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

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

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

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

Republicans / Right:

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


Democrats / Left:

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


Independent/Other:

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

The Maverick Philosopher vs. Ayn Rand

The Maverick Philosopher, who elects to identify himself at his blog under real-nym Bill Vallicella, doesn't think all that highly of Ayn Rand.

That is unfortunate, but understandable, given his context.

What's more, when he bashes Rand as being a "hack" and whatnot, he goes through the trouble of presenting evidence and argument.  So he presents something of a formidable foe to those who would take Rand seriously as a philosopher.  (He does allow that she is a philosopher, but just not a good one.)  As one could quite readily discern from his blog, he is an honorable fucking adversary, even if mistaken in his general assessment of Rand.  (Plus he has a better (more perfect) overall command of the written word than I.)  He provides a very refreshing alternative to the anti-philosophizing attitude represented by the ignoble Leiters.  Perhaps one day I should have the pleasure of meeting him and collaborating, as all mutual philosophizing should be about.  Here I want to take issue with his overall assessment while acknowledging, in the spirit of dialectic, what he gets right.

First, the "bad stuff" about Rand (and Peikoff) . . .

Maverick pretty much nails Rand on the issues he has decided to cover when discussing her.  Pretty much, though not all the way.  Rand's very simple approach to metaphysics on neo-Aristotelian lines either hardly adds to what Aristotle already accomplished, or gets things wrong when applying understanding of the axioms to various substantive issues, including perhaps The Most Substantive Issue of Metaphysics: Does God Exist?  Going back to Nathaniel Branden's "intellectual ammunition department" response to the God-as-First-Cause question in The Objectivist Newsletter, the official Objectivist position is, in essence, that God cannot exist because, as Branden put it, the universe is the totality of that which exists.  God is not part of the universe, therefore, God does not exist.  Q.E.D.  It's pretty much that bad, and Maverick will fill you in on the details.  It also makes Peikoff's own position very muddled in light of his statement that "existence exists" does not specify that a physical world exists (and how could it, given its trivially-true character?).

The Objectivist rendering of the law of causality as a corollary of the law of identity (stated as "A is A" although expanded upon by direct quotation from Aristotle in the last pages of Atlas) is at best a simplistic restatement of Aristotelian ideas about causes, while Peikoff's treatment of the issue in light of what he subsequently says about free will is muddled.  The standard Rand/Peikoff/(Binswanger?) claim is that since under a given set of circumstances, only one "action" (behavior?) is available to a given entity, this rules out  (as "irrational" or something) indeterministic interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.  The Objectivist interpretation  of causality as (correctly!) applied to free will is that the "only" action open to a volitional being is that which follows from its nature: to act freely, to choose.  The problem for the orthodox Objectivist is that this, in turn, allows for indeterministic causation (yes, you read that right) not just in the subatomic realm studied by QM, but universally.  What we are left with is the inductive epistemological task of discovering which phenomena are (mechanistically) determined and which are not.  (Indeterminism must not be equated with volition; if subatomic particles don't behave as classical mechanics would dictate, that hardly at all implies their exhibiting volition, as you might hear many an amateur student of Objectivism claim.)

Rand/Peikoff's "refutations" of idealism and materialism are similarly, and hopelessly, muddled.  The Objectivist axiom of consciousness dictates most reasonably that a consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms; that in order for it to be conscious, it had to be conscious of something (which exists).  The problem is, this doesn't do anything to refute idealism, since standard idealisms hold that, in Berkeley's formulation, "to be is to be perceived."  Consciousness still remains the faculty of perceiving that which exists, in such a formulation.  This cannot be rejected on the basis of "the primacy of existence" (if that is read as implied by the [I hate to put it this way, but I have to] trivially-true axioms).  This would amount to metaphysics-by-fiat, that "existence exists" means something substantive to the effect that Berkeley's formulation is automatically ruled out.  I think had Rand been surrounded by expert metaphysicians during her intellectual career, she'd have done a much better job at this sort of thing; however, had the mainstream of academic analytic philosophy at the time not been bogged down in anti-metaphysical practices while Aristotle was going relatively neglected, she might have found such experts where they around.  This gives rise to the question: Why did she not integrate/dialecticize with Henry Veatch, or him with her?  What we have here is a failure to integrate.

The Objectivist "refutation" of materialism is little better, since it amounts to a strawman equation of materialism with a vulgar, uber-reductive materialism.  In OPAR, Peikoff mentions four supposedly paradigmatic materialists in his sense: Democritus, Hobbes, Marx, and Skinner.  In one indication that Peikoff was behind the times at the time of OPAR's 1991 publication, he appears unaware that Skinner had long been a non-issue by then, particularly in wake of Chomsky's demolition job some two decades before.  Not only that, he hadn't been influential in mainstream philosophy.  Skinner might plausibly be an example of vulgar reductive materialism but since mainstream philosophers didn't take him seriously, what's the idea of bringing him into a discussion of what allegedly went wrong in metaphysics at the hands of philosophers?  The case of Marx doesn't work well here, either, because Marx as a vulgar reductionist reeks of a strawman.  But the real kicker here is: how does Objectivism escape charges of materialism when (contrary to Peikoff's earlier admission that the existence axiom doesn't specify the existence of a physical world) it rules out the existence of God on the grounds that only the physical universe exists?  Objectivism turns out to be a substantive naturalism, which isn't (as John W. Robbins's incompetent critique of Objectivism would have it) synonymous with materialism, at least not as Peikoff describes it (the vulgar-reductive kind which denies the reality of consciousness), but that leaves the question: who of significance in the history of philosophy does hold that latter view?  I won't hold my breath for an answer.

So, getting back to the Maverick, when he's bashing the substantive Rand/Peikoff arguments in metaphysics, he's shooting fish in a barrel.  It's no surprise to me that inasmuch as Rand scholars write on metaphysics they go back to Aristotle and sometimes Aquinas for beefing-up.  (For instance, Chapter 1 of Den Uyl and Rasmussen's The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand seems to contain more discussion about the Aristotelian tradition than about Rand in particular.)

When Maverick attacks Rand's views on abortion, he rightly points out where her views are sorely lacking, although I would not consider her views obviously stupid considering the time at which she wrote them, a time when Judith Thomson's flawed article defending abortion was not so obviously flawed according to the understanding of many readers then.  (The violinist example . . . whoo boy!  I mean, if a fetus could be easily transferred from the mother's body to some other nutritive environment - just as the violinist could be hooked up to someone else - then the violinist example is a great, knock-down defense of a woman's unlimited "right to choose what happens to and in her body."  Not to mention that whole thing about volitional activity bringing about the (special) relation of fetal dependence, in marked contrast to the involuntary hooking-up to the violinist.  And why a violinist, anyway?)  I would also take issue with one subtle but significant point.  When Rand wrote, "The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn)," Maverick interprets this as follows: "Rand equates the unborn with the not-yet living."  The "or" here might suggest a logical equivalence, but the rhetorical context does not make that at all clear and, being accustomed as I am to Rand's writing style, I read it as the different kind of "or," as in presenting two distinct cases.  In any case, I think needless to  say, the abortion debate has gotten more sophisticated in the nearly-forty years since, with Don Marquis's anti-abortion argument making a most potent case for how abortion is, at minimum, extremely morally problematic; the standard "woman's right over her body" arguments advanced by so many intellectually-lazy defenders of abortion rights have to fully confront Marquis's argument.

Maverick's coverage of Rand's intellectual relationship with John Hospers sorely mischaracterizes the reasons for their parting of ways.  It was not over Hospers having "dared criticize" Rand, but the style in which he did so.  Binswanger has the scoop on what precipitated their break, and if that is an accurate portrayal, then Hospers's behavior cries out for a reasoned explanation, which (due to Hospers's passing) we may never get.

Speaking of Binswanger, Maverick is to be commended for his respectful interchange with Binswanger at his blog.  It's too bad all these one-sided cheap-shot artists around the online world don't have the guts or the decency to do likewise.

