Philosophy profession discredits itself?

(a teensy bit of context)  (a not-so-teensy bit)

This situation is unacceptable: 8 in 10 Philosophy Majors Favor Socialism

In addition to being unacceptable (on the merits of socialism vs. capitalism), it makes a bad impression about philosophy on the wider American public which contains a great many folks skeptical of philosophy's value for society, and some of whom have influence on state university budgets.  This should be cause for alarm for the philosophers whose profession will inevitably be targeted because of this.

If ever there is an idea discredited theoretically, morally and historically, it is socialism.  Mises' 1922 book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (linked above) is an epic, monumental takedown of socialist "thought," and is widely acknowledged among defenders of the free market -- i.e., capitalism -- for being such.  (Keep in mind that a great many of capitalism's defenders are not often in agreement about what thinkers and arguments are its strongest.  Misesians may overlap plenty with Rothbardians, say, but there isn't so much overlap between Rothbardians and Randians.  Just for instance.)  Mises' book and case against socialism was most widely discussed in reference to his "calculation argument," in which he established with great thoroughness and care that a truly socialist production framework couldn't properly calculate prices (particularly for production factors, i.e., capital goods).  What role for entrepreneurs in a socialist framework, particularly if such putative entrepreneurs had to answer to some collective production bureau?  (There also is a sizable body of literature on entrepreneurship by 'Austrian school' economists influenced principally by Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises and Hayek.)

Socialism's defenders took Mises on regarding the "calculation problem" (which appears in the end to have vindicated Mises, if Heilbroner's testimony is any indication).  But they neglected the rest of Mises' book, which exposes patterns and habits of thought among socialists that are inimical to Western civilization.  The final chapters of Socialism concern the tendency of socialism toward cultural destructionism, for example.

The history of socialism was not only one of failure, but monumental and monumentally deadly failure.  Some 20 to 40 million or more people perished in the Great Chinese Famine alone.  Time and time again mediocrities and sociopaths with access to power were (unsurprisingly?) drawn to this ideology, or more specifically the Marxian strain of it.

If anything might have discredited socialism, it is this deadly (and often outright bloody) history.  There is no honest denial of it, no way to spin the evidence.

If anything discredits socialism it is the ethical premises it relies upon, and while ethical theory isn't subject to the same testing the way that socialism was tested historically, one uncontroversial ethical principle (if any exist at all) is that stated by John Hospers, philosophy professor and first Libertarian Party presidential candidate, more or less directly channeling his former sparring partner, Ayn Rand: "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of."  Socialism, by definition, contravenes this principle.

Here's the definition of socialism appearing at the top of the above-linked google search:

a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

As Rand states in "This is John Galt Speaking" (Atlas Shrugged), "When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind."  The theme (of course?) of Rand's novel is: the role of the mind in man's existence.  (This applies in both the material and the spiritual realms, in politics and religion.)  It is only by application of the distinctively human conceptual faculty that the human race has moved from a primitive, caveman existence to modern, technologically-sophisticated society - and in any era of this progression, it's exceptional individual minds/intellects rising above the herd level, the conventional, the given, who drive further progress.  Non-human-intellect natural resources (means of production) have to be transformed by the human intellect to generate value-added or technological advance, and these minds/intellects come attached to specific individuals who are in a unique position to develop and direct this resource.  But even more importantly, ethically speaking (and not just a matter of historical explanation) the minds/intellects are their owners' to dispose of.  The whole point of her novel's heroes going "on strike" is to devote their energies/talents/minds to ends and projects of their own choosing, rather than to be forcibly subjected to the dictates of their public-sector inferiors.

Now, I'm aware that Rand-bashers typically refuse to understand Rand's point, hence their resort to any number of intellectually lazy or reckless caricatures or outright smears.  In any case, she remains socialism's most potent critic of socialism (and defender of capitalism) on ethical grounds.

Now, socialism proper - the state or collective owning "the means of production" is discredited roundly enough that defenders of it are hard to find these days.  But there's a little loophole in the above definition of socialism: "or regulated".  The same moral principle applies: under this definition the state or collective can still control and direct (under force of law) how individuals are to dispose of their intellects, talents, time and energy and the subsequent property holdings.  And significant wide-ranging regulation of people's economic lives is not only typical of most nations' economies of today, but those of the more socialist bent seek more such control.

Anyone who finds socialism attractive and yet fails to engage with Rand and Hospers (and Nozick and Mack) with due dialectical diligence is either ignorant or dishonest.  So which of these two is this 80 percent of philosophy (sic) majors, and - more importantly - how did this 80 percent manage to end up supporting the unsupportable?  How poor a job did their philosophy (sic) instructors have to do in order to generate such an unacceptable result?  I understand that the philosophy majors who go on to grad school would have to do a minimally decent job of dialectic with the libertarian position espoused above (which holds that either (a) market arrangements are in fact the best-known way of improving people's economic situation as well as preserving other freedoms and republican political institutions, or (b) that non-market arrangements are the best way of improving lives where markets didn't meet the task, or both).  But what excuse is there for so many undergrads/majors for embracing such a monumentally stupid, immoral and un-American idea as socialism (whether defined in terms of ownership or of control of "the means of production")?  (The best non-market arrangement I can propose for improving people's lives is (of course?) widespread philosophical education.)

If philosophers concerned with the public image of their professors have a clue, they'll be driven to some amount of action to counteract what's going on here.  (How does socialism compare to / contrast with biblical fundamentalism, say?  With the Rapture-ready variants?  With more extreme variants than that?)  Let's put this in terms that might stimulate their competitive juices more:

Economics majors aren't nearly so favorable to socialism; "only" 1 in 4 find socialism appealing.  Now, in the undergraduate academy there are three main sectors: the physical sciences, the "soft" or social sciences, and the humanities.  Various measures of (academic) intelligence show consistently that the smartest (on average) physical sciences majors are in Physics, the smartest social scientists are in Econ, and the smartest humanists are in Philosophy.

So . . . which majors are really the smartest and least ignorant when it comes to socialism?

You can't really blame "the campus environment" for the deplorable level of Philosophy majors' support for socialism, since that toxic environment hasn't destroyed (yet) the Econ departments enough to result in their majors supporting socialism in similar numbers.  Anyway, the overwhelming majority of the Econ and the Philosophy majors can't both be right about the socialism thing; one of these groups is probably screwing up big-time.  So which group is it?  Are the Philosophy professors curious enough to find out, and perhaps clean up their acts?  This is assuming that institutional incentives related to possible departmental budget cuts by representatives of pissed-off taxpayers aren't motivation enough.

As it is, 80 percent of philosophy (sic) majors supporting socialism only supports the widely-held thesis that "philosophers don't know how the real world works."  Two last points to bring up here:

(1) There is indeed a widespread problem about the relation of philosophy to the real world, and that is a tendency among highly intellectual people - academic types perhaps most especially - toward cognitive rationalism, or a fundamental breach between ideas and the world that's supposed to moor down the ideas.  (If you're a philosopher who wasn't confronted the problem of rationalism head-on, explicitly, fully and systematically, then how do you know you're not beset by it?  Note that Peikoff delves in pretty deep on this stuff in Understanding Objectivism - head on by name in Lectures/chapters 8 and 9 and implicitly throughout the first 7 lectures/chapters as preparatory work.  

(2) How would the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Kant address the socialism subject?  One thing they (well, Aristotle for sure) wouldn't do is to fail to have a rigorous dialogue with the Econ profession.  (I say Aristotle for sure, not just because of his sprawling research program, but if you open a history of economic thought you might just well find Aristotle discussed as a leading founder of the discipline - basically not surpassed for some 2,000 years until the Physiocrats et al.)  Aristotle's sensibility is such that he'd be engaged heavily with Mises' book as well as Rand/Hospers' "your life is your own to dispose of" thesis.  Nozick's 1974 Anarchy, State, and Utopia was praised on a back-cover blurb for its "unsurpassed dialectical sensibility" or words to that effect.  It's unmistakable that this former leftist Nozick did his homework and concluded about socialism pretty much the same thing that Rand, Mises, Hayek, and Hospers did: it's indefensible as moral theory and as social science.  Would Aristotle with his unsurpassed dialectical sensibility conclude any differently?  Does Rawls' advocacy of a quasi-socialistic regime of economic and/or property rights fall afoul of the "individuals' lives are their own to dispose of" moral principle, and if it does, does this rule out as unacceptable (this aspect of) Rawls' theory?  Among leading Harvard political philosophers of the early 1970s, the ratio of Rawlsians to Nozickians was 1:1.  Wouldn't that be a more healthy representation of the philosophy profession than the (more or less) 4:1 ratio among philosophy majors?  If so, whence the disconnect between points A and B?

