The intellectuals are supposed to be the best and most esteemed repositories of society's wisdom, and so when so many of them are so ignorantly (and therefore basely) opposed to an intellectual figure such as Ayn Rand, they have failed in their task of being the guardians and integrators of human knowledge. (Only those with a clue about Ayn Rand will recognize this last turn of phrase. The ignorant haters won't have a clue, because that's what's in the nature of ignorant haters, A being A and all.) Now, imagine a treatise hitting the American intellectual scene that completely blasts away at the misrepresentations, distortions, and smears of Rand and her ideas that have circulated in the intellectual scene for decades. How do the veteran and entrenched intellectuals react?
First off, the notion that academia as it is today doesn't corrupt the study of philosophy in various insidious ways would be ignorant in its own right, but the results speak for themselves. While Rand essentially delivered a rational eudaemonistic ethics over half a century ago, and provided the American People with a philosophical guide to living, the Intellectual Class has stumbled and staggered to and fro (but with ample logical hairsplitting and footnotes) trying to get at the answers Rand already had reached. The Intellectual Class, in the meantime, became enamored with John Rawls's Theory of Justice because . . . psychologically speaking, it's because it speaks to them so persuasively.
We already saw, in the early 20th century, how socialism spoke so persuasively to the aspirations of the Intellectuals, even though the leading economist of the time, Ludwig von Mises, exploded their myths and aspirations - at least he exploded them logically. He didn't explode them existentially; they plunged ahead in their support for socialism, and the result was widespread death and destruction the more socialistic the ideas that were implemented. This is a dark history that the Left is in denial about. Their dreamy ideas were a fucking disaster in the real world, and it's hard to come to terms with that.
Now, in connection with this observed phenomenon - a friendliness toward socialism and antipathy toward capitalism in the Intellectual Class, most obvious in the Humanities - Robert Nozick provided a thoughtful diagnosis. Combined with an utter fucking ignorance of Rand's ideas among some of these intellectuals, and in some cases an ignorance combined with the most malicious hostility toward Rand or anything capitalistic, the idea that the prevailing academic model produces philosophy, per se, and not a biased cognitive environment, is quite ignorant in itself. As a philosopher, I fucking hate ignorance.
Given the overwhelmingly compelling case for capitalism presented in the works of 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, not to mention the overwhelming, real-world, not-merely-theoretical, demonstrated superiority of capitalism in practice, the opposition to capitalism in the Intellectual Class is nothing short of pathological - quite frighteningly so, in fact. It's hard to expect the Intellectual Class to take Rand seriously when it hardly takes anything pro-capitalism seriously, which in turn makes it exceedingly difficult to take the Intellectual Class seriously.
So here's how certain "types" of intellectual figures are bound to respond to such a bombshell treatise correcting the prevailing misconceptions which they should have been correcting long ago:
(1) The first type, the most intellectually curious and honest type, acknowledges that there was a big un-philosophical fuck-up that happened here, and that corrective measures needed to be adopted post haste.
(2) The second type, a somewhat mixed type, is the one whose context is so foreign to Rand's, that the response is likely to be one of caution and skepticism about new information that challenges one's prevailing opinions. This type would not be so keen on the "post haste" corrective measures, as they would call for the need for time - perhaps a prolongued period of time - to debate the ideas in the fashion that academics debate ideas, which has traditionally carried with it certain insidious tendencies - like those that led to the great degree of academic neglect of Ayn Rand's thought. This second type would be instructive to observe from the perspective of how deeply automatized and integrated a context can be, and how a new and unfamiliar context (but a deeply-integrated context in its own right) intrudes upon their understanding of the world.
(3) The third type would be the social-metaphysical second-hander or social-climber who waits and sees what the prestigious figures in the field say, and react to that. This type is part of the problem to begin with.
(4) The fourth type would be a defensive one - the kind of defensiveness you typically find when someone's long-held conceptions of things are put to severe challenge. Defensiveness can manifest itself in some pretty ugly ways depending on the case. This mentality is not very philosophical, but it can be subtly encouraged when enough like-thinking people (in this case, fellow members of one's trusted community, which is biased against capitalism) behave in like-thinking ways. A mixture of this type and type #3, and with perhaps another character trait added in, leads to the academy's lackluster response to one of their own - Nozick - destroying a great number of their bad non-capitalist views.
(5) The fifth type is the flat-out evader. This is the mentality that has been poisoned, and there are some such poisoned mentalities in the Intellectual Class already. These are the people whose evasions lead most directly to damaging real-world results, and who blatantly defy their job description. Some such so-called intellectuals hold tenured positions in the academy so they can't be fired as they should be. This type will just have to die off and be replaced by someone honest.
Now, if you have a range of people, many of whom fall into these "types," you're going to have clashing contexts between Randian or Perfectivist ideas and theirs, and it's this clashing of contexts that makes for any delay between the introduction of an idea and its acceptance. Rand found out this context-gap the hard way, upon publication of Atlas Shrugged: the context of many of those in her audience had been so fucked-up that effective communication between Rand and such unfortunate souls was next to nonexistent. (That's just how dysfunctional the intellectual climate in America was ca. 1957.) You had some idiotic reviewers of For the New Intellectual declaring quite emphatically that Rand's ideas were "near perfect in their immorality." (Not that these idiotic comments were from people who were able to think philosophically, the way a serious philosopher like, say, John Hospers did.) What's ironic is just how imbecilic the fashionable "liberal" reaction to Rand was. When I think "imbecile," I usually think Sarah Palin and her ilk, but how else do you describe the behavior of fashionable liberal intellectuals who don't have a clue?
