Generational Shift, Cont'd

Expanding upon my previous posting, I want to do a bit of a thought experiment. Say that you brought Aristotle into today's intellectual scene. What would he have to conclude on the political-philosophical front? (An alternative thought-experiment is to bring a short-list of All-Time Great Philosophers into today, but I like to keep it simple with Aristotle, since his powers of assimilation [or, in alternative terminology, dialectic] would make it kinda pointless to bring in the others. And I take it more or less for granted that, to use Rand's phraseology, Aristotle is the philosophical Atlas holding up the Western intellectual tradition.)

Now, I want to first put aside one point-missing answer that inevitably comes up in connection with Aristotle, to the effect that he endorsed questionable doctrines - universal teleology, an insufficient account of universals, a measure of political authoritarianism or collectivism, and other stuff in that vein. It misses the point that Aristotle was assimilating the best ideas of his day to come to the best answers available to him. If he were around today, with the benefit of 2,500 years of philosophical hindsight, he'd have better answers on these things. For example, in light of modern political philosophy, he'd incorporate Lockean insights, as well as those of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Spencer, Mill, Rand, Hayek, Rawls, and Nozick. By "incorporate" (or assimilate) I mean the Aristotelian method of considering all the views, isolating their merits from insufficient one-sided applications in any given case, and abstracting-integrating a more complete answer without the weaknesses of the others. He'd have a way of assimilating, say, Spencer and Rawls that doesn't preserve the substantive oppositions between them (given the law of non-contradiction - e.g., either we have an extensive welfare state or we don't). (Sciabarra presents a helpful overview of this methodology originating in Aristotle - what Sciabarra calls dialectics, or what I'd call integration (horizontal and vertical) - in the first part of Total Freedom.)

Okay, let's now take the most representative figures whose ideas have been most influential on political philosophy in America over the last half-century. I don't mean the most representative figures in the academy per se, but the most representative figures in "the real world," those who have actually had the most influence on the formation of present-day political positions and oppositions in America. If it were the academy deciding on things, there would be a decidedly more left-liberal "center" in American politics today than there is now; in fact, though, the academy has influenced American politics less than its inhabitants would have liked, given a certain resistance to the academy in the real-world American populace.

Another consideration in selecting the representative figures I'm about to name is that we want figures who are plausibly referred to as political philosophers and can rightly be accorded the distinction of "philosopher," rather than, say, polemicist, pundit, commentator, propagator, intellectual (but short of "philosopher" status - the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, to cite prominent names in recent years on non-political matters, don't qualify), etc. I make this qualification because while the likes of Buckley, Kirk, and Kristol have been influential on conservative "movement" politics, I don't think they have much in the way of philosophical chops. (Didn't want to have to knock conservative intellectuals down a notch, but the dastardly and disreputable treatment of Rand by Buckley and Kirk makes this knocking-down quite unavoidable.) I also make this qualification because I am thinking in terms of longer-term influence which comes from having philosophical-level stature. This stems from how profound and seminal a thinker is. I also do this in order to exclude political scientists, historians, and economists who haven't contributed much by way of political philosophy proper.

Through appropriate process of elimination, I come up with six most significant figures who, taken together, best define the best of what there is on offer for influential political ideology in America. They are, in order of birth date: Hayek, Rand, Rawls, Chomsky, Dworkin, and Nozick. They all have the virtue of being "big names," and the breakdown gives us, by American political standards, three "right" figures and three "left" figures. They span the range from "radical for capitalism" to "radical for anarcho-syndicalism." If there is any one figure that best defines the "center" in America, it would be Hayek, with Rawls a close second.

One thing to note about every one of these figures is the lack of a "conservative" emphasis on the centrality of religion to politics; the closest in that regard would be Hayek, an agnostic himself who acknowledges the importance of tradition (and hence, of some aspect(s) or other of religion to social ordering). Whatever any of them might say for religion, they're all really only interested in what we can know about the natural world (including the social and political world) independent of any religious or theological commitments. In that regard, they inherit an Aristotelian sensibility - and in that regard, modern theocentric conservatisms are implicitly hostile to Aristotelian sensibilities. If Aristotle were around today, I don't think he would have much to say for these conservatisms. So there you have it as far as theocentric political conservatisms go. (A much better approach for these conservatives is to invoke the natural-law tradition without a theological package-deal; that's in fact what the better ones do.)

So, taking the above six philosophical heavy-hitters, how would Aristotle do his characteristic assimilation? The answer, I think, is not one that left-liberals are going to like. Aristotle is too systematic a philosopher not to understand the priority of ethics over politics, which puts him closest to Ayn Rand among these six. Eudaemonist ethics are now, as in Aristotle's time, the best normative-ethical theory going. If you look at the contemporary scene as far as Aristotelian scholarship goes, and further narrow down that group to scholars who are familiar with Ayn Rand's ideas, you find - quite unsurprisingly, to those with so much as clue about these things - a great deal of sympathy toward her ideas. Were Aristotle around today, he couldn't help but to notice this, and to notice the affinity between his-ideas-with-2,500-years-of-hindsight and her own.

Further, it's hard to believe he would be unfamiliar with Norton's eudaemonism which is, to my knowledge, the best-developed modern text in eudaemonist ethics. He couldn't help but notice the literature on perfectionism, and make the appropriate assimilations. Further, he couldn't help but notice that an ethical program of perfectionism, as hierarchically prior to any political program, would render a lot of issues and debates in contemporary political philosophy - which take for granted widespread lack of perfectionistic virtues - moot. That's one outcome of Aristotelian-style assimilation: rendering many debates moot. In promoting a Nortonian-Randian perfectionist program, various debates among present-day left-liberals become irrelevant; obsessions with "distribution of the social product" and egalitarian ideals fall by the wayside - just as, say, debates amongst the various factions of materialists in Aristotle's day fall by the wayside under his assimilation.

(This is evidence of how removed from the real-world American mainstream the academic political-philosophical mainstream is, if we go by who occupies the top posts at the top-rated universities. Nozick's diagnosis has plenty bite to it, and it probably doesn't tell the whole story; Rand and Hayek have things to say about this as well, and one thing they do share is a criticism of tendencies toward rationalism among intellectuals. Here I can't help but think Aristotle would endorse these diagnoses and criticisms - which is why I think the second most similar to Aristotle among the six is Hayek. If Aristotelian-style philosophizing is the standard, it's just not looking too good for left-liberal academia.)

This is not to say that Aristotle wouldn't acknowledge, take into account, etc., the good points being made by the "left" figures I've mentioned; what he would oppose is incomplete and one-sided applications of the good parts. With Rawls, he might acknowledge the merits of a theory being aimed toward principles that people could, with suitably-defined impartiality, reasonably accept. The notion there is fairly vacuous on its own, though, and aside from its intuitive appealingness to a left-liberal academic audience, the contrivance that is the Original Position doesn't suitably account for your ordinary notions of justice once you take into account Rand and Norton with their eudaemonistic approach. (Norton's developmental approach to personhood, for example, makes it exceedingly silly to formulate a theory of justice based on a veil-of-ignorance model which pays no heed to the task of discovering and actualizing one's distinctive individuative potentialities. Norton gets into this in the last chapter of Personal Destinies.)

I couldn't speak for a hypothetical present-day Aristotle, but I think that of the three "left" figures, Chomsky may well be found the most sympathetic figure, given his (implicit) observations of just how devoid of virtue the present money-power-propaganda model is. (That's my spin on it, anyway; I share many of the "left-style" criticisms of today's corrupted political scene. I differ in my diagnosis and solution, while the hard-left-wing seems quite oblivious to what Ayn Rand actually has to say about power. They certainly haven't a clue as to how her views on reason and virtue hierarchically integrate with her views on political power and corruption. The characteristic blind attack on Rand I see from hard-leftists is based on the ignorant assumption that she endorses an exploitative model in virtue of her egoism and alleged "elitism." It's really very embarrassing how ignorant and oblivious to philosophy this stuff is. At least Chomsky himself has had the good sense to refrain from commenting on Rand, about whom he has no obvious qualifications to speak.) Chomsky is of the view that if people were really not so ignorant they'd embrace his social ideals, but we also run up against a limitation with Chomsky: he's not a philosopher proper. He's a political philosopher whose primary background is linguistics and social science; he isn't known for contributions in ethics or epistemology. Aristotle would supersede him. It's interesting that a primacy-of-social-sciences view seems to dominate the far-left mentality in this country.

Alright, enough for beating up on the left. I do want to now give a brief comment on what Aristotle would say about Ayn Rand, and it's probably not going to sit well with her more devoted admirers. While Aristotle would greatly admire Rand's methodological prescriptions, the integration of theoretical and practical, her substantive ethical views (eudaemonism), and quite likely her political philosophy (radical liberalism), he would not have approved of her very non-Aristotelian approach to other philosophers. In place of Rand's over-the-top caricatures and demonizations of Immanuel Kant, he'd have done something way more effective and Aristotelian: fully understand him, characterize Kant's views in his own terms, acknowledge his context, and proceed to refute him. Taking an adversarial stance carries the dangers of partisanship; Aristotle could do so without falling into partisan otherization and demonization, which we find so common in political rhetoric.

