Politics and/or religion without philosophy...

...are really bad/dangerous activities, as both logic and history confirm.

No-brainer, this.

[Edit 6/19: And why stop there?  Extend the point about unexamined politics/religion to the unexamined life.]

Bitter divisions over religion and politics, or: faith and force

(with due credit to Rand)

Basically, people don't take all that kindly to alien contexts and preferences being imposed on them.  In the case of religion the alien cognitive context is one or more religions one doesn't share, differentiated in content by items of faith ultimately inscrutable by earthly reason.  So two people get into a heated debate over which of their respective revealed dogmas is the more reliable and truth-reaching.  But given that these rationally inscrutible items become the very point of contention, a matter of context not shared by the two participants, the participants are left with asserting the truth and authority of their position over and against the preconditions for rational assent by the other - an assertion or imposition of epistemic ground against the recipient's wishes, in effect.  This is because the healthy rational and skeptical aspects of personality naturally kick in when it's the other's dogma being asserted as authoritative truth over and against one's own dogma.  In any case, any differences of opinion could not in principle be solved rationally from that point forward, and that tends to rightly irritate people who are otherwise calm, cool and and collected thinkers.  They don't have time for inscrutibles.  Etc.

In the case of politics, it's much easier and simpler to explain: people don't take kindly to having others' preferences imposed on them by force, and that's what politics in this day and age is all about.  Since when does the vote give you the right to dispose of my life?  Actually, this sort of question can only be asked, without irony, by libertarians.  In fact, the libertarian will go on to say that the less of imposing preferences by force on others, the better.  So how about we, e.g., build that social safety net in some way other than passing laws and getting the state involved, shall we?  (As for Republicans imposing their preferences on Democrats via force of law - making the Orange Man president for example - the Democrats' complaint would in effect have to reduce to: the wrong sets of preferences are being forcibly imposed and on the less deserving targets of forcible-preference-imposition.  Which is to say, Democrats have cultivated lousy habits of thinking about politics so as to rationalize their ethically unidimensional fairness/equality ethos (and to ignore or strawman or weak-man the libertarian your-life-belongs-to-you-not-the-demos refutation of statism).  In sum: politics is the art of the majority forcibly imposing its preferences on the minority.  If people were more consistent in their revulsion at the element of force involved, and do their homework thoroughly, they'd be libertarians.  (Much as Republicans have their weak spots - like, how did they nominate the Orange Man when Carly Fiorina's debate performance was more impressive? - they're closer to the libertarian mindset than are the socialism-lite Democrats.)

The element in common to both religion and politics is how the process of independent reasoned judgment is bypassed by authoritarianism in its epistemic and social manifestations.

Now that this simple explanation is out of the way, how about we try reason and freedom consistently?

Moral Leadership

If you want a damning indictment of the philosophy profession today, look no further than the fact that in the mind of the mainstream American, "moral leader" tends to signify "religious leader." Of course, given the meaning of "religion" in such a person's mind, this is a devastating package-deal, all rendered and accepted quite efficiently at the unexamined subconscious level; so why wouldn't "moral leader" tend to signify "philosopher"? Because (a) the mainstream of the philosophy profession has defaulted on moral theory, making it essentially useless to the community for workable moral guidance; (What moral leader is the Machiavellian-pragmatist Obama consulting these days, especially since he threw the Rev. Wright under the bus a while back?) and (b) When the mainstream American seeks moral advice on something, one can throw a stone and hit a priest, pastor, rabbi, etc. On the off-chance that consulting a philosopher for moral advice ever even occurs to such a person, how would the person know where to go?

In a perfectivism-enriched world, there would be no such problem.

Sunday Worship, 3/6/2011

Per Christian Malloch

I would like to think that my forthcoming opus is what Per might have written were he still around. He was effing brilliant.

And thank Rand for emphasizing the role of integration in cognitive perfection!

Question about Jesus

I confess to being ignorant of the many, many ways of doing Christian apologetics, so I don't know how this might be answered using the methods of apologetics:

Why didn't the incarnated God, presumably all-wise, impart the same intellectual wisdom imparted by Aristotle? Why did the world have to wait another ~1,230 years for Aquinas to do the synthesis? Part of God's plan, per usual?

