Justice vs. Force

From poll answers provided by Allen Wood, a Stanford philosophy professor and leading Kant scholar:

My real position could be accurately described as 'anti-hyperinegalitarianism'. But given the obscene inequalities we have in the actual world, this is close to egalitarianism,

Um . . . well, the Ultimate Philosophical Retort to this more or less academic-mainstream view is, "How are the inequalities obscene?"

One simple but fundamental error in current-day mainstream moral and political philosophy (that is, unless A. John Simmons represents some kind of silent libertarian mainstream, but I kind of doubt it) is the confusion of matters of justice with matters of what rights people have. Rawls's Theory of Justice is focused almost exclusively with how coercive institutions ought to deal with questions of both liberty and equality. The stolen assumption here is that institutions ought to be coercive at all.

Okay, let's imagine a eudaemonistic culture. Eudaemonism is concerned with self-actualization and the conditions required for such. Those conditions are, first and foremost, the agent's own moral dispositions, and then things like good upbringing and education, a minimally supportive culture, having basic needs fulfilled and . . . freedom (to exercise one's capacities, as a necessary constitutive element of eudaemonia). Equality hardly enters into the picture at all except in minimal legal terms (i.e., equality under the law). But take the core concern here that a left-liberal might share: the importance of fulfilling the conditions under which people can flourish. Ensuring that basic needs are met is part of that moral vision. So let's just posit this plausible assumption: a eudaemonistic culture is one in which people are concerned that the basic needs of people are met.

Now, where is force supposed to enter this picture? If a theory of "social" justice is about "what human beings owe to one another" as a matter of basic human decency, that's all fine and good. How does that translate into a prescription that people or a polity engage in force to see to it that these obligations are fulfilled? It's a complete non sequitur.

The basic rational principle of political governance is that it secures logically prior rights, i.e., that it secures the conditions of freedom under which people can flourish. Protecting freedom is the only proper concern of government. Matters of "obscene" inequalities are a moral concern that people in non-coercive organizations have every right (and duty, if we're really dealing with moral obscenity) to address. The paradigm that absolutely has to be tossed out here, however, is the force-is-acceptable paradigm. It's an age-old paradigm used and applied across the ages where human beings as a species hadn't reached a high-enough stage of enlightenment to recognize the evil of using force against rational beings.

(As far as moral obscenity goes, let's not buy into the floating, irrational egalitarian notion that the social problem to be concerned with is inequality per se. There is no rational moral principle underlying any such concern. As some version of eudaemonistic ethics is the only rational underpinning for any social-political ethics, the proper focus of concern here is not inequality but rather whether the requisite conditions for self-actualization have been fulfilled. Equality or inequality plays no significant role in this analysis. To decry, say, starvation in the Third World as a moral obscenity is not to decry it on grounds of inequality. I do keep in mind Prof. Wood's hedge here; maybe he's not advancing his concern for moral obscenity on such irrational grounds as egalitarianism, but rather on grounds having to do with meeting basic conditions for self-actualization in light of current disparities that supposedly can [only?] be addressed through political means.)

What we should seriously consider as philosophers is whether the coercive state is anathema to (eudaemonistic) moral values, even and perhaps especially including the socially-oriented concern that the basic conditions for self-actualization are met. To say that good people ought to do certain things or provide such-and-such conditions for one another as a matter of justice, is not to say that the coercive state is the means by which people get (i.e., make, through force) one another to respect the demands of justice.

My "force is evil" view might be labeled or lumped into the cluster of views known as "philosophical anarchism." If that means, simply, that people ought not to use force against one another, then "philosophical anarchism" is the only acceptable social-political position and, frankly, the only one that common-sense analysis leads to. The basic social principle I endorse is that no one has the right to initiate physical force against anyone else, and that any social institution must respect individual rights; a social institution calling itself government isn't exempt from such a requirement. Government, like any other social institution, should be based only on the consent of the participants involved.

The scheme of voluntary communities envisioned by Nozick in "A Framework for Utopia" (the last chapter of Anarchy, State, and Utopia) is much like what I have in mind. Unlike Nozick, however, I have a broader moral vision to offer which makes a plausible road to "utopia" so much as realistically possible: a society in which eudaemonistic values are widespread is a society in which (a) people tend to be a lot more appreciative of the requirements of self-actualization and are therefore more empathetic and peaceful and (b) a society where the institution of government becomes (perhaps radically) transformed from government as we know it today.

Suppose, for instance, that the mindset that made "Galt's Gulch" possible is so widespread, and the success of such a model so compelling, that government functions amount to the functions performed by Judge Narragansett in the valley. Ayn Rand firmly denied that she was an anarchist, but the model of governance entailed by widespread acceptance and application of her moral ideals meets the social conditions demanded by the self-styled anarchists (excepting perhaps the left-anarchists, unless they really wouldn't mind the productive geniuses going off to form their own capitalistic societies, in which case the left-anarchists' desire for peace exceeds their desire to interfere with capitalist acts amongst consenting adults). The essential aspect of government in Rand's definition is the exclusive power to enforce laws in a defined geographical area, as a necessary prerequisite to the Rule of Law. That sounds consistent with the requirement that all governments must be based entirely on the consent of the governed and where the model of governance is not unlike the minimalistic dispute-resolution functions provided by an effective legal apparatus as was the case in the Gulch.

Doesn't this vision of a good society offer a lot more to inspire people than a force-based quasi-egalitarian vision does?

One thing entailed in this vision is that politics as we know it (and politicians as we know them) can be a thing of the past. No longer would we entrust our concerns about justice (or other things) to the fucking sociopathic narcissists running governments these days. No longer would we entrust these narcissists with coercive powers over our activities. How we interact with one another would no longer be a matter of how to employ force but how to get on with the task of flourishing (which includes taking an interest in the flourishing of others). Provisions of welfare goods thereby would become, properly, a matter of ethics rather than politics. Sounds to me that Ayn Rand identified the issues here at a greater level of fundamentality than Rawls did, ergo Rand > Rawls. Duh.

