How does the left have any perceived credibility among reasonable people?

The American left today is dialectically estranged from the American mainstream and America's founding principles, although it still has the run of the education (sic) system (while missing the best tree to bark up, the philosophy one).  Almost surely the very best minds among the public-intellectuals have gravitated over time to the Right (while the very best minds among the academic, non-public-intellectual population contains a mixture of increasingly-libertarian Rawls-ish liberals and the libertarians, with Tomasi representating a state-of-the-art attempt at synthesis of the two). [*]

So what sustains any impression among reasonable, decent people that the left has quality ideas and intellectual and moral credibility any longer?  Some ideas:

(1) See above about the left's control of the bulk of the education (sic) institutions, a great many of them funded in whole or part by taxpayers.  (Before one rationalizes like a leftist that this points to the intellectual superiority of leftism/leftists, see Nozick for a alternative explanation.)  Lots of narrative-shaping going on there for many a captive audience, many of whom go out into the real world afterward rather than pursue (e.g.) state-of-the-art debates between Rawlsians and libertarians, so they don't have all that good an idea of how Rawlsians might not have any clear upper-hand despite left-wing dominance of the academy.

(2) The left is riding past successes in the areas of civil rights and LGBT+ equality.  Even until very recently the American cultural Right has been hostile to progress in the latter idea, much to its motherfucking shame.  The Blue States (not synonymous with the left, but a close approximation) have been making progress in the area of cannabis legalization, while outlets such as the otherwise-respectable Wall Street Journal continue to this very day to peddle bullshitted-up numbers and narratives supposedly showing how destructive cannabis and its legalization are.  (The fucking least they could do is acknowledge the testimony of cannabis-users like Carl Sagan, which they don't.)  What's not at all clear to me is that the Blue States are legalizing weed on the grounds of individual freedom as distinct from equitable treatment of minorities (who suffer disproportionately from the failed big-government War on Drugs) or the Blue States' greed for always-more tax revenues.  And even there, the state of CA has been shitting the bed in its efforts to reconcile its big-government ethos with a free-market one.

But weed legalization is a present-day trend with the merits still to be assessed over time by the American mainstream.  I don't fault the WSJ and other conservatives for having suspicions about its wisdom/merits when it's the Blue States (by and large - see Alaska for an exception) spearheading the effort.

Back to LGBT+ equality: The Civil Rights movement was over half a century ago now; the LGBT+ equality movement has been a recent thing where we can get a better sense of where the left has gone in more recent times.  The usually faulty and often downright awful arguments by the cultural Right (such as illogically linking acceptance of homosexuality to the questionable aspects of the Sexual Revolution generally and their implications for (namely) widespread abandonment of the nuclear family) would lend credence to the impression that the left has the upper hand intellectually.  (Note that on this and other issues the libertarians, who by default tend to end up on the "Right" side of the spectrum - especially nowadays - haven't usually been in the business of offering shitty arguments on this, cannabis, or other issues.)

(Note also that leading proponents of marriage equality include conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and Ted Olson.  What would really be nice is a well-publicized debate between Olson and Princeton's Robert George, but national intellectual bankruptcy seems to preclude interest in and calls for such.  No reasonable person respects the nincompoopery of the slippery-slope arguments from politicians like Santorum, after all.)

So far I've been pointing to what are broadly termed "cultural" and "personal freedoms" issues, not economic issues.  This ties into the next point:

(3) The placement of figures like Rawls and Keynes somewhere near the center-left of American opinion lends credence to the notion that there are still quality ideas on "the left" generally speaking, in the smeary ways many people often think of these things (my differentiation here is one of a continuum starting with the likes of Rawls on one end and the total commies on the other, with egalitarian commitments of varying strengths uniting them under the "left" umbrella).  But as with the lively Rawlsians vs. libertarians debates, there is a lively dialectic between Keynesians and more staunchly free-market positions (e.g., Hayek and Friedman, with Mises still regarded as more out on the "fringes" of free-market thought despite all his vastly learned/sage insights - a situation similar to that of Rand).  With the likes of Keynes and Rawls pushing sophisticated arguments for government interventions or a large public sector generally, further-left folks like Elizabeth Warren and Obama (who's definitely well to the left ideologically despite his more pragmatic-realpolitik presidency) feel more of a license to take this further with notions about the overwhelming role of state-provided infrastructure in individual success (for which see Krauthammer's rebuttal).

Points (1-3) may not individually explain how the left maintains such a degree of (real or perceived) cultural and political respectability today, but together they may explain quite a lot.  There may be other factors I can't think of right off.  The values-priorities that Haidt's research points to may also explain quite a lot.  Values are fundamental and prior to debates about whether this or that economic/fiscal policy is desirable; people's policy preferences are basically shaped by the values over and above whether they achieve some outcome (about which there are plenty of social-science disagreements, besides - measurement issues, replicability issues, causal understandings, etc.).  This would help explain why conservatives tend to oppose efforts at drug legalization irrespective of the awful outcomes: "do we want to send the wrong message (to young people)?"  (What if they applied this reasoning consistently across all policy issues?  Don't lefties say that tax cuts for the wealthy "send the message" that a fifth mansion for the wealthy is preferable to ringworm medication for the destitute, whatever the actual marginal propensity to consume at the high end?)  Much of political discourse comes down to signaling of virtues considered high-priority by one's favored group/party.

(There also, perceptions of value-priorities also come into play.  Lots of folks - left and right - seem to get a bunch of mileage out of caricaturing libertarians as being focused on only one moral value - individual liberty - and Haidt's categorizing of libertarians in these terms plays right into this perception.  Of course, libertarians are very minimalistic about the role of the state which severely constrains what they think political institutions ought to be doing to putatively achieve moral aims.  I don't think you'd have much difficulty getting a shit-ton of libertarians - if there even are that many - to sign on explicitly to the principle of subsidiarity which nearly everyone ought to know more about.  Anyway, caricaturing libertarians as being only freedom-focused just because their political priorities are so narrowly freedom-focused looks like a way for many non-libertarians to lazily avoid confronting the core libertarian 'self-ownership' thesis or discovering more about virtue-based libertarian thought, e.g., the Dougs or LeBar.)

Guess I might go smoke a bowl and see what else comes to mind?

[*] - Further differentiation: those I'll call the 'self-ownership' or hardcore rights-based libertarians on the one hand - Rand, Hospers and Nozick being leading examples - and the more consequences-oriented ones (Mises, Hayek, Friedman) on the other.  Tomasi seeks a synthesis between these two strains of libertarian thought as well as the broader synthesis.  Broadly speaking I like the idea of synthesis or dialectic, although my context (ahem) here is much more Sciabarra than Tomasi and hence probably more 'radical' in its libertarian sensibilities (within an 'Aristotelian/Randian-intellectualist' epistemological-ethical totality).

Big Govt Refucklicans vs. cannabis common sense

[Details to come; I just wanted to get that post title and images in as soon as I could.  Republicans qua Refucklicans selectively entrust (all of a sudden) and empower an insultingly paternalistic and always-increasingly bloated government bureaucracy to generate supposedly desirable outcomes; all of a sudden they rush toward Wickard-style federal overreach; how's that been working out for them? Should be fun lol ^_^ ]

"The Blue States are legalizing it and they're always wrong about everything. Also it's a gateway drug to opioid overdose, or something." -Scumbag GOP

A pretty smart and common sense guy, probably while saganized

The intellectual quality of 'Right' and 'Left' today

[The broad category of individuals listed here would be something like "public intellectual figures influential on contemporary mainstream American cultural and political thought."]

For the time being, I'll just drop this list of names and then explain later how the collected efforts of the 'Right' figures can easily wipe the floor with the collection of 'Left' figures listed.  I mean, isn't it obvious to anyone who's done his homework?  (Hint: which side has more overall aggregate wisdom?  [For instance, only one side has authors of books titled: The Book of Virtues; The Road to Character.]  It's a no-brainer, much like how a Golden State Warriors team with a healthy Curry and Durant wipes the floor with otherwise pretty skilled teams.  I'm sorry to say that I don't think that the "left" side rises to the level of the 2017-2018 Houston Rockets in this analogy, because it really isn't close.  The left side is more like a .500 team pretending it's an .800 [66-win] team.  The .900+ [74-8] team on the merits would be Aristotelians-Randians.)  And we're not even listing the not-so-influential but some vastly superior libertarian and Objectivist thinkers.

