The "Ayn Rand is for children" meme, cont'd

[A continuation upon an earlier theme.]

If you pay attention to the cultural discourse about Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, you will have heard it a thousand times: Objectivism appeals to people in their teens or college years, but then they outgrow it.  Our head-of-state said as much in a recent interview.  This supposedly explains why Objectivism supposedly doesn't get much respect from academic philosophers, who are by and large grown up, responsible, and empathetic human beings.  In nearly every thread on reddit's /r/politics subreddit, the most-upvoted comment on any thread with "Ayn Rand" in the title is that by-now well-worn, brief but non-witty quote comparing Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings.  Ayn Rand's writings are allegedly for the socially awkward high-school rejects, the naive, the naively idealistic, the maladjusted, those who don't understand human nature, those who are self-centered to the point of narcissism, and so on.

First off, I think it betrays a fundamental sense-of-life difference between Rand and her critics when the "intellectual adults" lecture the idealistic youth on their naivete - who demand, in essence, that justice prevail in this world, that most everyone - in principle - can see the moral truth and act upon that recognition, and the like.  The "adults" say that we soon learn "in real life" that we must be practical, that we must compromise, that we must conform, that wisdom comes from a resigned acceptance of the world the way it is, and so on. Ayn Rand's sense of life, what appeals to those idealistic youth, is her outright and absolute rejection of a dichotomy between the moral and the practical - that individual integrity is all that we have in our soul to hold onto, and that it wouldn't be considered "practical" in the mind of a Howard Roark, given his ideals, to surrender his soul.  (Practical - in terms of what?)  Ayn Rand, in other words, endorses the "benevolent universe premise" - i.e., the idea that a rational way of life on earth (to quote her hero, John Galt, near the very end of his radio address) "is real, it is possible, it is yours."  In other words, she completely repudiates cynicism.

Perhaps it says a whole lot about the current state of the world that so many people are cynical - that cynicism is considered to be a sign of maturity and wisdom! - that they did indeed abandon the ideals they held in their youth in order to embrace a life of stale practicality and safety - that, in the most vicious cases, they embraced the divine right of stagnation, to employ a phrased used by former Rand associate Nathaniel Branden, who wrote an essay by that title.  Cynicism is not so much an attitude about the world as it is a statement about oneself - and, tragically and needlessly, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in the people who accept, endorse, and practice it.

So, is that what the aforementioned Rand-diminishers actually mean to say when they couch their diminishing in the terms they do - as in, say, a defense mechanism for their own cynical sense of life?  Or, as they might purport to explain in explicit terms, it's because Ayn Rand's egoistic philosophy appeals to some a-social, anti-social, socially-naive, socially-insensitive, perhaps even sociopathic aspects of the human personality - that Rand's philosophy amounts, in essence, to a rationalization for such base and inadequate tendencies in human nature.  Now, that sort of objection doesn't exist on a sense-of-life level so much as an intellectual-interpretive one, and in that case what it demonstrates - in short - is an ignorance of her ideas and/or a failure of reading- or ideas-comprehension.

Now to the original point of my post.  I'm going to concretize in such a way as to make it empirically impossible for the "Rand is for socially-awkward teenagers" meme to gel with real-life instances.  The instances I want to discuss here are instances of people who undoubtedly understood Rand's ideas the way they are meant to be understood.  The real deals, not the random asshole who somehow or other latched onto Rand's ideas.  These individuals are the following, during the decade of the 1950s and first half of the 1960s: Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, Allen and Joan Blumenthal, Alan Greenspan, Elayne and Harry Kalberman, Leonard Peikoff,  Mary Ann Sures.  These are the individuals who comprised the "Collective," Rand's "inner circle" of students and associates.

None of these individuals were angsty teens at the time.  None of them were intellectual imbeciles.  None of them (during that period of time, anyway) behaved or lived dysfunctionally, and none of them - many of their various "fallings-out" or breaks with Rand notwithstanding - ever came to repudiate the core of Rand's Objectivist philosophy, most fundamentally her prescribed neo-Aristotelian, sense-based methods of reasoning in dealing with ideas (which have gone on to be explained at length in Peikoff's books and courses on Objectivism, and in such academic scholarly literature as Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, which is the only "outside" secondary literature on Rand to date to incorporate the entirety of Peikoff's lecture course series (along with tons of other material) into its research - and guess what, it ends up being quite clearly enough a very positive assessment of Rand's ideas!).  (Only after the mid-1960s did the Brandens in particular (Nathaniel most pathologically) choose to evade the principles they had accepted and espoused; point being, it wasn't the ideas they espoused that led them to their dysfunctional lifestyles and the 1968 Break that torpedoed a flowering movement and set it back decades.)

So, how is the "Ayn Rand is for awkward angsty teens" crowd to handle these high-level-understanding concrete instances?  There's only one thing it can do, short of abandoning that stupid meme: evade.

