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.

Generational Shift, Cont'd

Expanding upon my previous posting, I want to do a bit of a thought experiment. Say that you brought Aristotle into today's intellectual scene. What would he have to conclude on the political-philosophical front? (An alternative thought-experiment is to bring a short-list of All-Time Great Philosophers into today, but I like to keep it simple with Aristotle, since his powers of assimilation [or, in alternative terminology, dialectic] would make it kinda pointless to bring in the others. And I take it more or less for granted that, to use Rand's phraseology, Aristotle is the philosophical Atlas holding up the Western intellectual tradition.)

Now, I want to first put aside one point-missing answer that inevitably comes up in connection with Aristotle, to the effect that he endorsed questionable doctrines - universal teleology, an insufficient account of universals, a measure of political authoritarianism or collectivism, and other stuff in that vein. It misses the point that Aristotle was assimilating the best ideas of his day to come to the best answers available to him. If he were around today, with the benefit of 2,500 years of philosophical hindsight, he'd have better answers on these things. For example, in light of modern political philosophy, he'd incorporate Lockean insights, as well as those of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Spencer, Mill, Rand, Hayek, Rawls, and Nozick. By "incorporate" (or assimilate) I mean the Aristotelian method of considering all the views, isolating their merits from insufficient one-sided applications in any given case, and abstracting-integrating a more complete answer without the weaknesses of the others. He'd have a way of assimilating, say, Spencer and Rawls that doesn't preserve the substantive oppositions between them (given the law of non-contradiction - e.g., either we have an extensive welfare state or we don't). (Sciabarra presents a helpful overview of this methodology originating in Aristotle - what Sciabarra calls dialectics, or what I'd call integration (horizontal and vertical) - in the first part of Total Freedom.)

Okay, let's now take the most representative figures whose ideas have been most influential on political philosophy in America over the last half-century. I don't mean the most representative figures in the academy per se, but the most representative figures in "the real world," those who have actually had the most influence on the formation of present-day political positions and oppositions in America. If it were the academy deciding on things, there would be a decidedly more left-liberal "center" in American politics today than there is now; in fact, though, the academy has influenced American politics less than its inhabitants would have liked, given a certain resistance to the academy in the real-world American populace.

Another consideration in selecting the representative figures I'm about to name is that we want figures who are plausibly referred to as political philosophers and can rightly be accorded the distinction of "philosopher," rather than, say, polemicist, pundit, commentator, propagator, intellectual (but short of "philosopher" status - the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, to cite prominent names in recent years on non-political matters, don't qualify), etc. I make this qualification because while the likes of Buckley, Kirk, and Kristol have been influential on conservative "movement" politics, I don't think they have much in the way of philosophical chops. (Didn't want to have to knock conservative intellectuals down a notch, but the dastardly and disreputable treatment of Rand by Buckley and Kirk makes this knocking-down quite unavoidable.) I also make this qualification because I am thinking in terms of longer-term influence which comes from having philosophical-level stature. This stems from how profound and seminal a thinker is. I also do this in order to exclude political scientists, historians, and economists who haven't contributed much by way of political philosophy proper.

Through appropriate process of elimination, I come up with six most significant figures who, taken together, best define the best of what there is on offer for influential political ideology in America. They are, in order of birth date: Hayek, Rand, Rawls, Chomsky, Dworkin, and Nozick. They all have the virtue of being "big names," and the breakdown gives us, by American political standards, three "right" figures and three "left" figures. They span the range from "radical for capitalism" to "radical for anarcho-syndicalism." If there is any one figure that best defines the "center" in America, it would be Hayek, with Rawls a close second.

One thing to note about every one of these figures is the lack of a "conservative" emphasis on the centrality of religion to politics; the closest in that regard would be Hayek, an agnostic himself who acknowledges the importance of tradition (and hence, of some aspect(s) or other of religion to social ordering). Whatever any of them might say for religion, they're all really only interested in what we can know about the natural world (including the social and political world) independent of any religious or theological commitments. In that regard, they inherit an Aristotelian sensibility - and in that regard, modern theocentric conservatisms are implicitly hostile to Aristotelian sensibilities. If Aristotle were around today, I don't think he would have much to say for these conservatisms. So there you have it as far as theocentric political conservatisms go. (A much better approach for these conservatives is to invoke the natural-law tradition without a theological package-deal; that's in fact what the better ones do.)