(I am more closely familiar with the 'Right' stream of American thought and so there are more of them listed; I list only living people with one exception; I leave out those currently working in prominent government positions.)

Republicans / Right:

Walter Williams
Thomas Sowell
Richard Epstein
Roger Scruton
Glenn Beck
Bill O'Reilly
Krauthammer (d. 2018)
Kissinger
George Will
Rush Limbaugh
Sean Hannity
Michael Savage
Ben Shapiro
Mark Levin
Dennis Prager
Tucker Carlson
Greg Gutfeld
Newt Gingrich
Dinesh D'Souza
Bret Stephens
David Brooks
David Horowitz
Jason Riley
Heather Mac Donald
Peggy Noonan
Dana Perino
Jesse Watters
Dennis Miller
Jeanine Pirro
Dan Bongino
Candace Owens
Milo Y
Karl Rove
Brit Hume
Jonah Goldberg
Pat Buchanan
Lou Dobbs
Ann Coulter
James Dobson
Michael Medved
William Bennett
Robert Bork
George Gilder
Charles Murray
Andrew Napolitano
John Stossel
Victor Davis Hanson
Rod Dreher
Ross Douthat


Democrats / Left:

Jon Stewart
Stephen Colbert
Chris Cuomo
Rachel Maddow
Cenk Uygur
Chris Matthews
Matthew Yglesias
Paul Krugman
Joseph Stiglitz
Alan Blinder
William Galston
Austan Goolsbee
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Michael Eric Dyson
Cornel West
Noam Chomsky
Jurgen Habermas
Naomi Klein
Slavoj Zizek
Robert Reich
Juan Williams
Michael Moore
Thom Hartmann
Jesse Jackson
Al Sharpton
Al Franken
Bill Moyers
Matt Taibbi
David Brock
Nathan J. Robinson
Nicholas Kristof
Al Gore


Independent/Other:

Jordan Peterson
Andrew Sullivan
Glenn Greenwald
Alan Dershowitz
Jonathan Haidt
Thomas Friedman
Fareed Zakaria
The Economist (no bylines)
Steven Pinker
Joe Rogan
Bill Maher
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Sam Harris
Richard Dawkins
Peter Singer
Martha Nussbaum
Amartya Sen
Judith Butler

"Progressives" (leftists) and diversity

True to form, newbie Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez homes right in on the racial makeup of CBS News' 2020 election coverage team.  It also seems true to form for a higher-"ed"-infused perspective on diversity.  While there is clear focus and emphasis from both the campuses and from AOC on diversity of race, gender, etc., what about ideological diversity?  The conservatives are really keen on homing right in on the lack of that in the universities and in (non-Fox) 'mainstream media.'  What the "progressives" don't focus and home right in on, says as much as what they do harangue everyone about from their superior moral perches.  (AOC is apparently aiming to be the most obnoxiously zealous in such haranguing.)  She asks in a follow-up tweet, "Do you understand how fundamental the black experience is to American politics?"  Do AOC and her ilk understand how fundamental the conservative and/or libertarian experience is to American politics?

With honorable exceptions such as Haidt [edit: I had been under the impression Haidt identified as a left-leaning liberal, but he identifies as "a non-partisan centrist"], what an overwhelming portion of the Left side of the American political spectrum means by "diversity" is not what the rest of the country means by that term.  If anything, given the demographics involved, their push for greater "diversity" (their meaning) ensures more and more left-of-center opinion to the exclusion of the rest, and that doesn't seem to bother them much.

How much viewpoint diversity, exactly, is there in Ocasio-Cortez's congressional district, which has been touted for being ethnically diverse?

Classical liberal icon John Stuart Mill expresses a genuinely progressive sentiment as follows:

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

This sentiment is reproduced by Daniel Dennett's reviving of Rapoport Rules for intellectual engagement and criticism.  It is the heart of a method of philosophical inquiry known as dialectic.

How can those claiming to be progressive be so oblivious?

Regarding absolutes

Serious philosophers hold that there are absolutes - perhaps, indeed, that everything (every existent, every fact, every event, every sound mental integration of such things) is an absolute, i.e., not subject to alteration or revision.  The question then arises, what does that mean?  I'll respond first with a concrete instance: It's an absolute that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776; it is a fact and as such it isn't alterable.  But from what I've seen, many people have difficulties with the concept of absolutes (or absolutism), and so an example such as this might not really hit home in the face of their objection to, or rejection of, the idea that there are absolutes.

Miss Rand dismisses the doubters thusly:

“There are no absolutes,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute.

That sounds like a familiar stock response to skeptics who utter something to the effect that there are no absolutes.  It works, but maybe it doesn't address the non-skeptics, the "ordinary folks out there" who are suspicious of those who speak in terms of absolutes.  What I want to suggest is that  there isn't true confusion (among intellectually serious people) over there being absolutes or not, but rather the issue is what the rejection of something put forward as an absolute means in people's minds.  Are they really rejecting the idea of an absolute, or are they misunderstanding what "absolute" means to the serious philosopher, or are they, perhaps, simply rejecting something proposed as an absolute because either (a) they don't think the that something being proposed as an absolute (often a controversial moral, political, or religious ideal or principle) should be regard as an absolute, or (b) because the absolute being offered is ill-formed?

The case-in-point that brought me to thinking about this appeared in philosopher Edward Feser's blog, under the blog entry titled "The road from libertarianism," which chronicles his move away from ("right-wing" or capitalist) libertarianism to the politically conservative position he holds today.  What stuck in my mind was this paragraph in particular:

That the “ownership” aspect of the thesis is no less indeterminate than the “self” aspect also became more evident to me as I thought more carefully about John Locke, who was a defender of the thesis of self-ownership but also someone who denied that our rights were so absolute that we could have a right to commit suicide or to sell ourselves into slavery.  And after all, in everyday life we can rightly be said to own all sorts of things to which we don’t have absolute property rights.  For example, you might own the land your house sits on without thereby having the right to store nuclear waste on it.  But then, how absolute should we take property rights to be, and why?  That depends on your theory of rights.  And that reinforces the point that the thesis of self-ownership by itselfdoesn’t tell us nearly as much as many libertarians think it does.  Ifthe theory of rights that underlies the thesis entails an absolute right of self-ownership, then our rights over ourselves are exactly what libertarians think they are.  But if the theory that underlies the thesis does not entail such an absolute right -- as it didn’t for Locke -- then we might in some sense own ourselves, but withouttherefore having the right to take heroin, or unilaterally to divorce a spouse, or whatever.  Again, the idea of self-ownership by itselfwon’t tell you either way.  You have to look to the underlying theory of rights to find out -- in which case the thesis of self-ownership isn’t doing a whole lot of work.

The word "absolute" shows up five times in this paragraph, and as a means of dispensing with the idea of "self-ownership" as an absolute right or principle.  Feser's framing of the issue isn't so much about the absoluteness of a purported right of self-ownership, but about having to appeal to some other moral principles to make the principle determinate.  Do we have the right to sell ourselves into slavery?  That question can lead us in one of (at least) two directions: We can ask whether understanding the principle of self-ownership as an absolute leads us to accept the legal propriety of selling oneself into slavery; or, we can ask whether we need to appeal to other moral principles to determine whether a usefully determinate right of self-ownership entails the right to sell oneself into slavery.  Feser treats both of these in perhaps a significantly-related way.  My focus here, though, is on the way in which the term "absolute" is being used.  This need not even concern specifically the right of self-ownership under question, for early in the paragraph he discusses the idea of absolute property rights (over non-bodily resources) in conjunction with whether or not we have the right to store nuclear waste on our property, which raises intuitive concerns not altogether different than those raised by questions about a right to sell oneself into slavery.

That being clarified, let us now ask: Does your having an absolute right with respect to your duly-acquired property entail that you have the right to store nuclear waste there, right in the middle of a neighborhood, say?

This ties in with recent public debate over the Second Amendment individual right to bear arms.  Some people in the debate claim that the individual right to bear arms isn't absolute because we aren't rightfully permitted as individuals to bear nuclear arms.  This claim must be distinguished from a similar-sounding familiar claim, which says that the Second Amendment individual right to bear arms doesn't extend in scope to an individual right to bear nuclear arms - that such a restriction bearing on one's legal rights does not run afoul of the Second Amendment.  If someone makes this latter claim, they may or may not also mean to say that the Second Amendment isn't an absolute.  And that's the crux of the matter.