Also, perhaps philosophers might explain how Hospers - a non-Harvard man tainted by his enthusiasm for and association with Rand - has gotten little recognition for his "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of" formulation while Nozick's essentially similar point but stated less strikingly is what gets the academic attention?  What's wrong with Hospers' formulation?  How is it not a powerful moral principle?

(I once stated this principle to a Rand-basher who replied that "that's actually a Kantian principle," and whereas Kant was a philosopher this Rand-basher respected most highly, this basher wouldn't extend any credit to Rand for espousing that very idea.  Par for the Rand-bashing course, as my exhaustive experience in this area tells me.)

How on earth do philosophy (sic) majors appear utterly ignorant of such a hard-hitting formulation of libertarian principles?  Surely Aristotle wouldn't fail to engage fully and fairly with Rand, Hospers, Nozick and Mises?  Aristotle is one of the people I can confidently say didn't contribute to negative aspects of philosophy's reputation (notwithstanding hubristic STEM-lords who blame Aristotle for subsequent thinkers turning his physical theories into dogma).  He systematically eschewed cognitive rationalism.  If the only excuse today's philosophy profession has to offer for not operating at Aristotle's level is that they can't keep up with someone who had as a teacher someone who had Socrates as a teacher, then perhaps that's a legitimate excuse, but they might not like the can of worms this explanation might open up, either.  If the notion of (my hypothetical, resurrected, preferably drill-sergeant-role) Aristotle embracing socialism strikes one as ridiculous as it strike me, then one should operate accordingly.  Me, I wrote this blog post and have it duly contextualized with hard-hitting links.  (Here's even another one, right from the SEP.)  Perhaps others in the profession can take measures of their own to help salvage its reputation?

Socialism is a litmus test for sound moral and/or scientific reasoning.  In my experience, arguing with socialists is like arguing with flat-earthers; they will stop at nothing to spin the evidence in their preconceived direction, and when confronted with the Rand/Hospers/Nozick principle (especially when illustrated by an example such as a decision to start one's own business to compete with the collectively-run/regulated enterprise, or with the reality of the skills bell-curve that results in differences in income and wealth), they don't even bother spinning: they fall silent.  The socialists did a piss-poor job of responding to Mises' treatise in its full context (including his thesis about cultural destructionism), they've done a piss-poor job of even understanding Rand's main political-economic themes, they have a track record of apologetics for the most murderous and authoritarian political regimes; they have long since squandered the benefit of the doubt.  You don't even need a hypothetical example of a resurrected Aristotle to figure this out; the aforementioned figures already presented compelling arguments and the historical record of socialism's failure can't be honestly avoided.

Is the only sorry excuse for this sorry state of affairs that the meaning of "socialism" has changed between the time of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, et al and today, such that the Scandinavian welfare-state model (where the lives of the men of mind and ability, as Rand/Galt terms them, are merely extensively regulated but not owned outright) and not the USSR is the most representative case?  (As for the use of the term "socialism" to apply to Scandinavia but not to the USSR: how is the linguistic confusion run rampant here in any way acceptable in its own right?  How on earth can it look good, no matter how you spin it, that 4/5 of Philosophy majors favor socialism?)

I already linked above Alan Charles Kors' discussion of the malpractice of intellectuals (sic) during the USSR era and afterward.  Can there be an "after socialism," Kors asks, if the intellectuals don't come to grips with this malpractice?  (Unlike medical doctors they can't be sued for malpractice; it's not evident that they face any serious negative repercussions for the failures of their ideas, a point that Thomas Sowell has repeated endlessly.)  The fact that 80 fucking percent of philosophy majors find this evil idea attractive would indicate that the intellectuals (sic) are still engaged in the same malpractice, in essence.  Bad-faith rationalizations about how pro-capitalism, libertarian and/or conservative intellectuals aren't competitive in an academic environment won't cut it, and certainly won't help to rehabilitate the low to mixed public reputation of the philosophy profession.

How much could it hurt these academics for them to actually behave like the letters "PhD" behind their names would suggest?  How much does it really hurt them to seriously and fully consider that Bezos, Buffett, et al are entitled to their wealth for implementing visions that evidently no one else had the skills to do (at their level, anyway), that they're using their own skills/talents/energies/time/minds attached to their physical and moral personhood, that their activities tend to raise living standards generally, and other such truths about the capitalist system?  Short of my hypothetical resurrected Aristotle, there is the example of Nozick who went through all the alternatives on offer and found socialism - basically anything to the left of Rawls - to be woefully inadequate as serious political philosophy.  So, what did Nozick miss?  (And it wouldn't be very philosophical to peddle the easily-refuted myth that Nozick "abandoned libertarianism," now, would it.  What's the 2011 Slate article author's excuse for not acknowledging Nozick's 2001 interview?  This is just the sort of intellectually lazy, bad-faith shit I'm talking about, which seems to pass without comment way too damn much.  Heck, why don't leftist intellectuals respond to Kors and either atone as he recommends, or explain how they don't have to?  Had I somehow missed their addressing Kors' argument?  Do I need to make some exhaustive google search to confirm what I already suspect with ample justification?  Shouldn't the Kors search link provided above suffice?  If anything, the only arguments, facts and justifications here keep coming from the other direction, providing only more evidence of the academic left's shameful, credibility-squandering intellectual history.  And the mainstream of taxpaying America certainly doesn't have the patience for this far-left shit.)

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

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

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

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

Republicans / Right:

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


Democrats / Left:

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


Independent/Other:

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

The primacy of the intellect

[I was originally going to title this posting "America's healthcare affordability crisis," but I just kept integrating to wider and wider principles as I proceeded; the progression unfolds below.]

By this point, regular readers of this blog are most likely used to an inductively-established pattern I'm big on, namely that a great many human existential problems are primarily intellectual problems at their source.  That the intellect - how (well) it is used or misused - has more primacy in human affairs than any other human characteristic, is at the very core of the doctrine I have named P/perfectivism.  I think the distinction between "primary" and "only" is also well-known to Rand-influenced readers; that the intellect is the prime mover in human affairs, doesn't make it the only mover.  But in terms of a correct mode of analysis of human affairs, at the greatest level of fundamentality (and that which is fundamental in any context being what philosophers are supposed to discover), I don't know of anything more fundamental for purposes of explanation than the characteristically human mode of consciousness, i.e., a conceptual or abstractive one (the key faculty of abstraction being the intellect).

And so it is by this mode of analysis that one can only truly get to the root of such a concrete issue as the USA's healthcare affordability situation.

The connection between these two things would probably be met with incomprehension or incredulity among many of today's political observers.  How can something so (seemingly) abstract as the human mode of consciousness come to affect something so concretely-impacting as one's (or one's neighbors) healthcare situation?

I figured I would address this concrete issue in particular after having just had a discussion with Canadians about the qualities of its healthcare system.  The basic message I took from this discussion is that Americans are very ill-informed about the ways in which their own healthcare payment and delivery system compares with others in the industrially-advanced world.  Here in America a cancer diagnosis can wipe out people's life savings; that sort of thing is unheard of in a country like Canada.  (How Obamacare is supposed to address that concern is not clearly spelled out as far as I know.)  But to hear the American national discourse on the healthcare issue, the average American simply does not have the information (or an adequate grasp of it) to make well-considered decisions regarding policy (through direct support or indirectly through voting for leaders), even when some medical situations can be financially devastating to them under current policy.  It sounds like playing with fire, doesn't it?

The way that the issue and the debates about it get framed is all too easily corrupted as long as the polity remains in the dark; we cannot expect to have an integral exchange of ideas about causes and solutions under such conditions.  The healthcare affordability crisis is bad enough; this corruption of the discourse - and it has deadly consequences - is disgusting in its own right.  I mean, if Americans were well-informed about the various alternative healthcare payment and delivery frameworks in place around the world, and still made the determination that, on balance, all things considered, this system is still the one to have in place, that would presumably reflect epistemically-responsible behavior.  (Without some extensive analysis, it isn't all cut-and-dried, as leftist reddiots would have you believe, that transitioning over to a more "social-democratic" model would be a net improvement.)  But that's not what we have here; we have a healthcare affordability crisis coupled with widespread (and deadly) ignorance as to its causes and possible solutions.  That should make one pretty fucking angry, I would think.