Rand was incredulous at first at how the reaction to her work could be so fucking imbecilic (and clueless). She just wasn't prepared for the degree to which irrationality had been ingrained in the culture. Well, I think I'm gonna be more well prepared upon the release of my opus than Rand was on the release of hers. The capacity for people to be proudly imbecilic and clueless seemingly knows no bounds, and the myriad ways in which the anti-Rand crowd seemingly goes out of its way to misunderstand, misrepresent, distort and smear her, are all too predictable by now. But as I said in a previous posting, the target audience for my forthcoming book is, first and foremost, the young intellectuals who have the least invested in a faulty (non-perfective) worldview. The behavioral response across demographics will be quite the interesting subject of study.
How does one avoid the embarrassment of being proven manifestly and insanely wrong about a thinker such as Ayn Rand? My best advice is not to get oneself into that sort of pride-threatening pickle to begin with. It helps not to cultivate mental habits leading to anti-capitalist idiocy, as happens to quite an embarrassing degree in the Academy. No wonder the American people despise their Intellectual Class. And I think they'll be none to pleased to find out just how destructive to their interests the Intellectual Class has been. They won't put up with it; they just won't. I think the Comprachicos' days are numbered. Just how numbered they are, remains to be seen; there is free will, after all.
[ADDENDUM: For some idea of how far behind Rand the cultural and intellectual mainstream of 1957 was, keep in mind that this was before Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" article, before the rise of Virtue Ethics as a mainstream alternative to utilitarianism and deontology - a rise that has taken longer to happen due to the amount of attention and study diverted toward Rawls's theories - and before a number of authors - e.g., Henry Veatch, Jonathan Barnes, or, popularly, Mortimer Adler - began writing books on Aristotle for more public consumption, and less than two decades after The Basic Works of Aristotle were published in America. Philosophy was experiencing what Rand referred to as a "post-Kantian disintegration," in which Aristotle was being drowned out by lesser and more destructive thinkers, where Positivism and Existentialism were dominant. Only a clueless non-philosopher oblivious to the wisdom of Aristotle would conclude that Rand's ideas "are nearly perfect in their immorality," despite her well-known advertising of her admiration for Aristotle. The fact of the matter is, Rand was just well ahead of anyone else of her time, and figured out the things that it has been taking decades for the Mainstream to figure out. I see egg-on-face syndrome as quite inevitable here.]
Showing posts with label human behavior. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human behavior. Show all posts
Friday, March 18, 2011
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Barbara Branden, In a Nutshell
In the interview with Cynthia Peikoff for 100 Voices, there is a new twist on Barbara Branden's visit with Ayn Rand in 1981. From Ms. Branden's biography, the meeting was happy and benevolent. What Ms. Branden fails to mention is that shortly after their meeting - not during the meeting - she sent a letter to Rand informing her that she was going to write a biography on her, and asked if she could have Rand's support or input on it. The whole episode left Rand disgusted; the point of the meeting was to gain some kind of validation that Ms. Branden could then exploit for her book. Nice going, Babs.
It's also worth noting that Rand was most unimpressed with Ms. Branden after their visit; there just wasn't much there.
I would also like to bring up Ms. Branden's account of Rand's appearance on the Donahue show in 1979. Ms. Branden hones in on one unpleasant episode in the show (see here starting at 8:15), where a woman begins her question by insulting Rand. Rather than defend Rand, Ms. Branden characterizes the episode as Rand attacking this "young girl" even though Rand explained why she would not sanction such a form of disrespect. It's telling, psychologically, that Ms. Branden would identify more with the "young girl" here.
Apparently, Ms. Branden's fear-motivated behavior during her years with Rand - "walking on eggshells" and all that - was a problem on Rand's part - just as Rand's reaction of disgust to Ms. Branden's 1981 vulture-style behavior was Rand's problem, she would expect us to believe.
Nathan's behavior in regard to Rand - from the mid-'60s up to the present day - can be described as nothing short of monstrous. Ms. Branden, meanwhile, might best be characterized as flaky - morally, emotionally, intellectually, etc. Given the behavior of these two vultures, I don't know how they can be believed about anything in regard to Ayn Rand absent independent corroboration and context. Short of that, the thought of entertaining their tales and insinuations is disgusting. Some of us got burned with their first round of biographies and memoirs back in the '80s before the Estate got around to issuing its devastating response (see James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics); never again.
It's also worth noting that Rand was most unimpressed with Ms. Branden after their visit; there just wasn't much there.
I would also like to bring up Ms. Branden's account of Rand's appearance on the Donahue show in 1979. Ms. Branden hones in on one unpleasant episode in the show (see here starting at 8:15), where a woman begins her question by insulting Rand. Rather than defend Rand, Ms. Branden characterizes the episode as Rand attacking this "young girl" even though Rand explained why she would not sanction such a form of disrespect. It's telling, psychologically, that Ms. Branden would identify more with the "young girl" here.
Apparently, Ms. Branden's fear-motivated behavior during her years with Rand - "walking on eggshells" and all that - was a problem on Rand's part - just as Rand's reaction of disgust to Ms. Branden's 1981 vulture-style behavior was Rand's problem, she would expect us to believe.
