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:

Where Have You Gone,
Barack Obama?

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.

Hitch And Sully: Is Religion Fossilized Philosophy?

There are various gems from Sully in that exchange; a sampling:

A: But the kind of Christianity that Jefferson espoused—

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A: No, because philosophy doesn’t help you live.

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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.

Your New Dish

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."

America and Europe

These are only very preliminary thoughts to an investigation on a very important and difficult subject: what factors determine the course of nations.

One thing the left-liberals in this country enjoy doing is pointing to the welfare states of Europe as a model for America to adopt. None of it should sit at all well with either advanced students of economics or of Objectivism. The advanced student of economics is apt to root out whether variants of the "broken-window fallacy" or being committed - i.e., what is seen, vs. what is not seen? What are any of the hidden costs the welfare-state advocates are leaving out of their equation? Are they biased as many people tend to be; that is, do they look at the positive side of something they have an automatized positive reaction to, while managing not to notice the negatives? Have they considered the full context?

Just what is the full context? If you're limited to the level of political economy, you're dealing within a narrow context in regard to causal factors. Take, for instance, a favorite icon of the left, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, a linguist by profession, takes left-wing views on matter of political economy; his political ideal is something he calls "anarcho-syndicalism." If Chomsky is the genius many on the left claim he is, then we should hear a lot more from the left about the need to adopt an anarcho-syndicalist model rather than a welfare-state model. Why this schism between admiration for Chomsky's genius and the policies they support? Is it pragmatism? Why the pragmatism, if that's the case?

Besides, why do they go in for Chomsky's political-economic-level analysis of our popular culture? Manufacturing Consent is a left-wing bible, and in fact his analysis seems to provide a pretty comprehensive, over-arching explanation of how and why our national discourse is in the state that it's in right now. It would definitely (seem to) explain how and why a Dingbat has a prominent voice in our politics. Further, the popular culture, in the Chomsky-inspired analysis, is so infused through and through by the interests of a powerful moneyed elite that it overrides a lot of attempts at educating people about better ideas (e.g., the preferability of Euro-style welfare states). Americans these days are fat, dumb, apathetic, etc. - and the corporations only encourage all that more because of the profit involved and the interests of the moneyed elite that are served.

I don't know how exactly that's supposed to explain the popular appeal of, say, Creationism (as opposed to evolution) in the American landscape. Maybe the Chomsky-style explanation isn't meant to cover this, that, and everything - just a lot of things we see today. But then again, maybe the political-economic analysis can be refined or amended to account for that. It kinda gets squishy here.

How about the status of Ayn Rand in our mainstream culture? Here's where the analysis rather breaks down. The Chomsky-inspired analysis is that her ideas serve as useful fuel and rationalization for the moneyed elite's power-structure. Alan Greenspan, after all, was an inner-circle member and he helped to engineer the economic crisis which (supposedly) was a macrocosmic illustration of the moneyed elite's stranglehold on our political-economic system. That apparent explanation certainly looks convenient to a left-wing analysis, but the game here is one of guilt-by-association rather than one of understanding. Alan Greenspan is, after all, a pragmatist at root, which means his thought-processes and actions are not that of someone seriously well-versed in Rand's philosophy. So things start to really get squishy and squirmy here.

Just how does the left in the country see and grasp Rand? If they see and grasp things at the level of political economy, they're not going to have a firm grasp of anything there. They're just not. Further, the political-economic analysis of things in which a moneyed elite is manipulating and dumbing-down public opinion in order to best serve its interests, tends to be associated with thoughts that the American right suffers from intellectual inferiority. Again, they point to Europe as an example of greater enlightenment, because of their (apparent) advances over America in the areas the leftists and liberals find most important. (Didn't Rand say something about the realms "conservatives" and "liberals," respectively, find more important, and focus their policy concerns accordingly? I think it's in her essay, "Censorship: Local and Express." But only the Rand cultists could tell you about that essay.) But the fact of the matter is that Ayn Rand just doesn't fit into that picture of right-wing intellectual inferiority. In fact, it's really hard to pin down Ayn Rand as a right-wing figure at all. Not when she advocates the primacy of reason above all else.

Let's say that the average American is well-versed in Rand. Not just the novels and non-fiction writings, but the Peikoff stuff, too. (Rand explicitly said Peikoff was her best student, see. She explicitly said that his lecture courses are first-rate as presentations of her ideas.) The consequence is people who tend to think a lot more clearly, more efficiently, more well-integrated, etc. Assuming mind-body integration, this cognitive efficacy means lots of great existential results across all kinds of factors - economic, political, cultural, artistic, spiritual. So an America well-versed in Rand would be advanced beyond both present-day America and present-day Europe in a lot of ways. Psycho-epistemologically, they would be a lot healthier.