For all her methodological emphasis on integration and context, Rand's polemical style was very one-sided. That style has been insidious, a shortcoming that has fed upon itself in really nasty ways. It has been a huge impediment to her ideas taking hold in a timely fashion. It has been insidious, because it has attracted a certain kind of following consisting of adherents who emulate that style, often in increasingly offensive and bizarre ways. Some of the worst of it came out in the writings of Peter Schwartz and in other contributors to The Intellectual Activist in the '80s and '90s. It's why David Kelley, for whatever his shortcomings, couldn't stand it any longer and realized something had to get better.

What happened is that between Rand's heyday up through the 1990s, there were devoted adherents of Objectivism who best understood its methods as presented in Peikoff's courses, but who failed to consistently integrate those methods due to insidious bad practices. That's how you ended up with a movement were a Peter Schwartz was a de facto leader, while there was thorough ignorance of such magnificent ideas and sensibilities as Norton's. It's disgusting, really, that this kind of thing happened in a movement devoted to reason and reality. Not until the 2000s do we see serious attempts to repair this tendency. I think there is a lot to be learned from this problem, given all the cultural progress delayed by it. Rand was simply wrong to say things like, "Kant was the most evil man in mankind's history," and the various attempts I've seen over the years by the devout, to save Rand's condemnation of Kant, just don't hold up. She fucked up here, is all. She had shortcomings and blind spots, and of the sort that Aristotle would not have had or put up with.

But that's the genius of Aristotle. He could acknowledge where the shortcomings, fuck-ups, mistakes, personality flaws, etc. were in Rand's mode of philosophizing, and he could acknowledge and understand the context that led to these unfortunate tendencies, and still extract-and-assimilate the good stuff (of which there is a shit-ton), just as current-day Aristotle scholars like Gotthelf, Lennox, Miller, Rasmussen and Den Uyl have picked up on. And, I believe, he'd also have, Sgt. Hartmann-like, ripped the present-day academy a new gaping asshole for failing so badly to notice this good stuff. With an Aristotle-caliber philosopher, it's all about holding everyone to the highest standards. Perfectionism, you see.

[CLIFFHANGER: Will the next blog posting be that Sgt. Hartmann-like gaping-new-asshole-tearing? Stay tuned, because, whatever it'll be, you won't want to miss it!]

Generational Shift

Seeing as part of my Toward Utopia project is concerned with the subject of historical causation from the standpoint of the effects of intellectual movements on the whole of societies (which ends up pushing me toward the sort-of uncomfortable position of making Toward Utopia partly about itself), I cannot help but notice that America is headed quite irresistibly toward a new political paradigm that usually goes under the heading of "libertarianism."

By "libertarianism" I mean a political philosophy more or less espoused by our country's Founding Fathers, characterized by emphases on the dignity of the individual human being, individual rights (including property rights, i.e., capitalism), and governments essentially limited to protecting those rights. (I'll set aside for now the long-running and not-going-away-anytime-soon debate over "anarcho-capitalism" vs. laws being defined and enforced by a state.) In terms of concretes, of advocates of this idea, it has been set forth in varying terms in the writings of such figures as Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, David Friedman, James Buchanan, George Reisman, John Hospers, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Loren Lomasky, David Schmidtz, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Based on the limited evidence, the late David L. Norton apparently gravitated toward this political idea as well.

I'm quite firmly of the belief that if an intellectually-curious reader were to thoroughly take in the works of all the above figures - including and especially the comprehensive philosophical visions provided by Rand and Norton - the reader pretty much can't but help coming away a libertarian.

So why aren't we there already?

To answer that requires some investigation into historical causation with respect to the American intellectual scene. That will set the context for understanding. That intellectual tradition is markedly different from that of Europe, which has shown greater affinity toward statism, socialism, communism, fascism, Marxism, existentialism, subjectivism, nihilism, postmodernism (the "cashing-in" of all that, to use Rand's phrase), and the various sub-postmodernisms and post-postmodernisms that stink up the fucking place with anti-Aristotelian stuff. Given the ruling paradigms going on there, Rawlsianism looks relatively sane, and Europe's intellectuals can at least relate to that, the way they can at least relate to President Obama. But Ayn Rand? It's like she's on another planet. If "Europe's leading intellectual" of today (supposedly, and now that the post-post-post-realist Derrida has left the scene), Slavoj Zizek, is any indication, that assessment seems to hold up.

(The abstract for Zizek's asinine article in JARS is as follows: "SLAVOJ ZIZEK argues that Rand's fascination for male figures displaying absolute, unswayable determination of their Will, seems to offer the best imaginable confirmation of Sylvia Plath's famous line, "every woman adores a Fascist." But the properly subversive dimension of Rand's ideological procedure is not to be underestimated: Rand fits into the line of 'overconformist' authors who undermine the ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it. Her over-orthodoxy was directed at capitalism itself; for Rand, the truly heretic thing today is to embrace the basic premise of capitalism without its sugar-coating." Oh, brother. Ain't the jargon of post-whatever just so precious? The "cashing in" is on p. 225 of that article. Did the journal's editorship accept this article to illustrate a point, i.e., of just how off-the-rails the currently-fashionable Euro-intelligentsia has gone? That's a sympathetic spin on this farcical event. To be somewhat less damning of the European intellectual scene, I'll mention Habermas, but - and this ties directly into my present analysis, as I will expand upon below - have you noticed how old Habermas is now? Who is he being replaced by in the younger ranks? [One of his students, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, left for the States and has been advancing a hardcore Misesian-Rothbardian view.] Besides, ethics is primarily about eudaemonia, not discourse. ;-) )

Okay, so the American intellectual tradition is just markedly more friendly toward things like libertarianism, eudaemonism, Aristotelianism, realism, etc. What about the current dominant mainstream of the American academic humanities? In political philosophy, it's been dominated for the last four decades by Rawls, but my thesis here is that this paradigm is on the outs. Lemme explain.

In the mid-20th century, the political debate in this country was shaped essentially by the opposition between Americanism (framed in terms of "liberal democracy") and Communism. Marxism was the dominant ideology of the times. The adherents of Marxism were just waiting things out the way certain Christian sects hold out for the Rapture. The collapse of capitalism was going to happen any time now. Mises was a reactionary confined to a teaching post at the business school of the not-at-the-time-prestigious New York University. You can get a picture of just how insane the whole intellectual scene was by reading Rand's letters from the '30s and '40s. Then there was Galbraith - remember him? Is he even mentioned in economics courses any more? Well, he was a big deal in American economics in the '50s and '60s. William F. Buckley was heading up the conservative movement and made sure (much to the detriment of his eventual historical reputation) to set himself apart from Rand. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, published in '62 after a seeming decades-long drought of pro-capitalist literature as far as the mainstream was concerned, became a leading text for the pragmatic Right.

Basically, the debate, as it was framed then, was far removed from what it is today. Marxism is now a defunct ideology. Yep. It's done. It has run its course. It had considerably less of a foothold in America than it did in Europe - it could hardly ever get a foothold in America, save for its universities. If you're a Marxist in this day and age, you are . . . a reactionary. The same is going to be case, I believe, for Rawlsian liberals. Rawlsian or left-liberalism is on the way out as well.

Rawls's A Theory of Justice was published four decades ago now. My analysis leads me to the conclusion that it, too, is about to run its course and be supplanted by libertarianism, because, well, this is America. America is just too libertarian for statism in its various guises to maintain a foothold. Rawls's liberalism is a statism - a toned-down, less toxic form of statism than Marx-inspired statisms, but a statism nonetheless - and it just won't hold up in this country. The "overlapping consensus" his project aimed for is simply too unstable. The discourse is now dominated too much by consistent adherents of original American liberalism for it to hold up. The advocates of left-liberalism are now turning into dinosaurs, into . . . reactionaries.

Look at the intellectual scene on the American Left today. Just what figures dominate it? Rawls has passed on, and it's been a whole four decades since his most influential work hit the scene. There are more radical Leftists who will cite Chomsky, but if you hadn't noticed, his most influential work was done way back in the '50s, and that work wasn't even in political philosophy. He is also getting up there in years. The radical Left continues to hold onto Chomsky like a security blanket, operating under the Rapture-ready-like delusion that his analysis of the American corporate complex will vindicate a radical-Left vision rather than a consistent libertarian-capitalist one. (I may have more to say about the delusions of the "left libertarians" and "libertarian socialists" in due course. It strikes me as more wishful-thinking, security-blanket stuff. If these so-called libertarians want socialism, they're gonna have to get it within the Nozickian framework outlined in Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, that is, in voluntary hippie communes under a framework of libertarian-capitalist law. That's the best deal Chomsky & Co. are gonna get.)

It's worth pointing out that in the '50s and '60s, the Marxists were laboring (heh) under the delusion that Marxism would be vindicated soon. Little did they expect that in under 50 years, their whole worldview would be defunct. Analogously, the left-liberal community is operating under the delusion that their vision of liberal justice is going to be viable for the foreseeable future. But they have missed one crucial thing: just who in the younger generation is going to replace Rawls and his groupies (as I like to call them; Nagel & Co.) as they pass on? Just who is around to carry on the torch? I ask this, because from what I can tell, Rawlsian liberalism was a halfway-house measure, a kind of stopgap, a soft-landing device, between mid-20th-century American statism in its then-paradigmatic opposition to full-on Communist statism, and a return to original-style American libertarianism.