What I would advocate is the view that the Second Amendment, viewed as an absolute, doesn't extend in scope to an individual right to bear nuclear arms.  This, in short, as an example, illustrates the (absolute!) principle that there are absolutes, when those absolutes are properly formulated.  A not-so-serious "philosopher" might infer that the "when those absolutes..." qualification, by virtue of being a qualification or a condition, rules out the principle understood as an absolute.  In this person's mind, the concept of a conditional or qualified absolute doesn't compute.  The problem is, I think many folks out there suffer from this very problem when considering the subject of absolutes (assuming they ever actually consider them beyond brief dismissals of the very idea).  Now, Feser by all appearances is a serious philosopher but he engages in a not-so-serious approach to discussing absolutes in the way he does as quoted above.  It is pernicious to clear and cogent understanding of what is meant by "absolute," and as pernicious things go, "the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold." (Aristotle)

So in analogy to the Second Amendment example, I return to Feser's commentary about absolute property rights and storing nuclear waste.  The whole issue concerns not whether the rights in question are absolutes - they are - but what the correctly specified contours and scope of those rights are.  We have an abstract principle of what I and Locke and Jefferson would term natural rights, which has a number of formulations all of which amount more or less to the same idea: that individuals are rightly the sovereigns over their personal domain - over their physical person and their duly acquired property - and that their personal domains must be capable of peacefully coexisting with the personal domains of others.  And what does that mean, in practice?  Here we need to be careful, in our transition from the abstract formulation to the practical implementation, not to erect a pernicious dichotomy between the two.  If in practical implementation, we end up with (say) a prohibition on storing nuclear waste in a neighborhood setting, we don't get to then say, "Oh, that abstract statement isn't so absolute after all," or, more perniciously, "That abstract statement of an absolute isn't helpful for practical application."  After all, storing nuclear waste in a neighborhood setting imposes an unreasonable risk or threat to the personal domains of one's neighbors.

But there is something to be said for not rationalistically dabbling in abstractions without the ability to formulate good, workable, concretely-detailed laws governing people's domain-regarding interactions.

(And to circumvent pernicious "cultural conservative" mischief, we distinguish domain-regarding interactions from interactions regarding all the other areas of life; we are concerned here only with how boundaries ought to be set.  Within those boundaries, people have every natural right to do things the "cultural conservatives" find so horribly objectionable that boundary-invading force needs to be employed - you know, to keep teh gayz from doing gay stuff, for instance.  Let us dismiss without serious consideration the question of whether "natural right of personal domain" doesn't extend to or encompass the right to engage in "victimless crimes."  Calling Lysander Spooner for the knock-down, drag-out, no-brainer argument-stopper on that one...)

So how do we figure out what is domain-respecting and what is domain-disrespecting?  Well, through practice.  That institution known as the common law wasn't deduced from abstractions in a vacuum or in a philosopher's armchair; the laws pertaining to personal domains had to evolve - or, arguably, better yet - be discovered (through trial-and-error) over a long period of time.  This would be a sort of "natural rights/natural law" variant upon a familiar Hayekian theme, stressing said discovery as the "telos" of the legal process while giving neither constructivist rationalism nor slavish adherence to tradition any respect.

(Hayek's formulation of the spontaneously evolved legal order is in terms of being "between instinct and reason," which I think eventually approaches in concept that which we usually refer to as "tradition." Someone of such Randian sensibilities as yours truly cannot accept that formulation; the evolution of common law happens in the correctly-defined "middle ground" between tradition and rationalism, which is a general cognitive malady of which Hayek's diagnosis of constructivist rationalism is a variety, and rationalism is not, ever, in any way, to be confused with reason.  The sense of the term "reason" that Rand endorses (the appropriate aforementioned "middle ground") involves experience, trial-and-error, historical data, and so on, which makes legal evolution not so much "spontaneous" as a process of experience-based reasoning in progressive/perfective discovery of the correct implementation of correct abstract principle (i.e., natural rights).  Indeed, the idea of natural rights itself wasn't always around, and had to be discovered through that very same sort of process.  For the extended Objectivist treatment of the cognitive malady that is rationalism (which is treating reason in effect as a process of deduction with floating abstractions), there is the indispensable Understanding Objectivism.  For an(other) extensive study of the Objectivist opposition to all kinds of false dichotomies, including the theoretical and the practical, there's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.)

I make mention of Hayek in large part because that's where Feser's non-Randian, conservative political sensibilities are (keeping in mind that Hayek wrote this).  That might help to explain the pernicious language regarding absolute rights.  (Feser's more primary/fundamental philosophical sensibilities are closer to the Randian track, so that's good.  Being that he is of the theistic persuasion, one would very much expect a high regard for absolutes from him, but that doesn't mean that his paragraph quoted above isn't a slip into perniciousness.)  Hayek's approach to defending (classical) liberalism is a "pragmatic" one, and I'm not clear on whether this version of pragmatism isn't vulnerable to the standard objections to the pernicious sorts of pragmatism that eschew absolutism, or that it isn't at the very core of what Rand found so bad about Hayek qua defender of capitalism upon reading The Road to Serfdom.  It helps to keep in mind that the approach to defending classical liberal (and especially individualist) ideals among American theorists (Jefferson, Thoreau, Spooner, Tucker, Mencken, Rand, Rothbard, Nozick, Mack) tends to have a more extreme or robust flavor than that of the English ones (Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill . . . hell, Mill ended up a socialist, and have the Brits ever really recovered since?); Hayek's approach coincides much more with the latter, and it's even reflected in his rather dull prose.

(EDIT: This parenthetical become something of a diversion, but it all integrates in the end, of course.  Herbert Spencer, a Brit, was more of a radical, and boy has he paid the price in the form of vicious smears as a "social Darwinist."  And such a familiar-sounding vicious smear, innit? . . . and wouldn't you know it, Sully the Fool strikes again!  Why is it that when I keep integrating, Sully keeps showing up as a useless fool?  Why, I ask, why?  Let me guess, he's probably totally bogged down these days in cabinet-nominee discussions, the sort of thing no serious, long-term-focused intellectuals get bogged down in.  And OMG, wouldn't you know it, I'm right.  That's his most recent posting.  Integration/induction works yet again.  Checkmate, dickweed.   Here, how 'bout you do this (assuming you're keeping up on what's of real importance, i.e., blogs like this one, and this one's just getting warmed up): direct your readers to reddit for all the "useful" articles you post to the Dish, condense every twenty "opinion" postings into one unit apiece instead, use the rest of your time to study philosophy, and you might actually end up a historically-influential public intellectual.  Note that Hitchens won't be remembered all that much in the long run (except perhaps as a well-spoken leading figure of the intellectually-juvenile and hence short-lived New Atheist movement of the very early 21st century), and you're headed right in the same direction.  I just have a sense for these sorts of things - for example, like how P.T. Anderson's non-Oscar-nominated The Master will far outlast many of the films that got Oscar nominations this year.  Clearly PTA has a higher similarity-score with Kubrick qua filmmaker than do Bigelow, Russell, Spielberg, and even Tarantino, and that pretty much tells the story, does it not.  Ayn Rand: now there's someone with lasting influence, for reasons all too obvious to folks like me.  Get a fucking clue, Sully!  Also, for those who don't know: Sully, of Brit origins, is much more in line with the Brits in his reverence for the boring, "reason"-downplaying and overly-conciliatory-sounding Hayek in preference to the robust, reason-celebrating and uncompromising Rand.  It all integrates and makes sense just as I said, dunnit?)

So I think that about does 'er.  Wraps 'er all up.  Was it a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, old wine in new bottles, or a genuinely valuable insight unfamiliar to many?  It gets harder and harder for me to tell these days.  And does it even meet my river-of-gold standards of late?  Shouldn't I be, like, abstractly theorizing about the Singularity of singularities - you know, the coming Big Integration, whatever (awesome thing) that turns out to be?  (How do we make it past this problem though?  Urgency, do you feel it?)  Aw heck, I'm rambling again.