This is pretty much what the whole mainstream of Rand-ridicule amounts to.  Pathetic, innit?

All I know is, Rand's (neo-Aristotelian) Objectivist philosophy is an example of a perfectivism, and these ridiculers and diminishers most decidedly are not.  Rand FTW.  Game, set, match.  Done deal, pal.  Checkmate again, assholes.  Ain't integration fun? / You can't refute perfectivism. :-)

The "Ayn Rand is for children" meme

It is truer than any of her clueless leftist player-haters could barely begin to realize at this point; they are supremely foolish(ly ignorant) as to the why.

I mean, Kira Peikoff didn't turn out that bad, did she?

Peikoff's Philosophy of Education course (1985, according to the Russian Radical bibliography I have right here, and around the time daughter Kira is born).  Integrate with observable concrete outcome of such an approach, 27ish years later.  (Additional exercise: integrate Understanding Objectivism and The Romantic Manifesto with observable concrete outcome of the UO and TRM approach, namely: this here blog.  Integrate; assign A+ grade, a.k.a.: "Perfective." [Further exercise: Integrate the foregoing with The DIM Hypothesis.  Earn perfectivist medal badge.  Await further instruction, from self, of course.])  Compare/contrast to the Comprachico alternative, which pretty much exemplifies what the educational Left has to offer to the young - and, in turn, the caliber of minds emerging from our current, non-Jefferstotelian public school system.

Check, and mate.

(About the only thing that the Chicago Bozo and I agree on is the need for a philosophically-educated citizenry and - in generic terms - about the current cultural bankruptcy in America.  But I "get" Rand and he clearly doesn't, while I also know when to keep my own yap shut about Nietzsche.  The Reginster book (Affirming Life) was quite helpful, BTW, for understanding Nietzsche.  Why won't the Chicago Bozo even bother to read secondary Rand literature that has a clue about Rand?  It's Salon.com and Alternet.org hit pieces, when it could be Russian Radical, OPAR, Virtuous Egoist, and Gotthelf.  Vice of one-sidedness, I declare for all with wisdom-loving ears to hear!  My knowledge of Nietzsche could totally kick the ass of his "knowledge" of Rand (which amounts to: jack shit), and my study so far has been secondary literature only - Kaufmann and Reginster - in addition to that Fountainhead intro describing the author's sense-of-life similarities to Nietzsche, which ties in with a Kaufmann editorial footnote to a key aphorism, referencing Aristotle and the noble soul as a lover of self, which sheds crucial light on the egoist character of Rand's perfectivist eudaimonism.  All of a sudden, Rand looks like an Aristotelianized post-Nietzschean, which sounds way cooler than what Bozo-Boy evidently has to offer, which reeks of a politicized, Us-vs.-Them, pathologically elitist, mean-spirited, and - worst of all - malevolent-universe-ish mindset.  Consider: Is it some kind of effing accident that the American cultural dialectic is evidently converging on Ayn Rand, an avowed neo-Aristotelian?  No, it is not.  Ayn Rand is for children, and adults, all of whom have a vital need to integrate mentally.  I mean, duhhhh!  Also, my knowledge of the film canon vastly exceeds the Chicago Bozo's, and aesthetics is central to philosophy (just like Nietzsche would have said, Bozo-Boy).  So clearly I'm a vastly superior philosopher than he, at this time.  Also, Aristotle is the obvious perfectivist trump card in philosophical debate, and I'm definitely more Aristotelian than he!  And also much more capitalist in ethos, as anyone with a clue ought to be.  I blog about individualism (and in connection with eudaimonism, a moral theory with uniquely deep meaning-of-life resonance); he does not.  Strike three, the Bozo's out!)

"Checkmate, asshole."

Two more months of checkmating guaranteed!  And then what?  ;-)

-UP

:-p

A Real-Life Heroine, in Perfectivist Terms

Mind = Blown

In the "Spiritual Uplift" department . . .

On tonight's tentative playlist (I might improvise on it, of course):

John Coltrane, A Love Supreme
Radiohead, OK Computer
Euphoric Classics
The Most Uplifting Classics in the Universe
The Most Inspiring Classics in the Universe
Sibelius, Symphony No. 2 (Levi/Cleveland SO)
The Beatles, 1
Simon and Garfunkle's Greatest Hits

As Linz Perigo would say, that's KASS! :-)

EPIC WIN.

Spiritual Uplift for the Day

From the "Roarkian Soul" department:



(h/t: Frank O'Connor) (Also: TUW)

(ADDENDUM: More spiritual uplift.)

(ADDENDUM #2: Is this far and away the best philosophy blog on the internet, or what? :-D )

(ADDENDUM #3: Nicely done, self. Keep it up! :-) )

OMG, Miss Rand!?