The Trolley Problem

(Thoughts that occur as I look through some of the answers and analyses of the answers in a philosophers' poll.)

How would Ayn Rand answer "the Trolley Problem"? My inclination is to think she would ask for any real-world scenario in history that comes remotely close to resembling such a scenario. She was concrete-oriented that way. In terms of general principles - not to be confused with a rationalistic "top-down" approach which takes such a scenario as a "good test" of some abstract principle that may or may not have been derived rationally and properly - her approach is indicated in "The Ethics of Emergencies." The Trolley Problem would fit the definition of an emergency situation as well as any. So what's the right answer? Is there a right answer?

Philosophers of the "mainstream" variety like to use such hypotheticals to challenge either moral theories or moral intuitions or both. What do our intuitions on this say? "Intuition" seems like a euphemism for "common sense," and common sense tends to be a highly reliable indicator of at least being on the right track. (I like to think of Aristotelian and Randian philosophy as common sense carried through consistently and to the extreme.) Common sense would say that faced with such a scenario - and the scenario stipulates that one's actions affect strangers of an indistinct age, gender, intelligence, etc. - you "do the numbers" and flip the switch (resulting in one death as opposed to five).

Now, the question of interest to philosophers is whether doing the numbers validates utilitarianism as the ruling paradigm of moral reasoning.

Isn't that a bit insane? Isn't that more than a bit insane? What kind of philosophic/epistemic methodology leads one to such a conclusion? What if utilitarianism gets its appeal mainly from applying the ethics of emergencies to normal real-world scenarios? And that gets us back to the original question: what real-world historical scenario resembles the Trolley Problem? We need a theory we can apply to the real world and not just to a hypothetical scenario that may or may not resemble the real world.

My (and Rand's, and Aristotle's) moral theory is an individualistic eudaemonism, which would fall quite squarely into the "virtue ethics" category. Eudaemonism tends not to concern itself with such questions as what to do in a Trolley Scenario, but rather with what it takes to live a good human life. So ultimately what it comes down to is what decision is constitutive of the agent's living well as a rational animal. The broad principle is covered quite well in "The Ethics of Emergencies," and the broad principle aligns very closely with a common-sense orientation toward the world. Common sense dictates, without knowing anything about the people involved, without being provided any alternative to either one or five people dying, etc., that you flip the switch and save four lives. That seems to be the reasoning a eudaemonic agent goes through in such a situation. It looks like the decision a person trying to live the best life they can would reluctantly make.

But what bearing does that have on the way a eudaemonic individual lives his life generally? We get back to the real world and ask what scenarios look like that. I'll just throw this one out there as it seems like as good a concrete as any: the decision to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here we have political leaders faced with two basic alternatives, under the assumption that the Japanese army and its leadership are all brainwashed (much like the Nazis) and won't surrender peacefully: Drop the big bad radiation-spewing bombs, or go through a protracted invasion with much greater loss of life, especially of American life. Faced with such an alternative, what do you do? The American leaders "ran the numbers" and decided it definitely wasn't worth the cost in lives, especially in American lives. The real, main issue is what got these countries into such a fucking crazy scenario to begin with. But given the craziness of the scenario, the nukes - with all their own associated horrific effects - looked like the least-worst option. It so happens that no nukes have been used in wartime since. Coincidence? It also so happens that the leading nations of the world haven't gotten themselves into such a crazy fucking situation to begin with since then. Coincidence?

(Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove highlighted the fucking craziness of it all, and there hasn't been a nuclear showdown anything like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis since that time. Coincidence?)

Okay, so we have a real-world scenario that kind-of resembles the Trolley one, and best as I can tell, eudaemonistic ethics emerges essentially intact, so what do we learn from the Trolley Problem? Why do "mainstream" philosophers obsess over such things? (It so happens that those philosophers most associated with the problem, Philippa Foot and Judith Thomson, are among the best of "the mainstream," so perhaps the main upshot was to highlight the inadequacy of deontology and consequentialism as ethical theories, or maybe better yet, how incompetent but influential philosophers have used these theories in all kinds of counter-intuitive ways. Long story short, the answers these theories or their proponents are likely to give in such a situation are counter-intuitive. I don't find that to be surprising at all. These moral theories are rationalistic constructions that don't gel with common sense. Foot, however, was a virtue ethicist. Coincidence? I don't think so, seeing as how eudaemonism does everything an ethical theory is supposed to do.) Perhaps the "mainstream" obsesses on such matters because of bad philosophical methodology, i.e., bad epistemology. This would not be any surprise, seeing as how "mainstream (academic) philosophy" has become so specialized and so compartmentalized that epistemological issues hardly enter into the picture amongst the mainstream moral theorists.

We already know that to be the case when it came to the most influential mainstream moral philosopher of our times, John Rawls.

But seeing as how the Trolley Problem is, at the most fundamental root, about philosophical methodology (i.e., epistemology), how do you really answer it without doing all the appropriate background integrations to begin with. How on fucking earth do you approach any such problem (much less any other problem) without having done the appropriate background integrations (which include a high regard for common sense)? In other words, how does the mainstream of contemporary moral philosophy deliver anything but epistemic paralysis, short of becoming thoroughly familiar with proper principles of epistemology? Do these mainstream academic philosophers even really know what the word "integration" means?

Seriously, do they?

(Hint: During the course of 2 years of graduate study at what was, at the time, a leading program in moral and political philosophy, I don't think I ever heard the word "integration" once. Maybe in effect during my course in ancient philosophy given by a prominent Aristotelian-Randian, I did. Aristotle's hylomorphic theory of the soul was a big focus there, and that's basically all about integration without using the word. But it's doubtful all that many contemporary academic moral philosophers understand the epistemic implications of Aristotle's approach to the soul much less anything else. If they did, the world of academic philosophy wouldn't be mired in such a bog of shit, for one thing, and it would be all familiar with Ayn Rand's theory of concepts for another. So, no, the academic mainstream really hasn't the faintest what "integration" really means. Note: it's not the same thing as Rawslian "integration" - read: laughable attempt at reconciliation - of rational and irrational moral positions.)