The Maverick Philosopher vs. Ayn Rand

The Maverick Philosopher, who elects to identify himself at his blog under real-nym Bill Vallicella, doesn't think all that highly of Ayn Rand.

That is unfortunate, but understandable, given his context.

What's more, when he bashes Rand as being a "hack" and whatnot, he goes through the trouble of presenting evidence and argument.  So he presents something of a formidable foe to those who would take Rand seriously as a philosopher.  (He does allow that she is a philosopher, but just not a good one.)  As one could quite readily discern from his blog, he is an honorable fucking adversary, even if mistaken in his general assessment of Rand.  (Plus he has a better (more perfect) overall command of the written word than I.)  He provides a very refreshing alternative to the anti-philosophizing attitude represented by the ignoble Leiters.  Perhaps one day I should have the pleasure of meeting him and collaborating, as all mutual philosophizing should be about.  Here I want to take issue with his overall assessment while acknowledging, in the spirit of dialectic, what he gets right.

First, the "bad stuff" about Rand (and Peikoff) . . .

Maverick pretty much nails Rand on the issues he has decided to cover when discussing her.  Pretty much, though not all the way.  Rand's very simple approach to metaphysics on neo-Aristotelian lines either hardly adds to what Aristotle already accomplished, or gets things wrong when applying understanding of the axioms to various substantive issues, including perhaps The Most Substantive Issue of Metaphysics: Does God Exist?  Going back to Nathaniel Branden's "intellectual ammunition department" response to the God-as-First-Cause question in The Objectivist Newsletter, the official Objectivist position is, in essence, that God cannot exist because, as Branden put it, the universe is the totality of that which exists.  God is not part of the universe, therefore, God does not exist.  Q.E.D.  It's pretty much that bad, and Maverick will fill you in on the details.  It also makes Peikoff's own position very muddled in light of his statement that "existence exists" does not specify that a physical world exists (and how could it, given its trivially-true character?).

The Objectivist rendering of the law of causality as a corollary of the law of identity (stated as "A is A" although expanded upon by direct quotation from Aristotle in the last pages of Atlas) is at best a simplistic restatement of Aristotelian ideas about causes, while Peikoff's treatment of the issue in light of what he subsequently says about free will is muddled.  The standard Rand/Peikoff/(Binswanger?) claim is that since under a given set of circumstances, only one "action" (behavior?) is available to a given entity, this rules out  (as "irrational" or something) indeterministic interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.  The Objectivist interpretation  of causality as (correctly!) applied to free will is that the "only" action open to a volitional being is that which follows from its nature: to act freely, to choose.  The problem for the orthodox Objectivist is that this, in turn, allows for indeterministic causation (yes, you read that right) not just in the subatomic realm studied by QM, but universally.  What we are left with is the inductive epistemological task of discovering which phenomena are (mechanistically) determined and which are not.  (Indeterminism must not be equated with volition; if subatomic particles don't behave as classical mechanics would dictate, that hardly at all implies their exhibiting volition, as you might hear many an amateur student of Objectivism claim.)

Rand/Peikoff's "refutations" of idealism and materialism are similarly, and hopelessly, muddled.  The Objectivist axiom of consciousness dictates most reasonably that a consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms; that in order for it to be conscious, it had to be conscious of something (which exists).  The problem is, this doesn't do anything to refute idealism, since standard idealisms hold that, in Berkeley's formulation, "to be is to be perceived."  Consciousness still remains the faculty of perceiving that which exists, in such a formulation.  This cannot be rejected on the basis of "the primacy of existence" (if that is read as implied by the [I hate to put it this way, but I have to] trivially-true axioms).  This would amount to metaphysics-by-fiat, that "existence exists" means something substantive to the effect that Berkeley's formulation is automatically ruled out.  I think had Rand been surrounded by expert metaphysicians during her intellectual career, she'd have done a much better job at this sort of thing; however, had the mainstream of academic analytic philosophy at the time not been bogged down in anti-metaphysical practices while Aristotle was going relatively neglected, she might have found such experts where they around.  This gives rise to the question: Why did she not integrate/dialecticize with Henry Veatch, or him with her?  What we have here is a failure to integrate.

The Objectivist "refutation" of materialism is little better, since it amounts to a strawman equation of materialism with a vulgar, uber-reductive materialism.  In OPAR, Peikoff mentions four supposedly paradigmatic materialists in his sense: Democritus, Hobbes, Marx, and Skinner.  In one indication that Peikoff was behind the times at the time of OPAR's 1991 publication, he appears unaware that Skinner had long been a non-issue by then, particularly in wake of Chomsky's demolition job some two decades before.  Not only that, he hadn't been influential in mainstream philosophy.  Skinner might plausibly be an example of vulgar reductive materialism but since mainstream philosophers didn't take him seriously, what's the idea of bringing him into a discussion of what allegedly went wrong in metaphysics at the hands of philosophers?  The case of Marx doesn't work well here, either, because Marx as a vulgar reductionist reeks of a strawman.  But the real kicker here is: how does Objectivism escape charges of materialism when (contrary to Peikoff's earlier admission that the existence axiom doesn't specify the existence of a physical world) it rules out the existence of God on the grounds that only the physical universe exists?  Objectivism turns out to be a substantive naturalism, which isn't (as John W. Robbins's incompetent critique of Objectivism would have it) synonymous with materialism, at least not as Peikoff describes it (the vulgar-reductive kind which denies the reality of consciousness), but that leaves the question: who of significance in the history of philosophy does hold that latter view?  I won't hold my breath for an answer.

So, getting back to the Maverick, when he's bashing the substantive Rand/Peikoff arguments in metaphysics, he's shooting fish in a barrel.  It's no surprise to me that inasmuch as Rand scholars write on metaphysics they go back to Aristotle and sometimes Aquinas for beefing-up.  (For instance, Chapter 1 of Den Uyl and Rasmussen's The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand seems to contain more discussion about the Aristotelian tradition than about Rand in particular.)

When Maverick attacks Rand's views on abortion, he rightly points out where her views are sorely lacking, although I would not consider her views obviously stupid considering the time at which she wrote them, a time when Judith Thomson's flawed article defending abortion was not so obviously flawed according to the understanding of many readers then.  (The violinist example . . . whoo boy!  I mean, if a fetus could be easily transferred from the mother's body to some other nutritive environment - just as the violinist could be hooked up to someone else - then the violinist example is a great, knock-down defense of a woman's unlimited "right to choose what happens to and in her body."  Not to mention that whole thing about volitional activity bringing about the (special) relation of fetal dependence, in marked contrast to the involuntary hooking-up to the violinist.  And why a violinist, anyway?)  I would also take issue with one subtle but significant point.  When Rand wrote, "The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn)," Maverick interprets this as follows: "Rand equates the unborn with the not-yet living."  The "or" here might suggest a logical equivalence, but the rhetorical context does not make that at all clear and, being accustomed as I am to Rand's writing style, I read it as the different kind of "or," as in presenting two distinct cases.  In any case, I think needless to  say, the abortion debate has gotten more sophisticated in the nearly-forty years since, with Don Marquis's anti-abortion argument making a most potent case for how abortion is, at minimum, extremely morally problematic; the standard "woman's right over her body" arguments advanced by so many intellectually-lazy defenders of abortion rights have to fully confront Marquis's argument.

Maverick's coverage of Rand's intellectual relationship with John Hospers sorely mischaracterizes the reasons for their parting of ways.  It was not over Hospers having "dared criticize" Rand, but the style in which he did so.  Binswanger has the scoop on what precipitated their break, and if that is an accurate portrayal, then Hospers's behavior cries out for a reasoned explanation, which (due to Hospers's passing) we may never get.

Speaking of Binswanger, Maverick is to be commended for his respectful interchange with Binswanger at his blog.  It's too bad all these one-sided cheap-shot artists around the online world don't have the guts or the decency to do likewise.