Before continuing, I do want to mention that I'm lukewarm about Maverick's seemingly blanket characterizations of "liberals" as decadent libertines on moral and cultural matters and freedom-stomping statists on political and economic ones.  (Maverick self-identifies as a conservative.)  If one were to pin him down to specifics, I'm fairly sure he would distinguish the thoughtful liberals from the not-so-thoughtful ones, in which case the former aren't the ones giving liberalism such a bad name.  But doesn't that go for pretty much any "school" of thought, be it liberalism, libertarianism, Objectivism, or . . . conservatism?  If we're going to criticize "the liberals" for their faults, then "the conservatives" are fair game . . . and have you seen how "the conservatives" have done a piss-poor job, since roughly around the time of their adoption of the Southern Strategy, at presenting an intellectually-fortified defense of conservative ideals?  There was Barry Goldwater back in the '60s penning The Conscience of a Conservative, and then later coming to identify as a libertarian and to decry the religious fundamentalism taking over the GOP.  There was William F. Buckley (by the way, did he get calmly and methodically destroyed by Chomsky on his "Firing Line" show, or what?) who came to identify as a libertarian as well as conservative.  (I read somewhere that, to his credit, Buckley smoked a little bud; also, he proved in his eloquent style how the Drug War is a moral and practical disaster.) You had Reagan playing up to the il(classical)liberal Moral Majority, and things continued downhill from there: the Dan Quayle VP nod, the illiberal declaration of "culture war" at the '92 GOP convention, Clinton Derangement Syndrome, the Bush torture regime, FOX's credibility-destroying partisanship, Limbaugh's descent into intellectual dementia, Hannity's blatant partisanship and anti-intellectualism, Savage's paranoid hysteria, O'Reilly's anti-intellectual streak, the ridiculous '08 Dingbat VP nod, "refudiate," Obama Derangement Syndrome, demise-is-always-around-the-corner paranoia, End Times-ism, many Tea Partiers' selective attention/memory/knowledge, seeming GOP indifference to the healthcare affordability crisis, Moneybags as the lone credible (sic) '12 candidate, birtherism, intellectually vacant opposition to marriage equality, evolution denial, climate change denial (coupled by projections onto scientists as allegedly politicizing the issue), and, now, out-and-out morons running the House Science (sic) Committee.  If "the conservatives" would address these problems as much as "the liberals" should address theirs (starting perhaps with their pathological inability or unwillingness to seriously and honestly confront what they imagine to be impossible: a formidable Aristotelian-individualist-capitalist intellectual juggernaut spearheaded by a fiery novelist), we might well have neo-Aristotelian/perfectivist nirvana, would we not.

Okay.  Now.  Where does the Maverick get it wrong about Rand?

First, let me point out that his shooting-fish-in-a-barrel routine is directed almost exclusively at Rand's lousy substantive metaphysical arguments.  What he does not cover is her ethics, her politics, or - most crucially, most fundamentally, most signficantly - her prescribed (neo-Aristotelian) methodology for dealing with ideas.  (Method pertains primarily with epistemology, not metaphysics.)  Outside of what Peikoff, Sciabarra, and a few others have done, this never gets addressed those writing about Rand, her critics most of all.  One might claim that Peikoff's lecture courses, in which this central topic is most extensively worked out, are too inaccessible a format (the complaint about their being too expensive - as in the hundreds of dollars - no longer holds, by any remotely plausible stretch), but that still leaves Sciabarra's Russian Radical, which has been in print for nearly two decades now, and which Rand critics either brazenly evade or remain blazingly ignorant about.  Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism course has been in print for almost a year now (and if you aren't deeply familiar, directly or inderectly, with the contents of this course, then your understanding of Rand's philosophy is probably for shit, given the crucial, fundamental, supremely significant role of method in it; this is not even to speak of Peikoff's later courses, such as The Art of Thinking or Objectivism Through Induction) and so far the critics have remained completely silent about the book version of Understanding, through either ignorance/cluelessness or evasion.  (Right on bad-faith cue, the haters did manage, just around the same time Understanding was released, to heap attention upon Gary Weiss's Ayn Rand Nation which, from what I can tell, is as clueless as any of the secondary literature out there.  This disparity of response right here says pretty much all you need to know about the haters' total lack of scruples.)

(I mean, if staunch adherents/admirers of Thinker X's ideas uniformly tell you that such-and-such resource is absolutely essential to grasping Thinker X's ideas properly, the intellectually curious person would very much want to obtain that resource if the person wanted to speak competently and persuasively about the merits of Thinker X's ideas, rather than to run around like a random thug taking pot-shots at Thinker X and the adherents of Thinker X's ideas.  This is only common sense; this only stands to reason.  Oh, did I mention that Peikoff lecture courses available at $10 a pop, for undergrads to snatch up and integrate en masse, spells Game Over for the intellectual Establishment?  If not, I'll say it again: Peikoff lecture courses available at $10 a pop, for undergrads to snatch up and integrate en masse, spells Game Over for the intellectual Establishment.  Done deal.  I've never been more certain of anything in my life.  The fuck you think Russian Radical was all about, anyway, fun and games?   You've been spermjacked, Leiter & Co.  Checkmate, assholes.  You can't refute perfectivism. :-)

Second, the intellectually responsible thing to do is to see in what areas Rand's ideas have been carefully analyzed and developed by subsequent thinkers, if one wants to know where her strengths were.  I've already touched upon method (Peikoff and Sciabarra).  In ethics, there's Tara Smith's Cambridge-published book on Randian-egoistic normative virtue-ethics, along with the recent Ayn Rand Society volume.  In politics, Rand's "What is Capitalism?" is a hugely important essay with respect to a central theme of hers: the role of the mind in human existence.  The essential substance of her political ideas has reached its latest academic development in Sciabarra's Total Freedom and Rasmussen and Den Uyl's Norms of Liberty.  As for her aesthetics: first off, not to understand her aesthetics is not to understand her views about sense of life, which is not to understand Rand's own sense of life, which is not to understand the benevolent universe premise, which is not to understand Rand the person; it is to not understand her views on psycho-epistemology, which is to not understand her theory about method, which is to not understand her philosophy, period.  Second, when a scholar of aesthetics such as John Hospers says that Rand's novels carry much aesthetic importance, the intellectually responsible reaction is to perk up one's ears.  Finally, in regard to epistemology "proper," the forthcoming (2013) Ayn Rand Society volume continues and develops Rand's work on the nature of concepts and their role in knowledge.

It is a fascinating psychological and sociological dynamic to observe, how people's views on a thinker or topic can vary so much depending not only on their individual contexts of knowledge, but also on what data points they cull into making their observations and judgments.  If you focus exclusively on things like Rand's terrible polemics and lousy substantive arguments in metaphysics, one is bound to think little or negatively of her.  If one focuses exclusively on (to put it in briefest essence) the perfectivist aspects of Rand's philosophy and personality, one is bound to see her as the second coming of Aristotle.  The perfective dialectical reconciliation of these two seemingly disparate data sets - the act of objectively and comprehensively establishing the full context - involves doing as I do right here and in dozens of other blog entries on Rand.  And to his great credit Maverick, being staunchly anti-intellectual-bigotry and perfectivist in his sensibilities, wrote: "Rand's ideas ought to be discussed, not dismissed."  A shit-ton better than the closed-minded sneers and ultra-politicized "gatekeeping" of Leiter and his ilk, innit?  (A search on the term "nietzsche" at Maverick's Rand page (which I linked at the outset of today's discussion) is apropos.  Further, I have it on authority of a well-established Nietzsche scholar that Rand was more disciplined a thinker than Nietzsche was.  She did select the Aristotelian route from Alasdair MacIntyre's (dialectically inadequate?) Aristotle/Nietzsche alternative, if that tells you anything.  But what if Nietzsche had been productive another thirty years?...)

The unquestionable fact is, there is a fast-growing academic literature on Rand that didn't exist before.  Combined with the effect of those now-way-inexpensive Peikoff courses, and the publication of Understanding Objectivism, and the neo-Aristotelian resurgence in general gathering steam in the academy, the effect should be exponential: an explosion in interest in Rand among the intellectually curious.  The deniers - inside the academy and out - have two options: (1) keep evading and behaving like thugs, or (2) get a clue.  To wit:

"Checkmate, asshole."

Checkmate

(Published initially under the title, "Testing Rand's Theory of Culture.")

The theme under consideration: That philosophy is the driving force of a culture.

