What would Jefferson think?

What might be the cause of the intellectual corruption that leads to the culture of corruption discussed here?

Some antidote to that.

Were he around today, I think that the one-time president of the American Philosophical Society would be a big Ayn Rand fan.  Actually, I'm certain of it.

Why the fuck does no one else get this (or so it would seem)?

Thanks a lot, professional "educators"....

(Here's the spawn of the professional "educators," with the standard primacy-of-politics orientation we UP blog regulars have naturally come to be disgusted by; it's philistine-level crap.  Isn't a primacy-of-politics mentality the sort of thing that got us into the situation where the U.S. government can torture innocent people without accountability, all the while being brazenly hypocritical about it?  Well?  Being that philosophy is more all-encompassing cognitively than politics, wouldn't getting our nation's philosophical shit together generate more all-encompassing solutions to whatever problems that afflict it, than trying to fix its hierarchically-derivative political shit atop a crumbling foundation?  [Are you listening, "bleeding heart libertarians"?]  What would Jefferson think about all this?  I mean, like, duhhh!)

More antidote.

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....

Reddit's /r/philosophy: a fucking joke (and a silver lining)

Exhibit A

It's all too obvious from this example (and it's only one among many) that the malicious, cowardly Rand-hating thugs who infest this otherwise-important social-media outlet for widely-viewed intellectual discourse don't care to have an argument on a level field of play.  (Cowards! Weaklings! BUMS!)  The downvoting patterns are specifically directed at burying Yours Truly's eminently sensible, factually-supported responses to the well-upvoted anti-Rand idiocy that is rampant there.  That's not philosophy, that's a playground mentality intended to deceive the readership about the true nature of the discussion taking place there.  This is the kind of crowd grown and bred by the university philosophy departments these days?  That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, given the disgusting, pathological, politically-motivated pattern of behavior by a number of "eminent figures" in that profession.

I really don't know how this problem could be solved; it's a failing of the format that would not happen on a genuine Usenet-style format of old.  It's a problem that reddit itself is going to have to fix by some useful and workable change of the format.

(There's also some other software problem that has been resulting in a whole lot of my posted comments being filtered by a spambot for reasons not yet ascertained by the mods there.  Oh, well.  It's discouraging enough to see what I spend much time posting there get buried by anonymous cowards when my comments do show up.  (This is aside from the general feel someone such as myself gets from discussing Rand on /r/"philosophy": that I'm wading through a crowd of irrational bigots, probably much like trying to defend theism on /r/atheism.  [Oh, if you think religious people can be irrational bigots, just watch the way so many of those in the "new atheist" movement react like poo-flinging monkeys toward anyone religious.  "Liberals" can be much lower than the "conservatives" they so often stereotype.])   Discouragement is the malicious cowards' motivation, of course.  I shall have to adjust my own course of action accordingly.  One thing I'm sure of, however, is this: this epistemic aggression will not stand, man.  Not in the long run.  BUP.)

Perhaps the most discouraging thing of all - as a general proposition, not just in terms of concrete instances of injustice or against whom such malicious behavior is directed - is how the stifling of pro-Rand voices has implications beyond merely that for the nature and quality of philosophic discourse.  As Peikoff explained at great length in Chapter 8 of OPAR, on the virtues, the effects of a little dishonesty, by the nature of reality and how all rational cognition is integrated, cannot but spread like a cancer to more and more facets of the dishonest person's existence.  (The case of Nathaniel Branden's progressively worse and increasingly all-encompassing deceptions of Ayn Rand until it blew all up in the end - as it had to - serves as a striking illustration of the principle.)  As anyone who reads this blogs regularly knows, this culture desperately needs an infusion of Aristotelianism in order to address its problems and challenges (much less move above and beyond toward a positive: big-time cultural flourishing).  I don't know how many times it has to happen, for people to get the point that where Aristotelianism (or something like it - e.g., Jeffersonianism) is alive and well, cultures and societies have flourished in ways they didn't before.

As it happens, the single most influential intellectual figure on the American public scene for the last half century up until the present (who else would it be besides Rand?) is - as some of the nation's leading scholars of Aristotle will tell you - also a neo-Aristotelian.  This makes it quite inescapable that in any serious discussion about how to move America forward into a period of enlightenment and flourishing - about what ideas to preach, what behaviors to encourage, what strategies to pursue - the name "Ayn Rand" cannot just somehow be pushed off to the side as irrelevant.  This is simply the nature of things, an unalterable reality, an undeniable absolute.  I think that if there were some way around that, I would have thought of it by now.  But the (perfectivist) principle involved precludes it.  It has to.  Rand shares too fundamental a similarity to Aristotle and Jefferson for it not to be so.  One doesn't have to like this reality to acknowledge it.  Me, I've simply become accustomed to it; it matters not what my feelings about Rand are.  I'm a perfectivist, and she's a forerunner of the idea, and that's all there is to it.

So, given all this, assuming that it's an infusion of Aristotelianism that we need, why couldn't we just say "let's go with Aristotle and/or Jefferson, they provide the best examples to follow."  Okay, but how then do you manage to evade the logical consequence that Rand must enter the discussion?  I can't think of a single fucking way it can happen.  It's either-or.  Either you accept Aristotelianism and Jeffersonianism - and therefore accept Rand in some fundamentally important sense - or you reject Rand and thereby in effect reject Aristotelianism and Jeffersonianism.  The reddit /r/"philosophy" thugs, and all too many people in the academy, have chosen the latter course.  What are the American People going to think about that when they come to find all this out?  "mouse, meet Cat."

If these entities paid attention to Rand like they're supposed to - as Aristotle and Jefferson themselves would if they were around today, since their policy is not one of evasion but integration, particularly with respect to culturally-significant author-figures (this is no-brainer shit, is it not?) - then of course Aristotle would become their center of attention as well.  One need only look at how the really smart people very much influenced by Rand end up being big-time Aristotle fans as well.

As things stand at the moment, most of the non-Randian crowd are completely oblivious to what Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses are all about.  These courses used to be in the hundreds of dollars each, making them prohibitively expensive to the very people - college undergrads - for whom they would make the most difference.  Now, they're marked down to around 10 bucks apiece.  The completely-oblivious crowd does not know what this portends, but I do, and so do those who've listened to and absorbed the material contained therein.  It spells doom for the oblivious ones (if they don't clean up their act).  There's just no getting around the fact that when college undergrads by the thousands upon thousands get their digital hands on these courses, coupled with a growing academic literature on Rand, the older generation of intellectuals is going to be replaced over time by a bunch of Randian-Aristotelians - all for the better, of course.  If I knew of a way around this eventuality, short of Apocalypse stepping the way, I think I would have figured it out by now.  But, well, you know, A is A. ;-)  And /r/"philosophy" is a fucking joke.

But seriously, what do the Rand-haters do in the event that a shit-ton of undergrads have Understanding Objectivism coursing through their veins?  Now that's an ultimate hypothetical right there, a cultural-singularity type of event beyond which we can hardly predict.  Perhaps the question to be asked first, is: will a shit-ton of undergrads have Understanding Objectivism coursing through their veins in the reasonably near future?  If so, why?  If not, why not?  To listen to the Rand-haters, one might think they don't take such an eventuality seriously because, well, of course (for them) Objectivism is obviously shit and always will be.  But they haven't listened to Understanding Objectivism, though, now have they.  So what you then have to ask is whether someone could listen to Understanding Objectivism and come out of it not taking Objectivism seriously.  But all the evidence I've inductively observed tells me that the chances of that happening are slim to none, but then again what if the available sample size is already biased and too small?  (Huh.  What a question to ask.  I wonder what cognitive methodology would boldly facilitate one's asking such questions aimed at establishing the full context.  Gee, lemme think....)  But what if it isn't?  Then what?