America and Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Singularity Already Happened?

Once in a while, the Daily Dish has an especially interesting link. This one makes a case that the Singularity has already happened.

Oddly/interestingly enough, the 19th century on through right around WWI is that Golden Age in human history Miss Rand waxed so poetically about. Hell, come the early 1900s, the USA may well have been on the verge of utopia. Then, the assholes took over. I'm speaking, of course, of "progressive" pragmatists who had no answer to, or embraced, the fucking socialists (who'd already been chewed up and spit out by Mises, but his book was in German and so the readership was limited for a time). Having no answer to socialism, and facing economic crises, pragmatic experimentation with the American people's liberties set in. The results have been - seeing as the consequence has been a mixed economy (the legacy of pragmatism) - shall we say, mixed.

Just imagine extrapolating the 19th century onward. Where would we be now? Economic analysis - the competent capitalist stuff, not the incompetent or dishonest socialist stuff, or the pathologically-agnostic pragmatist stuff - says that we'd be way richer by now. One academic-style myth we should do away with, is this idea that human history is evolving toward something not all that capitalistic but rather some hybrid of capitalism and government controls. That myth is a legacy of pragmatism, which has this pathological tendency towards mixing, compromising, and reconciling. (When pragmatism dispenses with an accessible, stable, underlying causal reality and settles for "overlapping consensus" and other such buzzwords, the only result is a mixing of what's true and what's not true.) But let's just envision a world in which 40 percent of the country's resources aren't directed by fucking politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, and the rest of the pro-forced-stagnation crowd.

Now, it's a completely dishonest Marxist myth that prior to Big Government, America was having it pretty bad. One need only look at the progression between the Declaration of Independence to Henry Ford's assembly line to see the improvements for all classes of economic actors. What this says is that we shouldn't let the fucking Marxists dictate history to the rest of us - which is exactly what happened when those fucking Marxists took over the History (and other) departments. That has cost us decades of progress. So much for the "progressive," i.e., pragmatist-liberal, strategy of embracing A (freedom) and not-A (socialism) at the same time.

Now, my thesis is that the Singularity has begun, and that it began here. I have advertised this very blog as your headquarters for the Singularity. So what's all this stuff about a past Singularity? First off, Ray Kurzweil's concept of the Singularity centers around technology - and it's rather evident that we are headed into a true space-age of technology in the coming decades. I don't think it's relevant that this coming space-age is only a continuation of trends we've already had; the fact is that the past trends produced major technological advancement that had not reached the space-age tipping point that Kurzweil is talking about. What Kurzweil is talking about is such an advance over what we've seen already - given a geometric progression - that we can hardly imagine what humanity would look like a few generations from now.

So what's this business about the Singularity beginning here? Well, tying back into the 19th-century growth period, we have a record of the awesome success of the capitalistic system. The "new" Singularity is a return to that model. But going back to that model would merely be a consequence of a more fundamental underlying cause: a philosophical revolution. Kurzweil's prediction concerns technology; my conception of the Singularity is more all-encompassing and fundamentals-oriented than that. What we are looking at is an intellectual revolution.

We've had intellectual revolutions before, but not of the kind I'm talking about. Kant, for instance, initiated an intellectual revolution. Christianity represented an intellectual revolution. Marxism represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas (i.e., Aristotle) represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas aside, these revolutions were a false start, a fuck-up, a diversion, a regression, what have you. (Absolutely I consider the Christian era until Aquinas a regression compared to the ancient Greek era. I'd go so far as to say that because of the horrendous psycho-epistemology involved - the astonishing levels of denigration of the intellect - the West suffered roughly 1,500 lost years. Of course, with the denigration of this-worldly concerns involved, these Lost Years don't and shouldn't really matter to the medievalist mystics. Nice going, anti-reason assholes!) Now, with the help of Ayn Rand's philosophy - namely her theory of concepts and general methodology - we finally have a chance to get it right.