Some patterns already recognized/presupposed going into this analysis:

(1) The more Ayn Rand's (supremely perfectivist) philosophical ideas are exposed to the light of critical scrutiny, the more it turns out they hold up admirably and defeat their critics in the process.

(2) The "liberal" Ivy League intelligentsia are at present utterly unequipped and unprepared to deal with fact (1).

(3) The "liberal" Ivy League intelligentsia supposedly have all the best intellectual resources on their side; so why are they so utterly helpless in waging the war of ideas against their "neanderthal-like" anti-intellectual opposition on the political Right? What's stopping them from making an all-out slam-dunk effort to prove that their whole "progressive" worldview is so superior? I mean, it's so obvious how superior they believe it to be, isn't it? Couldn't they prove everything beyond a doubt in all their rigorously-peer-reviewed, Ivy-League-Press-published treatises, just like how peer-review helps ensure quality, thoroughness and true authoritativeness in the natural sciences?

(4) The "liberals" seem utterly weak at selling their ideas to an American audience. And the act of selling is so darned . . . capitalistic and entrepreneurial, innit? (For more evidence, see the stark contrast between the success of "conservative" talk radio and the failure of "liberal" talk radio to connect with listeners. If we used "liberals" as the model of reason, it would seem that reason has no selling-power, that it is impotent to change minds, and that the failure here can only be rationalized away attributed to a dumbed-down plutocracy. Also, note how this alleged model of reason illicitly smuggles in a neo-Marxian, materialist explanation for cultural conditions, another byproduct of modern Greek-ignorant philosophizing. Time for the "reality-based" and yet in-denial "liberals" to check a few premises and save themselves yet further embarrassment, perhaps? They might start by shifting their cognitive context away from the likes of Descartes/Hobbes/Hume/Marx/Rawls and toward true giants like Aristotle/Aquinas/Spinoza/Mises/Rand. It really works wonders, liberals! As an awesomely liberating, productivity-enhancing bonus, you'll become much less pathologically fearful and ignobly ignorant of capitalism in the process.)

(5) Neither the pro-Republican FOX News nor pro-Democrat MSNBC networks ever have any guests that you might term "serious philosophers." I mean, surely MSNBC could enlighten its audiences by have lots of university-professor guests who prove everything so well? Surely MSNBC's audiences would lap up the "manufacturing consent" theories of Noam Chomsky, if only this GE-owned subsidiary would have him on as a guest. Surely there's a whole coalition of Ivy League professors who could have broadcasted widely about the naked-emperor-like discrepancy between intellectual liberalism and MSNBC? Surely MSNBC could have them as guests to get the word out and enlighten the audience? (Surely, the professors are not too helpless and too un-enterprising to get the word out otherwise?)

(6) As Exhibit A of how low the mainstream culture has descended in absence of a boldly and decisively Aristotelian influence: The leading "public intellectuals" at the present are mostly the New Atheists - Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett. Harris at present is trying to ground ethics (well, "morality") in biology, with a crucial element missing: Aristotelianism. His context inherits, as a given, a Humean style, with its unresolvable is/ought (or nature/goodness) dualism. (Were Aristotle around today, which philosopher - Sam Harris or Ayn Rand - do you think he'd be way, way, way more impressed by?)

(7) Thinkers like Aristotle and Ayn Rand manage to cover their bases like f***. Their performances are analagous to super-grandmastery in chess. The common standard is essentializing-comprehensiveness or assimilation, i.e., mastering the art of dialectic.

(8) An adjective, "Aristotle-like," comes to mind when I think of a pattern of instances of highly-functional human beings in this or that endeavor, such as the concretes listed in "About Me."

Okay, now the test.

Objection:
If Rand's theory of philosophy's ruling power over a culture were correct, then our culture would be dominated by the basically Rawlsian views of the Ivy League intellectuals in political matters. In fact, Rawls is considered by the philosophy professors to be the most important philosopher of the last half-century, and by a pretty wide margin. This is also borne out by other data which show just how much greater Rawls' influence among academic philosophers is than Rand's. These data are pretty good evidence that Rand isn't worth taking seriously as a philosopher, aren't they?

Reply:

Seriously, now?

In American culture, what is more widely read: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, or A Theory of Justice by John Rawls?

Moreover, while Atlas Shrugged has placed a distant second in polls of readers asked to name the book that influenced them most, what placed first?

Moreover, in what fundamental similar respect are the top two choices in these polls so very unlike John Rawls's treatise? Consider: the impact of a comprehensive vision of man and existence as against a merely-political focus. (See also: the Ivy League intelligentsia's utter helplessness in the face of theocratic and militant Islamism.)

Moreover, see point (4) in the list of patterns recognized.

Moreover, see all the other patterns recognized.

Moreover, the act of establishing the wider pattern among these patterns is one of first-handed thought and integration, and cannot be otherwise. (In this regard, Ayn Rand simply cannot be "taught" overnight, in talking-heads shouting matches, or undigested (or undigestible) soundbites; it requires something the ancients referred to as habituation, and what Rand referred to as automatization of well-functioning cognitive processes, which are essentially Aristotelian in nature. The modern revival of "virtue ethics" cannot be complete or understood by the community at large without the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Randian form of perfectivism.)

Unless or until you get this last part, you're pretty much out-of-it when it comes to understanding Ayn Rand's greatness - why she is, like Aristotle, always and everywhere vindicated by any attempt to deny her. The stated Objection is an example of jumping into an analysis of ideas mid-stream, i.e., of dropping context, thereby thoroughly failing to recognize the vast sum of integrated facts behind Rand's analysis of (in this instance) cultural causation. To them (the context-droppers), it would seem that Rand was - as they were themselves, in actual fact - jumping into cultural-causal analysis mid-stream, all arbitrary and dis-integrated. If ever there is an instance of psycho-epistemological projection among Rand's out-of-it critics, this is it.

(This is also why this psycho-epistemological deficiency needs to be systematically rooted out and discouraged among college students by the professors - but . . . you might see the vicious cycle involved here. And if there ever was an instance of jumping in mid-stream - by Aristotelian, though not Humean, standards - while appearing to provide systematic foundations, it's Rawls's theory of justice. [See also here.] This is held up as "great" philosophy by out-of-touch academics. Pseudo-foundational or insidiously un-foundational, anti-context, anti-hierarchy philosophizing is a characteristically "modern" technique - particularly in the "analytic" tradition, which the whole Aristotelian-dialectical tradition is lost on - and so by no means does it originate with Rawls; Rawls is just the terminal cashing-in of the whole methodologically and cognitively corrupt style. The non-integration involved here feeds into a festering non-integration between abstract theory and real-world practice. Integrating with pattern (4), we find that this is a by-product of a systematic rooting-out of capitalistic memes and personality characteristics among the wordsmith-intellectuals. Capitalist-types can't afford to flout context in their endeavors, see; that the fashionable wordsmiths have failed to recognize this - much less to understand it all the way down to the Aristotelian self-identical explanatory causal root - is a result of their failure to grasp the capitalists' context. Checkmated.)

Finally, a better, widespread understanding of these points and their logical interconnections would lead to great improvements for American culture.

Q.E.D.

Ain't integration fun? :-)

[ADDENDUM: The chickens' homecoming. Remember, kids: Integrate! :-)]

Generational Shift

Seeing as part of my Toward Utopia project is concerned with the subject of historical causation from the standpoint of the effects of intellectual movements on the whole of societies (which ends up pushing me toward the sort-of uncomfortable position of making Toward Utopia partly about itself), I cannot help but notice that America is headed quite irresistibly toward a new political paradigm that usually goes under the heading of "libertarianism."

By "libertarianism" I mean a political philosophy more or less espoused by our country's Founding Fathers, characterized by emphases on the dignity of the individual human being, individual rights (including property rights, i.e., capitalism), and governments essentially limited to protecting those rights. (I'll set aside for now the long-running and not-going-away-anytime-soon debate over "anarcho-capitalism" vs. laws being defined and enforced by a state.) In terms of concretes, of advocates of this idea, it has been set forth in varying terms in the writings of such figures as Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, David Friedman, James Buchanan, George Reisman, John Hospers, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Loren Lomasky, David Schmidtz, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Based on the limited evidence, the late David L. Norton apparently gravitated toward this political idea as well.