Before continuing, I do want to mention that I'm lukewarm about Maverick's seemingly blanket characterizations of "liberals" as decadent libertines on moral and cultural matters and freedom-stomping statists on political and economic ones.  (Maverick self-identifies as a conservative.)  If one were to pin him down to specifics, I'm fairly sure he would distinguish the thoughtful liberals from the not-so-thoughtful ones, in which case the former aren't the ones giving liberalism such a bad name.  But doesn't that go for pretty much any "school" of thought, be it liberalism, libertarianism, Objectivism, or . . . conservatism?  If we're going to criticize "the liberals" for their faults, then "the conservatives" are fair game . . . and have you seen how "the conservatives" have done a piss-poor job, since roughly around the time of their adoption of the Southern Strategy, at presenting an intellectually-fortified defense of conservative ideals?  There was Barry Goldwater back in the '60s penning The Conscience of a Conservative, and then later coming to identify as a libertarian and to decry the religious fundamentalism taking over the GOP.  There was William F. Buckley (by the way, did he get calmly and methodically destroyed by Chomsky on his "Firing Line" show, or what?) who came to identify as a libertarian as well as conservative.  (I read somewhere that, to his credit, Buckley smoked a little bud; also, he proved in his eloquent style how the Drug War is a moral and practical disaster.) You had Reagan playing up to the il(classical)liberal Moral Majority, and things continued downhill from there: the Dan Quayle VP nod, the illiberal declaration of "culture war" at the '92 GOP convention, Clinton Derangement Syndrome, the Bush torture regime, FOX's credibility-destroying partisanship, Limbaugh's descent into intellectual dementia, Hannity's blatant partisanship and anti-intellectualism, Savage's paranoid hysteria, O'Reilly's anti-intellectual streak, the ridiculous '08 Dingbat VP nod, "refudiate," Obama Derangement Syndrome, demise-is-always-around-the-corner paranoia, End Times-ism, many Tea Partiers' selective attention/memory/knowledge, seeming GOP indifference to the healthcare affordability crisis, Moneybags as the lone credible (sic) '12 candidate, birtherism, intellectually vacant opposition to marriage equality, evolution denial, climate change denial (coupled by projections onto scientists as allegedly politicizing the issue), and, now, out-and-out morons running the House Science (sic) Committee.  If "the conservatives" would address these problems as much as "the liberals" should address theirs (starting perhaps with their pathological inability or unwillingness to seriously and honestly confront what they imagine to be impossible: a formidable Aristotelian-individualist-capitalist intellectual juggernaut spearheaded by a fiery novelist), we might well have neo-Aristotelian/perfectivist nirvana, would we not.

Okay.  Now.  Where does the Maverick get it wrong about Rand?

First, let me point out that his shooting-fish-in-a-barrel routine is directed almost exclusively at Rand's lousy substantive metaphysical arguments.  What he does not cover is her ethics, her politics, or - most crucially, most fundamentally, most signficantly - her prescribed (neo-Aristotelian) methodology for dealing with ideas.  (Method pertains primarily with epistemology, not metaphysics.)  Outside of what Peikoff, Sciabarra, and a few others have done, this never gets addressed those writing about Rand, her critics most of all.  One might claim that Peikoff's lecture courses, in which this central topic is most extensively worked out, are too inaccessible a format (the complaint about their being too expensive - as in the hundreds of dollars - no longer holds, by any remotely plausible stretch), but that still leaves Sciabarra's Russian Radical, which has been in print for nearly two decades now, and which Rand critics either brazenly evade or remain blazingly ignorant about.  Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism course has been in print for almost a year now (and if you aren't deeply familiar, directly or inderectly, with the contents of this course, then your understanding of Rand's philosophy is probably for shit, given the crucial, fundamental, supremely significant role of method in it; this is not even to speak of Peikoff's later courses, such as The Art of Thinking or Objectivism Through Induction) and so far the critics have remained completely silent about the book version of Understanding, through either ignorance/cluelessness or evasion.  (Right on bad-faith cue, the haters did manage, just around the same time Understanding was released, to heap attention upon Gary Weiss's Ayn Rand Nation which, from what I can tell, is as clueless as any of the secondary literature out there.  This disparity of response right here says pretty much all you need to know about the haters' total lack of scruples.)

(I mean, if staunch adherents/admirers of Thinker X's ideas uniformly tell you that such-and-such resource is absolutely essential to grasping Thinker X's ideas properly, the intellectually curious person would very much want to obtain that resource if the person wanted to speak competently and persuasively about the merits of Thinker X's ideas, rather than to run around like a random thug taking pot-shots at Thinker X and the adherents of Thinker X's ideas.  This is only common sense; this only stands to reason.  Oh, did I mention that Peikoff lecture courses available at $10 a pop, for undergrads to snatch up and integrate en masse, spells Game Over for the intellectual Establishment?  If not, I'll say it again: Peikoff lecture courses available at $10 a pop, for undergrads to snatch up and integrate en masse, spells Game Over for the intellectual Establishment.  Done deal.  I've never been more certain of anything in my life.  The fuck you think Russian Radical was all about, anyway, fun and games?   You've been spermjacked, Leiter & Co.  Checkmate, assholes.  You can't refute perfectivism. :-)

Second, the intellectually responsible thing to do is to see in what areas Rand's ideas have been carefully analyzed and developed by subsequent thinkers, if one wants to know where her strengths were.  I've already touched upon method (Peikoff and Sciabarra).  In ethics, there's Tara Smith's Cambridge-published book on Randian-egoistic normative virtue-ethics, along with the recent Ayn Rand Society volume.  In politics, Rand's "What is Capitalism?" is a hugely important essay with respect to a central theme of hers: the role of the mind in human existence.  The essential substance of her political ideas has reached its latest academic development in Sciabarra's Total Freedom and Rasmussen and Den Uyl's Norms of Liberty.  As for her aesthetics: first off, not to understand her aesthetics is not to understand her views about sense of life, which is not to understand Rand's own sense of life, which is not to understand the benevolent universe premise, which is not to understand Rand the person; it is to not understand her views on psycho-epistemology, which is to not understand her theory about method, which is to not understand her philosophy, period.  Second, when a scholar of aesthetics such as John Hospers says that Rand's novels carry much aesthetic importance, the intellectually responsible reaction is to perk up one's ears.  Finally, in regard to epistemology "proper," the forthcoming (2013) Ayn Rand Society volume continues and develops Rand's work on the nature of concepts and their role in knowledge.

It is a fascinating psychological and sociological dynamic to observe, how people's views on a thinker or topic can vary so much depending not only on their individual contexts of knowledge, but also on what data points they cull into making their observations and judgments.  If you focus exclusively on things like Rand's terrible polemics and lousy substantive arguments in metaphysics, one is bound to think little or negatively of her.  If one focuses exclusively on (to put it in briefest essence) the perfectivist aspects of Rand's philosophy and personality, one is bound to see her as the second coming of Aristotle.  The perfective dialectical reconciliation of these two seemingly disparate data sets - the act of objectively and comprehensively establishing the full context - involves doing as I do right here and in dozens of other blog entries on Rand.  And to his great credit Maverick, being staunchly anti-intellectual-bigotry and perfectivist in his sensibilities, wrote: "Rand's ideas ought to be discussed, not dismissed."  A shit-ton better than the closed-minded sneers and ultra-politicized "gatekeeping" of Leiter and his ilk, innit?  (A search on the term "nietzsche" at Maverick's Rand page (which I linked at the outset of today's discussion) is apropos.  Further, I have it on authority of a well-established Nietzsche scholar that Rand was more disciplined a thinker than Nietzsche was.  She did select the Aristotelian route from Alasdair MacIntyre's (dialectically inadequate?) Aristotle/Nietzsche alternative, if that tells you anything.  But what if Nietzsche had been productive another thirty years?...)

The unquestionable fact is, there is a fast-growing academic literature on Rand that didn't exist before.  Combined with the effect of those now-way-inexpensive Peikoff courses, and the publication of Understanding Objectivism, and the neo-Aristotelian resurgence in general gathering steam in the academy, the effect should be exponential: an explosion in interest in Rand among the intellectually curious.  The deniers - inside the academy and out - have two options: (1) keep evading and behaving like thugs, or (2) get a clue.  To wit:

"Checkmate, asshole."

Where did the conservative intellectuals go?

Today I've been researching this question.  The list of "conservative intellectuals, activists, and writers" at the wikipedia page (1st google result) is disappointing to say the least (and neither Rand, Hayek, nor Friedman - the most prominent intellectual figures listed there - were, or considered themselves, conservative; Rand was especially vehement about this whereas today's "conservatives" haven't taken the hint).  Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams are well into their retirement-age years.  How about anyone living today under, say, 65 years old who could qualify as a great conservative intellectual?  The field is catastrophically barren here.