The Rawls groupies are not getting any younger themselves. Nagel is now in his 70s and his most influential work was done more than 30 years ago. G. A. Cohen has passed on, marking the official end of Marxism. Thomas Scanlon is now in his 70s. Dworkin is well into his 70s and I don't know what influential work he's done since the mid-'80s. Sen is pushing 80. Parfit is pushing 70. So who is left, and - more importantly - just what up-and-comers show any promise of replacing them in their efforts to keep the left-liberal paradigm going?

In answer to that, I have no idea, really. (Does Krugman count?) If you look out onto the blogosphere for any indications, you find that the most mainstream of discussions there occurs on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, and the figures influencing him most are Hayek and Oakeshott, and he's pushing a pragmatic conservative-libertarian-"liberaltarian" line. (He comes from Britain, where Rand's ideas are still quite alien, but Hayek is pretty paradigmatic now as far as "pragmatic liberalism" goes.) Greenwald confines his discussions primarily to civil-liberties issues, where he fits right in with the American mainstream. But what left-liberal intellectual figures alive and not in their 70s or 80s are providing American left-liberals with fuel these days? Is it possible - nay, likely - that the best young intellectuals of the previous and current generation have found libertarianism too appealing to dismiss, and gravitated in that direction? Do today's left-liberals have any idea of the generational shift that has happened and is happening in the American intellectual scene?

[EDIT: Some research on contemporary left-liberalism turns up a familiar name I've been meaning to follow-up in due course: Martha Nussbaum, who isn't quite yet pushing 70. Oh, great, now I'm going into an obsessive-completist-perfectionist exercise in research into what important figures on the Right and the Left I may be missing. Does Scruton count as a prominent and influential conservative? What about the role in American intellectual life of Irving Kristol, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, George Gilder, George Will, Dinesh D'Souza, Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, or The Wall Street Journal? This is why the book keeps getting delayed. Research to cover bases, integrate cross-currents, sub-currents, undercurrents, etc.]

One thing I do know is that my own intellectual energies have been put into service of essentially Randian ideas, and not Rawlsian ones. I can't think that Toward Utopia is going to help the left-liberal cause any. And I've been spending too much time fortifying my ideas against potential left-liberal-type objections to believe they're going to come back with anything all that strong as an alternative, without presupposing the very ideas they'd be objecting to. (I've discovered this myself when it comes to Rand. If I find Rand's ideas wanting in some fashion or other, I can't escape her implicit and explicit advice to perfect upon whatever shortcomings there are in her writings. You can't refute perfectionism, see.)

Speaking of American intellectual and political movements, I find what passes for conservatism these days to be defunct as well. Unless you count Andrew Sullivan as a conservative, you have - as far as I can see - an intellectual void on the Right. Buckley was the leading animating light of conservatism in the second half of the 20th century, but he passed on and . . . what is he being replaced by? Talk radio isn't exactly reputable intellectually; Limbaugh is passe', Glenn Beck is a big mixed bag who may as well throw up any white flags of surrender to Ayn Rand, and phenomena like Palinism can't with a straight face be called intellectual ones. Thomas Sowell is now in his 80s. Hell, if there was any person that could be called a leading light of conservatism aside from Buckley, it would be Sowell. I think if there were other leading lights out there right now, I'd have noticed mentions on the Daily Dish from time to time. But, nope. It looks like the leading younger minds of today who might identify as conservative, are gravitating more and more toward libertarianism - and even with the religious conservatives, there is a shift away from any theocratic impulses.

Even the financial crisis and Great Recession haven't stifled the increasingly popular anti-statist sentiment. There aren't any Marxists around to urge the overthrow of capitalism as a solution, like there were in the '30s. There aren't influential left-liberals around who are shaping public opinion toward a more European-style social-democratic model.

Long story short, America is ripe for a full-on shift toward libertarianism in politics, and, soon enough, Randism as a dominant mainstream cultural force. Randism is already making some headway in the universities, with no effective opposition. Eudaemonism in ethics has no effective opposition there, so things are ripe for a surge in Norton studies, too. The economics profession is already under the influence of Mises, Hayek, and Friedman. In the area of law, the ideas of Hayek, Barnett, Epstein and David Friedman are increasingly mainstream. Mack, Lomasky, Schmidtz and the general flavor of things going on in the Social Philosophy & Policy journal are already providing effective counterweight to the Rawlsian-dominated Philosophy & Public Affairs crowd.

One thing to mention about the major libertarian figures I've been mentioning are that they, too, are either deceased, up there in age, or getting up there in age. The youngest of the bunch, Schmidtz, is now in his mid-50s. Inevitably this raises the same question: who in the younger generation is going to replace them, and what work will carry on theirs? You can take it from there.

[Continued in my next posting.]

David L. Norton's Personal Destinies

My current book project was initially conceived as something somewhat less ambitious (although the logic of it eventually led me to what it is now), and that was more or less a comparison between Ayn Rand's normative ethics and the ethics of David L. Norton's masterful Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism. I ended up making it my own personal destiny to write an ultimate book with the ideas of these two still at the substantive core, just teasing out the implications.

The very idea of connecting Rand to Norton in a close way seemingly hadn't occurred to anyone before, but you'd think it might have since the parallels are so compelling. They're both ethical individualists. They're both eudaemonists. They both have a compelling normative ethics - so darned compelling that were they widely known, understood, adopted and implemented, utopia would be automatic. So perhaps you can say that the mission of Toward Utopia is to make this normative-ethical vision so obviously compelling, so indisputable, so undeniable that a helluva lot of people ought to get on board right quick so that we fast-track right toward utopia.

Here's the gist of the program: We understand Ayn Rand's normative ethics as, in essence, a self-actualization ethics. The ground of virtue is the need to self-actualize, and we recognize self-actualization to be an inherently desirable thing. Rand and Norton conceive of the fundamental virtue in distinct but complementary ways (which can be integrated): Norton conceives of virtue as integrity to the self to be actualized; Rand conceives of virtue as rationality, or the optimal exercise of the human cognitive faculty, reason being the basic human mode of functioning. Rand's epistemology comes into play here because her entire philosophy is built toward a practical end, which is living our lives to the utmost. This is best achieved through mental unit-economy, which stems from following proper cognitive guidelines; the perfection of our cognitive faculty leads to optimal cognitive efficiency, effectively raising our IQ. (There is a genius, i.e., daemon, in all of us, see.) That fast-tracks us toward self-actualization, and when people cooperatively pool their now-enhanced cognitive resources, things get fast-tracked even more, which frees up yet more cognitive resources to enhance, and so forth. So I'm just playing my part in getting this avalanche started. After that, there is just no room for the cycnicism, pessimism, and defeatism (in addition to all that cognitive inefficiency and irrationality) currently holding us back from achieving a better world.

So this posting is about Personal Destinies. I don't intend it to be a review so much as a brief exposition and commentary in which I can barely hold back my fawning. If I had to name a single favorite philosophy book, it would be this one. There's a good reason why this is. First, my philosophical specialty is ethics, and ethics has a certain centrality in philosophy that the other branches of philosophy don't have. (Epistemology has a centrality of its own. Perhaps the contrast here is this: epistemology is more basic, while ethics is more central.) Second, it's expertly and beautifully crafted. Just brilliant. It also has the "cred" of coming from a leading university press, so there's no reason, no fucking reason, for academics to (continue to) overlook it. Third, it's true - chock full of true.

There's one downside: it is obscure. That is to say, it is written in an obscure style. I say this because some years ago, as I was in college and then in grad school, I tried on two occasions to venture into the book, and barely followed what Norton was saying. Now, when a graduate student in philosophy specializing in ethics reads this book and doesn't get what's going on, that's pretty good evidence that it's obscure. And I still say it's obscure. In fact, while there are parts of the book that I understand - and like a lot - there are still parts of the book quite hard for me to follow even on the basis of two recent readings. I'll get to that in a bit. But first, another tidbit as to how I re-encountered this book, if this is any clue as to the completist-perfectionist nature of the mental process involved.

See, when I first delved into the book way back when in school, I noticed that some chapters were devoted to critics of "recent eudaemonisms," including that of Nietzsche. The idea of Nietzsche as a eudaemonist struck me as odd and/or intriguing, which is why it stuck in the back of my mind for later retrieval. It was then a discussion in early 2010 on the SOLO forum in which Rand commentator Jennifer Burns and Rand-defender James Valliant were participating, where links between Rand and Nietzsche were discussed - I think it was about their respective celebrations of human excellence - and that's when it clicked. I had to go back and scrounge up my Norton book. Then I "got it." The first chapter (the most accessible) had me hooked.

(To even think of drawing the connection between Rand, Nietzsche and Norton requires a context of knowledge that only a few people possess. Hell, how did I even know about Norton to begin with? Only because he was mentioned in the works of Machan, Rasmussen and Den Uyl. And how many people have read them indepth? That demographic is limited to people interested in Rand, in ethics, and in academic-style philosophy. A small group to begin with. So what are the odds Norton's book would have fallen into total obscurity were it not for the works of these Rand-influenced philosophers? [Insert angry rant about Rand and the academy here.])