Now, just in case this claim (as to Americans' massive ignorance in regard to healthcare systems and causes and solutions) meets with skepticism, we must take into account a wider context: Americans are demonstrably very-ill-informed about a whole range of issues.  From that standpoint, that the healthcare issue falls within this range is the to-be-expected, not something that should come as any surprise.  And from that standpoint, we have an all-encompassing, inductively-established pattern concerning the average American's state of knowledge and awareness.  And from that standpoint, it's virtually a clear path, right on through the levels of abstraction involved in drawing wider and wider inductively-established conclusions, to the most broad, all-encompassing, abstract conclusion we can reach in this context, i.e., that the average American's state of knowledge and awareness stems from the average American's state of intellectual knowledge and awareness.  That is, the average American's state of knowledge and awareness concerning things like current pop-culture (e.g., knowing precisely the differences between American Idol and America's Got Talent) is a selective and compartmentalized knowledge that can still leave the average American oblivious to other issues (e.g., politics) impacting their lives.  That problem - compartmentalization - is also symptomatic of the problem for which the primary diagnosis has already been made: a lack of intellectual awareness, such as the awareness of the cognitive need to integrate the seemingly disparate areas of knowledge concerning matters that affect their lives.

In fact, I do quite firmly believe that many of the various cognitive maladies one could identify as a leading underlying cause for various observed problems can all be inductively-grouped on the basis of the primary underlying cause of all those underlying maladies, that is, the widest integration possible in this context which I have formulated in essence as: a crisis of intellectual awareness.

You'll find many amateur intellectually-minded folks on places such as reddit trying to come up with the most sense-making and at the same time the widest, most all-encompassing, most abstract causal explanation for America's existential trends.  Some of them (many of them, on reddit) locate the primary problem in a corporate plutocracy's stranglehold on the political system.  Stopping short of an underlying explanation for that would indicate the amateur explanation-giver's ascription of primacy to material economic factors.  In the meantime, many a religious right-winger would trace the nation's existential trends to a supposedly growing secularism - a "departure from God" - and then proceed, unsurprisingly, to point to all kinds of data points purporting to support this explanatory hypothesis.

For those familiar with Miss Rand's "Censorship: Local and Express", these dueling modes of analysis can be understood in terms of a more fundamental mode of analysis which she offers: a material/spiritual dichotomy, with each side - the "liberals" on one and the "conservatives" on the other - giving primacy of emphasis to what they respectively consider to be the most metaphysically important.  Miss Rand sums up the essence of this dichotomy as applied to politics here, and - now just as then - it packs lots of explanatory punch, and that being the case within the context of the yet-wider inductively-observed pattern providing a shit-ton of explanatory punch for America's - or any nation's - existential trends, that is, the pattern having to do with the prevalence of reason vis-a-vis unreason in a given culture.  Consistent with Miss Rand's pattern of expertise at identifying the issues of most fundamental explanatory importance - a pattern of expertise that must characterize the philosopher qua philosopher above all else - it is the efficacy and supremacy of reason which Rand explicitly stated was the primary concern of her work, and "the essence of Objectivism."

The primacy-of-something-else amateurs are usually unaware of Rand's core emphasis on the primacy of reason because their standpoint assigns primacy-of-explanation to other things, and so their (lack of understanding) of Rand is filtered through that perspective.  (That's their problem, not hers.)  And so - as a slam-dunk standing-on-one-foot test of someone's level of understanding of Rand - if a person has led her/himself to believe that the primary, fundamental virtue in Rand's ethics is "selfishness," that tells you about that person's frame of reference, but not much about Rand's.  "Selfishness" is, of course, not a primary - it can't be, not without some framework that tells a person what to be selfish about, or what selfishness consists in.  If Rand holds - as she did - that the standard of a person's moral perfection is unbreached rationality, then that makes a good 95% of the usual interwebbed hit-pieces on Rand's egoistic ethics quite entirely worthless as facilitators of understanding.  But what if these intellectually-incompetent hit-pieces are merely symptoms of the wider, more fundamental causal explanation I've offered for the nation's existential direction?  Where else would the chain of explanation end?  What could Rand herself provide as a more fundamental terminus qua "the essence of Objectivism" than the supremacy of reason?  Rand saw that the primary key to addressing human existential challenges - the endeavor which she would call a selfish one - was to be found in how efficaciously human beings employed their reasoning capacity.  Where else would the primacy of emphasis for this existential task be found?

Wouldn't Jefferson agree on that, for sure?

(The right-wing religionists who "explain" the USA's existential path in terms of a "departure from God" tend almost uniformly to speak of the country having been founded "on Judeo-Christian principles," that it was the Framers' alleged (right-wing style?) religiosity that informed the nation's founding documents.  What context has to be dropped to claim such a thing?  Right-wing religiosity had been abundant throughout the ages prior to the founding of America, and never managed to generate a constitutional republic founded on individual rights.  That was a historical constant; did it just suddenly work out that right-wing-style religiosity in the minds of the Framers is what made the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Common Sense, the American Philosophical Society, and so on a practical reality?  What's a better fundamental-level explanation for all that: ages-old, right-wing-style religiosity or the very-new Enlightenment culture of learning and boundless intellectual curiosity?  What's the variable of primary or greatest importance in this context?  The economistic Left doesn't fare any better; their mode of explanation comes down to the economic interests that the Framers had in gaining independence from the British Crown: rather than the King exploiting these rich white land-owners, the Framers sought the political framework in which to do (capitalistic) exploiting themselves.  Apparently, all the Left sees as fundamental about America is a history of conquest of economically-underprivileged and non-white peoples, and only after FDR's reforms was the Great American Middle Class made possible.  Seriously.  The GOP party base offers theocracy as the way to go; the Democrat party base offers FDR-style interventionism as the basic alternative.  The pragmatists in both parties are at a loss as to what to do, other than to succumb to mentality prevailing in the District of Cynicism.)

The true explanation and solution - for the nation's healthcare challenges and for everything else - are right under our noses.  There's one public intellectual from the last half-century that has been shouting this from the rooftops to a greater and more potent extent than anyone else.  To the clueless, it would seem outright crazy that some blogger self-identifying as The Ultimate Philosopher would be touting this particular public intellectual, over and over again.  But what other reasonable conclusion is there to draw?  One would presume that the professional philosophical community would be all on board with this true explanation and solution and, as a consequence, go out of its way to shout the very same thing from every available rooftoop, lectern, op-ed page, manifesto, and what have you - to identify, along with Aristotle and Ayn Rand - the primacy of intellectual flourishing to human and cultural flourishing. I mean, isn't that supposed to be the very spirit animating their own profession, for crying out loud?

What we have here is a failure to integrate.  It would be quite the fucking shame if this failure stemmed in significant part from the (by and large politically left-leaning) intellectual community's reactionary attitude toward the politically capitalistic nature of this leading contemporary source of the intellectualist eudaimonism staring them right in the face, now would it not.  But is there some other plausible explanation for this reaction, aside from its being a politically-motivated one?  Sure, their jobs might well be in jeopardy were this thinker's ideas carried out (for one thing, many would lose a lot of credibility for having failed to be Aristotelian intellectualist eudaimonists), but then job-security-motivated behavior wouldn't credibly qualify as philosophical behavior, now would it.  Anyway, this is just some stuff to think about when tying our current healthcare affordability crisis to fundamental intellectual factors.  Much as the intellectuals profess to hate that very crisis, whom else, exactly, do we have to thank for it, in the end analysis?

A subject to which I have been giving some thought (well, more in the way of questioning) is: In a hypothetical world populated (to a considerably greater extent than at present) by learned Aristotelian-Jeffersonian agents, just what would the general attitude toward "social welfare" issues such as healthcare payment and provision be like?  If you listen to the mainstream of academic political philosophy, a majority of well-informed agents would be (tah dah!) a lot like them: leftish Rawlsy social democrats who assign a crucial role to the coercive state in matters of provision of goods - in ensuring the provision of goods, as a matter of right and social-political justice - that would foster in individuals the capability to flourish.  If, on the other hand, these agents are eudaimonist libertarians, the provision of these goods would be left up to private institutions - indeed, that were we to come to such an enlightened state of affairs whereby communities were very much concerned with the cultivation of individuals' self-actualization capabilities, they would already have quality institutions in place for that very purpose, without the need for a coercive state apparatus in fulfilling that goal.  What would be the dialectical resolution in debates between the eudaimonist libertarians and advocates of Rawlsy social justice?  We have to assume of course that each side is amply familiar with the mindset behind the other side's views, as Aristotelian-Jeffersonian agents would be.  I'm thinking that it resolves toward eudaimonist libertarianism in practice (de facto), while the Rawlsies would assert a theoretical trump card in the form of a question: However provision of these self-actualization-capabilities goods is carried out, wouldn't the enlightened agents of our hypothetical society affirm a de jure right to such goods - i.e., that provision of these goods would be guaranteed as a basic "safety net" condition of such a society?  They would supplement this question with a hypothetical: If private institutions didn't prove fully sufficient at providing these goods, wouldn't the state have the rightful authority to assert coercive powers to make up the difference?

