shit he typically talks about is damn important. And how about what representative members of the Ayn Rand Society have to talk about, as it relates to contemporary political culture? Why aren't they prominent in today's mass-media discussion?Wouldn't they have the most of importance to offer in explanation of this whole "Ayn Rand phenomenon?" (One of them is a prominent Aristotle scholar currently at the No. 3 ranked department of philosophy in the English-speaking world, for crying out loud - and is editing a volume on Ayn Rand's epistemology due out this summer, as well another, much-anticipated Wiley-Blackwell volume due out hopefully in the very near future. Which would be of greater importance for understanding Rand's Objectivist ideas, that or the next rendition of Ayn Rand Nation by a fuckin' amateur? Which will the leftwing interblogs devote their attention to this time around? Last time around, with near-identical publication dates ca. March 2012, it was Gary Weiss's Ayn Rand Nation getting all their attention, with Leonard Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism getting none of their attention.) I mean, how fucking low does a culture have to be for their voices not being the most prominent in media discussions of Ayn Rand? Isn't that pretty much as pathetically bad as Chomsky not being all over the popular media?
Relevant distinction: "Intellectually high-brow" and "Important" (also consider: "Relevant")
More to come . . . .
#saganized
P.S. Another checkmate to come . . .
P.P.S. 24 days left...
Showing posts with label checkmate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label checkmate. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Friday, March 1, 2013
The "Ayn Rand is for children" meme, cont'd
[A continuation upon an earlier theme.]
If you pay attention to the cultural discourse about Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, you will have heard it a thousand times: Objectivism appeals to people in their teens or college years, but then they outgrow it. Our head-of-state said as much in a recent interview. This supposedly explains why Objectivism supposedly doesn't get much respect from academic philosophers, who are by and large grown up, responsible, and empathetic human beings. In nearly every thread on reddit's /r/politics subreddit, the most-upvoted comment on any thread with "Ayn Rand" in the title is that by-now well-worn, brief but non-witty quote comparing Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings. Ayn Rand's writings are allegedly for the socially awkward high-school rejects, the naive, the naively idealistic, the maladjusted, those who don't understand human nature, those who are self-centered to the point of narcissism, and so on.
First off, I think it betrays a fundamental sense-of-life difference between Rand and her critics when the "intellectual adults" lecture the idealistic youth on their naivete - who demand, in essence, that justice prevail in this world, that most everyone - in principle - can see the moral truth and act upon that recognition, and the like. The "adults" say that we soon learn "in real life" that we must be practical, that we must compromise, that we must conform, that wisdom comes from a resigned acceptance of the world the way it is, and so on. Ayn Rand's sense of life, what appeals to those idealistic youth, is her outright and absolute rejection of a dichotomy between the moral and the practical - that individual integrity is all that we have in our soul to hold onto, and that it wouldn't be considered "practical" in the mind of a Howard Roark, given his ideals, to surrender his soul. (Practical - in terms of what?) Ayn Rand, in other words, endorses the "benevolent universe premise" - i.e., the idea that a rational way of life on earth (to quote her hero, John Galt, near the very end of his radio address) "is real, it is possible, it is yours." In other words, she completely repudiates cynicism.
Perhaps it says a whole lot about the current state of the world that so many people are cynical - that cynicism is considered to be a sign of maturity and wisdom! - that they did indeed abandon the ideals they held in their youth in order to embrace a life of stale practicality and safety - that, in the most vicious cases, they embraced the divine right of stagnation, to employ a phrased used by former Rand associate Nathaniel Branden, who wrote an essay by that title. Cynicism is not so much an attitude about the world as it is a statement about oneself - and, tragically and needlessly, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in the people who accept, endorse, and practice it.
So, is that what the aforementioned Rand-diminishers actually mean to say when they couch their diminishing in the terms they do - as in, say, a defense mechanism for their own cynical sense of life? Or, as they might purport to explain in explicit terms, it's because Ayn Rand's egoistic philosophy appeals to some a-social, anti-social, socially-naive, socially-insensitive, perhaps even sociopathic aspects of the human personality - that Rand's philosophy amounts, in essence, to a rationalization for such base and inadequate tendencies in human nature. Now, that sort of objection doesn't exist on a sense-of-life level so much as an intellectual-interpretive one, and in that case what it demonstrates - in short - is an ignorance of her ideas and/or a failure of reading- or ideas-comprehension.
Now to the original point of my post. I'm going to concretize in such a way as to make it empirically impossible for the "Rand is for socially-awkward teenagers" meme to gel with real-life instances. The instances I want to discuss here are instances of people who undoubtedly understood Rand's ideas the way they are meant to be understood. The real deals, not the random asshole who somehow or other latched onto Rand's ideas. These individuals are the following, during the decade of the 1950s and first half of the 1960s: Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, Allen and Joan Blumenthal, Alan Greenspan, Elayne and Harry Kalberman, Leonard Peikoff, Mary Ann Sures. These are the individuals who comprised the "Collective," Rand's "inner circle" of students and associates.
None of these individuals were angsty teens at the time. None of them were intellectual imbeciles. None of them (during that period of time, anyway) behaved or lived dysfunctionally, and none of them - many of their various "fallings-out" or breaks with Rand notwithstanding - ever came to repudiate the core of Rand's Objectivist philosophy, most fundamentally her prescribed neo-Aristotelian, sense-based methods of reasoning in dealing with ideas (which have gone on to be explained at length in Peikoff's books and courses on Objectivism, and in such academic scholarly literature as Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, which is the only "outside" secondary literature on Rand to date to incorporate the entirety of Peikoff's lecture course series (along with tons of other material) into its research - and guess what, it ends up being quite clearly enough a very positive assessment of Rand's ideas!). (Only after the mid-1960s did the Brandens in particular (Nathaniel most pathologically) choose to evade the principles they had accepted and espoused; point being, it wasn't the ideas they espoused that led them to their dysfunctional lifestyles and the 1968 Break that torpedoed a flowering movement and set it back decades.)
So, how is the "Ayn Rand is for awkward angsty teens" crowd to handle these high-level-understanding concrete instances? There's only one thing it can do, short of abandoning that stupid meme: evade.
This is pretty much what the whole mainstream of Rand-ridicule amounts to. Pathetic, innit?
All I know is, Rand's (neo-Aristotelian) Objectivist philosophy is an example of a perfectivism, and these ridiculers and diminishers most decidedly are not. Rand FTW. Game, set, match. Done deal, pal. Checkmate again, assholes. Ain't integration fun? / You can't refute perfectivism. :-)
If you pay attention to the cultural discourse about Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, you will have heard it a thousand times: Objectivism appeals to people in their teens or college years, but then they outgrow it. Our head-of-state said as much in a recent interview. This supposedly explains why Objectivism supposedly doesn't get much respect from academic philosophers, who are by and large grown up, responsible, and empathetic human beings. In nearly every thread on reddit's /r/politics subreddit, the most-upvoted comment on any thread with "Ayn Rand" in the title is that by-now well-worn, brief but non-witty quote comparing Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings. Ayn Rand's writings are allegedly for the socially awkward high-school rejects, the naive, the naively idealistic, the maladjusted, those who don't understand human nature, those who are self-centered to the point of narcissism, and so on.
First off, I think it betrays a fundamental sense-of-life difference between Rand and her critics when the "intellectual adults" lecture the idealistic youth on their naivete - who demand, in essence, that justice prevail in this world, that most everyone - in principle - can see the moral truth and act upon that recognition, and the like. The "adults" say that we soon learn "in real life" that we must be practical, that we must compromise, that we must conform, that wisdom comes from a resigned acceptance of the world the way it is, and so on. Ayn Rand's sense of life, what appeals to those idealistic youth, is her outright and absolute rejection of a dichotomy between the moral and the practical - that individual integrity is all that we have in our soul to hold onto, and that it wouldn't be considered "practical" in the mind of a Howard Roark, given his ideals, to surrender his soul. (Practical - in terms of what?) Ayn Rand, in other words, endorses the "benevolent universe premise" - i.e., the idea that a rational way of life on earth (to quote her hero, John Galt, near the very end of his radio address) "is real, it is possible, it is yours." In other words, she completely repudiates cynicism.
Perhaps it says a whole lot about the current state of the world that so many people are cynical - that cynicism is considered to be a sign of maturity and wisdom! - that they did indeed abandon the ideals they held in their youth in order to embrace a life of stale practicality and safety - that, in the most vicious cases, they embraced the divine right of stagnation, to employ a phrased used by former Rand associate Nathaniel Branden, who wrote an essay by that title. Cynicism is not so much an attitude about the world as it is a statement about oneself - and, tragically and needlessly, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in the people who accept, endorse, and practice it.
So, is that what the aforementioned Rand-diminishers actually mean to say when they couch their diminishing in the terms they do - as in, say, a defense mechanism for their own cynical sense of life? Or, as they might purport to explain in explicit terms, it's because Ayn Rand's egoistic philosophy appeals to some a-social, anti-social, socially-naive, socially-insensitive, perhaps even sociopathic aspects of the human personality - that Rand's philosophy amounts, in essence, to a rationalization for such base and inadequate tendencies in human nature. Now, that sort of objection doesn't exist on a sense-of-life level so much as an intellectual-interpretive one, and in that case what it demonstrates - in short - is an ignorance of her ideas and/or a failure of reading- or ideas-comprehension.
Now to the original point of my post. I'm going to concretize in such a way as to make it empirically impossible for the "Rand is for socially-awkward teenagers" meme to gel with real-life instances. The instances I want to discuss here are instances of people who undoubtedly understood Rand's ideas the way they are meant to be understood. The real deals, not the random asshole who somehow or other latched onto Rand's ideas. These individuals are the following, during the decade of the 1950s and first half of the 1960s: Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, Allen and Joan Blumenthal, Alan Greenspan, Elayne and Harry Kalberman, Leonard Peikoff, Mary Ann Sures. These are the individuals who comprised the "Collective," Rand's "inner circle" of students and associates.
None of these individuals were angsty teens at the time. None of them were intellectual imbeciles. None of them (during that period of time, anyway) behaved or lived dysfunctionally, and none of them - many of their various "fallings-out" or breaks with Rand notwithstanding - ever came to repudiate the core of Rand's Objectivist philosophy, most fundamentally her prescribed neo-Aristotelian, sense-based methods of reasoning in dealing with ideas (which have gone on to be explained at length in Peikoff's books and courses on Objectivism, and in such academic scholarly literature as Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, which is the only "outside" secondary literature on Rand to date to incorporate the entirety of Peikoff's lecture course series (along with tons of other material) into its research - and guess what, it ends up being quite clearly enough a very positive assessment of Rand's ideas!). (Only after the mid-1960s did the Brandens in particular (Nathaniel most pathologically) choose to evade the principles they had accepted and espoused; point being, it wasn't the ideas they espoused that led them to their dysfunctional lifestyles and the 1968 Break that torpedoed a flowering movement and set it back decades.)
So, how is the "Ayn Rand is for awkward angsty teens" crowd to handle these high-level-understanding concrete instances? There's only one thing it can do, short of abandoning that stupid meme: evade.
This is pretty much what the whole mainstream of Rand-ridicule amounts to. Pathetic, innit?
All I know is, Rand's (neo-Aristotelian) Objectivist philosophy is an example of a perfectivism, and these ridiculers and diminishers most decidedly are not. Rand FTW. Game, set, match. Done deal, pal. Checkmate again, assholes. Ain't integration fun? / You can't refute perfectivism. :-)
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Today's items: Hospers on Rand; Rand on IQ; drug policy
(Your task: mentally integrate, i.e., draw the connections between, these items.)
Item 1:
A real philosopher assesses Ayn Rand based on extensive first-hand interaction:
John Hospers: Conversations with Ayn Rand, Part 1. Part 2.
Now, a portrait emerges of Rand that is . . . not so simple to sum up briefly. ("It's complicated.") On the one hand, Hospers speaks of her as having a wealth of insight ("life-changing") while at the same time being, um, difficult to explain many concepts in "academic-analytic philosophy" to. It's most apparent that Rand's temperament and style of "doing philosophy" was at variance with those "in the mainstream."
So much the worse for the other, each might say. Actually, how much does Rand differ from the "continental" tradition in this regard? Rand was big on the whole meaning-of-life part of philosophy; she had a theory of aesthetics, for example, to which Hospers, an aesthetician par excellance (Exhibit A: see the Music section here), was quite receptive to. In this regard, she was much more in line with the continental tradition of that time; the (academic) "mainstream" of American philosophy was grappling with its own problems, still in the process of recovering from positivism while at the same time doing hardly any grappling with Aristotle.
