Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019)

From University of California Press - Yikes!

I've commented on Duggan before here, focusing mainly on an online summary-excerpt of Mean Girl, as well as here, showcasing how Duggan (contemptuously and dishonestly) responds to challenging inquiries about her work: she is a poison tree from which one cannot expect honest fruits.  Having now had the opportunity to see the entirety of Mean Girl, I can point to a number of facts about this book that objectively demolish her intellectual and scholarly credibility.

Duggan quite perfectly epitomizes a subspecies of creature I dub the Rand-basher.  I've never encountered an honorable Rand-basher, and no one ever, ever, ever, ever, ever will, for one simple reason: Rand-bashing is an inherently dishonorable activity given the degree of value in Rand's work.  I'll name a few telltale characteristics of the Rand-basher, but the fundamental underlying one explaining all the rest is: intellectual dishonesty.

Here are discreditable tactics Rand-bashers invariably engage in:

• Intellectual laziness, or forming opinions without having done one's homework
• Evasion of available evidence running contrary to their opinion; lack of any curiosity to discover such contrary evidence or opinion
• Strawman argumentation style; rejection of the principle of interpretive charity
• Refusal to have a meeting of minds with proponents of an opposing viewpoint, not just on matters of what views they actually hold, but why; neglecting to acknowledge or address the aspects of the opponents' worldview that the opponents consider most fundamental
• Exclusive focus on the weaker proponents of opposing viewpoints when stronger proponents are readily discoverable
• Selective and one-sided acknowledgment or recognition of data points, especially when plenty of other data points providing an alternative or opposing perspective are available
• Replacing substantive argument with any number of informal fallacies or slimy tactics including ad hominem, goalpost-shifting, appeal to or abuse of authority, insults, reckless smears, sneering/snideness, overall nasty tone, obvious bad faith

I begin the list above with reference to laziness, because to any actual expert in Rand's thought, laziness is the strikingly obvious if not defining feature of Duggan's so-called scholarship.  There is a now-sizable body of philosophically serious Rand-scholarship, going back decades, which I catalog in rather extensive detail here.  Duggan cites from or references pretty much none of what's listed there.  That's a serious red flag right there.

You might think that a putative scholar of Rand's thought, whose thesis is set out in a title like Mean Girl, would want to take some care to counter the community of scholars who don't share that opinion.  The fact that she makes pretty much no effort whatsoever to engage these scholars is a red flag that this putative scholarship shouldn't be taken seriously.

And it's not like Duggan doesn't consult and cite numerous sources in the endnotes and bibliography.  In fact - given that her main focus is on Rand's literary and cultural influence - she does include in the bibliography the three volumes edited by Mayhew (a member of the Ayn Rand Society's steering committee, and acknowledged among the community of Rand experts as an expert) on Rand's three major novels.  But not only does she not quote, reference, or cite any of these volumes or its several contributions in the main text or the endnotes, while quoting and citing all kinds of negative comments on these novels, there is no evidence whatsoever that she is seriously familiar with what is in these volumes.  (Just for instance, the Gotthelf and Salmieri contributions to the volume of essays on Atlas Shrugged, focused in particular on the Galt speech that is the philosophical centerpiece of the novel, are indispensable contributions for anyone not already familiar with their thematic content.  Indeed, there is really no indication whatsoever in Mean Girl that Duggan has any familiarity with the underlying philosophical structure of Objectivism.  In that regard, she is not an intellectually serious commentator.  Her "summary" of the Galt speech is all of one brief paragraph and conveys none of the philosophical fundamentals in any serious or insightful way beyond anything else she had already said in Mean Girl.)

The only notable additions to the bibliography of secondary sources besides the three edited by Mayhew, are the two volumes Sciabarra is involved in, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical and Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand.  Now, any expert on this stuff knows how thoroughly (well, exhaustively) researched Russian Radical is - its reference sources include all the Peikoff courses up through the Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (I'll get to Peikoff more in a moment, since doing so is downright unavoidable in this context) and lots of other taped material besides - and any expert in this arena is also aware that Sciabarra delves deep into those philosophical fundamentals, particularly Rand's philosophical method (something something "dialectic as the art of context-keeping"; for some details in this blog see here and here) within which all her specific positions/theses, formulations, and applications are inextricably embedded.  But Duggan's only mention of this book is as a source for early biographical Rand information (which would be in the first section of Russian Radical).  Her only mention of Feminist Interpretations is almost merely in passing and with superficial reference to only a couple of the pieces.

Speaking of mere-in-passing mentions, Peikoff comes up in only two places.  The first is one brief paragraph as it relates to all the people Rand supposedly "alienated" thereby leaving "only" Peikoff around to inherit her estate.  (Amazingly enough, Duggan manages not to sink to the usual Rand-bashing low of mentioning that Rand accepted Social Security benefits in old age; usually the Rand-bashers do so in a gleeful "gotcha" manner as supposed proof of hypocrisy without bothering to mention or learn about her 1960s essay on government grants and scholarships.  Given the general pattern of dishonesty on Duggan's part, perhaps this was a lapse on her part so to speak, or perhaps I missed it.)  The other is an inclusion in a "Key Figures" section before the bibliography along with about 10 other people, with about 2 or 3 sentences provided for each.

Now, any serious scholar and expert on Rand knows about the importance of Leonard Peikoff to knowing what's what in Objectivism, including especially that stuff about method (context-keeping, integration, hierarchy, etc.).  To mention it for the umpteenth time, she give her very-high-bar-to-clear authorization and endorsement of the 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course, the most complete and definitive statement of her philosophy in her lifetime.  It's not like this and other courses (e.g, Understanding Objectivism) haven't been available, for free, on the Ayn Rand Institute website for some years now, or that Understanding hasn't been available in book form since 2012.  The book based on this course (which, not insignificantly, Peikoff considers the definitive statement of Objectivism) is Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991) (a.k.a. OPAR).  This isn't among the works listed in the bibliography.

One might think that critics of Rand, interested in getting it right, would be curious to see what a course or book titled Understanding Objectivism by Rand's most qualified student and endorsed teacher/interpreter, is all about.  But I have never once encountered the slightest curiosity from Rand-bashers in this regard when I've told them about it and that pretty much all serious long-time students of Objectivism attest to its importance.  Such a pattern of behavior falls under any number of the bullet points above.

Listed in the bibliography, meanwhile, is Slavoj Zizek's borderline-to-downright silly article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.  It's the only evidence that Duggan is so much aware that this journal exists.  (There are some not-so-silly articles that have appeared over the years in that journal, including this one.)  Now, if Duggan were a serious, honest, not-lazy scholar, she would have done her homework by inquiring into what besides Zizek appears in that journal.  There are, after all, plenty of pieces in there analyzing Rand from a literary and cultural perspective.

Duggan goes to great lengths in Mean Girl to portray Rand as having a contempt or disregard for "inferior" people, selectively and one-sidedly marshaling "evidence" to that effect (most if not all of it is slippery and snide insinuation based on assuming-the-worst readings of the original texts - this falls under the Strawman bullet-point above).  Given the mainly literary context in which Duggan is operating, she draws connections here between Rand and Nietzsche.  Now, a couple things Duggan says in connection with Nietzsche: First, he's among the 10 or so included in the "Key Figures" section; the first sentence under his name is, "The work of German philosopher Nietzsche has exerted a profound influence on Western intellectual history," and then mentions that Rand initially admired his critique of religion and Christian morality and his concept of the "Superman," before later rejecting him.  But guess who's not included in the "Key Figures" section: Aristotle.  Now, Duggan does mention at least a couple times in the main text that Rand was really big on Aristotle.  Perhaps the omission of Aristotle from the "Key Figures" section is just another piece of evidence of laziness and/or sloppiness on her part.