You're just totally fucking wrong about Beethoven, Miss Rand, and I'm most assuredly not a politeness-and-manners-dropping hippie in saying so!

Pastoral Symphony, op. 68 in F Major.

First movement: "Awakening of Cheerful Feelings Upon Arrival in the Country."

Third movement: "Merry Gathering of Country Folk."

Last movement: "Shepherd's Song: Happy and Thankful Feelings After the Storm."

MALEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE? Man's heroic fight against destiny and eventual DEFEAT? The opposite of your sense of life? (Ref.: 1981 Ford Hall Forum Q&A.) How 'bout: the exact effing opposite of Ludwig Van's?

WTF?

tisk, tisk, tisk

Oh, but I still love ya, though. Just gotta check those premises more perfectively, mmmkay?



But . . .










































Miss Rand, you've been vindicated yet again. I'm gonna go sit in the corner now.

Your Loyal and Humble Servant,

American Exceptionalism

Greenwald.

Rand.

Not really a tough call for me to say that Rand trumps Greenwald. (Greenwald is right, though, that Obama has become an empty suit after presenting such a promising and principled-sounding persona during the '08 campaign. Fool me once....) America as it is right now - in all its intellectually-stunted glory - is not obviously exceptional, even if it is still exceptional compared (in full context) to the alternatives. But America as it might be and ought to be? Of course it's exceptional. It's all about individualism and a benevolent sense of life. (America is also uniquely situated to boldly lead the world toward the Singularity. Ain't integration fun?)

To see that as clearly as Rand did or yours truly does, requires a massive amount of well-focused integration - e.g., a well-integrated understanding of Galt's radio address. Attaining such an integrated understanding is not at all quick or easy (if it were, everyone would be doing it), and the leads (e.g., this) are not at all obvious or accessible. Without the requisite context of understanding, Rand's words - about America, or just about anything else - fall on uncomprehending and/or cynical ears.

Hence the assignment at the end of my previous posting.

"Let your mind and your love of existence decide."

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! :-)

Individualism and Modern Philosophy

In a very recent post, I cited Nozick's offered explanation for the opposition amongst the Intellectuals to capitalism. Nozick suggests basically a psychological explanation. But of course I had to press the issue to the question not just of capitalism, but of individualism. (In turning my mind to the subject of moral individualism in relation to the state of modern philosophy, I find that my thoughts keep expanding; an adequate treatment of the subject might have to be chapter-length, so I couldn't post in depth on the subject here and now.)

One might think that while opposition to capitalism among many philosophers is readily understandable psychologically, the decided lack of interest among philosophers on the subject of individualism is bizarre. If individualism extols as a primary virtue "thinking for oneself," you'd think the philosophers would be most interested in the subject. But what academic literature is there out there on the subject? Aside from Norton, and a few Rand-influenced ethical philosophers (Machan, Mack, Rasmussen and Den Uyl), and parts of Lomasky and Nozick, what literature have professional philosophers generated on the subject in recent memory? Why does so deeply American a subject as individualism interest America's intellectual class so little?

I came to these thoughts when working through possible non-psychological explanations for the widespread antipathy to capitalism among intellectuals. At some point during one of Peikoff's lectures, a short and simple philosophical explanation was given: the widespread acceptance of "altruistic" morality in its various forms (e.g., Christianity, Kant, Mill, Marx, Rawls). But I'm not really satisfied with that explanation. Among the intellectuals, the antipode of altruism is not capitalism or individualism, but egoism, and the intellectuals have been hard at work devising moral theories that work somewhere in between the antipodes of egoism (e.g. Rand) and altruism (e.g. Comte). They find such extremes unacceptable because (aside from any pathologically pragmatistic opposition to extremes) altruism runs up against problems of rational motivation (which Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism makes a thorough effort to confront), while egoism supposedly - supposedly - runs up against the problem of respecting all moral agents over and above their serviceability to the agent's own interests.

But what about individualism? The most widely accessible and widely-read "text" on individualist ethics is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. The theme is "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but in man's soul." The political themes are there, but mainly by implication. The full implication would have to wait another 14 years. But aside from the supposedly "weird" characterizations and narrative that drive many a reader to miss the point, what about the Roarkian individualist ethos makes professional philosophers so uninterested? True, there are professional philosophers aplenty who openly oppose egoism, but I don't know of any that would dare openly oppose individualism, certainly not in America. Instead, on the subject of individualism, there's one conspicuous fact here: silence.