Three years ago, Newt Gingrich (one reason the wikipedia list is so disappointing) lauded a 14-year-old Jonathan Krohn as the intellectual future of the Republican Party.  Not only has that not panned out (the intellectually precocious Krohn went on to read some philosophy and to realize how intellectually vacuous his earlier views were), but there's obviously something gone awry about a political party in which a 14-year-old is so highly touted by the adults (or is it "adults"?) in the room.

The second Google result quotes at length from a blog posting by jurist Richard Posner which paints quite the grim picture.  The original, in full - without paragraph break-ups - is here.

There was a time when modern American-style conservatism (or should I say, the package-deal under that label of some good and some not-so-good ideas) had appeal to me - at a couple years older than Jonathan Krohn was as a GOP celebrity.  This was somewhere around twenty years prior to that, a number of years before the GOP had definitively jumped the shark (the younger Bush's presidency).  It was also before I encountered a book titled Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which spelled the end of American-style conservatism as an intellectually viable force in my mind.  Note how Barry Goldwater went on to repudiate the recent incarnation of the GOP.

If you look at the GOP today, it is a party that remains politically viable due in great part to two factors: (1) The super-wealthy support them: call this the financial support network; (2) The grassroots base - call this the electoral support network - is comprised to an astonishing extent (as abundant polling data show) of very ignorant people, geographically tilted toward the South and demographically tilted toward the old.  These two forces meet at the leading media outlet for GOP memes: Fox News.  Much financial and intellectual (or is it anti-intellectual?) capital has been spent largely via this propagation source to oppose such things as climate science, same-sex marriage and healthcare reform, to call into question Obama's "American credentials," and to promote fiscal and foreign policies that have little empirical data in their favor.  I would not be surprised if a poll of registered Republicans, when asked whether Al Jazeera is a political party, media organization or terrorist organization, ended up in a three-way split.  It's that fucking bad.

Very recently, this graph showing the relationship between favorite websites and political affiliation has been making the rounds.  I don't know how statistically reliable it is - it appears to be based on the Trendsetter app's user "likes" - but assuming it's reasonably accurate (and it looks quite accurate for reddit.com's placement), the most telling data point would be the location of the wikipedia logo.  This wouldn't even demonstrate how great Obama and the Dems are, instead of just how bad today's GOP and its candidates are in comparison.  (Keep in mind that book smarts and business smarts aren't the same; also keep in mind that plenty of business people support the Dems.)  If you look at the community of political philosophers, I'd expect the support for present-day American-style conservatism (not to be confused with, say, Hayekianism) to be close to (if not completely) nonexistent.

I will continue researching these Google results and encourage others to do likewise.

(EDIT: Note to self: try to keep the distinction between conservatism (and conservative intellectuals) and the GOP/Fox abundantly clear.)

(EDIT #2: The third Google result, a Wa-Post editorial, mentions Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning as a serious work.  Heck, it even scores 3.9 stars out of 5 at goodreads, way higher than similarly-titled Ann Coulter works score there.  A text search of the book brought up zero results for "Rawls" and one irrelevant result for "Chomsky," however.  So I'm skeptical about what "left" Goldberg is talking about.  Is this like writing a book on the crankery of libertarians by highlighting Ron Paul but not Robert Nozick?)

Generational Shift

Seeing as part of my Toward Utopia project is concerned with the subject of historical causation from the standpoint of the effects of intellectual movements on the whole of societies (which ends up pushing me toward the sort-of uncomfortable position of making Toward Utopia partly about itself), I cannot help but notice that America is headed quite irresistibly toward a new political paradigm that usually goes under the heading of "libertarianism."

By "libertarianism" I mean a political philosophy more or less espoused by our country's Founding Fathers, characterized by emphases on the dignity of the individual human being, individual rights (including property rights, i.e., capitalism), and governments essentially limited to protecting those rights. (I'll set aside for now the long-running and not-going-away-anytime-soon debate over "anarcho-capitalism" vs. laws being defined and enforced by a state.) In terms of concretes, of advocates of this idea, it has been set forth in varying terms in the writings of such figures as Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, David Friedman, James Buchanan, George Reisman, John Hospers, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Loren Lomasky, David Schmidtz, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Based on the limited evidence, the late David L. Norton apparently gravitated toward this political idea as well.

I'm quite firmly of the belief that if an intellectually-curious reader were to thoroughly take in the works of all the above figures - including and especially the comprehensive philosophical visions provided by Rand and Norton - the reader pretty much can't but help coming away a libertarian.

So why aren't we there already?

To answer that requires some investigation into historical causation with respect to the American intellectual scene. That will set the context for understanding. That intellectual tradition is markedly different from that of Europe, which has shown greater affinity toward statism, socialism, communism, fascism, Marxism, existentialism, subjectivism, nihilism, postmodernism (the "cashing-in" of all that, to use Rand's phrase), and the various sub-postmodernisms and post-postmodernisms that stink up the fucking place with anti-Aristotelian stuff. Given the ruling paradigms going on there, Rawlsianism looks relatively sane, and Europe's intellectuals can at least relate to that, the way they can at least relate to President Obama. But Ayn Rand? It's like she's on another planet. If "Europe's leading intellectual" of today (supposedly, and now that the post-post-post-realist Derrida has left the scene), Slavoj Zizek, is any indication, that assessment seems to hold up.

(The abstract for Zizek's asinine article in JARS is as follows: "SLAVOJ ZIZEK argues that Rand's fascination for male figures displaying absolute, unswayable determination of their Will, seems to offer the best imaginable confirmation of Sylvia Plath's famous line, "every woman adores a Fascist." But the properly subversive dimension of Rand's ideological procedure is not to be underestimated: Rand fits into the line of 'overconformist' authors who undermine the ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it. Her over-orthodoxy was directed at capitalism itself; for Rand, the truly heretic thing today is to embrace the basic premise of capitalism without its sugar-coating." Oh, brother. Ain't the jargon of post-whatever just so precious? The "cashing in" is on p. 225 of that article. Did the journal's editorship accept this article to illustrate a point, i.e., of just how off-the-rails the currently-fashionable Euro-intelligentsia has gone? That's a sympathetic spin on this farcical event. To be somewhat less damning of the European intellectual scene, I'll mention Habermas, but - and this ties directly into my present analysis, as I will expand upon below - have you noticed how old Habermas is now? Who is he being replaced by in the younger ranks? [One of his students, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, left for the States and has been advancing a hardcore Misesian-Rothbardian view.] Besides, ethics is primarily about eudaemonia, not discourse. ;-) )

Okay, so the American intellectual tradition is just markedly more friendly toward things like libertarianism, eudaemonism, Aristotelianism, realism, etc. What about the current dominant mainstream of the American academic humanities? In political philosophy, it's been dominated for the last four decades by Rawls, but my thesis here is that this paradigm is on the outs. Lemme explain.

In the mid-20th century, the political debate in this country was shaped essentially by the opposition between Americanism (framed in terms of "liberal democracy") and Communism. Marxism was the dominant ideology of the times. The adherents of Marxism were just waiting things out the way certain Christian sects hold out for the Rapture. The collapse of capitalism was going to happen any time now. Mises was a reactionary confined to a teaching post at the business school of the not-at-the-time-prestigious New York University. You can get a picture of just how insane the whole intellectual scene was by reading Rand's letters from the '30s and '40s. Then there was Galbraith - remember him? Is he even mentioned in economics courses any more? Well, he was a big deal in American economics in the '50s and '60s. William F. Buckley was heading up the conservative movement and made sure (much to the detriment of his eventual historical reputation) to set himself apart from Rand. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, published in '62 after a seeming decades-long drought of pro-capitalist literature as far as the mainstream was concerned, became a leading text for the pragmatic Right.

Basically, the debate, as it was framed then, was far removed from what it is today. Marxism is now a defunct ideology. Yep. It's done. It has run its course. It had considerably less of a foothold in America than it did in Europe - it could hardly ever get a foothold in America, save for its universities. If you're a Marxist in this day and age, you are . . . a reactionary. The same is going to be case, I believe, for Rawlsian liberals. Rawlsian or left-liberalism is on the way out as well.