But there's also an awfully dubious claim Duggan makes in an endnote (ch.2, note 26) in connection to Nietzsche: "Rand was not a close reader of Nietzsche, but more of a fan, until she eschewed his influence...".  Now, in Wiley-Blackwell's Companion to Ayn Rand (Gotthelf and Salmieri, eds., 2016, included in my extensive cataloging of Rand scholarship linked above), Nietzsche scholar/expert Lester Hunt writes a chapter on Rand's relation to Nietzsche.  It begins by quoting Rand from author-information material she submitted ca. 1935 to the publisher of We the Living that Also Sprach Zarathustra was her "bible" and that she could never commit suicide as long as it exists.  Does that sound like someone who isn't a close reader of Nietzsche?  Or: how did she ever happen upon the "noble soul" aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil that she discusses in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead (which Duggan obliquely refers to in the same footnote quoted above), without doing some pretty close reading?  Not only was Duggan evidently too effing lazy to know about the Companion and its contents, but how can she keep her story straight that a not-close-reader would know about such an aphorism?  This is Duggan characteristically playing fast and loose with the facts.

Here's another point of evidence of Duggan's lack of thoroughness and care: she does quote numerous times from Rand's Journals (including a context-omitting discussion of Rand's early comments on the serial killer William Hickman, whom Duggan blatantly-dishonestly asserts in the book's Overview section was an initial basis for Rand's "ruthless 'heroes'"), but there is no mention anywhere in the book of Rand's Letters!  There's a shit-ton of material of interest in the Letters.  This has direct bearing on the quality of Mean Girl's "scholarship."  For instance, in the Overview section there are a couple or so sentences describing the main points of each of the chapters, accompanied by bullet-pointed key concepts or names for each chapter.  For chapter 2, covering roughly the 1930s and 1940s of Rand's life/work, one of the bullet points, in addition to ones like 'Marriage to Frank O'Connor,' 'Anthem,' and 'The Fountainhead', is 'Isabel Paterson.'  Now, for one thing, the mentions of Paterson in the chapter are pretty much in passing, conveying merely that she was the main mentor-figure to Rand in the '30s and '40s, and that she wrote a book titled The God of the Machine (1943).  Now, in the Letters, there are two sizable chapters containing Rand's correspondence with two key figures: Paterson and John Hospers.  (Hospers isn't mentioned in Mean Girl.  Suffice it to say that this well-respected professional philosopher, expert in aesthetics, and big fan of Atlas Shrugged didn't regard Rand as "mean," whatever criticisms he did have of her.)  One of Rand's letters in connection with Paterson was one praising The God of the Machine as the best book in political philosophy in 300 years and a decisive antidote to The Communist Manifesto.  Duggan declares somewhere in Mean Girl that Rand's understanding of capitalism and markets is fundamentally deficient, but it's safe to say that Rand's understanding aligns with that of God of the Machine.  It's also safe to say that Duggan is too lazy to have known about this, or what's in that book.  Also in the Letters is Rand's ca. 1980 letter of reference for Leonard Peikoff as eminently qualified to teach her ideas, although I doubt Duggan cares to know this or its relevance.

In her discussion of Atlas Shrugged, Duggan neglects to mention its theme ("the role of the mind in man's existence."  Gallingly, she makes reference to the novel's "civilizational theme" as echoing the one that "shapes Anthem."  About Anthem, Duggan manages to at least make reference to "individual initiative" and "innovation," and then says, "The civilizational framework and character descriptions in Anthem are inscribed in a pervasive hierarchy [this is the prose of a pretentious twit, BTW] of mental and physical ability that intertwines with racial, class, and moral differences in all Rand's fiction."  So even when she kind-of touches upon the role-of-the-mind theme running throughout Rand's work, she poisons it with a discussion of a supposedly "racial" makeup to Rand's heroes (which she does at numerous points throughout Mean Girl, it's pretty disgusting).

When she bothers to discuss Rand's nonfiction writings, she does the following:

It's evident that she didn't bother to go through Rand's 'Objectivist Newsletter/The Objectivist/Ayn Rand Letter' collections, but rather only the anthologized books.

Now, she shows familiarity with at least the first essay in For the New Intellectual (1961), but also in FTNI are the speeches from her novels introduced by explicit discussions of their themes, which as I've said Duggan neglects to show any deep familiarity with.  (Ask Rand-bashers what the theme of Atlas Shrugged is, without cheating, and they'd never properly guess it in a million years.  I know this from experience.)

When she discusses The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) anthology, the one essay she discusses is the "Racism" one.  Duggan used this as an opportunity to bring up in the usual smeary Rand-basher ways Rand's supposed views on "the erasure on indigenous peoples, restriction on immigration from more 'primitive' parts of the world, and the persistence of sharp racial inequality in the 'private' economic and social spheres [as] part and parcel of her system of rational morality, even as she opposed state-imposed racial (and sex) discrimination."  Actually, an honest scholar discussing what is part and parcel of Rand's system of rational morality would at the very least make mention of the general points of the lead essay in The Virtue of Selfishness, "The Objectivist Ethics."

The same vice marks her treatment of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967).  Instead of demonstrating real and serious familiarity with the lead essay, "What is Capitalism?", she focuses instead (for a short paragraph) on the essay "The Wreckage of the Consensus," only to mention  Rand's positive reference to Reagan's speech nominating Goldwater in '64 "as a promising new direction for electoral politics - a new direction her influence helped to shape."  Big whoop.  What's really the meat and bones is what's in the lead essay.  For one thing, Rand gives her definition of capitalism there.  Duggan doesn't mention this definition anywhere, although she provides her own in the Glossary.

If all the laziness and sloppiness weren't in evidence enough, her discussion of The Romantic Manifesto (1969/1971), a work one might reasonably think is crucial to grasping Rand's literary aesthetic, is all of one sentence.

This is growing tiresome.  It's all too obvious that Duggan doesn't possess the intellectual/philosophical wherewithal to provide an insightful analysis of Rand's philosophy.  She leaves out way too many crucial sources that would shed a positive light on, and foster understanding of, Rand.  The length of the book is all of about 100 pages, and many topics are covered all to briefly to provide much if any useful information for serious inquirers.  A book accomplishing that task would have to be considerably longer than this, and there are already numerous books on Rand out there that provide way more value than this one does.  If there were constraints on publishing length limiting this to 100 or so pages, on that basis alone it is perhaps better that it not be published at all.  Or, if one were to assign Rand to a scholar in some academic 'Brief Introductions' series without butchering the subject, I can think of many - even relatively mediocre ones - who are way more qualified than Duggan.  No serious expert on Rand's thought can possibly think this book meets even minimum quality standards.  The dishonest title, if nothing else, is a dead giveaway that it's nothing more than a hatchet-job rather than a minimally decent attempt at being fair, objective, enlightening, or anything of the sort.  Its only use is as a foil case contra serious Rand scholarship and a lesson in how not to be taken seriously (which is the only point in going through the trouble of making this post).  I'll link again to another post demonstrating what high-quality Rand scholarship looks like.