That would move the dialectic up the ladder to another level: Without begging questions, how do we determine the content of a set of compossible rights upon a eudaimonist foundation, where rights are understood to be enforceable claims based on the requirements of human flourishing?  Freedom to exercise one's independent judgment is such a requirement, but so is the effective possession and use of such Maslow-hierarchical goods as food, clothing, and shelter.  A Rawlsy argument would hold that the structure of a set of compossible rights is determined through a conception of moral reason presented via the "Original Position" and "veil of ignorance" devices, which would derive rights to such things as food, clothing, and shelter.  The eudaimonist libertarian would object that the coercion necessary to implement this Rawlsy framework of supposed rights constitutes an unacceptable deprivation of the freedom of the talented creators, the "men of the mind," based on the principle that the freedom to exercise one's intellect in the pursuit of one's chosen ends is, in effect, morally axiomatic.  The Rawlsy response might be in effect to re-assert that a conception of moral reason represented by the Rawlsy argumentative devices is a superior conception at least insofar as it better tracks pretheoretical intuitions and makes for a more satisfactory reflective equilibrium.  The eudaimonist libertarian in effect (quite plausibly!) re-asserts the same thing about the freedom to exercise one's own judgment using one's own intellect.  Where does the dialectic go from there?

Keep in mind that in this hypothetical enlightened society, not all the agents are sitting around in the academic classrooms; some of them have businesses to run and, besides, short of a "pure" moral rationality devoid of economic incentives, the business community has to more or less be on board with any transition to some social order or other, practically speaking, right?  And, besides, what burdens are the business folk supposed to shoulder over and above doing a lot of heavy lifting, involving maximal use of their intellect, of course (remember, this is an Aristotelian-Jeffersonian dialectic we're talking about here), in making available goods and services on the market, under a rule of law that has a "socially conscious" dimension (pertaining to acts, not outcomes), etc.  And, for that matter, if we are talking about some point in a hypothetical future in which the adoption of Aristotelian-Jeffersonian principles of living has snowballed in positive effect over the course of generations, just how self-sufficient would people end up being, anyway?  And, for that matter, if we're going to hypothesize a dialectic between very-well-informed agents (given the presumed informational benefits made possible by advanced information-age technology), maybe the terms of any dialectic to be had at all will already be advanced well beyond our current ability to predict.  Keep in mind that a hypothetical society built upon the primacy of the intellect would bring with it all-encompassing effects on people's ways of living - more all-encompassing than debates (and their existential effects) within political philosophy.  Keep in mind that change in that direction occurs at the margins, but with snowballing effects at the newer and newer margins until, eventually, the whole of society is engulfed in the new intellectualist ethos (since there's no coherent opposition to be had against intellectualism, and only abundant benefit to be had by its adoption).

Such a line of hypothetical questioning ends up placing the current healthcare affordability crisis in quite a different perspective, doesn't it?  I mean, whatever the hypothetical enlightened society comes up with as a solution, it's sure bound to be a lot more effective and all-encompassing than what we would be able to come up with now, wouldn't it?  (This of course should not be taken as any sort of argument for not putting our best efforts into doing what we can do now, or for waiting around for everyone to be Aristotelianized/Jeffersonianized before we can solve the big problems.  The whole idea is to get better and better at the margins at addressing these problems as time goes on, and actualizing a snowballing effect.  If we have a deficient vision for how fallible humans could make this happen, we just use our noggins to think up a better and more workable vision and make necessary adjustments as we proceed, is all.  Yes we can.)

The somewhat strange thing here is that, given my context, the very activity of discussing this subject matter is no-brainer stuff, because for me the primacy of the intellect in human affairs is no-brainer stuff (and it keeps being confirmed by observations, to the point that the novelty has begun to wear off for me); and yet, it seems no one else out there is saying it - and it's not because it's such common wisdom that it goes without saying.  (How could it be, given the way the culture is right now?)  I even have to ask why Rand herself didn't make the sorts of futuristic extrapolations that I have - because that's what these hypothetical discussions are: extrapolations from the initial no-brainer (to me) inductively-certain principle.  And these discussions also bump up against some inherent limitations; how much further can I even go?  What possibilities do I think of next, from the philosopher's armchair more or less, for how an "ultimate culture" might play out?  I think I really might be speaking of an intellectual-cultural singularity here, with all that such a concept entails.  There's the increasingly-well-known concept of the technological singularity, a point in the not-distant future beyond which we can make no extrapolations beyond foreseeable nearer-future trends.  The futurists talking about the tech-singularity may be tech-centric enough not to be ideas-centric, else they'd be philosophers first and foremost.  What do I do as a philosopher in regard to the idea of a technological singularity?  I think up other possible singularities pertaining to some number of key avenues of human endeavor.  The cultural singularity would, I think, take the form of a widely-adopted intellectualist eudaimonism (what other form would it take if not that?) extrapolated into the currently-unknown.  Now we have two abstract-concretes, if you will, awaiting an inductive treatment: will there be a science singularity, an economic singularity, a political singularity (what would that be if not subsumed under a cultural singularity?), a media singularity, or others in addition to the technological and cultural ones?  And to extrapolate, how would all these intertwine?  Doesn't an accelerated intellectual progression speed up the technological one yet further, with a positive-feedback loop?  What happens if/when all "sub-"singularities converge into a Big Singularity?

And that's not even factoring in the effects of people maximally Saganizing their cognition by way of optimal use of cognitive-performance-enhancing substances....

And where does the discussion even proceed from here?  What are the current limits on the widest-possible, most all-encompassing philosophical abstractions?  What's there left to talk about once you identify the primacy-of-intellect principle and extrapolate?  My best answer right now: under consideration here is a Big conceptual file-folder which contains a whole hierarchy of sub-folders (and sub-sub-folders, etc.), all of the folders considered as (mental) units which ultimately reduce to perceptual units.  And there's plenty of stuff in the sub-folders to inquire about in the meantime, before everyone has gotten on board with the primacy of intellectual principle and run with it.  And I do have in mind what I want to post about next, but that'll remain a private possession for now. ;-)

Ayn Rand vs. leftist idiots, cont'd

(For the positive, the antidote to this idiocy, try here for starters.)

The latest case-in-point making the rounds amongt the reddiots, from radio talk show host Thom Hartmann and former Democrat staffer on Capitol Hill, Sam 'Sad' Sacks.  This is a continuation of an inductively-observed pattern discussed previously in this blog.

Gee, a radio talk show host and a former congressional staffer.  Prima facie that's some formidable opposition to Ayn Rand right there, huh?

The article's byline provides a link to The Thom Hartmann Reader, which reminds me of a book I picked up the other day, The Quotable Hitch: From Alcohol to Zionism--The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens.  Drawing the obviously logical connection from that, I submit that one need only browse through both that book and The Ayn Rand Lexicon to see which thinker was way more profound (distinct from witty and one-linery) than the other.  Heck, one need only see Hitch's mentions of Ayn Rand (focusing exclusively on her personal relationship with Nathaniel Branden) to figure out the truly amateurish level on which Hitch was operating.  (His colleague and ignorant Rand-basher, Andrew Sullivan, operates more or less on the same level, cut more or less from the same mold.)

Anyway, back to the talk show host and Democrat staffer.  First off, I want to distinguish the American intellectual left - confined more or less within the ivory tower (the chief exception being Noam Chomsky, who actually makes an effort - no thanks to the cowardly corporate media and political establishment - to get the word out far and wide) from the American political left.  Setting aside direct critique of the former, I'll make the observation that the latter is intellectually bankrupt.  (As an indirect critique of the former, one need only pursue the line of reasoning following from the question as to how the political left ended up intellectually bankrupt.)  This doesn't mark out the left as unique in this regard: the entire lamestream political dialogue in the country is intellectually bankrupt.  Nowhere to be found is Jeffersonian-Franklinian-Paineist dialogue - certainly not dialogue at the level at which these representative Founding Fathers would carry a dialogue.  We have instead a lowest-common-denominator caliber of dialogue.