Now, about the book. I mentioned the first chapter. The first chapter is enough to sell a reader on the basic idea. I knew just from reading the first chapter that there was a book project in the making. The chapter's title is "The Ethical Priority of Self-Actualization." Norton here is doing an ambitious integration of his own here: in a manner hardly at all accomplished in any of the other literature, Norton ties the ancient concept of eudaemonia to the 20th century concept of self-actualization popularized first and foremost by Abraham Maslow. I mean, how was that connection so badly missed outside of Norton's work? To top that, Norton mentions in his first footnote (in the Preface) that he uses the terms "eudaimonism" (his spelling) and "self-actualization ethics" and "perfectionism" interchangeably, and that "formally and inclusively" he he employs the term "normative individualism." It just all comes together!

Norton, in characteristically beautiful style, illustrates the concept of the "daimon" by analogy to the hollow clay busts of the semi-deity Silenus fashioned by ancient Greek sculptors, which contained inside them a golden figurine to be revealed when the bust is broken open. The golden figurine is akin to our inner daimon, i.e., the inner self. Our ethical task, in short, is to bring this self to outward actuality, so that (citing the passage from the Phaedrus which Norton quotes at the very beginning, before the Preface) the inward and the outward self may be at one. I mean, already you can tell this is an awesome ethical system. This is where the virtue of integrity comes in - you act so as to harmonize the inward and outward self. The parallels to Howard Roark are obvious to anyone in the habit of drawing integrations. Going back to the title of the first chapter: self-actualization has ethical priority. It is the chief and fundamental concern of ethics, from which other ethical considerations follow. Rand again! (How did so many miss this connection, again? HOW????!!!)

Norton is careful to distinguish self-actualization from self-realization. His claim is that the inward self is real whether actualized or not. It exists as potentiality. Moreover, Norton expands upon both Aristotle and Rand by emphasizing more than just the generic human potentiality of rationality; he uses the phrase (among the many wonderful phrase-coinings in this book) "innate distinct potentiality," which is the self. Each individual has his own "unique and irreplaceable potential worth" in virtue of his unique innate nature. Dougs Rasmussen and Den Uyl would later distinguish generic and individuative potentialities, the actualization of both of which are necessary to self-actualization or eudaemonia. The normative enterprise consists, then, in self-knowledge or self-discovery and engaging in the work to progressively actualize that potentiality.

That's the basic idea, upon which the rest of the book builds. Chapters 2-4 critique "recent eudaemonisms," in turn: British Absolute Idealism, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and then the Existentialism of Sartre. I assume these chapters would be of interest to those who are reasonably well-versed in these thinkers, which admittedly I am not (for the moment, only for the moment). I do have a basic idea as to the differences between Existentialism and a Grecophile eudaemonism, namely, as to whether "existence precedes essence." Norton (and Aristotle, and Rand) affirm that we do have an essence or nature from the onset of our existence; this defines our potentialities to be actualized.

Chapter 5, titled "The Metaphysics of Individualism," is perhaps the most difficult chapter in the book; not having specialized in metaphysics, a lot of his discussion here goes over my head. (I should mention here that there's a silver lining to the difficult parts of Norton's book: it affords the opportunity to come back for subsequent readings and get something out of it. How many books can one say that about?) One very intriguing thing Norton does in this chapter is to address the meta-ethical question of goodness and "ought" in relation to natural facts. The gist of Norton's answer here consists in conceiving "ought" as potentiality in relation to actuality (thereby answering Hume, who treats fact in terms of actuality without discussing such concepts as potentiality), and in describing the basic promissory nature of human actions. (I think this latter aspect may correspond to Rand's "initial choice" upon which obligation is grounded, in connection with facts about, essentially, our potentialities.)

Chapter 6, "The Stages of Life," provides Norton's conception of the person as informed by developmental psychology, starting with childhood, then adolescence, and then maturation, and, finally, old age. There are distinctive principles of behavior applying to each stage, while the transition between stages involves what Norton refers to as "world-exchange" by the person. Childhood essentially involves dependency; the stage of adolescence is characterized by creative exploration of potentialities; maturation or adulthood is the "main phase" for which eudaemonistic principles see their application; old age is . . . well, it sounds kinda drab the way Norton describes it. I don't want to think about old age until I approach it.

Chapter 7, "Eudaimonia: The Quality of Moral Life in the Stage of Maturation," describes the condition of "living in truth to oneself," or "being where one wants to be, doing what one wants to do." That sounds like a rare phenomenon in the present-day world, but the whole point is that we all have this daimon in us that can in principle be actualized under the right conditions. Norton refers to eudaemonia as a feeling and a condition; in the first chapter, he describes it as both a feeling and condition attendant upon the satisfaction of right desire, which distinguishes it from many prevailing conceptions of happiness (though in line with the ancient Greek conception of happiness). Eudaemonia is "marked by a distinctive feeling that constitutes its intrinsic reward and therefore bears the same name as the condition itself." My favorite part of this chapter - a fascinating one, at least - is the last part, where Norton discusses the "post-mortem life." To wit:

"...It follows that the individual who is living in truth to himself is ready to die at any time. The sense of this is conveyed in a report by Abraham Maslow of his feelings upon completion of what he identifies only as an 'important' piece of work. 'I had really spent myself. This was the best I could do, and here was not only a good time to die but I was even willing to die . . . It was what David M. Levy called the "completion of the act." It was a good ending, a good close.' What follows the good close is termed by Maslow 'post-mortem life.' He says, 'I could just as easily have died so that my living constitutes a kind of extra, a bonus. It's all gravy. Therefore I might just as well live as if I had already died.' What comes next in Maslow's account sounds a new note. 'One very important aspect of the post-mortem life,' he says, 'is that everything gets doubly precious, gets piercingly important. You get stabbed by things, by flowers and by babies and by beautiful things -- just the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends and chatting. Everything seems to look more beautiful rather than less, and one gets the much-intensified sense of miracles.'

"For myself, I cannot imagine a better evocation of the wonder that must have filled Adam in the moment when he first opened his eyes upon the world. . . .

"By the eudaimonic individual death is not feared as the 'period' by which a tragic fate cuts short the unfinished sentence. In the biography of the good life every sentence is a fitting epitaph and is the epitaph until it is succeeded by the next sentence. . . .

"Therefore to the good life death is no stranger, no alien event opposed to life, and death does not 'take us by surprise, as Sartre says, nor 'alienate us wholly in our own life.' Death is life in its consummation, and because consummation is perpetually within the well-lived life, so likewise death is within that life. The conception of death as alien to life is the product of a death-aversion which, by attempting to banish death from the sphere of life, precludes to life its consummation and its worth." (p. 239-240)

(This reminds me of Lester Burnham's final monologue in American Beauty.)

Chapter 8, "Our Knowledge of Other Persons," is also rather technical and difficult; he describes the process of "participatory enactment" in which we recognize in ourselves a world of possibilities only one of which is actualized in our own person, but this set of possibilities enables us to see those within others that are or can be actualized. I think the basic concept here is an explanation of how a self-actualizing individual recognizes and adopts a principle of universalizability, respect for persons, and taking an interest in the self-actualization of others.

This leads into chapter 9, "Social Entailments of Self-Actualization: Love and 'Congeniality of Excellences.'" Norton explains at length the distinction between love ("the aspiration to higher value"), passion, eros, and friendship, and brings up another wonderful phraseology, "diverse and complementary excellences," which is fairly self-explanatory. Chapter 10, "Intrinsic Justice and Division of Labor in Consequent Sociality" applies the social-entailment idea to the concept of justice. Here Norton brings up a principle of justice that I can't exactly describe as capitalistic, since he describes principles of justice in terms of what an individual is entitled to in virtue of his own distinctive excellence; this is presented as an alternative to the theories of justice advanced by Rawls and Nozick. Since I take the Nozickian principle to be the correct one, that has priority over what Norton says. Norton does have interesting things to say about what use a philosopher has for a sports car, though he seems to rule out that a philosopher can't also be interested in possessing sports cars. But it is plausible in the sense that philosophers, especially, aren't inclined toward seeking enrichment via material possessions such as sports cars. That idea is hardly new, and it may need modification (and certainly some kind of resolution with Rand's celebration of money-making).

Minor note: Norton uses the term "egoism" in a fairly standard sense, which is not Rand's, and rejects egoism in the standard sense as being morally inadequate. He does, however, commend the "egoistic" flavor of the ancient eudaemonists for rightly recognizing the priority of self (for which interest in others' self-actualization is an expression).

It is my hope that, in time, Personal Destinies will be mass-published and easily affordable; did I already mention that I think the world would be a better place if this book (or, say, a popularization of its ideas) were widely read? One thing's for sure: it has been a chief source of inspiration for me philosophically, as an example of how good a book can be.

On the Singularity

What is the Singularity? The term is associated most with futurist Ray Kurzweil. (See: "Ray Kurzweil: That Singularity Guy.") However, I, of all people, have had the audacity to buy the domain name singularityhq.com and point it right to this blog. What kind of possibly delusional stuff is that all about?

