The American left today is dialectically estranged from the American mainstream and America's founding principles, although it still has the run of the education (sic) system (while missing the best tree to bark up, the philosophy one). Almost surely the very best minds among the public-intellectuals have gravitated over time to the Right (while the very best minds among the academic, non-public-intellectual population contains a mixture of increasingly-libertarian Rawls-ish liberals and the libertarians, with Tomasi representating a state-of-the-art attempt at synthesis of the two). [*]
So what sustains any impression among reasonable, decent people that the left has quality ideas and intellectual and moral credibility any longer? Some ideas:
(1) See above about the left's control of the bulk of the education (sic) institutions, a great many of them funded in whole or part by taxpayers. (Before one rationalizes like a leftist that this points to the intellectual superiority of leftism/leftists, see Nozick for a alternative explanation.) Lots of narrative-shaping going on there for many a captive audience, many of whom go out into the real world afterward rather than pursue (e.g.) state-of-the-art debates between Rawlsians and libertarians, so they don't have all that good an idea of how Rawlsians might not have any clear upper-hand despite left-wing dominance of the academy.
(2) The left is riding past successes in the areas of civil rights and LGBT+ equality. Even until very recently the American cultural Right has been hostile to progress in the latter idea, much to its motherfucking shame. The Blue States (not synonymous with the left, but a close approximation) have been making progress in the area of cannabis legalization, while outlets such as the otherwise-respectable Wall Street Journal continue to this very day to peddle bullshitted-up numbers and narratives supposedly showing how destructive cannabis and its legalization are. (The fucking least they could do is acknowledge the testimony of cannabis-users like Carl Sagan, which they don't.) What's not at all clear to me is that the Blue States are legalizing weed on the grounds of individual freedom as distinct from equitable treatment of minorities (who suffer disproportionately from the failed big-government War on Drugs) or the Blue States' greed for always-more tax revenues. And even there, the state of CA has been shitting the bed in its efforts to reconcile its big-government ethos with a free-market one.
But weed legalization is a present-day trend with the merits still to be assessed over time by the American mainstream. I don't fault the WSJ and other conservatives for having suspicions about its wisdom/merits when it's the Blue States (by and large - see Alaska for an exception) spearheading the effort.
Back to LGBT+ equality: The Civil Rights movement was over half a century ago now; the LGBT+ equality movement has been a recent thing where we can get a better sense of where the left has gone in more recent times. The usually faulty and often downright awful arguments by the cultural Right (such as illogically linking acceptance of homosexuality to the questionable aspects of the Sexual Revolution generally and their implications for (namely) widespread abandonment of the nuclear family) would lend credence to the impression that the left has the upper hand intellectually. (Note that on this and other issues the libertarians, who by default tend to end up on the "Right" side of the spectrum - especially nowadays - haven't usually been in the business of offering shitty arguments on this, cannabis, or other issues.)
(Note also that leading proponents of marriage equality include conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and Ted Olson. What would really be nice is a well-publicized debate between Olson and Princeton's Robert George, but national intellectual bankruptcy seems to preclude interest in and calls for such. No reasonable person respects the nincompoopery of the slippery-slope arguments from politicians like Santorum, after all.)
So far I've been pointing to what are broadly termed "cultural" and "personal freedoms" issues, not economic issues. This ties into the next point:
(3) The placement of figures like Rawls and Keynes somewhere near the center-left of American opinion lends credence to the notion that there are still quality ideas on "the left" generally speaking, in the smeary ways many people often think of these things (my differentiation here is one of a continuum starting with the likes of Rawls on one end and the total commies on the other, with egalitarian commitments of varying strengths uniting them under the "left" umbrella). But as with the lively Rawlsians vs. libertarians debates, there is a lively dialectic between Keynesians and more staunchly free-market positions (e.g., Hayek and Friedman, with Mises still regarded as more out on the "fringes" of free-market thought despite all his vastly learned/sage insights - a situation similar to that of Rand). With the likes of Keynes and Rawls pushing sophisticated arguments for government interventions or a large public sector generally, further-left folks like Elizabeth Warren and Obama (who's definitely well to the left ideologically despite his more pragmatic-realpolitik presidency) feel more of a license to take this further with notions about the overwhelming role of state-provided infrastructure in individual success (for which see Krauthammer's rebuttal).
Points (1-3) may not individually explain how the left maintains such a degree of (real or perceived) cultural and political respectability today, but together they may explain quite a lot. There may be other factors I can't think of right off. The values-priorities that Haidt's research points to may also explain quite a lot. Values are fundamental and prior to debates about whether this or that economic/fiscal policy is desirable; people's policy preferences are basically shaped by the values over and above whether they achieve some outcome (about which there are plenty of social-science disagreements, besides - measurement issues, replicability issues, causal understandings, etc.). This would help explain why conservatives tend to oppose efforts at drug legalization irrespective of the awful outcomes: "do we want to send the wrong message (to young people)?" (What if they applied this reasoning consistently across all policy issues? Don't lefties say that tax cuts for the wealthy "send the message" that a fifth mansion for the wealthy is preferable to ringworm medication for the destitute, whatever the actual marginal propensity to consume at the high end?) Much of political discourse comes down to signaling of virtues considered high-priority by one's favored group/party.
(There also, perceptions of value-priorities also come into play. Lots of folks - left and right - seem to get a bunch of mileage out of caricaturing libertarians as being focused on only one moral value - individual liberty - and Haidt's categorizing of libertarians in these terms plays right into this perception. Of course, libertarians are very minimalistic about the role of the state which severely constrains what they think political institutions ought to be doing to putatively achieve moral aims. I don't think you'd have much difficulty getting a shit-ton of libertarians - if there even are that many - to sign on explicitly to the principle of subsidiarity which nearly everyone ought to know more about. Anyway, caricaturing libertarians as being only freedom-focused just because their political priorities are so narrowly freedom-focused looks like a way for many non-libertarians to lazily avoid confronting the core libertarian 'self-ownership' thesis or discovering more about virtue-based libertarian thought, e.g., the Dougs or LeBar.)
Guess I might go smoke a bowl and see what else comes to mind?
[*] - Further differentiation: those I'll call the 'self-ownership' or hardcore rights-based libertarians on the one hand - Rand, Hospers and Nozick being leading examples - and the more consequences-oriented ones (Mises, Hayek, Friedman) on the other. Tomasi seeks a synthesis between these two strains of libertarian thought as well as the broader synthesis. Broadly speaking I like the idea of synthesis or dialectic, although my context (ahem) here is much more Sciabarra than Tomasi and hence probably more 'radical' in its libertarian sensibilities (within an 'Aristotelian/Randian-intellectualist' epistemological-ethical totality).
Showing posts with label leftism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label leftism. Show all posts
Thursday, January 9, 2020
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Just how big of a loser is the Left/leftism, exactly?
Since the example of Ayn Rand is way to triggering for these intellectual lowlifes, how about we present a more, uh, conservative (as in very likely understated) case of unexceeded libertarian intellectual excellence in making the scholarly and technically-refined case for right-libertarian (i.e., capitalist) political theory/philosophy: Chris Matthew Sciabarra's Total Freedom: Towards a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000). Sciabarra has since gone on to be lead editor for the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (1999-present) while his academic background is such that he was a student of a leading Marx scholar of his day, Bertell Ollman, author of such works as Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971). It is also of such an astonishing research orientation that his Total Freedom ends up with 48 pages (or some 1300-ish) references, including all the major philosophers and works of philosophy throughout history along with pretty much anything dialectics-oriented (a tradition stemming from Aristotle, by reputation probably the greatest philosopher of all time, and continuing most especially through Hegel and Marx (in transumated form, i.e., dialectical materialism), and then on through to - Sciabarra argues quite convincingly - the 'dialectical libertarian ascendancy' of Mises, Hayek, and Rand. And judging by his Rand-related work (not the least of which would be his also-thoroughly-researched [which by necessity includes all the Peikoff courses up through its preparation/publication period] Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995)).
Sciabarra refers to dialectics as "the art of context-keeping," a notion (context-keeping, that is) quite familiar to the Serious Students of Objectivism, i.e., those with longtime exposure to the Peikoff courses. In briefest essence, context-keeping is orienting one's mind toward being able habitually to clearly establish interconnections among all of one's cognitive contents, being sure not to leave out parts or aspects of the truth that usually come crucially to bear on the treatment of any one aspect or part. And how does a perfectionistic research orientation reflected by 48 pages of references not demonstrate in practice a dialectical sensibility precisely as Sciabarra defines it? Wanna do dialectics excellently? Take a hint from the size and scope of the bibliography ffs. (Do leftists keep context nearly so well, or are they typically partial, fragmentary and one-sided on how they approach ideas, particularly political ones? Do they demonstrate a curiosity and interest in getting or telling the full story? If Rand demonstrates quite convincingly that that owners of mind/intellect are compensated accordingly and therefore justly in a free, capitalist economy, do leftists care about understanding her point to the satisfaction of all concerned and responding accordingly? Even better yet, how about being willing to bend over backwards to understand their opponents' views to everyone's satisfaction before uttering so much as a word of critique? Could we ever reasonably expect such interpretive charity coming from leftists, given what we can know and prove about them?)
(Having heard pretty much all of Peikoff's courses save for all but the first hour of his Grammar course, and having heard a number of them at least twice - and this includes Understanding Objectivism, the OPAR seminars, The Art of Thinking, and (duh) Objectivism Through Induction, I consider myself among these Serious Students although I don't necessarily identify as an Objectivist; I prefer the term 'Perfectivist' for some odd reason.)
Anyway, Sciabarra's Total Freedom is his exhaustively-researched answer to any variant of leftism that claims the mantle of dialectics. Private property is a sine qua non of libertarian individualism, there are just really no ways around that given the tie between intellectual production (an irreducibly individual activity - see, e.g., the inability of leftists/leftism to produce any other intellectual with the same powers of leftist agitation as Marx himself, in all these 150+ years ffs) and the exclusive control over material resources (including fundamentally one's body and mind/brain, BTW) traditionally characteristic of private property norms. Anyway, Sciabarra's covered all his bases, consulted all the essential scholarly sources, drove the point home with a critique of a less-than-satisfactorily-dialectical version of libertarianism advocated by one Murray Rothbard.
So, has there been a leftist rebuttal to Sciabarra's work in all this time, these past two decades and counting? Well, being also a perfectionist-research-orientation type, I know where to look first for promising leads in that direction, because of what I know about his pattern of past responses to criticisms and where he would post them. So here you go:
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/totalfrdm/tfrevues.htm
First off, I don't see anything that would suggest a leftist critique of Sciabarra's dialectics-based argument.
