A Big, Fat Anti-Euphemism

Ayn Rand was an expert at identifying and diagnosing the myriad techniques of intellectual sloppiness and evasion used by enemies of the American way of life, i.e., of reason, individualism and capitalism.

These techniques include (but are by no means limited to): package-dealing, smuggling in premises, stealing concepts, purveying anti-concepts, hurling ill-defined approximations, dropping context, equivocating, and weasel-wording.

One such occasion of expert Randian diagnosis occurs in a little-cited article, "How to Read (and Not to Write)" in a 1972 issue of The Ayn Rand Letter (reprinted in The Voice of Reason [1989]). There, Rand addresses a charge made against individualist ideas like hers time and time again, viz., that they promote "atomism." Rand breaks down a New York Times editorial, which stated that "this country cannot go back to the highly atomistic, competitive model of the early nineteenth century," as follows:

If a euphemism is an inoffensive way of identifying an offensive fact, then "highly atomistic, competitive model" is an anti-euphemism, i.e., an offensive way of identifying an inoffensive (or great and noble) fact -- in this case, capitalism. "Competitive" is a definition by non-essentials; "atomistic" is worse. Capitalism involves competition as one of its proper consequences, not as its essential or defining attribute. "Atomistic" is usually meant to imply "scattered, broken up, distintegrated." Capitalism is the system that made productive cooperation possible among men, on a large scale - a voluntary cooperation that raised everyone's standard of living - as the nineteenth century has demonstrated. So "atomism" is an anti-euphemism, standing for "free, independent, individualistic." If the editorial's sentence were intended to be fully understood, it would read: "this country cannot go back to the free, individualistic, private property system of capitalism." (Voice of Reason, p. 131)

(The chickens' homecoming, as far as any last shred of intellectual credibility in NYT editorials are concerned, has been dissected by Greenwald. The NYT euphemized torture so that the Bush Administration didn't have to, torture - usually a last-ditch, pathologically-agnostic, no-absolutes, panic-ridden attempt to force a mind - being the naked-essential end-of-the-line for a pragmatist ethos.)

I'd like to identify a massive anti-euphemism that has been perpetrated on this country, much to its long-term detriment. And that is the identification of the American ethos of "commonsense practicality" with pragmatism (either little-p or big-P).

This didn't happen overnight and the corruptions involved have hardly been made explicit much less manifest to the American people. America's implicit founding philosophy - groped toward by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine - was Aristotelian through and through. Rand is the only 20th-century American thinker to have made this fully explicit.

The fundamental difference one needs to know between Aristotelianism and Pragmatism has to do with their respective stands on the Law of Identity and the Primacy of Existence. Aristotelianism affirms Rand's statement that "Existence is identity; consciousness is identification." Pragmatism systematically undercuts this axiomatic principle.

Since Pragmatism understands truth in terms of "what works" rather than in terms of correspondence to an independent, term-setting, causal reality with its own definite identity, it fails right on its face to represent "common sense," whereas Aristotelianism clearly does not so fail. What's more, an Aristotelian primacy-of-existence approach recognizes the ontological primacy involved: something works in virtue of being properly in accord with reality. Pragmatism dispenses with any such talk as being "metaphysics" with no "cash value." But getting this right is fundamental to getting it right about the nature of existence and humans' relationship to existence, which includes having a philosophy that fully and adequately addresses the independent-fact-integrative requirements of our conceptual nature.

Before Aristotle's complete works were translated into English in the early 20th century and before Ayn Rand's arrival on the scene - before America had had the opportunity to become a philosophical behemoth as a complement to its becoming a political and economic behemoth - its budding intellectual class, consisting first and foremost of the Pragmatists, had to cobble together the "best" of the philosophical ideas out there (again, in the absence of Aristotle). It must be kept in mind that inasmuch as people had heard of Aristotle, it was in terms of non-essentials - for instance, that his biology had been overturned by Darwin, or that his universal teleology was outmoded, or that the Church had canonized him into a dogma, or (among those less intellectually out-of-it) that he was being invoked by Hegel and Marx as a forerunner to modern "dialectics."

(Throw into this whole mix the rise of modern psychology: by the mid-20th century, many of the most adept minds were preoccupied by matters of psychology rather than philosophy - see Nathaniel Branden, Stanley Kubrick, David L. Norton. It's probably not at all accidental that people who developed like these three did were also all born right around 1930. An intellectually-minded person reaching college age ca. 1950s is more likely to be reading a lot of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Maslow, and Fromm, than to be reading Aristotle or Rand. Only a highly-unusual instance - namely, Branden - would have feet in both these worlds. What's more, young idealists aren't going to be interested much in reading middling, cynicism-breeding Pragmatist philosophy, and anyone who bothers to delve into philosophy around this time is going to be assaulted by positivism and existentialism. Given this default by the philosophers, one can hardly blame a perfective artist like Kubrick for being much more psychology-focused than philosophy-focused. This of course only reinforces Miss Rand's point about the inescapable power of philosophy to affect a culture for good or bad, be it through influence or default. Oh, and ain't integration fun?)

No, Aristotle was pretty much a non-factor on the intellectual scene at the height of the Pragmatist movement. Instead, the chief influences were Hume and Kant, and if you want the non-identity, non-primacy-of-existence version of doing philosophy (complete with - get this - an atomistic, homo-economicus conception of the empirical-natural person!), you get it in full force with these two. In this fundamental respect, Hume and Kant share essential premises that only an Aristotelian approach can answer. In more specific terms, Hume and Kant both agreed that you could not get the concept of causal necessity from experience. From there, it's a matter of preference whether you go the Humean route of giving up on finding such an account, or the Kantian route of assigning to necessity a subject-dependent ("a priori") status.

On this point, I think Peikoff and Rand may have misidentified just how strongly "Kantian" the Pragmatists were, because I see them much more as Humean. What is the "cash value," after all, of Kant's whole categorical scheme? As a primacy-of-consciousness view - hence the purported subjectivity of the category of necessity - Kant's view is still a metaphysical one of sorts. (If you want another anti-euphemism in connection with this, how about the identification of Kant's critique of Rationalist metaphysics with a critique of metaphysics as such. Just imagine the thousandfold-multiplied disasters that might proceed from that kind of imperfect lumping-together. For evidence of the cashing-in there, see post-modernism.) Hume, to his commonsensical credit, makes no pretense to overturning empty metaphysics and replacing it with a primacy-of-consciousness one. In this, the Pragmatists are much more akin to Hume. It's Hume's philosophy, his whole approach, which sets the terms for everything to follow. The Pragmatists were too "common sense" to go with Kant's (metaphysical) subjectivism over Hume's (epistemological) subjectivism, which - unfortunately for the Pragmatists - still devolves into skepticism. (Again, see post-modernism for the final dead-end of a Humean influence.)

In the mind of the pragmatism-bred mainstream American now, philosophy is associated with skepticism - with questions without answers. That, of course, isn't practically workable, so the average American "rationally" rejects the study of philosophy as a waste of time. ("Rationally," that is, in the morally-vacuous sense used by social scientists who just don't know better, while their cognitively-Humean counterparts in the philosophy departments never told them otherwise. Certainly it's not "rationally" in the sense used by Rand or Henry Veatch. [From Hume: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions," and "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." This, today's philosophical Establishment considers a formidable thing to have to respond to - and is ill-equipped to do so as things currently stand.])