Dallas Cowboys Fire Head Coach

FOX News's Shep Smith reports that after the 45-7 trouncing at the hands of the Green Bay Packers (not too unlike the 41-7 dismantling of the Seahawks at the hands of the Giants to which I was a dark-humored observer yesterday), the Cowboys have fired their head coach.

A few facts here:

(1) This was FOX News
(2) I'm the self-styled Ultimate Philosopher
(3) I'm watching a lot of FOX News lately
(4) Earlier in the show Shep was interviewing Judge Napolitano on Bush and Cheney's, scratch that, Obama's, unconstitutional abuse of presidential authority (see Glenn Greenwald's blog for details).
(5) The Ultimate Philosopher is especially observant
(6) The typical cable-news viewer is not especially observant
(7) The Ultimate Philosopher is not your typical cable news viewer

Now, the Ultimate Philosopher poses a question: Is FOX News's Shep Smith reporting on the firing of the Dallas Cowboys head coach as a significant news item a sign of the Apocalype, or a sign that if that's the most significant thing to report, then things must be pretty darn good these days? Also, how does that integrate with FOX's apparent duplicity with respect to presidential abuses of power depending on whether the schmuck in question has a (R) or (D) after his name? Finally, what does the Ultimate Philosopher's watching a lot of FOX News portend?

More from the Facepalm Dept.

By way of Chicago Law Professor Brian Leiter's highly bigoted America-hating blog, a link to this more or less typical anti-capitalist, anti-rights whining. A perceptive reader notices the following failures of cognition:

(1) The zero-sum, fixed-pie mentality.

(2) No attempt to identify the underlying cause of increased inequality in the United States. Part of this has to do with how to measure income (more income is being taken in the form of benefits, particularly health insurance). Ask an economist, and the answer is more likely to be that globalization has caused a shifting in incomes. From the global vantage point, speaking of increasing inequality in one country is a massive context-drop. So, we have here a failure to identify cause and context.

(3) No recognition of any principle whatsoever, such as the absolute right of private property; perhaps the only principle involved is, "More equality good, greater inequality bad." Good luck in trying to ground any such principle. The highest court of appeal in this screwed-up mindset is Rawls's Theory of Justice, which is ultimately against groundings (since Rawls's theory is consensus-obsessed, and it's a given in such an approach that people cannot agree on groundings, such as the absolute human requirement to be free to create, earn and keep the product of one's own efforts).

(4) Focused on solutions that don't promote growth and initiative and expanding the pie, but rather on how to redistribute the pie. This follows more or less naturally from point (1). The fucking "liberal" socialists don't have any idea how to expand the pie, which has approximately 100 percent to do with individual initiative. Any policy should therefore be oriented towards actualizing individual initiative, and punishing success through force doesn't seem like a good way of doing that. Then again, I'm not a pragmatism-eaten economist, so I don't usually analyze policies in terms of "desirable" (read: consensus-wanted) results.

(5) A (quasi-?) Keynesian tenet whereby tax cuts going to the wealthy don't stimulate growth because "they don't go out and spend the money" the way the poor do. So whether or not you deserve to keep the products of your own talents, efforts and initiative depends on whether some fucking coercive policymaker in Washington determines whether you're going to "spend" the money rightly. Do keep in mind Keynes's axiomatic dictum for the pragmatism-eaten mindset: "In the long run we are all dead." Apparently, tax reductions for the wealthy just go into some unproductive bank account. Of course, then again, maybe those extra funds go into productive investments where the highest return is going to be had. Apparently those higher returns come from various developing countries with higher rates of economic growth. That would "exacerbate" the inequality right here at home, since these investments benefit the businesses and workers abroad, less so here at home. But this concerns underlying causes that the fucking liberals with their pragmatistic refusal to deal with underlying causes (that's "metaphysics" and nonsense) rarely if ever get into. That would require consulting the economists, and the economists have had this tendency to be a lot more pro-capitalist than the fucking liberals and socialists have been. I wonder why?

(6) Apparently, it's better to let fucking politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, and all their ilk decide how economic resources are to be directed, than to leave those decisions to the Evil Rich who got that way by . . . you guessed it, doing a better job deciding how economic resources are to be directed than everyone else did. But as we all realize by now, success in directing economic resources to their most profitable and productive lines is something that should be punished so that the fucking politicians can redistribute things more evenly and the American economy can stagnate more relative to the rest of the world.

(7) Stagnationism, not growth, as the basis for policy. This more or less sums up all the previous points. See also Nathaniel Branden's article, "The Divine Right of Stagnation," in The Virtue of Selfishness.

(8) America is a rotten place according to the fucking "liberal" socialists, so much so that people must be miserable living here. That's why so many immigrants come here to work, save, and invest. By the way, poor immigrants coming here just adds to the percentage of poor here in the country, which is Bad. Also, see point (7), where the basic mindset is that of stasis and stagnation. The poor immigrants coming here must be the same poor that come here five years from now.

Fact is, America is amazingly rich on average (or median); the only real issue here is how we Americans capitalize upon this great advantage. Sitting around like a bunch of whiny defeatists complaining about people making a lot of wealth is just not going to cut it here. What we absolutely need to do here, is to adopt the mentality of growth, i.e., of capitalism. What this entails is a rather new, scary, and initially-disorienting perspective: that Americans could become a huge rich capitalistic "class" (do please keep in mind how the term "class" is totally abused, applied totally out of context, basically undefined, etc. by the fucking Marxism-eaten "liberal" socialists) for the whole world. That would require a lot of Americans taking on the mentality of ownership rather than of stagnation in its various manifestations. Now, if we're defeatists, and pragmatists, and traditionalists, the argument is that "this can't be done." Why? Because it would be hard? Would it be too hard? Perhaps it would be too hard for people deeply embedded and devoted to a mentality of stagnation and weakness, e.g., many in the Democrat voting base.