And why would there be, really? Leftism is wrong, false to the facts. The human world is simply not suited to the left's egalitarian or quasi-egalitarian agenda; they have no remotely credible program for repealing the bell curve. They have no remotely credible argument for how capitalism is a fundamentally unfair system that impoverishes most those who create the most value-added. The argumentative techniques they have in favor of this latter view come off almost invariably as ignorant, dishonest, or downright stupid. Socialism in its original sense that all the leftists were agitating and apologizing for - collective ownership and/or control of "the means of production" (including in practice, as Rand points out, the most important means of production ignored by uniformly shitheaded socialists: the irreducibly individual self-moving human intellect) has proved time and time again to be a monumental failure if not humanitarian catastrophe. Rather than provide a remotely credible explanation for all this failure and catastrophe, or a remotely credible answer to Mises, Hayek, Rand, Nozick, Sciabarra, Hospers, Mack, Den Uyl and Rasmussen, and on and on go the names of the not-remotely-credibly-answered political philosophers, they continue to agitate, AOC-like if not Chomsky-like, for collective appropriation of individual intelligence. (Chomsky says in a video titled 'Manufacturing Consent' that things won't improve for ordinary folks unless there is an end put to "private control of the resources." "The resources" presumably including the human intellect? Chomsky is quite the intellect in many ways - even in ways praised explicitly by Rand in how he handled Skinner behaviorism - but on the matter of capitalism vs. socialism he seems like an absolute shithead.)
So, to boil it down: Sciabarra presented, two decades ago, a monumental work of scholarship fundamentally challenging the leftist claim to either dialectics or to libertarianism. If there had been even one rebuttal by the left to Sciabarra's thesis, I probably would have heard about it way back when. (I'm included among perhaps well over a hundred others in its Acknowledgments section, for one thing....) Roderick Long does have a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies review of Total Freedom, and he identifies as a left-libertarian of sorts, but he's also into Mises and praxeology and the Austrian School . . . and Rand . . . and Aristotelian philosophy most importantly, and since when were leftist losers big on whatever the Aristotelian tradition might have to offer to current understanding? Zizek does Marx and Hegel but what about Aristotle? Zizek has an article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies but it's not of much distinction and it sounds a lot like he's doing what he's reputed widely for: being provocative, i.e., a sort of philosophical troll. And does he have any good answer to Sciabarra/Total Freedom?
I can't think of any good answer; I don't have any high expectations that a near-future delving into of the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx is going to give me satisfactory or impressive answers in this regard. (Maybe it really is just some strange accident of history that Marxism attracted psychopathic cults time and time again, pretty much all rooted on the premise that "the capital-owning class" exploited "the working class." Take that, Hank Rearden/Galt/Rand?) Sciabarra's already aware of Ollmann's work and he's not a convert to Marxism/leftism, etc.
Now, just how is it that in all these two decades, apparently no prominent leftist critique of Sciabarra's work has emerged? Just how big of a loser does this make the Left/leftism, exactly? Because it seems to me that this lack of rebuttal is a devastating indictment of what I strongly suspect if not know if not know for a 100% certainty to be a fundamentally dishonest intellectual culture of leftism?
If that isn't a devastating indictment, then what is? There's simply no valid excuse for it, whatsoever.
And anyone who has the curiosity to seek out the evidence knows that this is just the apex of a mountain of it, when it comes to leftism. Leftism is fundamentally a corruption of the human soul/psyche and intellect; its persistence has to be more a psychological and sociological phenomenon than an intellectual one. The persistent absence of references to Aristotle or Aristotelian ideas speaks volumes in itself given the left's pretentions to intellectual and moral superiority. Nor do I find it surprising, given the history of human belief and ideological movements, that something so perfectly discreditable and cult-like as leftist/egalitarian/anti-capitalist thought could continue on so long after the argument had been settled on its merits.
(If you're still a leftist after roughly 1974, how serious an intellectual can you possibly be? From what I've been able to glean metadata-wise, Nozick's most prominent leftist critic, the Marxist G.A. Cohen, postulates that society could be run essentially along the lines of a camping trip. (Or why not a family?) Also, I did read through, way back when, his full-book-length critique of Nozick, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. If I could boil down what I think was the essential argument there, it's that from self-ownership alone you couldn't derive any specific regime of property rights.
[Edit: here, I'm checking it now, but you also can check out some 'metadata' on the book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394221.Self_Ownership_Freedom_and_Equality [Adjacent tabs now include: https://sites.google.com/site/professorericmack/home/selected-papers which contains a paper with 'marxism' in the title responding to Cohen; and http://politybooks.com/mack-online-chapter/ as well as a paper copy of Mack's Libertarianism book at hand; don't worry, I'm well ahead of y'all in metadata level things like where to look first and what related materials, etc. Also looking very forward to Mack's latest commentary on the Dougs' rights theory in that online chapter, sounds very tasty! Haven't had that much excitement since their 1993 Reason Papers exchange on, well, basically, teleology and deontology in rights theory if I can boil it down that way. I think I resolve the basic differences there in my 2006 JARS essay on egoism-and-rights, and just to be clear, Aristotelianism is foundational to the normative project, and it's the 'Kantian' elements found in the concept of rights that are built on the Aristotelian foundation given the prime-mover role of the intellect/reason in a eudaimonic/flourishing human life; Kantian normative theory is built on the formal requirements of a reasoning being's practical(/praxis/action) imperatives, but what's the ultimate point, the ultimate telos of practical imperatives? And what about the constitutive role of virtue/rationality in the best/happiest kind of human life? Anyway, Kant's categorical imperative(s) are monumental insights into the formal character of a reasoning being's practical imperatives, which in terms of the moral imperatives we call categorical, overriding and all-things-considered imperatives include things like: make your maxims applicable to all reasoning beings in all similar circumstances; respect yourself and your fellow human as an end-in-itself, not to be treated merely as a means or instrument to the ends of another (consequent to which the libertarian self-ownership principle: other men's lives are not yours to dispose of). And something or other about a Kingdom of Ends based on a universal implementation of Kantian-style moral reasoning, which sounds like one of those preconditions for an 'end of history' type of dealio there. Also, to make a long story very short, I believe this, and it's a big lesson that a lot of non-Aristotelian libertarians can really learn from as well: the reasons that we have for promoting a certain kind of reason-based or intellectualist or Aristotelian vision of the good life, are the same reasons we have for affirming a concept of rights based on the universalization of the free exercise of human reason and all that is consequent to that (including the capitalistic right to private property, a connection which Rand nailed as well as anyone).] ]
So as for Cohen's 'self'- vs. 'world'-ownership dichotomy: So much for Rand's point about the human mind/intellect and the bell-curve realities involved there? (And so much for the essential history of capitalism which is a marked material betterment of all folks on the bell curve, in an historically very short period of time, which Rand correctly attributes to individuals' reason being set as free as never before in the realm of material production?) Anyway, Hayek was a young socialist as of roughly 1922, until Mises' Socialism came out and changed his mind. What's the excuse for why so few non-Hayek folks did the honest thing? Socialism settled the argument on its merits in 1922, and Mises/Hayek were proved fundamentally right about socialism's inability to solve key problems of economic production, while Rand discredited socialist ethics right to its rotten little envious core as early as 1936 with her debut, We The Living. All the left ever managed against Mises were some 1930s articles by Lange and a couple others limited to the "calculation" issue (whereas Mises took on all aspects of socialist thought up to and including its tendencies toward cultural destructions), whereas Hayek rebutted Lange in subsequent articles anthologized in Individualism and Economic Order (1948). The collapse of socialist-proper economies vindicated Mises and Hayek. Hayek went on to supplement his economic work with work in politics, philosophy, and psychology. I'm unaware of much in the way of serious and honest leftist rebuttals to Hayek; the closest thing I know of to a Rawlsian response to Hayek is Tomasi's Free Market Fairness (2013), which is essentially positive and duly credits Hayek's insights. I mean, shouldn't Tomasi's book basically settle whether leftism has any shred of credibility remaining? Meanwhile, all the left has ever managed against Rand is a bunch of outrageous, context-eliding, dishonest-on-their-face smears. If this doesn't speak very poorly about the quality of leftist minds, then what does? [Rand not being around herself to ask this question, I guess it's on me to ask it on her behalf, and it's a great fucking question, is it not.])
So the left is really fucking pathetic, but just how really fucking pathetic, exactly?
[In the queue: Something positive and not altogether polemical, I swear! Wherein, I deal with the question, What would a society of people adopting Rand's philosophy for living (hint: the basic/fundamental virtue is rationality) look like? Spelled out in furthest nonfiction detail, we get her best student Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (based on the Rand-authorized course, etc.), and in particular the chapters on "Objectivity" (the basic habits/practices of mind of a well-ordered intellectual life) and "Virtue" (the section on Honesty being particularly memorable and effective). Peikoff's OPAR seminar lectures (as well as the parallel lectures in the authorized '76 course) on these topics are at the ARI Campus site for free, etc. etc., links needing to be supplied yet again?]
[Addendum: It's not just these intellectual figures the left has behaved dishonorably towards; just look at how the left recklessly smears Trump as a racist on the flimsiest of pretexts - pretty much every fucking time; maybe there was an exception or two where Trump really shouldn't have been so politically incorrect whatever valid point he was trying to make and the left ignored - and how the entirety of the American left seems just fine with how Brett Kavanaugh was recklessely smeared as a sex pervert based on stories that never got close to passing an honest sniff test, and how it's all fair game because of his "privileged white male" existence, or whatever the dishonest, scraping-bottom rationalization for the typically leftist affront to common sense (to be sneered at as 'bourgeois ethics') epitomized by the Kavanaugh episode. Nancy Peloser says Trump's border wall is about "making America white again" and not a leftist says a peep in protest or objection. (Not even a strategically wise remark to the effect of, "Keep it up, Nancy, and it'll cost us another presidential election"? Are leftists this fucking pathetic and depleted of the best minds, even at the lightweight level of activism strategy/tactics?) If that isn't disreputably scummy on her and their parts, then what is?]