The important thing which only a few astute intellectuals grasp at this time, is that Aristotle and Rand have Hume and the Pragmatists checkmated/trumped on Law-of-Identity and Primacy-of-Existence grounds, just like Aristotle had all the ancient skeptics and proto-pragmatists checkmated (in addition to having been more dialectically comprehensive-completist-perfectivist than was his otherwise beloved teacher, Plato - and having become the father of inductive Western science in the process). Rand's primary-of-existence terminology is her way of more effectively phrasing the fundamental essence of classical commonsense realism. American-style commonsense would dictate adopting the comprehensive/perfectivist style of an Aristotle or Rand over the disintegrative style of Hume and the Pragmatists. What's more, there's a lot more cash-value in adopting the former over the latter.

Relative to the implicit neo-Aristotelian philosophy of America's founding, Pragmatism represents a regression, and the chief force undermining what made this country great. By having Hume as the "best" to fall back on in the tradition, America has never really declared an intellectual independence from Britain (or British notions of common sense). The Intellectual Establishment here is so very Humean (that is, non-Aristotelian) in basic cognitive style and many of its leading practitioners don't even seem to be aware of it. (That's why I'm here to point this out.) It's quite undeniable, actually: had they been more Aristotelian in basic cognitive style, the Establishment leaders would have acknowledged the deep similarity of cognitive style between the venerated Aristotle and the snidely dismissed Rand. Absent Aristotelianism and Randism, these children of Hume are reduced to increasingly-complex acts of squaring circles: see, for instance, the various ingenious but non-Aristotelian attempts to get around Hume's "is-ought" distinction, attempts which serve no useful purpose to the community at large but which can make for exhaustive publication or dissertation material. And that's not the only thing the Intellectual Establishment is way out-of-touch about.

Pragmatism breeds staleness, conformity, mediocrity, stagnation, weakness, and cowardice. (And so much anti-euphemism-spouting, soul-killing cynicism!) For abundant real-world evidence of this, see the state of America today. For Rand's expert, naked-essentials, theoretical analysis of all that's wrong with Pragmatism as against Aristotelianism, see Peter Keating as contrasted (spiritually) with Howard Roark, or Mr. Thompson as contrasted (intellectually, morally and metaphysically) with John Galt.

The Long-Term Trend

Analysis of historical causation is a difficult undertaking, and I can't offer anything close to a complete or fully-formed analysis here, but I think that when I write about something on this blog, I've probably given the subject enough thought to say something useful. So here goes.

First off, I'm confining this post to the subject of America's historical trends. Second, I'm very highly optimistic for this country's future. I think that the intellectual advancement this country desperately needs is only a matter of time. The existence of the internet just on its own pretty much ensures it, especially when resources like the Ayn Rand Lexicon and the collection of articles and essays, video and audio, and the Ayn Rand multimedia archive at the ARI website are made freely available. It's only a matter of time before a growing number of up-and-coming intellectuals discover the treasure trove of wisdom contained just in these resources alone, providing an effective counterweight to the rampant anti-intellectualism encountered on "infotainment" sites (e.g., YouTube). It's nice to see the ARI adapt to the information needs of young intellectuals in the internet age. The Lexicon, especially, being made available online serves as a marvelous corrective to the ridiculous, out-of-context, dis-integrative distortions of Rand's ideas that have floated around out there for way too long; the distorters simply cannot get away with that shit any longer and maintain a semblance of intellectual credibility.

Third, I'm certain beyond a reasonable doubt that Ayn Rand's ideas are the most effective vehicle we have today for advancing Aristotelianism (in the broad sense) in the contemporary world. This is not wishful thinking, fawning devotion, or anything of the sort, but a sober observation of reality. There's just no way that the parallels between Aristotle's systematizing empiricism and Ayn Rand's can go unnoticed, ignored, evaded, etc. for much longer. Certainly the Intellectual Class has the least excuse for continuing its policy of base, ignoble and vicious intellectual laziness (born of a pathological disregard of the capitalist ethos) in this area. The better intellectuals are waking up and getting with the program.

Fourth, my expectations of the future are conditioned by my understanding of past trends leading up to this point. Here's where the (again, incomplete) analysis of this country's historical trends begins.

In 1961, Miss Rand gave a lecture at the Ford Hall Forum, entitled "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age." As evidence of her thesis, I offer the fact that no other intellectual figure was remotely close to presenting the ethical positions she presented in a paper that same year, "The Objectivist Ethics." The fact is that (almost?) no one was presenting the robust neo-Aristotelian voice for America, in 1961, aside from Ayn Rand. Certainly no well-recognized public figure was doing so. The leading voices for "conservatism" at the time, Buckley and Goldwater, don't even compare.

In 1961, America was a year away from the Cuban Missile Crisis. The young people of today - especially the products of the intellectual hellholes known as the public schools - have almost no frame of reference for understanding what led to that crisis, assuming they could even tell you what it was (which is doubtful). The only concrete they know that might be in the same ballpark is 9/11. Otherwise, it's like a distant memory in our nation's consciousness. A nation beat into concrete-boundedness by its leading influential philosophies doesn't grasp things long-term, as distinct from a range-of-the moment mentality which observes a stream of ever-new concretes with no rational policy of integration to identify their nature or a wider pattern.

The insanity exemplified by the Cuban Missile Crisis, then, perhaps can't be communicated to today's intellectually-dysfunctional mainstream. Hell, the underlying nature of it probably couldn't be identified or communicated even back then, except by You-Know-Who. But people did experience the insanity first-hand, most concretely, urgently, and terrifyingly. What many observers at the time (or now) did not know, was that the crisis was an illustration of the power of ideas. The dominant ideology of the age, after all, was Marxism. Rand experienced first-hand the effects of Marxist ideology implemented fully and consistently, knew the principle involved, and watched as America floundered - intellectually bankrupt - in the face of this massive evil. It's amazing she managed through the insane intellectual vacuum of the time as well as she did.

At least Marxism is defunct and discredited now, in 2011, which helps feed my optimism for America's future intellectual and existential growth.

But is America any less intellectually bankrupt now than it was in 1961? Has the dominant mainstream mentality in America changed fundamentally in the last 50 years? True, the stage is much better set for a Randian-style intellectual revolution than it was 50 years ago - for one thing, there are a lot more people who think like Rand now than 50 years ago - but what's the present intellectual state of America as a whole? If you took our current crop of politicians, media figures, leading Ivy League academics, corporatists and the rest of the Washington Establishment, and placed them into the same situation President Kennedy faced in 1962, would they be just as ideologically helpless as he was? I think they would be. I think this is ample reason to think that - thus far - Miss Rand's ideas have actually had next to zero impact on policymaking in Washington (the ignorant shrieks of leftist scum notwithstanding).

Presidents Kennedy and Obama both exemplify the ethos of the cultural elites (in this sorry excuse for a culture): Pragmatism. The same pressure-group warfare and pull-peddling, which is an inevitable byproduct of cultural pragmatism, is characteristic of Washington now just as much as it was in 1961. The same "military-industrial complex" the outgoing president warned of in January of that year is still well in place, determining the country's direction. This is what happens when ideas are cynically forsaken for short-term advantage.