In my previous post, regarding utopia, I made the observation that my thesis of utopianism and perfectionism covers more ground by centering on ethics, epistemology, and philosophy rather than politics. Politics is subordinate and derivative. The philosopher as such needs to discover the primary and the fundamental, i.e., to cover the greatest possible ground with each new integration. This process requires a huge amount of intellectual curiosity - the need to identify what items of fundamental importance one can in one's cognitive field of vision - and so, naturally, curiosity leads to encountering information about something called the Singularity, and to the realization that the concept of the Singularity would tie in with my concept of utopia. Not exactly anything mysterious going on here, at least yet, right? So just stick with this and see what "delusional" implications just might occur.

Now, as philosopher, I recognize that philosophy, in covering the most ground, takes hierarchical precedence over technology, which is Kurzweil's domain. I just have a more all-encompassion domain of vision than he does, in virtue of thinking more like a philosopher. He thinks like a technological inventor and futurist, so his knowledge in that domain would vastly exceed mine. But that doesn't affect my point. By virtue of our respective avenues of endeavor and interest, I can only say so much about technology, and he can only so so much about philosophy.

Now, what is technology, basically? It is a product of human conceptual consciousness. In this relation, human conceptual consciousness is the primary, technology is the secondary and derivative. This means human conceptual consciousness is more hierarchically primary than technology. Now, take a wild guess as to which domain of study focuses on the basic principles governing the functioning of human conceptual consciousness: philosophy, or technology?

With me still? Okay. Now, what would be of greater momentous import for human civilization: a technological maturity, or an intellectual and moral maturity? Now, if you were to ask Ray Kurzweil what he thinks intellectual and moral maturity consists in, and if he couldn't expertly tie his response to the ideas of Ayn Rand, David L. Norton and Thomas Hurka within a few seconds, then you're probably asking this question of the wrong "authority." You should be asking a philosopher.

And so, to cut a long story short, that's why a philosopher - the Ultimate Philosopher, in fact - bought the domain name singularityhq.com.

:-)

A Mind-Nugget Re: Utopia

A standard objection to laissez-faire capitalism or to utopian visions more generally is that "It would work only if people were morally better; as it is, people are too destructive in their behaviors." Unfortunately, that seems to be a discussion-ender for many people; the idea of bringing about a society of morally-better people just doesn't strike them as realistic enough to even entertain, or for it to even occur to them. All we know, historically, is a mixed record of human behavior.

My current project is focused, meanwhile, on how to bring about a society of morally-better people. Not only would objections to laissez-faire fall apart if there is a realistic blueprint for human moral perfection in place, but all other sorts of problems and objections, over and above politics, go away. So at the least I have a one-up on a lot of critics or opponents of laissez-faire: true enough, even if you don't need morally perfect or better people for laissez-faire capitalism to be the most desirable socio-economic system, you just cover a lot more ground when you begin to focus on the issue and the question of human moral perfection or betterment, over and above how well markets and property rights "work." (This is exactly an illustration of the nature of hierarchy: a philosopher, in drawing broader and broader integrations, covers more and more all-encompassing ground.)

Here's the next further-encompassing integration: we are all committed, in some fashion or other, whether we all realize it or not, to achieving just the kind of utopia I aim to provide a blueprint for. How is this? Well, we know it is achievable in principle, because of one thing a great many of us already accept: we have free will.

Free will makes possible Nazi Germany - and it makes possible laissez-faire utopia. There's really nothing hard to figure out here. To deny that we can end up with either of these is to deny the causal efficacy of consciousness and its products. (Even those who "deny free will" can't realistically deny that people can be greatly influenced by ideas swirling around in their cultural environment.) Further, as a certain novelist-philosopher put it, our basic and most fundamental virtue - that which (metaphysically) makes the greatest number of others possible, and which (epistemologically) explains the greatest number of others - is the virtue of rationality, which amounts in practice to nothing more than an integral commitment to thinking. (This also explains the last line in a comprehensive philosophical book by said novelist-philosopher's best student.) Not only that, but intellectual and moral virtue can make our lives - individually and socially - a lot better. So there's great incentive and reward involved with being morally better.

That's all it fundamentally comes down to: the virtue of thinking.

[ADDENDUM: "She was thinking all the time." -Harry Binswanger, in 100 Voices and/or "Centenary Reminiscences" - in reference, concretely, to Rand's manner of arriving at her concept of "value." She just spent all her time thinking about it - with no other thinker she could really refer to, save perhaps for Aristotle - before she found a fundamental explanatory answer. A real philosopher should be at least as fascinated by her process of thinking and arriving at answers, as by the answers themselves. It's really of secondary importance here whether the conclusions and arguments she used are true and sound. Given where she started and what she had to work with, it's really quite amazing what she managed to integrate in the time she had. It's exactly why Peikoff, Binswanger, Gotthelf and other trained philosophers in her midst compared her to Aristotle. It's not some fawning fucking cult-like devotion, but a natural response to the fact that she out-thought everyone she came in contact with, including being able to prove convincingly everything that seemed "weird" to outsiders or the uninitiated. (Up to and including the reasons she broke with that slimy bastard Branden.) It's just mind-boggling how so few people have picked up on this. What failure of thinking brings this about? Having only Aristotle and perhaps Nietzsche as chief formative influences, and philosophizing mid-20th-century, how formidable a system of thought could others come up with? Rand just fuckin' blows the others away, that's all there is to it; the rest is just a matter of explaining that point to anyone with a curious and functioning mind. And that's why her opposition is so often so disgusting. (But it can be corrected.)]

Comprachicos or Reagan?

I don't know to express how disgusting I find the likes of Brain Leiter, a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, and a leading Comprachico. It's these sorts of Comprachicos that fill the public mind with all kinds of intellectual poison. His latest rant is in regard to the centenary of President Reagan's birth. From the rant:

The "Reagan revolution" was, like the 1979 Iranian one, a revolution "from the right," a new phenomenon in the modern era. Reagan's represented the triumph of certain ideas, largely hatched (sad to say) at the University of Chicago, though these ideas (those of Friedman and Lucas and Hayek) triumphed not because of the arguments supporting them (decidedly a mixed bag), but because they justified policies that immediately enriched the richest and most powerful groups in American capitalism, who needed no arguments to see their merit. (The fact that, since that time, the "ideas" of Ayn Rand--the proverbial bean-brain by comparison to the other ideologues of the right like Friedman and Hayek--have come to the fore in the Republican Party is one of the legacies of Reagan's destruction of the public culture.)

Now, I think we have two competing hypotheses here:

(1) The "destruction of the public culture" in America is due to the likes of Ronald Reagan.

(2) The "destruction of the public culture" in America is due to the failure of the philosophical profession - namely, the failure to instigate and foster the right kind of educational environment for the people.

We sure as shit aren't going to get an improvement in the educational environment with the likes of Comprachico Leiter dictating the basic terms of discussion in our highest institutions of learning. Thank goodness Comprachico Leiter - rightly well-reviled in his own profession - doesn't dictate the basic terms of discussion. Few professional philosophers are that off-the-tracks.

Still, what more fundamentally affects and determines the course of the public culture: its philosophical profession, or its politicians? What has more fundamental causal efficacy in these areas? In Comprachico Leiter's case, we have in fact a somewhat-weird lack of a grasp of the importance of his own profession. (You'd more likely expect someone to over-emphasize the importance of their own profession.) This is itself an obvious failing on his part as a philosopher, and it can only corrupt the content of whatever it his he's filling his victims' minds with.

For anyone who follows Glenn Greenwald's blog on a regular basis, it's obvious that intellectual ideas play hardly any role in the formation of politics and policy today. The political culture now is so anti-intellectual, so cynical, so short-sighted, so pragmatistic, and so cutthroat, that the idea that anything in politics these days is the product of Rand, Friedman, Hayek or "right-wing ideology" (or other ideology) is flatly ridiculous. The only thing we might agree on is that today's political culture is owned more or less by corporations doing what it is that corporations do. (It wasn't Friedmanite or Hayekian, much less Randian, ideology that led to a greater respect for the free market over the last 30 years; simple reality and practicality and the failures of socialism led to pragmatic politicians and policy-makers having to adapt.) The public culture is also very anti-intellectual, cynical, etc. - which only further raises the question how ideologies of any kind could shape the culture today. If anything, what the current state of things demonstrates is the failure of the intellectual class to put forth any ideology at all that might shape things (much less for the better).

Not many people these days want to listen to the intellectuals - certainly not if the intellectuals are detached from the concerns and interests of the regular folk. Rand made the case that the ideas of philosophers are the fundamental determining factor in a culture, and I think the general thesis is true, but it's in applying that thesis that you can have disagreements. If, say, Kant is the fount of bad philosophical ideas and Kant is the leading philosopher of the modern era, that will certainly have effects - but what if the effects are not of people embracing Kantian ideas, but rather giving up on the philosophers who peddle them? For many folks, Kant certainly isn't going to override Jesus Christ (or, heck, Glenn Beck, or, heck, Barack Obama) in their hierarchy of values.