Hell, arguably the most intellectual figure in the mass media right now is Glenn Beck, whatever else one thinks about him, merely for regularly paying tribute to these geniuses on his TV show.  (He also discusses Ray Kurzweil on his show; what other major media figure is doing that?)  That alone demonstrates that he has some long-range, properly-Americanist vision thoroughly lacking elsewhere in the lamestream media.  His very proposal for an "Independence, USA" quasi-utopia demonstrates a greater degree of vision and imagination than found anywhere else in the lamestream.

Is it any surprise, then, that among any of the figures in the major media, Glenn Beck has the wherewithal to have a positive view of Ayn Rand?

I skimmed Hartmann's article and got the basic gist of why Hartmann is useless an an analyst of political trends: he actually thinks that Ayn Rand - author not just of Atlas Shrugged but also The Fountainhead, but also of non-fiction essays such as "For the New Intellectual," "What is Capitalism?", "What is Romanticism?", "The Comprachicos," and "Philosophy: Who Needs It" - has somehow become a decisive influence on our political establishment!  To anyone with a clue how ideas do affect a culture, that notion is ridiculous.  If some politically-motivated people want to use Miss Rand's ideas out of context, ripped out of the hierarchy of her philosophic system, not integrated with her other ideas, not inductively derived from the vast array of concretes of the sort that informed her philosophizing, then that's not her problem.  What evidence is there that our current crop of corporate and political leaders ever took Rand's philosophic message to heart?  For that to have happened is for our current crop of so-called leaders to be intellectually-inclined in roughly the same way that, oh, Jefferson and Franklin and Paine were intellectually-inclined.

In essence, I addressed this very point months ago.  It simply makes no sense that an intellectually-stunted culture is going to adopt and absorb intellectually-demanding ideas or ways of thinking.  (The dishonest rationalization here would be that Rand's ideas aren't intellectually-demanding, despite the real necessity for a lecture course called Understanding Objectivism, which would then allegedly explain her allegedly inordinate influence on our national direction.  Furthermore, an economic explanation and reality that the American Left evades is the effect of globalization on income and wealth dynamics at home.  That has not to much to do with any effects of ideology on culture but more like a worldwide recognition of the efficacy of markets to raise living standards in the previously non-capitalistic developing world.

The fact of the matter is, no one - left, right, or center - whether in the intelligentsia or in the lamestream political discourse has (much less is able to) both (a) come to grips with what it is that makes Ayn Rand great and (b) provide a compelling rebuttal to the essential thrust of her perfectivist ideology.

I've offered the following concrete example before and I'll offer it again: Jimmy Wales.  I've recently discussed "Jimbo" here.  Among reasonably widely-known figures on the American scene, Jimbo is (properly) paradigmatic of the sort of businessman who actually adopted, absorbed, and practiced Randian ideas.  So why does the Left never confront this evidence?  Well, I'll tell you why: he serves as a definitive refutation of the usual blatantly-amateurish characterizations (smears, really) of the Randian bogeyman-figure of the Left's feverish nightmare imagination, and the culture of the political Left is scummy.  That's not even to enumerate the many and growing examples of Randian scholars in the academic world, of whom the (intellectually-bankrupt) political Left are totally oblivious.  It's like they take pride in being ignorant.

What sets Jimbo apart from the great many other businessmen who might or might not be familiar with some of Rand's work?  He's intellectually-inclined.  How intellectually-inclined are the likes of Thom Hartmann and his sidekick, the former Democrat staffer?  (I referred to these sorts of idiots in my previous smackdown as "so-called liberals," forgetting that they like to call themselves "progressives" nowadays.  Same shit, different fraudulent label.)

It does all come down to intellectuality - how well people use their intellects - and it does (directly or indirectly, take your pick) implicate the Intellectual Class when a nation's cultural and political discourse is of the lowest-common-denominator variety.  I've concluded that the pathological condition on display in reddit-land toward Ayn Rand's ideas is not merely with respect to Rand in particular (although it's heightened in her case) but with respect to ideas as such.  It's not just Rand that gets dissed on /r/"philosophy", but also in effect Aristotle, whose value and importance also goes egregiously under-recognized there, even though he's arguably more of canonical figure among the philosophers (the other academic departments is another issue) than any others (Plato and Kant of course being the runners-up).  That he's as canonical as he is, may well be our culture's saving grace; where indeed would we all be without Aristotle's influence?  The only problem is that he's not canonized enough, being the foremost perfectivist in the intellectual tradition and all.

On a closely-related note: the public's seeming obliviousness to the Jeffersonian tradition of the Founders can also be attributed directly or indirectly to the doings of the intelligentsia (and most significantly among them, the philosophers).  As it is, I do happen to remember being taught about the Founders to some middling extent from grade school through high school, but after that . . . where do they get taught to people regularly outside of Glenn Beck's show?  [EDIT: Or C-SPAN's weekend "BookTV" programming?]  It's a rhetorical question on this blog at this point: what would the Founders themselves do in the face of these circumstances?  Hell, going to war for independence from the British Crown makes what they would do today a cakewalk by comparison; that's how much the spirit of the nation's founding has atrophied.  Thanks a lot, intelligentsia.

Another rhetorical question: why can't all of those in the intelligentsia be more like Aristotle?

"Why can't you be more like Aristotle?"  Say, that has a nice ring to it, am I wrong?

Alright, I'm off now to be more like Aristotle....

A conflict of visions

Not exactly the same conflict of visions of which Thomas Sowell spoke, but it is closely related....

One opinion piece below appears at a section called The Stone at the New York Times website; the sidebar describes The Stone as follows: "The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless."  We can safely take the opinion pages of the Times as representative of "left-liberal" opinion in the United States.  The other opinion piece below would find a home in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, which is fairly representative of right/conservative and libertarianish opinion in the USA.  The first is dated August 18 of 2012; the second, as if responding to the first retroactively, is dated August 13 2012.

(1) Deluded Individualism

(2) Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

Regular readers of this blog could readily tell which article I think better represents (a) reality and (b) traditionally and distinctively 'American' attitudes concerning the relation between the individual, civil society, and the state.  As I have pointed out in two separate blog entries in the past couple years, the interest among academic moral and political philosophers as a group in the whole idea of individualism appears almost nonexistent.  (There are two academically-published books I know of from within the past forty years that deal to a great extent with the concept of individualism: David L. Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, 1976), which can be found at many a good university library; and Leslie Paul Thiele's Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton, 1990), which can be found hardly anywhere, it would seem.  [EDIT: Upon further search, there are volumes by Tibor Machan that cover individualism in a positive light.  It also turns out that there are a few academic volumes scattered about here and there which tackle individualism, including a couple significant-looking ones by philosophy professors; they appear to aim at debunking individualist 'myths' such as the view - held by whom, I'm not sure - that the atomized individual is prior to or independent of society.  Perhaps this conception of individualism exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of authors like that of the first opinion piece above and not among actual proponents of individualism?])

(As the first opinion piece would have it, the content and direction of here blog is not due to autonomous or self-directing intellectually-virtuous/perfective activity; that would be a "delusion."  The credit for all this is due to society, or the welfare state, or other external factors.  That being the case, why isn't society all perfectivst already?  What contribution did I personally make to perfectivism?  Jack shit?)

I've said on this blog numerous times that, as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation.  To ward off a potential misunderstanding here among those who might go out of their way to misunderstand: The professional intellectual "class" is certainly filled to a great extent with people who are very bright, and very virtuous intellectually: they adhere to rigorous standards of truth-seeking inquiry.  If the People as a whole practiced such intellectual virtue in their own lives in their own ways and endeavors, we'd be in a vastly improved situation compared to what we have now.  This is the goal I would like to see accomplished.  So why isn't the nation going that way per my dictum?  Well, the chief problem is how the intellectuals make (or fail to make) their work relevant to the People.

It's not like the American people are inherently anti-intellectual.  Rather, what you see in this country is a widespread attitude, more on the Right than on the Left I should think, of hostility or indifference to what "higher learning" is or has become these days.  I'll enter as exhibit B (exhibit A being Scumbag Leiter & Co.) the first opinion piece above.  When this is the kind of thing that shows up on the opinion pages of "the liberal media's" flagship publication, accessible from page 3 of a google search on "individualism philosophy" no less, what else are the People - especially those right-of-center - to think about the "liberal" intelligentsia?  What use are such authors to the People?  Are they fulfilling their highest professional responsibility to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge?