Well, then it comes down to an issue of how many of those intellectually-eager undergrads are going to buy up these $10 courses and proceed to go hog wild with their classmates and professors, a scenario where understanding Objectivism becomes the cool new hip fad in a way it just wasn't before.  That might depend in good part on the use of existing media for advertising this material to the right demographic.  That's a fairly capitalistic concept, ones that the people at the Ayn Rand Institute might be more well-attuned to more than just about any of the ideas-merchants out there.  First off, they have Rand books selling like hotcakes, year in and year out.  In the middle of those books are those postcards telling you where you can get more information on things like newsletters, campus clubs, recorded lecture courses, and so forth.  You have a large number of existing Objectivists who've taken these courses telling the newer students of Objectivism on Facebook or wherever that "you've got to hear this course, it will really amplify your comprehension of the philosophy."  It'll be all in (near-)unison directed toward the "newbies."  And guess what, they won't cost an arm and a leg, either!  You could get a couple dozen courses for what used to be the price for only one!  And it's all Leonard Peikoff in his brilliantly engaging and entertaining lecturing style, too!  Wow!  What a fucking bargain, huh?  A steal.  Like, could this be for real?  Did the ARI really do that?  Why listen to music online for free when you could listen to Peikoff for 25 hours for $10?  And maybe instead of getting drunk at the frat party the undies will spend that time doing the more cool thing by listening to a Peikoff lecture.  Just maybe.

What was that about BUP again?  You know, I'm feeling so much better now than when I began this posting.  Took a negative and turned it into a positive.  Lesson: don't let the filthy, scummy, slimy fucks get you down.  Thanks for guiding me in this direction, /r/"philosophy," keep up the bad work! :-D

You can't refute perfectivism. :-)

"Checkmate, asshole."

(Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go tend to my splitting sides.)

An ultimate hypothetical

As an ideas-merchant I try to keep well-attuned to how an audience responds to framing.  Example: I propose the idea of a perfectivist utopia characterized at root by people maximally exercising their intellects.  The response may well be characterized by disbelief, incomprehension, cynicism, defensive cognitive bias or outright evasion, or who the hell knows what.  (Hard to predict, see, just in how many ways people can fail to recognize a good idea for what it is.  The best I can hope to do is to figure out ways to cut them off at the pass, do an end-around, be as dialectically comprehensive as I know how to be, set up as many safeguards 'twixt cup and lip . . . and then maybe there will be some success at getting the idea across.)  One problem in framing the issue in terms of an intellectualist perfectivist utopia is the sheer unfamiliar-ness of the idea to so many.  How can it possibly be concretized in their minds to their satisfaction given their limited context of knowledge?  Concretes do help a lot, after all.

So the concrete I'll use for framing is one Thomas Jefferson.  He's the guy that drafted the United States Declaration of Independence in 1976.  He's more well-known, more visible to the average citizen, than the author of the Nicomachean Ethics.  (In other words: If you polled the American citizenry and asked who authored the D of I, half of them might actually give the right answer.  Ask them who authored the Nicomachean Ethics, you might be lucky to get one in five answering correctly.  So the idea of presenting the latter as a basis for the cognitive revolution we so desperately need has a considerably greater chance of fuck-up on the transmission line.)  Another concrete to pair Mr. Jefferson with might well be that guy whose face shows up on the $100 bill, but probably not that guy who authored The Rights of Man and Common Sense (notwithstanding how well-known and influential as that guy was among the early Americans).  Perhaps the term "polymath" would draw blank stares, serving to throw the audience off the scent.  Perhaps "excellence in all endeavors" would convey the (Aristotelian) idea to more populist effect.  Jefferson and that guy on the $100 bill were polymaths strove for excellence in all endeavors.

How some guy ends up on the $100 bill, might very well intrigue a few in the audience.  Perhaps that could lead in some interesting directions.

It so happens that these two comprehensive-excellence-pursuers were either founder or president of the American Philosophical Society.  But so as not to distract the average citizen, one might want to avoid saying something like "if everyone lived the way the great philosophers did, . . . " because that would lead those who easily miss a point to wonder who would then do all those vitally important things like engineering, running businesses, conducting scientific research and development, raising kids, hitting home runs, cooking restaurant meals, growing the cannabis (oops, distraction) brewing the beer, directing the movies, balancing the books, performing open-heart surgery, etc. etc. etc. etc. - all those things "the philosophers don't do."

So we have to reframe this in terms of something like: constantly striving for improvement, which takes continuous learning, growth, intellectual curiosity and insatiability, development of talents, health-conscious lifestyles, cultivation of social relationships, seeing things from others' point of view rather than merely through one's own cognitive biases or filters, recognition and respect for human dignity and freedom, and other things listed on that hierarchy of needs thingy by that one psychologist guy.

Now, as it happens, carrying out these things successfully requires a love of wisdom, no question.  That doesn't require that one sit atop the rock like that thinker statue whatamacallit with the chin resting upon hand all of the time - just some of the time at very least -  and even that requires a good developmental environment from an early age, which includes decent nutrition, decent parenting, decent educational opportunities, and so forth.  A decent community would do whatever is within reason to ensure that its young members have as much of a good developmental environment as possible.  (Does this create a chicken-and-egg problem?  How do the not-young people figure out how to be so, um - is "virtuous" the appropriate term here? - kind and decent in intention and efficacious in action so as to foster such developmental excellence for the young'uns?  How do they do that, while also holding down a job and coming home tired, etc.?  Well?  Am I supposed to have all the answers?)

So, anyway, with that preamble out of the way, here's the hypothetical:

Say that the American People came to a broad minimal consensus: If we emulate (too distracting a word?) follow the example of behavior set by the greatest of the nation's Founding Fathers, especially TJ and the $100 bill guy - that is, if we sought to secure for ourselves and our family, friends, neighbors, and other community members the most optimal conditions for our flourishing (yeah, I think that is a good term to use - that mad-as-hell guy in Network uses it, too), that is to say, if we as a people sought to cultivate and foster the conditions under which people could flourish the way these gentlemen did in numerous endeavors be they science, philosophy, arts and letters, community and civic participation, statesmanship, business and entrepreneurship, education of one's fellow Americans, ethical and moral excellence, spiritual fulfillment, and so forth, then what kind of society might we come to inhabit?

(There's that pesky, distracting matter of their having owned slaves.  We shouldn't follow their example in that regard, of course.  Surely we can set aside that tree for the sake of the forest?)

Imagine our having a hypothetical conversation with these two men, asking their advice on how to improve the state of affairs in this country.  Assume if you possibly can that in our hypothetical conversation these men have some 200 years of hindsight that they did not actually possess in their time, but which they would have if they were alive today.  What would they think about what has become of the nation since their time - but more importantly, what advice would they offer for improvement?  Might they appeal to various historical figures for inspiration?  For example, Jefferson in some of his letters touted some ancient guys with names like Epictetus and Epicurus as deliverers of moral and practical wisdom.  Also, while Jefferson didn't believe in the traditional God of theism, he did believe in a Creator who set the world in motion (a view popular at the time, known as deism), and also praised as a genius one Jesus of Nazareth; as framing for the average American citizen goes, that's some pretty good stuff, but Jefferson would (of course) urge us to seek wisdom from all kinds of sources (hence his knowledge of those ancient Epi-something guys, among many others).