If people look to the philosophers and see either bad ideas or ideas they just don't connect with, how should we expect the public culture to be other than what it is now? Further, when educators look to the philosophers of our time and/or the past, what kind of wisdom might they glean and impart to students? What if, because of the things the philosophers say, the educators are more likely to become Comprachicos?

The causation involved here - and Ayn Rand's significance to all this - is not easy stuff to figure out. Hell, Comprachico Leiter is no dummy, and while I don't know what all is going on in that brain of his that leads him to be so viciously and irrationally hostile to Rand, capitalism, etc. - it is by no means obvious how philosophical ideas impact (or fail to impact) a culture.

(It shouldn't even require saying - but I'll say it here - that things besides philosophical ideas shape the course of cultures in a more short-run sense. Short-run, President Reagan has impacted things in ways that Rand has not and could not. But in fundamental, long-term terms, philosophy has the widest and furthest-reaching impact, just by the nature of the hierarchy of ideas. Perhaps my favorite example-illustration of this is the [rather undeniable?] role Aristotelianism had in bringing about the Renaissance as well as the scientific revolution.)

In this regard one can't really single out Comprachico Leiter for a failure of understanding; the nature of the role of philosophical ideas in shaping culture doesn't seem to have been picked up on by all that many philosophers besides Rand. (Hegel, apparently, had things to say here, though couched in much weird and inaccessible verbiage.) To "see" this kind of fundamental-level, long-term causation just takes a certain kind of context, interest, focus, time to think/integrate, etc., which very few people possess. It is, nonetheless, a subject that philosophers by their nature should be most interested in. At least someone like Rand has the mind, the vision, and the guts to speak about these issues in compelling terms; by contrast, you don't really get that vibe with Comrpachico Leiter, now do you.

So anyway, we've got lots of Fail here on all sorts of mutually-reinforcing and self-fulfilling levels. The long-term solution, of course, would be an educational program in the ways of critical thinking and human flourishing, but to get that program in place would be to, among other things, inform people of the crucial importance of philosophy (or lack thereof) to the course of daily life and of history. And whom, exactly, might we look to for clues as to such: a bitter, anti-capitalist Comprachico, or the author of "Philosophy: Who Needs It"?

[ADDENDUM: The economics profession, as it happens, is quite "centrist" and pragmatic - which is why the economics profession is much more friendly to capitalism than the Humanities are. Now, apply this to the subject of historical and cultural causation: due to the nature of the intellectual hierarchy, what affects society in more fundamental terms, the economics profession or the Humanities? How on earth does the prominence of Mises, Hayek and Friedman in today's economics scene even begin to counter the effects of the attitude toward capitalism in the mainstream of the Humanities - much less when we begin to look at the prevailing ideas in the culture at large (e.g., Christianity)?]

Academic Analytic Philosophy and The Meaning of Life

The Distinguished Professor, Comprachico Leiter, addresses the subject of the relation between professional philosophy and the public's view of meaning-of-life questions. Leiter is being his usual elitist self, while commenters further address the seeming divide between their profession and the public at large.

Meanwhile, the other day, Leiter took a typical pot-shot regarding a certain "hack philosopher."

Now, what might the connection between these two phenomena be? I ask because there absolutely is a connection here. The "hack philosopher," after all, provided very thoughtful and compelling answers on meaning-of-life questions; she has considerable popular appeal and an uber-practical approach to philosophical questions, while professional philosophers have by and large neglected to look at these answers. Surely there's an integrating connection between all these facts.

One of Leiter's blog commenters, David Velleman (a professor of philosophy at the top-rated philosophy program in the world, NYU) recommends a few books from Serious Philosophers that deal with meaning-of-life issues. The Serious Philosophers include the usual suspects: Rawls, Nagel, Nussbaum, Williams, etc. - all academics. The books by these figures he recommends are from academic presses, addressing questions in an academic fashion, appropriate first and foremost for fellow academic philosophers. Rawls's Theory of Justice aside, these works are and will continue to be virtually unknown by the public-at-large, precisely because they are so academic in nature. Doesn't recommending these books kind of miss the whole point about the disconnect between the academy and the public at large? Doesn't it illustrate the whole point?

The only two books I've read on Prof. Velleman's recommendations list are the Rawls and Nagel ones. Now, there is an essay by Nagel, "Equality," in Mortal Questions, that made me remark at the time how far removed in sense-of-life terms it is from the "hack philosopher's" essay on the Apollo 11 launch. I mean, if sense-of-life has something to do with the meaning of life (I just now raised the potential connection between these two concepts), then isn't there something more inspiring in meaning-of-life terms in "Apollo 11," than in an academic essay on the importance of equality?

Okay, let's take the more familiar case, that of Rawls. What does one get out of A Theory of Justice in meaning-of-life (and sense-of-life!) terms? How, for instance, does maximin or the Difference Principle come to bear on the virtues of character required to achieve eudaemonia? Let's just put this in very plain terms a member of the general public as well as professional philosophers can understand: what has a closer connection to our understanding of the whole issue of the Meaning of Life: the ancient-Greek-inspired concept of eudaemonia or real happiness, or Rawls's Difference Principle?

Prof. Velleman caps off his book recommendations with this: "These authors have been associated with some of the foremost philosophy departments, and no philosophy student can get far without reading their work."

I think this kind of sums the whole problem up. We also have here a case of good answers being right under everyone's noses.

Now, let's say we take another look at the "hack philosopher" from an objective and impartial perspective as regards the big meaning-of-life issues in philosophy. Well, the standard objection raised right off is that the "hack philosopher" advocates selfishness as a virtue, and that's a no-no. However, the no-no response is not really an intellectually responsible one at all; it all crucially hinges on what the philosopher in question means by "selfishness." Far as I can tell, an excruciatingly small number of philosophers have given serious and respectable thought to what that philosopher actually meant (it has something to do with that ancient-Greek-inspired concept of eudaemonia, I think), and they come out in basic agreement with the philosopher. This is a very interesting data point, don't you think?

Part and parcel of eudaemonia, and of understanding the meaning of life, is adopting a (properly) capitalistic ethos. Already this puts much of the academy - well, the humanities parts of the academy - at odds with the interests of the general public. Rejecting a capitalistic ethos necessarily entails a form of intellectual disintegration between theory and life. The economics portion of the academy has done a better job figuring this out, but the humanities portions are more insulated from economic reality which demonstrates the superiority of capitalism.

Back at the time that he was a lone voice in the wilderness, Ludwig von Mises explained in apodictic-praxeological terms why socialism would fail. On the biggest economic question of the 20th century, Mises turned out to be right. The Nobel Prize arguably should be replaced with the Mises Prize. Anyway, it seems only Robert Heilbroner had the good graces to admit defeat in his own time, and to acknowledge the greatness of Mises.

Now, if Mises was right about that, what else might he have been right about? If he was right, not just about the failure of socialism, but that the best and most feasible economic system is the laissez-faire capitalism of classical liberalism, then that really puts the academy - and especially the humanities portion - in disconnect with and at odds with the general public and regular folks' interests, aspirations, etc., now does it not.

So, what we have here is an institutional bias against capitalism in academia, combined with compelling but pro-capitalist answers to big meaning-of-life questions being right under everyone's noses. So there you have it.

[ADDENDUM: Isn't it a case against the prevailing academic model all on its own, that so many of its practitioners have failed to integrate all the facts available here? The best philosophers are those best at making integrations qua philosopher. Could it really be that hard to integrate, say, Objectivist ethics with the eudaemonist tradition, or eudaemonism with meaning-of-life questions, or meaning-of-life questions with the unqualified goodness of capitalism, or with sense of life, or with Kubrick, or with House, M.D., or with Ralph Vaughan Williams, or with the history of philosophy? I mean, seriously, how fucking hard could it be? Sheesh! No wonder Understanding Objectivism is going to be such a big seller in the future.]

[ADDENDUM #2: Placeholder for future blog entry under the title "Economy." Integration is all about achieving maximum mental economy by thinking in essentials. But to think in an economistic fashion is to think suspiciously like a . . . capitalist! No fucking wonder . . . (That was an act of integration right there, BTW.)]

America: A Dumbed-Down Plutocracy?

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

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

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

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

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

Where Did the Singularity Begin?

While this blog is your headquarters for the Singularity, where did the Singularity actually begin? I'm referring, of course, to the real Singularity, the one signifying the maturation of the human race as such, and not just a technological maturity discussed by Kurzweil and the like. So . . .

Did it begin here?

Or was it here, perhaps?

Or here?

Or was it here?

Applying the Rule of Fundamentality, I'm leaning toward #2 right now. That is to say, the Singularity may have been gathering for quite a while now, just at a non-accelerated pace. Then again, did it begin some millions of years ago with the first rudiments of humanoid reason, and only show signs of acceleration with #2?

Also, why have Kurzweil and the like not delved into this at the greatest level of fundamentality available? Does technology just expand on its own, materialist-like, as an extrapolation of biology? Wherever might they have gotten that idea?

Why I Am the Ultimate Philosopher

[Some very-rough draft material for the book.]