But (a) we shouldn't tailor policy or rights-theory to that mentality and (b) it really isn't that hopeless a situation. Growth can happen in many amazing and unexpected ways if you just foster the right conditions for it. Fostering a zero-sum, fixed-pie, envy-eaten, whiner mentality is not the way to do it. Fostering a radically capitalistic, individualistic, pro-strength, pro-independent-thought mindset is the key. Likening the United States of America to a banana republic is such a failure of cognition that it's, sadly, telling how it receives prominence of place in our leading news outlets.

Sunday worship, 11/7/2010

In the Facepalm Dept....

(Surprisingly enough, not from the Leiter Hate Factory this time.)

National Review is still in the intellectual shitter 50 years later with respect to all the hate/fear/ignorance directed towards Ayn Rand. This hit-piece isn't as world-historically bad as the Chambers review, of course, but has "conservatism" really been this stagnant, for 50 whole years? Well, of course it has been! "Conservatism" is essentially defined by stagnation. It's a fitting counterpart to the "liberals'" do-everything-half-assed pragmatism, innit?

America

Some of my favorite essays by Ayn Rand appear in the late 1960s and early 1970s; they represent a part of the Objectivist canon that goes underrecognized and underappreciated, because to fully recognize and appreciate them requires a certain (a) deep structural familiarity with Objectivism down to its unit-economizing psycho-epistemology and characteristically clear communication method, and (b) fundamentally American sense of life, one that the left-liberals squandered away with lousy philosophy. Some of my favorite Rand essays include "Apollo 11" (1969), "The Comprachicos" (1970-71), and "Don't Let It Go" (1972). This last, in particular, is unapologetic in its pro-Americanness. It represents a greater appreciation of America - not as it is, but as it might be and ought to be - than any of the flag-waving right-wingers (who would undermine America at every step, starting with silly and stupid amendments to the constitution to ban flag burning, as if a symbol were more important than the substantive freedom the symbol is supposed to symbolize; but it doesn't stop there: how about their reason-undermining religious tenets, eh?).

The Fountainhead is the Great American Novel. Rand's Letters are generously peppered with reverence and love for the country she emigrated to so that she could be more than nominally free to self-actualize as a novelist-philosopher. It's almost something the left-liberals simply don't get about this country, something they either forgot or never grasped, due to a Pragmatism-inspired education which inculcates Rawls-style mental processes rather than Rand-style mental processes. That alone stunts and stultifies genius and encourages wimpy conformity. What Americans qua Americans long for and hope for is a vision of man's greatness and examples of the ability to achieve it. They've already got that in its highest-paid actors, athletes, and businesspeople. Where they have yet to achieve that is in the area of the intellect, but once structural greatness is instilled at the level of the American intellect, we'll see "we've only just begun."

The left-liberals have nothing new to offer to enhance America's structural greatness; it's just more of the same old government, and bureaucrats, and public employee unions, and taxes, and crossed fingers ("maybe!") that it all doesn't fall apart on them. It's a cult not just of compromise and conformity, but of stagnation. Let's be more like the Euros and . . . stagnate. What kind of inspiring vision is that? It makes you almost want to hop right on over to the Palin camp, it's so stultifying and boring. Obama tells an audience of the converted the other today that "I am my brother's keeper." We've heard that for 2,000 years, and where has it gotten us? We are told that ethics and morality is supposed to be about restraining your own interests in the service of society. Kant, philosophy's Naked Emperor, said that ethics isn't and shouldn't be about achieving your own happiness, but about subordinating yourself to the Moral Law. The modern intellectuals just lap this nonsense right up, but it's not what America is about.

Already an observer of academia is seeing how happiness-based neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics is sweeping aside the fraudulent deontology-utilitarianism alternative, as neither of those manifestly inferior approaches tell us how to self-actualize or why that is the fundamental ethical priority. America's best home-grown intellects advance eudaemonism in ethics because, well, it's the only sound ethical system going. It's no mistake that Aristotle, the Philosopher, advocated a version of eudaemonism. At least Kant got it right that human moral life requires the free exercise of one's mind, but - aside from building that tenet upon an empty formalistic base - it's such an obviously true aspect of ethics that he doesn't get much more credit for identifying that ethical truism than other moderns like Locke, Jefferson, Spencer, Rand, Rothbard and many others deserve as well. Hell, Ayn Rand at age 21 could recognize that fundamental moral truism, in choosing America over Soviet Russia. That's the drawing power that America has to a truly functioning mind. Just let a country's minds be free, and there's pretty much no limit to the greatness that can unfold.

If you truly recognize, understand and appreciate what makes America great despite all its flaws and checkered history, you'll recognize that our best days are ahead of us, that we'll lead the rest of the world instead of follow, that Rand is on the way in and Rawls with his "let's forcibly sacrifice the most productive" ethos is on the way out, that Aristotelianism easily trumps Pragmatism as robustness trumps weakness as Roark trumps Keating, that this Friedmanite-liberaltarian pragmatist-maybe business is an aberration based on non-integration. We're going to see that Jefferson and Rand and Kubrick and Jordan and Stern and Buffett and Google can be the norm rather than the exception.

If we think of human history as analagous to human life-stages, we can identify the point in time that humanity reached its late adolescence, when it declared, via the United States Declaration of Independence, its independence from all forms of authority and tyranny over the mind of man. The rest of the world has had little choice but to follow in America's footsteps on this, or to perish. Humanity's next step is into full adulthood, and America can and will lead once again.

America - Fuck Yeah!