The feeling among many of the "higher ed" intelligentsia is mutual: a contempt for the unwashed masses.  There's a gulf separating what's going on up there in the ivory towers and what's going on out there in flyover country (where the folks cling bitterly to guns and bibles).  Whereas a genuine philosophical mindset and temperament would seek to facilitate a dialogue between the two groups, what we have here is a failure to integrate.  What's more, the intellectuals are in the position, as professional full-time thinkers, where they're supposed to understand the causes and solutions to this problem, and act accordingly.  (Or are they not really in control of this, per the first opinion piece above?)  So that's the short-short explanation for how the course of the country is dictated by the way the intellectuals conduct themselves.

What would Aristotle and/or Jefferson think about all this?

"Checkmate, asshole."

Establishment Philosophy vs. individualism

An exercise in the spiral:

If one googles 'individualism philosophy' one finds the same state of things, essentially, as what I pointed out nearly two years ago - a near-complete lack of interest among academic moral and political philosophers in individualism (and especially among the most "elite" of them - e.g., Oxford/NYU/Harvard's Derek Parfit, who also - mind-bogglingly - neglects Aristotle, eudaimonia, and virtue-ethics in his "state of the art," Oxford-published "magnus opus" on ethics).  This is a widespread corruption in the Intellectual Establishment, constituting an intellectual and moral betrayal of the American people and of the nation's founding ideals.  My observations remain as spot-on accurate now as they did then; spiral progression in the two years since has only further enhanced and solidified these findings.

I think the American people would like to know why this near-complete neglect of individualism is taking place in the Academic Establishment, wouldn't they?

There is an ominous parallel here to a culture- and polity-wide corruption in the Establishment - not in the universities (in this particular case) but in media and in government - when it comes to Noam Chomsky's near-complete absence from political discourse and exposure in (American) mass-media venues (outside of the internet, that is).

What I observe here are cultures of evasion, in which truth and justice are unpopular and inconvenient with regard to the status quo.

I don't think the Framers would stand for this status quo for one fucking second.

Do you?

As Walter Sobchak might very well have said, there's no reason - there's no FUCKing reason - for the national situation to be this way, or to stay this way.  One need only look at the complete failure of intellectual, moral, and political leadership in our nation's Legislative and Executive branches at doing the obviously-right fucking thing on cannabis legalization, to know our polity is a broken one.  I know it, you know it, and the American People (should damn well) know it.  Here we have overwhelming evidence and reasons for why cannabis should be legalized yesterday; we have a majority of the People showing support for its legalization according to polls; all logic, right, truth, and justice point in that direction; the de facto racist nature of the War on Drugs should sting at the conscience of everyone; the prison-industrial complex built up around this vicious War should likewise sting at everyone's consciousness; and, yet, no action from our national leaders.  The Democrat Establishment is no less corrupt in its ongoing support of this President despite the obviously-racist effects of the Drug Policies which he enforces (or does he?) and - worse - remains dubiously silent about in the face of all the evidence.

All this, no thanks to the Intellectual Class, and its culture of evasion and stagnation.  As the Intellectuals go, so goes the country - just as Rand said.

Do these Intellectuals even begin to wonder why even the leading one of their own, MIT's Prof. Chomsky, is nearly absent from America's public discourse?

It's their own fault, after all, having made philosophy almost totally irrelevant to ordinary citizens.

It so happens that Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom would be of more interest in meaning-of-life terms to the ordinary people, than would Quine's "Two Dogmas" article.  That's just a fact.  While that should (of course) not be construed to denigrate what Quine et al have been doing, it is a severe problem when meaning-of-life issues are neglected by the Philosophical Establishment in the process.  (The Existentialists and Rand were addressing fundamental meaning-of-life questions well over half a century ago, at a time that Academic Philosophy was going out of its way to be as irrelevant as ever to the People and is only now catching up in the meaning-of-life area - a task which can't even be addressed all that well as long as Rand and individualism remain largely neglected.  That's just a fact.)

Perhaps it's high (ahem) time that someone, somewhere, founded an alternate Academy, as individual philosophers did way back in the day - only perhaps the term "academy" should be dropped altogether given the disrepute that has been brought upon that term by institutional insiders, and replaced with something along the lines of "lyceum".  Just a hunch.

Am I wrong?

(Why does taking on an entire Philosophical Establishment feel like shooting fish in a barrel?  Is it supposed to feel that way?  Is that how Rand - who was decades ahead of her time in the virtue-ethics department - felt, too?  Is that why so many in the Establishment hate Rand?  A frightfully high number of these entities don't seem to give a shit what Gotthelf and the Ayn Rand Society have to say about her, either.  These aren't worthy fucking adversaries.  [A notable exception is one John M. Cooper of Princeton, a preeminent scholar of ancient philosophy and chair of a recent Ayn Rand Society program, "Ayn Rand as Aristotelian" (2005).  Perhaps the ancients had more noble ideas about how to carry out philosophical discourse and make it relevant to people's lives?])

P.S. Aw, fuck it; spiraling back to this subject, I'll go ahead and perfectively fortify my observations as follows: Prof. Leiter is a vicious piece of shit.  That motherfucker had better retract and apologize for his appalling treatement of Rand and Rand-scholars, or else.  (See item #9 here.)  One might think a simple concern about one's long-term intellectual and moral credibility would lead to such a retraction and apology, irrespective of my threat to go on strike beginning 4/20, because his (and his vile little cronies') credibility will be ruined long-term - whatever happens - if they don't.  Whatever his academic accomplishment, the man is a disgrace.  Maybe some of his colleagues could light a fire under his rotund posterior and improve their own reputations in the process.  The American People are not going to take kindly to this unbelievable shit once they find out what their most vocal intellectuals have been saying and doing these past years and decades to stonewall progress.  Once again: as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation.  (A recent Leiter entry has him whining about capitalism, yet again, whereas the solution to our nation's economic and existential problems lies in an Aristotelian eudaimonist intellectual perfection.  Why the fuck doesn't he at least advocate that?  [Of course, that would mean getting cornered like a rat for his treatment of Rand, all the same.  Maybe that's why?]  He complains all the goddamn time about America's intellectual and cultural dysfunction, but then shits all over Rand and capitalism without providing any real alternative answers.  Fuck 'em!)

P.P.S. reddit's /r/philosophy and I have a date Wednesday (tomorrow), baby!  Woo!!!

The Jerkoff-in-Chief

(and his intellectual enablers)

The stated policy of the current President on "marijuana" (cannabis) legalization can be found here.  If you want an Official Government line that uses every lawyerly (actually, outright dishonest) weasel-worded tactic available to justify the unjustifiable, it can be found there.  (The Catch-22 type of argumentation is the best part! :-)  At this point in history, a point-by-point refutation of this garbage would be kind of pointless seeing as nobody outside the beltway with a lick of common sense buys into this horseshit - certainly not as sufficient grounds to deny consenting adults their nature/God-given rights to toke up seeing as it's they as individuals (and certainly not the fuckers in D.C.) who are in the best position to decide for themselves whether cannabis use is for them.  See?  Common sense.  (The point-by-point refutations have already been done hundreds if not thousands of times already, so I won't waste my precious time reiterating them all when it's the reader's responsibility to be aware of the myriad refutations available by now.)  The President's point-by-point excuse for justifying a continued War on Weed flies right in the face of common sense by obfuscating the real issue, which is freedom, goddammit.

Now, what makes this even more infuriating is the current President's pathetic attempt to Please Everyone as usual.  (Worked out really nicely for his "look forward, not backward" approach to accountability for this government's acts of torture, hasn't it?  [Read: no accountability.])  This is his standard tactic of Leading from Behind because he doesn't have the nuts to take a clear stand at this time so that his positions and policies can be pummeled into the ground.  He has (apparently) adopted a "wait and see" approach to the new Washington and Colorado state laws aiming to end the insanity.  Well, that's only a Jerkoff move; is he going to enforce the "marijuana" policy stated on his website, or not?  Are we in some kind of postmodernist legal limbo, or what?  What the fuck is going on here, and what the fuck does the President/Jerkoff intend to do?  If he's got the nuts, why doesn't he stick to his federal enforcement powers in adherence to his oath of office, rather than send mixed signals like this?

This is a political maneuver in which the Jerkoff is trying to have it both A and not-A at the same time and in the same respect.  Legally, he's still within his ostensible constitutional authority to enforce the ridiculously insane federal drug laws.  (The term "ostensible" triggered in my mind an association with Orson Welles's adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial, where the court painter Titarelli (sp?) explains to Joseph K. in classic Trial fashion how an acquittal from the unknown charges leveled against him would make him only "ostensibly free," as he could come home only to be arrested and processed all over again.)  Politically, his game-playing - the result of which is that we don't really know at this time what policy he intends to enforce - has succeeded so far in distracting the public from his officially-stated policy.  Looks like a state of A-and-not-A jerkoff limbo to this here philosopher if there ever was such a thing; how about for you, reader?