In this post I haven't done much to show what Duggan actually does say about Rand in Mean Girl, but I've already discussed the gist of that in the post linked at the beginning of this one, and there's plenty there to show just how shoddy her work is - along with that second link revealing the level of intellectual and moral character behind this work.  Along with fundamental dishonesty, her other main character flaw, along with so many other leftists and "progressives," is hubris.

I'm going to close by removing any possible remaining doubts about Duggan's honesty and credibility.  The key context of Duggan's hatchet-job is that, like most Rand-bashers, and most of the very worst and nastiest of them, she is a leftist/anti-capitalist.  The very same dishonest tactics these creatures use to recklessly attack and smear Rand are used likewise to attack and smear capitalism.  If the following isn't the last nail in the coffin as far as Duggan's (and their) credibility goes, I don't know what is.

In the preface, Duggan asserts (as does the typical nasty leftist) that "From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal [i.e., more or less capitalist] politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world.  The political climate Ayn Rand celebrated - the reign of brutal capitalism - intensified."  Now, aside from the rather ludicrous claim that Rand's philosophy in its actual neo-Aristotelian essentials has even so much as come close to exerting its proper neo-Aristotelian influence on the culture (as in, what actually would take place if everyone absorbed and practiced the principles espoused in Galt's speech and OPAR), the factual claim about expanding global inequality is false and can only be the product of a reckless and willful ignorance of the data.

The only serious question remaining at this point is how someone like Duggan and her ilk (this includes all the ignorant fools - willing if not eager dupes - who positively blurbed this trash) could have ended up with the positions in the academy that they occupy, filling publications and student's heads with garbage.  It is precisely because of entities like these that the academy has taken the widely-loathed, ever-leftward and therefore ever-inbred and pro-dishonesty path of recent years.  Upon comprehensive exposure of their blatant dishonesty, I recommend sardonic ridicule as the next appropriate course of action.  Is it really too much to ask that these creeps clean up their act?

What quality Rand scholarship looks like

I've just had the pleasure of reading the first chapter of Volume Three of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies Series, Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand's Political Philosophy (2019).  It is by Darryl Wright (one of the members of the Society's steering committee), and is titled, "The Place of the Non-Initiation of Force Principle in Ayn Rand's Philosophy."  It is available as a free sample at the book's website.

(Polemical paragraph...)
It puts all the Rand-bashing hackery ranging from sloppy to reckless out there in a very different light.  Rand-bashing (as distinct from fair and honest criticism, which I anticipate in the later chapters of this book; the bashing basically characterizes Rand as a cruel hack herself who appeals only to pimply adolescents) is all blatantly dishonest, every last bit of it, and every Rand-basher qua such, without exception, is a blankety-blank lowlife.  Here is just one recent example of it at reddit's badphilosophy subreddit, a forum which purports to highlight and ridicule the myriad examples of usually-amateurish thinkers and ideas falling afoul of respectable and serious philosophical practice (supposedly Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are egregious offenders in addition to Rand).  The blankety-blanks at the askphilosophy and main philosophy (sic) subreddits are little better when it comes to Rand.  (Reddit as a whole is toxic/leftist/structurally dishonest in its political aspect; its upvote/downvote model - itself structurally dishonest - is a lower-pleasure-indulging popularity contest rather than a truth-seeking mechanism.) There is no excusing said behavior given all the scholarship that's been available for decades now from professional philosophers/scholars demonstrating that Rand can be understood adequately by competent and careful interpreters, and the bashers will be judged accordingly in the eyes of history.  They have obstructed progress on the wider consideration of crucial neo-Aristotelian philosophical themes (as are in evidence in Wright's article, Den Uyl and Rasmussen's work, Tara Smith's book, Sciabarra's work, etc.).  Speaking of which, Volume Four of the Society's series, in preparation, is specifically focused on Rand's comparative relation to Aristotle, the man whom no one but philosophically ignorant STEM-lords and whatnot dare to bash (and whom, as the man said of his teacher Plato, not even the wicked have the right to praise).

One of the virtues of Wright's article is to situate Rand's thought within certain themes and controversies in philosophy as they've been traditionally approached.  It is particularly memorable how Wright masterfully summarizes (and it is only a summary or condensation) Rand's epistemology or theory of proper cognitive functioning - which, as any serious student of Objectivism knows, makes fundamental reference to the role of hierarchy and context in knowledge-formation.  I like his reference not just to concept-formation but concept-maintenance, an active ongoing process that incorporates new information.  It had always struck me as a bit odd how Rand and Objectivists would speak of the formation part without explicitly referencing the maintenance part.  Bashers might say that this is an example of Objectivists' being sloppy and incomplete, but the Objectivists (most of them, usually) are implicitly if not explicitly intellectual perfectionists doing the best with what time and resources they've got, no thanks to the so-called professional mainstream.

An example of where Wright ties themes in Objectivism to 'mainstream' disputes occurs on p. 38, footnote 26, where he brings up the familiar notion of observation being "theory-laden."  He ties this to the 'Objectivism-speak' about the "prior context of general knowledge that guides the assimilation of the evidence."  Another fine example of Wrights tying-in of themes is his characterization of Rand's concept of knowledge as awareness (Rand uses the phrase "mental grasp") as distinct from 'justified true belief.'  I remember back in the day (the previous century most likely, probably on Jimmy Wales' MDOP) first being introduced to the interpretation of Rand's conception of knowledge as awareness, and it had always struck me as very plausible or correct given the difficulties that arise with the traditional 'justified true belief' formulations.  It strikes me as one point on which epistemologists might take a helpful cue from Rand/Objectivists/Peikoff.  (Wright more than once references lecture 1 of Peikoff's Induction in Physics and Philosophy course, a lecture which also made a favorable impression on me.)

Wright raises an example of an item of genuine knowledge as follows:

"A concept classifies together a potentially unlimited class of the referents to which it applies, and an inductive generalization similarly purports to identify the attributes of or relations among an unlimited set of particular instances. For instance, a statement such as “The human body absorbs vitamin D from sunlight” condenses a wide body of (ultimately perceptual) evidence and applies to an unlimited number of cases past, present, and future." (p. 35)

“The human body absorbs vitamin D from sunlight” is as incontrovertible an item of knowledge as any, which should tell you right off that skeptics are in the weeds and shouldn't be taken seriously.  The only issue of real concern is the how for arriving at/validating such an item of knowledge, which is a yuuuuge topic but . . . well, to apply the principle of induction here I'm going to go to the Series page at UPitt Press's website, click on the Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology (2013) link, go down to the sample link at the same location I found the Wright piece's sample link at the Foundations of a Free Society link, and voila, Gotthelf's article, "Ayn Rand’s Theory of Concepts: Rethinking Abstraction and Essence."  See?  Induction works.

One word to note in Wright's paragraph above - one that caught my attention when Peikoff used it in one of the early lectures of his Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand course - is the word "condenses."  What conceptual knowledge/awareness does is to condense the vast range of perceptual observations/awareness, with higher-order abstractions or also what Rand terms abstraction from abstraction, condensing the more rudimentary concepts into broader classifications and ultimately into organized theories or sciences or episteme.  This condensation-function of concepts is referenced directly by Rand with her discussion of unit-economy.  I apply the principle of unit-economy a lot in my postings when I provide contextualizing hyperlinks so that all the content doesn't have to be reproduced in one blog post (since blog posts can get long enough as it is...).  They serve more as a file-folder (using Rand's imagery) to reference as the need arises.  (It helps to organize one's mental contents really well, in order to make the recall function that much more useful/effective.)  It's a very nice principle to have induced and to apply, since contextualization of bold and controversial-sounding claims (e.g., Rand-bashers qua such invariably are scum) is fucking great.