We are now at a tipping point, intellectually. We are now finally on the verge of getting our epistemological house in order. We are finally at a point, given our historical progression of fits and starts, of reaching intellectual maturity. Kurzweil's conception of the Singularity is one of technological maturity. Technology, however, is deadly in the hands of those empowered by a deadly worldview. With the intellectual maturity, we also get a moral maturity.

Given the history of human evolution, consider humanity's intellectual and moral maturation a matter of moving beyond a lesser stage of development or maturation. Religion is like the product of a child-level epistemology, one of dependence on authority, before a more critical or questioning stage comes about. That critical or questioning stage - analogous to adolescence in an individual - began some 2,500 years ago with the advent of Philosophy. The child-epistemology religion-attachment stays around during this period until the conflict is worked out; that working out is the onset or maturation or adulthood. (David L. Norton refers to the stage of maturation in an individual as eudaimonia.) The course of history, all the way from the primordial ooze up through the present day, is ample demonstration of this development.

I mean, isn't it obvious once you think about it?

The only issue now is how much ultimately-futile opposition, denial, sneering, fear-mongering, etc. is going to get in the way of this progress toward full maturation.

Why Ayn Rand = The Future

The spread of Randianism/Objectivism will definitely provide some parallels to the spread of Christianity in the centuries following Jesus's death. There's something these two quite-different worldviews have in common: the ability to inspire. There's that obscure part of The Fountainhead where Roark agrees that he is a "profoundly religious man, in [his] own way." There's this theme in there about the projection of a human ideal. Rand described the consequent emotion and practice as man-worship." The vision and sense-of-life associated with this is a heroic one. "My philosophy, in essence, is man as a heroic being..." Here's the last paragraph in the first AR Lexicon entry under "man-worship":

The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it. . . . [Man-worshipers are] those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth.

This represents a radical transformation from the other-worldly religion of Christianity, placing the object of reverence and worship back in the realm of observable reality grasped through reason alone: man as he might be and ought to be.

Unlike the many philosophers in history - the likes of Plato excepted in part - Rand presents a comprehensive vision of life that hits home on not just the intellectual level, but the spiritual level as well. From the standpoint of ability to inspire and appeal to people's spiritual sense, Rand's philosophy offers what Christianity does, without all the vicious (anti-)intellectual baggage.

Rand's philosophy is a philosophy for America - America as it might be and ought to be. It offers a vision of freedom from all forms of tyranny over the mind of man. It offers a vision of greatness and genius actualized once all the shackles of unreason and oppression are lifted. Salvation lies within. Moral perfection is possible to human beings. All this is grounded in one's own observation of reality and not in some book of myths or epistemologically-unsound wishful-thinking.

Rand offers a vision of man not as a corrupt and ugly being wallowing in the muck; rather, when she looks at man she sees the possibility of a Howard Roark or a John Galt. She sees a being capable of being shiny, happy, radiant, clean, and benevolent. It's the total opposite of the cynicism ruling the mainstream-swamp. "What fuel can support one’s fire? Love for man at his highest potential."

If we as a country and as a world are to move ahead - full speed, not in the usual stale, worn-out way - then it is Ayn Rand's philosophy we need to understand and embrace. (On the intellectual side there's also Aristotle; the big A did not, however, inspire spiritually - at least not in the extant writings/lecture notes.) The 2,000 years following Randian reason will absolutely blow away the 2,000 years following Christian mysticism. The essential precondition - freedom of thought - was secured by the American Revolution. Now is the time to fulfill that Revolution's promise.

Bill O'Reilly: Pinhead for a Day

(I'm "on vacation" for the week but didn't want to let this one pass.)

Oh, goodness gracious:

"Seventy percent of Americans don't want that mosque down there, so don't give me the 'we' business," said O'Reilly to co-host Joy Behar; the studio audience applauded.

Fifty percent of Americans also don't believe in evolution. Point?

Afterward, when pressed by Goldberg and Behar to explain why the "Ground Zero mosque" was somehow "inappropriate," O'Reilly leaned over and pointed at Goldberg saying, "Muslims killed us on 9/11."

Ah. So, the structure of the argument is something like this:

I. Muslims killed Americans on 9/11
II. The 'Ground Zero Mosque' is built by Muslims
____________
:. The 'Ground Zero Mosque' is therefore inappropriate.