I'm quite firmly of the belief that if an intellectually-curious reader were to thoroughly take in the works of all the above figures - including and especially the comprehensive philosophical visions provided by Rand and Norton - the reader pretty much can't but help coming away a libertarian.

So why aren't we there already?

To answer that requires some investigation into historical causation with respect to the American intellectual scene. That will set the context for understanding. That intellectual tradition is markedly different from that of Europe, which has shown greater affinity toward statism, socialism, communism, fascism, Marxism, existentialism, subjectivism, nihilism, postmodernism (the "cashing-in" of all that, to use Rand's phrase), and the various sub-postmodernisms and post-postmodernisms that stink up the fucking place with anti-Aristotelian stuff. Given the ruling paradigms going on there, Rawlsianism looks relatively sane, and Europe's intellectuals can at least relate to that, the way they can at least relate to President Obama. But Ayn Rand? It's like she's on another planet. If "Europe's leading intellectual" of today (supposedly, and now that the post-post-post-realist Derrida has left the scene), Slavoj Zizek, is any indication, that assessment seems to hold up.

(The abstract for Zizek's asinine article in JARS is as follows: "SLAVOJ ZIZEK argues that Rand's fascination for male figures displaying absolute, unswayable determination of their Will, seems to offer the best imaginable confirmation of Sylvia Plath's famous line, "every woman adores a Fascist." But the properly subversive dimension of Rand's ideological procedure is not to be underestimated: Rand fits into the line of 'overconformist' authors who undermine the ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it. Her over-orthodoxy was directed at capitalism itself; for Rand, the truly heretic thing today is to embrace the basic premise of capitalism without its sugar-coating." Oh, brother. Ain't the jargon of post-whatever just so precious? The "cashing in" is on p. 225 of that article. Did the journal's editorship accept this article to illustrate a point, i.e., of just how off-the-rails the currently-fashionable Euro-intelligentsia has gone? That's a sympathetic spin on this farcical event. To be somewhat less damning of the European intellectual scene, I'll mention Habermas, but - and this ties directly into my present analysis, as I will expand upon below - have you noticed how old Habermas is now? Who is he being replaced by in the younger ranks? [One of his students, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, left for the States and has been advancing a hardcore Misesian-Rothbardian view.] Besides, ethics is primarily about eudaemonia, not discourse. ;-) )

Okay, so the American intellectual tradition is just markedly more friendly toward things like libertarianism, eudaemonism, Aristotelianism, realism, etc. What about the current dominant mainstream of the American academic humanities? In political philosophy, it's been dominated for the last four decades by Rawls, but my thesis here is that this paradigm is on the outs. Lemme explain.

In the mid-20th century, the political debate in this country was shaped essentially by the opposition between Americanism (framed in terms of "liberal democracy") and Communism. Marxism was the dominant ideology of the times. The adherents of Marxism were just waiting things out the way certain Christian sects hold out for the Rapture. The collapse of capitalism was going to happen any time now. Mises was a reactionary confined to a teaching post at the business school of the not-at-the-time-prestigious New York University. You can get a picture of just how insane the whole intellectual scene was by reading Rand's letters from the '30s and '40s. Then there was Galbraith - remember him? Is he even mentioned in economics courses any more? Well, he was a big deal in American economics in the '50s and '60s. William F. Buckley was heading up the conservative movement and made sure (much to the detriment of his eventual historical reputation) to set himself apart from Rand. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, published in '62 after a seeming decades-long drought of pro-capitalist literature as far as the mainstream was concerned, became a leading text for the pragmatic Right.

Basically, the debate, as it was framed then, was far removed from what it is today. Marxism is now a defunct ideology. Yep. It's done. It has run its course. It had considerably less of a foothold in America than it did in Europe - it could hardly ever get a foothold in America, save for its universities. If you're a Marxist in this day and age, you are . . . a reactionary. The same is going to be case, I believe, for Rawlsian liberals. Rawlsian or left-liberalism is on the way out as well.

Rawls's A Theory of Justice was published four decades ago now. My analysis leads me to the conclusion that it, too, is about to run its course and be supplanted by libertarianism, because, well, this is America. America is just too libertarian for statism in its various guises to maintain a foothold. Rawls's liberalism is a statism - a toned-down, less toxic form of statism than Marx-inspired statisms, but a statism nonetheless - and it just won't hold up in this country. The "overlapping consensus" his project aimed for is simply too unstable. The discourse is now dominated too much by consistent adherents of original American liberalism for it to hold up. The advocates of left-liberalism are now turning into dinosaurs, into . . . reactionaries.

Look at the intellectual scene on the American Left today. Just what figures dominate it? Rawls has passed on, and it's been a whole four decades since his most influential work hit the scene. There are more radical Leftists who will cite Chomsky, but if you hadn't noticed, his most influential work was done way back in the '50s, and that work wasn't even in political philosophy. He is also getting up there in years. The radical Left continues to hold onto Chomsky like a security blanket, operating under the Rapture-ready-like delusion that his analysis of the American corporate complex will vindicate a radical-Left vision rather than a consistent libertarian-capitalist one. (I may have more to say about the delusions of the "left libertarians" and "libertarian socialists" in due course. It strikes me as more wishful-thinking, security-blanket stuff. If these so-called libertarians want socialism, they're gonna have to get it within the Nozickian framework outlined in Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, that is, in voluntary hippie communes under a framework of libertarian-capitalist law. That's the best deal Chomsky & Co. are gonna get.)

It's worth pointing out that in the '50s and '60s, the Marxists were laboring (heh) under the delusion that Marxism would be vindicated soon. Little did they expect that in under 50 years, their whole worldview would be defunct. Analogously, the left-liberal community is operating under the delusion that their vision of liberal justice is going to be viable for the foreseeable future. But they have missed one crucial thing: just who in the younger generation is going to replace Rawls and his groupies (as I like to call them; Nagel & Co.) as they pass on? Just who is around to carry on the torch? I ask this, because from what I can tell, Rawlsian liberalism was a halfway-house measure, a kind of stopgap, a soft-landing device, between mid-20th-century American statism in its then-paradigmatic opposition to full-on Communist statism, and a return to original-style American libertarianism.

The Rawls groupies are not getting any younger themselves. Nagel is now in his 70s and his most influential work was done more than 30 years ago. G. A. Cohen has passed on, marking the official end of Marxism. Thomas Scanlon is now in his 70s. Dworkin is well into his 70s and I don't know what influential work he's done since the mid-'80s. Sen is pushing 80. Parfit is pushing 70. So who is left, and - more importantly - just what up-and-comers show any promise of replacing them in their efforts to keep the left-liberal paradigm going?

In answer to that, I have no idea, really. (Does Krugman count?) If you look out onto the blogosphere for any indications, you find that the most mainstream of discussions there occurs on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, and the figures influencing him most are Hayek and Oakeshott, and he's pushing a pragmatic conservative-libertarian-"liberaltarian" line. (He comes from Britain, where Rand's ideas are still quite alien, but Hayek is pretty paradigmatic now as far as "pragmatic liberalism" goes.) Greenwald confines his discussions primarily to civil-liberties issues, where he fits right in with the American mainstream. But what left-liberal intellectual figures alive and not in their 70s or 80s are providing American left-liberals with fuel these days? Is it possible - nay, likely - that the best young intellectuals of the previous and current generation have found libertarianism too appealing to dismiss, and gravitated in that direction? Do today's left-liberals have any idea of the generational shift that has happened and is happening in the American intellectual scene?

[EDIT: Some research on contemporary left-liberalism turns up a familiar name I've been meaning to follow-up in due course: Martha Nussbaum, who isn't quite yet pushing 70. Oh, great, now I'm going into an obsessive-completist-perfectionist exercise in research into what important figures on the Right and the Left I may be missing. Does Scruton count as a prominent and influential conservative? What about the role in American intellectual life of Irving Kristol, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, George Gilder, George Will, Dinesh D'Souza, Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, or The Wall Street Journal? This is why the book keeps getting delayed. Research to cover bases, integrate cross-currents, sub-currents, undercurrents, etc.]