So, taking the above six philosophical heavy-hitters, how would Aristotle do his characteristic assimilation? The answer, I think, is not one that left-liberals are going to like. Aristotle is too systematic a philosopher not to understand the priority of ethics over politics, which puts him closest to Ayn Rand among these six. Eudaemonist ethics are now, as in Aristotle's time, the best normative-ethical theory going. If you look at the contemporary scene as far as Aristotelian scholarship goes, and further narrow down that group to scholars who are familiar with Ayn Rand's ideas, you find - quite unsurprisingly, to those with so much as clue about these things - a great deal of sympathy toward her ideas. Were Aristotle around today, he couldn't help but to notice this, and to notice the affinity between his-ideas-with-2,500-years-of-hindsight and her own.

Further, it's hard to believe he would be unfamiliar with Norton's eudaemonism which is, to my knowledge, the best-developed modern text in eudaemonist ethics. He couldn't help but notice the literature on perfectionism, and make the appropriate assimilations. Further, he couldn't help but notice that an ethical program of perfectionism, as hierarchically prior to any political program, would render a lot of issues and debates in contemporary political philosophy - which take for granted widespread lack of perfectionistic virtues - moot. That's one outcome of Aristotelian-style assimilation: rendering many debates moot. In promoting a Nortonian-Randian perfectionist program, various debates among present-day left-liberals become irrelevant; obsessions with "distribution of the social product" and egalitarian ideals fall by the wayside - just as, say, debates amongst the various factions of materialists in Aristotle's day fall by the wayside under his assimilation.

(This is evidence of how removed from the real-world American mainstream the academic political-philosophical mainstream is, if we go by who occupies the top posts at the top-rated universities. Nozick's diagnosis has plenty bite to it, and it probably doesn't tell the whole story; Rand and Hayek have things to say about this as well, and one thing they do share is a criticism of tendencies toward rationalism among intellectuals. Here I can't help but think Aristotle would endorse these diagnoses and criticisms - which is why I think the second most similar to Aristotle among the six is Hayek. If Aristotelian-style philosophizing is the standard, it's just not looking too good for left-liberal academia.)

This is not to say that Aristotle wouldn't acknowledge, take into account, etc., the good points being made by the "left" figures I've mentioned; what he would oppose is incomplete and one-sided applications of the good parts. With Rawls, he might acknowledge the merits of a theory being aimed toward principles that people could, with suitably-defined impartiality, reasonably accept. The notion there is fairly vacuous on its own, though, and aside from its intuitive appealingness to a left-liberal academic audience, the contrivance that is the Original Position doesn't suitably account for your ordinary notions of justice once you take into account Rand and Norton with their eudaemonistic approach. (Norton's developmental approach to personhood, for example, makes it exceedingly silly to formulate a theory of justice based on a veil-of-ignorance model which pays no heed to the task of discovering and actualizing one's distinctive individuative potentialities. Norton gets into this in the last chapter of Personal Destinies.)

I couldn't speak for a hypothetical present-day Aristotle, but I think that of the three "left" figures, Chomsky may well be found the most sympathetic figure, given his (implicit) observations of just how devoid of virtue the present money-power-propaganda model is. (That's my spin on it, anyway; I share many of the "left-style" criticisms of today's corrupted political scene. I differ in my diagnosis and solution, while the hard-left-wing seems quite oblivious to what Ayn Rand actually has to say about power. They certainly haven't a clue as to how her views on reason and virtue hierarchically integrate with her views on political power and corruption. The characteristic blind attack on Rand I see from hard-leftists is based on the ignorant assumption that she endorses an exploitative model in virtue of her egoism and alleged "elitism." It's really very embarrassing how ignorant and oblivious to philosophy this stuff is. At least Chomsky himself has had the good sense to refrain from commenting on Rand, about whom he has no obvious qualifications to speak.) Chomsky is of the view that if people were really not so ignorant they'd embrace his social ideals, but we also run up against a limitation with Chomsky: he's not a philosopher proper. He's a political philosopher whose primary background is linguistics and social science; he isn't known for contributions in ethics or epistemology. Aristotle would supersede him. It's interesting that a primacy-of-social-sciences view seems to dominate the far-left mentality in this country.