(Keep in mind that Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy," which urged a return to Aristotle to remedy the ills of modern moral philosophy, had come out at the same time as Atlas. Besides, the name "Anscombe" was more likely to prompt associations with Wittgenstein at the time, thereby helping to nudge those paying attention to Anscombe off the Aristotelian scent. Only ca. 1960 did a new wave of Aristotle literature - Randall; Veatch - begin to hit the scene, which had hardly given the "mainstream philosophers" of the period a chance to assess it within their own [ahem] context.) Rand's discussions with Hospers also occurred right around the time that Peikoff was finishing up his Ph.D. in Philosophy (under NYU's Sidney Hook), and Peikoff in The Art of Thinking (1992 lecture course) recounts in lecture 1 how he grappled tortuously with shuffling back and forth between the "pragmatist" academic context and the neo-Aristotelian context he was getting via Rand. (He describes this as a problem of "clashing contexts" and it ties in with the phenomenon of mental automatization.) So this is the context of the period. Looking back, and armed with all the relevant integrated-information, there were ways in which Rand was well ahead of her academic competition; for example, the essential thrust of her ethics, irrespective of the logic-chopping treatment her argument receives at the hands of academic critics, gets it as right as the most extensive academic treatment to date of her normative ethics shows it to be right. This doesn't even get us to the subject of Randian methodology, which may contain her most revolutionary insights of all. (The search results in this link are a bit of evidence that I'm way ahead of the curve on at least some crucial issues in philosophy. How long before a critical mass of others catch up? Months? Years? Decades?) And we also have a forthcoming volume on Rand's epistemology, edited by another serious philosopher, which is sure to have the neo-Aristotelian take on the epistemological issues Hospers discusses in Part 2 of "Conversations.")
Anyway, to cut to the chase: How is it that the one "outsider" professional philosopher who had extensive interaction with Ayn Rand managed not to come away thinking of her as a hack, or a lightweight, or a pea-brain, or a narcissistic megalomaniac, or a cunt, or a hypocrite, or a childish imbecile, or a worshipper of murderers, or an opponent of empathy, or a cult-leader, or . . . (fill in alternet/thinkprogress/salon smear of the day here, approvingly linked to by Prof. Bozo at the University of Chicago while being cheered on by his nasty little crony-type intellectual thugs who somehow "educate" the young'uns, who in turn blindly spread the smears around, mob-rule-like, on reddiot.com - all of which exemplifies, needlessly-tragically, today's mainstream intellectual state).
Supplemental links re Hospers and Rand:
Binswanger on Rand's break with Hospers
The Maverick Philosopher with a slanted, not-very-wise take on the entire contents of Hospers's two-part article. Seems that the essential, to him, was the second part, out of context from the first. This may be "maverick" philosophizing, but it ain't no ultimate philosophizing that I ever heard of.
Item 2:
Rand on IQ. First, a link. Damn, would you look at the first result there?! Anyway, it's the quote of the day to chew on: Wait, hold up again. Would you look at the fourth result there?! Does Google in conjunction with adept blogging facilitate the integration of information into knowledge, or what? Okay, the quote:
In response to the question posed at the 1967 Ford Hall Forum, "Could you write a revised edition of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology for people with an IQ of 110, or will it remain available [accessible? -UP] only to people with an IQ of 150?"
Rand responds: "I'd prefer that people raise their IQ from 110 to 150. It can be done."
Gee, I wonder how? Anyone have any promising, uh, leads?
Leads? Yeah. Let me just check with the boys down at the psych lab.
Item 3:
(R-rated language to follow. Proceed at your own risk of being entertained.)
The coward-in-chief hides behind his drug czar. This drug-policy situation has gotten completely insane. You can quote me on that. "Ultimate Philosopher, ultra-careful assessor of evidence, says U.S. drug policy situation is completely insane." I'll say again what I said in a recent posting: There is no intellectually-credible case whatsoever even so much as on offer at this point in time for keeping drug policy the way it is. This leaves only three possible explanations for why the status quo is at it is: (1) ignorance; (2) malice (including willful ignorance); (3) some combination of (1) and (2). The coward-in-chief-who-hides-behind-his-drug-czar isn't ignorant (well, he does take pride in being ignorant of some things, the cocksucker), so that tells you about that entity's case. That still leaves a bunch of other entities who are complicit in the drug-war insanity. At least some elected House representatives have been coming to their senses with bills that should pass yesterday at the very latest.
Note the parallels between the state of the drug-war debate and the state of the marriage-equality debate. One side totally wiping the floor with the other. Actually, the parallel ends there: there's a basic minimum of a debate going on regarding marriage equality, happening in the courts; there's not even a debate going on about the need to radically dismantle the current drug policy. It's one honest, well-informed side with all the supportable-by-reason ideas, up against a pro-status-quo monolith of ignorance and/or malice that has defaulted in the realm of ideas, with no arguments on offer at all. There's no other explanation for this present status quo, there's no excuse for it, and Jefferson would be so disgusted at this outright insanity, as to fucking puke his guts out.
What about you, reader? Are you, too, disgusted at this state of affairs enough to fucking puke your guts out?
(How, I wonder, did this situation come to exemplify, needlessly-tragically, today's mainstream intellectual state? Whatever you do, Private Pyle, don't fail to integrate, that would break my fucking heart! Oh that's right, Private Pyle, don't make any fucking effort to get to the top of the fucking obstacle. If God would have wanted you up there he would have miracled your ass up there by now, wouldn't he? Come on, Pyle, move it! Up and over, up and over! Are you quitting on me? Well, are you? Then quit, you slimy fucking walrus-looking piece of shit! Get the fuck off of my obstacle! Get the fuck down off of my obstacle!)
Also, as UP-blog-regulars know, the clock's ticking on that 4/20 thingy.
How does one declare "Checkmate, asshole," when the opponent has left the table, or never came to play at all? How can one even say that it isn't worthy fucking adversaries we're up against, when no adversary has even shown up? I declare for any and all with wisdom-loving ears to hear: This is fucking ridiculous!
Item 1:
A real philosopher assesses Ayn Rand based on extensive first-hand interaction:
John Hospers: Conversations with Ayn Rand, Part 1. Part 2.
Now, a portrait emerges of Rand that is . . . not so simple to sum up briefly. ("It's complicated.") On the one hand, Hospers speaks of her as having a wealth of insight ("life-changing") while at the same time being, um, difficult to explain many concepts in "academic-analytic philosophy" to. It's most apparent that Rand's temperament and style of "doing philosophy" was at variance with those "in the mainstream."
So much the worse for the other, each might say. Actually, how much does Rand differ from the "continental" tradition in this regard? Rand was big on the whole meaning-of-life part of philosophy; she had a theory of aesthetics, for example, to which Hospers, an aesthetician par excellance (Exhibit A: see the Music section here), was quite receptive to. In this regard, she was much more in line with the continental tradition of that time; the (academic) "mainstream" of American philosophy was grappling with its own problems, still in the process of recovering from positivism while at the same time doing hardly any grappling with Aristotle.
(Keep in mind that Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy," which urged a return to Aristotle to remedy the ills of modern moral philosophy, had come out at the same time as Atlas. Besides, the name "Anscombe" was more likely to prompt associations with Wittgenstein at the time, thereby helping to nudge those paying attention to Anscombe off the Aristotelian scent. Only ca. 1960 did a new wave of Aristotle literature - Randall; Veatch - begin to hit the scene, which had hardly given the "mainstream philosophers" of the period a chance to assess it within their own [ahem] context.) Rand's discussions with Hospers also occurred right around the time that Peikoff was finishing up his Ph.D. in Philosophy (under NYU's Sidney Hook), and Peikoff in The Art of Thinking (1992 lecture course) recounts in lecture 1 how he grappled tortuously with shuffling back and forth between the "pragmatist" academic context and the neo-Aristotelian context he was getting via Rand. (He describes this as a problem of "clashing contexts" and it ties in with the phenomenon of mental automatization.) So this is the context of the period. Looking back, and armed with all the relevant integrated-information, there were ways in which Rand was well ahead of her academic competition; for example, the essential thrust of her ethics, irrespective of the logic-chopping treatment her argument receives at the hands of academic critics, gets it as right as the most extensive academic treatment to date of her normative ethics shows it to be right. This doesn't even get us to the subject of Randian methodology, which may contain her most revolutionary insights of all. (The search results in this link are a bit of evidence that I'm way ahead of the curve on at least some crucial issues in philosophy. How long before a critical mass of others catch up? Months? Years? Decades?) And we also have a forthcoming volume on Rand's epistemology, edited by another serious philosopher, which is sure to have the neo-Aristotelian take on the epistemological issues Hospers discusses in Part 2 of "Conversations.")
Anyway, to cut to the chase: How is it that the one "outsider" professional philosopher who had extensive interaction with Ayn Rand managed not to come away thinking of her as a hack, or a lightweight, or a pea-brain, or a narcissistic megalomaniac, or a cunt, or a hypocrite, or a childish imbecile, or a worshipper of murderers, or an opponent of empathy, or a cult-leader, or . . . (fill in alternet/thinkprogress/salon smear of the day here, approvingly linked to by Prof. Bozo at the University of Chicago while being cheered on by his nasty little crony-type intellectual thugs who somehow "educate" the young'uns, who in turn blindly spread the smears around, mob-rule-like, on reddiot.com - all of which exemplifies, needlessly-tragically, today's mainstream intellectual state).
Supplemental links re Hospers and Rand:
Binswanger on Rand's break with Hospers
The Maverick Philosopher with a slanted, not-very-wise take on the entire contents of Hospers's two-part article. Seems that the essential, to him, was the second part, out of context from the first. This may be "maverick" philosophizing, but it ain't no ultimate philosophizing that I ever heard of.
Item 2:
Rand on IQ. First, a link. Damn, would you look at the first result there?! Anyway, it's the quote of the day to chew on: Wait, hold up again. Would you look at the fourth result there?! Does Google in conjunction with adept blogging facilitate the integration of information into knowledge, or what? Okay, the quote:
In response to the question posed at the 1967 Ford Hall Forum, "Could you write a revised edition of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology for people with an IQ of 110, or will it remain available [accessible? -UP] only to people with an IQ of 150?"
Rand responds: "I'd prefer that people raise their IQ from 110 to 150. It can be done."
Gee, I wonder how? Anyone have any promising, uh, leads?
Leads? Yeah. Let me just check with the boys down at the psych lab.
Item 3:
(R-rated language to follow. Proceed at your own risk of being entertained.)
The coward-in-chief hides behind his drug czar. This drug-policy situation has gotten completely insane. You can quote me on that. "Ultimate Philosopher, ultra-careful assessor of evidence, says U.S. drug policy situation is completely insane." I'll say again what I said in a recent posting: There is no intellectually-credible case whatsoever even so much as on offer at this point in time for keeping drug policy the way it is. This leaves only three possible explanations for why the status quo is at it is: (1) ignorance; (2) malice (including willful ignorance); (3) some combination of (1) and (2). The coward-in-chief-who-hides-behind-his-drug-czar isn't ignorant (well, he does take pride in being ignorant of some things, the cocksucker), so that tells you about that entity's case. That still leaves a bunch of other entities who are complicit in the drug-war insanity. At least some elected House representatives have been coming to their senses with bills that should pass yesterday at the very latest.
Note the parallels between the state of the drug-war debate and the state of the marriage-equality debate. One side totally wiping the floor with the other. Actually, the parallel ends there: there's a basic minimum of a debate going on regarding marriage equality, happening in the courts; there's not even a debate going on about the need to radically dismantle the current drug policy. It's one honest, well-informed side with all the supportable-by-reason ideas, up against a pro-status-quo monolith of ignorance and/or malice that has defaulted in the realm of ideas, with no arguments on offer at all. There's no other explanation for this present status quo, there's no excuse for it, and Jefferson would be so disgusted at this outright insanity, as to fucking puke his guts out.
What about you, reader? Are you, too, disgusted at this state of affairs enough to fucking puke your guts out?
(How, I wonder, did this situation come to exemplify, needlessly-tragically, today's mainstream intellectual state? Whatever you do, Private Pyle, don't fail to integrate, that would break my fucking heart! Oh that's right, Private Pyle, don't make any fucking effort to get to the top of the fucking obstacle. If God would have wanted you up there he would have miracled your ass up there by now, wouldn't he? Come on, Pyle, move it! Up and over, up and over! Are you quitting on me? Well, are you? Then quit, you slimy fucking walrus-looking piece of shit! Get the fuck off of my obstacle! Get the fuck down off of my obstacle!)