[Addendum #2: Ollman - again, Sciabarra's mentor and author of the book on Marx's conception of alienation - had this blurb about Russian Radical: "Ayn Rand, a radical? A comrade of Marx, methodologically speaking? Libertarians and Marxists BEWARE, because Sciabarra makes a solid case for his astounding claim. An eye-opening work, and a pleasure to read!" This about a work nearly a quarter century old now, and did the leftists ever take Ollman up on his provocative claims? I'm talking the Academic Left, here. Did it lift a finger in the direction of intellectual curiosity when a leading scholar of Marx raised the equivalent of a red flag (ahem?) requiring some pretty urgent attention? I mean, like, how is it possible that one could apply methodological tools that have deep parallels to Marx's, and end up with a libertarian-capitalist politics? As a(n aspiring) metaphilosopher with something of an obsessive interest in methodology myself, this strikes me as pretty rock-bottom fundamental stuff with huge implications over time and place for a whole lotta people. I mean, look at the 20th century implications of Marxian theory, in action, and think carefully and thoroughly about what important lessons this tells us about applying methodology correctly? It's clear - or is it? - that despite their own professed commitments to full context-keeping, Marx and Rand ended up going about it differently. Rand has no commitments to historical materialism (materialist conception of history, histomat, diamat, etc.). She claims methodological precedents in (and her only acknowledged philosophical debt to) Aristotle, and as anyone who's looked carefully and honestly into her system of ideas (which necessarily includes anything closely related to that Rand-authorized/endorsed 1976 course and its presenter) can see how Rand presents a plausible vision for how neo-Aristotelian sensibilities might be applied today to some pretty fundamental-level issues (such as the nature of virtue, or philosophic method itself, or why ever have any institutions that employ physical force), and one thing I don't see coming out of such a program or anything like it is what came from Marxism, e.g., the Gulag Archipelago, the Great Chinese Famine, ongoing Chinese illiberalism/repression (the actual fascism-like concrete we can look to today, pace that goddamned knuckleheaded nitwit AOC and her vocal fry...), the ever-cult-like Academic Left, and other very anti-human-telos failures of the past century. I'll get all the data and metadata I need for full diagnostics on this pitiful excuse for an effort at creating what that Comprachico--ized numbskull AOC & ilk refer to as an advanced society, once I go through the Oxford Handbook of Marx. On the fail scale, Stalinism is as good a candidate for a 10/10 rating as any, but it's like these 'demo-rat socialist' leftist losers are trying their best to push a 7 or 8, something more Atlas Shrugged-like if their latest ideologically inbred lurching is any indication. As the too-brainwashed-to-know-she's-a-walking-caricature AOC declared, someone's right to housing supersedes your privilege of earning a profit. The Blue State model currently being played out in NY, CA, CT, MA, IL, and other more advanced societies appears not to be yet far left enough for AOC and the Academic Left. There's still too much capitalism, too much gentrification, too much of economic laws dictating what bourgeois neoliberals consider practical and feasible. Sounds like they need some reeducation/immunization from neoliberal ideology? Double down on the leftist Cold War line of the 20th century, in other words? But I do wish those bourgeois neoliberals in San Francisco, NYC, and LA the best of luck in their effort to keep things fiscally sustainable (the primary key is to avoid an Atlas-style brain drain...), not be overtaken by an ever-insistent far left, and maintaining their own smug satisfaction that they've so much as adequately rebutted Rand, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Nozick, Krauthammer, Limbaugh, Buckley, et al. I mean, I don't expect any adequate rebuttal to any of these thinkers from an AOC or Peloser, but someone, anyone among the center-left neoliberal bourgeoise? I was hoping Rawls might do a 50-page rebuttal to Nozick like Nozick did with Rawls, but no such luck there, so where do I look next, pray tell? Someone rebutting Mack (rebutting Cohen rebutting Nozick)? I guess not. Anyone rebutting Hospers' libertarianism formulation ("other men's lives not yours to dispose of")? I already know about no rebuttals to Sciabarra (and it's not like he doesn't debate his points exhaustively with his critics and seems to get in the last word, much like the neo-Aristotelian Dougs Den Uyl and Rasmussen, who also aren't being rebutted, although as I've pointed out before in this blog under the "dialectic" tag, the Sciabarra and Dougs arguments seem to come to the basic essential idea, a perfectionist/dialectical social ethos combined with a nonperfectionist/libertarian politics, so it wouldn't be any surprise if neither of these arguments met with serious rebuttals, right?...). Krauthammer, widely reputed in D.C. for having been the leading intellectual figure among its regular commentators, was a Democrat until the mid-1980s, by which point it had become clear to the finest observant minds that a Reagan-like agenda was superior to a typical Demo-rat-like one. What did the Demo-rats do since the 1980s that would have led Krauthammer to reverse his judgment on this? Jack shit, that's what. And on and on it goes. As I've indicated, I don't think Cohen's rebuttal to Nozick amounts to anything, although I do have to grant credit to one James P. Sterba for his taking on libertarians for their full-on rejection of welfare-rights claims. So there's Sterba, noteworthy for standing out for taking on libertarians more effectively than just about anyone (although my metadata about Beyleveld's Gewirthian treatise The Dialectical Necessity of Morality (1992) tells me that he does an admirable job there as well...). So Sterba and Beyleveld/Gewirth among the center-left bourgeois neoliberals, and no far-left criticisms of right-libertarian politics worth serious consideration IMHO. And this is even without taking into consideration the neglect (by center-left liberals, leftists, and many libertarians) of conservative thought. (I know, there are just so few of them in academia, it can be hard for the leftists, center-left, and libertarians while going after one another to remember about the conservatives. That's kinda fucking sad, actually. I mean, surely there's a really good treatise-length refutation of conservatism out there, somewhere? Monograph-length? Also, is there any good refutation of Rand by conservatives anywhere? John W. Robbins just doesn't cut it, now, does he. Sciabarra's grasp of Rand is way better, also the Dougs'. And since leftists are so shitty at refuting Rand, and the center-left so-called liberals don't seem to know really what to do except fall back on Rawls, or something, and non-Randian libertarians spend so much of their time barking up less than optimal trees, one is left to ask where any good refutation of Rand might ever come from. I mean, Nozick, Huemer, Mack (his 'Problematic Arguments'/'Shuffle' critiques), Charles King, Scott Ryan . . . they raise points worth going through, but do they really refute any of insights from the likes of the Dougs and Sciabarra into the most fundamental Rand stuff, i.e., the method, the life-based teleological eudaimonism, objectivity in cognition as requiring social and political freedom (man as an end in himself, etc.), the role of sense of life in aesthetics, . . . . BTW, Rand's essay "What is Capitalism?" is, as far as I can tell, irrefutable; as Rand points out, it can serve as an essentialization of Atlas Shrugged's theme about the role of the mind in human existence, and it also brings into the discussion a philosophical essential for Rand - her distinction between the objective, the intrinsic, and the subjective. Now, I've not yet obtained a physical copy of the Ayn Rand Society's Philosophical Studies series Volume 3, 'Reflections on a Free Society,' but the metadata I've gleaned about it is that there is no debate about "What is Capitalism?" in this volume. (The focus is a lot more on Rand's theory of rights and government, with one Darryl Wright doing quite a bit of heavy lifting with the first three chapters.) It's like there's simply nothing in there to debate! - that Rand nailed a difficult philosophical topic and in the process established a foundational grounding for capitalism-related common sense going forward. Of course capitalism is a system uniquely suited to actualizing the potentialities of human intelligence in the realm of material production, and the concretes and contrasting systems are all around us today and throughout history. So how did the universities churn out so many fools like AOC?) One last thing: when that Volume 4 in the works, about Rand's relation to Aristotle and Aristotelian themes, is published, what are the enemies/bashers/smearers/belittlers of Rand going to do to then? Flush their credibility yet further down the toilet by pretending that it or any such book doesn't exist? By failing to recognize its significance? Just how more fucking pathetic, exactly, are they willing to get? Do these fuckheads not know that Salmieri studied under Gotthelf who was both a leading scholar of Aristotle's biology and and longtime associate of Rand's? The Aristotelian tradition is as high-profile a tradition or school of thought as it gets. Its scholars are perfectionists. So what is one to make of the fact of there being a highly-reputed scholar of Aristotle who takes Rand most seriously as a neo-Aristotelian figure? Metadata-wise, what does it tell you? Does it tell you that it's safe to go on ignoring, belittling, etc. Rand if intellectual credibility is your concern? That it would be safe to ignore the work in progress by Salmieri, Sciabarra, Tara Smith (someone big on perfectionism, BTW), Den Uyl and Rasmussen, Miller, Lennox, Mayhew and other neo-Aristotelian Rand-positive scholars? I mean, because the Academic Left is placing its bets and staking its long-term credibility on ignoring these very figures (on the assumption that Rand being evil/lightweight, Rand-positive people are themselves intellectually/morally deficient). The decision to ignore these figures still wouldn't give a shred of a valid excuse for why there doesn't seem to be a peep coming from the Academic Left about the virtues of Aristotle or Aristotelian themes. Not even about his being the father of dialectical method, before Hegel and Marx. How bright can they possibly be compared to their smug pretentions?]
Sciabarra refers to dialectics as "the art of context-keeping," a notion (context-keeping, that is) quite familiar to the Serious Students of Objectivism, i.e., those with longtime exposure to the Peikoff courses. In briefest essence, context-keeping is orienting one's mind toward being able habitually to clearly establish interconnections among all of one's cognitive contents, being sure not to leave out parts or aspects of the truth that usually come crucially to bear on the treatment of any one aspect or part. And how does a perfectionistic research orientation reflected by 48 pages of references not demonstrate in practice a dialectical sensibility precisely as Sciabarra defines it? Wanna do dialectics excellently? Take a hint from the size and scope of the bibliography ffs. (Do leftists keep context nearly so well, or are they typically partial, fragmentary and one-sided on how they approach ideas, particularly political ones? Do they demonstrate a curiosity and interest in getting or telling the full story? If Rand demonstrates quite convincingly that that owners of mind/intellect are compensated accordingly and therefore justly in a free, capitalist economy, do leftists care about understanding her point to the satisfaction of all concerned and responding accordingly? Even better yet, how about being willing to bend over backwards to understand their opponents' views to everyone's satisfaction before uttering so much as a word of critique? Could we ever reasonably expect such interpretive charity coming from leftists, given what we can know and prove about them?)
(Having heard pretty much all of Peikoff's courses save for all but the first hour of his Grammar course, and having heard a number of them at least twice - and this includes Understanding Objectivism, the OPAR seminars, The Art of Thinking, and (duh) Objectivism Through Induction, I consider myself among these Serious Students although I don't necessarily identify as an Objectivist; I prefer the term 'Perfectivist' for some odd reason.)
Anyway, Sciabarra's Total Freedom is his exhaustively-researched answer to any variant of leftism that claims the mantle of dialectics. Private property is a sine qua non of libertarian individualism, there are just really no ways around that given the tie between intellectual production (an irreducibly individual activity - see, e.g., the inability of leftists/leftism to produce any other intellectual with the same powers of leftist agitation as Marx himself, in all these 150+ years ffs) and the exclusive control over material resources (including fundamentally one's body and mind/brain, BTW) traditionally characteristic of private property norms. Anyway, Sciabarra's covered all his bases, consulted all the essential scholarly sources, drove the point home with a critique of a less-than-satisfactorily-dialectical version of libertarianism advocated by one Murray Rothbard.
So, has there been a leftist rebuttal to Sciabarra's work in all this time, these past two decades and counting? Well, being also a perfectionist-research-orientation type, I know where to look first for promising leads in that direction, because of what I know about his pattern of past responses to criticisms and where he would post them. So here you go:
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/totalfrdm/tfrevues.htm
First off, I don't see anything that would suggest a leftist critique of Sciabarra's dialectics-based argument.
And why would there be, really? Leftism is wrong, false to the facts. The human world is simply not suited to the left's egalitarian or quasi-egalitarian agenda; they have no remotely credible program for repealing the bell curve. They have no remotely credible argument for how capitalism is a fundamentally unfair system that impoverishes most those who create the most value-added. The argumentative techniques they have in favor of this latter view come off almost invariably as ignorant, dishonest, or downright stupid. Socialism in its original sense that all the leftists were agitating and apologizing for - collective ownership and/or control of "the means of production" (including in practice, as Rand points out, the most important means of production ignored by uniformly shitheaded socialists: the irreducibly individual self-moving human intellect) has proved time and time again to be a monumental failure if not humanitarian catastrophe. Rather than provide a remotely credible explanation for all this failure and catastrophe, or a remotely credible answer to Mises, Hayek, Rand, Nozick, Sciabarra, Hospers, Mack, Den Uyl and Rasmussen, and on and on go the names of the not-remotely-credibly-answered political philosophers, they continue to agitate, AOC-like if not Chomsky-like, for collective appropriation of individual intelligence. (Chomsky says in a video titled 'Manufacturing Consent' that things won't improve for ordinary folks unless there is an end put to "private control of the resources." "The resources" presumably including the human intellect? Chomsky is quite the intellect in many ways - even in ways praised explicitly by Rand in how he handled Skinner behaviorism - but on the matter of capitalism vs. socialism he seems like an absolute shithead.)