Alright, enough for beating up on the left. I do want to now give a brief comment on what Aristotle would say about Ayn Rand, and it's probably not going to sit well with her more devoted admirers. While Aristotle would greatly admire Rand's methodological prescriptions, the integration of theoretical and practical, her substantive ethical views (eudaemonism), and quite likely her political philosophy (radical liberalism), he would not have approved of her very non-Aristotelian approach to other philosophers. In place of Rand's over-the-top caricatures and demonizations of Immanuel Kant, he'd have done something way more effective and Aristotelian: fully understand him, characterize Kant's views in his own terms, acknowledge his context, and proceed to refute him. Taking an adversarial stance carries the dangers of partisanship; Aristotle could do so without falling into partisan otherization and demonization, which we find so common in political rhetoric.

For all her methodological emphasis on integration and context, Rand's polemical style was very one-sided. That style has been insidious, a shortcoming that has fed upon itself in really nasty ways. It has been a huge impediment to her ideas taking hold in a timely fashion. It has been insidious, because it has attracted a certain kind of following consisting of adherents who emulate that style, often in increasingly offensive and bizarre ways. Some of the worst of it came out in the writings of Peter Schwartz and in other contributors to The Intellectual Activist in the '80s and '90s. It's why David Kelley, for whatever his shortcomings, couldn't stand it any longer and realized something had to get better.

What happened is that between Rand's heyday up through the 1990s, there were devoted adherents of Objectivism who best understood its methods as presented in Peikoff's courses, but who failed to consistently integrate those methods due to insidious bad practices. That's how you ended up with a movement were a Peter Schwartz was a de facto leader, while there was thorough ignorance of such magnificent ideas and sensibilities as Norton's. It's disgusting, really, that this kind of thing happened in a movement devoted to reason and reality. Not until the 2000s do we see serious attempts to repair this tendency. I think there is a lot to be learned from this problem, given all the cultural progress delayed by it. Rand was simply wrong to say things like, "Kant was the most evil man in mankind's history," and the various attempts I've seen over the years by the devout, to save Rand's condemnation of Kant, just don't hold up. She fucked up here, is all. She had shortcomings and blind spots, and of the sort that Aristotle would not have had or put up with.

But that's the genius of Aristotle. He could acknowledge where the shortcomings, fuck-ups, mistakes, personality flaws, etc. were in Rand's mode of philosophizing, and he could acknowledge and understand the context that led to these unfortunate tendencies, and still extract-and-assimilate the good stuff (of which there is a shit-ton), just as current-day Aristotle scholars like Gotthelf, Lennox, Miller, Rasmussen and Den Uyl have picked up on. And, I believe, he'd also have, Sgt. Hartmann-like, ripped the present-day academy a new gaping asshole for failing so badly to notice this good stuff. With an Aristotle-caliber philosopher, it's all about holding everyone to the highest standards. Perfectionism, you see.

[CLIFFHANGER: Will the next blog posting be that Sgt. Hartmann-like gaping-new-asshole-tearing? Stay tuned, because, whatever it'll be, you won't want to miss it!]

The problem with "maybe"

This posting is to address the fundamentally different paradigms represented by Randianism and "liberaltarianism," respectively. The thing with Ayn Rand is that she represents very basic American, Aristotle-inspired, Jefferson-mirroring respect for common sense, which of necessity includes "Lockean" natural rights of person and property. In academic-philosophical jargon, intuitionism is some kind of theoretical stand-in for "ordinary common sense." (I happen to think "intuition" is a euphemism for Randian "grasp," but that's not a theory of epistemic justification, much less any theory involving bullshit metaphysics a la Plato.) And one thing that hard-headed, uncommon common-sense does not put up with is mushy "maybe"s. Just think how "maybe" commonly infused throughout your everyday life wouldn't result in anything other than an unsustainable anti-conceptual chaos. And yet that's what the "liberaltarian" paradigm gets us. It is borne of a psycho-epistemology of chronic uncertainty and pragmatism. What Aristotelian-Jefferson-Randian American commonsense was hijacked by, was a home-grown Pragmatism.