I do believe Mr. J would lament the polling data pointing to unacceptable levels of ignorance among the citizenry, but he would also be pro-active about solutions.  Beginning with the ignorance of the very political system he and his buddies founded, he might ask such things as: Why are the people this ignorant?  Is it because they're just intellectually lazy, or has their political system gotten to where they are apathetic or too discouraged about participating in the political process?  If we can devise a fix whereby they become genuinely interested in the political goings-on around them, their knowledge of such things will naturally expand.  Were I interested in the fate of the Green Bay Packers, I'd know quite a bit about them.  And while there's no obvious reason why every citizen ought to be interested in the Packers given their limited time and priorities, it's a plausible proposition that every citizen ought to be interested in our political system and ought to be able to pass a basic science literacy test even years after being a fifth grader.  (That unbelievably awful show would have no place in a Jeffersonian culture.)

Now, in presenting such a hypothetical one might well encounter stubborn cynicism:

"People are just the way they are, hardwired and stuff, or Original Sin, you can't expect them to improve." (UP: Speak for yourself!  Also, what about what that Harvard psychology guy has been saying about the decline in levels of violence over human history?  I can dig up the reference if you're curious.  Or how about slavery no longer being a societal norm?  And, to cite this one 20th century author lady, if we have free will as the proponents of the Original Sin idea nevertheless say we do, then why couldn't the idea of Original Virtue make just as much sense?)

"IQ's will always be centered around 100, how do you expect people to get smarter?" (UP: Aren't literacy rates a lot higher these days than in the Dark Ages?  Same basic genetic structure, yet better outcomes.)

"Those are great men, how do you expect ordinary people to live up to such lofty standards?" (UP: Who said anything about everyone becoming a Jefferson or $100 bill guy?  Let's start with a more realistic idea: a considerably greater number of people of their caliber than at present - in effect, a shifting of the cultural bell curve.  Besides, we're talking in essence about excellence of character.)

"You're trying to sneak in the idea of a Utopia under the guise of widely-implemented Jeffersonianism.  But people - even reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful people - will always disagree among one another about various things.  In a Utopia there isn't supposed to be such disagreement, since everyone is supposed to be 'perfect'."  (UP: Call it what you will - Utopia, Jeffersonianism, Nicomachean Ethics-ism - what you're talking about is a strawman.  This societal ideal need only meet certain minimum requirements, like nonviolence, stable social unions, a rule of law.  Now, to get to such an ideal would take some amount of time and, in short, education.  There's a good reason to think that in order to get to those minimum requirements just stated, the necessary process of education would lead to widespread improvement in moral character, which turns this society into not simply a "liberal, freedom-respecting" one, but also a highly virtue-encouraging one as "communitarian" theorists argue for.  A nice integration/synthesis reconciliation of these seemingly competing ideals, isn't it?  And if some people even in such a social order somehow find it to their advantage to be among a criminal element, that's what the rule of law is still there for.  But most likely by then those who comprise the society would have discovered much better ways of preventing and responding to criminal behavior than they do now.  That's what you'd expect in a society in which intellectual curiosity and insatiable learning are a cultural norm rather than an exception.)

At this point, I'd have to leave it up to the hardcore cynic to come up with objections that even I have not yet anticipated.  (I mean, shit, if they're that persistent and that creative at coming up with objections, how does that not just reinforce the perfectivist Jeffersonian point that humans can get pretty good at things if they set their minds to it?  Now, is that an ultimate flanking of the potential opposition, or what?  You can't refute Jeffersonianism. :-)

I.e.:

"Checkmate, unimaginitive naysayers."

Now: What would America end up looking like if it went wholeheartedly back to its Jeffersonian roots, i.e., to what made the country's founding and the country's greatness possible in the first place?  What might America look like?  If the American people can't even so much as entertain this thought experiment, then they might very well be fucked doomed.  But what, in principle, is there to stop them from entertaining it and going on to act accordingly, besides nothing?

ADDENDUM: Oh, by the way, for those of you not out of your element: is that one scene near the end of the pretty good story that the Stranger unfolded, that scene with the nihilists, is that about overcoming nihilism accompanied by a diminution of the Appetitive Soul?  And what about that goldbricker pretending to be a millionaire?  What does he symbolize?  There's a vanity theme there to be sure.  And how about the slut nympho that poor woman, or, for that matter, the known pornographer whom she's been banging?  And what about the strongly vaginal artist, and the video artist with a cleft asshole?  And how about the Stranger?  Is he a daimon of sorts?  A lot of strands to keep in my head, man.  A lot of strands in UP's head.

Glenn Greenwald (and Ayn Rand) vs. Evasion

Evasion - i.e., the refusal to think, to see, to know - is, as Ayn Rand pointed out - and which many people (ironically? non-ironically?) evade because of the messenger - the root of all human evils.

Glenn Greenwald documents on a daily basis the devolution of the American justice system going on right before our eyes in the wake of the so-called War on Terror. It's nothing short of fucking disgusting what's going on - as are the evasions that enable it.

Is it any coincidence - any coincidence at all - that the American justice system, and the American political system, were perverted in the face of the so-called War on Drugs? In fact, we might as well assume that the perversions enacted by the so-called War on Drugs were a test by our Political Class to see just how far the American People could be hoodwinked into giving up the principles of freedom in order to Keep Us Safe. Hence, the so-called War on Terror.

I say principles of freedom here, because even if you or your neighbor's rightful freedom wasn't infringed by these ridiculous policies, the principle involved was torn asunder. Hell, let's just make it plain: the principles of freedom have gradually been torn asunder since the days of FDR (to "keep us free from fear," or whatnot). Perhaps before that, going back to who-knows-when. As the ever-prescient Rand pointed out, quite incontrovertibly, there was a contradiction from the very start between the nation's founding political principles and the wider moral-intellectual ethos of its people. As she pointed out, America didn't have a well-recognized moral-philosophical base (i.e., reason and egoism, but primarily reason) for its political ideals.

We're seeing the results of this split. It's quite inevitable, really. And we continue to ignore - i.e., to evade - the inevitable consequences of this split, at our own peril.

Back to the matter of principles: one thing that an anti-intellectual ethos does, is to destroy people's ability to think in terms of principles. So if some far-off stranger has his freedoms trampled upon in the most egregious of anti-American ways, an intellectually-stunted populace will sigh in relief that at least their own freedoms aren't being trampled upon - ignoring the principle of fredom involved. (This is even assuming they value freedom any longer, as distinct from, say, Safety.) Well, the departure from principle has led to the de facto state of lawlessness in which our Political Class now operates. That's what happens when a principle is abandoned.

Anyone who is paying attention - i.e., doesn't evade in one fashion or other - realizes that the current state of things, politically and intellectually, would make Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration, and long-serving president of the American Philosophical Society, fucking vomit. Further, if you pay attention and exercise any capacity for independent thinking in principles, you realize that this problem won't - and can't - go away, not without some significant change in the mindset of the American People. Only the ire and rage of the American People against its lawless Political Class could serve as a check against the perversions of its founding principles (i.e., individual rights). Only the evasions of the American People can keep the problem festering, and keep diminishing America's standing in the world.