A philosopher, more than anyone, sees things in the most fundamental, broadest-reaching, furthest-reaching form. A philosopher should be able to look throughout history and identify fundamental causal sequences that shape the course of history. "Fundamental" here is crucial: it does not identify the only causal sequence, but the causal sequence that best explains all the greatest number of other causal sequences. This is looking at things in fundamental-causal, not mono-causal, terms. Ideas most fundamentally shape the course of history, but they are not the only shape-r of history.

On this point, the message Rand and Peikoff give off is quite misleading to readers not well-versed in themes discussed in, say, Peikoff's The Art of Thinking course, say, lecture 3 where he talks about thinking in terms of fundamentals. Yes, if something thinks with a healthy psycho-epistemology to guide them, then they get the message that ideas are the fundamental and not only factor shaping history. But it is simply assuming too much cognitive efficacy on the part of the average reader to tell them, "Ideas are the fundamental shaping force in history." They'll just mistake fundamentality for monocausality, then look at the state of philosophy today and its irrelevance for most people's lives, and dismiss any such notion. What causes someone to mistake fundamentality for monocausality? An improper theory of concepts, of course!

People simply have not been given - until Ayn Rand developed her theory of concepts, or until someone presents an improved theory that would still be fundamentally similar to heres - a proper means of tying down the best of everyday commonsense cognition to the fundamental theoretical roots. As far as the "big philosophers in history" go, the closest anyone had come was Aristotle. But his moderate realism was not a fully satisfactory answer. Lacking such an answer, people will give up on philosophy as a guide to life. Ayn Rand has come closer than anyone else before to providing an accounting for that. What was the key to Rand's success in this department? Basically, dismissing basically the entirety of the modern philosophical tradition! What she did, instead, as she educated herself in the philosophical tradition, is compare the performance of the ancients as against the moderns, think in terms of the relevant essentials (for instance, Aristotle's views in astronomy, biology, physics, and politics are not the most relevant essentials in his way of thinking), and identify Aristotle as the man whose lead we need to follow in order to use philosophy as a means of improving our lives! So follow Aristotle's lead as best as you can, that's all.

Now, a crash course in fundamental-level causation in history:

The Greeks were going to be fine as long as Aristotle's works were preserved and disseminated. But those works got misplaced, and so for most of the next, oh, 1,500 years the dominant forces in intellectual life were Platonism and Christianity. Now, consider this: without Aristotle, and without Aquinas, where would the West be today? Think of how the Church ruled: all the greatest intellects were part of the church hierarchy, and Plato-Plotinus-Augustine were the most dominant intellectual forces until Aristotle's work was rediscovered (this was more fundamental than whether it would have been Aquinas or someone else making the reconciliation - it should not be called a synthesis, which is a goddamn modern term indicating the fusion of contradictory attributes [again, indicating a failure to find a proper theory of concepts]). Aristotle inserted a wedge fundamentally deadly to Church dominance: the independent use of secular reason as against received theocratic authoritarian dogma. The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution would follow in historically short order.

Science since the Renaissance has basically - at a practical level - provided all the solution we need to the "problem of induction." (We now just need to recognize the alignment of the theoretical and the practical in a proper theory of concepts.) The Church, meanwhile, in canonizing Aristotle, turned his ideas into a dogma. Along the way, no proper solution to the "problem of universals" had been presented. Philosophers, not seeing the relevant fundamentals about Aristotle, then set on a course of trying to "ground" natural science all over again.

Kant is Rand's chief whipping-boy among the moderns. I do not think Kant had malicious intentions in setting out to create his philosophy. Kant was merely the most impressive cashing-in - a dead end if you will - of the modern approach to philosophy. In Kant perhaps than anyone, you find the basic cleavage between ideas and the concerns of everyday common sense, i.e., between philosophy and life. Kant was an arch-rationalist in the more fundamentally relevant, i.e., psycho-epistemological sense. But Kant didn't do this all alone. This was an entrenched practice that Hume had perfected quite well himself - and admitted openly in his writings that he could not reconcile his philosophical ideas with his daily routine. But was this just Kant and Hume, or were they following other leads?

When first-time students of philosophy today are introduced to certain thinkers, who do they get? Descartes and Hume. But Descartes and Hume are terrible examples to follow psycho-epistemologically. Absolutely terrible. When students are introduced to this as how philosophy is done in this day and age, it is no wonder at all they'll lose interest. All "philosophers" do is raise idle questions and irrelevant problems. With Descartes and Hume are the models - yes. With Kant's style of exposition - yes.

Kant was a culmination of that cognitive model. Hegel is a mixed bag; he tries to be a synthetic middle-way between Aristotle and Kant, but the product looks even more rationalistic psycho-epistemologically than Kant. They're both about equally removed from common sense, each in their own way. One thing Hegel did recognize, though - and, again, this is before a proper theory of concepts was developed - was that his philosophy was the culmination of everything that came before. He was, up to that time, the "ultimate philosopher." When Rand formed her theory of concepts, she then became the "ultimate philosopher," and, too, recognized in some sense that her philosophy is the "culmination" of what came before - i.e., once all the alternatives have been eliminated. As already pointed out, Rand recognized the essential - that Aristotle had come closest - and proceeded to follow his essential lead: to the full integration of philosophy and life.

Rand singled out Kant as the chief modern villain because of his substantive conclusions, but those conclusions and his method were the culmination of a method of (psycho-epistemological) rationalism practiced by (arguably) all the major moderns. Rationalism is characterized, in Peikoff's terms, by the widespread detachment of philosophy from life. It's clear-cut in Hume. In his own way, Hume represents the culmination of that method. He hit his limit and could go no further. Hume and Kant - they're both terrible (i.e., anti-Aristotelian) models of doing philosophy. They both set the tone for the impressive-looking splitting-up ("distinction-making") of what is, in reality, self-identical. Oh, and Descartes was a master of that, too. Just all the splitting-up as such: what for? What is accomplished? The practical effect, in the end, is a split of philosophy from daily life.

Then there's Pragmatism, which Rand and Peikoff attribute to Kant. But do we get Pragmatism in its mature form without both Hume and Kant, much less all the other moderns helping to set the tone? With Descartes, Hume, Kant, and the Pragmatists, we get in all cases a non-Aristotelian interpretation of the world. This is thew fundamental-level problem with all of them. So bombard the American intellectual scene with Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Pragmatism (and some Marx and, up until only recently, Aristotle and Rand), and what do you get?

Whatever it is, a figure like Rawls is emblematic of it. One thing Rawls does not do, is provide an integrated view of existence all the way to the fundamentals, metaphysics and epistemology. His project is, in his words, "political not metaphysical." If this is the philosopher most influential on the liberal intellengtsia in the last few decades, it's little wonder those on the left now feel helpless to implement the changes they want. Too few people listen to the intellectuals these days to be swayed by them, because the intellectuals have the reputation for being wankers and often elitist. Those of an intellectual bent on the Right are not impressed, because their opponents are reduced to arguing less-fundamental political matters and focusing on political change rather than a change to the soul. (This is not want Rawls intended, but it's the outcome of the intellectual process.) But focusing on political-level change without identifying the fundamental causes of the necessary intellectual change, represents a P/pragmatic influence. I take this to be the essence of Peikoff's distinction between "disintegration" or D (recall also how David Kelley ends up working with libertarian organizations to "help spread the word"), and varieties of integration that tie all ideas together systematically.

Meanwhile, if they would just recognize and understand the importance of a proper theory of concepts...

(To be continued?)

[ADDENDUM: Shooting right to the fundamental: So did the real Singularity begin here, or with Rand? Or with Kubrick, perhaps? Would that make for a catchy book title perhaps: The Singularity Began With Stanley Kubrick? But this title is more perfect than that one. Hmmmm....]

The $6 Billion Plan to Fix America, Updated and Expanded

Here's the deal: $6 billion is hardly enough investment. The number needs to be expanded to more like $100 for every person in America, or $30 billion. The primary difference is the inclusion of Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism course, since methodology and first-hand thinking is at least as important as the content. If there's anything students of Objectivism might have learned by now, is that throwing the content out there, absent a means of integrating it, is darn near hopeless (aside from a frighteningly small number of exceptional cases). The contexts are just too far apart. The people out there need to be able to think. That, of course, requires a whole restructuring of our educational system, but first thing's first.

The essential books are 10 of the titles:

The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged
For the New Intellectual
The Virtue of Selfishness
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
The Romantic Manifesto
Philosophy: Who Needs It (we might need double or triple orders of this one)
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
The Ayn Rand Lexicon
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (by Leonard Peikoff)

Assume an average of $10 per book copy, plus $150-200 for the course, multiplied by 100 million sets distributed. That runs to $25-30 billion total.

Let's get it done.

The Intellectuals Need Rand

Okay, so the mainstream discourse in this country is an anti-intellectual cesspool. That's the problem. There's really no question that's the problem. It will do no good to idly harp on that problem over and over. We need to diagnose the problem's causes, and then work to solve it. I think we have some good idea on the diagnostic level: a culture-wide denigration of reason down to the very roots. We need a revolution - an intellectual one - from the ground up. For this to happen, it is an absolute imperative for the nation's best and brightest minds to adopt reason wholesale - not superficially, not ostensibly, not at-the-political-economic-level, but all the fucking way. All the way to Aristotle and Rand. There's just no way around it. The absolutism of reality offers no alternatives.