Nathan's behavior in regard to Rand - from the mid-'60s up to the present day - can be described as nothing short of monstrous. Ms. Branden, meanwhile, might best be characterized as flaky - morally, emotionally, intellectually, etc. Given the behavior of these two vultures, I don't know how they can be believed about anything in regard to Ayn Rand absent independent corroboration and context. Short of that, the thought of entertaining their tales and insinuations is disgusting. Some of us got burned with their first round of biographies and memoirs back in the '80s before the Estate got around to issuing its devastating response (see James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics); never again.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Peikoff vs. McCaskey
Well, I'm prepared to admit a bit of an egg-on-face problem in light of Peikoff's explanation for the "split" with McCaskey.
One thing to mention as a matter of my context, was the impression that his released email criticizing McCaskey was a "last word" type of thing on the subject - a policy he adopted with respect to David Kelley upon publishing "Fact and Value." (I'm still disappointed with how the Kelley-split thing was handled, probably by a good number of those involved.) I'd also like to mention how Peikoff's statements of this sort come off in sense-of-life terms: a sense of needlessly contemptuous tone. The same tone drags down the ability of his magnum opus, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, to engage most effectively with a normal reader. It comes across in Rand's writings at times as well. (I'm not yet through with my multi-part explanation of my sense-of-life differences with Atlas Shrugged.) But one thing I simply don't have is a personal acquaintance with Leonard Peikoff, and such a personal-level acquaintance tends to help in situations such as this.
Further, a general epistemic lesson to take away from this is to consider that a wider context may well exist where we haven't heard "definitively" from both sides of a dispute. Just imagine watching a court case and forming a judgment based only on what the prosecution said. This lesson is particularly crucial when applied to the Rand/Branden break, where all kinds of people (myself included) drew conclusions about Ayn Rand based on distorted and one-sided accounts from the Brandens themselves without having seen/read/heard Rand's side of things (again, having been under the impression that "To Whom it May Concern" was Rand's "final" statement on the matter . . . which actually meant Branden getting off easy considering that the truly reprehensible nature of his misdeeds remained hidden from the public until James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics).
Anyway, for what it's worth, before I (just now) became aware of Peikoff's statement on the McCaskey matter, I had already purchased David Harriman's The Logical Leap, and Peikoff's The Art of Thinking course (one of the lecture courses from Peikoff's age 50-60 prime-period I hadn't heard yet) is already on its way. The more I study these two individuals - Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff - the more it keeps coming together and making total sense. Still not sold on all the (ultra-contemptuous) "Kant is evil" polemics, but I'm almost grasping the full context in which some of these polemics were formed. And her theory of concepts as inductive generalizations - the center of it all, the thing that really matters most in the end, long-term - is effing brilliant and cements Rand's place alongside Aristotle as the greatest philosopher to date. When Rand commends Peikoff for his ability to communicate Objectivist ideas "superlatively" (her word), there's no shittin' about it: he knows his Objectivism pretty much as well as anyone alive. (For whatever reason, Branden pretty fell off the map in this area; his theory-practice integration dropped through the floor, he indicates a failure to understand Objectivism by projecting his own psychological issues onto Objectivism's theoretical structure, and he hasn't produced anything like Peikoff's lecture courses since the Break. Just as with his relation to Rand, the Philosopher outlasts the Psychotherapist.) (Meanwhile, I'm the leading authority on the next level/integration beyond Objectivism: Perfectionism.) As his Understanding Objectivism course essentially established, the Objectivist methodology - the center of it all - is pretty much invincible, having to be invoked in order to be attacked. Once you account for how concepts (our means of grasping reality) are formed objectively, the rest falls into place.
(Damn, if only an in-fashion socialist had come up with the measurement-omission account, the academy would have lapped it all up already. But then again, the kind of integration it took to arrive at the theory of concepts is the same kind of integration involved in recognizing the truth of the moral rightness of capitalism. Hell, just to recognize this point requires an appreciation of and good job integrating the method. I ask again, as I did the other day, do present-day mainstream academic philosophers even know what "integration" means? By the way, there is ample justification for Rand's contempt towards the "academic model," a model drenched in social metaphysics. The contempt here seems quite mutual; they don't like her and she didn't like them. Of course, by a number of indicators, the academy isn't stuck in quite as big a pile of shit as it was mid-20th-century; the ascendancy of Aristotle - kinda hard to stop that juggernaut, innit? - and the relative decline of assholes like Marx and other socialists has surely added to the conceptual clarity going on there. And Rand is getting some traction in the area of ethics without any meaningful criticism in opposition, as well. Let's not forget about that.)
Speaking of integration, I'm still trying to integrate what Peikoff is doing bringing up his "stature" in the Objectivist movement in these kinds of disputes. Again, Peikoff does note that his comments in the email presupposed a context shared amongst all the recipients. Still, there's something "off" about it, perhaps part of the same tone that comes off (sense-of-life-wise) as so contemptuous. Anyway, I've got bigger fish to fry than spending a lot of time focusing on this stuff. I look forward to listening to his course, reading the Harriman book, and integrating it all as need be into my forthcoming treatise. This thing needs to come out of the starting gate full-speed with bases amply covered, see.
One thing to mention as a matter of my context, was the impression that his released email criticizing McCaskey was a "last word" type of thing on the subject - a policy he adopted with respect to David Kelley upon publishing "Fact and Value." (I'm still disappointed with how the Kelley-split thing was handled, probably by a good number of those involved.) I'd also like to mention how Peikoff's statements of this sort come off in sense-of-life terms: a sense of needlessly contemptuous tone. The same tone drags down the ability of his magnum opus, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, to engage most effectively with a normal reader. It comes across in Rand's writings at times as well. (I'm not yet through with my multi-part explanation of my sense-of-life differences with Atlas Shrugged.) But one thing I simply don't have is a personal acquaintance with Leonard Peikoff, and such a personal-level acquaintance tends to help in situations such as this.