It should be pointed out that Wright's article situates Rand's principle of the non-initiation of force within her broader philosophical theory, i.e., it contextualizes it for purposes of what follows in the book.  The whole point of Rand's having formulated an epistemological theory (explicated in fuller detail in Peikoff's works, most importantly OPAR) is a practical one: in order for a human being to flourish most effectively, the human must exercise the conceptual/knowing faculty most effectively, for which the human requires a systematic guide for operating, i.e., for organizing mental contents.
This has something to do with the principle of dialectic, what Sciabarra identifies in fundamental terms as the art of context keeping, which has fundamentally to do with mental integration, which fundamentally guides the principle of the wikipedia hyperlinking format as I'm sure Wales was well aware of.  I mean, heck, Wales' introduction to Objectivism was the Lexicon.  Note also that Rand's description of the fundamentality of philosophy in human cognition is exactly-correctly reflected in the hierarchical fundamentality of philosophy in wikipedia's hyperlink structure.  So to recap: Wales induces an organizing principle from the Lexicon, applies it to the now-widely-used wikipedia, proves Rand right about philosophy's fundamentality, and the Rand-bashers have what to stand on, exactly?  Zilch.  Well, they do have a point (by accident) about her polemics (most notably her Kant ones), but they're way bigger offenders themselves in that regard, so they still lose.

As one might have induced from the above, the above organizes and condenses a lot of principles into a few paragraphs, buttressed by the presumptively-knowledge-expanding function of internet hyperlinking.  (In the internet age, what's the Rand-bashers' excuse, or the excuse for blatantly ignorant opinion-formation generally?)  The perfectionistic/perfective condensing habit takes cultivation and effort to form and maintain, and that effort is one of focusing one's mind, and it is this act of focus that is the irreducible fundamental element of human volition or free will.  As I'm sure Wright explains in full detail in his next chapter in Foundations for a Free Society, "Force and the Mind," and as Peikoff explains in detail in lecture 8 ("The Evil of the Initiation of Force") of his Objectivism Through Induction course, physical force is antithetical to this volitional knowledge-formation-and-maintenance process.

Force is the partly or wholly successful attempt to substitute the free and independent judgment of a person's mind/intellect with someone else's, and that is antithetical to the cognitive requirement of objectivity, i.e., of the necessary processing of mental contents for knowledge and decision-making in the service of one's life/flourishing.  (Rand introduces this point in the language of objectivity or of the objective/intrinsic/subjective triad in her essay, "What is Capitalism?" of which no one has even attempted a rebuttal in 50+ years, it's that definitive and final in the essentials.)  Rand uses the term "physical force" to emphasize that it is a physical action that severs the relation between the victim's (free) thoughts and (coerced) actions - the closest thing to an actual real-world duality or opposition between the mental and the physical, if you will.  See also my recent posting, "The core libertarian principle explained" for more.

To wrap up: now that this post has provided a flavor of what quality, clue-having Rand scholarship and Randian method looks like, we can safely flush the willfully clueless Rand-bashers down the toilet and safely give serious Rand scholars the attention and consideration they (and Rand) deserve.  (2019's other "scholarly," university-published (yikes) Rand book, leftist scumbag Lisa Duggan's Mean Girl, provides the definitive contrast case, right down to the blatantly dishonest smear that is its title.  [The gullible ignoramuses in the comments section of a new video with Scumbag Duggan, in which they slime and smear Rand as a sociopath and her admirers as gullible ignoramuses, without showing the least bit of effort at rudimentary fairness and mutual/empathetic understanding - it's like they go out of their way and bend over backwards not to make such an effort - should take a good, hard look at themselves.])  Both the (abnormal) bashers and the (normal) critics tend to say things about how Rand just isn't rigorous or systematic enough in her writings to be taken seriously as a philosopher (or as a world-historically great or important philosopher at least on the level of, say, a Rousseau or a Marx if not a Spinoza or Nietzsche), but the case of Wright and others shows that anyone who studies the relevant materials carefully can identify and explain the rigor and systematicity in Rand's thought.

[Addendum: I've mentioned/link a number of Peikoff's courses but the one that any serious student or reputable scholar of Objectivism needs to be familiar with, just on the basis of its name alone if nothing else, is his Understanding Objectivism one (also in book form).]

[Addendum #2: re Rand's anti-Kant polemics referenced above (and again now), I will at some point address what appears to be an unacceptable part of the ethical theory as he presented it - though not really a part of neo-Kantian ethical theories I've been exposed to, just as with his infamous argument against lying to protect the innocent from a prospective murderer (as distinct from a duly contextualized virtue of honesty that rationally compels taking deceptive measures to protect the innocent from the murderously wicked). What would be unacceptable is that Kant appears to hold the view that continuing life in an indefinitely miserable state rather than committing suicide is the morally preferable option.  That's what Rand gleans from the one passage of his that she ever quotes at any length (from the Groundwork, and which is contained in her "Kant" Lexicon entry just again linked - "It is a duty to preserve one's life..."), about the man who is miserable but continues on out of a sense of duty.  Alternative and perhaps overly charitable readings of the passage are that he's merely applying the otherwise helpful inclination/duty distinction ("duty" meaning the morally obligatory recognized by the actor as such, grounded in Kant's theory in the Categorical Imperative(s) [about which Rand is unacceptably silent all the while she bashes him]).  The Aristotelian virtuous person/character is one for whom virtuous action and desire are harmoniously integrated, where (employing Susan Wolf's terminology as applied to life's meaning) subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness (or perhaps the noble or fine or kalos).  Why not say that remaining alive but miserable, or truth-tellingly exposing the innocent to the murderously wicked, is to treat one's own or the innocent's humanity merely as a means to a theoretical abstraction?  Or, is Kantian ethical method (re: e.g., respecting humanity as an end-in-itself) an empty formalism as some critics have claimed, unless supplemented or contextualized by things other ethical theories consider important?  [Note: I need to study Parfit's impressive-looking synthesis of Kantian with other ethical theories, although a maximally impressive theory would incorporate virtue ethics, of which Aristotle is the most prominent/influential exponent.]  That being said, see my "Core libertarian principle explained" link where principles widely recognized as 'Kantian' or 'deontological' are employed, although in a context that's foundationally Aristotelian/eudaimonist.  [General note about standards for effective polemics, especially philosophical ones: They should follow those Dennett/Rapoport Rules as a matter of habit, which implies that characterization of X should rise to the standard of what seasoned scholars of X accept as accurate (which is how so many anti-Rand polemics can be dismissed from the get-go; the proper standard there might be, "Would Darryl Wright or other Ayn Rand Society scholars or Leonard Peikoff take it seriously?"), and they should be done at enough length to uproot all the assumptions that lead to a complex theory worth polemicizing against.  I've pointed to Mises' polemics against Marxism/DiaMat as an example of how to do polemics, and while they meet the length requirement, I'll have to look at how his characterizations hold up after I go through the high-paywalled Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx published last year.  But he is quoting directly from Marx's condensation/summary statement of historical materialism in the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy....]]