A major difference, now, is that the country is on the hook for the ultimate effects of its long-term course to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars. Call it the Chickens' Homecoming if you like. Combine tens of trillions in fiscal obligations coming due with rampant anti-intellectualism and cynicism, and you get the state of things in America today.

If there is an account-overdrawn "end of the line" for pragmatism, this is it.

Put that way, the nation is arguably as intellectually bankrupt as it was in 1961.

This is hardly surprising if we take a long-term outlook on things. Given the nation's intellectual course over the past half-century, why should it be any different? The nation's Intellectual Class is defaulting now just as much as it was then. The Comprachicos are fucking up the minds of the young as much as ever. The country's politics are as devoid of ideas as ever. If one didn't know the actual long-term cause of our situation, one might despair of our country's situation and maybe even give up on this country's future. Some folks are doing just that.

But what got me interested in writing this post was the question: when did this country reach an absolute low-point intellectually? Given the "lag time" between the ideas formulated by the philosophers and their existential effects on a culture, could things have gotten even worse at some point between 1961's "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age" and now? If a nation's intellectual course is like a supertanker, then even the heroic efforts of an Ayn Rand can only do so much to arrest a slide toward oblivion. There's intellectual bankruptcy, and then there's INTELLECTUAL BANKRUPTCY. I think that if we actually did have the latter, we'd be doomed as a nation. A nation cannot survive if it has reached the capital-letters stage of intellectual bankruptcy.

This kind of analysis inevitably leads to creative imagination of counterfactual scenarios. Namely: what would this country's existential state be like now were it not for Ayn Rand? Let's say that young Alyssa Rosenbaum was murdered by the rabid Marxists back in Russia before she could get out. Who might possibly pick up the slack in this country? Among 20th-century intellectuals, who comes close to the qualities of mind and spirit exhibited by Ayn Rand? Who among them could possibly be compared to Aristotle as an intellectual, an Atlas that could effectively carry America forward on her shoulders? Without The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and all the rest, just how much of a gutter would we be in? Would someone step up to fill the void?

We will never know, given free will, but if we were to use the pro-capitalist intellectuals aside from Rand - led by Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard, and Nozick - as our signposts, what would we have today? For one thing, given the power of philosophy over economics, I think Rothbard and Nozick would, in this counterfactual world, be more prominent and influential than they actually are, given their philosophical bent. Rothbard's wide-ranging scholarship would still have led him to the "natural law" tradition, but he was an economist by training and profession and as such I don't think he would have come close to making the identifications in ethics and epistemology that Rand did, and therefore - given the primacy of philosophy to the course of a culture - Rothbard simply would not have provided the intellectual defense for capitalism we need. Nozick for his part would have done pretty much the same thing in the absence of Rand, and I don't see any evidence that he was Aristotelian enough to provide the intellectual defense we need, either. Hayek's defense of capitalism liberalism inasmuch as he put on a philosophical hat was downright insipid compared to Rand's. By the nature of non-insipidness and radicalism as a source of appeal to intellectuals who seek integration, a combination of Mises and Rothbard would probably be the most prominent defense of capitalism on offer in Rand's absence. That is to say, the defense would be primarily economic, with some middling philosophy thrown in.

That is to say, going forward from 2011, the counterfactual-America's course in absence of Ayn Rand's ideas and influence would probably not be pretty. There'd still be that tens of trillions of fiscal obligations coming due, rampant anti-intellectualism, an ever-entrenched out-of-touch Intellectual Class . . . and intellectual bankruptcy with no end in sight, no ideas to save us from potential ruin. The progress of Aristotelianism in the academy is happening too slowly; Aristotle's mainstream-assigned stature as one of the "Big Three" simply doesn't do justice to his actual Atlas-like stature. Too many folks miss the point about Aristotle as it is. And who knows how many more young intellectuals would be sucked in by Nietzsche and existentialism in Rand's absence....

So, back to the question raised earlier: was there a lowest point between 1961 and now? If you imagine being able to plot our intellectual course on a graph and draw a trend-curve, where does it hit the lowest gutter-point? Was there an "end of the line" we might be able to point to, the point where the chickens had most definitely come home to roost?

I'm thinking that things bottomed out for the country sometime between 1960 and 1980. There was the Cuban Missile Crisis, then Vietnam and the draft, then the Great Society programs, then the intellectually-bankrupt counter-culture which ran its course quickly soon enough, then Nixon and his wage-and-price controls, then the Democrats jumping into the gutter with McGovern, then Watergate, then Carter and his stagflation and malaise and lust in his heart and the Iran hostage crisis and detente with the Soviets. As much as Rand hated Reagan, he did appear to provide a welcome relief to all that, with his tax cuts and presidential change of tune toward the Commie bastards, while Rand's Reagan-related fears on the abortion front never materialized. This is far from saying that Reagan was some kind of panacea, much less by political standards, but starting with Reagan the country was showing some improvement for the better. Keep in mind that a nation's politicians are only a symptom, not a cause.

Culturally and politically, the era of the Nixon presidency pretty much did it for Rand. The atmosphere of the time made Rand too discouraged to continue cultural commentary via her newsletters. She remarked quite clearly during the 1970s that the culture had sunk too low to be worth commenting on regularly, and while she couldn't stand Reagan, she did note that the country did appear to be taking a promising turn to the Right. Something was changing for the better in the late 1970s. If I had to name some kind of lowest gutter-point, the trough on the trend-curve, it was probably the period from Watergate to the Carter presidency.

Now, one thing to note in this connection is Rand's observation that while the country was taking a turn to the Right starting in the mid-'70s, the Intellectuals were stuck in a McGovernite mentality, and that never before was the chasm between the Intellectuals and the American people so obvious. I'd say that this condition has pretty much held up ever since.

If there was a cashing-in, a chickens' homecoming, a gutter-point in the nation's intellectual condition, I'd have to say it was concretized by John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). The lasting prominence of this work among the nation's Intellectuals means basically a 40-year-and-counting gutter as far as that goes. The American people don't want, don't need, and don't care about A Theory of Justice. They haven't bought into the confiscate-and-redistribute ethos at its core. They're not interested in being told they are being unjust for not following its prescriptions to "correct for the contingencies of nature" through coercive confiscation and redistribution. They're not interested in McGovernism. If this be intellectualism, then the American people deserve at least some credit for being anti-intellectual. There's only so much fucking insanity flowing from the Ivory Tower that they can put up with. There's only so much bullshit rationalistic contrivance to justify un-American redistributive policies that they can handle. Absent a commonsensical Aristotelian alternative, you can't really blame Americans for their pragmatic rejection of the Intellectuals.

Once again, compare the Original Position getting its own whole entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia, with the truly fucking disgusting neglect of individualism there.

("[The intellectuals] are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social groups.")