Also, as UP-blog-regulars know, the clock's ticking on that 4/20 thingy.
How does one declare "Checkmate, asshole," when the opponent has left the table, or never came to play at all? How can one even say that it isn't worthy fucking adversaries we're up against, when no adversary has even shown up? I declare for any and all with wisdom-loving ears to hear: This is fucking ridiculous!
Friday, February 22, 2013
The Oscars: a cinephile's thoughts
(If you don't know what "cinephile" means and entails, then you're probably much too out of your element to be reading this posting.)
P.S. "Never pay any attention to what critics say. Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic." - Jean Sibelius
(take that, Ms. Kael, ya effing philistine)
Perhaps the most appropriate response to anyone asking me what I think of this coming Sunday's Academy Awards would be, "I don't think of them." To explain the basis for this, in full, would involve a systematized presentation best reserved for non-blog publication. Anyway, I have some rather simple criteria for assessing the merits of a film with an eye to the long-run and history. The first and most important is, "How likely am I to watch this film again, in the not-distant future?" That necessarily includes a question: "Is this film useful for purposes of formulating future philosophical and cultural commentaries?" That automatically cuts way down on the number of films that I think can stand the test of time, in this year's (or any other years') Academy Awards contest. Another criterion, this mainly for assessing the greatness of past films, is how many times I've actually watched a film. Having seen Taxi Driver half a dozen times or so, I'm not as likely to watch that again before I watch P.T. Anderson's The Master again (which I intend to do as soon as it comes out on Blu-Ray). To say I've seen a movie half a dozen times or so would suggest (though not confirm) that I've familiarized myself with it enough not to need to see it again soon. Point being, that I've seen Taxi Driver that many times and The Master so few, means an adjustment needs to be made for viewing opportunities. I'll need more time and opportunity to tell for sure whether The Master belongs in the pantheon of great films along with Taxi Driver.
(Speaking of the motion picture pantheon: having just re-watched Michael Mann's Heat, I would place it right up there. An effing masterpiece of plot-theme-characterization-style integration in which every major character gets more or less what's coming to her/him. Even better, heroism is evident there. I had seen it twice or thrice before, but it gets better with additional viewings. Never mind the cheesy-ish '80s-ish soundtrack; actually, embrace it: it's part of the mastery. The Pacino/De Niro coupling alone almost certainly makes it a must-see for anyone interested in movies. I mean, like, duhhh! [This looks promising.])
(Speaking of the motion picture pantheon: having just re-watched Michael Mann's Heat, I would place it right up there. An effing masterpiece of plot-theme-characterization-style integration in which every major character gets more or less what's coming to her/him. Even better, heroism is evident there. I had seen it twice or thrice before, but it gets better with additional viewings. Never mind the cheesy-ish '80s-ish soundtrack; actually, embrace it: it's part of the mastery. The Pacino/De Niro coupling alone almost certainly makes it a must-see for anyone interested in movies. I mean, like, duhhh! [This looks promising.])
Out of the ten nominated films this year, I have seen three of them so far - Django Unchained, Lincoln, and Silver Linings Playbook. To weed these out: I got the point of Lincoln the first time around; don't need to see it again. (This is the case for a great many historical or bio-pics.) Also, it's Spielberg, and I usually don't need to see a Spielberg film more than once these days (if I even see it - amazingly enough, I missed out on War of the Worlds!). Silver Linings Playbook was good, but certainly not worthy of the Oscar-buzzy 8 nominations. I'd see it again, but I don't know when. Its director, David O. Russell, doesn't have a particularly distinguished film-directing career. Among his other films, I'd be most likely to give I (Heart) Huckabees one more chance before deciding whether or not it's worth a damn. This leaves Django, which is recycled Tarantino, which does tell me this: I could see it again before all that long, just as I've seen Basterds twice, which was just about the right fill for me (and Django is basically Basterds pt. 2).
Indeed, at an unlikely online resource for movies which carries more credibility with me than any other (and which I'd rather not reveal here, in order to help keep it as exclusive as possible), the top three movies of 2012 are Django, Moonrise Kingdom, and The Master. I'll take the combination of these three over the three nominees that I've seen, without the slightest hesitation. (I haven't seen the odds-on front-runner, Argo, but I will on home video; would I ever need to see it more than once? I have my doubts....)
My approach to these things is rather director-centric, which is natural for a cinephile who accepts more or less an 'auteur' theory of filmmaking - that a film succeeds best as art (as distinguished from entertainment) when it reflects an integral directorial vision, and succeeds even better when it reflects a comprehensive or completist (or perfectionist/perfectivist) approach to the craft, which works out best in proportion to how intellectual the director is. By that standard, the un-nominated The Master easily outdoes these other three nominated pictures, in terms of value for future cultural and philosophical commentary. (I envision it being to the Academy's 2012 performance what 2001 is to the Academy's 1968 farce.) If that doesn't tell you a good deal about the true value of a film (vs. what's popular among the general public or in the academy), then I don't know what does.
Anyway, who are the greatest living English-language directors, by that standard? To get into a full explanation would, again, require a systematized treatment. Here's the rough list, followed by key films and the approximate number of times I've watched them:
Scorsese - Taxi Driver (6+), Casino (3+), Gangs of New York (3), Goodfellas (3), Raging Bull (3), Mean Streets (2)
Coppola - Godfather (3+), G2 (3+), Apocalypse Now (3+), The Conversation (2)
Malick - Tree of Life (1), The Thin Red Line (2), The New World (2), Days of Heaven (2+), Badlands (2)
Coens - Lebowski (10+), Miller's Crossing (3+), Fargo (3+), The Man Who Wasn't There (3+), A Serious Man (2), No Country for Old Men (2; more Cormac McCarthy than Coen?)
Lynch - Eraserhead (3), Blue Velvet (2 or 3), Mulholland Dr. (4-ish), The Elephant Man (2), The Straight Story (2)
P.T. Anderson - The Master (1), Punch-Drunk Love (3), There Will Be Blood (3), Magnolia (2), Boogie Nights (2)
Woody Allen - Annie Hall (3), Manhattan (2), Crimes and Misdemeanors (2), Bullets over Broadway (2), Match Point (1), Love and Death (1)
Tarantino - Pulp Fiction (4+), Reservoir Dogs (2+), Jackie Brown (2)
Clint Eastwood - Unforgiven (2), Million Dollar Baby (1), A Perfect World (1), Gran Torino (1)
Terry Gilliam - Brazil (2, and more to come), The Fisher King (2-ish, ditto), Twelve Monkeys (2), Fear and Loathing (1; more Hunter S. Thompson than Gilliam?)
Wes Anderson - The Royal Tenenbaums (2, and more to come), Rushmore (ditto), Moonrise Kingdom (1), Life Aquatic (2)
Polanski - Chinatown (3), Repulsion (2-ish) The Tenant (2), The Pianist (1)
Ridley Scott - The Duellists (3-ish), Blade Runner (3-ish), Alien (1 or 2), Thelma & Louise (1?) Gladiator (1?), Matchstick Men (1; would see again)
Spielberg - Schindler's List (3), Saving Private Ryan (2), Empire of the Sun (1), The Color Purple (1)
Peter Weir - Picnic at Hanging Rock (3+), Dead Poets Society (2), Fearless (2), The Truman Show (2)
Nicolas Roeg - Don't Look Now (3-ish), Walkabout (2), The Man Who Fell to Earth (2)
Rob Reiner - Princess Bride (3+), Spinal Tap (2; will watch again), Stand by Me (2; more S. King than Reiner?)
Hal Hartley - Henry Fool (3+), Trust (1; will watch again), Simple Men (ditto), The Unbelievable Truth (ditto)
Alexander Payne - Election (5-ish), About Schmidt (1 so far), Sideways (ditto), The Descendants (1)
David Fincher - Fight Club (3+; more Chuck P. than Fincher?), Se7en (2 or 3)
That's twenty directors, anyway. The likes of Christopher Nolan are marginal at best for inclusion here.
For comparison: I've seen the seven Kubrick films from Strangelove onward between 4 and 8 times apiece.
Anyway, that's what I think of this year's Oscars. And you'll probably learn more of serious relevance about them right here than just about anywhere else you look.
 |
| "Checkmate, assholes." - Stanley Kubrick to the Academy |
(take that, Ms. Kael, ya effing philistine)
Thursday, February 21, 2013
The "Ayn Rand is for children" meme
It is truer than any of her clueless leftist player-haters could barely begin to realize at this point; they are supremely foolish(ly ignorant) as to the why.
I mean, Kira Peikoff didn't turn out that bad, did she?
Peikoff's Philosophy of Education course (1985, according to the Russian Radical bibliography I have right here, and around the time daughter Kira is born). Integrate with observable concrete outcome of such an approach, 27ish years later. (Additional exercise: integrate Understanding Objectivism and The Romantic Manifesto with observable concrete outcome of the UO and TRM approach, namely: this here blog. Integrate; assign A+ grade, a.k.a.: "Perfective." [Further exercise: Integrate the foregoing with The DIM Hypothesis. Earn perfectivist medal badge. Await further instruction, from self, of course.]) Compare/contrast to the Comprachico alternative, which pretty much exemplifies what the educational Left has to offer to the young - and, in turn, the caliber of minds emerging from our current, non-Jefferstotelian public school system.
Check, and mate.
(About the only thing that the Chicago Bozo and I agree on is the need for a philosophically-educated citizenry and - in generic terms - about the current cultural bankruptcy in America. But I "get" Rand and he clearly doesn't, while I also know when to keep my own yap shut about Nietzsche. The Reginster book (Affirming Life) was quite helpful, BTW, for understanding Nietzsche. Why won't the Chicago Bozo even bother to read secondary Rand literature that has a clue about Rand? It's Salon.com and Alternet.org hit pieces, when it could be Russian Radical, OPAR, Virtuous Egoist, and Gotthelf. Vice of one-sidedness, I declare for all with wisdom-loving ears to hear! My knowledge of Nietzsche could totally kick the ass of his "knowledge" of Rand (which amounts to: jack shit), and my study so far has been secondary literature only - Kaufmann and Reginster - in addition to that Fountainhead intro describing the author's sense-of-life similarities to Nietzsche, which ties in with a Kaufmann editorial footnote to a key aphorism, referencing Aristotle and the noble soul as a lover of self, which sheds crucial light on the egoist character of Rand's perfectivist eudaimonism. All of a sudden, Rand looks like an Aristotelianized post-Nietzschean, which sounds way cooler than what Bozo-Boy evidently has to offer, which reeks of a politicized, Us-vs.-Them, pathologically elitist, mean-spirited, and - worst of all - malevolent-universe-ish mindset. Consider: Is it some kind of effing accident that the American cultural dialectic is evidently converging on Ayn Rand, an avowed neo-Aristotelian? No, it is not. Ayn Rand is for children, and adults, all of whom have a vital need to integrate mentally. I mean, duhhhh! Also, my knowledge of the film canon vastly exceeds the Chicago Bozo's, and aesthetics is central to philosophy (just like Nietzsche would have said, Bozo-Boy). So clearly I'm a vastly superior philosopher than he, at this time. Also, Aristotle is the obvious perfectivist trump card in philosophical debate, and I'm definitely more Aristotelian than he! And also much more capitalist in ethos, as anyone with a clue ought to be. I blog about individualism (and in connection with eudaimonism, a moral theory with uniquely deep meaning-of-life resonance); he does not. Strike three, the Bozo's out!)
Two more months of checkmating guaranteed! And then what? ;-)
-UP
:-p
I mean, Kira Peikoff didn't turn out that bad, did she?
Peikoff's Philosophy of Education course (1985, according to the Russian Radical bibliography I have right here, and around the time daughter Kira is born). Integrate with observable concrete outcome of such an approach, 27ish years later. (Additional exercise: integrate Understanding Objectivism and The Romantic Manifesto with observable concrete outcome of the UO and TRM approach, namely: this here blog. Integrate; assign A+ grade, a.k.a.: "Perfective." [Further exercise: Integrate the foregoing with The DIM Hypothesis. Earn perfectivist medal badge. Await further instruction, from self, of course.]) Compare/contrast to the Comprachico alternative, which pretty much exemplifies what the educational Left has to offer to the young - and, in turn, the caliber of minds emerging from our current, non-Jefferstotelian public school system.
Check, and mate.
