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!

Andrew Sullivan: Mushy, Cont'd

Glenn Greenwald puts on a clinic. In what deep shithole would our political discourse be mired were it not for the seeming-lone-wolf Greenwalds laying the smackdown on the teeming hordes of lesser-thinking, power-deferential, D.C.-based wussies?

Hmmmmm?

Andrew Sullivan: Mushy

If there's one thing I cannot abide, it's mushiness. Andrew Sullivan, probably the world's most-read blogger on political and religious matters, fails to make my Ultimate Blogroll (see column at right) for two main reasons: Obama-Love and his weekly Sunday attempts to rationalize a religious faith (which happens to be Catholicism, but weirdly enough isn't Islam, or Judaism, or any of the hundreds or thousands of other religious faiths out there - no, it has to be Catholicism with its bullshit metaphysics of transubstantiation among other things). The religious mushiness is old hat, nothing new to see here. It is notable only because he's supposed to be, like, the Most Reasonable Blogger on the Internet, and yet this grown man seemingly cannot manage to wean himself off the god-nonsense. It matters not a whit to any of this that Jesus of Nazareth may have been a wonderful human being. That's not the point; the point is how grown adults with fully functioning intellectual capacities get all mushy and sentimental and start doing god-talk that can't be pinned down to literal facts.

(Fuck political correctness; stripped of its pretenses and euphemisms, PC is a cover for intellectual weakness and an attack on intellectual courage and honesty. People die millions of times over in the name of religion, and it's goddamn time people figure out why that is. Sully treats it as if it some kind of accident that the leaders of his chosen fantasy-sect have done untold damage to people around the world, for centuries on end. Sully: your religion sucks, grow up and get over it already. Your mealy-mouthed and second-rate apologetics notwithstanding, you're only two or three steps removed from the Wasilla Dingbat because of this, and only a few steps more removed from hardcore fanatics with a different fantasy than yours and who are willing to die and kill in its name.)

What really ticks me off, though, is how you can't get a coherent picture from him about our current president, Barack Obama. Here's Andrew Sullivan on September 9, 2010, just 3 weeks ago:

But Obama's insistence on protecting every Bush era war criminal and every Bush era war crime from any redress or even scrutiny is a sign both of how cold-blooded he can be, but more, I think, of how powerful the security state now is, how it can protect itself, how it exists independently of any real accountability to anyone, how even the metrics of judging it are beyond the citizen's reach or understanding.

I tried valiantly not to believe this of Holder and Obama for months; I tried to see their legitimate concerns about exposing a war machine when it is still at war; I understand the need for some extraordinary renditions; and the necessity for executive power in emergencies to act swiftly, as the Founders intended. Yes war requires some secrecy. But Obama has gone much further than this now. The cloak of secrecy he is invoking is not protecting national security but protecting war crimes. And this is now inescapably his cloak. He is therefore a clear and knowing accessory to war crimes, and should at some point face prosecution as well, if the Geneva Conventions mean anything any more. This won't happen in my lifetime, barring a miracle. Because Obama was a test case. If an outsider like him, if a constitutional scholar like him, at a pivotal moment for accountability like the last two years, cannot hold American torturers to account, there is simply no accountability for American torture. When the CIA actually rehires as a contractor someone who held a power-drill against the skull of a prisoner, you know that change from within this system is impossible. The system is too powerful. It protects itself. It makes a mockery of the rule of law. It doesn't only allow torture; it rewards it.

Now, on September 30, it's like he's forgotten all that:

Obama's speech to Gen44 tonight knocked my socks off. ... If you've forgotten why many of you worked your ass off for this guy, and felt hope for the first time in many years, watch it. He deserves criticism when necessary as this blogazine has not shied from at times. But he remains in my judgment the best option this country still has left - and it's far too easy for the left and far too dangerous for serious conservatives and independents to abandon him now.

(and more Obama-knob-slobbering in similar vein)

This is why Glenn Greenwald makes the Ultimate Blogroll, and Sully doesn't. It's only a matter of time before I'm vindicated on this. Unless he changes his ways, Sully will go down as a mush-head who refuses to speak truth to power in a principled and convincing way, and who tries to be a "uniter and not a divider" when the choice is food or poison. (Notice, if you click on the Sept. 9 link, how it is Glenn Greenwald and his principled commentary that eventually brought Sully around to the "Obama is a tyrant" and "I have been radicalized" viewpoint.)

This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise when Sully's intellectual heroes are not principled advocates of reason, individualism, and capitalism, such as Ayn Rand, but evolutionary "conservative" types such as Hayek and Oakeshott. I have the utmost respect for Hayek in his areas of professional expertise, economics and social theory. The evolutionary model is correct as a description of how institutions change over time, and there are solid classically-liberal conclusions suggested by such description as long as the audience isn't overwhelmed by intellectual mush or lack of common sense. But there's a reason why radicals for capitalism such as Ayn Rand are the wave of the future, and non-radicals are not. Barry Goldwater's proclamation that "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue" is lost on the likes of Sully. Hayekian jurisprudence is fine as a descriptive model, but the correct prescriptive one is natural law, where talk of pragmatism, compromise, incrementalism and whatnot are out of the question. Vascillating back and forth between "Obama is a tyrant" and "Obama is what we need right now" is a clear and convincing failure to grasp or apply natural-law ideals.

The main part of Sully's appeal - to a concrete-bound and politically-focused blog audience - is how he does a convincing job beating up on the dysfunctional American Right. It is true, the Dingbat & Co. have totally destroyed the GOP's reputation for intellectual respectability. Or, better yet, the Dingbat & Co. are the inevitable outcome of decades of cynical and anti-intellectual GOP political strategy. But come on. This is like shooting fish in a barrel. Standing up and being consistent about whether President Barack Obama is a lawless tyrant and manipulative Machiavellian orator or the best political thing since sliced bread, however, is not. It requires a courage and an intellectual context that Sully lacks. If Sully knew the first thing about proper cognitive method - about integration - you wouldn't see him damning Obama one minute and praising him to the stars the next. That lame excuse for a balancing act simply doesn't make sense to people who can retain a thought from one moment or day or week or month to the next.

If we get a meaningful America-worthy freedom in our lifetimes, it'll be no thanks to Europeanized, intellectually-disintegrated, pragmatistic, concrete-bound, mushy, crypto-quasi-socialists like Andrew Sullivan. It's very irrelevant to all this that we've got current problems that, in the prevailing context, require governments doing this or that to "help and protect" people, or being fiscally responsible enough to ensure that taxation covers government outlays as much as reasonably possible. That's all short-term, very concrete stuff. That seems to be all that Sully is currently capable of grasping in his half-assed way. It is, however, the next planet over from how Ayn Rand commented on the concretes of her day. And one thing she was most certainly was not, in any way, shape, or form, was mushy. Where the hell would our political discourse be today were it not for her? Thank GOD for Ayn Rand!

Andrew Sullivan, eh? Read Greenwald instead. No mush there.

[ADDENDUM: Credit where it's due, one thing that Sully hasn't been mushy on over the years, is his defense of gay rights. But that only reinforces the lesson here: in those matters, personally critical to him, there is absolutely no room for mush. But intellectual disintegration, just in virtue of what that is, can mean firmness in one area and mushiness everywhere else. The lesson to draw here is that Sully could be that much more effective if he were as firm on everything as he is on gay rights. That ultimately requires an intellectual context he presently resists for no good reason.]