So, to boil it down: Sciabarra presented, two decades ago, a monumental work of scholarship fundamentally challenging the leftist claim to either dialectics or to libertarianism. If there had been even one rebuttal by the left to Sciabarra's thesis, I probably would have heard about it way back when. (I'm included among perhaps well over a hundred others in its Acknowledgments section, for one thing....) Roderick Long does have a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies review of Total Freedom, and he identifies as a left-libertarian of sorts, but he's also into Mises and praxeology and the Austrian School . . . and Rand . . . and Aristotelian philosophy most importantly, and since when were leftist losers big on whatever the Aristotelian tradition might have to offer to current understanding? Zizek does Marx and Hegel but what about Aristotle? Zizek has an article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies but it's not of much distinction and it sounds a lot like he's doing what he's reputed widely for: being provocative, i.e., a sort of philosophical troll. And does he have any good answer to Sciabarra/Total Freedom?
I can't think of any good answer; I don't have any high expectations that a near-future delving into of the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx is going to give me satisfactory or impressive answers in this regard. (Maybe it really is just some strange accident of history that Marxism attracted psychopathic cults time and time again, pretty much all rooted on the premise that "the capital-owning class" exploited "the working class." Take that, Hank Rearden/Galt/Rand?) Sciabarra's already aware of Ollmann's work and he's not a convert to Marxism/leftism, etc.
Now, just how is it that in all these two decades, apparently no prominent leftist critique of Sciabarra's work has emerged? Just how big of a loser does this make the Left/leftism, exactly? Because it seems to me that this lack of rebuttal is a devastating indictment of what I strongly suspect if not know if not know for a 100% certainty to be a fundamentally dishonest intellectual culture of leftism?
If that isn't a devastating indictment, then what is? There's simply no valid excuse for it, whatsoever.
And anyone who has the curiosity to seek out the evidence knows that this is just the apex of a mountain of it, when it comes to leftism. Leftism is fundamentally a corruption of the human soul/psyche and intellect; its persistence has to be more a psychological and sociological phenomenon than an intellectual one. The persistent absence of references to Aristotle or Aristotelian ideas speaks volumes in itself given the left's pretentions to intellectual and moral superiority. Nor do I find it surprising, given the history of human belief and ideological movements, that something so perfectly discreditable and cult-like as leftist/egalitarian/anti-capitalist thought could continue on so long after the argument had been settled on its merits.
(If you're still a leftist after roughly 1974, how serious an intellectual can you possibly be? From what I've been able to glean metadata-wise, Nozick's most prominent leftist critic, the Marxist G.A. Cohen, postulates that society could be run essentially along the lines of a camping trip. (Or why not a family?) Also, I did read through, way back when, his full-book-length critique of Nozick, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. If I could boil down what I think was the essential argument there, it's that from self-ownership alone you couldn't derive any specific regime of property rights.
[Edit: here, I'm checking it now, but you also can check out some 'metadata' on the book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394221.Self_Ownership_Freedom_and_Equality [Adjacent tabs now include: https://sites.google.com/site/professorericmack/home/selected-papers which contains a paper with 'marxism' in the title responding to Cohen; and http://politybooks.com/mack-online-chapter/ as well as a paper copy of Mack's Libertarianism book at hand; don't worry, I'm well ahead of y'all in metadata level things like where to look first and what related materials, etc. Also looking very forward to Mack's latest commentary on the Dougs' rights theory in that online chapter, sounds very tasty! Haven't had that much excitement since their 1993 Reason Papers exchange on, well, basically, teleology and deontology in rights theory if I can boil it down that way. I think I resolve the basic differences there in my 2006 JARS essay on egoism-and-rights, and just to be clear, Aristotelianism is foundational to the normative project, and it's the 'Kantian' elements found in the concept of rights that are built on the Aristotelian foundation given the prime-mover role of the intellect/reason in a eudaimonic/flourishing human life; Kantian normative theory is built on the formal requirements of a reasoning being's practical(/praxis/action) imperatives, but what's the ultimate point, the ultimate telos of practical imperatives? And what about the constitutive role of virtue/rationality in the best/happiest kind of human life? Anyway, Kant's categorical imperative(s) are monumental insights into the formal character of a reasoning being's practical imperatives, which in terms of the moral imperatives we call categorical, overriding and all-things-considered imperatives include things like: make your maxims applicable to all reasoning beings in all similar circumstances; respect yourself and your fellow human as an end-in-itself, not to be treated merely as a means or instrument to the ends of another (consequent to which the libertarian self-ownership principle: other men's lives are not yours to dispose of). And something or other about a Kingdom of Ends based on a universal implementation of Kantian-style moral reasoning, which sounds like one of those preconditions for an 'end of history' type of dealio there. Also, to make a long story very short, I believe this, and it's a big lesson that a lot of non-Aristotelian libertarians can really learn from as well: the reasons that we have for promoting a certain kind of reason-based or intellectualist or Aristotelian vision of the good life, are the same reasons we have for affirming a concept of rights based on the universalization of the free exercise of human reason and all that is consequent to that (including the capitalistic right to private property, a connection which Rand nailed as well as anyone).] ]
So as for Cohen's 'self'- vs. 'world'-ownership dichotomy: So much for Rand's point about the human mind/intellect and the bell-curve realities involved there? (And so much for the essential history of capitalism which is a marked material betterment of all folks on the bell curve, in an historically very short period of time, which Rand correctly attributes to individuals' reason being set as free as never before in the realm of material production?) Anyway, Hayek was a young socialist as of roughly 1922, until Mises' Socialism came out and changed his mind. What's the excuse for why so few non-Hayek folks did the honest thing? Socialism settled the argument on its merits in 1922, and Mises/Hayek were proved fundamentally right about socialism's inability to solve key problems of economic production, while Rand discredited socialist ethics right to its rotten little envious core as early as 1936 with her debut, We The Living. All the left ever managed against Mises were some 1930s articles by Lange and a couple others limited to the "calculation" issue (whereas Mises took on all aspects of socialist thought up to and including its tendencies toward cultural destructions), whereas Hayek rebutted Lange in subsequent articles anthologized in Individualism and Economic Order (1948). The collapse of socialist-proper economies vindicated Mises and Hayek. Hayek went on to supplement his economic work with work in politics, philosophy, and psychology. I'm unaware of much in the way of serious and honest leftist rebuttals to Hayek; the closest thing I know of to a Rawlsian response to Hayek is Tomasi's Free Market Fairness (2013), which is essentially positive and duly credits Hayek's insights. I mean, shouldn't Tomasi's book basically settle whether leftism has any shred of credibility remaining? Meanwhile, all the left has ever managed against Rand is a bunch of outrageous, context-eliding, dishonest-on-their-face smears. If this doesn't speak very poorly about the quality of leftist minds, then what does? [Rand not being around herself to ask this question, I guess it's on me to ask it on her behalf, and it's a great fucking question, is it not.])
So the left is really fucking pathetic, but just how really fucking pathetic, exactly?
[In the queue: Something positive and not altogether polemical, I swear! Wherein, I deal with the question, What would a society of people adopting Rand's philosophy for living (hint: the basic/fundamental virtue is rationality) look like? Spelled out in furthest nonfiction detail, we get her best student Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (based on the Rand-authorized course, etc.), and in particular the chapters on "Objectivity" (the basic habits/practices of mind of a well-ordered intellectual life) and "Virtue" (the section on Honesty being particularly memorable and effective). Peikoff's OPAR seminar lectures (as well as the parallel lectures in the authorized '76 course) on these topics are at the ARI Campus site for free, etc. etc., links needing to be supplied yet again?]
[Addendum: It's not just these intellectual figures the left has behaved dishonorably towards; just look at how the left recklessly smears Trump as a racist on the flimsiest of pretexts - pretty much every fucking time; maybe there was an exception or two where Trump really shouldn't have been so politically incorrect whatever valid point he was trying to make and the left ignored - and how the entirety of the American left seems just fine with how Brett Kavanaugh was recklessely smeared as a sex pervert based on stories that never got close to passing an honest sniff test, and how it's all fair game because of his "privileged white male" existence, or whatever the dishonest, scraping-bottom rationalization for the typically leftist affront to common sense (to be sneered at as 'bourgeois ethics') epitomized by the Kavanaugh episode. Nancy Peloser says Trump's border wall is about "making America white again" and not a leftist says a peep in protest or objection. (Not even a strategically wise remark to the effect of, "Keep it up, Nancy, and it'll cost us another presidential election"? Are leftists this fucking pathetic and depleted of the best minds, even at the lightweight level of activism strategy/tactics?) If that isn't disreputably scummy on her and their parts, then what is?]