Maverick Philosopher on Peikoff on the Supernatural

Maverick Philosopher (Bill Vallicella; hereafter MP) goes after Peikoff on pretty much the same topic about which he's gone after Rand/Objectivism/Peikoff before.  (I've discussed MP's take on Rand before, and there's even plenty of GOP-bashing in that link just in case anyone was wondering whether I reserve my political bashings for Demo rats.)  The topic - and MP's area of specialization/expertise on which he has published extensively - is theology (and metaphysics).

I'll try not to repeat what I've said in my earlier discussion linked above.  I'll point out, if I haven't already, that it wasn't Rand/Peikoff's views on metaphysics that brought me to enthusiasm about Objectivism.  In specific branches of philosophy my interest in Rand is stimulated most in aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy, and in epistemology with special emphasis on matters of method.  It's these matters of method that are covered most extensively in Peikoff's courses, in particular Understanding Objectivism (1983), The Art of Thinking (1992), and Objectivism Through Induction (1998).  The topic of God is hardly discussed at all in these courses, so surely his points of emphasis/focus are elsewhere.  His Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (or OPAR [1991], which is quoted by MP, and which faithfully represents what can be found at the Ayn Rand Lexicon, all the material in which is vetted by Rand herself even if OPAR is not).  By Rand's own attestation (e.g., pp. 666-7 of Letters of Ayn Rand), Peikoff is eminently qualified to teach about her ideas, and it is these above-mentioned "advanced" courses in Objectivism that the actual, flesh-and-blood, longtime students of Objectivism have been immersed in for decades, and of which Rand-bashers are wholly ignorant.  (Let's just say that these long-time students are not on the same page with the Rand-bashers about a whole lot of things Rand and Objectivism, including especially the fundamentality of cognitive and philosophical method to "living as an Objectivist.")

MP makes criticisms of the passage from OPAR about the that are entirely understandable given Peikoff's wording (and without further elaboration from Peikoff that might counter objections from theologians like MP).  MP goes on to say:

It is trivially true that there is nothing natural beyond nature, and nothing existent beyond existence.  But these trivialities do not supply anyone with a good reason to reject the supernatural. It is because of such shoddy reasoning as I have just exposed that most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously.  Objectivists should take this in a constructive way: if you want your ideas to gain wider acceptance, come up with better arguments for them.

"Most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously" is considerably toned down from previous MP postings on Rand/Peikoff.  Some years ago, it was "Rand is a hack."  Or, perhaps, "she argues like a hack."  Or, perhaps, "She argues like a hack on a subject about which I am an expert."  Or, perhaps, "philosophers don't take Rand seriously."  Now, it's "most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously."

I'm supposing that MP has toned down the belittling of Rand in no small part due to efforts by yours truly (through blog as well as non-blog means of communication) to show how and on what subjects she is being taken seriously by professional philosophers, including those without (well-known) pre-existing sympathies to Rand.  There are now three volumes from the Ayn Rand Society (not to be confused with the Ayn Rand Institute, as I've personally witnessed Rand-bashers ignorantly confuse the two) in which Objectivist professional philosophers debate non-Objectivists.  The latest volume, for instance, has (now UC-Boulder philosophy professor) Michael "Why I am Not an Objectivist" Huemer taking Rand seriously enough to devote some of his valuable time to covering (in spite of the proliferation of countless philosophy articles and books that no one human could read more than a fraction of, as he pointed out elsewhere).  There is an exchange between him and the supposedly "intolerant jerk" Harry Binswanger, on the anarchism-vs-government debate, a debate that orthodox Objectivists had supposedly treated as closed as of Rand's 1963 article, or supposedly ran away from upon encountering the subsequent arguments from Rothbard, David Friedman, the Tannehills, et al.  (One might note that none of the three aforementioned were professional philosophers.  It might also be noted that for many hardcore "students of Objectivism" such as myself, spending their time mentally "chewing" the Peikoff courses, the anarchism-vs-government debate isn't high priority unless or until the preconditions for a liberty-respecting society are in place, and that deeper issues of method are much higher priority for both that and for personal happiness.)

Another example that illustrates my point rather boldly is the way philosopher John Hospers approached Rand's ideas.  The place of Hospers in the "Rand and philosophy" timeline is discussed here.  I note there that: (1) Hospers was a well-respected member of his profession, including having served a term as president of the American Society of Aesthetics; (2) Rand's ethical ideas made a deep and lasting impression on him; (3) Rand basically converted him to libertarianism; (4) Hospers wrote a glowing tribute to Atlas Shrugged in 1977; (5) Hospers thought Rand's ideas serious enough that he encouraged her to publish her ideas in professional journals; (6) Hospers wrote a comprehensive guide to classical music listening (which I would have found more useful than I did had I not encountered classical music some years before discovering his guide), which by itself shows he's not exactly a lightweight on aesthetics; and last but not least, (7) in his aesthetics text, Understanding the Arts (1982), he quotes from Rand once, but the quotation pertains to the most central and fundamental of concepts in Rand's theory of art, sense of life.

Now, I can only (safely?) assume that had Hospers encountered some writer on art theory other than Rand who discussed sense of life, he would have mentioned or quoted them.  But sense-of-life appears to be a distinctively Randian contribution to understanding the nature of art.  So, is it Rand's or Hospers' fault that "most philosophers find it hard to take Rand's aesthetics seriously"?  AYFKM?  The best explanation I can think of here is that Rand's Romantic Manifesto is a grand work in aesthetics, the product of a lifetime of thought by a philosopher-artist, and that "most philosophers" have (for whatever reason) failed to recognize its merits.  (The first two chapters of The Romantic Manifesto are titled "Philosophy and Sense of Life" and "Art and Sense of Life," BTW.  The most advanced essay in that collection of essays is "Art and Cognition" from 1971....)

There are other examples which can be gleaned from my linked Rand-and-philosophy timeline.  In The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984), did editors and contributors "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen somehow do an inadequate job of showing how and where Rand should be taken seriously?  Their chapter on Rand's metaphysics, "Ayn Rand's Realism," shows what they take to be Rand's carrying on the Aristotelian torch.  Heck, Rasmussen is a Catholic philosopher and theologian, so if MP is looking for a conversation with a philosophically-trained Christian Rand-enthusiast on theological matters, he can contact Rasmussen and (probably) learn more about how or why, e.g., a Christian philosophy professor could also be a Rand-enthusiast.

Suppose, however, that Rand/Peikoff produce arguments about God that theologians or metaphysics experts find unimpressive, and one were to draw the conclusion that if such unimpressive arguments are the fruit of Objectivist method (in those courses the non-Objectivists much less the committed Rand-bashers know next to nothing about), then the method must not be all that impressive.  (See, I've anticipated a counter-point that MP might bring up.)  I've pointed out above about how these issues of method are key to Objectivist epistemology (and I take chapters 4 and 5 especially of OPAR to be distillations of the methodological subjects Peikoff covered in so many of his courses).  The concepts of context and hierarchy, especially, are central to Objectivist method.  And there's no guarantee that one will apply these methodological principles correctly in all areas, a point I made in my post about how to criticize Rand effectively.  Heck, one of my own takeaways from the constant admonitions from Peikoff about keeping context is that to engage in polemics or debate generally, one needs to establish a grasp of the opponent's context, which is to make every effort to characterize their positions as they would characterize the positions themselves.  (The Rapoport/Dennett Rules, in other words - rules flouted 100% of the time by Rand-bashers, BTW.)  And that's one big issue I take with Rand's philosophical polemics, as I've made well-known.  (I think her political polemics are spot-on; for instance, compare her treatment of the Comprachico "educators" with their most loyal [ideologically-inbred] spawn two generations onward in every left-dominated institution you look at.)