One thing I do know is that my own intellectual energies have been put into service of essentially Randian ideas, and not Rawlsian ones. I can't think that Toward Utopia is going to help the left-liberal cause any. And I've been spending too much time fortifying my ideas against potential left-liberal-type objections to believe they're going to come back with anything all that strong as an alternative, without presupposing the very ideas they'd be objecting to. (I've discovered this myself when it comes to Rand. If I find Rand's ideas wanting in some fashion or other, I can't escape her implicit and explicit advice to perfect upon whatever shortcomings there are in her writings. You can't refute perfectionism, see.)

Speaking of American intellectual and political movements, I find what passes for conservatism these days to be defunct as well. Unless you count Andrew Sullivan as a conservative, you have - as far as I can see - an intellectual void on the Right. Buckley was the leading animating light of conservatism in the second half of the 20th century, but he passed on and . . . what is he being replaced by? Talk radio isn't exactly reputable intellectually; Limbaugh is passe', Glenn Beck is a big mixed bag who may as well throw up any white flags of surrender to Ayn Rand, and phenomena like Palinism can't with a straight face be called intellectual ones. Thomas Sowell is now in his 80s. Hell, if there was any person that could be called a leading light of conservatism aside from Buckley, it would be Sowell. I think if there were other leading lights out there right now, I'd have noticed mentions on the Daily Dish from time to time. But, nope. It looks like the leading younger minds of today who might identify as conservative, are gravitating more and more toward libertarianism - and even with the religious conservatives, there is a shift away from any theocratic impulses.

Even the financial crisis and Great Recession haven't stifled the increasingly popular anti-statist sentiment. There aren't any Marxists around to urge the overthrow of capitalism as a solution, like there were in the '30s. There aren't influential left-liberals around who are shaping public opinion toward a more European-style social-democratic model.

Long story short, America is ripe for a full-on shift toward libertarianism in politics, and, soon enough, Randism as a dominant mainstream cultural force. Randism is already making some headway in the universities, with no effective opposition. Eudaemonism in ethics has no effective opposition there, so things are ripe for a surge in Norton studies, too. The economics profession is already under the influence of Mises, Hayek, and Friedman. In the area of law, the ideas of Hayek, Barnett, Epstein and David Friedman are increasingly mainstream. Mack, Lomasky, Schmidtz and the general flavor of things going on in the Social Philosophy & Policy journal are already providing effective counterweight to the Rawlsian-dominated Philosophy & Public Affairs crowd.

One thing to mention about the major libertarian figures I've been mentioning are that they, too, are either deceased, up there in age, or getting up there in age. The youngest of the bunch, Schmidtz, is now in his mid-50s. Inevitably this raises the same question: who in the younger generation is going to replace them, and what work will carry on theirs? You can take it from there.

[Continued in my next posting.]

Apollo 11 and Ted Williams vs. The Intellectual Misfits

The story of newly-employed radio man Ted Williams is stuff of the benevolent universe at the heart of the American sense of life. Contrast that story, however, with the blog entries following it at the Huffington Post link above, and you might get a sense of the very disgust Ayn Rand was feeling toward Apollo 11 naysayers when she wrote that most Randian of articles. (It might be outdone only by "The Comprachicos.")

One blogger turns the subject into a surreal joke. Another - citing "objective economic measures" - assures us that this glimmer of hope called the American Dream is illusory after all. (This particular specimen informs us that the media's treatment of the Ted Williams story is one of many "false, establishment-serving narratives.") A third points out God's role in all this.

This is what passes for commentary at the intellectually-superior-liberal Huffington Post.

Thanks a lot, modern philosophy.

The Intellectuals Need Rand

Okay, so the mainstream discourse in this country is an anti-intellectual cesspool. That's the problem. There's really no question that's the problem. It will do no good to idly harp on that problem over and over. We need to diagnose the problem's causes, and then work to solve it. I think we have some good idea on the diagnostic level: a culture-wide denigration of reason down to the very roots. We need a revolution - an intellectual one - from the ground up. For this to happen, it is an absolute imperative for the nation's best and brightest minds to adopt reason wholesale - not superficially, not ostensibly, not at-the-political-economic-level, but all the fucking way. All the way to Aristotle and Rand. There's just no way around it. The absolutism of reality offers no alternatives.

If you look out at the world right now - on the grand scale, on the big picture - you get the acute sense that we're on a crash course with disaster if things don't change pretty damn fast. It's a train wreck in slow motion. The locomotive is doing its thing, charging right ahead with the brakes barely being applied, and we see down the track some faint signs of the object with which the train would collide. We can't be sure just what it is, but it looks like it's there, and we have only so much time.

The intellectual class in this country - and make no mistake about it, for all this country's poor intellectual reputation around the world right now, we have the world's leading intellectuals right here in this country, because America is the breeding ground of greatness and leadership - sees the vast chasm separating their average worldview from that of the country's mainstream. They just don't know what to do about it. Well, good news: help can be on the way, if they're willing to accept it. They're going to have to clean up their acts first.

The silver lining with pragmatists is their willingness to shift course when they are, near-panic-stricken, under the impression their current course just isn't working. They can't say they know their current course isn't working; that isn't the pragmatist psycho-epistemology. They can only say that they can attach a probability to things, and when they get the impression that things are past 50/50, they've got to consider alternative courses of action. Well, now's the time to consider it. If there's one thing the liberal intellectuals in this country can be credited for, it's a pragmatic - and I mean this in a good sense, i.e., the concern with practicality and, therefore, reasonable, real-world, empirical, scientific input for decision-making - sensibility at root. There's a reason Dr. Peikoff finds a closer ally among the "liberals" than among the intellectually-defunct and deranged "conservatives." The "conservative" intellectual movement in this country delivered us the Dingbat, a strident ignorance, and a demand for regression into pre-modernist unreason. Dingbat is the final cashing-in, the final proof of the full-on intellectual and cognitive failure of the American Right.

When Rand delivered a lecture in 1961, titled "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age," she was addressing it primarily to the "liberals" in her audience who care about reason more than the "conservatives" do. She was, however, also speaking at a time when Marxism and socialism were at a peak of intellectual and political influence around the world. You have to look back and realize the surreal nature of a lot of it; her lecture was one year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and just a few years before America conscripted its young to go fight in what eventuated in a failed war. You had the President delivering an inaugural address asking Americans to accept a false dichotomy between receiving altruistic handouts or performing the altruistic handouts. You had the "liberals" clamoring for a "War on Poverty" just as capitalist economic growth was almost finishing the job for them.

(Poverty rates have since escalated, and the "liberals" are, inherently and fundamentally, at a loss to understand why. They turn to the economics community and get mixed answers at best from their vantage point. They just don't know. They've run out of answers.)

Rand's main goal was to try to get the "liberals" to recognize that their adherence to reason should lead them to reconsider the socialist-Marxist rewriting of capitalism's history. By then, however, the intellectual dominance of Marxism was too entrenched for that reconsideration to happen any time soon. The nature of intellectual entrenchment is, for the most part, a generational thing: many intellectuals have already formed a worldview by their 20s and it conditions and lenses their interpretation of everything. Practically speaking, the way around entrenchment is for the current generation to die off and be replaced.

Remember, however, the pragmatist silver lining: everything gets to be open to reconsideration. The pragmatic mindset is to eschew hard doctrines. Notice, further, that today's intellectual class is basically out of answers as to how to fix problems. They have no ideology to fall back on, like the Marxists did. They're adrift at sea without a rudder or compass. That's their cashing-in. They put their political eggs in the Obama basket and got just what they should have expected by placing their trust in politicians and government to fix problems. All they know is "at least he's not the Republicans," the Republicans being Bush, Cheney, and the Dingbat. That's what they get for thinking any significant fundamental change is going to originate at the political level.

They think - though they don't know - that the economic crisis we're going through is the result of too much "Republican," "right-wing" economic policy - knowing full well that politicians in Washington in recent memory have been from both parties, doing what politicians in an intellectually-bankrupt age could only be expected to do, and that is to sell influence to the highest bidder. So they can only guess that the current crisis has anything at all to do with smaller-government (much less "laissez faire" - are you fucking kidding me?) economic policies. They're awash in a sea of not knowing anything with any degree of certainty - certainly not in this day and age, when the economic data appear to point in all directions, some appearing to point in the pro-capitalist one, others appearing to point in the Euro-welfare-state one, a vanishingly small amount pointing toward the Marxist one. They don't have Marxism to point to like the intellectuals of the '30s did. They don't have any ideology at all that they find appealing. They only know - actually, here, they do know - that their opponents across the political aisle are intellectually defunct from beginning to end. They just haven't seriously considered any alternatives to get out of the cesspool they're sinking into.