Just how does the average/mainstream European compare to the average/mainstream American, cognitively or psycho-epistemologically. Which of the two thought-processes are more logical and reality-oriented? Isn't that a more primary determinant of cultural, political, artistic and spiritual health? Moreover, does the standard left-liberal, or the standard Chomsky-style analysis broaden the investigation to this level of generality? If so, then do the nature of economic systems provide us with the level of generality, i.e., fundamentality that we need? I don't think Rand would have said that, given the primacy of ideas over economics. So how does America stack up to Europe in regard to average/mainstream cognition, and how does this factor into the left-liberal comparisons? Further, and very importantly, what fundamentally influences the course of a nation's average/mainstream cognitive or psycho-epistemological health?

I think that the left-liberals are onto one major facet of things, and that is the nature of cognitive processes dominant in various cultures. Is the dominant culture one that values reason over unreason? The American South gets flunking grades here, whereas the stridently irrationalist forms of religion are much less prominent in Europe now. That's one very significant difference right there. Predominant forms of religious belief here in the states poison scientific dialogue by poisoning cognitive processes - by reinforcing and rewarding cognitive failure.

Let's say that the nature of a culture or cultural mainstream is determined primarily and fundamentally by ideas. Now, look at the most dominant philosophical figures in the West - those whose ideas most influence those of the other philosophers, and down through the pyramidal structure of ideas, all the way down to the "man on the street." So we have Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, first and foremost. This threesome more than any others determines - as far as philosophy goes - the basic cultural structure of Western societies. Yeah, Europe has more extensive welfare states and less obvious dingbattery in their leading political figures. But aside from differences, the basic structure of both Europe and America is pretty similar. They both have welfare states, they both have (some meaningful semblance of) a rule of law, free elections, pretty advanced science disciplines, pretty good university systems, etc. You could say that Europe and America are more fundamentally similar to one another than to an Islamist theocracy.

But they're also different from one another in less basic terms. We mentioned only Plato, Arisotle, and Kant. What, then, about Jesus Christ? Was he a philosopher, or would he be considered some other kind of intellectual leader-figure? Perhaps Jesus - or the prevailing received idea of Jesus - is more aptly called a spiritual leader. And in the hierarchy of human life, where does the spirit rank? How does it rank in relation to the intellect? They're both fundamentally crucial aspects of a human being's soul. I haven't determined (yet) which is of more fundamental causal importance, but they're both really fundamental and interrelated. Now, take Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, and throw Jesus Christ into the mix, and what do you get?

Rand said that religion is a primitive form of philosophy - that it is a less-conceptually-refined, i.e., less-intellectually-advanced view about the nature of reality and humans' relation to it. So let's advance this thesis: Jesus Christ - more specifically, the role Jesus Christ plays in the lives of believers in Him - represents a primitivist influence on the West. People turn to Him to meet spiritual needs, at the expense of intellectual values. (The Thomist tradition is an uneasy hybrid. For all that intellectual rigor that goes into an ontological proof of God's existence, you'd think they'd get around to showing how the standard miracle-story of the Christ passes the philosophical sniff test. None of it holds up well under Kaufmann's withering examination, anyway.) So throw Jesus Christ into the mix in differing doses from one culture to the next, and cognitive health will vary accordingly. Now, with all their welfare states and whatnot, how are the Euros doing spiritually? (Oh. We're back at "Censorship: Local and Express" again.) Do we hear much of anything about that from the left-liberal Euro-peddlers? Just wondering. Because once religion is out, something has to fill the void. Anyway, I do hear that "happiness indices" rank average Euros higher than average Americans. So perhaps reason has ample spiritual value, after all.

Then again, maybe I haven't considered all the factors. One thing about those welfare states, by the way: homogenous and shrinking populations are probably easier to take care of via welfare states, than what's going on population-wise in the USA. I'm not clear on how that fits into the left-liberal Euro-pimping. After all, it's not apples and apples.

As I said, these are only very preliminary thoughts; this subject needs a lot more working-out....

Ground Zero Mosque: A and not-A

First, the bigotry:

Palin (7/18): "Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. ."

Gingrich (7/21): "There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia."

Pawlenty (8/6): "I think it's inappropriate... From a patriotic standpoint, it's hallowed ground, it's sacred ground, and we should respect that. We shouldn't have images or activities that degrade or disrespect that in any way."

Huckabee (8/4): Even if the Muslims have the right to build it, don’t they do more to serve the public interest by exercising the responsible judgement to not build it, given that it’s really offensive to most New Yorkers and Americans? Or is it just that we can offend Americans and Christians, but not foreigners and Muslims?"

Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom (today): "Governor Romney opposes the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero. The wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda compel rejection of this site."

Now that I'm back from vomiting, I'd like to distill the essence of what is going on here.

All of these 2012 hopefuls are looking to secure the nomination of a party that is intellectually hopeless. This playing-to-the-base is religious bigotry and runs counter to all liberal values of the West. But here's the disgusting part: They are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. In other words, they are trying to have their irrational religious bigotry and they are trying their damnedest to reconcile this with some semblance of reasonableness and tolerance.

It cannot be done.

What we have, as a result, is contortions of logic in order to fit the square of unreason into the circle of reason. To anyone who can smell disingenuous bad faith from a mile off, this stuff stinks.

Basically, in order to secure the 2012 nomination, all the likely hopefuls are shitting away any pretense to intellectual integrity. What's more, this is a necessary consequence of what the GOP has become: an intellectual cesspool.

As Andrew Sullivan keeps saying, and the GOP leaders keep dishonestly evading: "It will only get worse before it gets better."

Who is John Thune?

(No, not Galt. Thune.)

Seems that America is facing domestic wars on (at least) two fronts: against elitist capitalism-hating assholes in academia on one hand, and against evangelical reason-hating idiots on the other.

Here are the current odds for who will win the 2012 GOP nomination. The "best" candidate - and Establishment favorite - is Mitt Romney. He has a roughly 30% chance of winning the nomination. It's doubtful he could beat Obama, but at least he would put up a minimally respectable fight. Then you have the Dingbat with a 17% chance. Figgie Newton has a roughly 11% chance and steadily rising. Pawlenty has an 11% chance, but nobody cares about him and his name isn't even presidential. Fuckabee is at 7%. But none of these are the third-place contender. That honor goes to John Thune, junior Senator from South Dakota, at roughly 15%.

Thune has better looks and better hair than Romney. That'll be part of the appeal his fans will tout, just like the (more or less) same fans tout the looks of Dingbat. (As corporate monstrosities like Yum! Brands will tell you, looks and packaging are essential to marketing a shit sandwich.) Here's the money quote from the wikipedia article on Thune:

Thune has described his religious faith as the most important aspect of his political career: "Having a Christian worldview shapes my decision-making with respect to all aspects of my life. I always respect people in public life who are principled, and those principles have to be connected to something. And my faith is what serves as the anchor and directs my actions."[13] In June 2006, Thune reaffirmed his strong support to amend the United States Constitution to ban same-sex marriage: "The Federal Marriage Amendment debate simply is an opportunity for us to affirm our support for marriage...It is an important debate to have in this country."

So it would appear that a combination of good looks, anti-intellectualism and pathological homophobia is what has right-wing hearts all aflutter.

Didn't we already see where 8 years of this shit got us?

How the Right doesn't get it

Sullivan links to this blog entry by Prof. Stephen M. Bainbridge lamenting the state of the American Right today.

The last item on his list of things that make "real" conservatives embarrassed by the modern "conservative movement" is this:

The substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk radio for reasoned debate. Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, and even Rush Limbaugh are not exactly putting on Firing Line. Whatever happened to smart, well-read, articulate leaders like Buckley, Neuhaus, Kirk, Jack Kent, Goldwater, and, yes, even Ronald Reagan?

The myopia and double-standard here is too much to take with a straight face. How else does one characterize Whittaker "Gas" Chambers's review of Atlas Shrugged in the pages of Buckley's National Review, other than the substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk for reasoned debate?

It is a context-dropping, intellectually-inferior narrative amongst "respectable conservatives" that Buckley served as some kind of quality-control enforcer for the conservative movement. This is plainly false. While reading people like the John Birchers out of the conservative movement, Buckley (via Chambers) also read Ayn Rand out of the movement, which is to say, that he read out of the conservative movement the most potent intellectual voice for reason, individualism, and capitalism. This is to say that Buckley's quality-control standards were shit from the beginning.

This is also to say that the kookery in which the American Right has been drowning, is just the chickens' homecoming.

The Right is now flailing about, grasping somewhere - anywhere - for intellectual leadership. They have now opportunistically latched onto Ayn Rand in addition to everyone else, but they still reject at root all the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics that make for an intellectually sound defense of capitalistic freedom. They don't get it, they will continue not getting it for the foreseeable future, and their problems will continue for that reason.

Incidentally, Rand wrote an article in the '60s, titled "Conservatism: An Obituary," reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. She already diagnosed the "conservatives'" problem back then, and her insights remain as spot-on as ever. The chief, central problem of "conservatism" then and now has been anti-intellectualism, which Chambers's review of Atlas epitomizes.