[Addendum #2: Ollman - again, Sciabarra's mentor and author of the book on Marx's conception of alienation - had this blurb about Russian Radical: "Ayn Rand, a radical? A comrade of Marx, methodologically speaking? Libertarians and Marxists BEWARE, because Sciabarra makes a solid case for his astounding claim. An eye-opening work, and a pleasure to read!" This about a work nearly a quarter century old now, and did the leftists ever take Ollman up on his provocative claims? I'm talking the Academic Left, here. Did it lift a finger in the direction of intellectual curiosity when a leading scholar of Marx raised the equivalent of a red flag (ahem?) requiring some pretty urgent attention? I mean, like, how is it possible that one could apply methodological tools that have deep parallels to Marx's, and end up with a libertarian-capitalist politics? As a(n aspiring) metaphilosopher with something of an obsessive interest in methodology myself, this strikes me as pretty rock-bottom fundamental stuff with huge implications over time and place for a whole lotta people. I mean, look at the 20th century implications of Marxian theory, in action, and think carefully and thoroughly about what important lessons this tells us about applying methodology correctly? It's clear - or is it? - that despite their own professed commitments to full context-keeping, Marx and Rand ended up going about it differently. Rand has no commitments to historical materialism (materialist conception of history, histomat, diamat, etc.). She claims methodological precedents in (and her only acknowledged philosophical debt to) Aristotle, and as anyone who's looked carefully and honestly into her system of ideas (which necessarily includes anything closely related to that Rand-authorized/endorsed 1976 course and its presenter) can see how Rand presents a plausible vision for how neo-Aristotelian sensibilities might be applied today to some pretty fundamental-level issues (such as the nature of virtue, or philosophic method itself, or why ever have any institutions that employ physical force), and one thing I don't see coming out of such a program or anything like it is what came from Marxism, e.g., the Gulag Archipelago, the Great Chinese Famine, ongoing Chinese illiberalism/repression (the actual fascism-like concrete we can look to today, pace that goddamned knuckleheaded nitwit AOC and her vocal fry...), the ever-cult-like Academic Left, and other very anti-human-telos failures of the past century. I'll get all the data and metadata I need for full diagnostics on this pitiful excuse for an effort at creating what that Comprachico--ized numbskull AOC & ilk refer to as an advanced society, once I go through the Oxford Handbook of Marx. On the fail scale, Stalinism is as good a candidate for a 10/10 rating as any, but it's like these 'demo-rat socialist' leftist losers are trying their best to push a 7 or 8, something more Atlas Shrugged-like if their latest ideologically inbred lurching is any indication. As the too-brainwashed-to-know-she's-a-walking-caricature AOC declared, someone's right to housing supersedes your privilege of earning a profit. The Blue State model currently being played out in NY, CA, CT, MA, IL, and other more advanced societies appears not to be yet far left enough for AOC and the Academic Left. There's still too much capitalism, too much gentrification, too much of economic laws dictating what bourgeois neoliberals consider practical and feasible. Sounds like they need some reeducation/immunization from neoliberal ideology? Double down on the leftist Cold War line of the 20th century, in other words? But I do wish those bourgeois neoliberals in San Francisco, NYC, and LA the best of luck in their effort to keep things fiscally sustainable (the primary key is to avoid an Atlas-style brain drain...), not be overtaken by an ever-insistent far left, and maintaining their own smug satisfaction that they've so much as adequately rebutted Rand, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Nozick, Krauthammer, Limbaugh, Buckley, et al. I mean, I don't expect any adequate rebuttal to any of these thinkers from an AOC or Peloser, but someone, anyone among the center-left neoliberal bourgeoise? I was hoping Rawls might do a 50-page rebuttal to Nozick like Nozick did with Rawls, but no such luck there, so where do I look next, pray tell? Someone rebutting Mack (rebutting Cohen rebutting Nozick)? I guess not. Anyone rebutting Hospers' libertarianism formulation ("other men's lives not yours to dispose of")? I already know about no rebuttals to Sciabarra (and it's not like he doesn't debate his points exhaustively with his critics and seems to get in the last word, much like the neo-Aristotelian Dougs Den Uyl and Rasmussen, who also aren't being rebutted, although as I've pointed out before in this blog under the "dialectic" tag, the Sciabarra and Dougs arguments seem to come to the basic essential idea, a perfectionist/dialectical social ethos combined with a nonperfectionist/libertarian politics, so it wouldn't be any surprise if neither of these arguments met with serious rebuttals, right?...). Krauthammer, widely reputed in D.C. for having been the leading intellectual figure among its regular commentators, was a Democrat until the mid-1980s, by which point it had become clear to the finest observant minds that a Reagan-like agenda was superior to a typical Demo-rat-like one. What did the Demo-rats do since the 1980s that would have led Krauthammer to reverse his judgment on this? Jack shit, that's what. And on and on it goes. As I've indicated, I don't think Cohen's rebuttal to Nozick amounts to anything, although I do have to grant credit to one James P. Sterba for his taking on libertarians for their full-on rejection of welfare-rights claims. So there's Sterba, noteworthy for standing out for taking on libertarians more effectively than just about anyone (although my metadata about Beyleveld's Gewirthian treatise The Dialectical Necessity of Morality (1992) tells me that he does an admirable job there as well...). So Sterba and Beyleveld/Gewirth among the center-left bourgeois neoliberals, and no far-left criticisms of right-libertarian politics worth serious consideration IMHO. And this is even without taking into consideration the neglect (by center-left liberals, leftists, and many libertarians) of conservative thought. (I know, there are just so few of them in academia, it can be hard for the leftists, center-left, and libertarians while going after one another to remember about the conservatives. That's kinda fucking sad, actually. I mean, surely there's a really good treatise-length refutation of conservatism out there, somewhere? Monograph-length? Also, is there any good refutation of Rand by conservatives anywhere? John W. Robbins just doesn't cut it, now, does he. Sciabarra's grasp of Rand is way better, also the Dougs'. And since leftists are so shitty at refuting Rand, and the center-left so-called liberals don't seem to know really what to do except fall back on Rawls, or something, and non-Randian libertarians spend so much of their time barking up less than optimal trees, one is left to ask where any good refutation of Rand might ever come from. I mean, Nozick, Huemer, Mack (his 'Problematic Arguments'/'Shuffle' critiques), Charles King, Scott Ryan . . . they raise points worth going through, but do they really refute any of insights from the likes of the Dougs and Sciabarra into the most fundamental Rand stuff, i.e., the method, the life-based teleological eudaimonism, objectivity in cognition as requiring social and political freedom (man as an end in himself, etc.), the role of sense of life in aesthetics, . . . . BTW, Rand's essay "What is Capitalism?" is, as far as I can tell, irrefutable; as Rand points out, it can serve as an essentialization of Atlas Shrugged's theme about the role of the mind in human existence, and it also brings into the discussion a philosophical essential for Rand - her distinction between the objective, the intrinsic, and the subjective. Now, I've not yet obtained a physical copy of the Ayn Rand Society's Philosophical Studies series Volume 3, 'Reflections on a Free Society,' but the metadata I've gleaned about it is that there is no debate about "What is Capitalism?" in this volume. (The focus is a lot more on Rand's theory of rights and government, with one Darryl Wright doing quite a bit of heavy lifting with the first three chapters.) It's like there's simply nothing in there to debate! - that Rand nailed a difficult philosophical topic and in the process established a foundational grounding for capitalism-related common sense going forward. Of course capitalism is a system uniquely suited to actualizing the potentialities of human intelligence in the realm of material production, and the concretes and contrasting systems are all around us today and throughout history. So how did the universities churn out so many fools like AOC?) One last thing: when that Volume 4 in the works, about Rand's relation to Aristotle and Aristotelian themes, is published, what are the enemies/bashers/smearers/belittlers of Rand going to do to then? Flush their credibility yet further down the toilet by pretending that it or any such book doesn't exist? By failing to recognize its significance? Just how more fucking pathetic, exactly, are they willing to get? Do these fuckheads not know that Salmieri studied under Gotthelf who was both a leading scholar of Aristotle's biology and and longtime associate of Rand's? The Aristotelian tradition is as high-profile a tradition or school of thought as it gets. Its scholars are perfectionists. So what is one to make of the fact of there being a highly-reputed scholar of Aristotle who takes Rand most seriously as a neo-Aristotelian figure? Metadata-wise, what does it tell you? Does it tell you that it's safe to go on ignoring, belittling, etc. Rand if intellectual credibility is your concern? That it would be safe to ignore the work in progress by Salmieri, Sciabarra, Tara Smith (someone big on perfectionism, BTW), Den Uyl and Rasmussen, Miller, Lennox, Mayhew and other neo-Aristotelian Rand-positive scholars? I mean, because the Academic Left is placing its bets and staking its long-term credibility on ignoring these very figures (on the assumption that Rand being evil/lightweight, Rand-positive people are themselves intellectually/morally deficient). The decision to ignore these figures still wouldn't give a shred of a valid excuse for why there doesn't seem to be a peep coming from the Academic Left about the virtues of Aristotle or Aristotelian themes. Not even about his being the father of dialectical method, before Hegel and Marx. How bright can they possibly be compared to their smug pretentions?]
Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Leftism's reverse-Midas effect: toxicity (e.g., "white privilege")
Following up my recent post on the "educators" indoctrinating their impressionable captive audience about "white privilege":
"White privilege" is an academic-leftist neologism that has not been run by the mainstream of America before the left foisted the notion on the rest of us. I encourage readers to look at the wikipedia link on "white privilege" to see the notion explained. From the introductory section:
In essence, then, "white privilege" is whites not being treated unjustly. No, it's not some special or acquired advantage, as the term "privilege" traditionally denotes (or is it connotes...). It doesn't mean an advantage conferred, per se. It means a disadvantage inflicted on others. (And speaking of things that disadvantage black youth, does the greater prevalence of single-parent families among minorities and black people in particular also contribute to "white privilege"? Should we double down and insist that this disparity is due to the white-privilege power structure, etc.?)
At this point you might understand how this notion would "elicit defensiveness and misunderstanding" among those upon whom the notion is foisted. What is taken by the leftist authors of "white privilege" to be defensiveness and misunderstanding is really nothing more than disorientation and confusion as to how the term "privilege" is genuinely applicable to a situation in which what makes the "privileged" privileged is that they're not treated unjustly. Instead of a term that conveys, commonsense-like, the unjust treatment of nonwhites, the leftists have decided thatbastardizing altering the language is a preferable move. (More examples of leftist language-alterations here.) And you'd better go along with this alteration pretty darn quickly, lest you be complicit in perpetuating "white privilege."
I wish that there were something that I'm missing here, but I've given up on giving leftists the benefit of the doubt.
If the "white privilege" notion were an isolated thing, not intertwined with a bunch of leftist ideology, with a related cluster of neologisms and dogmas, etc., then one might reasonably treat it as an unfortunate inexactness, or a lapse in an otherwise cogent, good-faith critique of prevailing American institutions. But that's not what this is.
I think leftism is toxic wherever it is found, but a thesis I'd like to advance in connection with this (the "white privilege" topic as well as all the other intellectual failings documented quite exhaustively in my leftism-related links) is as follows:
The American left is especially toxic and intellectually bankrupt, because of how at-odds leftism is with uniquely American founding and operating ideals, namely: freedom from state power. The American left is set up starkly over-and-against the American mainstream, standing in a position (as it were) of dialectical alienation. (This is why leftism seems to be a much "better fit" in European nations such as France, where (e.g.) the French Revolution of the late 18th century illustrates the contrast with America's revolution/break with the English Crown.)
A key example: the ideas of Ayn Rand are within a legitimate Overton Window of range of opinion in America. There is a (relatively) healthy debate on the American Right over the role that Ayn Rand should play in forming culture and politics. A great portion of the ideas in Atlas Shrugged resonate with a large segment of the Right (particularly the free-market, libertarian right). How does the Left respond to Ayn Rand? I'm speaking here of the American Left; the Left as well as non-Left in Europe don't treat Rand as being within the Overton Window of discourse there. (Just how punitively high should taxes on the rich be, is the point in contention in these Euro-welfare-states. Just how much someone should be able to keep what they earn through providing value-added to customers/purchasers in legitimately voluntary transactions, is the point of contention in the American mainstream. Or: does your life fundamentally belong to you, or to the state/demos/collective? And: is politics the most just, appropriate, humane, etc. way of addressing social problems?)
Returning to the question: how does the American Left treat or respond to Ayn Rand? My very extensive experience with this is that these leftists do nothing more than misrepresent, distort, and smear Rand, when they're not ignoring or evading her message. ("She would let the poor die in the gutter, since her heroes say their lives belong to themselves and not to the poor or govt agents purporting to act on their behalf." And they choose to ignore the message from Galt about virtue-based aid to the unfortunate. The leftist assumption here seems to be that if it isn't state-directed aid, it is too precarious and conditional to fit the requirements of justice. That's an area for good-faith disagreement, not for unquestioned assumption.)
Given the founding and (still by and large - at a roughly 65% rate, anyway) operative principles of America, the legitimate Overton Window would be the range of opinion between Rawls and Nozick/Rand. [Edit: And a Rawls vs. Nozick/Rand debate might not even take all that much into consideration the reasonably well-argued opinions of many of those describing themselves as conservatives, which pretty much makes it that much more difficult for the Left to defeat non-leftist opinion on the merits.] But this is not what the American Left sees as the legitimate range of opinion. The "center" of leftist opinion in America today is the more Euro-style "democratic socialism" of Bernie Sanders and AOC, with Rand/Nozick written off as terribly misguided, inhumane, evil, etc. What else explains the absolutely pathetic way the American Left debates - i.e., avoids debating head-on, in good faith - rightist ideas (including those of conservatives/Republicans and Trump supporters in general)?