So here's how Pragmatism clashes with common sense: Pragmatism doesn't give us any fixed, firm absolutes, whereas common sense does. Common sense tells us that it is wrong to initiate the use of physical force against human beings, since the appropriate mode of activity for human beings is that guided by the use of their own minds, and physical force (inasmuch as it is present) negates the possibility of such activity. So in common sense such behavior is wrong, and such anti-force principles are ingrained in common law and well-understood under natural-law doctrine. Pragmatism is different: it takes fallible and imperfect humans as the given, as the standard to which all practice is to be tailored. Out is the concept of reality as the ultimate given and standard-setter (as common sense dictates). It is no surprise that Pragmatism quite commonly devolves into cynicism. The fundamental orientation becomes one of taking conflicts between fallible humans as the primary and finding a means of resolving the conflict, rather than of establishing the truth of the matter. Does this not describe the entire ugly process that is politics, oh my brothers. Everything gets subject to the authority of committee decision rather than of reality. Aren't we better than this?

So here's the problem with Pragmatist-liberlatarianism: all we get is "maybe." The most unacceptable "maybe" of them all is its basic epistemic uncertainty. Humans don't function that way because humans acting with common sense are reality-oriented, and reality is an absolute. And from the radical epistemic "maybe" of Pragmatism we get a moral-social-political "maybe" on the question of whether physical force is acceptable. The Pragmatist has to go through some non-reality-based process or other of determining whether the force in some instance (or class of instances) "works," according to arbitrarily or committee-defined standards of what "works." So apparently it is an open "maybe" in the Pragmatist-liberaltarian mindset whether depriving a human being of the effective use of his own mind and judgment "works" to advance some desired end. The absolutist and common sense response to this is a facepalm in reaction to the whole contradictory notion of it all from the outset. Why the fuck do "liberaltarians" leave such a fundamental moral primary - of not using force against a rational being - up to a big fat "MAYBE"? What kind of goddamn selling point is that?

Here's the problem, then: The Pragmatist-liberaltarian readily admits that if everyone became aware of the prag-lib arguments, maybe we'd all get the nice libertarian capitalist utopia we've all been wet-dreaming about. Maybe we wouldn't even need to address more fundamental metaphysical, epistemological and ethical ideas, including ideas about human virtue and perfection and self-actualization, to get to this nice utopian scenario.

Ayn Rand wouldn't settle for this. The whole idea is to make our lives as perfect as we can, and that doesn't admit of mushy maybes. We need to know that in the good society we will be free of physical force. We need to know that our arguments are right, that anybody presented with them will be convinced that physical force is categorically evil. It is an absolute matter of fact: a people who are exposed to and independently-integratively understand Ayn Rand's ideas will by necessity be a libertarian and capitalist people in virtue of being self-perfecters intellectually and morally.

Much as F.A. Hayek's arguments are as compelling as it gets in the Pragmatist-liberaltarian paradigm, I'm gonna have to go with Ayn Rand on this, thank you very much. The world is going to be a heck of a lot better place a lot sooner as a result.