So, during the times I'm not posting here, a good blog to read is Greenwald's. He is one of the few still remaining who have the courage to call out the corruption of our political system in the most clear and uncompromising terms.

The problem is, at root, an intellectual one. A philosophy like Rand's is the ultimate solution. The ultimate diagnostic approach is philosophical. But at the least Greenwald is highlighting what our political problem is in the starkest terms, even if he hasn't identified the why. (I've added "pragmatism" as a tag to this post, seeing as how pragmatism - a most unfortunate intellectual phenomenon in America - has proved insidious against its founding principles. Also, I've added "integration," since this all ties together. Oh, I've also added "torture," since that integrates with the rest. Long story short: Pragmatism leads to disintegration, which leads to lawless torture.) Greenwald constantly kicks ass; as far as I can remember, he's always putting the apologists for the Status Quo in their place in any debate that arises. The defenders of the Status Quo have a vested interest in people evading what Greenwald says. So far, these slimeballs have been getting away with it well enough to keep conducting a progressive erosion of all law and decency. If you get the People dumbed-down enough through a long-enough train of evasions, they will accept tyranny, plutocracy, endless war, you name it.

Far as I can tell, Greenwald identifies as "left-liberal" politically, which really has little to do with the effectiveness of his blog, which focuses on constitutional rights and their abuse by politicians of both parties. Further, he's not a philosopher, so that limits his intellectual context and range of awareness. He does share with Ayn Rand at least one feature: marginalization by the Establishment. But, more essentially and crucially, he shares with Ayn Rand a basic intellectual attitude: the refusal to evade facts. It's just mind-boggling how rare such an attitude is today.

Now, back to composing....

P.S. Please take a look at my previous posting and let it sink in, if it hasn't yet.

Randian Heroes as Perfectionists

I am coming to grips with what all I am prepared to say and what I am not yet prepared to say in my book. Tying my central perfectionist thesis to the issues that the leading academic philosophers - particularly those in epistemology - are concerned with, it just not going to be possible in this first book. I do not have the requisite training (from self or others) and context for it. I am quite rusty at my academic-style philosophizing after a decade away from graduate school. Further, my book is conceived as aiming squarely at the intelligent layperson; and the intelligent layperson is far removed from what Quine's "Two Dogmas" is all about. The perfectionist in me says this tying-in would make a good candidate for a second book, though.

My academic area of specialty was ethics and political philosophy. My grasp of these issues is a lot more sound than the issues that the likes of Quine, Kripke, Davidson and David Lewis specialize in. However, I think my perfectionist thesis is plenty good enough to blow away the competitors in the field of ethics, and that includes the leading "contemporary" moral philosopher, Rawls.

Ethical perfectionism is a synonym for eudaemonism, which is best defended in the "canon" literature by Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics. Up until about 30 years ago, the main alternatives in ethical theory (aside from forms of rejection of moral theories) were "utilitarianism" (or, more broadly, consequentialism) and "Kantianism" (or, more broadly, deontology). This alternative is what was being presented to students in college philosophy courses as the best that philosophers had to offer in the field of ethics. Pretty sad, huh? So, since that time, Aristotle and "virtue ethics" have surged into prominence, and as recent or contemporary literature is scoured for "virtue-ethical" positions within this Aristotelian tradition, Ayn Rand's name naturally comes up. Her ethical egoism is hardly dissimilar to ancient Greek and especially Aristotelian ethics on the matter of being self-centered in ethics, with virtue defined in terms of promoting self-actualization or eudaemonia or real happiness. Whether the academic literature has fully made the identification yet, eudaemonism and perfectionism and self-actualization and virtue ethics (with some kind of stress on the needs of the self foremost hierarchically) are synonymous because they all are descriptions of the same basic concept. As academic literature goes, David L. Norton's Personal Destinies is the best contemporary statement of eudaemonist or virtue ethics.

What really reveals someone's ignorance of Ayn Rand and of the history of philosophy, is comparing her ethics and her idealized heroes to Nietzsche's Ubermensch, usually package-dealt with some strawman claim that Rand, "like Nietzsche," is an elitist, and more likely than not looking for a moral justification (through hijacking Nietzsche, more or less) for capitalist exploitation. Yes, it's one of those eye-rollers students of Objectivism have been confronted with thousands of times. Why don't these idiots appreciate Rand for what she actually said, the students of Objectivism keep asking. (Good question, actually.) Further, it really reveals a lack of intellectual sophistication to hone in on similarities to Nietzsche rather than similarities to Aristotle.

(Let's say that Nietzschean-style "nihilism" is the main alternative modernity has to clinging on to religion-and-morality. I mean, that's what has plunged the political left into a deep-structural moral vacuum (see the '60s and its effects), and the right into fear that the world will collapse without a return to religion-and-morality (see the right from Buckley to today). Aristotelian-Thomistic-Lockean-Jeffersonian-Randian "natural-law" perfectionism is the third way that would give us the fix we need, but unfortunately there is massive ignorance of this tradition. So the typical little left-wing college know-it-all has a context where Nietzsche is taken to be a, or the, leading voice of the secular world, and where leftists succeeded in rewriting America's history into a class-war context rather than an individualist one, and compares Rand to other thinkers in that context. Really lame and so cliched, right?)

Randian heroes are perfectionists. Rand is clear about this in some of her Letters ca. 1946, so it gives some idea of where Rand was in her intellectual development at that time, and how she viewed the relation between moral perfection and traditional religion. (This was around the time she was most embroiled in discussions with Isabel Paterson about all the Big Issues - God, religion, morality - and "Pat" informed her that her ethics had a character all its own, simply distinct from the egoists Nietzsche and Stirner.) This is around the time she was also studying the history of philosophy, with emphasis on the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions; this was around the time that the significance of the "problem of universals" became known to Rand, and the time she made her earliest identifications leading to her theory of concepts. In her maturest stage of intellectual development, her ideas were far more Aristotelian or Thomistic than Nietzschean. This goes for her eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics.

The heroes represent what a eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics lived-out might look like. Her heroes were always reflections of her husband Frank or herself, and there's nothing of an "Ubermensch" character about them (either the heroes, Frank, or herself); they're just normal human beings reaching their full potentials through virtue (rationality), and doing so with an individualistic pride - like what America's supposed to be about, right?

Conservatism vs. Liberty

I was provided these links in an email:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/018060.html

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017938.html

The sender said, "You rarely comment on the Conservative critiques of Rand. You focus more on the Leftist ones which is understandable. I was curious what you think of these arguments."

I'm the sort of "intellectual elitist" that is so disgusted with the Right as an (anti-)intellectual phenomenon, that I rarely expect to see much of any merit from those quarters. I figure that if the "conservatives" would crawl out of their intellectual cave, they'd stop being conservatives and be Jeffersonian or classical liberals instead. (I don't mind the term "libertarian" personally, but there's an awesome amount of baggage with that term when used in or around Objectivist circles. Rand's policy was to put the term in "scare quotes," indicating that she regarded it as an anti-concept - not at all surprising with terms applied in a political context. Me, I just take the term in its ordinary connotation and conclude that it's a matter of plain common sense to be a libertarian.) As it is, the history of the "conservative" movement starting with William F. Buckley is a disgrace to rational values. Buckley's monstrously incompetent treatment of Rand sets the tone. There's also that pesky matter of how religion of the sort embraced by Rightists is downright fucking toxic to rational values.