Obama = President Rawls

To follow up my postings yesterday on pragmatism, what we have today is an extremely pragmatistic president in the epistemic mold of Harvard philosopher John Rawls. What does Obama stand for? He doesn't appear to stand for anything other than an undefined, please-everybody reconciliationism. He's like the perfect pragmatistic president.

It's most fitting that both of these Elites define the culture that is the Harvard culture. They're the consensus pick of the fellow elites for the best that America has to offer. According to these elites, Rawls's Harvard colleague Robert Nozick is the best representative of libertarian philosophy anyone has to offer, and it is a left-liberal mythology of these elites that Thomas Jefferson today would side with Rawls over Nozick. Ayn Rand, in this elitist mythology, is a reactionary-capitalist antisocial individualism (she did say that selfishness is a virtue, after all, and it's obvious to anyone what she must have meant by that: antisocial individualism) that defines the "libertarian" side in politics which Nozick, via Kantian intuitions, does a more respectable job of defending and is one of the two big "sides" Rawls incorporates into his Great American Synthesis along with the effective de facto abolition of private property (via trump-claims on individual talents by the community) so as to please the kindly, well-intentioned Marxists.

Here's a blatant falsehood in the elitist mythology: Jefferson today would not side with Rawls. He would side with Rand and Nozick. He would be a radical for capitalism, a libertarian, and he would affirm these things as a matter of common sense. He would not be a "progressive" who defines away capitalistic freedom, by piecemeal concession, into some bizarre and insidiously anti-American caricature of it (as with, e.g., John Rawls). So while Obama the pragmatist represents intellectual stagnation in America, Jefferson represented intellectual radicalism and progress, a President Rand if you will. Jefferson, in his radically libertarian, capitalistic, natural-law political ethos, was more progressive than self-styled "progressives" are!

Oh, my brothers, the Established Elites will scoff at first upon reading this, but what comeuppance they will receive, oh what comeuppance!

One great thing about Jefferson was his contempt for class-minded elites. So just keep that in mind. A President Rand (Jefferson) today would be against a corporatist economic elite in bed with the government, so let's just chalk Rand's "economic elitism" up to ignorant misunderstanding on the part of her opponents. (That's usually how you can chalk up liberal-left characterizations of Ayn Rand. They're really just very ignorant and point-missing. Once the liberals get the same education in Randianism that Leonard Peikoff's students have gotten, they'll be way on board with pretty much the entirety of her philosophical edifice, mark my words. All it takes is mental focus and some conscientious integration, for crying out loud.) So this mythology about Rand as a voice of an angry American "right-wing" bent on being callously selfish assholes to their fellow human beings, is just plain old intellectual incompetence fostered by a pragmatistic spirit of intellectual conformity amongst America's pragmatism-eaten elites.

You know what the problem is with these fucking pragmatist elites? Just take all the evil ideas in the world and the pragmatists' lack of any deep ethical, epistemological and metaphysical commitments, and just hand all the deep commitments to the America-destroying, man-destroying Bad Guys, why don't we. Really, now? Really? Say what you will about the tenets of Totalitarian Islam, at least it's an ethos. At least they've got the deep commitments that the cowardly Established American Elite lack. Dinesh D'Souza is onto something here in his own demented right-wing theocratic-authoritarian way ("let's be more like the Islamofascists; at least they maintain law and order and virtue and tradition")! All we get with pragmatism is intellectual chaos. (Didn't Rand say this throughout her Vietnam-era essays, like, a hundred times? Also, Peikoff's recent DIM Hypothesis work deals with the implications of an intellectually disintegrated worldview in contrast to an integrated worldview with deeper commitments. American liberals have pretty much disarmed themselves intellectually due to their ever-insidious pragmatism - especially when their opponents offer a whole moral and intellectual package-deal along with Americanism. This is true whether the package-dealing is a fundamentalist-Christian one or a rational neo-Aristotelian/Jeffersonian one.) The cashing in: Let's reconcile the opposing views. Let's be more like them, but not too much. Let's be less like them, but not too much. Let's keep mixing politics and religion together in vaguely defined ways because that's how things have been done before and it works well enough. Let's keep trying to mix socialism and liberty and keep genuflecting to John Rawls who has no deep commitments on the really big philosophical issues that matter - and on those issues let's have an unsteady, unseemly, and unsanitary admixture of all three of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.

That works. Right? Maybe.

Say that Obama wins in a landslide in 2012, which is the likely outcome absent a major short-term game-changer. Contra the reactionary Tea Party types, the progressive pragmatistic Rawlsian Elites will feel short-term vindication. ("He improved the economy! Right? Maybe.") Not having the wherewithal or deep enough commitments to view the world in terms of the Big Picture Issues, they do not foresee the long-term triumph of the Randian model over theirs. Ideas do rule human history, as Ayn Rand - given all her deep commitments - recognized and affirmed, and Pragmatism as an idea has had its time and failed.

America vs. Pragmatism

To follow up today's earlier posting, I'd like to provide a brief intellectual narrative of the United States of America.

The United States of America were founded upon an absolutism and radicalism expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Its chief author, Thomas Jefferson, was an uncompromising advocate of reason as against unreason - including opposition to the use of physical force as a reason-negating activity, as a matter of principle. His moral groundings were in Lockean natural law (with some Jesus-inspired other-oriented benevolence thrown in to complement the rights- and self-preservation angles covered in natural-law theory). The Founders, Jefferson included, grounded their statements on things like "self-evidence" and "the Creator" and some abstract "Divine Providence." The religious overtones of it notwithstanding, the radically libertarian idea - then as well as now - was one of religious toleration and freedom, hence the broadly abstract and not-specifically-defined statements concerning "Divine Providence."