Further, a general epistemic lesson to take away from this is to consider that a wider context may well exist where we haven't heard "definitively" from both sides of a dispute. Just imagine watching a court case and forming a judgment based only on what the prosecution said. This lesson is particularly crucial when applied to the Rand/Branden break, where all kinds of people (myself included) drew conclusions about Ayn Rand based on distorted and one-sided accounts from the Brandens themselves without having seen/read/heard Rand's side of things (again, having been under the impression that "To Whom it May Concern" was Rand's "final" statement on the matter . . . which actually meant Branden getting off easy considering that the truly reprehensible nature of his misdeeds remained hidden from the public until James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics).
Anyway, for what it's worth, before I (just now) became aware of Peikoff's statement on the McCaskey matter, I had already purchased David Harriman's The Logical Leap, and Peikoff's The Art of Thinking course (one of the lecture courses from Peikoff's age 50-60 prime-period I hadn't heard yet) is already on its way. The more I study these two individuals - Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff - the more it keeps coming together and making total sense. Still not sold on all the (ultra-contemptuous) "Kant is evil" polemics, but I'm almost grasping the full context in which some of these polemics were formed. And her theory of concepts as inductive generalizations - the center of it all, the thing that really matters most in the end, long-term - is effing brilliant and cements Rand's place alongside Aristotle as the greatest philosopher to date. When Rand commends Peikoff for his ability to communicate Objectivist ideas "superlatively" (her word), there's no shittin' about it: he knows his Objectivism pretty much as well as anyone alive. (For whatever reason, Branden pretty fell off the map in this area; his theory-practice integration dropped through the floor, he indicates a failure to understand Objectivism by projecting his own psychological issues onto Objectivism's theoretical structure, and he hasn't produced anything like Peikoff's lecture courses since the Break. Just as with his relation to Rand, the Philosopher outlasts the Psychotherapist.) (Meanwhile, I'm the leading authority on the next level/integration beyond Objectivism: Perfectionism.) As his Understanding Objectivism course essentially established, the Objectivist methodology - the center of it all - is pretty much invincible, having to be invoked in order to be attacked. Once you account for how concepts (our means of grasping reality) are formed objectively, the rest falls into place.
(Damn, if only an in-fashion socialist had come up with the measurement-omission account, the academy would have lapped it all up already. But then again, the kind of integration it took to arrive at the theory of concepts is the same kind of integration involved in recognizing the truth of the moral rightness of capitalism. Hell, just to recognize this point requires an appreciation of and good job integrating the method. I ask again, as I did the other day, do present-day mainstream academic philosophers even know what "integration" means? By the way, there is ample justification for Rand's contempt towards the "academic model," a model drenched in social metaphysics. The contempt here seems quite mutual; they don't like her and she didn't like them. Of course, by a number of indicators, the academy isn't stuck in quite as big a pile of shit as it was mid-20th-century; the ascendancy of Aristotle - kinda hard to stop that juggernaut, innit? - and the relative decline of assholes like Marx and other socialists has surely added to the conceptual clarity going on there. And Rand is getting some traction in the area of ethics without any meaningful criticism in opposition, as well. Let's not forget about that.)
Speaking of integration, I'm still trying to integrate what Peikoff is doing bringing up his "stature" in the Objectivist movement in these kinds of disputes. Again, Peikoff does note that his comments in the email presupposed a context shared amongst all the recipients. Still, there's something "off" about it, perhaps part of the same tone that comes off (sense-of-life-wise) as so contemptuous. Anyway, I've got bigger fish to fry than spending a lot of time focusing on this stuff. I look forward to listening to his course, reading the Harriman book, and integrating it all as need be into my forthcoming treatise. This thing needs to come out of the starting gate full-speed with bases amply covered, see.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Ground Zero Mosque: A and not-A
First, the bigotry:
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."
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."
Monday, August 2, 2010
Vileness in academia
The Distinguished Professor is just a vile human being. His latest cowardice involves this cheap shot that doesn't address any of the substance of any of the arguments.
I have experienced, first hand, the DP's closed-mindedness and/or dull-wittedness on the subject of Ayn Rand. One thing to keep in mind regarding his vile and vicious (and ignorant! let's not forget ignorant) attacks on Rand and Randians is that a former colleague of his at the University of Texas, Tara Smith, is one of those "lightweights" he implicitly insults, attacks, and slimes with his broad brush. I wonder, just what are the hiring standards at the University of Texas, anyway, and why does the DP impugn them so? This is especially odd considering that the University of Texas philosophy department is ranked No. 20 in the Leiter Report (the DP's long-running project of obsessively ranking things to satisfy his pathological narcissism and elitism).
The fact of the matter is, if it were Brian Leiter against any of the people on the Ayn Rand Society's steering committee, he'd have his ass handed to him, and something tells me that he has an inkling of an awareness of this fact and decides to evade it mentally. How vile! What a creep!
I have experienced, first hand, the DP's closed-mindedness and/or dull-wittedness on the subject of Ayn Rand. One thing to keep in mind regarding his vile and vicious (and ignorant! let's not forget ignorant) attacks on Rand and Randians is that a former colleague of his at the University of Texas, Tara Smith, is one of those "lightweights" he implicitly insults, attacks, and slimes with his broad brush. I wonder, just what are the hiring standards at the University of Texas, anyway, and why does the DP impugn them so? This is especially odd considering that the University of Texas philosophy department is ranked No. 20 in the Leiter Report (the DP's long-running project of obsessively ranking things to satisfy his pathological narcissism and elitism).