(About the only thing that the Chicago Bozo and I agree on is the need for a philosophically-educated citizenry and - in generic terms - about the current cultural bankruptcy in America. But I "get" Rand and he clearly doesn't, while I also know when to keep my own yap shut about Nietzsche. The Reginster book (Affirming Life) was quite helpful, BTW, for understanding Nietzsche. Why won't the Chicago Bozo even bother to read secondary Rand literature that has a clue about Rand? It's Salon.com and Alternet.org hit pieces, when it could be Russian Radical, OPAR, Virtuous Egoist, and Gotthelf. Vice of one-sidedness, I declare for all with wisdom-loving ears to hear! My knowledge of Nietzsche could totally kick the ass of his "knowledge" of Rand (which amounts to: jack shit), and my study so far has been secondary literature only - Kaufmann and Reginster - in addition to that Fountainhead intro describing the author's sense-of-life similarities to Nietzsche, which ties in with a Kaufmann editorial footnote to a key aphorism, referencing Aristotle and the noble soul as a lover of self, which sheds crucial light on the egoist character of Rand's perfectivist eudaimonism. All of a sudden, Rand looks like an Aristotelianized post-Nietzschean, which sounds way cooler than what Bozo-Boy evidently has to offer, which reeks of a politicized, Us-vs.-Them, pathologically elitist, mean-spirited, and - worst of all - malevolent-universe-ish mindset. Consider: Is it some kind of effing accident that the American cultural dialectic is evidently converging on Ayn Rand, an avowed neo-Aristotelian? No, it is not. Ayn Rand is for children, and adults, all of whom have a vital need to integrate mentally. I mean, duhhhh! Also, my knowledge of the film canon vastly exceeds the Chicago Bozo's, and aesthetics is central to philosophy (just like Nietzsche would have said, Bozo-Boy). So clearly I'm a vastly superior philosopher than he, at this time. Also, Aristotle is the obvious perfectivist trump card in philosophical debate, and I'm definitely more Aristotelian than he! And also much more capitalist in ethos, as anyone with a clue ought to be. I blog about individualism (and in connection with eudaimonism, a moral theory with uniquely deep meaning-of-life resonance); he does not. Strike three, the Bozo's out!)
 |
| "Checkmate, asshole." |
Two more months of checkmating guaranteed! And then what? ;-)
-UP
:-p
 |
| A Real-Life Heroine, in Perfectivist Terms |
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Today (2/20/2013)
That date could mean only one thing - the two-month mark on the countdown to the 4/20 Ultimate Cliff. Yes, for any newbies reading this, that's the date I've set for going "on strike," withdrawing the products of my mind from public circulation, unless a number of eminently reasonable demands are met by that date, including the legalization of cannabis for all adults 21 and over in all jurisdictions in the United States (preferably coupled with a solid program of public education on the effects of cannabis, to go along with education in tons of other subjects the totality of which form an integrated conceptual whole very much needed by the youth, who naturally yearn for cognitive integrity in their most intellectually-formative years). The right to toke is there in the Ninth Amendment, and it's what Jefferson would support in a heartbeat. It's a right Bob Marley would get up and stand up for. It's a cognitive Saganizer for many, and potentially many more. (So who are the effing idiots standing in the way, exactly? They should be pushovers.) Put that material in your in your "primacy of intellect" pipe and smoke it.
Mental exchange of the day:
CRITICS OF AYN RAND: "You have no children in your novels."
AYN RAND TO CRITICS: "Those authors you like so much? They have no heroes in theirs."
CRITICS OF AYN RAND: "Touche!"
AYN RAND TO CRITICS: "Checkmate, assholes."
Is this like shooting fish in a barrel, or what? :-D Man, if only the Left (and its comically-ignorant reddiot spawn) could mount a remotely respectable criticism of Ayn Rand of all people, a full half-century after the publication of Atlas Shrugged.... Instead, what we get today from them is mostly intellectually-childish imbecility. What we have here is a failure to integrate, and therefore a loss of great amounts of intellectual credibility for leftists. Viz.:
I dare anyone to go find and someone who's read through Rand's corpus of writings thoroughly (it couldn't exceed a dozen or so volumes, could it? how effing hard can that be to do?), and engaged the secondary literature (including the spoken canon - in other words, the infamously excruciating mind-numbing drudgery of Leonard Peikoff lecture courses), and still come out talking the same shit - or anything remotely like that shit - about her. I effing double and triple dog dare anyone to do it. I think if there were such an individual, I'm pretty sure I'd have heard about her/him by now. (I consider myself to be pretty thorough/perfectivist about this kind of shit.) The only thing that the Left has got her on is her bad polemics, and the Left ain't no sweetie-pie itself in that department, all the academic resources at its avail notwithstanding. Anyway, the role of the mind in man's existence is key for Rand, and absolute independence of the mind (given the nature of the mind and its functioning) is thereby also key. None but poorly-trained intellectual imbeciles - like Donny, out of his element, like a little child wandering into the middle of a movie - would have a problem with that, right?
So. Where does that put our cultural discourse, going forward? Is it more intellectually-childish imbecility from leftist player-haters, or more in the way of heroes, the benevolent universe premise, sense of life, and such? Does this here blog more or less become Ground Zero for that cultural discourse in the near future? If so, why? If not, why not? Something to think about. Glenn Beck is already outdoing you leftist fools in the intellectual department, for crying out loud, and he's yet to even take a Peikoff course, or read Norton's Personal Destinies, or log thousands of hours of Howard Stern show listening, or Saganize his cognition, or memorize much of the film canon and then work to integrate it into a functioning mental unit for later processing. And yet, while Beck discusses Ray Kurzweil ("The Singularity Guy"), the media "progressives" focus instead on the latest cabinet nominee filibustering; do you see some effed-up priorities on someone's part here? If these fools can't tell by now that the theme of Atlas Shrugged is not empathy-disregarding capitalist ubermensch-ism (a chicken-shit strawman in any event), but the role of the mind in man's existence, that's Exhibit A right there that they're doomed as an intellectual and political movement. Exhibit B would be when they claim that the fundamental virtue for Rand is "selfishness" instead of the correct answer as to the chief Randian virtue: (Aristotelian) rationality. Such piss-poor comprehension of ideas! Whence does this pathology emerge and fester? By golly, I put it in the most extreme terms applicable and it's still 100% spot-on, as any objective truth-observant light of history shall document. Not too bad, huh?)
Also, you can't separate aesthetics from the rest of the philosophy. Just thought I'd throw that out there off the cuff for consideration. (Benevolent universe premise and heroism and sense of life - they being as much at the core of Rand's philosophy as her method of intellectual integration and her advocacy of reason as human beings' only absolute. Why does the Left hate all that so efffing much, or so it would appear?) Also, how does that principle integrate with the film canon, anyway? Anyway, the goal remains: a neo-Aristotelian utopia. Aristotle and Jefferson rolled into one, minus the slavery stuff and other imperfections. Doable. But how quickly? Keep in mind that Jefferstotle doesn't suffer fools gladly. Checkmate in 3...2...1...
Mental exchange of the day:
CRITICS OF AYN RAND: "You have no children in your novels."
AYN RAND TO CRITICS: "Those authors you like so much? They have no heroes in theirs."
CRITICS OF AYN RAND: "Touche!"
AYN RAND TO CRITICS: "Checkmate, assholes."
Is this like shooting fish in a barrel, or what? :-D Man, if only the Left (and its comically-ignorant reddiot spawn) could mount a remotely respectable criticism of Ayn Rand of all people, a full half-century after the publication of Atlas Shrugged.... Instead, what we get today from them is mostly intellectually-childish imbecility. What we have here is a failure to integrate, and therefore a loss of great amounts of intellectual credibility for leftists. Viz.:
"The political aspects of Atlas Shrugged are not its theme. Its theme is primarily ethical-epistemological: the role of the mind in man's existence - and politics, necessarily, is one of the theme's consequences. But the epistemological chaos of our age, fostered by modern philosophy, is such that many young readers find it difficult to translate abstractions into political principles and apply them to the evaluation of today's events. This present book may help them. It is a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged." -Ayn Rand, "Introduction," Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, p. ix (pb).
I dare anyone to go find and someone who's read through Rand's corpus of writings thoroughly (it couldn't exceed a dozen or so volumes, could it? how effing hard can that be to do?), and engaged the secondary literature (including the spoken canon - in other words, the infamously excruciating mind-numbing drudgery of Leonard Peikoff lecture courses), and still come out talking the same shit - or anything remotely like that shit - about her. I effing double and triple dog dare anyone to do it. I think if there were such an individual, I'm pretty sure I'd have heard about her/him by now. (I consider myself to be pretty thorough/perfectivist about this kind of shit.) The only thing that the Left has got her on is her bad polemics, and the Left ain't no sweetie-pie itself in that department, all the academic resources at its avail notwithstanding. Anyway, the role of the mind in man's existence is key for Rand, and absolute independence of the mind (given the nature of the mind and its functioning) is thereby also key. None but poorly-trained intellectual imbeciles - like Donny, out of his element, like a little child wandering into the middle of a movie - would have a problem with that, right?
So. Where does that put our cultural discourse, going forward? Is it more intellectually-childish imbecility from leftist player-haters, or more in the way of heroes, the benevolent universe premise, sense of life, and such? Does this here blog more or less become Ground Zero for that cultural discourse in the near future? If so, why? If not, why not? Something to think about. Glenn Beck is already outdoing you leftist fools in the intellectual department, for crying out loud, and he's yet to even take a Peikoff course, or read Norton's Personal Destinies, or log thousands of hours of Howard Stern show listening, or Saganize his cognition, or memorize much of the film canon and then work to integrate it into a functioning mental unit for later processing. And yet, while Beck discusses Ray Kurzweil ("The Singularity Guy"), the media "progressives" focus instead on the latest cabinet nominee filibustering; do you see some effed-up priorities on someone's part here? If these fools can't tell by now that the theme of Atlas Shrugged is not empathy-disregarding capitalist ubermensch-ism (a chicken-shit strawman in any event), but the role of the mind in man's existence, that's Exhibit A right there that they're doomed as an intellectual and political movement. Exhibit B would be when they claim that the fundamental virtue for Rand is "selfishness" instead of the correct answer as to the chief Randian virtue: (Aristotelian) rationality. Such piss-poor comprehension of ideas! Whence does this pathology emerge and fester? By golly, I put it in the most extreme terms applicable and it's still 100% spot-on, as any objective truth-observant light of history shall document. Not too bad, huh?)
Also, you can't separate aesthetics from the rest of the philosophy. Just thought I'd throw that out there off the cuff for consideration. (Benevolent universe premise and heroism and sense of life - they being as much at the core of Rand's philosophy as her method of intellectual integration and her advocacy of reason as human beings' only absolute. Why does the Left hate all that so efffing much, or so it would appear?) Also, how does that principle integrate with the film canon, anyway? Anyway, the goal remains: a neo-Aristotelian utopia. Aristotle and Jefferson rolled into one, minus the slavery stuff and other imperfections. Doable. But how quickly? Keep in mind that Jefferstotle doesn't suffer fools gladly. Checkmate in 3...2...1...
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Poor Sully (poor America!)
[Okay, so America isn't quite as poor as Sully's place in the current discourse would indicate. But if that status quo were to continue, with the likes of Sully giving away the case for what made America great, we might well end up in deep poop.]
So I was doing an Ayn Rand search in the "Blogs" tab of Google search, and this link by Sully appears, which references Boston U. Professor of Political Science Alan Wolfe's piece-of-shit article in the online Chronicle of Higher Education last year (which I briefly touch upon here).
(Just for once, will there ever be an interwebbed critical article on Rand by a professor of philosophy, conversant with the other side? There is critical discussion by Swanton and Cullyer in that recent book on Rand's ethics and in the brand-new book by James P. Sterba, long-time proponent of a "from liberty to welfare" argument which I've somehow managed not to address in this blog - yet. From the available Amazon.com "preview" feature, Sterba correctly identifies Rand's ethics as a version of Aristotelianism [Chapter 5] - now that's progress! - and given all the pages left out of the Amazon preview feature I can't yet adequately assess his arguments there regarding Rand or much of anything else. Anyway, the Ayn Rand being discussed by these philosophical critics in these hard-copy books bears next to no resemblance to the "Ayn Rand" that Sully and many other fools on the interwebs speak of. Okay, okay, so there are webbed articles criticizing Rand available here, including from Profs. Bass, Huemer, and Vallicella, which partly answers my question . . . and guess what, that Rand bears hardly any resemblance to the incompetently-depicted Rand appearing all over elsewhere on the interwebs, either. There are other relevant distinctions pertaining to these articles to make as well, for another blog entry; one of them has to do with whether Randian egoism is indeed correctly interpreted as a version of Aristotelianism - i.e., of perfectivism. ;-) )
Anyway, this blog entry isn't (directly) about Rand, it's about the sad state of the political blogosphere as reflected by arguably its most representative figure, Andrew Sullivan. (For the positive, the antidote to this sad state, try here for starters.) The aforementioned Google search brought be to Sullivan's "Dish" (which I hardly read otherwise).