I can hardly blame Miss Rand for her disgusted reaction ("An Untitled Letter") to the arrival of A Theory of Justice on the scene. Her "Untitled Letter" was by no means scholarly, but the author of "This is John Galt Speaking" had little patience for dignifying basically the same shit she already dispensed with quite adequately in her novels. In a big way it's a sense-of-life thing, whether one finds either individualistic achievement or coercive confiscation desirable and ennobling. How else do you expect someone with Rand's sense of life to react to Rawls's concept of justice? Does it really matter how nice a guy Rawls may have been, or how appealing his arguments are to academics, when none of it would get past John Galt's bullshit detectors?

I mean, if Rawls and Galt were ever to actually get into a dialogue, how does Galt not trounce and/or convert Rawls? Hell, just by getting people to adopt and absorb the ideas in Galt's radio address - namely, the encouragement to use one's mind to the fullest - the "Difference Principle" becomes a total irrelevancy. If Rawls's reputation means anything, he'd graciously concede this, repudiate A Theory of Justice, and jump on the Randian team to come on in for the big win. And that's how - short, short version - a neo-Aristotelian dialectic dispenses with and supersedes A Theory of Justice.

(This gets into another counterfactual analysis: if Rawls weren't so out-of-touch and got on the winning team early, and therefore never wrote A Theory of Justice, just how much sooner would we see the country advance to intellectual maturity? Just how much precious intellectual resources have been wasted due to A Theory of Justice throwing so many intellectuals off the scent? Just how much sooner would a Rand-Norton synthesis have happened? Just how much sooner would the professional Humanities gotten its act together? (For that matter, how much sooner would the intellectual revolution have happened had Nathaniel Branden not been so dishonest to Rand and to all his readers regarding their '68 break?))

So, to sum up: the long-term, large-scale trend over the last 50 years in America appears to have been dominated by a pragmatic non-intellectualism in combination with an out-of-touch intellectual class, with little cultural improvement on net over that time, with a trough sometime in the 1970s, and the stage much more well set for future improvement than it was 50 years ago, due to the effects of education over time and accompanying generational shift. Things are, at long last, actually looking bright! :-)

Apologizing for Profits

A pragmatism-eaten apologist for capitalism might think this Chevron "We Agree" ad is genius:



Given the intellectual bankruptcy and cynicism of our media and political institutions, this is what qualifies as "marketing genius," and it's probably the best that can be done in such a context. Hey, look, we put our profits to good use! It serves the common good! Capitalism works! Here, listen to our enemies, whom we are providing a platform, and we agree with them!

Of course, Ayn Rand would throw a shit-fit if she saw this advertisement, and she'd be spot-on right, as usual.

Need I go on?

Animals and Fetuses in a High-Tech Future

Are Peter Singer and other leading animal-rights ethicists not being progressive and forward-thinking enough about human fetuses? The main gist a casual observer gets from Singer & Co. is that animals deserve strong moral consideration in virtue of being sentient, but that human fetuses, not being sentient or advanced in development, are not and needn't be accorded strong moral consideration as against "a woman's right to choose." The first position (about animals) is pretty radical by today's standards (and I'm highly sympathetic to say the least, despite not being an ethical utilitarian), but the latter position (about fetuses) is pretty mainstream today.

The course of Western history has included, over extended periods of time, progressive "reading-in" of classes of morally-significant beings to more full-fledged consideration or membership in the moral community. We have seen in America, by progressive stages, the abolition of legal slavery, then suffrage for women, then the Civil Rights movement of the '60s, the transformation of the traditional family model starting in the '60s toward greater independence for women (hence the current not-very-fetus-friendly laws), and, most recently, the eminently sensible push for marriage equality regardless of one's choice of consenting adult partner.

Animals currently have some protections under the law against behavior we might vaguely (in moral terms, independent of whatever non-vague language of the law) refer to as "needlessly cruel." Fetuses begin seeing legal protections only after the first trimester of pregnancy. Both of these represent about the most effective pragmatic compromise we might expect under present law given prevailing widespread moral attitudes. We are well short of the expectations of the radicals who seek a greater measure of equality under the law for animals and fetuses, respectively.

The opposition raised between the pragmatic mainstream and the radicals is an opposition between a supposedly "considered and wise" course and a supposedly "morally enlightened" one. The "morally enlightened" argument is that, in history, previously marginalized or discriminated-against classes of morally-relevant human beings ended up winning equal respect under the law, and certain already-existing morally-relevant features is the reason their equality was eventually recognized. It takes a progressive, forward-looking, enlightened mindset to identify these morally-relevant features and then to work to knock down the unreasonable, retrograde mindsets that keep these features from being recognized. At least that's a take on it that the radicals would endorse.

The pragmatic mindset, meanwhile, notices how upsetting to a stable order radical change can be, and so resists these overnight pushes toward an ideal. The current system works well enough; it is not so obviously broken that it needs to be overthrown in one fell swoop. Just look at what happened to Soviet Russia when that was tried.

This pragmatic-idealist opposition (a false dichotomy a Perfectivist doesn't accept) is well-presented and explained in Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. Sowell's distinction, which essentially lines up with this one, is between the "constrained" and the "unconstrained" vision of human beings.

Anyway, what leads me to this is posting is my thinking about what a technologically-advanced future would look like in regard to the legal protections of animals and fetuses. I do this because I think that the current resistance to radicalism on these subjects is borne not of willful moral blindness necessarily, but definitely a certain moral blind spot engendered by the pragmatic mindset. Both sides ("pragmatic" and "idealist") fall into faulty diagnoses and rationale. But focusing on the problem with pragmatism for a moment: it inhibits visionary thinking, the ability to even creatively explore and challenge the structural weaknesses of the present paradigm. It also results in a tendency toward skepticism, subjectivism, and relativism.

One thing pragmatism is noted for is the skepticism about universal and eternal "categories" that might somehow impress themselves upon us if only we just look and see. That attitude is actually a reaction in the opposite direction from Platonism and "metaphysics" (the investigation of "ultimate reality" as logically prior to the fleeting and ephemeral experience). This notion hardly seems new in the history of philosophy - it comes up in various sects of lesser philosophers in ancient Greece, e.g., the Skeptics and the Cynics - but it is the prevailing, dominant "sense of life" and mindset in America, or at least was half a century ago.

(How many effing times did Rand quote a weak, wishy-washy, or villainous character in Atlas saying, "We've got to be practical--" and stopping, like it needs no further explanation, other than that one shouldn't stand on principle? She was reporting on the state of reality at the time. Rand wasn't alone in this, by the way; Mises once got up at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin society and informed the appeasers and compromisers there that they were all socialists. How impractical! Trump card: By what standard do we regard something as practical? What was Roark's standard of the practical? Would selling out his principles be practical according to his sense of self and standard of value? Notice who the Pragmatist in The Fountainhead is. Actually, there are two of them. One is a mediocrity, the other a slave to the whims of the mob.)

Since half a century ago, Randism has become a cultural force and Aristotelianism has been (slowly but surely) emerging triumphant in the academy. One thing about Aristotelianism (in the broad sense, not Aristotle's own conclusions per se) is that it doesn't succumb to criticism. It just doesn't. Just as the sophists, skeptics, and cynics couldn't hold a candle to Aristotle back then, so American-style pragmatism can't hold a candle to Aristotelianism 2,300 years later. The opposition to Plato-style eternal categories doesn't apply to Aristotelianism, and also falls apart in the face of Aristotelianism. An Aristotelian framework does speak in terms of natural laws within the context of a realist systematizing empiricism.