If you look at today's political environment and asked to identify the two main alternatives, they are pragmatism on one side, and unreason on the other. A person of conviction, of reason, of love for America's founding ideals will say, "No, thanks."

These thoughts originated earlier today while thinking about the oncoming train wrecks we're told about all the time (assuming we're paying attention): man-made global warming, peak oil production, a general American decline. Now, if we were to take off any political or ideological hats, ignore any political agendas and motives on either "side" of the debate about man-made global warming, the first thing to notice is that very few of us are scientists who have studied the issue in depth. The notion that more than a few of us have any expertise on the issue is like the notion that more than a few people have any expertise in the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The notion is ludicrous. What we do have, however, is a large and growing body of evidence that (a) the global mean temperatures are rising at a fast rate in geological terms, and (b) human-made emissions play a causal (not merely "correlative") role in helping this process along.

Now, if you were to look at the mainstream, cesspool-style debate on the issue, you have pragmatic liberals on one side, and fucking knuckle-draggers on the other. In what has to be one of the most jaw-dropping acts of projection any of us may ever see, the right-wing in this country, on this issue, accuses the other side of being driven by a political agenda. Sure enough, there is a political agenda going on on both sides, but any reasonable and intelligent person can abstract from the political agendas to look at the plain scientific facts of the matter. Doing that requires a minimal ability to distinguish descriptive statements from prescriptive ones. The right-wing charges (fears - and the fears are to some extent justified - but the main driving element here is fear, not justification) that the "liberals" are using climate science data as a reason to tax and control the American people more. I don't side with the "liberals" on the prescription, but their prescription is not hard to understand given the ruling paradigmatic mindset that if there is a problem, then the solution is government controls, taxes, etc. (I think we do need to be concerned that if - more likely, when - the scientifically-modeled global warming predictions materialize, that the industrialized nations are potentially open to class-level legal action of some kind, when peoples of non-industrialized nations are displaced by rising coastal waters and other bad stuff.) The "liberals'" error here is relatively minor next to the strident, screaming anti-science and anti-reason of the opposition. The opposition won't even get on board with the descriptive element, even though it is informed by the best science. They won't do it on the issue of evolution, so why in the hell would they do it on this issue?

So I think we as Americans should be willing to prepare ourselves for the worse - more warming, and, simultaneously, a peak and drop in petroleum production - and arm ourselves accordingly. I don't mean, of course, arming ourselves with guns, to prepare ourselves for the supposed "resource wars" some people are predicting. I mean arming ourselves cognitively and intellectually. The only way to do this, is to adopt and integrate the Randian method. There just isn't any other way. Reality doesn't allow for another way.

What the liberal intellectuals need to do, to get people of reason on their side and push the screamingly irrational right-wing into the status of irrelevant minority, is to get over their silly little aversion to Ayn Rand, and adopt reason in all its primacy over the political. If, as I think is the case, they're pragmatic enough to acknowledge the failures and problems with Big Government - not the least of which is how Big Government runs contrary to America's founding ideals - and look for serious alternatives, they might find that they have a chief ally in reason with Ayn Rand, the dreaded egoist-capitalist. The socio-political problems the liberals fear (yes, they have their own version of fear) from adopting a Randian social ethic (a) are not real concerns once you actually understand what she's saying, (b) are secondary and subordinate to the issue of reason, and (c) a culture of reason would make the whole issue moot. A culture of reason has much better means at its disposal to solve any and all problems, be it poverty, or global warming, or energy production, or even obstinate right-wing ignorance. The genuinely intellectual and intelligent elements on the political right today - the "economically conservative and socially libertarian" - are already on board with the Randian program whether they even know it or not.

It's the pragmatic liberal intellectuals who now need to step up and do their part to build the cultural bridge that can unite us as Americans, as a people of reason (and, therefore, of individualism, freedom, and capitalism). If they would only put down their defenses for a bit and do some intellectually curious and responsible investigation (this means not chuckling and dismissing Rand when, oh, like when she says "A is A" - believe me, by now I know pretty much every trick in the book people have for dismissing this and that about Rand - hell, I was prone in my own ways to that same kind of problem back in my naive stages), they'd recognize in Rand their greatest and most potent ally.

Time may well be running out.

(They should just do it, anyway. Rand's eventual status as world-historic thinker is inevitable. Better sooner than later. And, the left is out of ideas, besides.)

Let's get it done! :-)

[ADDENDUM: I'm considering making this my "sign off" post before going into heavy-duty writing of the book's manuscript. I won't give a timetable on a finish, but it should be really soon now. Time is, after all, of the essence. ;-) ]

America and Europe

These are only very preliminary thoughts to an investigation on a very important and difficult subject: what factors determine the course of nations.

One thing the left-liberals in this country enjoy doing is pointing to the welfare states of Europe as a model for America to adopt. None of it should sit at all well with either advanced students of economics or of Objectivism. The advanced student of economics is apt to root out whether variants of the "broken-window fallacy" or being committed - i.e., what is seen, vs. what is not seen? What are any of the hidden costs the welfare-state advocates are leaving out of their equation? Are they biased as many people tend to be; that is, do they look at the positive side of something they have an automatized positive reaction to, while managing not to notice the negatives? Have they considered the full context?

Just what is the full context? If you're limited to the level of political economy, you're dealing within a narrow context in regard to causal factors. Take, for instance, a favorite icon of the left, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, a linguist by profession, takes left-wing views on matter of political economy; his political ideal is something he calls "anarcho-syndicalism." If Chomsky is the genius many on the left claim he is, then we should hear a lot more from the left about the need to adopt an anarcho-syndicalist model rather than a welfare-state model. Why this schism between admiration for Chomsky's genius and the policies they support? Is it pragmatism? Why the pragmatism, if that's the case?

Besides, why do they go in for Chomsky's political-economic-level analysis of our popular culture? Manufacturing Consent is a left-wing bible, and in fact his analysis seems to provide a pretty comprehensive, over-arching explanation of how and why our national discourse is in the state that it's in right now. It would definitely (seem to) explain how and why a Dingbat has a prominent voice in our politics. Further, the popular culture, in the Chomsky-inspired analysis, is so infused through and through by the interests of a powerful moneyed elite that it overrides a lot of attempts at educating people about better ideas (e.g., the preferability of Euro-style welfare states). Americans these days are fat, dumb, apathetic, etc. - and the corporations only encourage all that more because of the profit involved and the interests of the moneyed elite that are served.

I don't know how exactly that's supposed to explain the popular appeal of, say, Creationism (as opposed to evolution) in the American landscape. Maybe the Chomsky-style explanation isn't meant to cover this, that, and everything - just a lot of things we see today. But then again, maybe the political-economic analysis can be refined or amended to account for that. It kinda gets squishy here.

How about the status of Ayn Rand in our mainstream culture? Here's where the analysis rather breaks down. The Chomsky-inspired analysis is that her ideas serve as useful fuel and rationalization for the moneyed elite's power-structure. Alan Greenspan, after all, was an inner-circle member and he helped to engineer the economic crisis which (supposedly) was a macrocosmic illustration of the moneyed elite's stranglehold on our political-economic system. That apparent explanation certainly looks convenient to a left-wing analysis, but the game here is one of guilt-by-association rather than one of understanding. Alan Greenspan is, after all, a pragmatist at root, which means his thought-processes and actions are not that of someone seriously well-versed in Rand's philosophy. So things start to really get squishy and squirmy here.

Just how does the left in the country see and grasp Rand? If they see and grasp things at the level of political economy, they're not going to have a firm grasp of anything there. They're just not. Further, the political-economic analysis of things in which a moneyed elite is manipulating and dumbing-down public opinion in order to best serve its interests, tends to be associated with thoughts that the American right suffers from intellectual inferiority. Again, they point to Europe as an example of greater enlightenment, because of their (apparent) advances over America in the areas the leftists and liberals find most important. (Didn't Rand say something about the realms "conservatives" and "liberals," respectively, find more important, and focus their policy concerns accordingly? I think it's in her essay, "Censorship: Local and Express." But only the Rand cultists could tell you about that essay.) But the fact of the matter is that Ayn Rand just doesn't fit into that picture of right-wing intellectual inferiority. In fact, it's really hard to pin down Ayn Rand as a right-wing figure at all. Not when she advocates the primacy of reason above all else.