The fact of the matter is, if it were Brian Leiter against any of the people on the Ayn Rand Society's steering committee, he'd have his ass handed to him, and something tells me that he has an inkling of an awareness of this fact and decides to evade it mentally. How vile! What a creep!
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Brian Leiter: Jackass, Cont'd
Yesterday, the Distinguished Professor posted a link to this piece in the Boston Globe. It's a good piece. The gist of it is, to quote Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science,” and that the typical American voters' response to belief-refuting facts is to retrench further with the belief:
Now, one might think that this behavior is exclusive to the uneducated, non-academically-elite rabble, right? But let's also consider this:
Professor Leiter and his band of emulators pride themselves on being more sophisticated than the average boob. But they are not immune from this cognitive deficiency. Indeed, when the likes of Professor Leiter bash capitalism (which is awesome) and praise socialism (a total failure), they are engaging in sophisticated forms of rationalization of rather base emotions ("capitalism is bad because of the pursuit of profit" or some such BS). Attendant to this process of rationalization is a reflexive antipathy towards thinkers like Ayn Rand not actually borne out by a remotely careful investigation of her ideas. But since the Leiter-types have the prestige, they evidently feel some kind of special entitlement to dismiss contrary viewpoints in a very sneering, snide, and smug fashion, and to evade accountability for doing so when reasonably challenged.
In linking the Boston Globe piece, Leiter clearly demonstrates a monumental lack of self-awareness for someone so "sophisticated."
What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.
Now, one might think that this behavior is exclusive to the uneducated, non-academically-elite rabble, right? But let's also consider this:
And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”
Professor Leiter and his band of emulators pride themselves on being more sophisticated than the average boob. But they are not immune from this cognitive deficiency. Indeed, when the likes of Professor Leiter bash capitalism (which is awesome) and praise socialism (a total failure), they are engaging in sophisticated forms of rationalization of rather base emotions ("capitalism is bad because of the pursuit of profit" or some such BS). Attendant to this process of rationalization is a reflexive antipathy towards thinkers like Ayn Rand not actually borne out by a remotely careful investigation of her ideas. But since the Leiter-types have the prestige, they evidently feel some kind of special entitlement to dismiss contrary viewpoints in a very sneering, snide, and smug fashion, and to evade accountability for doing so when reasonably challenged.
In linking the Boston Globe piece, Leiter clearly demonstrates a monumental lack of self-awareness for someone so "sophisticated."
Brian Leiter: Jackass and Bully
Seeing as I have no aspirations to enter academia anytime in the near future - that is, unless perhaps the likes of Brian Leiter get their comeuppance or simply grow old and fall out of the ranks - I feel totally uninhibited about shining the light of truth on this individual and those blog-cronies who genuflect in his direction.
Some background: Prof. Leiter holds a distinguished professorship in law and philosophy at the prestigious University of Chicago. He is a big-time Nietzsche scholar, having published books on Nietzsche from the most prestigious academic presses, Oxford University Press in particular. He runs a blog disseminating various bits of philosophical news. Among the bits of "news" he disseminates from time to time are items relating to Ayn Rand. His attitude towards Ayn Rand is hostile, sneering, and dismissive. She "isn't taken seriously by serious philosophers," i.e., by distinguished elites such as himself.
Leiter takes great interest and pride in academic attainment and status; for him it is a "filter of reliability" for what to take seriously or pay attention to. That might be all well and good, were it not also an excuse to deride, ignore, and dismiss such thinkers as Ayn Rand, who stand well outside of the academy in terms of style, substance, readability, and prestige-worship. One thinker Leiter and his blog commentators take most seriously is former Harvard philosopher John Rawls, whose landmark A Theory of Justice presents a highly influential synthesis of libertarian and egalitarian concerns. This left-liberal politics is the mainstream for academia, and presumed in that arena to be the political-philosophical orientation for which there are the best arguments. A look at the philosophy faculty at the top universities would seem to confirm this assessment.
A couple months ago, Leiter posted this blog entry, containing a link to this hit piece on Ayn Rand which Leiter describes as "amusing and worth reading." Anyone with a clue about Ayn Rand's ideas would instantly recognize how utterly, abysmally shoddy and ignorant the hit-piece is. Leiter, however, poses as some kind of qualified commentator on Ayn Rand's philosophical credentials. He apparently thinks that his highly negative opinions about Ayn Rand carry some considerable amount of weight or credibility given his prestigious position within the academy, presumably attained through a process of quality intellectual work and assessment of philosophical ideas. I cannot comment on his published work, not having read it, but I say this without reservation:
Brian Leiter is a jackass. An arrogant, elitist, narcissistic jackass. He thinks he is entitled to bash Ayn Rand and not have to actually present any quality evidence for his claims. The shameful excuse behind which he seems to hide is that to study Ayn Rand seriously is not worth the time and energy. As someone with much more of a clue about Rand's actual ideas and substantive merits, I beg to differ. So what would explain his unscholarly hostility towards Ayn Rand?
We get a clue here. What Leiter displays is an extreme antipathy towards capitalism, and he is also known to be an admirer of Karl Marx, whose characterizations of "capitalist exploitation" have been long discredited amongst those with a clue about economics. (It is unlikely that Leiter is unfamiliar with Robert Nozick's decimation of exploitation theory in Anarchy, State, and Utopia - a theory Nozick describes as an exploitation of economic ignorance.) Marx also made predictions regarding the eventual collapse of the capitalistic mode of production, also not borne out by empirical and historical realities. As these are central ideas in Marx's purported analysis of the capitalistic system, one is left wondering what there is to admire so much about Marx, his methodology, and his mode of inquiry. Whatever Marx might have gotten right, there's really next to nothing in his purported analysis of capitalism that actually corresponds to reality. But it still retains its appeal to Leiter.