Here's the different ways pragmatism and Aristotelian respond, respectively, to the present gaps between human knowledge and natural laws in their entirety: Pragmatism dispenses with the notion of "natural law," because, all said and done, there is no "cash value" to be had in the idea of natural law over and above observed regularity. The Aristotelian response is to simply ascribe the gap to the limitations of our knowledge at any given time, and that present ignorance about natural laws does not mean there aren't any or that we can't speak meaningfully about them. Rand takes this analysis to its extreme: denying natural law is effectively tantamount to committing the fallacy of the stolen concept, or perhaps even more strongly, to denying that existence has primacy over consciousness (i.e., to denying that consciousness is identification of already-existing facts, regularities, etc.). Or, perhaps even stronger yet, we could invoke the principle of Affirmation through Denial: inasmuch as we do philosophy well, we're thinking as perfectively, i.e., as comprehensively as to subject matter as Aristotle did, like Rand did.

Now, as to animals and fetuses. I anticipate changes in the law in the future regarding the treatment of animals and fetuses because of changes in technology. In regard to animals, for instance, we will eventually be able to synthesize meat without having to use animals in the process. Food would be assembled in large labs or factories, etc. Likewise, technology will exist in the future that would enable embryos to be removed from the mother's body and stored safely. And the law would mandate that because of the unique potentialities for self-actualized personhood that exist in principle within each embryo. It would be a crime, morally, to dispense of that potentiality it can be saved safely and with little cost. (A technological trump card here would be more completely effective contraceptive practices, so that the inconveniences of unwanted pregnancy don't even become an issue.)

Now, to envision this kind of futuristic scenario requires some thinking-outside-the-box that pragmatism doesn't deal in and doesn't regard as practical. To the pragmatist, we have to deal with the here-and-now, and here and now people get significant enjoyment from eating animals. Hey, it seems to work well enough (despite the tendencies toward bad health that the recently-emerging eating habits have been creating). What's more, the pragmatist doesn't really get into the business of challenging the base and ignoble rationalizations people will offer for eating factory-farmed meat. To call those rationalizations "base and ignoble" is to presuppose a standard that the pragmatist won't endorse. But they are rationalizations born of a blindness or ignorance (whether it's willful blindness or ignorance depends on the individual case). The self-serving rationalizations one is likely to hear are creepily similar to the self-serving rationalizations people would offer at various times for slavery, the subjugation of women, racial discrimination, marriage discrimination, etc. And the pragmatist has no answer to them, because "We have to be practical--"

Let's not mistake something here: the present situation of cruelty to animals and relative indifference to fetuses ("zygotes aren't people/citizens/etc.") is the result of a pragmatic mentality, just like slavery, subjugation, etc. in previous eras were. The Founding Fathers did espouse natural rights, but to get a new country going, they had to pragmatically compromise on slavery. This is not to say that this didn't constitute an improvement over things prior to the founding of the United States. But it is to say that they were willing to "go along and get along" with an evil (under natural law) because that's the best they could do at the time. It would seem that the history of legal rights is a history of the greatest deal of human and/or animal dignity consistent with economic feasibility.

But to deny that there are natural rights is, while the cashing-in (if you will) of Pragmatism, it is opposed to the ideals upon which this country was founded. And when the last century in America was dominated by Pragmatism rather than Aristotelianism, that provides a very compelling explanation for a widespread resistance to Ayn Rand's idealism. (An explanation with much . . . cash value, wouldn't you say?) But if Americans do have a good understanding of their country's founding roots, and if they do understand therefore the value and practicality of idealism, then they're quite ripe and ready for an Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Randian-Perfectivist program of idealistic education and therefore of a revolution for the better.

With that period of a new Enlightenment, a Second Renaissance, people just wouldn't get away with peddling the open irrationalities we see all over the place; they would be called out and refuted way more resoundingly and effectively than they are now. (This includes capitalism-bashing Comprachicos with top-flight professorships.) This also means that self-serving rationalizations, pragmatic compromises, and the like, would be discredited and rejected that much more quickly. Then, just like with slavery, women's subjugation, etc., people will look back on the treatment of animals and realize just how ignorant, self-serving, and economic-feasibility-based the previous generations' "moral" reasoning was, given the absolute facts of the matter.

. . . and that's why I've adopted Perfectivism. :-)

[ADDENDUM: I've mentioned it before, but it bears mentioning again: Pragmatism encourages dis-integration. How do you best judge the merit of a philosopher? By how extremely, how radically, how emphatically, how heroically the philosopher stresses the systematic integration of knowledge in accordance with the absolute requirements of our conceptual mode of consciousness. Pragmatism is disqualified from the get-go. And that's why America is floundering at the moment. What America needs is a realist philosophy to support its "common sense" ethos - realist metaphysics, systematizing-empirical epistemology, eudaemonist ethics, benevolent individualist social ethics, capitalist political economy, Romantic aesthetics. "Let your mind and your love of existence decide."]

[ADDENDUM #2: By "self-serving rationalization" above I mean, of course, rationalization which serves a current self that is not a fully-actualized self, i.e., the self as it might be and ought to be.]

Glenn Greenwald (and Ayn Rand) vs. Evasion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, back to composing....

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

America: A Dumbed-Down Plutocracy?

The Left and the Right are all about constructing narratives targeted toward certain segments of the population. The Left tend to be more self-aware about this; after all, that's where I get the phrase "constructing narratives." The Right usually aren't that bright. Their constructed narrative, after all, is that American Decline is attributable to increasing secularism - "turning away from God." Now, that's a really stupid narrative-construction right there. I'm not sure it's more stupid, though, than the Left's constructed narrative - in effect, that American Decline is attributable to a dumbing-down to serve the interests of a corporatist oligarchy-plutocracy.

The Left's narratives are a holdover from another religious viewpoint - Marxism. It's about as anti-reality an ideological narrative as whatever spews forth from the Right. Anyone with anything resembling a sound understanding of economics is quite familiar with the ideas of Mises and Hayek on the benefits of the private property, i.e., capitalistic order, while the Marxian-inspired ideas are against the Mises-Hayek understanding of things. So if you apply the neo-Marxian analyses to the current state of America - with its demonstrably-ill-informed public and corporate ownership of politics - you end up with the theory that this is an outcome of the capitalistic order. More wealth accumulates in fewer hands, which in turn fuels more pro-wealthy policies at the expense of the populace, who are further dumbed-down in the process, etc. This stuff is very cliche' and could fit right on a napkin just like the Laffer Curve (which is a truism, actually, while Marxism in its various guises is pure shit).

The basic reason we have what we have in America today is that people are often very pragmatic: they go with what they think is the best available to them, all things considered. The current set-up we have now, is what we have because that's what the American people have chosen. They do realize in a pretty clear-cut way that the current state of things is pretty lousy; they have a commonsense "instinct" that the politicians are totally cynical and aren't squaring with them; they have a commonsense understanding that their government has done things in their name that are not too admirable; they have a commonsense perception that they are indeed ill-informed but what can they really do about it? What better alternatives are there, anyway? In a country with a mixed culture - a product, fundamentally, of mixed premises - the best results you can expect will be mixed.