Speaking of sad states, how about The Dish's masthead, taking pride (however ironically or humorously) in being "biased and balanced"? The whole idea among philosophers, of course, is to fight like hell against any biasing influences - hence the whole goddamn enterprise of philosophy, to weed out bullshit and fallacies and wishful thinking and inexactness, so as to differentiate mere opinion from knowledge. (The success of that very enterprise - reflected most smashingly by the success of modern science - gives lie to whatever thrust there might have been behind Plantinga's "evolutionary argument against naturalism," discussed here. We can reason past initial biases which were selected for survival value, and that's all there is to it. Also, how does Plantinga's free will theodicy account for the suffering of non-human animals? Is their undeserved and morally-pointless suffering justified by the "greater good" of human freedom? Is God a utilitarian? Have I misunderstood the argument? Have I seen anything by Plantinga to be all that impressed by? Does the notion of a maximally excellent or perfect being, which is at the root of his modal-ontological argument, make any more sense than Anselm's original notion? And why is it that, seemingly, the best philosophy of religion nowadays is associated with panentheism, of which Plantinga is not a known proponent? How did I get off on this tangent? Oh. Bias. It's like Sully takes pride in being a fool.)
So, Sully's "latest keepers" include these items:
So I was doing an Ayn Rand search in the "Blogs" tab of Google search, and this link by Sully appears, which references Boston U. Professor of Political Science Alan Wolfe's piece-of-shit article in the online Chronicle of Higher Education last year (which I briefly touch upon here).
(Just for once, will there ever be an interwebbed critical article on Rand by a professor of philosophy, conversant with the other side? There is critical discussion by Swanton and Cullyer in that recent book on Rand's ethics and in the brand-new book by James P. Sterba, long-time proponent of a "from liberty to welfare" argument which I've somehow managed not to address in this blog - yet. From the available Amazon.com "preview" feature, Sterba correctly identifies Rand's ethics as a version of Aristotelianism [Chapter 5] - now that's progress! - and given all the pages left out of the Amazon preview feature I can't yet adequately assess his arguments there regarding Rand or much of anything else. Anyway, the Ayn Rand being discussed by these philosophical critics in these hard-copy books bears next to no resemblance to the "Ayn Rand" that Sully and many other fools on the interwebs speak of. Okay, okay, so there are webbed articles criticizing Rand available here, including from Profs. Bass, Huemer, and Vallicella, which partly answers my question . . . and guess what, that Rand bears hardly any resemblance to the incompetently-depicted Rand appearing all over elsewhere on the interwebs, either. There are other relevant distinctions pertaining to these articles to make as well, for another blog entry; one of them has to do with whether Randian egoism is indeed correctly interpreted as a version of Aristotelianism - i.e., of perfectivism. ;-) )
Anyway, this blog entry isn't (directly) about Rand, it's about the sad state of the political blogosphere as reflected by arguably its most representative figure, Andrew Sullivan. (For the positive, the antidote to this sad state, try here for starters.) The aforementioned Google search brought be to Sullivan's "Dish" (which I hardly read otherwise).
Speaking of sad states, how about The Dish's masthead, taking pride (however ironically or humorously) in being "biased and balanced"? The whole idea among philosophers, of course, is to fight like hell against any biasing influences - hence the whole goddamn enterprise of philosophy, to weed out bullshit and fallacies and wishful thinking and inexactness, so as to differentiate mere opinion from knowledge. (The success of that very enterprise - reflected most smashingly by the success of modern science - gives lie to whatever thrust there might have been behind Plantinga's "evolutionary argument against naturalism," discussed here. We can reason past initial biases which were selected for survival value, and that's all there is to it. Also, how does Plantinga's free will theodicy account for the suffering of non-human animals? Is their undeserved and morally-pointless suffering justified by the "greater good" of human freedom? Is God a utilitarian? Have I misunderstood the argument? Have I seen anything by Plantinga to be all that impressed by? Does the notion of a maximally excellent or perfect being, which is at the root of his modal-ontological argument, make any more sense than Anselm's original notion? And why is it that, seemingly, the best philosophy of religion nowadays is associated with panentheism, of which Plantinga is not a known proponent? How did I get off on this tangent? Oh. Bias. It's like Sully takes pride in being a fool.)
So, Sully's "latest keepers" include these items:
Um, Sully is about five years late to asking this question. Glenn Greenwald - one of the major redeeming figures of the blogosphere - asked this question at the time that Obama voted on the 2008 FISA bill to grant retroactive immunity to telecoms complicit in illegal eavesdropping. One might well rationalize that breach of integrity as a necessary maneuver to secure establishment support so that the charismatic and very-ambitious ("Yes we can!") future head of state could then reform the establishment from within. (Was it naivete to buy into that, or was it a last gasp of idealism in an age of cynicism? Keep in mind that the only reason this asshole got re-elected was because the opposition party is half-nuts, the only viable candidate it offered being an out-of-touch, no-ideals-having, culturally-reactionary, personally-boring, retroactively-retiring plutocrat.) Even then, the signs of unraveling were already there - as Greenwald was pointing out - in the presidential transition season between Nov. 2008 and Jan. 2009 when the future head of state brought onto his team scores of members of the very cynical, hypocritical establishment he had (fraudulently) rhetoricized against. It was then that lingering sentiments of idealism about this future "leader" should have been seriously called into question or abandoned outright. This "leader" is never going to do anything to seriously address the coming $107 trillion Social Security and Medicare cluster-fuck, is he. None of the "leaders" in the District of Cynicism wants to even mention it.
The story of this "leader's" initial appeal - his stated vision in 2008 - and of his cowardly betrayal of that vision is told in summary essence in this NPR interview with Harvard Law (the irony!) professor Lawrence Lessig.
Sully pleads:
"Come back, Mr Obama. The nation turns its lonely eyes to you."
Joe DiMaggio had a 56-game hitting streak (and 72 games out of 73) and hit 361 career home runs with a homer-killing deep left field in Yankee stadium, along with three prime ballplaying years away for military service. What's-his-face was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing, and then later killed U.S. citizens with no judicial oversight. What the fuck is the comparison supposed to be here? I mean, Joe D. wasn't the hitter that Ted Williams was, and neither does the current head of state merit mention in the same breath as the guys depicted on Mt. Rushmore, but c'mon. Joe D.'s highest similarity score through age 27 was Hank Aaron, for crying out loud. Who tops the current hypocrite-in-chief's similarity score chart? I'll let you, the reader, guess who the Babe Ruth of American presidents was. Babe Ruth was on his way to the Hall of Fame as a pitcher, keep in mind, before going on to slug .690 lifetime.
The story of this "leader's" initial appeal - his stated vision in 2008 - and of his cowardly betrayal of that vision is told in summary essence in this NPR interview with Harvard Law (the irony!) professor Lawrence Lessig.
Sully pleads:
"Come back, Mr Obama. The nation turns its lonely eyes to you."
Joe DiMaggio had a 56-game hitting streak (and 72 games out of 73) and hit 361 career home runs with a homer-killing deep left field in Yankee stadium, along with three prime ballplaying years away for military service. What's-his-face was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing, and then later killed U.S. citizens with no judicial oversight. What the fuck is the comparison supposed to be here? I mean, Joe D. wasn't the hitter that Ted Williams was, and neither does the current head of state merit mention in the same breath as the guys depicted on Mt. Rushmore, but c'mon. Joe D.'s highest similarity score through age 27 was Hank Aaron, for crying out loud. Who tops the current hypocrite-in-chief's similarity score chart? I'll let you, the reader, guess who the Babe Ruth of American presidents was. Babe Ruth was on his way to the Hall of Fame as a pitcher, keep in mind, before going on to slug .690 lifetime.
There are various gems from Sully in that exchange; a sampling:
A: But the kind of Christianity that Jefferson espoused—
---
A: No, because philosophy doesn’t help you live.
A: No, because philosophy doesn’t help you live.
---
A: Religion is the practical impulse, it is how do we live, how do we get through the day knowing that we could die tomorrow, knowing that we are mortally—
A: Religion is the practical impulse, it is how do we live, how do we get through the day knowing that we could die tomorrow, knowing that we are mortally—
H: But how does the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin help you to do that?
A: That particular belief may not.
Sully, of course, has no idea just how embarrassing his performance in that debate really is.
Oh. Enhancing the blog in the cosmetic dept., not in the dept. it needs real enhancing ("philosophy doesn't help you live" - this sonofabitch taught at Harvard for Prof. Sandel????). Gee, thanks.
For insight and edification on the nature of today's political-cultural scene, read Greenwald and the other blogs listed in the column to your right, instead.
 |
| "Checkmate, asshole." |
Monday, February 4, 2013
On to greener forum pastures
It was almost two years ago that I bid indefinite farewell to reddit's /r/"philosophy" forum, and I'm doing so again now. I've inductively determined that the very comments format of reddit - involving anonymous upvotes and downvotes - is inherently corrupt and anti-philosophical. The desire for reddit admins and users to maintain quality content is going to have to be done some other way for it not to be the equivalent of mob rule; mob rule is incompatible with philosophy as such.
I suppose that were reddit not so overwhelmingly left-wing in its user base, the problem from the standpoint of political-minority users there would not be so manifest, but it is inductively manifest what happens when an ignorant mob does get its mitts on the approval and disapproval buttons whatever the popular opinion. The very notion that ignorant mob rule does not respond well to satire should be the first tip-off of the inherent problem with such a format. I had thought that perhaps something good might come from an earnest return-to-reddit effort to calmly and rationally defend unpopular opinions there, but evidently it is not to be. So much the worse for reddit's credibility as far as intellectual content goes. In principle it differs not at all from Gail Wynand's Banner.
(I'm just amazed that its admins have yet - after all this time, after all the damning evidence they cannot have failed to see - to revise the comments format appropriately. Every which excuse that might come up for not doing so is not good enough.)
Think of it this way: if you are a reader of reddit threads - not even a commenter - the mob gets to determine for you what content is deemed worthwhile enough to reach your attention first and foremost. How precisely does that differ in principle from the Old Establishment Media where it's the broadcast media people who decide what's to be of interest to the audience? Their decisions there are based on ratings and therefore advertising revenue, after all - once again, the mob deciding for the individual.
And that, of course, means the lowest common denominator. Ever wonder how the History Channel ended up stuffing "Pawn Stars" down the viewer's gullet? The fundamental underlying problem here is, of course, the state of the culture, to which the Corporate Media Establishment is responsive based on bottom-line concerns. So what exactly has really changed since before the internets in this regard? Same shit, new media. How, do you think, is it that Sully is the leading (by mob rule standards) figure in the blogosphere despite his demonstrable ignorance on key philosophical matters affecting the cultural discourse? How else does a similar un-Jeffersonian ignoramus occupying the Oval Office get elected twice?
-----
And, so, I am moving over to web-based formats where the the primary determinant of content-exposure is individual interest in responding to it, the way it should always be - the way it was in the days of Usenet. An added advantage over reddit's format is the lack of a "hot" 24-hour-news-cycle that decides for the user that once a story is more than a day old, it's no longer of interest. Threads on web formats go on for as long as the individual user is interested in participating. That might otherwise make sense for a news outlet, but from an intellectual standpoint it encourages short-term-focused, concrete-bound methods of thinking.
So. In this blog's headline banner I've switched from having a link to my reddit user profile, over to links to my profiles for newly-created accounts on web-based philosophy forums. I had to shorten the links to tinylink URLs due to a Google Blogger character limit for header text. The links are, in order, to: Online Philosophy Club, PhilosophyForums.com (my account here has been active for a couple years now, actually), and I Love Philosophy. The first and third of these require a registered-user login to view the profile, but none of them requires logins to view the main forum discussions.
I do, again, thank /r/"philosophy" for steering me in a better direction. ;-) I wish there were something I could do as an individual to help out those poor young souls on reddit being intellectually-stunted to the extent that their viewing is shaped by the hivemind's mob rule, but I've tried my best twice now over there; over here, on this blog, I can only identify and explain the problem in the hopes that the message gets out. There may well be a perfective mode of navigating the "social media" format that has become the internet, but I am still in the process of figuring out what that might be. Large as reddit's subscriber and viewer numbers, I've decided that I'll probably have more success in my aims on the web forums. My only hope is that out-and-out mob rule formats such as reddit's current one will be widely discredited in the long run in favor of something rational.