As to the bearing of Rand/Peikoff/Objectivist method on the subject of God and the supernatural, the connection isn't all that hard to draw, although I don't draw it in the realms of metaphysics/existence or theology, but in the realm of epistemology/knowledge.  They are hardcore anti-Platonist Aristotelians who base all knowledge, all context and all hierarchy on what first comes through the senses.  The notions of God and the supernatural - notions set over and against nature, to use Hegelian terminology - don't have a place in knowledge according to Rand/Peikoff.  There isn't an induction from the range of perceptual concretes that will get us to God (and Rand/Peikoff emphatically don't agree that the timber of humanity is irredeemably crooked...).  But I'll mention, again, that a neo-Aristotelian like Rasmussen surely has some different thoughts about that.  In the interests of engaging fully in the art of context-keeping, there should be rigorous back-and-forth between Objectivists and theologians (any neo-Aristotelian ones, especially) as and when personal contexts (interests, priorities) dictate.  Perhaps the Ayn Rand Society will get around to that.  In the meantime, their focus has been on ethics (Vol. 1 of the Society's Philosophical Studies series), epistemology (Vol. 2), and politics (Vol. 3).  The upcoming fourth volume is on the theme of "Ayn Rand and Aristotle," and that's the one I'm really anticipating very eagerly because, well, Aristotle isn't exactly a lightweight - along with Plato and Kant he has more SEP entries by far than the rest - and you have experts on both Rand and Aristotle, academic scholars no less, who think there is a high degree of similarity between these two thinkers.  A considerable number of these experts are pictured right there on the Ayn Rand Society website.  (The late Allan Gotthelf had the distinction of being both a leading scholar of Aristotle('s biology) and a long-time associate of Rand's.)  Past steering committee members not pictured/listed there include Douglas Rasmussen and Tara Smith.  And you can bet that Prof. Smith knows all about Rand's unique place in the (Aristotelian) virtue-ethical tradition which has seen a recent revival in academia.  (When Rand wrote "The Objectivist Ethics" in 1961 - presented at an academic symposium, BTW, probably with Hospers' encouragement - virtue ethics was hardly even a thing at the time, as ethics was dominated by Kantian and utilitarian schools of thought, along with non-biologically-based accounts of value or goodness.  Rand's theory is (and was presented as) a bold alternative to those schools of thought.  Nozick took up the Randian argument as late as 1971, only for the "Dougs" to show in 1978 how Nozick missed the Aristotelian character of Rand's argument.  See again the linked Rand and philosophy timeline for the links.  Is it that Rand's argument was spotty or shoddy and that trained academics like the Dougs had to step in to buttress the case?  Or does it go to show that some philosophers have identified things in Rand that other philosophers missed, and that those who have identified those things also happen to be strongly Aristotelian?  Gee, ya think?  How else does Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (2006) get written?)

As much of the preceding makes evident, my issue here isn't so much about the quality of this or that argument or conclusion but rather about how philosophical inquiry by trained practitioners should be conducted.  There are leads available to be pursued, and they're not exactly obscure or lightweight.  I haven't even mentioned the lead that is Sciabarra's exhaustively-researched work (including the university-press published Journal of Ayn Rand Studies of which he is lead editor).

Now what I would like to know is how, despite all the available non-obscure leads, there is still so much ignorance and hostility toward Rand/Objectivism out there.  The underlying problem there goes well beyond anything specifically Rand.  The problem hits home for someone like MP/Vallicella who finds there to be so much ignorant hostility toward theism in light of available philosophical theology (and he perceives Rand/Peikoff to be one source or instance of such).  It's a serious, huge, perhaps monumental problem to be overcome.  It is a problem which humanity on the whole has not yet developed a shape of consciousness (to wax Hegelian again) sufficient to overcome.  Perhaps humanity as a whole has missed the point of Plato's Republic all this time, in spite of the not-so-obscure lead in the form of philosopher-ruler Marcus Aurelius (to which no politician I know of today remotely compares).  But it is a problem I have been documenting exhaustively in this blog for diagnostic purposes.  The problem would be solved if a critical mass of humanity were to bring the art of dialectic to a high level.  And guess what: given the leads I've noticed, homed in on, and pursued, Rand's philosophy - and the Aristotelian tradition in general - has a particularly valuable role in providing the tools to practice dialectic at the highest level.  (Hegel and Aristotle, anyone?  Come on, already, ffs.  [I found out about this book in particular by searching multiple university library catalogs for books on Hegel, BTW.  It's available in e-format, even.  Insatiable curiosity carried to the highest level, anyone?])

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

Exhibit A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can't refute perfectivism. :-)

"Checkmate, asshole."

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

The internet, philosophy, and the future

What follows is a series of interconnected facts, observations, and extemporaneous thoughts about the long-term future and the internet's place in it all.  Heroes will be touted, villains exposed, internet culture analyzed, large-scaled trends identified, and what have you.  It's gonna be fun, because integration is fun. :-)

Where to begin . . . I'll start out with Noam Chomsky, who co-authored (with Edward S. Herman - I've never heard of him, either) his most well-known work, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).  Since that time - particularly since the early-to-mid-1990s - Chomsky's analysis has become less and less applicable to the mass media as they have evolved since that time.  The principal and most revolutionary mass medium to emerge in that time is, of course, the internet (a series of tubes; A.K.A. the internets).  I needn't go into the transformational effects of this medium on our culture just so far, even without the culture-wide recognition of philosophy as the prime mover of cultural and historical evolution; suffice to say it has been a game-changer in the mass-media dynamic.

The primary benefits of the internet have included: a decentralizing of information command-and-control; vastly increased user-control over the content they are exposed to (there are downsides to this in the epistemic-closure department...); vastly enhanced interconnection of people and integration of information and knowledge; vastly enhanced information search along with vastly enhanced ease and speed of access.  Those are at least some benefits that come to mind off the top of my head.  The convergence of forces to which all this will lead is inevitable and will be the primary driver of what I and some others term the approaching Cultural Singularity.  This Singularity is driven by advances in technological infrastructure (which ties into the Technological Singularity on the horizon that Ray Kurzweil, Stanley Kubrick (way back in the '60s!), and others have been talking about) and the social-media-generated power of memes (ideas) to alter the intellectual and cultural discourse in major and often unpredictable ways.  Chomsky himself recognized the new power of social media in the wake of the Occupy movement.

What has yet to be figured out by the vast majority of people - if they had figured it out already I wouldn't be needing to type any of this stuff - is that in terms of ideas and memes, philosophy is the prime mover.

(If you're too lazy or proudly ignorant to click on and read the links I provide for your edification, this is probably not the blog for you.  Go fucking read what Rand said about philosophy, which serves as part of the background for what I say here.  That's what internet links are for, goddammit: to integrate seemingly disparate collections of information and knowledge that much more quickly and efficiently.  Hell, you could read through the entirety of this blog and pretty much have all this shit figured out as much as I do; I'm not that special.  Now Aristotle and Rand: they were truly special, way ahead of their times.  The whole point is for everyone to become that special as a social norm, beginning with a program of education formulated in great part already by ancient visionaries like Plato and Aristotle.)