The conclusion of course is a complete non-sequitur, so one would have to be a fucking idiot to think the argument has merit. How does this blatant idiocy become a centerpiece of our nation's political discourse? This is sickness and madness and downright irrational bigotry, whether it's coming from the Wasilla Dingbat (or other cynical, scum-sucking politicians), or from Bill O'Reilly. What's more, I expect better from O'Reilly, even if he isn't an intellectual giant. You know who'd really clean his clock on this point, is FOX's own analyst, Megyn Kelly.

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.]

Ground Zero Mosque: A and not-A

First, the bigotry:

Palin (7/18): "Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. ."

Gingrich (7/21): "There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia."

Pawlenty (8/6): "I think it's inappropriate... From a patriotic standpoint, it's hallowed ground, it's sacred ground, and we should respect that. We shouldn't have images or activities that degrade or disrespect that in any way."

Huckabee (8/4): Even if the Muslims have the right to build it, don’t they do more to serve the public interest by exercising the responsible judgement to not build it, given that it’s really offensive to most New Yorkers and Americans? Or is it just that we can offend Americans and Christians, but not foreigners and Muslims?"

Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom (today): "Governor Romney opposes the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero. The wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda compel rejection of this site."

Now that I'm back from vomiting, I'd like to distill the essence of what is going on here.

All of these 2012 hopefuls are looking to secure the nomination of a party that is intellectually hopeless. This playing-to-the-base is religious bigotry and runs counter to all liberal values of the West. But here's the disgusting part: They are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. In other words, they are trying to have their irrational religious bigotry and they are trying their damnedest to reconcile this with some semblance of reasonableness and tolerance.

It cannot be done.

What we have, as a result, is contortions of logic in order to fit the square of unreason into the circle of reason. To anyone who can smell disingenuous bad faith from a mile off, this stuff stinks.

Basically, in order to secure the 2012 nomination, all the likely hopefuls are shitting away any pretense to intellectual integrity. What's more, this is a necessary consequence of what the GOP has become: an intellectual cesspool.

As Andrew Sullivan keeps saying, and the GOP leaders keep dishonestly evading: "It will only get worse before it gets better."

How the Right doesn't get it

Sullivan links to this blog entry by Prof. Stephen M. Bainbridge lamenting the state of the American Right today.

The last item on his list of things that make "real" conservatives embarrassed by the modern "conservative movement" is this:

The substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk radio for reasoned debate. Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, and even Rush Limbaugh are not exactly putting on Firing Line. Whatever happened to smart, well-read, articulate leaders like Buckley, Neuhaus, Kirk, Jack Kent, Goldwater, and, yes, even Ronald Reagan?

The myopia and double-standard here is too much to take with a straight face. How else does one characterize Whittaker "Gas" Chambers's review of Atlas Shrugged in the pages of Buckley's National Review, other than the substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk for reasoned debate?

It is a context-dropping, intellectually-inferior narrative amongst "respectable conservatives" that Buckley served as some kind of quality-control enforcer for the conservative movement. This is plainly false. While reading people like the John Birchers out of the conservative movement, Buckley (via Chambers) also read Ayn Rand out of the movement, which is to say, that he read out of the conservative movement the most potent intellectual voice for reason, individualism, and capitalism. This is to say that Buckley's quality-control standards were shit from the beginning.

This is also to say that the kookery in which the American Right has been drowning, is just the chickens' homecoming.

The Right is now flailing about, grasping somewhere - anywhere - for intellectual leadership. They have now opportunistically latched onto Ayn Rand in addition to everyone else, but they still reject at root all the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics that make for an intellectually sound defense of capitalistic freedom. They don't get it, they will continue not getting it for the foreseeable future, and their problems will continue for that reason.

Incidentally, Rand wrote an article in the '60s, titled "Conservatism: An Obituary," reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. She already diagnosed the "conservatives'" problem back then, and her insights remain as spot-on as ever. The chief, central problem of "conservatism" then and now has been anti-intellectualism, which Chambers's review of Atlas epitomizes.