Once in a while, though, we get something resembling a carefully-reasoned critique of Jeffersonian-liberal values. Perhaps the most advanced critique goes under the heading of "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism." The above-provided links are a variant on the basic theme.

First, I'd like to point out the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on the subject of physical force, this excerpt in particular:

An attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying man’s capacity to recognize the good, i.e., his capacity to value. Force invalidates and paralyzes a man’s judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one’s mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge.

Now, to quote the last two paragraphs of the first link:

The bottom line: the dictum, "Do whatever you like, so long as you don't hurt anyone else," does not suffice to order a society, because it does not suffice to order an individual life. There is a complex nexus of feedback relations between individual lives and the social order, of which the legal order is an aspect. Individual lives depend upon society, and constitute it. As they go, so it goes; and as it goes, so do they. To say this is no more than to say that if we are to live, we must do so together, and so must order our lives in respect to each other, and to our joint prosperity--not just across space, but across time.

Ordering lives across time, across generations, is the function of tradition. Libertarianism presupposes a vibrant moral tradition, that has informed a people from the bottom up, so that the net result of their unsupervised activities is social harmony, justice, prosperity. Where such a tradition perdures, the libertarian project can perhaps succeed. Where not, not. If you have no tradition, you have no nexus of support for your individual agency, and thus no true freedom to organize your activities toward your own ends. Rather, you have only raw lurching from one dire exigency to the next, with no notion of a fundamental moral order to inform your deliberations. Randian atheism demolishes the ontological basis for morality, and so cannot but destroy moral tradition, thus preventing the option of libertarianism. "If there is no God, then all is permitted"--including force, and fraud.

First, this part about everything being permitted if there is no God is intellectually disreputable and automatically creates suspicion about the author's intellectual caliber. The Euthyphro Dilemma suffices to show what's wrong with a divine-command basis for ethics. So already we have a fundamentally mistaken context informing this rationale for force - a faulty metaphysics, epistemology and meta-ethics. One can only guess how corrosive the effects of such a context will be in any particular case, but once you do go into flights of epistemological fancy on matters such as the basis of morality, who knows where the epistemological flights of fancy might pop up next.

(This is just one example of why conservatives have such a low reputation amongst philosophers.)

Anyway, putting aside the fucked-up underlying context, we have a seemingly serious criticism of the liberal ethos; it's nothing new, however. It's a reiteration of a standard Communitarian critique of liberalism that's been going through academia since the '70s, in response first and foremost to John Rawls's theory of justice. Now, readers of my blog might remember the time I slammed Rawls for his lack of respect for philosophical hierarchy - namely, how there's no deeper structure to his political philosophy. Rawls more than readily plays right into that criticism in such later essays as "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical." (Rand would just flip out if she heard of that title, wouldn't she?) The Communitarian criticism coincides with a rise in Virtue Ethics in the past few decades. An ethics of virtue would constitute part of the deeper structure but Rawls doesn't view virtue as being the concern of politics. (This is only slightly weird given that justice itself is a virtue. But Rawls's first statement about justice is that it's the first virtue of social institutions - consistent with his regarding justice as a political-level concern.)

Now, is virtue a concern of politics? Does it have any role at all in determining the basic social structure of socio-political liberalism? The relation between morality proper and politics is not an easy one to explain in a very brief space; for a lengthier treatment there is my article "Egoism and Rights". The gist of the relation is that man requires the use of reason to live qua man. Reason is a volitional capacity and does not operate under coercion. Under coercion you aren't the author of your actions; you've been effectively deprived of moral agency. To subject a reason-having being to force is, to that extent, to treat them not as a reason-having being, and to attempt to force the person into "good" is a contradiction for the reasons Rand explained. For a human being, the good must be chosen. (Think about the moral conscience of A Clockwork Orange.)

Now, one place where the conservative proposal to force human beings into virtue fails, is the failure to identify the place of force within the philosophical hierarchy. Why should force ever enter into any moral picture? What, if anything, is the proper use of force? Rand or a Jeffersonian liberal says that it enters the picture at the level of self-defense. Now, just observe the weasel-version of the concept of "self-defense" as used in the conservative pro-force proposal. "Society" would have a vital interest in forcing individuals as a matter of "self-defense." Apparently this is so whether or not we see society as deriving its moral value from the value provided to individuals.

(I take it for granted here that society is not prior to individuals in any morally-relevant sense and that moral directives of any sort derive from the living-requirements of individuals. If we don't even have that context, then the gap between the pro-force view and the individual-liberty view is simply too radical. We're assuming here that the individual-liberty view is being called into question on the grounds that it ultimately undercuts the best interest of individuals.)

The philosophical hierarchy being flouted in this instance concerns the distinction between "social" and "political." Social relationships are not the same as political ones. In the hierarchy of moral justification, sociality precedes political relations. The political relations are those relations formed for the purpose of regulating the use of force. Social relationships as such are not.

So, let's say that someone does non-virtuous things that or to his or her own detriment. Sure enough, this non-virtuous behavior does abuse the goodwill of the people - family, friends, community - who have a rational stake in the person's well-being. But having a rational stake in something doesn't warrant initiating force against someone to obtain or promote the value in question. There are plenty of non-coercive means that family, friends and community can use to deal with the person's self-detrimental behavior. The idea of resorting to force is pathological - perhaps a holdover from olden-times when force was a "natural" part of human life and its evil not recognized or understood.

As for "effects on society" of individual behavior, that's nebulous and could lead to who-knows-what. If we're going to appeal to a commonsensical guide like the common law, on the other hand, we need to establish demonstrable causal relationships between an individual's behavior and injury or damages to an identifiable victim. There had better be a really fucking good reason for restricting someone's freedom of action - and, sorry, "effects on society" doesn't cut it.

I mentioned above the justificatory hierarchy with respect to individuals, society, and polity. In that hierarchy, individuals precede the rest, as it is individual lives that are being acted out by moral agents. As Norton in Personal Destinies shows, ethical priority lies in self-actualization. This means that, even if we come into the world embedded in social relationships and are partly nurtured by those relationships, individuals are ethically prior to society. The common law reflects this individualism in regard to social causes and effects.

For socio-political purposes it is axiomatic that people have the right to live their own lives as they choose. They own their own lives. By what right does a society - a group of people - force a person other than in self-defense?

The second link above provides little over and above the first one, but I want to add that Rand does offer a comprehensive vision of life that the run-of-the-mill libertarians do not. That comprehensive vision - in addition to a socio-political prohibition on the use of initiatory force - endorses an entire ethical system that defines virtuous behavior for individuals, and rests its ethical conclusions on a base of reason, the principles of which are defined by epistemology. If we envision a society based on Randian values, it is a peaceful, prosperous, rational, cooperative, benevolent, humane society - and, by necessary consequence, it is a society that eschews force as a solution to problems. If you respect reason at its root - and that means preserving hierarchy and rejecting false justifications for morality (e.g., God) - and are consistent in that respect for reason, it follows quite naturally and common-sensibly that you would reject the use of force against reason-having beings. This stuff really is a no-brainer.

The criticism that a libertarian social order is devoid of a deeper structure which helps to preserve the societal structure and unite people under common values, simply doesn't apply to thinkers like Rand. She would - and did - make the argument that you can't have a societal structure of lasting liberty without a deeper structure of reason.

To sum up:

The only rightful purpose of government is the defense and preservation of freedom.