Now, what is some prima facie evidence readily available to today's internet user of philosophy's fundamental importance?  I'll mark as Exhibit A the Getting to Philosophy phenomenon on wikipedia.  A number of people who have learned about this phenomenon have gone, "whoa," like it was something out of left field or what have you.

I have to digress at this point and talk a little bit about wikipedia's main founder, Jimmy Wales ("Jimbo" to a number of long-time internet acquaintances and students of Objectivism).  For those of us old enough to remember these things, there was some webpage way back when, probably 15 years ago now, where prominent students of Objectivism described how they got into Rand.  Jimbo describes how he encountered a copy (non-digital, of course) of The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z (1986, compiled and edited by Harry Binswanger), and never turned back.  Would that it were so for everyone....

A little digression-within-a-digression: Students of Peikoff's lecture courses, especially Understanding Objectivism, but also such courses as the Advanced OPAR Seminars and The Art of Thinking, have "never come back" from Objectivism as a way of thinking and living.  A curious mind - and any aspiring author who wants to conduct a serious study of Objectivism - will want to know why that is so.  Well, click on that link there a few lines above and find out for yourselves for only a few bucks.  Serious students of Objectivism used to have to shell out hundreds of bucks for this stuff and, again, never looked back.  (Digression-within-digression-within-digression: The reason that you will not see any serious and credible book criticizing Objectivism in the future - ever - is that material such as Peikoff's lecture courses, not to mention the growing academic secondary literature on Objectivism, will have to serve as research material for any serious, honest, credible, and competent commentary on Rand and Objectivism.  Given how inexpensively all this material is available for now, there are no excuses for students, researchers and authors not to listen to and absorb this material - to actually understand Objectivism as Objectivism's founder herself did.  And they all will find that - as a variety of cognitive and ethical perfectivism - Objectivism is, like an axiom, as irrefutable as any (dynamic) Aristotelianism on the world-historical scene.  This is why selectively-reality-oriented scumbags like Leiter and his vile little cronies are fucked right in the reputational poopchute unless they mend their ways.  That's just the way it is; don't shoot the quasi-anonymous cuss-word-slinging messenger, now [you FUCKS].  (Digression-thrice-removed: My word search counts 94 instances of the f-word on the front page of this blog going back to Nov. 24.  Only 94???  I shall redouble my efforts!  Walter didn't watch his buddies die face down in the muck so that these fucks could waltz around the internet spreading their anti-Aristotelian hate.  95 "fucks" now.  96.))

Back to Jimbo: The method to the madness that went into creating the Lexicon is nothing new to serious long-time students of Objectivism: integration.  With that, there is a recognized hierarchy of knowledge   (a topic covered indepth in Understanding Objectivism and discussed in a segment of Chapter 4 of OPAR).  On top of this I'll make the observation that key concepts of methodology in Objectivism - integration, hierarchy, context, induction - are elements of a phenomenon known in more traditional terms as encyclopedic learning.  (I call it perfective learning.)  If you haven't drawn the connections already: Jimbo, an encyclopedic learner, found quite a home in the Lexicon, and later went on to found the leading encyclopedia on the internet, in which a "Getting to Philosophy" phenomenon is observed to be the norm, which is due unavoidably to the hierarchy of human knowledge.  Do you think this is all some kind of accident?  For some of us - especially those of us well-versed in the Randian Arts - this is all a no-brainer to figure out and comes as no surprise at all.  Philosophy is the most fundamental discipline with respect to the hierarchy of knowledge, the term-setter for all other fields of study, the integrator and uniter of all the disciplines, the primary, the fountainhead.  As Miss Rand puts it on p. 74 of ITOE:

If it should be asked, at this point: Who, then, is to keep order in the organization of man's conceptual vocabulary, suggest the changes or expansions of definitions, formulate the principles of cognition and the criteria of science, protect the objectivity of methods and of communications within and among the special sciences, and provide the guidelines for the integration of man's knowledge? -- the answer is: philosophy.  These, precisely, are the tasks of epistemology.  The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge.

(Question: why doesn't this appear in the Lexicon under the Philosophy entry?  Evidently the Lexicon needs further perfecting!)

To this I'll add the observation that Jimbo has advanced the cause of objective integration of human knowledge quite admirably; it helps to have a good philosophy informing one's habits and decisions, dunnit?  It's also an incontrovertible fact that Jimbo is perfectly normal - not some brain-numbed cultist the Leiters of the world wished would define Rand's avid readership - and a highly successful leader in business and culture.  He's the kind of person that the New Society of Reason can and ought to be modeled upon; all it takes is a sensible, not-excruciatingly-difficult-to-implement program of citizen education.

/digression

[As I'm a little tired now, I'll finish this posting later; I've given the curious and observant reader enough to chew on as it is, and all beyond any shadow of dispute at that.  And, yes, /r/philosophy (and, by implication, the contemporary Philosophy Profession) will be getting the Wednesday ass-fucking it's been begging for. :-D ]

To continue:

In The Psychology of Self-Esteem (1969), Nathaniel Branden wrote:

A man of self-esteem and sovereign consciousness deals with reality, with nature, with an objective universe of facts; he holds his mind as his tool of survival and develops his ability to think.  But the pscyho-epistemological dependent lives not in a universe of facts, but in a universe of people; people, not facts, are his reality; people, not reason, are his tool of survival.  It is on them that his consciousness must focus; reality is reality-as-perceived-by-them; it is they who he must understand or please or placate or deceive or maneuver or manipulate or obey.  It is his success at this task that becomes the gauge of his efficacy - of his competence at living. ... The temporary dimunition of his anxiety, which the approval of others offers him, is his substitute for self-esteem.  This is the phenomenon that I designate as "Social Metaphysics." ... Social metaphysics is the psychological syndrome that characterizes a person who holds the minds of other men, not objective reality, as his ultimate psycho-epistemological frame of reference.  (Mass-market paperpack, p. 179-80; original Branden article, "Social Metaphysics," appeared in the Nov. 1962 *Objectivist Newsletter*.)

So what does this have to do with anything I've been talking about?  Well, since every cognitive unit is interconnected with every other one: everything, of course.  Social metaphysics pervades - sometimes subtly, sometimes quite openly - so many aspects of human societies today that it would make Socrates and Aristotle fucking puke given the millennia humans have had to get their act together since their time.  What is even worse, even more disgusting, even more disgraceful, is when social metaphysics infiltrates and corrupts the world of philosophy.  Reddit's /r/philosophy subreddit is a microcosm of this deplorable phenomenon.

In the emerging age of social media, there are tools that people need in order to hone in on their likes and filter out their dislikes.  The Facebook "like" button is one such thing.  It aids people in organizing their mental and online content.  This sounds really nice in theory, but in practice - and when it comes to philosophy above all - no panacea has been achieved and none will be achieved given prevailing social-media formats.

The feature on reddit whereby users anonymously and unaccountably vote up or vote down content is the Achilles Heel of /r/philosophy.  It utterly destroys any defensible pretense to fairness, honesty, objectivity and related values.  The very notion that philosophical discourse should be subject to the mob-rule of such an upvote/downvote format is obscene.  It doesn't even matter what the popular prevailing views are, be it capitalism or be it socialism, eudaimonism or utilitarianism, Aristotelianism or Zizekism.  The inescable fact is that when philosophical discourse (i.e., the appearance of such) operates in effect under mob-rule (also known as "the hivemind" [cringe]), the very integrity of the discourse is shat all upon.  This is social metaphysics in a most ugly manifestation; what receives readership and attention is what is popular, not necessarily (and usually not) what is right.  There is one word eminently applicable to this phenomenon: evil, i.e., opposed to the requirements of successful human living.