What this President hasn't done, is to do the courageous thing, i.e., what a President Jefferson would have done, and that's to speak out clearly against the madness that is the drug war, and propose serious revisions if not downright legalization (for cannabis, at the very least).  That's what common sense and backbone would dictate.  Instead, we have a "leader" more in the mold of a Mr. Thompson, the Head of State in Atlas Shrugged: a pathological pragmatist engulfed in a "Heraclitean Flux" of Non-Principle.  The President pulled this same shit with his transparently dishonest "evolving views on same-sex marriage" shtick, when he could have nutted up like a real leader and stood up all along for what he knew to be right and just.  (Miss Rand's comment on the character of Mr. Thompson as described here is precious.)  Meanwhile, intellectually-deficient but influential pundits such as our fellow blogger Andrew Sullivan are reduced to groveling before the President, entreating him to "please not use your ostensibly-duly-established constitutional powers to interfere with States' Rights, and follow reason instead," or some such A-and-not-A excuse for an argument that hardly even merit the status of a fallback.  Do recall that this very same Andrew Sullivan said not more than two weeks ago that, quote, "the public has every right to legislate morals," unquote.  (That's why, apparently, he thinks cannabis policy is a matter for States' Rights rather than individual, Ninth-Amendment-style rights.)  Do keep in mind that the federal government's executive branch has the power to enforce laws enacted by Congress, to crack down on any and all pot whether it's legal under a given state's laws or not.  Is the federal government going to be treating citizens of the different states differently just because majorities in some states enacted legalization initiatives?  We just don't know right now.

Sullivan's weary and ineffectual last appeal for the President not to enforce the federal drug laws amounts to nothing more than, quote, "...if they [i.e., the current Administration] decide that opposing a near majority of Americans in continuing to prosecute the drug war on marijuana, even when the core of their own supporters want an end to Prohibition, and even when that Prohibition makes no sense ... then we will give them hell."  Say what?  You mean, the American people aren't giving them hell already?  What makes anyone think that continuing the status quo at the federal level will change anything?  Then again, maybe it would be some sort of last straw for the People.  How do we know at this point?

You begin to see the problem when objectivity and identity are replaced in the public discourse by ambiguity, obfuscation, limbo, flux and short, non-integrative attention spans.  Where are the Professional Philosophers in all this?  Why is the task of pleading before the President in the mainstream media left to some intellectually-muddled blogger who gives away the case in the very act of presenting it?

Had enough yet?  I haven't.  (This is Philosophical Boot Camp and I'm the senior drill instructor; we haven't had enough until I say we've had enough.)  In his groveling appeal to the President, Sullivan writes that "the federal War on Marijuana is racist in its enforcement."  Certainly it is de facto and substantively if not procedurally racist in its enforcement, one of the eminently sensible reasons to end this War.  One might think that this President would be responsive to this, or that he should be given his race.  (Meanwhile, Sullivan quotes another author, Pete Guither, who makes the sensible matter-of-fact observation that the President appears to have floated a "blatant political trial balloon using the New York Times."  See?  Leadership.)  Anyway, that the Drug War is de facto racist is one of the several matters of fact that Sullivan gets right, and proud we are of all of him for that, but in missing the real point and target, he essentially gives away the case to the goddamned statists.  To wit:

Let's have this debate openly and honestly. Let the government prove that marijuana is as dangerous as heroin and should be treated as such. The very process will reveal the anachronism of the provision itself and the racial and cultural panic that created it. The very discussion will point to an inevitable, scientific conclusion that the current federal policy is based on nothing. 

So do nothing, Mr president, with respect to these states and their legitimate decisions. Set the DEA's priorities so that this trivial, medically useful, pleasure is not in any way a priority for law enforcement. Let the states figure this out, as they are on marriage equality. 

Lead from behind. An entire generation is ahead of you.

Yes, the mainstream national discourse has fallen just this low, given oh-so-much intellectual bankruptcy as its background context.  (Isn't this what Miss Rand would say about the present situation were she around now?  Something tells me that were she around now and commanding national attention as she did in her prime, things would be getting shaken up a lot more.  So I can only do my best to emulate her style of cultural and political commentary in my own unique way.)  We have Andrew Sullivan, the nation's leading political blogger, asking the President to "lead from behind" and "do nothing" even though the White House's official statement of drug policy indicates that it doesn't accept that "doing nothing" is the right thing to be doing.  (To reiterate: we're getting mixed signals on this from the White House and its political trial balloons.)  In addition, Sullivan didn't waste an opportunity to leave the matter of marriage equality up to the states rather than up to sound interpretation of the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments.

With "friends of freedom" like this, who needs enemies?  If this is the best critical voice out there in Mainstream Public Opinion today, this President needn't worry about truly serious challenges to his doings.  (Actually, the best critical voices in that context would be Greenwald and Chomsky, but as long as the Public remains largely ignorant of what these two are saying, the President still needn't worry.  My point is, even if/though the public isn't largely ignorant of Sullivan, the President needn't have much to worry about in the way of intellectually serious and credible opposition.  After all, the public has "every right" to legislate morals 'n' all that, and decent and intelligent Catholics and others can find only "puerile cruelty" in the works of Ayn Rand.  The President himself, in typically un-Jefferson-like, philosophically-vacant fashion, doesn't understand jackshit about Rand, either, so the circle of ignorance [EDIT: or, how about . . . epistemic closure?  Booyah, score one for the UP!] is complete.)  And as long as the public remains largely ignorant of philosophy - thanks in part to the failure of the Professional Philosophers to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge - we will continue to get lousy, non-identity, Orwellian "leadership" like this.

This feels like shooting fish in a barrel, a task for which Perfectivism seems particularly well-suited, I'll point out.  (Praise due to Ayn Rand for establishing precedent in this area with her Objectivism.)  So you're welcome, or something.

Merry Fucking Christmas.

P.S. I've come to the realization that, his having put several decades of deeply-Rand-influenced thought into the subject, Leonard Peikoff is (in a just world) our current leading authority on the philosophy of history, his The DIM Hypothesis (2012) being the culmination of his investigations.  (Note that I say philosophy of history, not history of philosophy.  In the latter department, Peikoff suffers from many of the very same problems Rand had.  His latest statements about Kant in The DIM Hypothesis bear no resemblance to recent Kant scholarship, such as Korsgaard's.  You might as well have jerkoff academic "philosophy" bloggers commenting on Ayn Rand in complete obliviousness to, say, Peikoff's interpretive work, and get precisely the same embarrassing effect.  You have to have the analytical skills - as Aristotle did - to separate out the wheat from the chaff in Peikoff and Rand's expositions, or you're going to fail miserably at getting their essential core message, something about focus vs. evasion and the role of the mind in human existence [EDIT: and the vital importance of mental integration], I believe.)  Few people alive are as keenly aware as Peikoff is, of the central role of integration (or lack thereof, or misapplication thereof) in the course of human life and history.  His latest work requires serious attention from philosophers of history, if any (besides Peikoff and those on his wavelength) are even around today.  I mean, if I were asked where serious philosophy of history is being done these days, the only name that pops into mind is Peikoff's - and there's no good reason to think anyone has put in nearly the kind and level of analysis that he has put in over some 60 years of thought and study, half of them under the tutelage of a fucking grandmaster of integration.  The Professional Philosophers ignore Peikoff's work in this area (as well as his two books on Objectivism now in publication) at their own peril.  Arguably, they've done so for so long as it is that a Point of No Return has been passed, probably in the last decade or so.  They can ignore the well-researched Rand scholarship for only so long before their intellectual credibility begins swirling around toward the bottom of the shitter.  Tara Smith's 2006 book was the final litmus test of what these so-called philosophers are really made of, and of whether they could make themselves useful to the public discourse for a change; many of them failed that test miserably.  So fuck 'em.  Let their departmental funding get cut and market principles encroach further into their insulated bubble of security, and let them whine incessantly about capitalism in their blogs.  The whiners had their final opportunity in 2006 to close the massive gap between themselves and the Real World (where Ayn Rand matters - a lot), and they blew it big-time; the more ignoble bastards among them have resorted instead to vicious, savage, smears pertaining to Rand's youthful (and irrelevant, and not-admiring) comments about a serial killer, and other such intellectually-reckless or negligent tactics for which their pathological groupie-colleague-enablers hold them not at all accountable.  To see these fucks get their comeuppance - it's not a matter of if, but when - will be a particular pleasure of mine to behold.  So the current situation is that we have this national discourse where Rand looms as a major presence and influence on people's ideas, and instead of participating in that national dialogue on a level field of play the Professional Philosophers gratuitously dropped the ball and retreated ever-further into their Ivory Towers.  ("Cowards!  Weaklings!  Bums!")  So, again, until they get their act together: Fuck 'em.  In the meantime, I'll be reading DIM, and integrating, of course.