If, however, Americans were shown a viable alternative that's clearly better than the status quo, then there's hope for this country after all. They just haven't been shown the better alternative yet. That better alternative does not, however, come enmeshed in left-wing narratives about a dumbed-down plutocracy that needs to "go Euro" to save itself. Rather, it comes enmeshed in a neo-Aristotelian respect for reason at perfectionistic levels. That means not fucking up a commonsense understanding of what capitalism, i.e., the private property order, is all about. It means abandoning the various retarded (usually Marx-inspired) notions that capitalism is, in effect, zero-sum and exploitative. It means actually embracing the capitalist ethos, while recognizing what it takes, intellectually, on the whole, to do so - again, a neo-Aristotelian respect for reason at perfectionistic levels, which entails enhanced cognitive (and therefore economic) efficiency. Americans do want to think critically; they have the intimation that doing so would greatly enhance their flourishing; they just need a guidebook of some sorts that they haven't yet gotten....

(Next on my radar: the Right's obvious narrative failures - fundamentally, a disrespect for the intellect and reason, purportedly in the name of spiritual enrichment.)

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. ;-) ]

Obama: Weak

The tax cut extension was a good idea, but Obama's rationale and rhetoric are quite telling. No one forced his hand on this, but he caved on his campaign pledges and (ridiculously) likened the GOP leadership to hostage-takers with whom he wouldn't negotiate . . . unless . . . always an "unless" with this guy . . . unless refusing to negotiate would bring harm to the hostage.

Great. Wonderful way to telegraph weakness to the Terrorists, innit?

[ADDENDUM: I guess strength in the Obama paradigm, when it comes to the Terrorists, is to continue the Cheney-era lawbreaking. If he wants to equate strength with cheating - this is what our political system today has come to, isn't it - he should just say so.]

[ADDENDUM #2: Ever the Machiavellian mentality, Obama played politics on these tax cut extensions. He waited for the November election returns before deciding on the issue. In the 2008 primaries, he told his left-wing DailyKos/reddit/ThinkProgress/Soros base what it wanted to hear, and now he screws them over. All the while, Obama's Machiavellianism seems to go over really well on the increasingly boring, short-term-oriented, small-fry-focused Daily Dish - an insidious effect of adopting a Hayekian over a Randian paradigm. WEAK!]

The Lesson of the Peikoff-Kelley Split, Cont'd

Following up yesterday's posting, I want to take up the issue of David Kelley's strategy of "working with" libertarians to achieve libertarian and/or Objectivist goals. This strategy reveals a fundamental failure to grasp the Objectivist view on philosophical hierarchy, and in ways Peter Schwartz's incompetent attack on the "libertarian movement" failed to capture.

I made reference in yesterday's posting to one-time Atlas Society Executive Director Ed Hudgins' totally lame op-eds. Hudgins came over to the Atlas Society from the CATO Institute, and those two organizations have intertwined over the years. Now, here's the issue: what does Objectivism-advocacy have to gain from Objectivists hobnobbing with libertarian groups? What, exactly, has Kelley's alliance with CATO produced to help advance the spread of Objectivism? More fundamentally, what could he gain on the Objectivism-advocacy front with this strategy? What crucially important ideas do organizations like CATO offer for Objectivists? What's the goal, and what has been accomplished?

An alliance between a primarily Objectivist organization and a primarily libertarian organization offers nothing of use to the Objectivist one. I mean, isn't it obviously so? The American discourse is up to its neck in pragmatic policy analysis, which is what CATO in all its glory specializes in. This isn't to downplay the useful aspects of such policy analysis in the discourse. But we've been awash in policy analysis with libertarian or capitalist implications for decades on end. What good has it all done? The mainstream is still way suspicious of capitalism and laissez-faire and individualism. Doesn't this suggest that this isn't a question of there being enough economics education, but rather not enough philosophical education?

This begs the question: just what were Kelley & Co. doing, devoting their precious intellectual resources to aligning with libertarian organizations in their advocacy-strategy? Not only has that strategy not accomplished much of anything given the empirical record, it couldn't accomplish anything. You don't even need Kelleyite pragmatic experimentation along such lines to test this true hypothesis. Why? Because of the philosophical hierarchy. (Duh.)

I'll quote Objectivism's founder on this point:

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. (For a definition of reason, see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Reason in epistemology leads to egoism in ethics, which leads to capitalism in politics.

(For further amplification of reason in its full meaning, see Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism and other courses.)

Now, it's self-evidently obvious that had Kelley understood this point, he wouldn't be substituting a fight for reason with a fight for the same thing libertarian groups are already fighting for. Rand recognized the primacy of ethics over politics and of epistemology over ethics. In terms of epistemology - i.e., cognitive methodology - Peikoff has done a shit-ton more of value in the time since Rand's death than Kelley has. Peikoff did work of greater philosophical fundamentality with his work on induction alone. Perhaps it's no coincidence that as Kelley spent more and more time courting libertarians, on a level of lesser philosophical fundamentality, his grasp of the principles of greater fundamentality atrophied, culminating in his evasion on the Branden matter?

Well-versed students of Objectivism are well aware of how abstract principles of greater fundamentality are broader reaching in their practical effects. When Rand looked at the American political scene, she recognized that a moral revolution was needed to restore America to its founding roots, as policy analysis provides only facts, not values. And she asked, further, what preconditions were necessary to bring about the moral revolution. To do that, she looked at things the way a true philosopher is supposed to: at the greatest level of fundamentality applicable. The fundamental is reason, which is adherence to reality by means of logical integration; the pursuit of happiness and the freedom to exercise one's mind are derivative of that fundamental.

Rand gave up on aligning with the many conservatives and libertarians of her day, given the fundamental differences between what they were fighting for and what she fought for. The absolutism, primacy and supremacy of reason was her chief concern. What is Kelley's?

[Hint: at the core of a sound understanding of Objectivism is knowing how to apply the Rule of Fundamentality on any given issue. Rand was a fucking master at it (leaving aside her polemics). A much more fundamental goal than educating people about libertarian policy analysis is educating people on how to master the Rule of Fundamentality as well as Rand did. Since this is an issue concerning the essence (i.e, the fundamentals) of sound cognition as such - an illustration of the very Rule in question - the implications in practice are going to be the most far- and wide-reaching. The basic reason there isn't laissez-faire in this country isn't primarily because people fail to grasp what's so great about freedom; that is merely a consequence. The underlying cause is people's inability to think properly. As we've seen, this malady of improper thinking strikes even (or is it especially?) intellectuals, with the greatest tragic effects in practice (again, given the Rule).]

The Lesson of the Peikoff-Kelley Split Today

If the last 20 years of the Objectivist movement tell us anything, it's the triumph of the Peikoff model over the Kelley model. This is not to say that the Peikoff model is correct in every way, but its superiority over the Kelley model is now no longer in any serious question - much like how even advocates of socialism like Robert Heilbroner eventually and graciously conceded to Ludwig von Mises.