The Genius of Glenn Beck

I want to start out by saying that to really "get" Glenn Beck, you have have have to watch his show for yourself over a period of at least a few weeks. (Perhaps this is a rule for immersing yourself in just about anything or anybody.) It simply will not do to rely on the hit-piece style of "quoting" from his show by (probably Soros-supported?) sources. Otherwise, what I say in praise of Beck's show would seem incomprehensible and/or crazy. But his show is some of the most riveting stuff in television; an hour of Beck just flies right on by. You just have to go into it with no preconceptions and get drawn in over time by the core message.

Anyway, to capture this man's genius in a nutshell: on today's show he quotes from a document called the United States Declaration of Independence, thusly:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Then he proceeds to ask: How do you "progress" beyond this principle? "There is no higher principle than this!"

Take that, "progressives" (a.k.a. cowards afraid to identify themselves openly with socialism and/or substance).

America

Some of my favorite essays by Ayn Rand appear in the late 1960s and early 1970s; they represent a part of the Objectivist canon that goes underrecognized and underappreciated, because to fully recognize and appreciate them requires a certain (a) deep structural familiarity with Objectivism down to its unit-economizing psycho-epistemology and characteristically clear communication method, and (b) fundamentally American sense of life, one that the left-liberals squandered away with lousy philosophy. Some of my favorite Rand essays include "Apollo 11" (1969), "The Comprachicos" (1970-71), and "Don't Let It Go" (1972). This last, in particular, is unapologetic in its pro-Americanness. It represents a greater appreciation of America - not as it is, but as it might be and ought to be - than any of the flag-waving right-wingers (who would undermine America at every step, starting with silly and stupid amendments to the constitution to ban flag burning, as if a symbol were more important than the substantive freedom the symbol is supposed to symbolize; but it doesn't stop there: how about their reason-undermining religious tenets, eh?).

The Fountainhead is the Great American Novel. Rand's Letters are generously peppered with reverence and love for the country she emigrated to so that she could be more than nominally free to self-actualize as a novelist-philosopher. It's almost something the left-liberals simply don't get about this country, something they either forgot or never grasped, due to a Pragmatism-inspired education which inculcates Rawls-style mental processes rather than Rand-style mental processes. That alone stunts and stultifies genius and encourages wimpy conformity. What Americans qua Americans long for and hope for is a vision of man's greatness and examples of the ability to achieve it. They've already got that in its highest-paid actors, athletes, and businesspeople. Where they have yet to achieve that is in the area of the intellect, but once structural greatness is instilled at the level of the American intellect, we'll see "we've only just begun."

The left-liberals have nothing new to offer to enhance America's structural greatness; it's just more of the same old government, and bureaucrats, and public employee unions, and taxes, and crossed fingers ("maybe!") that it all doesn't fall apart on them. It's a cult not just of compromise and conformity, but of stagnation. Let's be more like the Euros and . . . stagnate. What kind of inspiring vision is that? It makes you almost want to hop right on over to the Palin camp, it's so stultifying and boring. Obama tells an audience of the converted the other today that "I am my brother's keeper." We've heard that for 2,000 years, and where has it gotten us? We are told that ethics and morality is supposed to be about restraining your own interests in the service of society. Kant, philosophy's Naked Emperor, said that ethics isn't and shouldn't be about achieving your own happiness, but about subordinating yourself to the Moral Law. The modern intellectuals just lap this nonsense right up, but it's not what America is about.

Already an observer of academia is seeing how happiness-based neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics is sweeping aside the fraudulent deontology-utilitarianism alternative, as neither of those manifestly inferior approaches tell us how to self-actualize or why that is the fundamental ethical priority. America's best home-grown intellects advance eudaemonism in ethics because, well, it's the only sound ethical system going. It's no mistake that Aristotle, the Philosopher, advocated a version of eudaemonism. At least Kant got it right that human moral life requires the free exercise of one's mind, but - aside from building that tenet upon an empty formalistic base - it's such an obviously true aspect of ethics that he doesn't get much more credit for identifying that ethical truism than other moderns like Locke, Jefferson, Spencer, Rand, Rothbard and many others deserve as well. Hell, Ayn Rand at age 21 could recognize that fundamental moral truism, in choosing America over Soviet Russia. That's the drawing power that America has to a truly functioning mind. Just let a country's minds be free, and there's pretty much no limit to the greatness that can unfold.

If you truly recognize, understand and appreciate what makes America great despite all its flaws and checkered history, you'll recognize that our best days are ahead of us, that we'll lead the rest of the world instead of follow, that Rand is on the way in and Rawls with his "let's forcibly sacrifice the most productive" ethos is on the way out, that Aristotelianism easily trumps Pragmatism as robustness trumps weakness as Roark trumps Keating, that this Friedmanite-liberaltarian pragmatist-maybe business is an aberration based on non-integration. We're going to see that Jefferson and Rand and Kubrick and Jordan and Stern and Buffett and Google can be the norm rather than the exception.

If we think of human history as analagous to human life-stages, we can identify the point in time that humanity reached its late adolescence, when it declared, via the United States Declaration of Independence, its independence from all forms of authority and tyranny over the mind of man. The rest of the world has had little choice but to follow in America's footsteps on this, or to perish. Humanity's next step is into full adulthood, and America can and will lead once again.

America - Fuck Yeah!

Obama = President Rawls

To follow up my postings yesterday on pragmatism, what we have today is an extremely pragmatistic president in the epistemic mold of Harvard philosopher John Rawls. What does Obama stand for? He doesn't appear to stand for anything other than an undefined, please-everybody reconciliationism. He's like the perfect pragmatistic president.

It's most fitting that both of these Elites define the culture that is the Harvard culture. They're the consensus pick of the fellow elites for the best that America has to offer. According to these elites, Rawls's Harvard colleague Robert Nozick is the best representative of libertarian philosophy anyone has to offer, and it is a left-liberal mythology of these elites that Thomas Jefferson today would side with Rawls over Nozick. Ayn Rand, in this elitist mythology, is a reactionary-capitalist antisocial individualism (she did say that selfishness is a virtue, after all, and it's obvious to anyone what she must have meant by that: antisocial individualism) that defines the "libertarian" side in politics which Nozick, via Kantian intuitions, does a more respectable job of defending and is one of the two big "sides" Rawls incorporates into his Great American Synthesis along with the effective de facto abolition of private property (via trump-claims on individual talents by the community) so as to please the kindly, well-intentioned Marxists.

Here's a blatant falsehood in the elitist mythology: Jefferson today would not side with Rawls. He would side with Rand and Nozick. He would be a radical for capitalism, a libertarian, and he would affirm these things as a matter of common sense. He would not be a "progressive" who defines away capitalistic freedom, by piecemeal concession, into some bizarre and insidiously anti-American caricature of it (as with, e.g., John Rawls). So while Obama the pragmatist represents intellectual stagnation in America, Jefferson represented intellectual radicalism and progress, a President Rand if you will. Jefferson, in his radically libertarian, capitalistic, natural-law political ethos, was more progressive than self-styled "progressives" are!

Oh, my brothers, the Established Elites will scoff at first upon reading this, but what comeuppance they will receive, oh what comeuppance!