If you look out at the world right now - on the grand scale, on the big picture - you get the acute sense that we're on a crash course with disaster if things don't change pretty damn fast. It's a train wreck in slow motion. The locomotive is doing its thing, charging right ahead with the brakes barely being applied, and we see down the track some faint signs of the object with which the train would collide. We can't be sure just what it is, but it looks like it's there, and we have only so much time.

The intellectual class in this country - and make no mistake about it, for all this country's poor intellectual reputation around the world right now, we have the world's leading intellectuals right here in this country, because America is the breeding ground of greatness and leadership - sees the vast chasm separating their average worldview from that of the country's mainstream. They just don't know what to do about it. Well, good news: help can be on the way, if they're willing to accept it. They're going to have to clean up their acts first.

The silver lining with pragmatists is their willingness to shift course when they are, near-panic-stricken, under the impression their current course just isn't working. They can't say they know their current course isn't working; that isn't the pragmatist psycho-epistemology. They can only say that they can attach a probability to things, and when they get the impression that things are past 50/50, they've got to consider alternative courses of action. Well, now's the time to consider it. If there's one thing the liberal intellectuals in this country can be credited for, it's a pragmatic - and I mean this in a good sense, i.e., the concern with practicality and, therefore, reasonable, real-world, empirical, scientific input for decision-making - sensibility at root. There's a reason Dr. Peikoff finds a closer ally among the "liberals" than among the intellectually-defunct and deranged "conservatives." The "conservative" intellectual movement in this country delivered us the Dingbat, a strident ignorance, and a demand for regression into pre-modernist unreason. Dingbat is the final cashing-in, the final proof of the full-on intellectual and cognitive failure of the American Right.

When Rand delivered a lecture in 1961, titled "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age," she was addressing it primarily to the "liberals" in her audience who care about reason more than the "conservatives" do. She was, however, also speaking at a time when Marxism and socialism were at a peak of intellectual and political influence around the world. You have to look back and realize the surreal nature of a lot of it; her lecture was one year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and just a few years before America conscripted its young to go fight in what eventuated in a failed war. You had the President delivering an inaugural address asking Americans to accept a false dichotomy between receiving altruistic handouts or performing the altruistic handouts. You had the "liberals" clamoring for a "War on Poverty" just as capitalist economic growth was almost finishing the job for them.

(Poverty rates have since escalated, and the "liberals" are, inherently and fundamentally, at a loss to understand why. They turn to the economics community and get mixed answers at best from their vantage point. They just don't know. They've run out of answers.)

Rand's main goal was to try to get the "liberals" to recognize that their adherence to reason should lead them to reconsider the socialist-Marxist rewriting of capitalism's history. By then, however, the intellectual dominance of Marxism was too entrenched for that reconsideration to happen any time soon. The nature of intellectual entrenchment is, for the most part, a generational thing: many intellectuals have already formed a worldview by their 20s and it conditions and lenses their interpretation of everything. Practically speaking, the way around entrenchment is for the current generation to die off and be replaced.

Remember, however, the pragmatist silver lining: everything gets to be open to reconsideration. The pragmatic mindset is to eschew hard doctrines. Notice, further, that today's intellectual class is basically out of answers as to how to fix problems. They have no ideology to fall back on, like the Marxists did. They're adrift at sea without a rudder or compass. That's their cashing-in. They put their political eggs in the Obama basket and got just what they should have expected by placing their trust in politicians and government to fix problems. All they know is "at least he's not the Republicans," the Republicans being Bush, Cheney, and the Dingbat. That's what they get for thinking any significant fundamental change is going to originate at the political level.

They think - though they don't know - that the economic crisis we're going through is the result of too much "Republican," "right-wing" economic policy - knowing full well that politicians in Washington in recent memory have been from both parties, doing what politicians in an intellectually-bankrupt age could only be expected to do, and that is to sell influence to the highest bidder. So they can only guess that the current crisis has anything at all to do with smaller-government (much less "laissez faire" - are you fucking kidding me?) economic policies. They're awash in a sea of not knowing anything with any degree of certainty - certainly not in this day and age, when the economic data appear to point in all directions, some appearing to point in the pro-capitalist one, others appearing to point in the Euro-welfare-state one, a vanishingly small amount pointing toward the Marxist one. They don't have Marxism to point to like the intellectuals of the '30s did. They don't have any ideology at all that they find appealing. They only know - actually, here, they do know - that their opponents across the political aisle are intellectually defunct from beginning to end. They just haven't seriously considered any alternatives to get out of the cesspool they're sinking into.

If you look at today's political environment and asked to identify the two main alternatives, they are pragmatism on one side, and unreason on the other. A person of conviction, of reason, of love for America's founding ideals will say, "No, thanks."

These thoughts originated earlier today while thinking about the oncoming train wrecks we're told about all the time (assuming we're paying attention): man-made global warming, peak oil production, a general American decline. Now, if we were to take off any political or ideological hats, ignore any political agendas and motives on either "side" of the debate about man-made global warming, the first thing to notice is that very few of us are scientists who have studied the issue in depth. The notion that more than a few of us have any expertise on the issue is like the notion that more than a few people have any expertise in the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The notion is ludicrous. What we do have, however, is a large and growing body of evidence that (a) the global mean temperatures are rising at a fast rate in geological terms, and (b) human-made emissions play a causal (not merely "correlative") role in helping this process along.

Now, if you were to look at the mainstream, cesspool-style debate on the issue, you have pragmatic liberals on one side, and fucking knuckle-draggers on the other. In what has to be one of the most jaw-dropping acts of projection any of us may ever see, the right-wing in this country, on this issue, accuses the other side of being driven by a political agenda. Sure enough, there is a political agenda going on on both sides, but any reasonable and intelligent person can abstract from the political agendas to look at the plain scientific facts of the matter. Doing that requires a minimal ability to distinguish descriptive statements from prescriptive ones. The right-wing charges (fears - and the fears are to some extent justified - but the main driving element here is fear, not justification) that the "liberals" are using climate science data as a reason to tax and control the American people more. I don't side with the "liberals" on the prescription, but their prescription is not hard to understand given the ruling paradigmatic mindset that if there is a problem, then the solution is government controls, taxes, etc. (I think we do need to be concerned that if - more likely, when - the scientifically-modeled global warming predictions materialize, that the industrialized nations are potentially open to class-level legal action of some kind, when peoples of non-industrialized nations are displaced by rising coastal waters and other bad stuff.) The "liberals'" error here is relatively minor next to the strident, screaming anti-science and anti-reason of the opposition. The opposition won't even get on board with the descriptive element, even though it is informed by the best science. They won't do it on the issue of evolution, so why in the hell would they do it on this issue?

So I think we as Americans should be willing to prepare ourselves for the worse - more warming, and, simultaneously, a peak and drop in petroleum production - and arm ourselves accordingly. I don't mean, of course, arming ourselves with guns, to prepare ourselves for the supposed "resource wars" some people are predicting. I mean arming ourselves cognitively and intellectually. The only way to do this, is to adopt and integrate the Randian method. There just isn't any other way. Reality doesn't allow for another way.

What the liberal intellectuals need to do, to get people of reason on their side and push the screamingly irrational right-wing into the status of irrelevant minority, is to get over their silly little aversion to Ayn Rand, and adopt reason in all its primacy over the political. If, as I think is the case, they're pragmatic enough to acknowledge the failures and problems with Big Government - not the least of which is how Big Government runs contrary to America's founding ideals - and look for serious alternatives, they might find that they have a chief ally in reason with Ayn Rand, the dreaded egoist-capitalist. The socio-political problems the liberals fear (yes, they have their own version of fear) from adopting a Randian social ethic (a) are not real concerns once you actually understand what she's saying, (b) are secondary and subordinate to the issue of reason, and (c) a culture of reason would make the whole issue moot. A culture of reason has much better means at its disposal to solve any and all problems, be it poverty, or global warming, or energy production, or even obstinate right-wing ignorance. The genuinely intellectual and intelligent elements on the political right today - the "economically conservative and socially libertarian" - are already on board with the Randian program whether they even know it or not.

It's the pragmatic liberal intellectuals who now need to step up and do their part to build the cultural bridge that can unite us as Americans, as a people of reason (and, therefore, of individualism, freedom, and capitalism). If they would only put down their defenses for a bit and do some intellectually curious and responsible investigation (this means not chuckling and dismissing Rand when, oh, like when she says "A is A" - believe me, by now I know pretty much every trick in the book people have for dismissing this and that about Rand - hell, I was prone in my own ways to that same kind of problem back in my naive stages), they'd recognize in Rand their greatest and most potent ally.

Time may well be running out.

(They should just do it, anyway. Rand's eventual status as world-historic thinker is inevitable. Better sooner than later. And, the left is out of ideas, besides.)

Let's get it done! :-)

[ADDENDUM: I'm considering making this my "sign off" post before going into heavy-duty writing of the book's manuscript. I won't give a timetable on a finish, but it should be really soon now. Time is, after all, of the essence. ;-) ]