(Nozick also provided one intriguing socio-psychological-institutional explanation for the hostility towards capitalism amongst the intelligentsia. It is this explanation, and not explanations grounded in the substantive merits of capitalism, that more likely explains the hostility. There is another, more comprehensive explanation, I think: the disconnect between the mode of inquiry all-too-widely practiced in the academy and actual, everyday reality. Hayek diagnosed this intellectual illness as rationalism. Rawls's theory of justice is one such elaborate exercise in rationalism, but I'll get to that in future postings.)
So anyway, Leiter is big on Marx, who screwed up big-time as an analyst of anything capitalism-related. But I guess he excuses him for that, because the main point seems to be that capitalism is still, nonetheless, exploitative and that it sucks. I can only speculate on what alleged facts of reality - not some rationalistic exercise performed on concepts (well, words purporting to represent meaningful concepts) removed from reality - leads to his overwhelming condemnation of capitalism. My strong hunch is that the explanations (well, the causes) are socio-psychological-institutional in nature. What this is not, is the impartial search for truth that is philosophy. Let's not confuse academia with philosophy. Leiter's got the academia part down, anyway.
Anyway, back to Leiter's contrasting of Rand and Nietzsche: it's plainly ignorant of Rand's ideas. Leiter, incompetently, misconstrues Rand's conception of selfishness and productive achievement. Whether or not one agrees that Rand gave a proper definition of "selfishness," she clearly spelled out what she meant by that term and it is shoddy interpretation to treat her like she meant something else. It is also manifestly clear from Rand's novel The Fountainhead, exemplified in the character of Howard Roark, what selfishness meant in the context of the pursuit of material values. When Roark turned down a major commission - meaning money - because it would mean compromising his own vision, he told the board of directors that it was the most selfish thing they ever saw a man do. In the Randian-Roarkian conception, selfishness means integrity - truth to one's own rationally-based values. It has nothing to do with the vulgar pursuit of material profit. Indeed, Roark is being as true to his vision as Beethoven (mentioned approvingly by Leiter) was to his.
Now how on earth could Leiter be ignorant of this, and yet be so certain that Rand sucks? How on earth can a philosophy of genuine individualism be so crudely mischaracterized by someone so academically prestigious? This is laughable, and Jackass Leiter should really be embarrassed for himself.
Leiter speaks about Rand's "superficiality," but what other way is there to characterize his own reading of Rand?
Leiter then quotes a crony-contributor, Prof. Robert Hockett at the intimidatingly prestigious Cornell Law School:
The irony here speaks for itself.
It is also intellectually incompetent to refer to Rand as an elitist, considering it is precisely sneering elitists like Professors Leiter and Hockett she was so opposed to. One need also only - once again - look to the character of Roark and see whether there was an ounce of elitism in him.
So much for Leiter's ridiculous, superficial, stupid, sophomoric, clueless, snooty, incompetent, ignorant and mean-spirited reading of Ayn Rand.
(At some later point I will address Ayn Rand's own similar weak point - her polemics against other thinkers such as Immanuel Kant. Suffice it to say that "Rand did it too" is classic self-serving fallacy and won't work as a defense for Leiter.)
There's another Leiter episode I would like to comment on here. This concerns his attitude towards the CATO Institute's Will Wilkinson. This attitude is reflected in this blog entry of a couple years back. Leiter likes to make wind of the fact that Wilkinson dropped out of philosophy graduate school, the insinuation being that a "libertarian zealot" like Wilkinson wouldn't be able to hack it in that setting.
Let's clear up a bit of Leiterite-leftist mythology about libertarianism and academia. First off, in economics, at least three notable libertarians - Friedman, Hayek, and James Buchanan - are Nobel Prize winners, as high a mark of intellectual prestige as I can imagine. Second, the case of former Harvard professor Robert Nozick presents a bit of a stumbling block for the mythology that libertarianism isn't an academically-serious political philosophy. The mythology has it that he "abandoned his libertarianism" later in life, when this is an egregious oversimplification at best. What he did specifically abandon was the extreme version of libertarianism he advocated earlier, citing concerns about community - concerns that no serious libertarian would ignore in any event. Also, it is unclear how any of his later shifts would provide justification for the sorts of violations of libertarian constraints he defends in AS&U. Seeing as he did not write in detail on political philosophy after that book, the public is left with the little nuggets he provided later on, and much guesswork. Anyway, the point here is that it's patently false that serious, "prestigious" intellectuals - even by Leiter's narrow standards - can't advance compelling justifications for libertarian ideas.
Apparently Wilkinson doesn't meet Leiter's narrow and exacting standards of seriousness and prestige, given how he dropped out of academia to work for a libertarian think tank. Apparently Leiter thinks this entitles him to make note of that fact in order to denigrate him as a thinker ("zealot"). This is the mark of an intellectual bully trying to throw his academic weight around, and it's not an isolated instance of Leiter's behavior. (Some attribute his pattern of behavior to Leiter's possibly being a head-case. I'm not in the business of diagnosing head cases, but this may provide potential pointers for those so interested.) He has a reputation for engaging in vendettas against those who get in his way. How this lines up with being a philosopher is beyond me and anyone else with a bit of common sense. (My own experience with Leiter was a brief email exchange some time back in which I tried to talk some sense into him about Rand, and met a brick wall. Again, this is philosophy?) It's quite possible that a major reason Will Wilkinson left the academy was because of how many assholes like Brian Leiter he had to deal with there.