The American Left has replaced a good-faith dialogue with the American Right, with an ever-more-inbred debate about, e.g., how exactly to construct the "white privilege" notion, or just how racist Trump and his supporters are, or just how much more GDP should go to the public sector, or just how evil Rand is, or just how much illegal immigration should be incentivized, or just exactly which past American presidents and national symbols should be besmirched and boycotted, or just how exactly to blame capitalism for high healthcare costs, or just exactly how fundamentally unfair the capitalist system is, or just how exactly and how much to smear Brett Kavanaugh, or just how exactly to distort/smear/deplatform/cancel/evade what conservative opinion that does exist on college campuses, and on and on.
Is it any surprise, then, that the chief source of toxicity in American politics today is leftism, with the Trump phenomenon a backlash against that?
Here's another, related thesis: on the actual merits, many of the best political minds in America are on the Right. The American Left, by virtue of an atrophied dialectical sensibility, is full of hubris - namely, the assumption that they possess a superior intellectual and moral compass (made more developed by proximity to big coastal cities and college campuses, apparently). By their own lights this puts them at odds with an American mainstream full of irredeemable deplorables, racists, religious fundamentalists clinging bitterly to their Bibles/religion, rednecks clinging to their guns, etc. Given their hubris, their outsized commitments to political activism (a substitute religion) as a source of meaning, and the roadblocks to their political vision presented by conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, Trump, talk radio, Fox News, the electoral college, and the Constitution as interpreted in good faith (i.e., with the strong presumption of liberty), it's no surprise that they come off as so miserable and nasty over not having gotten their way.
I would say that the problem has gotten only worse over time (and will continue to get worse) because of the irreconcilable opposition between leftism and America and the American left's doubling down on the correctness of leftism (with the complicitly of the "educators") in the face of this.
I won't belabor this further; either you see how I'm right (here and in all the other blog posts about leftism/leftists I have provided ample leads for above) or you don't. If anything, this here blog post demonstrates that it's pretty much the end of the line as far as American-leftism's credibility is concerned; it serves more or less as a culmination of all those other blog posts. This here blog post can and will serve well as a one-stop unit for future reference, whenever I mention how intellectually and morally bankrupt the American Left is. (The further left you go, the more deranged and toxic it gets.) Had they ever engaged in good faith with the likes of Rand I might have concluded differently. If they were nearly as progressive and forward-looking as they pretend to be, they'd be gung-ho on philosophy and philosophical education.
As it is, my one-word summary of the American left is: pathetic.
"White privilege" is an academic-leftist neologism that has not been run by the mainstream of America before the left foisted the notion on the rest of us. I encourage readers to look at the wikipedia link on "white privilege" to see the notion explained. From the introductory section:
White privilege (or white skin privilege) is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. ...Writers have noted that the "academic-sounding concept of white privilege" sometimes elicits defensiveness and misunderstanding among white people, in part due to how the concept of white privilege was rapidly brought into the mainstream spotlight through social media campaigns such as Black Lives Matter.[9] As an academic concept that was only recently brought into the mainstream, the concept of white privilege is frequently misinterpreted by non-academics; some academics, having studied white privilege undisturbed for decades, have been surprised by the seemingly-sudden hostility from right-wing critics since approximately 2014.[10]Again, I encourage a reading of the full wikipedia link, where what is explained as "white privilege" is advantages that whites (qua whites) experience relative to nonwhites in America. The "advantages" enjoyed by whites are actually the effect of (real or contrived-by-leftists) unfair and unjust treatment of nonwhites. In essence - and I'm doing my utmost to characterize this notion accurately - what the wikipedia link describes is a set of circumstances in which whites are not treated unfairly relative to nonwhites.
In essence, then, "white privilege" is whites not being treated unjustly. No, it's not some special or acquired advantage, as the term "privilege" traditionally denotes (or is it connotes...). It doesn't mean an advantage conferred, per se. It means a disadvantage inflicted on others. (And speaking of things that disadvantage black youth, does the greater prevalence of single-parent families among minorities and black people in particular also contribute to "white privilege"? Should we double down and insist that this disparity is due to the white-privilege power structure, etc.?)
At this point you might understand how this notion would "elicit defensiveness and misunderstanding" among those upon whom the notion is foisted. What is taken by the leftist authors of "white privilege" to be defensiveness and misunderstanding is really nothing more than disorientation and confusion as to how the term "privilege" is genuinely applicable to a situation in which what makes the "privileged" privileged is that they're not treated unjustly. Instead of a term that conveys, commonsense-like, the unjust treatment of nonwhites, the leftists have decided that
I wish that there were something that I'm missing here, but I've given up on giving leftists the benefit of the doubt.
If the "white privilege" notion were an isolated thing, not intertwined with a bunch of leftist ideology, with a related cluster of neologisms and dogmas, etc., then one might reasonably treat it as an unfortunate inexactness, or a lapse in an otherwise cogent, good-faith critique of prevailing American institutions. But that's not what this is.
I think leftism is toxic wherever it is found, but a thesis I'd like to advance in connection with this (the "white privilege" topic as well as all the other intellectual failings documented quite exhaustively in my leftism-related links) is as follows:
The American left is especially toxic and intellectually bankrupt, because of how at-odds leftism is with uniquely American founding and operating ideals, namely: freedom from state power. The American left is set up starkly over-and-against the American mainstream, standing in a position (as it were) of dialectical alienation. (This is why leftism seems to be a much "better fit" in European nations such as France, where (e.g.) the French Revolution of the late 18th century illustrates the contrast with America's revolution/break with the English Crown.)
A key example: the ideas of Ayn Rand are within a legitimate Overton Window of range of opinion in America. There is a (relatively) healthy debate on the American Right over the role that Ayn Rand should play in forming culture and politics. A great portion of the ideas in Atlas Shrugged resonate with a large segment of the Right (particularly the free-market, libertarian right). How does the Left respond to Ayn Rand? I'm speaking here of the American Left; the Left as well as non-Left in Europe don't treat Rand as being within the Overton Window of discourse there. (Just how punitively high should taxes on the rich be, is the point in contention in these Euro-welfare-states. Just how much someone should be able to keep what they earn through providing value-added to customers/purchasers in legitimately voluntary transactions, is the point of contention in the American mainstream. Or: does your life fundamentally belong to you, or to the state/demos/collective? And: is politics the most just, appropriate, humane, etc. way of addressing social problems?)
Returning to the question: how does the American Left treat or respond to Ayn Rand? My very extensive experience with this is that these leftists do nothing more than misrepresent, distort, and smear Rand, when they're not ignoring or evading her message. ("She would let the poor die in the gutter, since her heroes say their lives belong to themselves and not to the poor or govt agents purporting to act on their behalf." And they choose to ignore the message from Galt about virtue-based aid to the unfortunate. The leftist assumption here seems to be that if it isn't state-directed aid, it is too precarious and conditional to fit the requirements of justice. That's an area for good-faith disagreement, not for unquestioned assumption.)
Given the founding and (still by and large - at a roughly 65% rate, anyway) operative principles of America, the legitimate Overton Window would be the range of opinion between Rawls and Nozick/Rand. [Edit: And a Rawls vs. Nozick/Rand debate might not even take all that much into consideration the reasonably well-argued opinions of many of those describing themselves as conservatives, which pretty much makes it that much more difficult for the Left to defeat non-leftist opinion on the merits.] But this is not what the American Left sees as the legitimate range of opinion. The "center" of leftist opinion in America today is the more Euro-style "democratic socialism" of Bernie Sanders and AOC, with Rand/Nozick written off as terribly misguided, inhumane, evil, etc. What else explains the absolutely pathetic way the American Left debates - i.e., avoids debating head-on, in good faith - rightist ideas (including those of conservatives/Republicans and Trump supporters in general)?
The American Left has replaced a good-faith dialogue with the American Right, with an ever-more-inbred debate about, e.g., how exactly to construct the "white privilege" notion, or just how racist Trump and his supporters are, or just how much more GDP should go to the public sector, or just how evil Rand is, or just how much illegal immigration should be incentivized, or just exactly which past American presidents and national symbols should be besmirched and boycotted, or just how exactly to blame capitalism for high healthcare costs, or just exactly how fundamentally unfair the capitalist system is, or just how exactly and how much to smear Brett Kavanaugh, or just how exactly to distort/smear/deplatform/cancel/evade what conservative opinion that does exist on college campuses, and on and on.
Is it any surprise, then, that the chief source of toxicity in American politics today is leftism, with the Trump phenomenon a backlash against that?
Here's another, related thesis: on the actual merits, many of the best political minds in America are on the Right. The American Left, by virtue of an atrophied dialectical sensibility, is full of hubris - namely, the assumption that they possess a superior intellectual and moral compass (made more developed by proximity to big coastal cities and college campuses, apparently). By their own lights this puts them at odds with an American mainstream full of irredeemable deplorables, racists, religious fundamentalists clinging bitterly to their Bibles/religion, rednecks clinging to their guns, etc. Given their hubris, their outsized commitments to political activism (a substitute religion) as a source of meaning, and the roadblocks to their political vision presented by conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, Trump, talk radio, Fox News, the electoral college, and the Constitution as interpreted in good faith (i.e., with the strong presumption of liberty), it's no surprise that they come off as so miserable and nasty over not having gotten their way.
I would say that the problem has gotten only worse over time (and will continue to get worse) because of the irreconcilable opposition between leftism and America and the American left's doubling down on the correctness of leftism (with the complicitly of the "educators") in the face of this.
I won't belabor this further; either you see how I'm right (here and in all the other blog posts about leftism/leftists I have provided ample leads for above) or you don't. If anything, this here blog post demonstrates that it's pretty much the end of the line as far as American-leftism's credibility is concerned; it serves more or less as a culmination of all those other blog posts. This here blog post can and will serve well as a one-stop unit for future reference, whenever I mention how intellectually and morally bankrupt the American Left is. (The further left you go, the more deranged and toxic it gets.) Had they ever engaged in good faith with the likes of Rand I might have concluded differently. If they were nearly as progressive and forward-looking as they pretend to be, they'd be gung-ho on philosophy and philosophical education.
As it is, my one-word summary of the American left is: pathetic.
Friday, August 30, 2019
One glaring bias of the left
Political leftists aren't nearly as intellectually and morally superior as they think they are; indeed, their political views are at least as much the product of personality/psychological quirks or disorders and cognitive biases as many others' political views are.
One key example of this is leftists' hostility toward capitalism, i.e., the system of private property. On their view, this system "generates inequities," a phrasing that preys upon standard human failings in the area of jealousy or envy, even as the presence of capitalism in a country is typically associated over the last two and a half centuries with rising living standards across the board. One prominent instance of leftist rationalization in the face of this evidence is typically to attribute this rise to scientific progress during that time, which is to ignore or evading the role that business plays in bringing technological benefits to a market at profitable scale; the rationalization also thoroughly ignores/evades the close connections between intellectual, political and economic freedoms. Another instance of leftist rationalization is to shift the goalposts and talk about climate change. One thing you can't and won't get a leftist to do, however, is to address the very strongest arguments for or characterizations of the capitalist system, such as in Rand's essay "What is Capitalism?" which is over half a century old now but has received absolutely zilch in the way of response from leftists, which should be a red flag right there. Heck, over 60 years ago, Atlas Shrugged and the "Galt speech" were published and no leftist has dared to rebut the content of that speech. Go google till you're exhausted looking for a decent, non-strawman, non-glib, non-intellectually-lazy, leftist rebuttal to Rand. Guaranteed result: Zilch! Pathetic.