[ADDENDUM: I swear to God, I didn't see this Sully post until after posting the above. The problem with Sully, of course, is that he quotes Cowen's "maybe" stuff approvingly - as if probability, uncertainty, statistical reasoning, and so forth are the best model. I'd like to ask: did the truly great philosophers think in probabilistic terms? Is that how the reality under consideration by them - absolute, ontological reality - appears to them, in probabilistic terms? Is that how they reasoned on ethical matters? Aristotle was some version of a pragmatic philosopher, but was he vague in any way about the absolute, categorical, and binding character of abstract principles as a constitutive means of the practical? Ayn Rand - soon to be widely recognized as one of the 5 greatest philosophers of all time - certainly wasn't at all vague about the relation between the abstract and the practical. Hell, was Hayek probabilistic, uncertain, and all "maybe"-like about how decentralized and dispersed knowledge is necessary to a working social order, or that socialism fails in virtue of its constructivist-rationalism, or that liberal norms occupy a place between instinct and abstract-reason? I haven't studied Popperian epistemology - a chief influence on Hayek's thinking along with Misesian praxeology - enough to know whether it encourages or thrives on the uncertainty-ethos. My best guess is that it's very British and therefore very commonsensical along with being very, um, pragmatic and non-rationalistic. So in some sense, yeah, I think it does thrive in that context. Anyway, as theory, Hayekianism has much the similar appeal that Misesian praxeology has, but built on some kind of scientific (though avidly anti-scientistic) empiricism rather than aprioristic categories. Let's just not mistake all that for Aristotelian-Randian methodology.]

Andrew Sullivan: Mushy

If there's one thing I cannot abide, it's mushiness. Andrew Sullivan, probably the world's most-read blogger on political and religious matters, fails to make my Ultimate Blogroll (see column at right) for two main reasons: Obama-Love and his weekly Sunday attempts to rationalize a religious faith (which happens to be Catholicism, but weirdly enough isn't Islam, or Judaism, or any of the hundreds or thousands of other religious faiths out there - no, it has to be Catholicism with its bullshit metaphysics of transubstantiation among other things). The religious mushiness is old hat, nothing new to see here. It is notable only because he's supposed to be, like, the Most Reasonable Blogger on the Internet, and yet this grown man seemingly cannot manage to wean himself off the god-nonsense. It matters not a whit to any of this that Jesus of Nazareth may have been a wonderful human being. That's not the point; the point is how grown adults with fully functioning intellectual capacities get all mushy and sentimental and start doing god-talk that can't be pinned down to literal facts.

(Fuck political correctness; stripped of its pretenses and euphemisms, PC is a cover for intellectual weakness and an attack on intellectual courage and honesty. People die millions of times over in the name of religion, and it's goddamn time people figure out why that is. Sully treats it as if it some kind of accident that the leaders of his chosen fantasy-sect have done untold damage to people around the world, for centuries on end. Sully: your religion sucks, grow up and get over it already. Your mealy-mouthed and second-rate apologetics notwithstanding, you're only two or three steps removed from the Wasilla Dingbat because of this, and only a few steps more removed from hardcore fanatics with a different fantasy than yours and who are willing to die and kill in its name.)

What really ticks me off, though, is how you can't get a coherent picture from him about our current president, Barack Obama. Here's Andrew Sullivan on September 9, 2010, just 3 weeks ago:

But Obama's insistence on protecting every Bush era war criminal and every Bush era war crime from any redress or even scrutiny is a sign both of how cold-blooded he can be, but more, I think, of how powerful the security state now is, how it can protect itself, how it exists independently of any real accountability to anyone, how even the metrics of judging it are beyond the citizen's reach or understanding.

I tried valiantly not to believe this of Holder and Obama for months; I tried to see their legitimate concerns about exposing a war machine when it is still at war; I understand the need for some extraordinary renditions; and the necessity for executive power in emergencies to act swiftly, as the Founders intended. Yes war requires some secrecy. But Obama has gone much further than this now. The cloak of secrecy he is invoking is not protecting national security but protecting war crimes. And this is now inescapably his cloak. He is therefore a clear and knowing accessory to war crimes, and should at some point face prosecution as well, if the Geneva Conventions mean anything any more. This won't happen in my lifetime, barring a miracle. Because Obama was a test case. If an outsider like him, if a constitutional scholar like him, at a pivotal moment for accountability like the last two years, cannot hold American torturers to account, there is simply no accountability for American torture. When the CIA actually rehires as a contractor someone who held a power-drill against the skull of a prisoner, you know that change from within this system is impossible. The system is too powerful. It protects itself. It makes a mockery of the rule of law. It doesn't only allow torture; it rewards it.