The early decades of the United States of America were defined by the height of Enlightenment-era philosophy, and Thomas Jefferson (not Germany's Immanuel Kant) best represents those heights. There's not just the reverence for natural law, or the uncompromising commitment to reason intermixed with a people-respecting religious tolerance, or the recognition of the secular value of Jesus's teachings in isolation from the magical-mystical bullshit of his non-philosophical adherents, but also the commitment to a very central American value: common sense. In addition to being President of the United States of America, he was, at the same time, president of the American Philosophical Society. If you read through some of his letters concerning philosophy, he shows he is well-versed in the ancient Greek philosophers, notably and positively Epicurus. His statement that Epicurus represents the height of secular and Greek philosophy is incomprehensible except in light of the evident fact that he wasn't aware of Aristotle. Can you just fucking imagine how robust America would be had Thomas Jefferson known about Aristotle? Would Ayn Rand's philosophical writings have even been necessary to restore America to its intellectual origins? Ayn Rand was correct on one point: Aristotle, via Aquinas, via John Locke, was the intellectual father of America, without the Founders even knowing it. Nevertheless, Jefferson represents one heck of a standard for America to follow; the basic sensibility is all the same as with Aristotle.

Aristotle, Jefferson, Rand - they all represent an approach to philosophizing that is empirical and yet absolutist, reality-oriented without being authoritarian, judgmental and pro-virtue and non-libertine while remaining libertarian, eudaemonistic and perfectionistic with emphasis on personal well-being and happiness (incorporating other-related virtues - most importantly, justice) as the aim of life, unapologetically capitalistic, and marked at all times by a respect for common sense. It's as American as it gets.

So, how did pragmatism come about and begin to consume the American ethos from within? For the first 100 or so years of America, there was a classically Jeffersonian ethos that ruled. It's ultimately what led to the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves. Being very practical and productive, the American people had little time or patience for the wankers who often pass for philosophers. The main focus of life in the American mindset is to live this life well, and philosophy is only of value, cash-value if you will, if it is of aid in advancing the life well lived. Until the pragmatist movement came along in the late 19th century, after the Civil War, American intellectual life was radically individualistic, optimistic, and perfectionistic. The abolition of slavery, for instance, was a moral necessity to America's leading intellectual lights. Any visions of future utopias - be they Josiah Warren's hippie-communes or Spoonerite-Tuckerian private-property arrangements - were all based on a vision of voluntary participation rather than state-enforced regimentation. Those utopian-perfectionist voluntaristic visions remain as true now as they did then; only the American intellectual context has changed since that time.

The Pragmatist movement was borne of a concern about relating ideals to practice. One thing that has to be emphasized here is that when the Pragmatist movement was at its height - ca. 1900 - Aristotle had only begun being translated for an English-speaking audience. So it was really just a matter of timing and place, essential factors in analyzing the history of ideas. If Epicureanism (or whatever the top English-speaking philosophers like Hume, Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill had to say) was the best philosophy known to Americans at the time, something better had to be erected in order to deal with the emerging problems and challenges that Epicurean or British philosophy just can't deal with. You need intellectuals who aren't wankers who can usefully guide us through these challenges.

Pragmatism is not defined by specific commitments but by a certain way of dealing with challenges, and the method here is rather minimalistic: piecemeal adjustment with empirical weighing of hopefully-well-defined and well-measured costs and benefits (short-term as well as long-term, with priority given to the short term, ceteris paribus, given Keynes's dictum about the long term).

Compare America's intellectual state ca. 1930 vs. that of the European states. By 1930, Europe had been bombarded with bad philosophy for centuries, was under the spell of Kant's disastrous "Copernican" subjectivism, under the spell of unsurprisingly mystical interpretations of Hegel's Absolute and historical necessity, or under the spell of Schopenhauerian metaphysics of Will, or Nietzschean subjectivism, or under the spell of non-Aristotelian, Humean-Millian empiricism, or under the spell of Marxian socialism, or under spell of Millian progressive-socialism, and the spell of Hegel-inspired Nationalism. With that kind of intellectual bombardment, it's no surprise that Germany embraced National Socialism, that Britain was not far behind in the push for socialism, that France was filled with ennui and existential angst about it all, that the Soviet experiment (with millions of people's lives, against their will, it must be pointed out) was being embraced and/or taken seriously as an alternative model of organization of "the resources." It wasn't a matter of Ludwig von Mises having or not having compelling arguments against socialism; it was a matter of a condition of intellectual dysfunction/insanity whereby the vast majority of his contemporaries were heavily invested in the nationalist-socialist mentality. The history of ideas is such that the kind of intellectual revolution Mises initiated requires time to unfold; had Mises been writing around at the time of Marx's heyday, things would very likely have been quite different. (It's also worth mentioning that by ca. 1900, the intellectual center of Europe had migrated from Germany to Austria, given the failings of German philosophy and the relative promise offered by the Vienna intellectuals.)

In America ca. 1930, the intellectual context was one of Jeffersonian individualism combined with home-grown Pragmatism. The Pragmatic mindset was that our Constitution didn't embody such abstract ideals as those set forth in Herbert Spencer's radically libertarian Social Statics. That famous pronouncement by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was taken as received wisdom rather than as an easily-challenged - and false - understanding of constitutional jurisprudence. Wouldn't it just be mind-blowing if the Fourteenth Amendment did indeed enact Mr. Spencer's Social Statics? The very mind-blowingness of such a notion is enough to send any good Pragmatist running in fear. It's un-pragmatic to blow people's minds, now, so let's play it safe. . . . Do you begin to see the insidious unintended effects of a pragmatist mindset? Could the American Revolution, or the slave-freeing Civil War, have happened on a pragmatist base?

One bad but understandable interpretation of American-grown pragmatism is that it saved the United States of America from pursuing the same path that the Marx-infused European nations pursued. Going full-out socialist would have been unpragmatic, as it represented too drastic, too idealistic and too radical a shift from . . . from whatever American ideals at the time were. As a pragmatism-infused mindset is not defined so much by specific commitments but rather a means of dealing with conflicts amongst commitments, the radically individualistic and Jeffersonian ideals America was built on were incidental to the pragmatist analysis. The main objectionable thing to a swift departure from these ideals is not that it is a departure, but that it's swift and - get this - overly idealistic. And, we have discovered (via empiricistic observation - so there's always a pervasive uncertainty and "maybe" about it all) that capitalism "works" well enough to satisfy competing mainstream (the mainstream being defined - how?) ideological demands.