(One easy way to tell whether the Rand-bashers have a clue what they're talking about is to compare/contrast their characterizations with those from actual Rand experts giving such courses as "A Study of Galt's Speech" and "The Atlas Project." If the basher doesn't demonstrate familiarity with the "role of the mind in man's existence" theme, then the basher is in no way whatsoever a competent interpreter, and instead is likely a hubristic/pretentious snot.)
There is a clear-cut tie-in between the way leftists treat someone like Rand and the point I'm about to make.
Leftist website vox.com has this story: Female scientists are up against a lot of unconscious bias. Here’s how to fight it.
Quick, close your eyes and picture a scientist.
Did you just picture a man?
There’s a pretty good chance you did. Many of us unconsciously associate the concept “science” with the concept “male,” even if we would consciously reject that association. Unfortunately, the “science = male” stereotype is making it harder for female scientists to get promotions they deserve. Yes, even in 2019.
A two-year study published Monday in Nature Human Behavior examined how 40 scientific evaluation committees decided which researchers should get promoted to plum positions. It found that most scientists on the committees — whether they were men or women, and whether they worked in particle physics or political science — unconsciously associated science with men.
That implicit bias affected their promotion decisions, so long as they didn’t consciously believe there were external barriers (like discrimination) holding back women in science. But, interestingly, the implicit bias did not influence their decisions if they acknowledged the existence of such barriers.
Basically, if someone can say, “Yes, gender bias exists — women really do get discriminated against on the basis of gender,” the simple fact of acknowledging that can undercut their unconscious tendency to discriminate against women. Aware that such bias can exist, they’ll seek to counteract it.
Leftists have a very-well-developed sense of there being biases affecting people's chances for success, but this sense itself is also stunted and biased. Consider:
Quick, close your eyes and picture an academic professor in the social sciences or humanities.
Did you just picture a leftist?
There's a pretty good chance you did. Many of us unconsciously associate the concept "academic professor" with the concept "leftist," even if we would consciously reject that association. Unfortunately, the "academic professor = leftist" stereotype is making it harder for rightists/conservatives to get promotions they deserve. Yes, even in 2019.
Isn't it blazingly obvious what goes in in the process of academic hiring, promotion, etc., given the unconscious biases if not conscious hubris involved?
Although there are two "sides" of the political spectrum - call them "left" and "right" - a typical college student taking a political science class cannot rationally expect to be provided a fair and balanced picture of what it is that would account for the left/right divide, what accounts for the appeal of rightist ideas to those holding them, what a meaningful left/right dialogue would thereby entail, etc. The intended or unintended effect of this is to reinforce the leftist biases that formed the ideology of the professors (both current and future, the future ones being the current students). It would be a surprise if this pathological situation didn't contribute to the toxicity of the political environment nowadays. Indeed, much of Trump's appeal comes from the fact that many people are fed up with the sort of toxicity and pathology that passes for intellectualism on the left, manifested in a Political Correctness (sic) run amok. (See the likes of AOC as more or less perfect examples of the pathology at work.) This toxic PC-run-amok situation further fuels the leftist reaction to Trump and his supporters, basically a doubling-down: "basket of deplorables," "racist" this and that, etc. It's not like these leftists want to really understand what's going on here, else their whole MO would change to one which respects the process of dialectic with opposing viewpoints. Jonathan Haidt has rung the alarm bells that this pathology, bias, etc. is basically destroying the intellectual credibility of the left, but it's not evident that the academic left is really interested in seriously listening to the message or in changing its ways.
Yes, even in 2019. This is more than half a century after Rand's prime, and nearly half a century since Nozick's libertarian treatise Anarchy, State, and Utopia hit the academic scene. It's not like there are any obvious much less subtle advantages that Rawls' theory of justice has over Nozick's; they're basically competing sets of moral intuitions about the role of the state in people's lives. Both theories and sets of intuitions have seen lots of challenges and rebuttals over the years - these are difficult subjects where slam-dunk arguments are few and far between - but I haven't seen anything that would compel an unbiased observer to believe that one theory is clearly superior to the other, i.e., I haven't seen a good explanation for why, on the merits, Rawlsians should far outnumber Nozickians.
(We're talking Rawls vs. Nozick here. We're not even bringing in Rand's neo-Aristotelian arguments [for political conclusions essentially like Nozick's] that revolve around the role of the mind in man's existence and how that entails a uncompromising commitment to a combination of virtue and freedom. Indeed, I for one don't see what role there is for the state beyond any necessary peacekeeping functions, in a society where Aristotelian virtue is the norm. And good luck getting leftists of all people to know anything much less speak about Aristotelian virtue; it's all politics with them as a source of meaning and morals. [Also, as a terminological aside, it makes as much sense to speak of Aristotelian ethics as the paradigmatic virtue-ethical theory, as it does to speak of Kantian ethics as the paradigmatic deontological theory; if we're going to name the usual triad of theories and the deontological one is called Kantianism we might as well call the virtue one Aristotelianism. If.])
But I don't think you would ever know about the difficulties and challenges involved in the competing theories (libertarianism vs. Rawls-ish liberalism) by looking at the political makeup of the academy. Nozick's own curiosity was piqued enough by this for him to ask and supply an explanation for why intellectuals (of the "wordsmith," i.e., humanities or social sciences variety) oppose capitalism, and his explanation has enough of a ring of truth to it that it calls for an answer from leftists. (I am unaware of any such answers; if there had been, wouldn't it they be well-known?) If academic leftists had the first clue about what is involved in running a business like (e.g.) Amazon - the specializations/expertise differ here, see - they might not be so hostile to the business world and billionaires. But (of course) it's the very job of academics to identify, uproot, see past, etc. the biases that might affect even their own views of the world. The evidence suggests that they're just not up to doing this job, which (of course) severely undercuts the academics' claim to a superior intellectual or moral perspective on the world. They're specialists/experts on certain subject matters, is all. (The paradigmatic leftist thinker, Marx, could study and write all about capital, for instance, but there is no evidence he himself was capable of running a capitalist or otherwise profit-making enterprise. Shouldn't this be a red flag *ahem* of some kind?) My belief is that for roughly every really smart and informed lefty (most likely Rawls-ish) you could find a really smart and informed libertarian, but it's typical leftist practice to be intellectually lazy and give libertarianism (and especially Rand's moral-individualist version) short shrift. There are two major factors at work that could explain the relatively low number of libertarians in the academy: (1) The conscious or unconscious biases that make the academy a less hospitable and career-advancing place for libertarians and (2) Many libertarian-minded people putting their intellectual skills to work in the business world instead.
For further evidence of my thesis, see the demographic breakdown among those with advanced degrees on pp. 87-88 of Maddox and Lilie's Beyond Liberal and Conservative. Perhaps the most serious hubris-related problem of leftists is their view that there aren't that many smart people on the right, but this applies especially to their attitude toward libertarians (who tend to fall into the political "right" these days due to their views about capitalism and limited government). And so:
"What would Nozick much less Rand do about the poor dying in the gutter, or having poor opportunity sets? Where is their empathy? We should at least respect if not empathize with one another. That requires a sense of fairness. [maybe a couple other main premises or elaboration] Hence we need a welfare state and/or enforced opportunity maximin, conceptual severing of property rights from human rights, etc." Does this sound like basically sound reasoning, a basis for political consensus, a homework-doing representation of putatively marginal viewpoints, or anything respectable as a dialectical counter to the libertarian norm that individuals' lives are their own and not the state/collective/tribe/poor/disadvantaged to forcibly dispose of? Maybe there are good arguments that the state/collective/others do have a right to dispose of individual lives, and/or that private property isn't in any serious way an extension of individual thought/action, and I just missed them? Maybe I just missed where leftists speak of freedom in addition to their nonstop talk of (in)equality? This isn't even to address the various conservative arguments about the role of the state in people's lives which leftists routinely ignore - one should distinguish here between hearing and listening - but to which libertarians have a thoroughly reasonable counter along the lines just stated and which has abundant backing in themes motivating the founding of America (which wasn't a conservative movement per se but arguably has the best elements of conservatism including the recognition of the corrupting influence of power, as well as the notion that a sustainably free republic requires a minimally virtuous citizenry).
In short: You may very well be a leftist if you see and decry sexist bias at work in the science professions but not political bias at work in the other fields or walks of life. This fits quite well with commonsense observations these days about leftist hubris and - what comes to the same thing - the terrible leftist attitude toward real/serious dialogue. (In the non-academic world, have a look at the almost utterly terrible, awful and pathetic MSDNC channel for what passes for opinion commentary there, at pretty much any hour of the day. At least unlike CNN, MSDNC doesn't try to hide its biases....)
[ADDENDUM: I shouldn't let it pass without pointing out that hubris comes with costs, one way or another. Hubris is another word for false pride, as in the age-old saying about pride coming before a fall. Well, in the case of today's leftists there is not just the "fall" of seeing someone like Trump elected president (much less whatever else is coming to them), but the leftists' hubris about the intellectual and moral superiority of their ideas, combined with their addiction to the political as source of meaning and morals, has them in a very unhappy state in regard to the way things are politically. In that sense I kinda feel bad for them. (But it's their own fault....) It's not just the generally political but Trump in particular that has them very unhappy, because it's not even the real Trump that has taken up space rent-free in their heads, but rather an imaginary and scary Racist President Trump. (Or let's just say that their case that he is racist is so, uh, trumped-up as to come off as desperate and definitely biased.) So if the political is all-consumingly important to you, and you're utterly convinced of your rightness and superiority, and yet a political bogeyman is living rent-free in your head, I can see how that would be detrimental to your mental well-being. I offer no solution to this rather pitiful state of affairs other than a philosophical education.]
[ADDENDUM #2: I've finished the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, so which is the more perfect research move for the next reading, the previously-mentioned Natural Reasons (Hurley) or the Oxford Handbook of Leibniz? I also have The Socialist Manifesto (Sunkara, 2019) checked out, but since the political isn't all-consumingly important to me, I may well skip it for now to focus on the things Hurley and/or Leibniz were focused on. Just think about it for a moment: Which sort of theme/project would, if carried out really well, most likely do a better job of improving the human condition: a socialist manifesto, or a treatise on better living through philosophy? Sunkara has implicitly bet on the former. I'm pursuing the latter. Perhaps as part of the latter I can skim through the socialist manifesto as part of a sprawling research program, more Aristotle-like than otherwise, and treat it as a foil or contrast case. For one thing, socialism has a terrible track record at being implemented as its advocates envision. For another, socialists have historically done a terrible job of engaging in dialectic with their opponents. And for another, socialism is at root morally evil, stupid and un-American. And last but not least, soulcraft is a more all-encompassing project than statecraft, and if you attempt the latter without the former, you might well be an idiot or monster. So skimming the 2019 socialist manifesto would be yet another exercise in seeing just what mountain of good sense got overlooked and just how one-sided the argument is this time around....]