Now, on September 30, it's like he's forgotten all that:

Obama's speech to Gen44 tonight knocked my socks off. ... If you've forgotten why many of you worked your ass off for this guy, and felt hope for the first time in many years, watch it. He deserves criticism when necessary as this blogazine has not shied from at times. But he remains in my judgment the best option this country still has left - and it's far too easy for the left and far too dangerous for serious conservatives and independents to abandon him now.

(and more Obama-knob-slobbering in similar vein)

This is why Glenn Greenwald makes the Ultimate Blogroll, and Sully doesn't. It's only a matter of time before I'm vindicated on this. Unless he changes his ways, Sully will go down as a mush-head who refuses to speak truth to power in a principled and convincing way, and who tries to be a "uniter and not a divider" when the choice is food or poison. (Notice, if you click on the Sept. 9 link, how it is Glenn Greenwald and his principled commentary that eventually brought Sully around to the "Obama is a tyrant" and "I have been radicalized" viewpoint.)

This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise when Sully's intellectual heroes are not principled advocates of reason, individualism, and capitalism, such as Ayn Rand, but evolutionary "conservative" types such as Hayek and Oakeshott. I have the utmost respect for Hayek in his areas of professional expertise, economics and social theory. The evolutionary model is correct as a description of how institutions change over time, and there are solid classically-liberal conclusions suggested by such description as long as the audience isn't overwhelmed by intellectual mush or lack of common sense. But there's a reason why radicals for capitalism such as Ayn Rand are the wave of the future, and non-radicals are not. Barry Goldwater's proclamation that "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue" is lost on the likes of Sully. Hayekian jurisprudence is fine as a descriptive model, but the correct prescriptive one is natural law, where talk of pragmatism, compromise, incrementalism and whatnot are out of the question. Vascillating back and forth between "Obama is a tyrant" and "Obama is what we need right now" is a clear and convincing failure to grasp or apply natural-law ideals.

The main part of Sully's appeal - to a concrete-bound and politically-focused blog audience - is how he does a convincing job beating up on the dysfunctional American Right. It is true, the Dingbat & Co. have totally destroyed the GOP's reputation for intellectual respectability. Or, better yet, the Dingbat & Co. are the inevitable outcome of decades of cynical and anti-intellectual GOP political strategy. But come on. This is like shooting fish in a barrel. Standing up and being consistent about whether President Barack Obama is a lawless tyrant and manipulative Machiavellian orator or the best political thing since sliced bread, however, is not. It requires a courage and an intellectual context that Sully lacks. If Sully knew the first thing about proper cognitive method - about integration - you wouldn't see him damning Obama one minute and praising him to the stars the next. That lame excuse for a balancing act simply doesn't make sense to people who can retain a thought from one moment or day or week or month to the next.

If we get a meaningful America-worthy freedom in our lifetimes, it'll be no thanks to Europeanized, intellectually-disintegrated, pragmatistic, concrete-bound, mushy, crypto-quasi-socialists like Andrew Sullivan. It's very irrelevant to all this that we've got current problems that, in the prevailing context, require governments doing this or that to "help and protect" people, or being fiscally responsible enough to ensure that taxation covers government outlays as much as reasonably possible. That's all short-term, very concrete stuff. That seems to be all that Sully is currently capable of grasping in his half-assed way. It is, however, the next planet over from how Ayn Rand commented on the concretes of her day. And one thing she was most certainly was not, in any way, shape, or form, was mushy. Where the hell would our political discourse be today were it not for her? Thank GOD for Ayn Rand!

Andrew Sullivan, eh? Read Greenwald instead. No mush there.

[ADDENDUM: Credit where it's due, one thing that Sully hasn't been mushy on over the years, is his defense of gay rights. But that only reinforces the lesson here: in those matters, personally critical to him, there is absolutely no room for mush. But intellectual disintegration, just in virtue of what that is, can mean firmness in one area and mushiness everywhere else. The lesson to draw here is that Sully could be that much more effective if he were as firm on everything as he is on gay rights. That ultimately requires an intellectual context he presently resists for no good reason.]