Let's say that the average American is well-versed in Rand. Not just the novels and non-fiction writings, but the Peikoff stuff, too. (Rand explicitly said Peikoff was her best student, see. She explicitly said that his lecture courses are first-rate as presentations of her ideas.) The consequence is people who tend to think a lot more clearly, more efficiently, more well-integrated, etc. Assuming mind-body integration, this cognitive efficacy means lots of great existential results across all kinds of factors - economic, political, cultural, artistic, spiritual. So an America well-versed in Rand would be advanced beyond both present-day America and present-day Europe in a lot of ways. Psycho-epistemologically, they would be a lot healthier.

Just how does the average/mainstream European compare to the average/mainstream American, cognitively or psycho-epistemologically. Which of the two thought-processes are more logical and reality-oriented? Isn't that a more primary determinant of cultural, political, artistic and spiritual health? Moreover, does the standard left-liberal, or the standard Chomsky-style analysis broaden the investigation to this level of generality? If so, then do the nature of economic systems provide us with the level of generality, i.e., fundamentality that we need? I don't think Rand would have said that, given the primacy of ideas over economics. So how does America stack up to Europe in regard to average/mainstream cognition, and how does this factor into the left-liberal comparisons? Further, and very importantly, what fundamentally influences the course of a nation's average/mainstream cognitive or psycho-epistemological health?

I think that the left-liberals are onto one major facet of things, and that is the nature of cognitive processes dominant in various cultures. Is the dominant culture one that values reason over unreason? The American South gets flunking grades here, whereas the stridently irrationalist forms of religion are much less prominent in Europe now. That's one very significant difference right there. Predominant forms of religious belief here in the states poison scientific dialogue by poisoning cognitive processes - by reinforcing and rewarding cognitive failure.

Let's say that the nature of a culture or cultural mainstream is determined primarily and fundamentally by ideas. Now, look at the most dominant philosophical figures in the West - those whose ideas most influence those of the other philosophers, and down through the pyramidal structure of ideas, all the way down to the "man on the street." So we have Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, first and foremost. This threesome more than any others determines - as far as philosophy goes - the basic cultural structure of Western societies. Yeah, Europe has more extensive welfare states and less obvious dingbattery in their leading political figures. But aside from differences, the basic structure of both Europe and America is pretty similar. They both have welfare states, they both have (some meaningful semblance of) a rule of law, free elections, pretty advanced science disciplines, pretty good university systems, etc. You could say that Europe and America are more fundamentally similar to one another than to an Islamist theocracy.

But they're also different from one another in less basic terms. We mentioned only Plato, Arisotle, and Kant. What, then, about Jesus Christ? Was he a philosopher, or would he be considered some other kind of intellectual leader-figure? Perhaps Jesus - or the prevailing received idea of Jesus - is more aptly called a spiritual leader. And in the hierarchy of human life, where does the spirit rank? How does it rank in relation to the intellect? They're both fundamentally crucial aspects of a human being's soul. I haven't determined (yet) which is of more fundamental causal importance, but they're both really fundamental and interrelated. Now, take Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, and throw Jesus Christ into the mix, and what do you get?

Rand said that religion is a primitive form of philosophy - that it is a less-conceptually-refined, i.e., less-intellectually-advanced view about the nature of reality and humans' relation to it. So let's advance this thesis: Jesus Christ - more specifically, the role Jesus Christ plays in the lives of believers in Him - represents a primitivist influence on the West. People turn to Him to meet spiritual needs, at the expense of intellectual values. (The Thomist tradition is an uneasy hybrid. For all that intellectual rigor that goes into an ontological proof of God's existence, you'd think they'd get around to showing how the standard miracle-story of the Christ passes the philosophical sniff test. None of it holds up well under Kaufmann's withering examination, anyway.) So throw Jesus Christ into the mix in differing doses from one culture to the next, and cognitive health will vary accordingly. Now, with all their welfare states and whatnot, how are the Euros doing spiritually? (Oh. We're back at "Censorship: Local and Express" again.) Do we hear much of anything about that from the left-liberal Euro-peddlers? Just wondering. Because once religion is out, something has to fill the void. Anyway, I do hear that "happiness indices" rank average Euros higher than average Americans. So perhaps reason has ample spiritual value, after all.

Then again, maybe I haven't considered all the factors. One thing about those welfare states, by the way: homogenous and shrinking populations are probably easier to take care of via welfare states, than what's going on population-wise in the USA. I'm not clear on how that fits into the left-liberal Euro-pimping. After all, it's not apples and apples.

As I said, these are only very preliminary thoughts; this subject needs a lot more working-out....

The Big Picture

I am approaching the point where my blog goes temporarily "silent" and I bang out the book for soon-as-possible publication. Much of the blogging has been for concretizing what's been developing in my mind over the past several months (ultimately, over my entire lifetime). The main, driving goal of all this is to get as strong a product as possible out there, in as short a time as possible. If ideas are the over-arching, driving force in human history - and they are - then getting Toward Utopia out there ASAP is an imperative.

I have a selfish/eudaemonic interest in seeing the culture and the world become healthy and functional, at or near the level of a Rand or a Kubrick himself. I have a benevolent, "unselfish," eudaemonic interest in people being happy and successful as a matter of course rather than as the exception. (There is also the economic benefit to everyone of everyone else being happy and successful - more inventions, better ideas, etc.) I would have said "as a matter of normal course," but the term "normal" doesn't mean statistical normalcy, in which half a populace still disbelieves in evolution and a full 80% at least is disgustingly ignorant of the big ideas. I mean normal as in proper functioning. A culture in which the mainstream "norm" is what we have now, is not a properly functioning culture.

Ayn Rand set out to remake the world in her own sense-of-life image. The time in which she did so was such a gutter-point in human history that it only amplifies her heroism. At the very moment she was singing the praises of the creative individual in The Fountainhead, millions of people were being shoved into ovens and gas chambers, as the ultimate culmination of the intellectuals' message: the denigration of the individual mind and spirit. This intellectual class still, to this day - if Comprachico Leiter is any indication - fills its subjects with anti-America, anti-individual, anti-capitalist, anti-clear-thought poison. The result is the low state of the culture and learning we see today. Where dingbats appear on presidential tickets. Where economic ignorance, protectionism, stagnationism and defeatism run opposite the reality of globalization, competition, and growth. Where "Ayn Rand" is a euphemism for anti-social greed and intellectual-outsider status.

My aim is to complete the work Rand started. Reading through her masterful "The Comprachicos" once again, one is struck by the profound sense of isolation from "the mainstream" Rand felt growing up. Her whole being screamed out against having to "adjust" to a dysfunctional society, which could only be a recipe for soul-killing cynicism. It certainly did not help in her case that her formative years included a staggeringly anti-man, anti-life Revolution in her home country. (The Bolshies still retained some level of respect for man; they didn't deliberately round up people by the millions and put them in gas chambers as a matter of goal and intention. They did that, in effect, on a smaller scale, against dissidents, but their aim was the "good of humanity" and the killing and imprisoning merely unpalatable means of doing so. The Nazis took the anti-man ethos fully and consistently: the aim was to kill the individual. Thanks a lot for endorsing that ethos, Heidegger.) I can say that anyone with their head screwed on straight today, looking out at the culture, has a profound sense of revulsion. Their whole sense-of-life screams out at the idiocy passing for respectability, for banality passing as attention-grabbing, for minutiae passing as profoundly interesting.

When Rand looked at the Left, she saw only hatred of achievement and success. (See "The Age of Envy.") It doesn't matter that some or many of those on the Left aren't even consciously aware of their hatred, of where their ideas lead. It doesn't matter that the Left "sees things" in different terms, under a different paradigm where it's the rich plutocratic oligarchy against the powerless working people who - get this - actually support the rich. The issue is deeper than that: what leads them to embrace that paradigm - all while ignoring, denouncing, denigrating and sneering at people like Ayn Rand and gleefully advertising their ignorance and anti-intellectualism in the process? That's where Rand cut to the fundamental: these folks have been conditioned from early on to resent all the values Rand fought for. Rand looked at the drugged-out hippie culture, for instance, with its axiomatic anti-capitalism and whim-worship, and could respond only with disgust and contempt.