What I think needs to happen is for Brian Leiter not to be enabled further in his pattern of destructive and irrational behaviors. This means for his blog-cronies and/or other colleagues not to continue their pattern of me-tooing, kowtowing and circle-jerking. As it is, he is the epitome of the Academic Elitist, the very embodiment of what makes the commonsensical, intelligent man-on-the-street (for whom Ayn Rand was an eloquent spokesman, I might add) so contemptuous of the academic world.
(Lest Leiter and his cronies whine and complain about how devastating to his pretentions I am being here, just keep this in mind: He brought this on himself. Reality, as Ayn Rand put it, is its own avenger. I'm only the messenger. The solution, of course, is not for him to bash or denigrate me, but to clean up his own despicable act. But should he deem it suitable to attack me, I say: Bring it on, Jackass, if you're so a glutton for punishment. I can out-think you, I can out-learn you, and I can out-philosophize you.)
Some background: Prof. Leiter holds a distinguished professorship in law and philosophy at the prestigious University of Chicago. He is a big-time Nietzsche scholar, having published books on Nietzsche from the most prestigious academic presses, Oxford University Press in particular. He runs a blog disseminating various bits of philosophical news. Among the bits of "news" he disseminates from time to time are items relating to Ayn Rand. His attitude towards Ayn Rand is hostile, sneering, and dismissive. She "isn't taken seriously by serious philosophers," i.e., by distinguished elites such as himself.
Leiter takes great interest and pride in academic attainment and status; for him it is a "filter of reliability" for what to take seriously or pay attention to. That might be all well and good, were it not also an excuse to deride, ignore, and dismiss such thinkers as Ayn Rand, who stand well outside of the academy in terms of style, substance, readability, and prestige-worship. One thinker Leiter and his blog commentators take most seriously is former Harvard philosopher John Rawls, whose landmark A Theory of Justice presents a highly influential synthesis of libertarian and egalitarian concerns. This left-liberal politics is the mainstream for academia, and presumed in that arena to be the political-philosophical orientation for which there are the best arguments. A look at the philosophy faculty at the top universities would seem to confirm this assessment.
A couple months ago, Leiter posted this blog entry, containing a link to this hit piece on Ayn Rand which Leiter describes as "amusing and worth reading." Anyone with a clue about Ayn Rand's ideas would instantly recognize how utterly, abysmally shoddy and ignorant the hit-piece is. Leiter, however, poses as some kind of qualified commentator on Ayn Rand's philosophical credentials. He apparently thinks that his highly negative opinions about Ayn Rand carry some considerable amount of weight or credibility given his prestigious position within the academy, presumably attained through a process of quality intellectual work and assessment of philosophical ideas. I cannot comment on his published work, not having read it, but I say this without reservation:
Brian Leiter is a jackass. An arrogant, elitist, narcissistic jackass. He thinks he is entitled to bash Ayn Rand and not have to actually present any quality evidence for his claims. The shameful excuse behind which he seems to hide is that to study Ayn Rand seriously is not worth the time and energy. As someone with much more of a clue about Rand's actual ideas and substantive merits, I beg to differ. So what would explain his unscholarly hostility towards Ayn Rand?
We get a clue here. What Leiter displays is an extreme antipathy towards capitalism, and he is also known to be an admirer of Karl Marx, whose characterizations of "capitalist exploitation" have been long discredited amongst those with a clue about economics. (It is unlikely that Leiter is unfamiliar with Robert Nozick's decimation of exploitation theory in Anarchy, State, and Utopia - a theory Nozick describes as an exploitation of economic ignorance.) Marx also made predictions regarding the eventual collapse of the capitalistic mode of production, also not borne out by empirical and historical realities. As these are central ideas in Marx's purported analysis of the capitalistic system, one is left wondering what there is to admire so much about Marx, his methodology, and his mode of inquiry. Whatever Marx might have gotten right, there's really next to nothing in his purported analysis of capitalism that actually corresponds to reality. But it still retains its appeal to Leiter.
(Nozick also provided one intriguing socio-psychological-institutional explanation for the hostility towards capitalism amongst the intelligentsia. It is this explanation, and not explanations grounded in the substantive merits of capitalism, that more likely explains the hostility. There is another, more comprehensive explanation, I think: the disconnect between the mode of inquiry all-too-widely practiced in the academy and actual, everyday reality. Hayek diagnosed this intellectual illness as rationalism. Rawls's theory of justice is one such elaborate exercise in rationalism, but I'll get to that in future postings.)
So anyway, Leiter is big on Marx, who screwed up big-time as an analyst of anything capitalism-related. But I guess he excuses him for that, because the main point seems to be that capitalism is still, nonetheless, exploitative and that it sucks. I can only speculate on what alleged facts of reality - not some rationalistic exercise performed on concepts (well, words purporting to represent meaningful concepts) removed from reality - leads to his overwhelming condemnation of capitalism. My strong hunch is that the explanations (well, the causes) are socio-psychological-institutional in nature. What this is not, is the impartial search for truth that is philosophy. Let's not confuse academia with philosophy. Leiter's got the academia part down, anyway.