Which raises the question: why did Usenet fall out of internet prominence to begin with? Does it have to do with early users being more, ahem, intelligent on average than the latecomers? What sort of mentality does the mob-rule version of social media appeal to, anyway? And what are the professional educators doing about it?
-----
I'd thought I'd take this opportunity for a reminder: two and a half months till my Ultimate Cliff deadline, 4/20/2013. All of my demands are no-brainers, but I just might - might - whittle it down to the cannabis-legalization one given the date of the event (whatever that event is to be - it'd make for a neat dramatic narrative whatever it is, am I wrong?), and move the ultimatum for the other demands to a later date. Seeing legalization happen by 4/20 would be awesome in its own right, wouldn't it?
I suppose that were reddit not so overwhelmingly left-wing in its user base, the problem from the standpoint of political-minority users there would not be so manifest, but it is inductively manifest what happens when an ignorant mob does get its mitts on the approval and disapproval buttons whatever the popular opinion. The very notion that ignorant mob rule does not respond well to satire should be the first tip-off of the inherent problem with such a format. I had thought that perhaps something good might come from an earnest return-to-reddit effort to calmly and rationally defend unpopular opinions there, but evidently it is not to be. So much the worse for reddit's credibility as far as intellectual content goes. In principle it differs not at all from Gail Wynand's Banner.
(I'm just amazed that its admins have yet - after all this time, after all the damning evidence they cannot have failed to see - to revise the comments format appropriately. Every which excuse that might come up for not doing so is not good enough.)
Think of it this way: if you are a reader of reddit threads - not even a commenter - the mob gets to determine for you what content is deemed worthwhile enough to reach your attention first and foremost. How precisely does that differ in principle from the Old Establishment Media where it's the broadcast media people who decide what's to be of interest to the audience? Their decisions there are based on ratings and therefore advertising revenue, after all - once again, the mob deciding for the individual.
And that, of course, means the lowest common denominator. Ever wonder how the History Channel ended up stuffing "Pawn Stars" down the viewer's gullet? The fundamental underlying problem here is, of course, the state of the culture, to which the Corporate Media Establishment is responsive based on bottom-line concerns. So what exactly has really changed since before the internets in this regard? Same shit, new media. How, do you think, is it that Sully is the leading (by mob rule standards) figure in the blogosphere despite his demonstrable ignorance on key philosophical matters affecting the cultural discourse? How else does a similar un-Jeffersonian ignoramus occupying the Oval Office get elected twice?
-----
And, so, I am moving over to web-based formats where the the primary determinant of content-exposure is individual interest in responding to it, the way it should always be - the way it was in the days of Usenet. An added advantage over reddit's format is the lack of a "hot" 24-hour-news-cycle that decides for the user that once a story is more than a day old, it's no longer of interest. Threads on web formats go on for as long as the individual user is interested in participating. That might otherwise make sense for a news outlet, but from an intellectual standpoint it encourages short-term-focused, concrete-bound methods of thinking.
So. In this blog's headline banner I've switched from having a link to my reddit user profile, over to links to my profiles for newly-created accounts on web-based philosophy forums. I had to shorten the links to tinylink URLs due to a Google Blogger character limit for header text. The links are, in order, to: Online Philosophy Club, PhilosophyForums.com (my account here has been active for a couple years now, actually), and I Love Philosophy. The first and third of these require a registered-user login to view the profile, but none of them requires logins to view the main forum discussions.
I do, again, thank /r/"philosophy" for steering me in a better direction. ;-) I wish there were something I could do as an individual to help out those poor young souls on reddit being intellectually-stunted to the extent that their viewing is shaped by the hivemind's mob rule, but I've tried my best twice now over there; over here, on this blog, I can only identify and explain the problem in the hopes that the message gets out. There may well be a perfective mode of navigating the "social media" format that has become the internet, but I am still in the process of figuring out what that might be. Large as reddit's subscriber and viewer numbers, I've decided that I'll probably have more success in my aims on the web forums. My only hope is that out-and-out mob rule formats such as reddit's current one will be widely discredited in the long run in favor of something rational.
Which raises the question: why did Usenet fall out of internet prominence to begin with? Does it have to do with early users being more, ahem, intelligent on average than the latecomers? What sort of mentality does the mob-rule version of social media appeal to, anyway? And what are the professional educators doing about it?
-----
I'd thought I'd take this opportunity for a reminder: two and a half months till my Ultimate Cliff deadline, 4/20/2013. All of my demands are no-brainers, but I just might - might - whittle it down to the cannabis-legalization one given the date of the event (whatever that event is to be - it'd make for a neat dramatic narrative whatever it is, am I wrong?), and move the ultimatum for the other demands to a later date. Seeing legalization happen by 4/20 would be awesome in its own right, wouldn't it?
 |
| The Face of Billions and Billions on 4/20? |
EDIT: "Greener." ^_^
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Reddit's /r/philosophy: a fucking joke
(and a silver lining)
Exhibit A
It's all too obvious from this example (and it's only one among many) that the malicious, cowardly Rand-hating thugs who infest this otherwise-important social-media outlet for widely-viewed intellectual discourse don't care to have an argument on a level field of play. (Cowards! Weaklings! BUMS!) The downvoting patterns are specifically directed at burying Yours Truly's eminently sensible, factually-supported responses to the well-upvoted anti-Rand idiocy that is rampant there. That's not philosophy, that's a playground mentality intended to deceive the readership about the true nature of the discussion taking place there. This is the kind of crowd grown and bred by the university philosophy departments these days? That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, given the disgusting, pathological, politically-motivated pattern of behavior by a number of "eminent figures" in that profession.
I really don't know how this problem could be solved; it's a failing of the format that would not happen on a genuine Usenet-style format of old. It's a problem that reddit itself is going to have to fix by some useful and workable change of the format.
(There's also some other software problem that has been resulting in a whole lot of my posted comments being filtered by a spambot for reasons not yet ascertained by the mods there. Oh, well. It's discouraging enough to see what I spend much time posting there get buried by anonymous cowards when my comments do show up. (This is aside from the general feel someone such as myself gets from discussing Rand on /r/"philosophy": that I'm wading through a crowd of irrational bigots, probably much like trying to defend theism on /r/atheism. [Oh, if you think religious people can be irrational bigots, just watch the way so many of those in the "new atheist" movement react like poo-flinging monkeys toward anyone religious. "Liberals" can be much lower than the "conservatives" they so often stereotype.]) Discouragement is the malicious cowards' motivation, of course. I shall have to adjust my own course of action accordingly. One thing I'm sure of, however, is this: this epistemic aggression will not stand, man. Not in the long run. BUP.)
Perhaps the most discouraging thing of all - as a general proposition, not just in terms of concrete instances of injustice or against whom such malicious behavior is directed - is how the stifling of pro-Rand voices has implications beyond merely that for the nature and quality of philosophic discourse. As Peikoff explained at great length in Chapter 8 of OPAR, on the virtues, the effects of a little dishonesty, by the nature of reality and how all rational cognition is integrated, cannot but spread like a cancer to more and more facets of the dishonest person's existence. (The case of Nathaniel Branden's progressively worse and increasingly all-encompassing deceptions of Ayn Rand until it blew all up in the end - as it had to - serves as a striking illustration of the principle.) As anyone who reads this blogs regularly knows, this culture desperately needs an infusion of Aristotelianism in order to address its problems and challenges (much less move above and beyond toward a positive: big-time cultural flourishing). I don't know how many times it has to happen, for people to get the point that where Aristotelianism (or something like it - e.g., Jeffersonianism) is alive and well, cultures and societies have flourished in ways they didn't before.
As it happens, the single most influential intellectual figure on the American public scene for the last half century up until the present (who else would it be besides Rand?) is - as some of the nation's leading scholars of Aristotle will tell you - also a neo-Aristotelian. This makes it quite inescapable that in any serious discussion about how to move America forward into a period of enlightenment and flourishing - about what ideas to preach, what behaviors to encourage, what strategies to pursue - the name "Ayn Rand" cannot just somehow be pushed off to the side as irrelevant. This is simply the nature of things, an unalterable reality, an undeniable absolute. I think that if there were some way around that, I would have thought of it by now. But the (perfectivist) principle involved precludes it. It has to. Rand shares too fundamental a similarity to Aristotle and Jefferson for it not to be so. One doesn't have to like this reality to acknowledge it. Me, I've simply become accustomed to it; it matters not what my feelings about Rand are. I'm a perfectivist, and she's a forerunner of the idea, and that's all there is to it.
So, given all this, assuming that it's an infusion of Aristotelianism that we need, why couldn't we just say "let's go with Aristotle and/or Jefferson, they provide the best examples to follow." Okay, but how then do you manage to evade the logical consequence that Rand must enter the discussion? I can't think of a single fucking way it can happen. It's either-or. Either you accept Aristotelianism and Jeffersonianism - and therefore accept Rand in some fundamentally important sense - or you reject Rand and thereby in effect reject Aristotelianism and Jeffersonianism. The reddit /r/"philosophy" thugs, and all too many people in the academy, have chosen the latter course. What are the American People going to think about that when they come to find all this out? "mouse, meet Cat."
If these entities paid attention to Rand like they're supposed to - as Aristotle and Jefferson themselves would if they were around today, since their policy is not one of evasion but integration, particularly with respect to culturally-significant author-figures (this is no-brainer shit, is it not?) - then of course Aristotle would become their center of attention as well. One need only look at how the really smart people very much influenced by Rand end up being big-time Aristotle fans as well.
As things stand at the moment, most of the non-Randian crowd are completely oblivious to what Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses are all about. These courses used to be in the hundreds of dollars each, making them prohibitively expensive to the very people - college undergrads - for whom they would make the most difference. Now, they're marked down to around 10 bucks apiece. The completely-oblivious crowd does not know what this portends, but I do, and so do those who've listened to and absorbed the material contained therein. It spells doom for the oblivious ones (if they don't clean up their act). There's just no getting around the fact that when college undergrads by the thousands upon thousands get their digital hands on these courses, coupled with a growing academic literature on Rand, the older generation of intellectuals is going to be replaced over time by a bunch of Randian-Aristotelians - all for the better, of course. If I knew of a way around this eventuality, short of Apocalypse stepping the way, I think I would have figured it out by now. But, well, you know, A is A. ;-) And /r/"philosophy" is a fucking joke.
But seriously, what do the Rand-haters do in the event that a shit-ton of undergrads have Understanding Objectivism coursing through their veins? Now that's an ultimate hypothetical right there, a cultural-singularity type of event beyond which we can hardly predict. Perhaps the question to be asked first, is: will a shit-ton of undergrads have Understanding Objectivism coursing through their veins in the reasonably near future? If so, why? If not, why not? To listen to the Rand-haters, one might think they don't take such an eventuality seriously because, well, of course (for them) Objectivism is obviously shit and always will be. But they haven't listened to Understanding Objectivism, though, now have they. So what you then have to ask is whether someone could listen to Understanding Objectivism and come out of it not taking Objectivism seriously. But all the evidence I've inductively observed tells me that the chances of that happening are slim to none, but then again what if the available sample size is already biased and too small? (Huh. What a question to ask. I wonder what cognitive methodology would boldly facilitate one's asking such questions aimed at establishing the full context. Gee, lemme think....) But what if it isn't? Then what?
Well, then it comes down to an issue of how many of those intellectually-eager undergrads are going to buy up these $10 courses and proceed to go hog wild with their classmates and professors, a scenario where understanding Objectivism becomes the cool new hip fad in a way it just wasn't before. That might depend in good part on the use of existing media for advertising this material to the right demographic. That's a fairly capitalistic concept, ones that the people at the Ayn Rand Institute might be more well-attuned to more than just about any of the ideas-merchants out there. First off, they have Rand books selling like hotcakes, year in and year out. In the middle of those books are those postcards telling you where you can get more information on things like newsletters, campus clubs, recorded lecture courses, and so forth. You have a large number of existing Objectivists who've taken these courses telling the newer students of Objectivism on Facebook or wherever that "you've got to hear this course, it will really amplify your comprehension of the philosophy." It'll be all in (near-)unison directed toward the "newbies." And guess what, they won't cost an arm and a leg, either! You could get a couple dozen courses for what used to be the price for only one! And it's all Leonard Peikoff in his brilliantly engaging and entertaining lecturing style, too! Wow! What a fucking bargain, huh? A steal. Like, could this be for real? Did the ARI really do that? Why listen to music online for free when you could listen to Peikoff for 25 hours for $10? And maybe instead of getting drunk at the frat party the undies will spend that time doing the more cool thing by listening to a Peikoff lecture. Just maybe.