We can see an influential home-grown theory of justice - John Rawls's A Theory of Justice - as an exercise in American-style pragmatism. We have two competing ideals - libertarianism and egalitarianism - that need to be reconciled via a please-everybody Synthesis. Only - as with pretty much anything pragmatistic - it satisfies no one except for the compulsively pragmatistic (like many academic philosophers). What we don't get in Rawls is anything "mind-blowing" or "too radical." What we do get is a kindly and well-intentioned (the road to hell, etc.) attempt to fuse (evil) egalitarianism with (good) libertarianism. The reason that Rawls's theory even gives so much weight to liberty is because of its being American. Leaving everything in the hands of the Euro intellectuals, what would we get? Given the European context, the best we get in reaction to socialistic egalitarianism is Mises and Hayek, and neither of them offered their pro-capitalistic visions as moral visions. What we get with them is a classical liberalism little distinguished from that of Hume and Mill. With Hume we get chronic uncertainty; with Mill we get a consequentialist defense of liberty based on its social benefits. And in a pragmatistic mindset, these get thrown into the mix as ideas that need to be reconciled with the others. Hey, I'm as ecumenical in my sensibilities as they come, but it's more like Aristotle's ecumenism: recognizing what's right in a view will tossing out the weak stuff. Pragmatism doesn't acknowledge the strong and the weak in this sense; rather, there is a Primacy of Reconciliation that has ideas and conflicts amongst them, rather than an absolute and independent reality, as the primary focus and orientation. (How on earth can Rawls's theory of justice have truly lasting impact when it steadfastly abstains from deep ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical commitments? Are Rawls's genuflecting-wankers this intellectually puny? The notion is mind-blowing, I know. That's why the Prevailing Academic Model of Doing Philosophy is going to fall on its face. Mind-blowing, I know....)

Here's what Ayn Rand said in the most succinct and biting terms about pragmatism as the intellectual malady that it is: "Someone wants to bash your skull in, reach a livable compromise: Tell him to break one leg." (Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A, p. 7)

After some 50 years of pragmatism making its way through American culture, America was broken intellectually in the mid-20th century. Broken, dysfunctional, directionless, proudly anti-philosophical (philosophy having been dispensed with as an impractical failure). Ayn Rand was proclaiming this fact like it should have been as obvious to everyone in her day as it was to her. But just keep in mind: in a pragmatist mindset, someone making the sweeping and absolutist and idealistic (and unacceptably mind-blowing) proclamations that Ayn Rand made is not to be trusted. Rand simply was far ahead ("out of place") of her time, thrown into a world of anti-philosophical intellectual disintegration. But taking a long-run view of these things, all that Rand was doing was initiating an intellectual revolution, in the midst of a sea of pragmatism, to get America back to its roots. In short, the pragmatist movement was a diversion from America's (and the world's) true course, an intellectual stumbling block borne of a lack of Aristotle. Aristotle alone whacks Pragmatism upside the head; Rand puts Pragmatism to shame; historical experience will be the ultimate proof of its anti-practical failings.

Now, here's what's gonna happen. (Only someone perceptive enough to run a blog like this one knows how these blog postings are "for the ages," and there is a special satisfaction of knowing how subsequent generations will look back and say, "Yes, indeed, those ideas were mind-blowing for the time, but he turned out to be right, of course.") The big one-two punch that, on its own, would, in time, restore America to its founding ideals, is the introduction to America of Aristotle's English-translated works, and Ayn Rand's Objectivism. One amazing thing about Rand's early philosophy - summed up in her most perfect novel, The Fountainhead - is how much of it is simply Americanism, discovered and discoverable quite independently of Aristotle. (This is just how commonsensical Jeffersonian-American ideals really are; they aren't beyond the reach of the "man on the street," even; all we need is the right kind of intellectual leadership, like we had in Jefferson's day, and not wankers who eschew common sense.) The best evidence indicates that Rand did not start into a hardcore study of Aristotle and the history of philosophy until the early- to mid-1940s. Random Houses's Basic Works of Aristotle, a compiled volume of translations edited by Richard McKeon, was first published in 1941. Rand mentions in a 1940s letter having bought a copy of "the complete works" of Aristotle, presumably referring to this volume. Anyway, the basic point here is that Aristotle was just being introduced to America in the early 1900s, and Ayn Rand was independently developing American-common-sensical ideas in a radical, integrated, and systematic way after taking from Nietzsche what needed to be taken and integrated into a rational individualism (namely, a heroic sense of man's greatness and potential). With founding ideals represented by Jefferson, and bold echoes of those very ideals in the world-historic philosophers Aristotle and Ayn Rand, what will happen "as if by necessity" is a second Renaissance centered right here in America. America's potential hasn't even come close to being fulfilled.

The problem with Pragmatism? It simply couldn't offer a moral vision like this, and therefore simply can't work to bring about the desired result (widespread human flourishing-perfection).

The problem with "maybe"

This posting is to address the fundamentally different paradigms represented by Randianism and "liberaltarianism," respectively. The thing with Ayn Rand is that she represents very basic American, Aristotle-inspired, Jefferson-mirroring respect for common sense, which of necessity includes "Lockean" natural rights of person and property. In academic-philosophical jargon, intuitionism is some kind of theoretical stand-in for "ordinary common sense." (I happen to think "intuition" is a euphemism for Randian "grasp," but that's not a theory of epistemic justification, much less any theory involving bullshit metaphysics a la Plato.) And one thing that hard-headed, uncommon common-sense does not put up with is mushy "maybe"s. Just think how "maybe" commonly infused throughout your everyday life wouldn't result in anything other than an unsustainable anti-conceptual chaos. And yet that's what the "liberaltarian" paradigm gets us. It is borne of a psycho-epistemology of chronic uncertainty and pragmatism. What Aristotelian-Jefferson-Randian American commonsense was hijacked by, was a home-grown Pragmatism.