One great thing about Jefferson was his contempt for class-minded elites. So just keep that in mind. A President Rand (Jefferson) today would be against a corporatist economic elite in bed with the government, so let's just chalk Rand's "economic elitism" up to ignorant misunderstanding on the part of her opponents. (That's usually how you can chalk up liberal-left characterizations of Ayn Rand. They're really just very ignorant and point-missing. Once the liberals get the same education in Randianism that Leonard Peikoff's students have gotten, they'll be way on board with pretty much the entirety of her philosophical edifice, mark my words. All it takes is mental focus and some conscientious integration, for crying out loud.) So this mythology about Rand as a voice of an angry American "right-wing" bent on being callously selfish assholes to their fellow human beings, is just plain old intellectual incompetence fostered by a pragmatistic spirit of intellectual conformity amongst America's pragmatism-eaten elites.

You know what the problem is with these fucking pragmatist elites? Just take all the evil ideas in the world and the pragmatists' lack of any deep ethical, epistemological and metaphysical commitments, and just hand all the deep commitments to the America-destroying, man-destroying Bad Guys, why don't we. Really, now? Really? Say what you will about the tenets of Totalitarian Islam, at least it's an ethos. At least they've got the deep commitments that the cowardly Established American Elite lack. Dinesh D'Souza is onto something here in his own demented right-wing theocratic-authoritarian way ("let's be more like the Islamofascists; at least they maintain law and order and virtue and tradition")! All we get with pragmatism is intellectual chaos. (Didn't Rand say this throughout her Vietnam-era essays, like, a hundred times? Also, Peikoff's recent DIM Hypothesis work deals with the implications of an intellectually disintegrated worldview in contrast to an integrated worldview with deeper commitments. American liberals have pretty much disarmed themselves intellectually due to their ever-insidious pragmatism - especially when their opponents offer a whole moral and intellectual package-deal along with Americanism. This is true whether the package-dealing is a fundamentalist-Christian one or a rational neo-Aristotelian/Jeffersonian one.) The cashing in: Let's reconcile the opposing views. Let's be more like them, but not too much. Let's be less like them, but not too much. Let's keep mixing politics and religion together in vaguely defined ways because that's how things have been done before and it works well enough. Let's keep trying to mix socialism and liberty and keep genuflecting to John Rawls who has no deep commitments on the really big philosophical issues that matter - and on those issues let's have an unsteady, unseemly, and unsanitary admixture of all three of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.

That works. Right? Maybe.

Say that Obama wins in a landslide in 2012, which is the likely outcome absent a major short-term game-changer. Contra the reactionary Tea Party types, the progressive pragmatistic Rawlsian Elites will feel short-term vindication. ("He improved the economy! Right? Maybe.") Not having the wherewithal or deep enough commitments to view the world in terms of the Big Picture Issues, they do not foresee the long-term triumph of the Randian model over theirs. Ideas do rule human history, as Ayn Rand - given all her deep commitments - recognized and affirmed, and Pragmatism as an idea has had its time and failed.

America vs. Pragmatism

To follow up today's earlier posting, I'd like to provide a brief intellectual narrative of the United States of America.

The United States of America were founded upon an absolutism and radicalism expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Its chief author, Thomas Jefferson, was an uncompromising advocate of reason as against unreason - including opposition to the use of physical force as a reason-negating activity, as a matter of principle. His moral groundings were in Lockean natural law (with some Jesus-inspired other-oriented benevolence thrown in to complement the rights- and self-preservation angles covered in natural-law theory). The Founders, Jefferson included, grounded their statements on things like "self-evidence" and "the Creator" and some abstract "Divine Providence." The religious overtones of it notwithstanding, the radically libertarian idea - then as well as now - was one of religious toleration and freedom, hence the broadly abstract and not-specifically-defined statements concerning "Divine Providence."

The early decades of the United States of America were defined by the height of Enlightenment-era philosophy, and Thomas Jefferson (not Germany's Immanuel Kant) best represents those heights. There's not just the reverence for natural law, or the uncompromising commitment to reason intermixed with a people-respecting religious tolerance, or the recognition of the secular value of Jesus's teachings in isolation from the magical-mystical bullshit of his non-philosophical adherents, but also the commitment to a very central American value: common sense. In addition to being President of the United States of America, he was, at the same time, president of the American Philosophical Society. If you read through some of his letters concerning philosophy, he shows he is well-versed in the ancient Greek philosophers, notably and positively Epicurus. His statement that Epicurus represents the height of secular and Greek philosophy is incomprehensible except in light of the evident fact that he wasn't aware of Aristotle. Can you just fucking imagine how robust America would be had Thomas Jefferson known about Aristotle? Would Ayn Rand's philosophical writings have even been necessary to restore America to its intellectual origins? Ayn Rand was correct on one point: Aristotle, via Aquinas, via John Locke, was the intellectual father of America, without the Founders even knowing it. Nevertheless, Jefferson represents one heck of a standard for America to follow; the basic sensibility is all the same as with Aristotle.

Aristotle, Jefferson, Rand - they all represent an approach to philosophizing that is empirical and yet absolutist, reality-oriented without being authoritarian, judgmental and pro-virtue and non-libertine while remaining libertarian, eudaemonistic and perfectionistic with emphasis on personal well-being and happiness (incorporating other-related virtues - most importantly, justice) as the aim of life, unapologetically capitalistic, and marked at all times by a respect for common sense. It's as American as it gets.

So, how did pragmatism come about and begin to consume the American ethos from within? For the first 100 or so years of America, there was a classically Jeffersonian ethos that ruled. It's ultimately what led to the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves. Being very practical and productive, the American people had little time or patience for the wankers who often pass for philosophers. The main focus of life in the American mindset is to live this life well, and philosophy is only of value, cash-value if you will, if it is of aid in advancing the life well lived. Until the pragmatist movement came along in the late 19th century, after the Civil War, American intellectual life was radically individualistic, optimistic, and perfectionistic. The abolition of slavery, for instance, was a moral necessity to America's leading intellectual lights. Any visions of future utopias - be they Josiah Warren's hippie-communes or Spoonerite-Tuckerian private-property arrangements - were all based on a vision of voluntary participation rather than state-enforced regimentation. Those utopian-perfectionist voluntaristic visions remain as true now as they did then; only the American intellectual context has changed since that time.

The Pragmatist movement was borne of a concern about relating ideals to practice. One thing that has to be emphasized here is that when the Pragmatist movement was at its height - ca. 1900 - Aristotle had only begun being translated for an English-speaking audience. So it was really just a matter of timing and place, essential factors in analyzing the history of ideas. If Epicureanism (or whatever the top English-speaking philosophers like Hume, Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill had to say) was the best philosophy known to Americans at the time, something better had to be erected in order to deal with the emerging problems and challenges that Epicurean or British philosophy just can't deal with. You need intellectuals who aren't wankers who can usefully guide us through these challenges.

Pragmatism is not defined by specific commitments but by a certain way of dealing with challenges, and the method here is rather minimalistic: piecemeal adjustment with empirical weighing of hopefully-well-defined and well-measured costs and benefits (short-term as well as long-term, with priority given to the short term, ceteris paribus, given Keynes's dictum about the long term).