What was that about BUP again? You know, I'm feeling so much better now than when I began this posting. Took a negative and turned it into a positive. Lesson: don't let the filthy, scummy, slimy fucks get you down. Thanks for guiding me in this direction, /r/"philosophy," keep up the bad work! :-D
You can't refute perfectivism. :-)
 |
| "Checkmate, asshole." |
Saturday, February 2, 2013
An ultimate hypothetical
As an ideas-merchant I try to keep well-attuned to how an audience responds to framing. Example: I propose the idea of a perfectivist utopia characterized at root by people maximally exercising their intellects. The response may well be characterized by disbelief, incomprehension, cynicism, defensive cognitive bias or outright evasion, or who the hell knows what. (Hard to predict, see, just in how many ways people can fail to recognize a good idea for what it is. The best I can hope to do is to figure out ways to cut them off at the pass, do an end-around, be as dialectically comprehensive as I know how to be, set up as many safeguards 'twixt cup and lip . . . and then maybe there will be some success at getting the idea across.) One problem in framing the issue in terms of an intellectualist perfectivist utopia is the sheer unfamiliar-ness of the idea to so many. How can it possibly be concretized in their minds to their satisfaction given their limited context of knowledge? Concretes do help a lot, after all.
So the concrete I'll use for framing is one Thomas Jefferson. He's the guy that drafted the United States Declaration of Independence in 1976. He's more well-known, more visible to the average citizen, than the author of the Nicomachean Ethics. (In other words: If you polled the American citizenry and asked who authored the D of I, half of them might actually give the right answer. Ask them who authored the Nicomachean Ethics, you might be lucky to get one in five answering correctly. So the idea of presenting the latter as a basis for the cognitive revolution we so desperately need has a considerably greater chance of fuck-up on the transmission line.) Another concrete to pair Mr. Jefferson with might well be that guy whose face shows up on the $100 bill, but probably not that guy who authored The Rights of Man and Common Sense (notwithstanding how well-known and influential as that guy was among the early Americans). Perhaps the term "polymath" would draw blank stares, serving to throw the audience off the scent. Perhaps "excellence in all endeavors" would convey the(Aristotelian) idea to more populist effect. Jefferson and that guy on the $100 bill were polymaths strove for excellence in all endeavors.
How some guy ends up on the $100 bill, might very well intrigue a few in the audience. Perhaps that could lead in some interesting directions.
It so happens that these two comprehensive-excellence-pursuers were either founder or president of the American Philosophical Society. But so as not to distract the average citizen, one might want to avoid saying something like "if everyone lived the way the great philosophers did, . . . " because that would lead those who easily miss a point to wonder who would then do all those vitally important things like engineering, running businesses, conducting scientific research and development, raising kids, hitting home runs, cooking restaurant meals,growing the cannabis (oops, distraction) brewing the beer, directing the movies, balancing the books, performing open-heart surgery, etc. etc. etc. etc. - all those things "the philosophers don't do."
So we have to reframe this in terms of something like: constantly striving for improvement, which takes continuous learning, growth, intellectual curiosity and insatiability, development of talents, health-conscious lifestyles, cultivation of social relationships, seeing things from others' point of view rather than merely through one's own cognitive biases or filters, recognition and respect for human dignity and freedom, and other things listed on that hierarchy of needs thingy by that one psychologist guy.
Now, as it happens, carrying out these things successfully requires a love of wisdom, no question. That doesn't require that one sit atop the rock like that thinker statue whatamacallit with the chin resting upon hand all of the time - just some of the time at very least - and even that requires a good developmental environment from an early age, which includes decent nutrition, decent parenting, decent educational opportunities, and so forth. A decent community would do whatever is within reason to ensure that its young members have as much of a good developmental environment as possible. (Does this create a chicken-and-egg problem? How do the not-young people figure out how to be so, um - is "virtuous" the appropriate term here? - kind and decent in intention and efficacious in action so as to foster such developmental excellence for the young'uns? How do they do that, while also holding down a job and coming home tired, etc.? Well? Am I supposed to have all the answers?)
So, anyway, with that preamble out of the way, here's the hypothetical:
Say that the American People came to a broad minimal consensus: If weemulate (too distracting a word?) follow the example of behavior set by the greatest of the nation's Founding Fathers, especially TJ and the $100 bill guy - that is, if we sought to secure for ourselves and our family, friends, neighbors, and other community members the most optimal conditions for our flourishing (yeah, I think that is a good term to use - that mad-as-hell guy in Network uses it, too), that is to say, if we as a people sought to cultivate and foster the conditions under which people could flourish the way these gentlemen did in numerous endeavors be they science, philosophy, arts and letters, community and civic participation, statesmanship, business and entrepreneurship, education of one's fellow Americans, ethical and moral excellence, spiritual fulfillment, and so forth, then what kind of society might we come to inhabit?
(There's that pesky, distracting matter of their having owned slaves. We shouldn't follow their example in that regard, of course. Surely we can set aside that tree for the sake of the forest?)
Imagine our having a hypothetical conversation with these two men, asking their advice on how to improve the state of affairs in this country. Assume if you possibly can that in our hypothetical conversation these men have some 200 years of hindsight that they did not actually possess in their time, but which they would have if they were alive today. What would they think about what has become of the nation since their time - but more importantly, what advice would they offer for improvement? Might they appeal to various historical figures for inspiration? For example, Jefferson in some of his letters touted some ancient guys with names like Epictetus and Epicurus as deliverers of moral and practical wisdom. Also, while Jefferson didn't believe in the traditional God of theism, he did believe in a Creator who set the world in motion (a view popular at the time, known as deism), and also praised as a genius one Jesus of Nazareth; as framing for the average American citizen goes, that's some pretty good stuff, but Jefferson would (of course) urge us to seek wisdom from all kinds of sources (hence his knowledge of those ancient Epi-something guys, among many others).
I do believe Mr. J would lament the polling data pointing to unacceptable levels of ignorance among the citizenry, but he would also be pro-active about solutions. Beginning with the ignorance of the very political system he and his buddies founded, he might ask such things as: Why are the people this ignorant? Is it because they're just intellectually lazy, or has their political system gotten to where they are apathetic or too discouraged about participating in the political process? If we can devise a fix whereby they become genuinely interested in the political goings-on around them, their knowledge of such things will naturally expand. Were I interested in the fate of the Green Bay Packers, I'd know quite a bit about them. And while there's no obvious reason why every citizen ought to be interested in the Packers given their limited time and priorities, it's a plausible proposition that every citizen ought to be interested in our political system and ought to be able to pass a basic science literacy test even years after being a fifth grader. (That unbelievably awful show would have no place in a Jeffersonian culture.)
Now, in presenting such a hypothetical one might well encounter stubborn cynicism:
"People are just the way they are, hardwired and stuff, or Original Sin, you can't expect them to improve." (UP: Speak for yourself! Also, what about what that Harvard psychology guy has been saying about the decline in levels of violence over human history? I can dig up the reference if you're curious. Or how about slavery no longer being a societal norm? And, to cite this one 20th century author lady, if we have free will as the proponents of the Original Sin idea nevertheless say we do, then why couldn't the idea of Original Virtue make just as much sense?)
"IQ's will always be centered around 100, how do you expect people to get smarter?" (UP: Aren't literacy rates a lot higher these days than in the Dark Ages? Same basic genetic structure, yet better outcomes.)
"Those are great men, how do you expect ordinary people to live up to such lofty standards?" (UP: Who said anything about everyone becoming a Jefferson or $100 bill guy? Let's start with a more realistic idea: a considerably greater number of people of their caliber than at present - in effect, a shifting of the cultural bell curve. Besides, we're talking in essence about excellence of character.)
"You're trying to sneak in the idea of a Utopia under the guise of widely-implemented Jeffersonianism. But people - even reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful people - will always disagree among one another about various things. In a Utopia there isn't supposed to be such disagreement, since everyone is supposed to be 'perfect'." (UP: Call it what you will - Utopia, Jeffersonianism, Nicomachean Ethics-ism - what you're talking about is a strawman. This societal ideal need only meet certain minimum requirements, like nonviolence, stable social unions, a rule of law. Now, to get to such an ideal would take some amount of time and, in short, education. There's a good reason to think that in order to get to those minimum requirements just stated, the necessary process of education would lead to widespread improvement in moral character, which turns this society into not simply a "liberal, freedom-respecting" one, but also a highly virtue-encouraging one as "communitarian" theorists argue for. A niceintegration/synthesis reconciliation of these seemingly competing ideals, isn't it? And if some people even in such a social order somehow find it to their advantage to be among a criminal element, that's what the rule of law is still there for. But most likely by then those who comprise the society would have discovered much better ways of preventing and responding to criminal behavior than they do now. That's what you'd expect in a society in which intellectual curiosity and insatiable learning are a cultural norm rather than an exception.)
At this point, I'd have to leave it up to the hardcore cynic to come up with objections that even I have not yet anticipated. (I mean, shit, if they're that persistent and that creative at coming up with objections, how does that not just reinforce theperfectivist Jeffersonian point that humans can get pretty good at things if they set their minds to it? Now, is that an ultimate flanking of the potential opposition, or what? You can't refute Jeffersonianism. :-)
I.e.:
So the concrete I'll use for framing is one Thomas Jefferson. He's the guy that drafted the United States Declaration of Independence in 1976. He's more well-known, more visible to the average citizen, than the author of the Nicomachean Ethics. (In other words: If you polled the American citizenry and asked who authored the D of I, half of them might actually give the right answer. Ask them who authored the Nicomachean Ethics, you might be lucky to get one in five answering correctly. So the idea of presenting the latter as a basis for the cognitive revolution we so desperately need has a considerably greater chance of fuck-up on the transmission line.) Another concrete to pair Mr. Jefferson with might well be that guy whose face shows up on the $100 bill, but probably not that guy who authored The Rights of Man and Common Sense (notwithstanding how well-known and influential as that guy was among the early Americans). Perhaps the term "polymath" would draw blank stares, serving to throw the audience off the scent. Perhaps "excellence in all endeavors" would convey the
How some guy ends up on the $100 bill, might very well intrigue a few in the audience. Perhaps that could lead in some interesting directions.
It so happens that these two comprehensive-excellence-pursuers were either founder or president of the American Philosophical Society. But so as not to distract the average citizen, one might want to avoid saying something like "if everyone lived the way the great philosophers did, . . . " because that would lead those who easily miss a point to wonder who would then do all those vitally important things like engineering, running businesses, conducting scientific research and development, raising kids, hitting home runs, cooking restaurant meals,
So we have to reframe this in terms of something like: constantly striving for improvement, which takes continuous learning, growth, intellectual curiosity and insatiability, development of talents, health-conscious lifestyles, cultivation of social relationships, seeing things from others' point of view rather than merely through one's own cognitive biases or filters, recognition and respect for human dignity and freedom, and other things listed on that hierarchy of needs thingy by that one psychologist guy.
Now, as it happens, carrying out these things successfully requires a love of wisdom, no question. That doesn't require that one sit atop the rock like that thinker statue whatamacallit with the chin resting upon hand all of the time - just some of the time at very least - and even that requires a good developmental environment from an early age, which includes decent nutrition, decent parenting, decent educational opportunities, and so forth. A decent community would do whatever is within reason to ensure that its young members have as much of a good developmental environment as possible. (Does this create a chicken-and-egg problem? How do the not-young people figure out how to be so, um - is "virtuous" the appropriate term here? - kind and decent in intention and efficacious in action so as to foster such developmental excellence for the young'uns? How do they do that, while also holding down a job and coming home tired, etc.? Well? Am I supposed to have all the answers?)
So, anyway, with that preamble out of the way, here's the hypothetical:
Say that the American People came to a broad minimal consensus: If we
(There's that pesky, distracting matter of their having owned slaves. We shouldn't follow their example in that regard, of course. Surely we can set aside that tree for the sake of the forest?)
Imagine our having a hypothetical conversation with these two men, asking their advice on how to improve the state of affairs in this country. Assume if you possibly can that in our hypothetical conversation these men have some 200 years of hindsight that they did not actually possess in their time, but which they would have if they were alive today. What would they think about what has become of the nation since their time - but more importantly, what advice would they offer for improvement? Might they appeal to various historical figures for inspiration? For example, Jefferson in some of his letters touted some ancient guys with names like Epictetus and Epicurus as deliverers of moral and practical wisdom. Also, while Jefferson didn't believe in the traditional God of theism, he did believe in a Creator who set the world in motion (a view popular at the time, known as deism), and also praised as a genius one Jesus of Nazareth; as framing for the average American citizen goes, that's some pretty good stuff, but Jefferson would (of course) urge us to seek wisdom from all kinds of sources (hence his knowledge of those ancient Epi-something guys, among many others).