(Contempt, I learned from Mary Ann Sures's reminiscences, was something Rand hated feeling - but is was the only appropriate response to an anti-values culture. The usual ignorant and hateful anti-Rand polemic is that she reveled in contempt at "the lower classes" or "the masses", as if the not-yet-redeemed Dominique (and not Roark) was Rand's own voice - all the while ignorant that the salvation of the masses would come from their liberation from those very same hateful polemicists - the so-called intellectuals. The thrust of Ayn Rand's writing was her hope for a world in which people didn't have to feel isolation from and contempt for the culture and the world in which they lived, ever again.)

In the hippies, Rand didn't even see hatred of the good; she saw, rather, nihilism - a departure from the whole process of celebrating the intellect or rational values. They might proclaim love for man but then turn around and declare that this means dropping out of capitalist society and living primitively, collectively. One could understand how, if the hippie generation looked to its intellectuals and educators for guidance and answers, they would find none, and give up. The real contempt Rand had here was for the intellectuals and educators who made the hippies, the nihilists and the haters possible.

I would like at this point to point out the default of the liberal intelligentsia in the realm of ideas. Hundreds of thousands of liberal educators, and millions upon millions of liberally-educated Democrats, pose as defenders of reason. Comparably speaking, this might well be true if the alternative is the "conservatives" and their religionism. But that is not the only alternative, of course - which begs the question: Why have all these millions of liberals failed to take the Randian alternative seriously? Since we are talking about a massive number of people, the reasons and explanations can vary widely, but what might some of them be? Here's one explanation: cowardice - cowardice as a product of a social-metaphysical fear of being marginalized by those whose minds they respect. They look at the intelligentsia - people who have studied ideas over a lifetime - and see that the intelligentsia must be right for ignoring Rand, whatever their own rational judgment might have told them. This cowardice, by the way, is a ruling feature of any politicized environment - as the academy surely is, not only in terms of inter-academy politics, but in terms of a general alignment with the political Left: in many instances (i.e., the public schools), academic sustenance depends on Democrat politicians being elected. And here we are back at the theme of "The Comprachicos" - the public schools' indoctrination of students along democratic-socialist lines.

In any case, whatever the reasons or causes in any given instance, the "intellectual class" in this country has failed in its responsibilities. Justice demands that we not reward and subsidize failure. We need an entire overhaul of our educational establishment. We need to undermine it as best we can, in every way we can, from the outside. We need to make it known just what happens when politicized, anti-individualist, anti-capitalist institutions take hold. The intellectual salvation the well-meaning liberals sought - a defense of reason all the way up to a solution to the problem of universals - was there in Rand the whole time, but politics got in the way. Well-meaning liberals who are not philosophers or particularly intellectual themselves might well not even know the issue; they figure that the professionals had it well in hand on who and what to study; they might not even know that the battle ultimately lies not in politics but in the realm of the mind.

The professional intellectuals, on the other hand, should know better. They devote their lives to study; they ostensibly devote their lives to intellectual curiosity. They claim to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff on any issue. (If that were true, they would know to separate the things in Rand's style they find objectionable and look at the substance. Rand's style is not a reason not to take her ideas seriously. [I would say just the opposite, by focusing on a fundamental of her style: her ability to condense vast bodies of observation, and to do so clearly. If the intellectuals don't like how she gores a sacred ox like Rawls, then they should be able easily to point out what the substantive problem is. Why should we take seriously a theory that subjects the activities of a Roark or a Galt to the evil Difference Principle? What the fuck is the attraction of a theory like that in the first place?!]) They claim to be open-minded. They claim this and that - and yet their not-getting-it problem with a thinker like Rand is pathological.

This is starting to run a bit long. Here's the gist: In today's culture, there is little more than the same ol' back-and-forth between two non-defined "sides" (Left and Right) over the most petty minutiae. The latest has to do with extending the Bush tax cuts for two years. In the long run, in the full scale, in the eye of history, this little squabble will mean next to nothing. It will be long forgotten so many years down the line. (Hell, in politics, little is remembered after a few months. Come '12, the Dems will forget or downplay Obama's sellout - "at least he's not the Republicans.") Of course it would be forgotten: people have only so much capacity in their minds to retain what is important. In the Big Picture, what is the most important thing - that which would transform the culture most fundamentally and long-term? It sure as shit isn't whether the Bush tax cuts are extended another two years. So what is it? It's a question too many folks would find too daunting to even ask, much less tackle. Many of them are so consumed by cynicism that they've given up asking. For some, even asking it never so much as occurred to them. (Thanks again, ya fucking Comprachicos.)

You have a big-picture-oriented right-wing that sees the course of America in fundamentally religious terms. They view the Founding through the lens of establishing a Christian Nation with belief in a Creator who endows us with our inalienable rights. They read into Jefferson this religious component while essentially evading everything else Jefferson said. This selective focus on religion is a compartmentalization - a phenomenon discussed by Rand and Peikoff as a form of disintegration. Jefferson is the most representative of the Founders and is the intellectual, spiritual, and sense-of-life father of what makes America great: reason. An otherwise big-picture-oriented right-wing that compartmentalizes and fails to grasp the basis of America's greatness, can't be the source of the right answers; being big-picture, the errors can only be that much more devastating if wrong. Methodologically this is corrupt and full of dangerously insidious evasions.

The Left, meanwhile, seems to offer little more intellectually than John Rawls's Theory of Justice - absent all deep structure in normative ethics, epistemology and metaphysics, of course. The Rawlsian Synthesis - a synthesis of good (liberty) and evil (socialism) - takes as axiomatic a publicized, politicized version of human existence in which political (read: government) processes are a routine part of life. The American sense of life rebels against that very notion: the people are fed up with politics and government. They cry out for a change they don't know how to get, or what such a change would look like, or how we would ever get there. The central players in politics - the politicians - are the exact antithesis of long-range thinking, of justice as a reward for virtue, of principles, of doing the right thing, of individualism, of the requirements of reason as a ruling guide in life. Now, given the long-run triumph of capitalism over socialism - we're still in the process of that triumph working itself out - the Left is now reduced to a blind, uncomprehending opposition to "the status quo," conceived as an oligarchic plutocracy the politicians - if only the right politicians can be elected - might protect the people from. Then they get disappointed when a politician's politician, Barack Obama, sells out on them in order to keep the gears of the System running as smoothly as possible. In short, the Left is helpless and their only known revolt is against a package deal of capitalism and plutocracy, or against right-wing idiocy, or both, or both wrapped in yet another package-deal.

It's clear that neither of these paradigmatic "sides" have the right values to offer long-run.

So, here's the question: Isn't it about time they - and everyone else caught in the middle of their mudslinging and cultural degeneracy in general - got with the program? Isn't it time they jumped on the team and came on in for the big win?

Yes, it is. But they need the right ideas for fuel. Toward Utopia will help provide that fuel. It will consolidate vast bodies of observations into accessible terms, and it will aim at anyone with a decent amount of intellectual curiosity. The title alone condenses and summarizes the whole shebang. There are things that will appeal immediately to the left, right and center; if there is anything that could be called an "Unstated American Consensus," Toward Utopia will finally state it, at last. (In the meantime, I recommend Rand's writings about America, especially "Don't Let it Go.")

After writing Atlas Shrugged, Rand wanted to write a nonfiction treatise on her philosophy, which she tentatively titled, Objectivism: A Philosophy for Living On Earth. The closest she got to writing such a treatise was her monograph, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. By the time her system became actualized as a full philosophy, it was left to Leonard Peikoff to present it in lecture form, in 1976. By that time, for various reasons, Rand just did not have the time to put it all in book form. Peikoff put it in book form in OPAR. (Everything came that much closer together with James Valliant's Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics; the amount of sense-of-life fuel provided by PARC's finally setting the record straight about Rand the person, is incalculable.) I see Toward Utopia merely as a natural implication of OPAR: if a society adopts the ideas therein, what else would we have? What else could we have?

Well?