P.P.S. Sign of a/the verbal river of gold to come?  Merry Fucking Christmas. :-)

The Economic Left: Irrational Bigots?

[See here for context re: this blog entry's headline title.]

It's no secret that left-liberals fancy themselves more intellectual, more informed, more enlightened, etc. than the population at large. Just look at the makeup of university faculties, after all. The people who spend the most time thinking about things just have this inevitable tendency to lean "left." (The illustrious thinker, Robert Nozick, thinks through why this is, and comes up with a fine explanation: there are plenty of thinkers out there who are also doers, namely, business-creators. You'd be hard-pressed to find Marxists teaching at business schools or running Fortune 500 companies. That requires a kind of smarts and skill-set that Marxists and the rest of their left-wing academic ilk either don't possess or don't much approve of. [I take an example like George Soros to be roughly like a Glenn Greenwaldian "voice of conscience" with extreme financial smarts. An example like Warren Buffett, I don't think would really reflect the left-ward bent in the academic humanities. You'd have to look to the economics departments to get a much closer match.] Of course, to be fair, it does cut both ways; I don't much admire, say, Wall Street philistines who are conspicuously out of touch with the more plausible grievances of the "Occupy" movement, or - put more generally - those who've allowed their own circumstances to bias them and blind them to certain realities.)

I just bracketed-parenthetically mentioned the economics departments. There, you don't see much of a left-ward bent at all; it's a very pragmatic - which is to say, quite centrist - profession. Several Nobel Laureates come from the "right." Many economists are out in the business world. There's this old adage, "those who can't do, teach." According to that adage, the ones who don't go out into the business world, can't do. Teaching is a kind of doing, though, and the adage over-generalizes anyway; it's intended to be partly humorous. But there is a ring of truth to it as well, because it applies to at least some academics - and if employment out in "the real world" is any indication of this, the hard sciences have the greatest number of "doers," the social sciences presumably less so (with economics among the social sciences boldly standing out as the least left-wing), and the humanities presumably even less so. I don't know the percentages, but it just intuitively rings true and Nozick's explanation makes plenty of sense.

This is all preface to the following observation: left-wing teachings when it comes to economic matters tend to be toxic. There's quite a lot of it that not even "mainstream liberals" in the economics profession would endorse. But certain memes get out there among left-wing thinkers and the connection between these memes and (a responsible reading of) the facts is tenuous. Now, take your typical liberal college student, place him or her in a large online social gathering to partake in meme-spreading, and what do you get? The reddit.com politics site. (I count this site as among my daily reads among several others, including the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.) This site is particularly a breeding-ground for "Occupy"-movement memes. The thing with the "Occupy" movement is there are some worthwhile or semi-worthwhile memes all mixed-up with some really toxic ones. I'd like to focus on a very toxic meme in particular, one based on shady numbers, having to do with wealth and income inequality.

The very Marx-inspired narrative feeding this toxic meme is one of continuous impoverishment and immiseration of "the working classes" and, seemingly, of ever-widening inequality, absent the democratically-controlled state stepping in to correct the problem. "Democracy before capitalism" is the basic political ethic going on here. Democracy, properly practiced, will work in the best interests of the People, while capitalism tends to devolve into plutocracy.

We've been bitten once already by Marx's prediction of the collapse of capitalism. (How many times do we need to be bitten before we figure out the real problem here?) Needing some theoretical modifications and looking for some semblance of intellectual leadership, the left these days has latched onto (most prominently) Noam Chomsky. While Chomsky is brilliant and authoritative on many things, and serves as a voice of conscience in the face of American wrong-doings and double-standards, that doesn't mean he's got his economic narrative correct. But he's a darling of the left in any event, and his pronouncements are treated accordingly. Taking his lead, the Economic Left - and its representative end-result on the politics reddit - filters and interprets economic data to fit its narrative-worldview.

Now, to throw a wrench into that whole inequality/immiseration narrative.

(I mean, shouldn't they have known better? Shouldn't they have seen this coming? Shouldn't they have been more objective and fact-oriented?)

Here it is:

(Clickable link in the image. To play the academic-credentialism game: the article is written by Maxim Pinkovskiy, Department of Economics, MIT, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Professor of Economics, Columbia University.)

The really "weird" (read: "counter-intuitive," with special emphasis on the scare qoutes) part about this is that world-scale inequality has fallen as globalization has expanded, and this fall has accelerated after 1990, i.e., after the fall of Communism and after NAFTA and GATT.

Now, why aren't international data on inequality in wealth and income ever cited by the Occupy crowd and their academic enablers? Is it because they're unaware of it? Is it because they've ignored it? Do they consider it irrelevant? Do they consider the data flawed? What might account for the Economic Left's failure to address the most comprehensive and global data set available?

The favorite data of the Economic Left concern wealth and inequality here in the United States, which by all indications is increasing. There seems at least to be an awareness that globalization has something to do with it: many lower-skilled and manufacturing jobs have gone oversees. There's also the effects of illegal immigration taking American jerbs, though that's more of a right-wing meme. While the rich Americans retain residence here, their capital goes more and more abroad, they get the returns from that while the middle-class and poor do not, hence the widening income and wealth gap among Americans.

Left out of the intra-American discussions about the growing wealth and income gap is the effect of globalization on global wealth and income inequalities. It's probably of little consolation to Americans that their now-outsourced jobs improve the quality of lives of foreign workers, but it is nonetheless a fact that needs to be taken into account if we're to build a narrative, correct? If the narrative is "widening inequality in wealth and income," then you'd need to have the data to back that up, right? Some philosopher-level amount of intellectual curiosity should lead people to seek out and consider global data and not just data about Americans, yes?

From the way Chomsky and the reddit-hive-mind tell it, the multinational corporations, seeking Profit over People, ship the jobs oversees where people are exploitatively paid 15 cents an hour, pretty much a deadweight loss for all concerned except for the Evil Corporations/Stockholders. From the way they tell it, you'd expect inequality and immiseration on the world scale to be exacerbated by these turns of events. I mean, isn't that what capitalism without democratic intervention, is all about? That is, after all, the very narrative they push about the American historical experience prior to the New Deal. (Presumably, so the narrative goes, it's what's supposed to happen in any industrially-developing nation.) I strongly suspect we've already been bitten there, too.

The reality of the matter is that while many Americans have it tough and things might well get even worse in the future for them, a global-scale perspective will shed light on the reality of the matter: there are some billions of people around the world who are dirt poor, by American standards, willing to work for improved wages but still dirt cheap, by American standards. If enlightened cosmopolitanism and altruism are supposed to be our motives, we should be welcoming these developments. There seems to be something quite toxic here at work, though: a rejection of economic reality, a rejection driven by fear, envy, prejudice, what have you. Much the same as what happens on the Right when it comes to the Right's pet anti-reality issues.

That being said, there is something to the "Occupy" narrative that all pro-reality people should acknowledge: our government is bought by moneyed interests, and is corrupted accordingly. The People have a large part in letting this happen by electing unenlightened and cynical representatives. So, e.g., while budgetary reality says that deficit reduction will require (in part) raising taxes on the only people who have the money these days, the political reality is the insanity that this isn't even on the table at present (due to the Republicans, who have their own anti-reality narratives on fiscal matters. I.e., supply-side tax cuts make a lot more fiscal and economic sense when marginal tax rates are 70% than when they're in the 30s; and the deceptive "only 50 percent of the people pay taxes" meme should have been dead long ago).

A pox on both of their houses.

[ADDENDUM: A case in point of shady numbers, even applied to the "global" scale. ("On Monday the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a massive 400-page report surveying the state of inequality around the world. The report, United We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising reaffirms that inequality is now rising not just in the United States, but globally." Bold emphasis mine.) The study in this case involves the 34 OECD member countries - which doesn't include China or India (which make up more than a third of the world population) much less more than a hundred other nations. How exactly is that "global"?]