Rawls's A Theory of Justice was published four decades ago now. My analysis leads me to the conclusion that it, too, is about to run its course and be supplanted by libertarianism, because, well, this is America. America is just too libertarian for statism in its various guises to maintain a foothold. Rawls's liberalism is a statism - a toned-down, less toxic form of statism than Marx-inspired statisms, but a statism nonetheless - and it just won't hold up in this country. The "overlapping consensus" his project aimed for is simply too unstable. The discourse is now dominated too much by consistent adherents of original American liberalism for it to hold up. The advocates of left-liberalism are now turning into dinosaurs, into . . . reactionaries.

Look at the intellectual scene on the American Left today. Just what figures dominate it? Rawls has passed on, and it's been a whole four decades since his most influential work hit the scene. There are more radical Leftists who will cite Chomsky, but if you hadn't noticed, his most influential work was done way back in the '50s, and that work wasn't even in political philosophy. He is also getting up there in years. The radical Left continues to hold onto Chomsky like a security blanket, operating under the Rapture-ready-like delusion that his analysis of the American corporate complex will vindicate a radical-Left vision rather than a consistent libertarian-capitalist one. (I may have more to say about the delusions of the "left libertarians" and "libertarian socialists" in due course. It strikes me as more wishful-thinking, security-blanket stuff. If these so-called libertarians want socialism, they're gonna have to get it within the Nozickian framework outlined in Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, that is, in voluntary hippie communes under a framework of libertarian-capitalist law. That's the best deal Chomsky & Co. are gonna get.)

It's worth pointing out that in the '50s and '60s, the Marxists were laboring (heh) under the delusion that Marxism would be vindicated soon. Little did they expect that in under 50 years, their whole worldview would be defunct. Analogously, the left-liberal community is operating under the delusion that their vision of liberal justice is going to be viable for the foreseeable future. But they have missed one crucial thing: just who in the younger generation is going to replace Rawls and his groupies (as I like to call them; Nagel & Co.) as they pass on? Just who is around to carry on the torch? I ask this, because from what I can tell, Rawlsian liberalism was a halfway-house measure, a kind of stopgap, a soft-landing device, between mid-20th-century American statism in its then-paradigmatic opposition to full-on Communist statism, and a return to original-style American libertarianism.

The Rawls groupies are not getting any younger themselves. Nagel is now in his 70s and his most influential work was done more than 30 years ago. G. A. Cohen has passed on, marking the official end of Marxism. Thomas Scanlon is now in his 70s. Dworkin is well into his 70s and I don't know what influential work he's done since the mid-'80s. Sen is pushing 80. Parfit is pushing 70. So who is left, and - more importantly - just what up-and-comers show any promise of replacing them in their efforts to keep the left-liberal paradigm going?

In answer to that, I have no idea, really. (Does Krugman count?) If you look out onto the blogosphere for any indications, you find that the most mainstream of discussions there occurs on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, and the figures influencing him most are Hayek and Oakeshott, and he's pushing a pragmatic conservative-libertarian-"liberaltarian" line. (He comes from Britain, where Rand's ideas are still quite alien, but Hayek is pretty paradigmatic now as far as "pragmatic liberalism" goes.) Greenwald confines his discussions primarily to civil-liberties issues, where he fits right in with the American mainstream. But what left-liberal intellectual figures alive and not in their 70s or 80s are providing American left-liberals with fuel these days? Is it possible - nay, likely - that the best young intellectuals of the previous and current generation have found libertarianism too appealing to dismiss, and gravitated in that direction? Do today's left-liberals have any idea of the generational shift that has happened and is happening in the American intellectual scene?

[EDIT: Some research on contemporary left-liberalism turns up a familiar name I've been meaning to follow-up in due course: Martha Nussbaum, who isn't quite yet pushing 70. Oh, great, now I'm going into an obsessive-completist-perfectionist exercise in research into what important figures on the Right and the Left I may be missing. Does Scruton count as a prominent and influential conservative? What about the role in American intellectual life of Irving Kristol, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, George Gilder, George Will, Dinesh D'Souza, Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, or The Wall Street Journal? This is why the book keeps getting delayed. Research to cover bases, integrate cross-currents, sub-currents, undercurrents, etc.]

One thing I do know is that my own intellectual energies have been put into service of essentially Randian ideas, and not Rawlsian ones. I can't think that Toward Utopia is going to help the left-liberal cause any. And I've been spending too much time fortifying my ideas against potential left-liberal-type objections to believe they're going to come back with anything all that strong as an alternative, without presupposing the very ideas they'd be objecting to. (I've discovered this myself when it comes to Rand. If I find Rand's ideas wanting in some fashion or other, I can't escape her implicit and explicit advice to perfect upon whatever shortcomings there are in her writings. You can't refute perfectionism, see.)

Speaking of American intellectual and political movements, I find what passes for conservatism these days to be defunct as well. Unless you count Andrew Sullivan as a conservative, you have - as far as I can see - an intellectual void on the Right. Buckley was the leading animating light of conservatism in the second half of the 20th century, but he passed on and . . . what is he being replaced by? Talk radio isn't exactly reputable intellectually; Limbaugh is passe', Glenn Beck is a big mixed bag who may as well throw up any white flags of surrender to Ayn Rand, and phenomena like Palinism can't with a straight face be called intellectual ones. Thomas Sowell is now in his 80s. Hell, if there was any person that could be called a leading light of conservatism aside from Buckley, it would be Sowell. I think if there were other leading lights out there right now, I'd have noticed mentions on the Daily Dish from time to time. But, nope. It looks like the leading younger minds of today who might identify as conservative, are gravitating more and more toward libertarianism - and even with the religious conservatives, there is a shift away from any theocratic impulses.

Even the financial crisis and Great Recession haven't stifled the increasingly popular anti-statist sentiment. There aren't any Marxists around to urge the overthrow of capitalism as a solution, like there were in the '30s. There aren't influential left-liberals around who are shaping public opinion toward a more European-style social-democratic model.

Long story short, America is ripe for a full-on shift toward libertarianism in politics, and, soon enough, Randism as a dominant mainstream cultural force. Randism is already making some headway in the universities, with no effective opposition. Eudaemonism in ethics has no effective opposition there, so things are ripe for a surge in Norton studies, too. The economics profession is already under the influence of Mises, Hayek, and Friedman. In the area of law, the ideas of Hayek, Barnett, Epstein and David Friedman are increasingly mainstream. Mack, Lomasky, Schmidtz and the general flavor of things going on in the Social Philosophy & Policy journal are already providing effective counterweight to the Rawlsian-dominated Philosophy & Public Affairs crowd.

One thing to mention about the major libertarian figures I've been mentioning are that they, too, are either deceased, up there in age, or getting up there in age. The youngest of the bunch, Schmidtz, is now in his mid-50s. Inevitably this raises the same question: who in the younger generation is going to replace them, and what work will carry on theirs? You can take it from there.

[Continued in my next posting.]

The Intellectuals Need Rand

Okay, so the mainstream discourse in this country is an anti-intellectual cesspool. That's the problem. There's really no question that's the problem. It will do no good to idly harp on that problem over and over. We need to diagnose the problem's causes, and then work to solve it. I think we have some good idea on the diagnostic level: a culture-wide denigration of reason down to the very roots. We need a revolution - an intellectual one - from the ground up. For this to happen, it is an absolute imperative for the nation's best and brightest minds to adopt reason wholesale - not superficially, not ostensibly, not at-the-political-economic-level, but all the fucking way. All the way to Aristotle and Rand. There's just no way around it. The absolutism of reality offers no alternatives.

If you look out at the world right now - on the grand scale, on the big picture - you get the acute sense that we're on a crash course with disaster if things don't change pretty damn fast. It's a train wreck in slow motion. The locomotive is doing its thing, charging right ahead with the brakes barely being applied, and we see down the track some faint signs of the object with which the train would collide. We can't be sure just what it is, but it looks like it's there, and we have only so much time.

The intellectual class in this country - and make no mistake about it, for all this country's poor intellectual reputation around the world right now, we have the world's leading intellectuals right here in this country, because America is the breeding ground of greatness and leadership - sees the vast chasm separating their average worldview from that of the country's mainstream. They just don't know what to do about it. Well, good news: help can be on the way, if they're willing to accept it. They're going to have to clean up their acts first.