[ADDENDUM: I shouldn't let it pass without pointing out that hubris comes with costs, one way or another. Hubris is another word for false pride, as in the age-old saying about pride coming before a fall. Well, in the case of today's leftists there is not just the "fall" of seeing someone like Trump elected president (much less whatever else is coming to them), but the leftists' hubris about the intellectual and moral superiority of their ideas, combined with their addiction to the political as source of meaning and morals, has them in a very unhappy state in regard to the way things are politically. In that sense I kinda feel bad for them. (But it's their own fault....) It's not just the generally political but Trump in particular that has them very unhappy, because it's not even the real Trump that has taken up space rent-free in their heads, but rather an imaginary and scary Racist President Trump. (Or let's just say that their case that he is racist is so, uh, trumped-up as to come off as desperate and definitely biased.) So if the political is all-consumingly important to you, and you're utterly convinced of your rightness and superiority, and yet a political bogeyman is living rent-free in your head, I can see how that would be detrimental to your mental well-being. I offer no solution to this rather pitiful state of affairs other than a philosophical education.]
[ADDENDUM #2: I've finished the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, so which is the more perfect research move for the next reading, the previously-mentioned Natural Reasons (Hurley) or the Oxford Handbook of Leibniz? I also have The Socialist Manifesto (Sunkara, 2019) checked out, but since the political isn't all-consumingly important to me, I may well skip it for now to focus on the things Hurley and/or Leibniz were focused on. Just think about it for a moment: Which sort of theme/project would, if carried out really well, most likely do a better job of improving the human condition: a socialist manifesto, or a treatise on better living through philosophy? Sunkara has implicitly bet on the former. I'm pursuing the latter. Perhaps as part of the latter I can skim through the socialist manifesto as part of a sprawling research program, more Aristotle-like than otherwise, and treat it as a foil or contrast case. For one thing, socialism has a terrible track record at being implemented as its advocates envision. For another, socialists have historically done a terrible job of engaging in dialectic with their opponents. And for another, socialism is at root morally evil, stupid and un-American. And last but not least, soulcraft is a more all-encompassing project than statecraft, and if you attempt the latter without the former, you might well be an idiot or monster. So skimming the 2019 socialist manifesto would be yet another exercise in seeing just what mountain of good sense got overlooked and just how one-sided the argument is this time around....]
Thursday, July 11, 2019
Answer to Prof. Wolff on inequality
The loathsome leftist loser Leiter links to (Marxist/museum piece) Robert Paul Wolff critiquing what he takes to be standard lines of justification for income/wealth inequality used by defenders of capitalism. I've addressed the essential point in this blog fairly recently using the example of Amazon/Bezos, but I elaborate on my argument further below. First, Wolff:
Here's my reply to Wolff, reproduced from the comments section and with some links added:
Now, if you're a leftist/anticapitalist with limited understanding of how (pro-)capitalists think - especially the most intellectually challenging/formidable capitalists - you might find this an impressive counter to the supposed defender of capitalism. (The loathsome Leiter says it's "sensible commentary.") Heck, one of the Marxists in Wolff's comments section links to this imbecilic strawman of Rand and capitalist thought at Existential Comics, "making Wolff's very serious, and not silly, point." (In what cannot be but an irony, the main Achilles Heel of EC is its ignorant anticapitalism. The same Marxist linking to EC's imbecilic strawman later complains about how Marx is widely, ignorantly caricatured. Gee, it's like dialectic has broken down, or something. On a completely unrelated note, why isn't Ferrarin's Hegel and Aristotle all the rage? And when you do hear from leftists about philosophy you might hear quite a bit about Marx, and then some Hegel, maybe some Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze (& Guattari), Frankfurt School . . . but what about the greatest philosopher of all, Aristotle? I mean, Marx is reacting to Hegel, who is reacting to Aristotle and developing Aristotelian-teleological themes which aren't exactly superseded by anything after Aristotle. Here I was told the left is really woke and advanced? And what about philosophy for children/everybody? How did they manage to miss that one, pray tell? Misplaced priorities, perhaps?)In order to focus our attention and make the argument concrete, let me take as an example the Columbia University Sociology Department in which I shall again be teaching this fall. There are upwards of forty members of the department, including many distinguished scholars, and a support staff of four. Since Columbia, unlike UMass, is a private university, it is of course impossible to find out easily how much each of these folks makes [whereas at UMass this is public knowledge], but I think we can assume that there is a considerable pay gap between the senior professors and the departmental secretaries – maybe three hundred percent or more. How can this be explained and justified?The standard answer is that it takes both long preparation and really rare talent to be a Columbia Sociology Professor, and the big bucks are needed to get the right people into those jobs. I freely grant that being a Columbia Sociology Professor requires long preparation and really rare talent. But do you need to pay big salaries to get the best people into those jobs. [Alert: I am going to ignore the effect of competition among universities in all of this. I trust it is obvious that that consideration can be bracketed for the purposes of this analysis. If it isn’t obvious, sit and think about it for a bit before you rush to comment.]Well, think about it. Setting to one side the cost of job preparation and the foregone income [see above], suppose we ask Shamus Kahn [currently Department Chair] whether he would prefer to remain as a Professor of Sociology or take over the job of Winston Gordon III [one of the support staff.] Leave aside being Department Chair, which Shamus, like any sensible academic, could do without [or so he told me.] As a Professor, he would be expected to be on campus 32 weeks out of the year, two or three days a week. He would be in class 4 or 5 hours a week, would hold office hours 2 hours a week, would prepare lectures, and [ugh] would grade papers once or twice a semester. He would also be encouraged [but not required] to do any independent research he wished and every so often to publish the results. Contrariwise, as a departmental staff member, he would be expected to be on campus 48 weeks a year, five days a week, seven hours a day. He would answer the phone, file papers, respond to student inquiries, assist professors with secretarial tasks, run errands, and perhaps manage the finances of the department.In order to explain why it is necessary to pay Shamus three or four time as much as Winston, we must assume that if Shamus were to be offered the same salary as Winston, he would respond, “If it is all the same, I would just as soon do Winston’s job.” Since the excellence of the Columbia University enterprise really requires that Shamus agree to be a Professor, we may suppose that a negotiation would ensue, with Shamus offered more and more money until finally, he replies, “Weeell, all right, but only if every seventh year you give me six months off from the grind; call it a sabbatical.”Seriously? You can do the same thought experiment for a corporate manager and the man who cleans the toilets in the home office. To get the right people into the right jobs, you need to test them and sort them and sift them. But do you also have to pay the suits so much more than the shirts?
Ultimate Philosopher said...
I'm not following. I assume you're all familiar with Nozick's example of Wilt Chamberlain, and the $100K salary. Well, today, the top sports stars (think Mike Trout, Tom Brady, LeBron James) make upwards of $40M a year, an even greater cause of disparity compared to what, oh, say, the concessions workers make.
Concessions workers are readily replaceable. Mike Trout could do concessions work, but there's comparative advantage. The concessions workers can't do what Trout does.
True, if Trout were offered the same wage or salary as the concessions worker makes for playing baseball, his love of playing baseball would still lead him to prefer the baseball playing.
Heck, we're talking about people who play a game for a living, and have fun much of the time doing it. Many of the concessions workers are stuck doing whatever their skill set qualifies them for, and they're likely not having much fun much of the time. They have to deal with lots of stupid and crappy customers, for example. They're perhaps acutely aware that they don't have the talents that the customers are coming to pay the most money to see. Etc.
But Trout is commanding what the market will bear, enjoying a big surplus over what he *would* be willing to play baseball for. (And on top of that, there are performance metrics these days tied to the concept of "Value Above Replacement Player," and Trout is shooting up the career leaders list there at almost astonishing speed. And even a replacement-level player, ready to be knocked down to AAA, has talents that are in-demand enough to make several hundred thousand a year. [We can bracket for now baseball's antitrust exemption, particularly given that the customers prefer to watch as undiluted a talent pool on the field as is consistent with a few dozen big cities, but not many more, having teams.])
And so, I ask along with Nozick, where is the injustice exactly? Is commanding what the market will bear unjust, or lacking in justification? (Of course, you should all know Nozick's justification by now: it's what people choose to do with their holdings.) (There's also Robin Hanson's rather mangled attempt to apply leftist reasoning about justice to the market for sexual and/or romantic partners. Guess what: a lot of people are SOL there no matter what they do, while a select few can get "10" partners even if they *would* settle for 7s. [Hanson's "creepy" in-jest proposal to force the more fortunate to have sex/romance with the less fortunate can be toned down to something more like a system of tax incentives/disincentives, something much more to the liking of statists who insist on separating human rights from property rights.] The point being, life isn't fair, but you sure get a lot of selective outrage about that from anticapitalists who, to a lot of procapitalists, appear to be rationalizing envy. A retort along Rawlsian lines is that what is fair is not nature but how we as a society respond to such natural unfairness, e.g., to maximize as much as possible the opportunity set of the least advantaged. Nozick's rebuttal is something to the effect that what's fair is when I dispose of my life as I choose, i.e., that it isn't others' to dispose of [and that otherwise nice-sounding ideas about maximin should be left to people to implement voluntarily {for which a good place to start might be philosophy for children, for which see the SEP entry there}]. Oh wait, that's originally Hospers/Rand....)
UP/CRC
Sunday, June 30, 2019
What makes the Left so loathsome and dangerous?
Two major problems with present-day left-wing American politics:
1. The usual problems with leftism I've discussed before, but in particular the clamor among left-wingers - and the lefter the more bizarro and unhinged - for more government taxes, controls, etc.
2. The left's refusal to engage in a serious, responsible, accountable dialogue with the opposition (much less the strongest representatives among their opposition [e.g.]). (The irony of the left's defecating all over Habermas on this count is lost on them....) Today the leftist trend is ever more toward deplatforming, shaming, shunning, ignoring, strawmanning, contempt, hubris, flat-out dishonesty/evasion, ridicule, echo-chambering, mob intimidation, screaming and shouting, gaslighting, crying racism/sexism/transphobia/etc. on razor-thin pretexts, smearing . . . those are some big intellectual vices, and they explain a ton about the deplorable intellectual degeneration/atrophying/disease of the present-day left.
So, combine 1 with 2; what does that mean?
It means that the left seeks to impose their values and vision on the rest of America, through the ever-expanding power of the state -- but they don't want to engage in a good-faith conversation with those upon whom they seek to forcibly impose their values and vision.
This makes today's leftists something other than ordinary fellow citizens: it makes them domestic enemies.
1. The usual problems with leftism I've discussed before, but in particular the clamor among left-wingers - and the lefter the more bizarro and unhinged - for more government taxes, controls, etc.
2. The left's refusal to engage in a serious, responsible, accountable dialogue with the opposition (much less the strongest representatives among their opposition [e.g.]). (The irony of the left's defecating all over Habermas on this count is lost on them....) Today the leftist trend is ever more toward deplatforming, shaming, shunning, ignoring, strawmanning, contempt, hubris, flat-out dishonesty/evasion, ridicule, echo-chambering, mob intimidation, screaming and shouting, gaslighting, crying racism/sexism/transphobia/etc. on razor-thin pretexts, smearing . . . those are some big intellectual vices, and they explain a ton about the deplorable intellectual degeneration/atrophying/disease of the present-day left.
So, combine 1 with 2; what does that mean?
It means that the left seeks to impose their values and vision on the rest of America, through the ever-expanding power of the state -- but they don't want to engage in a good-faith conversation with those upon whom they seek to forcibly impose their values and vision.
This makes today's leftists something other than ordinary fellow citizens: it makes them domestic enemies.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
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
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
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