Anyway, back to Leiter's contrasting of Rand and Nietzsche: it's plainly ignorant of Rand's ideas. Leiter, incompetently, misconstrues Rand's conception of selfishness and productive achievement. Whether or not one agrees that Rand gave a proper definition of "selfishness," she clearly spelled out what she meant by that term and it is shoddy interpretation to treat her like she meant something else. It is also manifestly clear from Rand's novel The Fountainhead, exemplified in the character of Howard Roark, what selfishness meant in the context of the pursuit of material values. When Roark turned down a major commission - meaning money - because it would mean compromising his own vision, he told the board of directors that it was the most selfish thing they ever saw a man do. In the Randian-Roarkian conception, selfishness means integrity - truth to one's own rationally-based values. It has nothing to do with the vulgar pursuit of material profit. Indeed, Roark is being as true to his vision as Beethoven (mentioned approvingly by Leiter) was to his.
Now how on earth could Leiter be ignorant of this, and yet be so certain that Rand sucks? How on earth can a philosophy of genuine individualism be so crudely mischaracterized by someone so academically prestigious? This is laughable, and Jackass Leiter should really be embarrassed for himself.
Leiter speaks about Rand's "superficiality," but what other way is there to characterize his own reading of Rand?
Leiter then quotes a crony-contributor, Prof. Robert Hockett at the intimidatingly prestigious Cornell Law School:
I thought that this passage in the Rand book review was the most accurate of all:
"Rand's particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism -- to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished." (Fourth full para. at page 8.)
In short, she is the Lumpen-"philosopher" par excellence. My better half was asking me, just as I began to read this review aloud, what could possibly account for the popularity of this ridiculous woman. I hypothesized that it was the way in which she afforded a sort of vicarious self-flattery to narcissistic imbeciles. Then I began reading, and upon finding the just-quoted sentence, smiled with Randian self-satisfaction!
The irony here speaks for itself.
It is also intellectually incompetent to refer to Rand as an elitist, considering it is precisely sneering elitists like Professors Leiter and Hockett she was so opposed to. One need also only - once again - look to the character of Roark and see whether there was an ounce of elitism in him.
So much for Leiter's ridiculous, superficial, stupid, sophomoric, clueless, snooty, incompetent, ignorant and mean-spirited reading of Ayn Rand.
(At some later point I will address Ayn Rand's own similar weak point - her polemics against other thinkers such as Immanuel Kant. Suffice it to say that "Rand did it too" is classic self-serving fallacy and won't work as a defense for Leiter.)
There's another Leiter episode I would like to comment on here. This concerns his attitude towards the CATO Institute's Will Wilkinson. This attitude is reflected in this blog entry of a couple years back. Leiter likes to make wind of the fact that Wilkinson dropped out of philosophy graduate school, the insinuation being that a "libertarian zealot" like Wilkinson wouldn't be able to hack it in that setting.
Let's clear up a bit of Leiterite-leftist mythology about libertarianism and academia. First off, in economics, at least three notable libertarians - Friedman, Hayek, and James Buchanan - are Nobel Prize winners, as high a mark of intellectual prestige as I can imagine. Second, the case of former Harvard professor Robert Nozick presents a bit of a stumbling block for the mythology that libertarianism isn't an academically-serious political philosophy. The mythology has it that he "abandoned his libertarianism" later in life, when this is an egregious oversimplification at best. What he did specifically abandon was the extreme version of libertarianism he advocated earlier, citing concerns about community - concerns that no serious libertarian would ignore in any event. Also, it is unclear how any of his later shifts would provide justification for the sorts of violations of libertarian constraints he defends in AS&U. Seeing as he did not write in detail on political philosophy after that book, the public is left with the little nuggets he provided later on, and much guesswork. Anyway, the point here is that it's patently false that serious, "prestigious" intellectuals - even by Leiter's narrow standards - can't advance compelling justifications for libertarian ideas.
Apparently Wilkinson doesn't meet Leiter's narrow and exacting standards of seriousness and prestige, given how he dropped out of academia to work for a libertarian think tank. Apparently Leiter thinks this entitles him to make note of that fact in order to denigrate him as a thinker ("zealot"). This is the mark of an intellectual bully trying to throw his academic weight around, and it's not an isolated instance of Leiter's behavior. (Some attribute his pattern of behavior to Leiter's possibly being a head-case. I'm not in the business of diagnosing head cases, but this may provide potential pointers for those so interested.) He has a reputation for engaging in vendettas against those who get in his way. How this lines up with being a philosopher is beyond me and anyone else with a bit of common sense. (My own experience with Leiter was a brief email exchange some time back in which I tried to talk some sense into him about Rand, and met a brick wall. Again, this is philosophy?) It's quite possible that a major reason Will Wilkinson left the academy was because of how many assholes like Brian Leiter he had to deal with there.
What I think needs to happen is for Brian Leiter not to be enabled further in his pattern of destructive and irrational behaviors. This means for his blog-cronies and/or other colleagues not to continue their pattern of me-tooing, kowtowing and circle-jerking. As it is, he is the epitome of the Academic Elitist, the very embodiment of what makes the commonsensical, intelligent man-on-the-street (for whom Ayn Rand was an eloquent spokesman, I might add) so contemptuous of the academic world.
(Lest Leiter and his cronies whine and complain about how devastating to his pretentions I am being here, just keep this in mind: He brought this on himself. Reality, as Ayn Rand put it, is its own avenger. I'm only the messenger. The solution, of course, is not for him to bash or denigrate me, but to clean up his own despicable act. But should he deem it suitable to attack me, I say: Bring it on, Jackass, if you're so a glutton for punishment. I can out-think you, I can out-learn you, and I can out-philosophize you.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)