Let's start with the endorsement Ayn Rand herself lent to Leonard Peikoff. His 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course is - superseding any and all presentations by the discredited Nathaniel Branden in particular - the only course on Rand's philosophy she herself authorized. In a general recommendation included in Letters of Ayn Rand, she described Dr. Peikoff as having a "superlative" understanding of her philosophy and ability to communicate it. This observation is borne out for normal listeners of such Peikoff audio courses as Understanding Objectivism and the advanced seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Let me cut to the chase of the thought that led me to post this rumination: David Kelley's version represents a mushy, pragmatist approach to Objectivism. It all seemed quite innocuous back then, in 1990, when he penned Truth and Toleration and spoke to some commonsense issues such as how not to judge people illicitly based only on ideas they espouse. The concern and issue that I think Peikoff and Kelley each in their own way addressed was the role of context in moral judgment. But Kelley would make these awkward formulations of Objectivist principles that you'd never in a million years see Ayn Rand making. The formulations sounded a little mushier, a little more accommodating to Objectivism's critics and opponents. We got these Rawls-sounding digressions about dialoguing and reconciling, a "forge an overlapping consensus" type of approach (hence the "libertarian outreach"), doing more of the give-and-take of discourse, and strange pragmatist language about "balancing acts."

If Ayn Rand taught us anything about philosophical integration, it's that small and subtle disintegrations are insidious to the integrity of the whole. This is the basic problem with pragmatism: once you start going into "compromise" mode, there's no end to it. This is the basic issue behind the "quality control" that Rand and Peikoff were always concerned about maintaining. It wasn't about enforcing agreement, but about keeping out mushiness. And that's what David Kelley symbolizes: mushiness.

As personages go, the Brandens are central to the difference in the respective courses charted by Peikoff and Kelley. It starts with the Brandens' bios/memoirs, Nathaniel's being the especially vicious, pathological, and dishonest one. The issue of Barbara Branden is a minor distraction relative to the issue of Nathaniel Branden. If you don't get it about Nathaniel Branden by now, there's something gone wrong. If there's anything that all the now-available evidence about his grossly immoral treatment of Ayn Rand (among others) shows, it's that he can't be trusted any further than he can be thrown. Anyone paying at least half attention could discern that the Rand-Branden schism wasn't about "a jealous woman scorned" but about gross immorality by someone posing as a spokesman for Objectivism. That's all it was about. Allen Blumenthal had figured that out, which is why he stuck by his 1968 pledge and left Kelley's Institute for Objectivist Studies when Branden was brought on there.

But let's just say - and there are reasonable bases for saying this - that the full scope and extent of Branden's immorality was not made publicly manifest until excerpts from Rand's journal were published in Jim Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics in 2005. The gist was Nathaniel Branden's dishonesty and betrayal of Objectivist principles, and Barbara Branden's complicity in that. Anyway, they lied convincingly to Rand for years, taking advantage of her goodwill, and then Branden continued to conceal the full scope and extent of his "psychology/sex problem sessions" with Rand in his Judgment Day/My Years With Ayn Rand, while laying out an open challenge for Rand's journals regarding the whole train wreck to be released. Well, they were released - and Branden was proven to be a way bigger liar than he had let on. (And not merely a liar. Brad Aisa once summed it up aptly: "Branden's a creep." He was revealed not to be a semi-helpless guy caught between a rock and a hard place, but a manipulative, narcissistic creep. In addition to being a liar.) The only rationally justifiable thing to do at that point was to be entirely disgusted at Nathaniel Branden and his monstrously unjust treatment of Rand.

Kelley's response to The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics was - let's cut the shit - an evasion. A downright cowardly refusal to face facts and accordingly. It was the "cashing in" of the initial mushiness taking hold and building. So, even after Branden was exposed as a total fraud and creep, up through his memoirs and beyond, he was still invited to present at the Objectivist Center's (the new name for the Institute for Objectivist Studies)
events. That's when the falling-out began. Lindsay Perigo couldn't stand the ever-insidious-and-expanding mushiness (a lack of what he called KASS, or a Kick-ASS sense of life), much less the outright cowardice on the Branden issue. Once Perigo left in disgust, the dominoes fell. Along the way, the Objectivist Center changed its name again, to the Atlas Society (Perigo affectionately dubbed it the "KASSless Society"), and quickly became irrelevant.

Today, the only Objectivism-advocacy organization doing serious work training the next generation of intellectuals is the Ayn Rand Institute. Kelley's brand of doing things is all but defunct.

There was a time that I found Kelley's sensibility more attractive. It hit home more for me as an aspiring academic philosopher. Kelley's idea of advancing Objectivism was to make advocacy more like the academic model of doing philosophy - with the inevitable consequence of repudiating Rand's "intolerant," non-scholarly approach to thinkers like Kant. (Pathological fixation on "scholarship" may well explain various problems within "the academic model." Rand's not being "a scholar" or "consensus-forger" in her mode of popular exposition is a question-begging excuse for the insular snobs to downplay or ignore her.) Indeed, for a period of time there in the 1990s, many of the best minds within the Objectivist movement were attracted to Kelley's organization. The case for ARI around this time was hurt severely by the presence and position of Peter Schwartz there. In addition to writing a disreputable and silly hatchet job on some non-existent he called "Libertarianism," he also cited Rand's authorship of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as good-enough proof of her character vis-a-vis the Brandens. (According to Atlas Shrugged, a morally-ideal person, Dagny, apparently-needlessly shoots a guard toward the end of the story. Is this to say Ayn Rand herself would do such a thing, or is this to say that Atlas Shrugged is subtly and insidiously flawed in mis-integrated kinds of ways?) Never mind that this settles no issue, epistemologically, when the disputants are Atlas Shrugged's author and dedicatee, respectively, a decade after the novel was written. One of them went corrupt, but which one? Long story short, the credibility of Peikoff and ARI suffer around this time due to the Schwartz MO.

I happen to be a rather unique case in that, even while drawn to the "academic model" around the mid- to late-1990s, I also listened to a good number of Peikoff audio courses. These courses provided little in the way of help for my graduate-school years in Philosophy - the paradigms are so at odds - but have proven to be saving graces and game-changers long-term. The essence of courses like Understanding Objectivism is that Objectivism doesn't need "updating" and "improving" or bridge-building with academia; rather, understood and used properly, it is its own best defender. Kelley seemed to pay lip service to Objectivism's special imperviousness to refutation, but what he says and the way he says it is unconvincing; the way he talks about Objectivism, it ends up sounding like merely a reasonable-sounding entry into the discourse with no special sales points. I think if he were truly aware of its special sales points, he'd not have drifted the way he did.

This gets back to his drift in regard to Nathaniel Branden. Branden is so discredited by now that his influence can only be poisonous. But there's something of a "sense of life" nature here, and that has to do with Ayn Rand's sense of life as opposed to David Kelley's. Rand was an uncompromising idealist and this comes out in her art. Kelley's basic operative MO is pragmatism. Much like in Rand's art, the cashing-in of Kelley's pragmatism is the irrelevancy of his organization and MO after 20 years. (You ever have the patience to sit through an Ed Hudgins op-ed when he was Ex-Dir of the Objectivist Center and/or Atlas Society? Total undistinguished mush, every time.)