I do believe Mr. J would lament the polling data pointing to unacceptable levels of ignorance among the citizenry, but he would also be pro-active about solutions. Beginning with the ignorance of the very political system he and his buddies founded, he might ask such things as: Why are the people this ignorant? Is it because they're just intellectually lazy, or has their political system gotten to where they are apathetic or too discouraged about participating in the political process? If we can devise a fix whereby they become genuinely interested in the political goings-on around them, their knowledge of such things will naturally expand. Were I interested in the fate of the Green Bay Packers, I'd know quite a bit about them. And while there's no obvious reason why every citizen ought to be interested in the Packers given their limited time and priorities, it's a plausible proposition that every citizen ought to be interested in our political system and ought to be able to pass a basic science literacy test even years after being a fifth grader. (That unbelievably awful show would have no place in a Jeffersonian culture.)
Now, in presenting such a hypothetical one might well encounter stubborn cynicism:
"People are just the way they are, hardwired and stuff, or Original Sin, you can't expect them to improve." (UP: Speak for yourself! Also, what about what that Harvard psychology guy has been saying about the decline in levels of violence over human history? I can dig up the reference if you're curious. Or how about slavery no longer being a societal norm? And, to cite this one 20th century author lady, if we have free will as the proponents of the Original Sin idea nevertheless say we do, then why couldn't the idea of Original Virtue make just as much sense?)
"IQ's will always be centered around 100, how do you expect people to get smarter?" (UP: Aren't literacy rates a lot higher these days than in the Dark Ages? Same basic genetic structure, yet better outcomes.)
"Those are great men, how do you expect ordinary people to live up to such lofty standards?" (UP: Who said anything about everyone becoming a Jefferson or $100 bill guy? Let's start with a more realistic idea: a considerably greater number of people of their caliber than at present - in effect, a shifting of the cultural bell curve. Besides, we're talking in essence about excellence of character.)
"You're trying to sneak in the idea of a Utopia under the guise of widely-implemented Jeffersonianism. But people - even reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful people - will always disagree among one another about various things. In a Utopia there isn't supposed to be such disagreement, since everyone is supposed to be 'perfect'." (UP: Call it what you will - Utopia, Jeffersonianism, Nicomachean Ethics-ism - what you're talking about is a strawman. This societal ideal need only meet certain minimum requirements, like nonviolence, stable social unions, a rule of law. Now, to get to such an ideal would take some amount of time and, in short, education. There's a good reason to think that in order to get to those minimum requirements just stated, the necessary process of education would lead to widespread improvement in moral character, which turns this society into not simply a "liberal, freedom-respecting" one, but also a highly virtue-encouraging one as "communitarian" theorists argue for. A nice
At this point, I'd have to leave it up to the hardcore cynic to come up with objections that even I have not yet anticipated. (I mean, shit, if they're that persistent and that creative at coming up with objections, how does that not just reinforce the
I.e.:
 |
| "Checkmate, unimaginitive naysayers." |
Now: What would America end up looking like if it went wholeheartedly back to its Jeffersonian roots, i.e., to what made the country's founding and the country's greatness possible in the first place? What might America look like? If the American people can't even so much as entertain this thought experiment, then they might very well be fucked doomed. But what, in principle, is there to stop them from entertaining it and going on to act accordingly, besides nothing?
ADDENDUM: Oh, by the way, for those of you not out of your element: is that one scene near the end of the pretty good story that the Stranger unfolded, that scene with the nihilists, is that about overcoming nihilism accompanied by a diminution of the Appetitive Soul? And what about that goldbricker pretending to be a millionaire? What does he symbolize? There's a vanity theme there to be sure. And how about the slut nympho that poor woman, or, for that matter, the known pornographer whom she's been banging? And what about the strongly vaginal artist, and the video artist with a cleft asshole? And how about the Stranger? Is he a daimon of sorts? A lot of strands to keep in my head, man. A lot of strands in UP's head.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Chomsky, Dershowitz, and Taba
In 2005, notable adversaries on the Israel-Palestinian situation, Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz, debated the subject at Harvard. (TRANSCRIPT) These are perhaps the most formidable opponents from each side on the issue, and once you cut through Dershowitz's abusive "Planet Chomsky" B.S. in the debate, they end up essentially in agreement on one thing: The Taba Summit was a laudable basis for a two-state mideast peace solution.
So . . . if these two adversaries can agree on that, then what the fuck is the holdup? Huh? I don't know what's more ridiculous, the stalling here or the stalling on the legalization of bud. They're both obviously no-brainers. If you will it, it is no dream; am I wrong?
So . . . if these two adversaries can agree on that, then what the fuck is the holdup? Huh? I don't know what's more ridiculous, the stalling here or the stalling on the legalization of bud. They're both obviously no-brainers. If you will it, it is no dream; am I wrong?
 |
| "Checkmate, asshole." |
 |
| "Checkmate, Israeli right wing; you're even more of an asshole than me." |
Thursday, January 24, 2013
A conflict of visions
Not exactly the same conflict of visions of which Thomas Sowell spoke, but it is closely related....
One opinion piece below appears at a section called The Stone at the New York Times website; the sidebar describes The Stone as follows: "The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless." We can safely take the opinion pages of the Times as representative of "left-liberal" opinion in the United States. The other opinion piece below would find a home in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, which is fairly representative of right/conservative and libertarianish opinion in the USA. The first is dated August 18 of 2012; the second, as if responding to the first retroactively, is dated August 13 2012.
(1) Deluded Individualism
(2) Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society
Regular readers of this blog could readily tell which article I think better represents (a) reality and (b) traditionally and distinctively 'American' attitudes concerning the relation between the individual, civil society, and the state. As I have pointed out in two separate blog entries in the past couple years, the interest among academic moral and political philosophers as a group in the whole idea of individualism appears almost nonexistent. (There are two academically-published books I know of from within the past forty years that deal to a great extent with the concept of individualism: David L. Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, 1976), which can be found at many a good university library; and Leslie Paul Thiele's Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton, 1990), which can be found hardly anywhere, it would seem. [EDIT: Upon further search, there are volumes by Tibor Machan that cover individualism in a positive light. It also turns out that there are a few academic volumes scattered about here and there which tackle individualism, including a couple significant-looking ones by philosophy professors; they appear to aim at debunking individualist 'myths' such as the view - held by whom, I'm not sure - that the atomized individual is prior to or independent of society. Perhaps this conception of individualism exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of authors like that of the first opinion piece above and not among actual proponents of individualism?])
(As the first opinion piece would have it, the content and direction of here blog is not due to autonomous or self-directing intellectually-virtuous/perfective activity; that would be a "delusion." The credit for all this is due to society, or the welfare state, or other external factors. That being the case, why isn't society all perfectivst already? What contribution did I personally make to perfectivism? Jack shit?)
I've said on this blog numerous times that, as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation. To ward off a potential misunderstanding here among those who might go out of their way to misunderstand: The professional intellectual "class" is certainly filled to a great extent with people who are very bright, and very virtuous intellectually: they adhere to rigorous standards of truth-seeking inquiry. If the People as a whole practiced such intellectual virtue in their own lives in their own ways and endeavors, we'd be in a vastly improved situation compared to what we have now. This is the goal I would like to see accomplished. So why isn't the nation going that way per my dictum? Well, the chief problem is how the intellectuals make (or fail to make) their work relevant to the People.
It's not like the American people are inherently anti-intellectual. Rather, what you see in this country is a widespread attitude, more on the Right than on the Left I should think, of hostility or indifference to what "higher learning" is or has become these days. I'll enter as exhibit B (exhibit A being Scumbag Leiter & Co.) the first opinion piece above. When this is the kind of thing that shows up on the opinion pages of "the liberal media's" flagship publication, accessible from page 3 of a google search on "individualism philosophy" no less, what else are the People - especially those right-of-center - to think about the "liberal" intelligentsia? What use are such authors to the People? Are they fulfilling their highest professional responsibility to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge?
The feeling among many of the "higher ed" intelligentsia is mutual: a contempt for the unwashed masses. There's a gulf separating what's going on up there in the ivory towers and what's going on out there in flyover country (where the folks cling bitterly to guns and bibles). Whereas a genuine philosophical mindset and temperament would seek to facilitate a dialogue between the two groups, what we have here is a failure to integrate. What's more, the intellectuals are in the position, as professional full-time thinkers, where they're supposed to understand the causes and solutions to this problem, and act accordingly. (Or are they not really in control of this, per the first opinion piece above?) So that's the short-short explanation for how the course of the country is dictated by the way the intellectuals conduct themselves.
What would Aristotle and/or Jefferson think about all this?
One opinion piece below appears at a section called The Stone at the New York Times website; the sidebar describes The Stone as follows: "The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless." We can safely take the opinion pages of the Times as representative of "left-liberal" opinion in the United States. The other opinion piece below would find a home in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, which is fairly representative of right/conservative and libertarianish opinion in the USA. The first is dated August 18 of 2012; the second, as if responding to the first retroactively, is dated August 13 2012.
(1) Deluded Individualism
(2) Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society
Regular readers of this blog could readily tell which article I think better represents (a) reality and (b) traditionally and distinctively 'American' attitudes concerning the relation between the individual, civil society, and the state. As I have pointed out in two separate blog entries in the past couple years, the interest among academic moral and political philosophers as a group in the whole idea of individualism appears almost nonexistent. (There are two academically-published books I know of from within the past forty years that deal to a great extent with the concept of individualism: David L. Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, 1976), which can be found at many a good university library; and Leslie Paul Thiele's Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton, 1990), which can be found hardly anywhere, it would seem. [EDIT: Upon further search, there are volumes by Tibor Machan that cover individualism in a positive light. It also turns out that there are a few academic volumes scattered about here and there which tackle individualism, including a couple significant-looking ones by philosophy professors; they appear to aim at debunking individualist 'myths' such as the view - held by whom, I'm not sure - that the atomized individual is prior to or independent of society. Perhaps this conception of individualism exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of authors like that of the first opinion piece above and not among actual proponents of individualism?])
(As the first opinion piece would have it, the content and direction of here blog is not due to autonomous or self-directing intellectually-virtuous/perfective activity; that would be a "delusion." The credit for all this is due to society, or the welfare state, or other external factors. That being the case, why isn't society all perfectivst already? What contribution did I personally make to perfectivism? Jack shit?)
I've said on this blog numerous times that, as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation. To ward off a potential misunderstanding here among those who might go out of their way to misunderstand: The professional intellectual "class" is certainly filled to a great extent with people who are very bright, and very virtuous intellectually: they adhere to rigorous standards of truth-seeking inquiry. If the People as a whole practiced such intellectual virtue in their own lives in their own ways and endeavors, we'd be in a vastly improved situation compared to what we have now. This is the goal I would like to see accomplished. So why isn't the nation going that way per my dictum? Well, the chief problem is how the intellectuals make (or fail to make) their work relevant to the People.
It's not like the American people are inherently anti-intellectual. Rather, what you see in this country is a widespread attitude, more on the Right than on the Left I should think, of hostility or indifference to what "higher learning" is or has become these days. I'll enter as exhibit B (exhibit A being Scumbag Leiter & Co.) the first opinion piece above. When this is the kind of thing that shows up on the opinion pages of "the liberal media's" flagship publication, accessible from page 3 of a google search on "individualism philosophy" no less, what else are the People - especially those right-of-center - to think about the "liberal" intelligentsia? What use are such authors to the People? Are they fulfilling their highest professional responsibility to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge?
The feeling among many of the "higher ed" intelligentsia is mutual: a contempt for the unwashed masses. There's a gulf separating what's going on up there in the ivory towers and what's going on out there in flyover country (where the folks cling bitterly to guns and bibles). Whereas a genuine philosophical mindset and temperament would seek to facilitate a dialogue between the two groups, what we have here is a failure to integrate. What's more, the intellectuals are in the position, as professional full-time thinkers, where they're supposed to understand the causes and solutions to this problem, and act accordingly. (Or are they not really in control of this, per the first opinion piece above?) So that's the short-short explanation for how the course of the country is dictated by the way the intellectuals conduct themselves.
What would Aristotle and/or Jefferson think about all this?
 |
| "Checkmate, asshole." |
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