Social media sites are crucial to the future flowering of culture and society, via the propagation of memes that survive or perish in the marketplace of ideas.  Reddit is today's leading example of such a social medium, in terms of subscribership and exposure.  Given the cultural primacy of philosophy, /r/philosophy becomes a particularly crucial focal point (at least for the moment...) in this context.  Its number of subscribers recently surpassed the 100,000 mark - almost surely far exceeding any other philosophy forums on the internet.  Users who go to /r/philosophy seeking wisdom have a reasonable presumption that what they are exposed to reflects the integrity of philosophical discourse.  If it fails to reflect this, then this constitutes an unnecessary, tragic and unconscionable stunting and delaying of intellectual - and therefore cultural - progress.

As it happens - and probably not all that coincidentally - Ayn Rand and Objectivism are unpopular on reddit.  The usership there is well-known to be left-leaning.  Left-leaningness isn't a particularly troubling thing in itself; as long as people have a means of expressing their ideas on a level field of play, the better ideas have at least a chance to win out.  What destroys reddit as a propagator of true and rational intellectual memes is a leftward bias - a widely-enacted cognitive vice that has the effect of creating an atmosphere of epistemic closure.  For those of you who make fun of today's Right for its epistemic-closure tendencies, I submit that you haven't seen nothin' yet until you see the left-biased vileness that prevails on reddit's social-metaphysical/mob-rule discussion platform.  For those of you who think that closed-mindedness, willful ignorance and similar cognitive vices are exclusive or near-exclusive provinces of the Right, the Left is at least as capable of such.  What's so galling about this is the hypocrisy of it, seeing as how those on the Left tend to pride themselves so much on being fair and open-minded.  And it even goes all the way to the highest levels - university philosophy departments, academic "philosophy" blogs, etc. - and it is, at root, why so many people out in the real world don't take the academy seriously.

(I'll make this observation: left-liberals seem to be quite a bit better at being intellectually conscientious.  It is leftists - the kind of people who are attracted first and foremost to Marxism, and who in scary unison hysterically and ignorantly hate capitalism - that seem to behave in the scummiest ways and encourage similar behavior among their fellow leftists.  Not truth-seeking but politics seems to be a primary motivator of their M.O.  A further observation: these leftist scum seem to find a particular affinity with post-modernism and its countless post- offshoots.  Not even this stuff is taken seriously in the vast majority of university philosophy departments, and yet it does find its way into other departments of the Humanities, where leftist scum run rampant and ignorantly hate capitalism as if out of instinct.  Fuck 'em!  They richly deserve to be the first departments to have their funding cut in university-downsizing processes.)

Back to Rand and Objectivism, and their unpopularity on reddit.  The arbitrary, anonymous-cowardly downvoting of pro-Rand comments and threads on /r/philosophy is bad enough, before we even get to the issue of their not even understanding Objectivism.  People who understand Objectivism tend to overlap quite well with those who are familiar with Peikoff's lecture courses.  This doesn't register with the anonymous cowardly downvoters; what seems of central importance for these entities is that Rand advocated capitalism - and, as such, all manner of scummy behavior and injustice is permissible in their minds in order to stifle serious and honest debate about her ideas.  This phenomenon is quite wholly independent of who it is that advances pro-Rand arguments there, how nicely they advance them, how popular or unpopular they are, or how well-reasoned their arguments are.  No; this pathology goes deeper than that, and it's all-pervasive on reddit: the behavior is just as bad if not worse on /r/politics.  But any of this shit in /r/philosophy is already well beyond the pale by definition for reasons I gave above, which makes it oodles more pathological in a philosophy forum than anywhere else.  These people are in the wrong or in a state of ignorance and yet no effective mechanism exists for those who actually understand Objectivism to correct them with as much exposure to readers/subscribers as the Rand-hating comments have.  I mean, this situation - just like the unconscionable and indefensible Drug War - is fucking ridiculous.

A great part of reddit's usership is young people, many of them college-age.  Many of them come onto reddit thinking that social-metaphysical mob-rule is acceptable if not the norm.  How do so many young people come to absorb and adopt such a mentality?  Moreover, how do college-age people come to accept it?  Shouldn't higher standards of behavior be inculcated in them, if not from an early age, then at least by the time they are in college?  Are their professors - most importantly, the philosophy professors - doing much if anything to encourage cognitive virtue and discourage cognitive vice, so that they can understand this social-metaphysical epistemic chaos and insanity for what it is?  And why does Ayn Rand, in particular, elicit the worst of such pathologies?

I think these questions pretty much answer themselves at this point, no?  Individualism - i.e., intellectual, moral, and political independence - is all but ignored in the academic mainstream, after all.

What the various parties involved here need to do, as expeditiously as possible, is to get their fucking act together.  If they so much as neglect to dialogue with leading adherents of unpopular viewpoints, their long-term credibility is shot.  They will be seen as obstacles to, and not advocates of, a cultural renaissance in which all ideas are debated out in the open on a level field of play.  Aristotle wouldn't accept anything less.

I'd like to make a constructive recommendation here, one that would alleviate some of this pathology, and that is for reddit to adopt a format, for its intellectually-most-important subreddits, similar to that of Usenet.  Back in the days of Usenet, evasion and cowardice just did not and could not thrive, given the ways in which the format encouraged openness and accountability.  This is not to say that Usenet did not have its downsides, but they were quite manageable and tolerable in comparison to anonymous social-metaphysical cowards destroying the integrity of discourse by burying comments and threads they didn't like.  In my experience, the Usenet group humanities.philosophy.objectivism embodied pretty much what internet discourse could and should be (at least given certain unfortunate imperfections at the time in the way people conducted themselves).  Since that time (the 1990s), the format of internet discourse has arguably devolved, fracturing into scattered web-based forums and eventuating in such realms of social "discourse" as Twitter and the dead-end format (for integral intellectual discourse, that is) that is currently reddit's.  On h.p.o., a moderator had the job of doing very light patrolling, primarily for spam; otherwise, people could say whatever the hell they wanted with the only repercussion being that they might end up in someone else's killfile-filter.  (Is there any fucking reason such a filter-mechanism couldn't be made available to reddit users, in place of an unaccountable, social-metaphysical upvote/downvote feature?)  I would not be surprised if, in its heyday - the late '90s, roughly - h.p.o. was home to the highest-caliber discussion on Usenet.  That shit just kinda naturally happens when perfectivist philosophy is the subject of the forum, and especially when the forum participants understand said philosophy (as opposed to parroting what malicious third-rate hit-piece writers on scummy leftist websites assert about Rand and her ideas, and getting upvoted into greater reader-visibility for doing so).

Whatever it is, /r/philosophy is not philosophy in a truly integral sense of that term, just as being selectively reality-oriented does not make a person integrally virtuous in character.  It is a bastardization of philosophy, a form of false advertising.  It is manifestly and (because readily avoidable) unconscionably pathological.  Evasion of this problem by the relevant actors can and will (of course!) only exacerbate the problem.

As I'm not here to do your thinking for you, I'll leave it to you, reader, to tie all these points together and act accordingly.  I've got other shit to do, after all.  (103 days and counting down till the shit hits the fan, or intellectual and cultural renaissance is underway....)