Compare America's intellectual state ca. 1930 vs. that of the European states. By 1930, Europe had been bombarded with bad philosophy for centuries, was under the spell of Kant's disastrous "Copernican" subjectivism, under the spell of unsurprisingly mystical interpretations of Hegel's Absolute and historical necessity, or under the spell of Schopenhauerian metaphysics of Will, or Nietzschean subjectivism, or under the spell of non-Aristotelian, Humean-Millian empiricism, or under the spell of Marxian socialism, or under spell of Millian progressive-socialism, and the spell of Hegel-inspired Nationalism. With that kind of intellectual bombardment, it's no surprise that Germany embraced National Socialism, that Britain was not far behind in the push for socialism, that France was filled with ennui and existential angst about it all, that the Soviet experiment (with millions of people's lives, against their will, it must be pointed out) was being embraced and/or taken seriously as an alternative model of organization of "the resources." It wasn't a matter of Ludwig von Mises having or not having compelling arguments against socialism; it was a matter of a condition of intellectual dysfunction/insanity whereby the vast majority of his contemporaries were heavily invested in the nationalist-socialist mentality. The history of ideas is such that the kind of intellectual revolution Mises initiated requires time to unfold; had Mises been writing around at the time of Marx's heyday, things would very likely have been quite different. (It's also worth mentioning that by ca. 1900, the intellectual center of Europe had migrated from Germany to Austria, given the failings of German philosophy and the relative promise offered by the Vienna intellectuals.)

In America ca. 1930, the intellectual context was one of Jeffersonian individualism combined with home-grown Pragmatism. The Pragmatic mindset was that our Constitution didn't embody such abstract ideals as those set forth in Herbert Spencer's radically libertarian Social Statics. That famous pronouncement by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was taken as received wisdom rather than as an easily-challenged - and false - understanding of constitutional jurisprudence. Wouldn't it just be mind-blowing if the Fourteenth Amendment did indeed enact Mr. Spencer's Social Statics? The very mind-blowingness of such a notion is enough to send any good Pragmatist running in fear. It's un-pragmatic to blow people's minds, now, so let's play it safe. . . . Do you begin to see the insidious unintended effects of a pragmatist mindset? Could the American Revolution, or the slave-freeing Civil War, have happened on a pragmatist base?

One bad but understandable interpretation of American-grown pragmatism is that it saved the United States of America from pursuing the same path that the Marx-infused European nations pursued. Going full-out socialist would have been unpragmatic, as it represented too drastic, too idealistic and too radical a shift from . . . from whatever American ideals at the time were. As a pragmatism-infused mindset is not defined so much by specific commitments but rather a means of dealing with conflicts amongst commitments, the radically individualistic and Jeffersonian ideals America was built on were incidental to the pragmatist analysis. The main objectionable thing to a swift departure from these ideals is not that it is a departure, but that it's swift and - get this - overly idealistic. And, we have discovered (via empiricistic observation - so there's always a pervasive uncertainty and "maybe" about it all) that capitalism "works" well enough to satisfy competing mainstream (the mainstream being defined - how?) ideological demands.

We can see an influential home-grown theory of justice - John Rawls's A Theory of Justice - as an exercise in American-style pragmatism. We have two competing ideals - libertarianism and egalitarianism - that need to be reconciled via a please-everybody Synthesis. Only - as with pretty much anything pragmatistic - it satisfies no one except for the compulsively pragmatistic (like many academic philosophers). What we don't get in Rawls is anything "mind-blowing" or "too radical." What we do get is a kindly and well-intentioned (the road to hell, etc.) attempt to fuse (evil) egalitarianism with (good) libertarianism. The reason that Rawls's theory even gives so much weight to liberty is because of its being American. Leaving everything in the hands of the Euro intellectuals, what would we get? Given the European context, the best we get in reaction to socialistic egalitarianism is Mises and Hayek, and neither of them offered their pro-capitalistic visions as moral visions. What we get with them is a classical liberalism little distinguished from that of Hume and Mill. With Hume we get chronic uncertainty; with Mill we get a consequentialist defense of liberty based on its social benefits. And in a pragmatistic mindset, these get thrown into the mix as ideas that need to be reconciled with the others. Hey, I'm as ecumenical in my sensibilities as they come, but it's more like Aristotle's ecumenism: recognizing what's right in a view will tossing out the weak stuff. Pragmatism doesn't acknowledge the strong and the weak in this sense; rather, there is a Primacy of Reconciliation that has ideas and conflicts amongst them, rather than an absolute and independent reality, as the primary focus and orientation. (How on earth can Rawls's theory of justice have truly lasting impact when it steadfastly abstains from deep ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical commitments? Are Rawls's genuflecting-wankers this intellectually puny? The notion is mind-blowing, I know. That's why the Prevailing Academic Model of Doing Philosophy is going to fall on its face. Mind-blowing, I know....)

Here's what Ayn Rand said in the most succinct and biting terms about pragmatism as the intellectual malady that it is: "Someone wants to bash your skull in, reach a livable compromise: Tell him to break one leg." (Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A, p. 7)

After some 50 years of pragmatism making its way through American culture, America was broken intellectually in the mid-20th century. Broken, dysfunctional, directionless, proudly anti-philosophical (philosophy having been dispensed with as an impractical failure). Ayn Rand was proclaiming this fact like it should have been as obvious to everyone in her day as it was to her. But just keep in mind: in a pragmatist mindset, someone making the sweeping and absolutist and idealistic (and unacceptably mind-blowing) proclamations that Ayn Rand made is not to be trusted. Rand simply was far ahead ("out of place") of her time, thrown into a world of anti-philosophical intellectual disintegration. But taking a long-run view of these things, all that Rand was doing was initiating an intellectual revolution, in the midst of a sea of pragmatism, to get America back to its roots. In short, the pragmatist movement was a diversion from America's (and the world's) true course, an intellectual stumbling block borne of a lack of Aristotle. Aristotle alone whacks Pragmatism upside the head; Rand puts Pragmatism to shame; historical experience will be the ultimate proof of its anti-practical failings.

Now, here's what's gonna happen. (Only someone perceptive enough to run a blog like this one knows how these blog postings are "for the ages," and there is a special satisfaction of knowing how subsequent generations will look back and say, "Yes, indeed, those ideas were mind-blowing for the time, but he turned out to be right, of course.") The big one-two punch that, on its own, would, in time, restore America to its founding ideals, is the introduction to America of Aristotle's English-translated works, and Ayn Rand's Objectivism. One amazing thing about Rand's early philosophy - summed up in her most perfect novel, The Fountainhead - is how much of it is simply Americanism, discovered and discoverable quite independently of Aristotle. (This is just how commonsensical Jeffersonian-American ideals really are; they aren't beyond the reach of the "man on the street," even; all we need is the right kind of intellectual leadership, like we had in Jefferson's day, and not wankers who eschew common sense.) The best evidence indicates that Rand did not start into a hardcore study of Aristotle and the history of philosophy until the early- to mid-1940s. Random Houses's Basic Works of Aristotle, a compiled volume of translations edited by Richard McKeon, was first published in 1941. Rand mentions in a 1940s letter having bought a copy of "the complete works" of Aristotle, presumably referring to this volume. Anyway, the basic point here is that Aristotle was just being introduced to America in the early 1900s, and Ayn Rand was independently developing American-common-sensical ideas in a radical, integrated, and systematic way after taking from Nietzsche what needed to be taken and integrated into a rational individualism (namely, a heroic sense of man's greatness and potential). With founding ideals represented by Jefferson, and bold echoes of those very ideals in the world-historic philosophers Aristotle and Ayn Rand, what will happen "as if by necessity" is a second Renaissance centered right here in America. America's potential hasn't even come close to being fulfilled.

The problem with Pragmatism? It simply couldn't offer a moral vision like this, and therefore simply can't work to bring about the desired result (widespread human flourishing-perfection).

The problem with "maybe"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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