Another insidious effect of pragmatism is how easily it devolves into cynicism. And it is ugly, naked cynicism that explains so many folks' seemingly instinctive attraction to the Branden message: that Rand was a "great, but ultimately flawed" human being. A cynical sense of life is shut off to ideations of greatness and grandeur and moral innocence and purity. "These ideals only pop up in juvenile novels and appeal to naive youth." That's the kind of amateurish bullshit that the Kelleys and Brandens feed right into. "Great, but ultimately flawed" is typical cynical double-speak and the effects of this portrayal of "flawed greatness" was - of course - entirely insidious; naturally, it devolved into "Rand was an unhappy/tyrannical/delusional/etc. human being," with the acknowledgment of her greatness - if it even remains after all the evisceration - reduced to a mere concession.

I still take issue with certain aspects of the Rand/Peikoff MO, and it concerns mainly their (non-essential) polemical criticisms of other thinkers or ideas. Nonetheless, if you disregard their polemics entirely - hell, I'm fine with that; Rand and Peikoff never advised anyone to take their word for it, after all - the substantive core, particularly the methodology (which is the fundamental ground of the rest, including the theory of concepts), stands pure and strong. Rand and Peikoff mastered that methodology at a much higher level than Kelley did. Branden was as clear a litmus test as any.

To illustrate Peikoff's continuing contribution to the discourse about Objectivism in ways Kelley doesn't measure up to, I'd like to mention Peikoff's own DIM Hypothesis and apply it to the difference between Peikoff and Kelley. Kelley, through his basic pragmatist orientation, falls into the "D" or "disintegration" category. Rand goes into the "I" or "integration" category. (I'll leave aside here the issue of subtle/insidious mis-integration or "M" as it's popped up in Objectivist circles.) Peikoff has a deeper grasp of Rand's "I" method. Part of Peikoff's DIM Hypothesis is that integrated worldviews have a kind of influence and appeal that disintegrated worldviews do not. This was illustrated in the 2004 presidential election campaign: Kelley, er, uh, John Kerry was the mushy disintegrated guy who didn't stand for anything and came off as weak. Counter to that, there was a widespread attraction to Bush's being bold and standing for something even if it was wrong; at least with fundamentalist cowboys like Bush there's no question about his sticking to a course or position whatever the practicality or political winds.

To sum up: Kelley = mushy pragmatic "D"; Rand and Peikoff = uncompromising and intransigent "I". It's like Keating vs. Roark all over again. At stake this time: the future of philosophy. Rand FTW!

Palin: Unqualified. End of Story.

I have posts on the metaphysics of perfection, on where is-ought unity obtains, and on sense-of-life defects in Atlas Shrugged in the queue, and yet I've gotta spend my valuable fucking time addressing something else here.

Sarah Palin is a dingbat. She exercises poor judgment on matters political. She couldn't hack it for more than half a term as governor of Alaska. She's proudly ignorant. She's proudly anti-intellectual. She's incompetent at basic grammar and spelling ("refudiate"). She's unqualified to be president of the United States. She was unqualified two years ago when she ran, and she's unqualified now. Nothing has changed in this regard. It's the same old Sarah Palin. She's demonstrated amply that she refuses or is simply unable to do the work necessary to get or be ready for such a job. She's nothing more than a celebrity these days, riding her name-recognition for all it's worth. She's a phony and a fraud, which alone is enough to disqualify her from the office. She refuses outright to answer any hardball questions from the media. Whenever she is caught off guard with a question from someone and stoops to answer, she makes an ass of herself all over again.

So why in the fuck is Sarah Palin still even a prominent figure in American politics? And why does the GOP establishment run around like panicked pragmatistic cowards trying to contain the Palin Phenomenon? Since political operatives tend to be so anti-ideas (it's essentially not about ideas but about strategy - basically, Machiavellianism and narcissism), they have no clue at all how to contain it. To those embroiled in the political cesspool, the Palin Phenomenon is a given, something that simply cannot be beaten down because her following is so rabid and willing to believe pretty much anything.

Given that context, the political establishment cannot even wrap its puny intellectual capacities around the glaringly obvious fact that she is unqualified to be president. What's the upshot of the intellectual mess here? A concern that she is unelectable. They are apparently incapable or unwilling to address the core fundamental problem, which is her lack of qualifications. Almost no one in the lamestream media seems able or willing to address this very point in the necessary bold and clear terms. The only name that comes to mind is Keith Olbermann, and he has a "boy who cries wolf" problem anyway, while his ratings and audience are disgruntled-left-focused. The only other place you get a rational Palin-is-unqualified analysis is Sullivan's Daily Dish.

Sullivan specializes in shooting GOP fish in a barrel, see. He's really good at that, seeing as he's a political wonk and in a similar trap of confronting Palin as a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of sorts. Sullivan, being ignorant of Ayn Rand, hasn't the faintest how to deal with this phenomenon at a deeper, wider and long-term level. But at least he identifies Palin as thoroughly unqualified and thoroughly lacking in any credibility whatsoever. That part he's obsessively gotten right for two years and counting.

So why won't anyone but a couple lone voices in the media-political establishment call out this fucking farce for what it is? I mean, it's a plainly obvious fact to anyone capable of even semi-principled integration that she's way out of her depth qualifications-wise. Then again, it should be plainly obvious to anyone capable of even semi-principled integration that the whole political scene today is a circus of insanity, or that Ayn Rand offers the appropriate long-term intellectual solutions to what ails Americans individually and collectively. Only a small minority of people - mostly those deeply familiar with Ayn Rand's ideas - seem able to recognize the problem and the solution.

Absent such an engine of cognitive integration, you're at the mercy of the outside forces that are a seeming given. Just the very idea of Palin having a roughly 20% shot at the 2012 nomination is a kind of uncertainty that a rational polity shouldn't and wouldn't be subject to. So the conclusion to draw here is that we simply don't have a rational polity right now. Not rational in any deep and fundamental sense. Maybe at some superficial social-scientific pragmatistic "rational irrationality" level, what we do have is a rational polity. What democratic polity isn't rational by such a standard?

Back to the fucking Republicans. Their chief concern seems to be her electability, as no prominent Republican has the guts to call it like it is concerning her being unqualified. Everyone with a lick of common sense knows that the GOP would be all over a Democrat candidate so lacking in qualifications. Say it's not even a matter of guts, but plain old intellectual recognition. Are they so lacking in that? They may very well be. Politics today is so extremely cynical and anti-intellectual as it is (this comes from a pragmatistic orientation towards life), so such a lack of recognition would not be surprising in the least. Whatever the causes, we're left with a totally pathetic GOP reduced to the complaint that she is unelectable, and what's more - anti-concept alert! - she's "polarizing" and "extreme." Ayn Rand is so prescient on these things. This is also to say that the reason for, scratch that, the cause of Palin's popularity is intellectual disintegration. A polity incapable of recognizing the more fundamental underlying problem - not just that she is patently unqualified, but how someone patently unqualified has any place of prominence in the world's most significant polity - has much bigger problems than whether some dingbat is electable or too "polarizing" or "extreme."

At this point, there's really nothing further to be said. An unqualified dingbat has prominence of place in our insane politics because our insane politics is the product of intellectual disintegration. Perhaps the intellectual elements in our society had better get past their issues/phobias and consider a paradigm shift by seriously considering Ayn Rand's consistently-reason-based, pro-integration alternative. Just maybe?