The silver lining with pragmatists is their willingness to shift course when they are, near-panic-stricken, under the impression their current course just isn't working. They can't say they know their current course isn't working; that isn't the pragmatist psycho-epistemology. They can only say that they can attach a probability to things, and when they get the impression that things are past 50/50, they've got to consider alternative courses of action. Well, now's the time to consider it. If there's one thing the liberal intellectuals in this country can be credited for, it's a pragmatic - and I mean this in a good sense, i.e., the concern with practicality and, therefore, reasonable, real-world, empirical, scientific input for decision-making - sensibility at root. There's a reason Dr. Peikoff finds a closer ally among the "liberals" than among the intellectually-defunct and deranged "conservatives." The "conservative" intellectual movement in this country delivered us the Dingbat, a strident ignorance, and a demand for regression into pre-modernist unreason. Dingbat is the final cashing-in, the final proof of the full-on intellectual and cognitive failure of the American Right.

When Rand delivered a lecture in 1961, titled "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age," she was addressing it primarily to the "liberals" in her audience who care about reason more than the "conservatives" do. She was, however, also speaking at a time when Marxism and socialism were at a peak of intellectual and political influence around the world. You have to look back and realize the surreal nature of a lot of it; her lecture was one year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and just a few years before America conscripted its young to go fight in what eventuated in a failed war. You had the President delivering an inaugural address asking Americans to accept a false dichotomy between receiving altruistic handouts or performing the altruistic handouts. You had the "liberals" clamoring for a "War on Poverty" just as capitalist economic growth was almost finishing the job for them.

(Poverty rates have since escalated, and the "liberals" are, inherently and fundamentally, at a loss to understand why. They turn to the economics community and get mixed answers at best from their vantage point. They just don't know. They've run out of answers.)

Rand's main goal was to try to get the "liberals" to recognize that their adherence to reason should lead them to reconsider the socialist-Marxist rewriting of capitalism's history. By then, however, the intellectual dominance of Marxism was too entrenched for that reconsideration to happen any time soon. The nature of intellectual entrenchment is, for the most part, a generational thing: many intellectuals have already formed a worldview by their 20s and it conditions and lenses their interpretation of everything. Practically speaking, the way around entrenchment is for the current generation to die off and be replaced.

Remember, however, the pragmatist silver lining: everything gets to be open to reconsideration. The pragmatic mindset is to eschew hard doctrines. Notice, further, that today's intellectual class is basically out of answers as to how to fix problems. They have no ideology to fall back on, like the Marxists did. They're adrift at sea without a rudder or compass. That's their cashing-in. They put their political eggs in the Obama basket and got just what they should have expected by placing their trust in politicians and government to fix problems. All they know is "at least he's not the Republicans," the Republicans being Bush, Cheney, and the Dingbat. That's what they get for thinking any significant fundamental change is going to originate at the political level.

They think - though they don't know - that the economic crisis we're going through is the result of too much "Republican," "right-wing" economic policy - knowing full well that politicians in Washington in recent memory have been from both parties, doing what politicians in an intellectually-bankrupt age could only be expected to do, and that is to sell influence to the highest bidder. So they can only guess that the current crisis has anything at all to do with smaller-government (much less "laissez faire" - are you fucking kidding me?) economic policies. They're awash in a sea of not knowing anything with any degree of certainty - certainly not in this day and age, when the economic data appear to point in all directions, some appearing to point in the pro-capitalist one, others appearing to point in the Euro-welfare-state one, a vanishingly small amount pointing toward the Marxist one. They don't have Marxism to point to like the intellectuals of the '30s did. They don't have any ideology at all that they find appealing. They only know - actually, here, they do know - that their opponents across the political aisle are intellectually defunct from beginning to end. They just haven't seriously considered any alternatives to get out of the cesspool they're sinking into.

If you look at today's political environment and asked to identify the two main alternatives, they are pragmatism on one side, and unreason on the other. A person of conviction, of reason, of love for America's founding ideals will say, "No, thanks."

These thoughts originated earlier today while thinking about the oncoming train wrecks we're told about all the time (assuming we're paying attention): man-made global warming, peak oil production, a general American decline. Now, if we were to take off any political or ideological hats, ignore any political agendas and motives on either "side" of the debate about man-made global warming, the first thing to notice is that very few of us are scientists who have studied the issue in depth. The notion that more than a few of us have any expertise on the issue is like the notion that more than a few people have any expertise in the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The notion is ludicrous. What we do have, however, is a large and growing body of evidence that (a) the global mean temperatures are rising at a fast rate in geological terms, and (b) human-made emissions play a causal (not merely "correlative") role in helping this process along.

Now, if you were to look at the mainstream, cesspool-style debate on the issue, you have pragmatic liberals on one side, and fucking knuckle-draggers on the other. In what has to be one of the most jaw-dropping acts of projection any of us may ever see, the right-wing in this country, on this issue, accuses the other side of being driven by a political agenda. Sure enough, there is a political agenda going on on both sides, but any reasonable and intelligent person can abstract from the political agendas to look at the plain scientific facts of the matter. Doing that requires a minimal ability to distinguish descriptive statements from prescriptive ones. The right-wing charges (fears - and the fears are to some extent justified - but the main driving element here is fear, not justification) that the "liberals" are using climate science data as a reason to tax and control the American people more. I don't side with the "liberals" on the prescription, but their prescription is not hard to understand given the ruling paradigmatic mindset that if there is a problem, then the solution is government controls, taxes, etc. (I think we do need to be concerned that if - more likely, when - the scientifically-modeled global warming predictions materialize, that the industrialized nations are potentially open to class-level legal action of some kind, when peoples of non-industrialized nations are displaced by rising coastal waters and other bad stuff.) The "liberals'" error here is relatively minor next to the strident, screaming anti-science and anti-reason of the opposition. The opposition won't even get on board with the descriptive element, even though it is informed by the best science. They won't do it on the issue of evolution, so why in the hell would they do it on this issue?

So I think we as Americans should be willing to prepare ourselves for the worse - more warming, and, simultaneously, a peak and drop in petroleum production - and arm ourselves accordingly. I don't mean, of course, arming ourselves with guns, to prepare ourselves for the supposed "resource wars" some people are predicting. I mean arming ourselves cognitively and intellectually. The only way to do this, is to adopt and integrate the Randian method. There just isn't any other way. Reality doesn't allow for another way.

What the liberal intellectuals need to do, to get people of reason on their side and push the screamingly irrational right-wing into the status of irrelevant minority, is to get over their silly little aversion to Ayn Rand, and adopt reason in all its primacy over the political. If, as I think is the case, they're pragmatic enough to acknowledge the failures and problems with Big Government - not the least of which is how Big Government runs contrary to America's founding ideals - and look for serious alternatives, they might find that they have a chief ally in reason with Ayn Rand, the dreaded egoist-capitalist. The socio-political problems the liberals fear (yes, they have their own version of fear) from adopting a Randian social ethic (a) are not real concerns once you actually understand what she's saying, (b) are secondary and subordinate to the issue of reason, and (c) a culture of reason would make the whole issue moot. A culture of reason has much better means at its disposal to solve any and all problems, be it poverty, or global warming, or energy production, or even obstinate right-wing ignorance. The genuinely intellectual and intelligent elements on the political right today - the "economically conservative and socially libertarian" - are already on board with the Randian program whether they even know it or not.

It's the pragmatic liberal intellectuals who now need to step up and do their part to build the cultural bridge that can unite us as Americans, as a people of reason (and, therefore, of individualism, freedom, and capitalism). If they would only put down their defenses for a bit and do some intellectually curious and responsible investigation (this means not chuckling and dismissing Rand when, oh, like when she says "A is A" - believe me, by now I know pretty much every trick in the book people have for dismissing this and that about Rand - hell, I was prone in my own ways to that same kind of problem back in my naive stages), they'd recognize in Rand their greatest and most potent ally.

Time may well be running out.

(They should just do it, anyway. Rand's eventual status as world-historic thinker is inevitable. Better sooner than later. And, the left is out of ideas, besides.)

Let's get it done! :-)

[ADDENDUM: I'm considering making this my "sign off" post before going into heavy-duty writing of the book's manuscript. I won't give a timetable on a finish, but it should be really soon now. Time is, after all, of the essence. ;-) ]