This might reduce back to some psychological explanations. The Fountainhead is, after all, about individualism and collectivism in the human soul, and provides certain archetypes of motivation. Roark finds himself in fundamental opposition to what, for a long time, he can only term "The Principle Behind the Dean." Keating embraces that principle; it's about the only principle a pragmatist, for all the pragmatists' opposition to principles, can willingly accept. One thing about Rand's style of writing is that she would directly confront, in the most extreme and oppositional terms, the psychology of her readers. The Roark-Keating opposition is pretty deep, and being more fundamentally a psychological rather than intellectual one, it carries more fundamental explanatory power about how people behave. (It would explain, for instance, why someone would turn toward a less intellectual life as such, as distinct from turning to an intellectual life that is, say, socialism-friendly. It also explains Ayn Rand's - the real Ayn Rand's, not the caricatured, distorted, misrepresented and smeared Ayn Rand's - behavior in regard to those who disagreed with her. She valued intellectuality above agreement as such. (There are rare exceptions, like with her treatment of Kant, but she simply did not get Kant or his context.))

This gets to something very fundamental, perhaps not as fundamental in Rand's philosophy as it was in her very soul and being: sense of life. One's views about a thing such as individualism are fundamentally conditioned by one's sense-of-life. Now, either you share Rand's basic sense of life, or you don't. (I like to think that I share her sense of life, and then some.) With Rand, on the subject of individualism, there is heroic and passionate affirmation and praise and benevolence. With someone who doesn't share Rand's sense of life, the response is one of so much indifference.

The logical conclusion to draw here is that the mainstream of the Intellectual Class does not share Ayn Rand's basic sense of life. The American People, on the other hand - the best within the American people, of course - well, they do share her basic sense of life.

And that's how modern "canon" philosophy has defaulted on its task and failed the people. Can I not help but think that modern "canon" philosophy's days are sooooo numbered?

:-)

[ADDENDUM: See any entry under "Individualism" here? For that, you have to go here. CASE CLOSED.]

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.]

Roarkian Soul

Roarkian soul: do you have it?

On the automatized and surface level, this is a matter of sense-of-life. Either you have a concept of and reverence for the greatness of soul possible to human beings, or you're tragically stunted, perhaps a victim of overwhelming cynicism. "Love for man at his highest potential" seems to be a rare phenomenon. How many people ever have a sense of that feeling in their lives? How many have a sense of radiant benevolence and a real commitment to making the most of their potentials? How many can connect, at that basic sense-of-life level, with the saying that "A noble soul has reverence for itself"? How many, on the other hand, see examples of human achievement and are struck immediately, in sense-of-life terms, with envy, resentment, bitterness, etc.?

How many are committed to a life of learning and growth and integrity, as opposed to a satisfying ignorance, or stagnation, or compromise? How many have the courage to stand up for a vision of their own which exalts actual or potential human greatness? How many can think in terms of principles, or an integrated view of existence? How many exalt an intellectually-disciplined commitment to reason as one's basic guide to belief and action?

How is it that a reader of The Fountainhead would come away with either a "getting it" and therefore positive attitude, a (necessarily ill-defined) negative attitude, or a not-getting-it attitude? Does one have any sort of vision of the human ideal - one that doesn't require some well-worn supernatural mythology? Does one understand that perfection - in the realistic, Aristotelian sense of the term - is possible to human beings?

Does one believe that strength resides in courage, integrity and rationality, or that it resides in numbers?

Apply this question to the behavior of the present-day "philosophical community," which - most unphilosophically - plays a version of the "strength in numbers" game. Now, here's a good question for anyone of any intellectual worth to entertain: shouldn't a big-time philosopher these days be able to take a careful look at the ideas of Ayn Rand and then assess its merits vis a vis leading ideas in the analytic-philosophy field? If Aristotle were around today, what would he do? Would he neglect having a disciplined look at a controversial and influential figure, especially one who espouses ideas remarkably congenial to his? No, he would not: Aristotle's policy wasn't to ignore, but to integrate.

Take Aristotle's approach with respect to the materialists and idealists of his day, for instance: he had to account for either side's appeal while showing both to be mistaken. Yes, to properly credit Sciabarra here, he engaged in a "dialectic" with the prevailing opposed ideas to show how the illicit dualism or lack of integration involved with the prevailing opposition will generate views which present only a partial perspective on the truth, whereas Aristotle's hylomorphism provides a completed (perfected!) perspective.

Clearly there are no "big-name professional philosophers" these days presently up to the task of engaging the intellectual playing field the way Aristotle was. Not while they ignore rather than integrate what it is that accounts for the appeal of allegedly "outsider," "fringe" figures like Ayn Rand. (Comparing Rand to, say, Scientology simply wouldn't cut it. Scientology is a supernaturalistic religion which is accorded the appropriate epistemic status of such by "the philosophical community.") That certainly rules out the possibility of any of them being the "ultimate philosopher" if there is one. Meanwhile, here's what I think must be the case: anyone who could be called the "ultimate philosopher" in our time would have to have Roarkian soul.

My job as philosopher is to emulate the likes of Aristotle and Roark as best I can, see.