So here's how Pragmatism clashes with common sense: Pragmatism doesn't give us any fixed, firm absolutes, whereas common sense does. Common sense tells us that it is wrong to initiate the use of physical force against human beings, since the appropriate mode of activity for human beings is that guided by the use of their own minds, and physical force (inasmuch as it is present) negates the possibility of such activity. So in common sense such behavior is wrong, and such anti-force principles are ingrained in common law and well-understood under natural-law doctrine. Pragmatism is different: it takes fallible and imperfect humans as the given, as the standard to which all practice is to be tailored. Out is the concept of reality as the ultimate given and standard-setter (as common sense dictates). It is no surprise that Pragmatism quite commonly devolves into cynicism. The fundamental orientation becomes one of taking conflicts between fallible humans as the primary and finding a means of resolving the conflict, rather than of establishing the truth of the matter. Does this not describe the entire ugly process that is politics, oh my brothers. Everything gets subject to the authority of committee decision rather than of reality. Aren't we better than this?

So here's the problem with Pragmatist-liberlatarianism: all we get is "maybe." The most unacceptable "maybe" of them all is its basic epistemic uncertainty. Humans don't function that way because humans acting with common sense are reality-oriented, and reality is an absolute. And from the radical epistemic "maybe" of Pragmatism we get a moral-social-political "maybe" on the question of whether physical force is acceptable. The Pragmatist has to go through some non-reality-based process or other of determining whether the force in some instance (or class of instances) "works," according to arbitrarily or committee-defined standards of what "works." So apparently it is an open "maybe" in the Pragmatist-liberaltarian mindset whether depriving a human being of the effective use of his own mind and judgment "works" to advance some desired end. The absolutist and common sense response to this is a facepalm in reaction to the whole contradictory notion of it all from the outset. Why the fuck do "liberaltarians" leave such a fundamental moral primary - of not using force against a rational being - up to a big fat "MAYBE"? What kind of goddamn selling point is that?

Here's the problem, then: The Pragmatist-liberaltarian readily admits that if everyone became aware of the prag-lib arguments, maybe we'd all get the nice libertarian capitalist utopia we've all been wet-dreaming about. Maybe we wouldn't even need to address more fundamental metaphysical, epistemological and ethical ideas, including ideas about human virtue and perfection and self-actualization, to get to this nice utopian scenario.

Ayn Rand wouldn't settle for this. The whole idea is to make our lives as perfect as we can, and that doesn't admit of mushy maybes. We need to know that in the good society we will be free of physical force. We need to know that our arguments are right, that anybody presented with them will be convinced that physical force is categorically evil. It is an absolute matter of fact: a people who are exposed to and independently-integratively understand Ayn Rand's ideas will by necessity be a libertarian and capitalist people in virtue of being self-perfecters intellectually and morally.

Much as F.A. Hayek's arguments are as compelling as it gets in the Pragmatist-liberaltarian paradigm, I'm gonna have to go with Ayn Rand on this, thank you very much. The world is going to be a heck of a lot better place a lot sooner as a result.

[ADDENDUM: I swear to God, I didn't see this Sully post until after posting the above. The problem with Sully, of course, is that he quotes Cowen's "maybe" stuff approvingly - as if probability, uncertainty, statistical reasoning, and so forth are the best model. I'd like to ask: did the truly great philosophers think in probabilistic terms? Is that how the reality under consideration by them - absolute, ontological reality - appears to them, in probabilistic terms? Is that how they reasoned on ethical matters? Aristotle was some version of a pragmatic philosopher, but was he vague in any way about the absolute, categorical, and binding character of abstract principles as a constitutive means of the practical? Ayn Rand - soon to be widely recognized as one of the 5 greatest philosophers of all time - certainly wasn't at all vague about the relation between the abstract and the practical. Hell, was Hayek probabilistic, uncertain, and all "maybe"-like about how decentralized and dispersed knowledge is necessary to a working social order, or that socialism fails in virtue of its constructivist-rationalism, or that liberal norms occupy a place between instinct and abstract-reason? I haven't studied Popperian epistemology - a chief influence on Hayek's thinking along with Misesian praxeology - enough to know whether it encourages or thrives on the uncertainty-ethos. My best guess is that it's very British and therefore very commonsensical along with being very, um, pragmatic and non-rationalistic. So in some sense, yeah, I think it does thrive in that context. Anyway, as theory, Hayekianism has much the similar appeal that Misesian praxeology has, but built on some kind of scientific (though avidly anti-scientistic) empiricism rather than aprioristic categories. Let's just not mistake all that for Aristotelian-Randian methodology.]

Sunday worship, 10/24/2010

The GOP: Truly Disgusting

As a hardcore philosopher, I have no option but to be a hardcore independent in today's political scene. I can't stand either the Republicans or the Democrats. Today, however, I would like to comment on the GOP.

Ever since the disaster known as the Bush Presidency, and ever since the nomination of Sarah Palin for Vice President in 2008, the GOP has absolutely jackshit for credibility as a major political party.

As a hardcore philosopher, I am also a hardcore liberal in the original, true sense. (Today the concept is associated with the term "libertarian.") It means that I have at least as much animus towards state power as many in the GOP claim to have. When it comes to state power, however, the GOP has absolutely shat away its credibility.

Supposedly, according to the thoroughly dishonest narrative foisted on us by the Republican Establishment (read: Roger Ailes's propaganda outlet, FOX News), the American People are fed up with government and, therefore, fed up with Barack Obama and his big-government ways. The solution, goes the narrative, is to hand the reigns of power right back over to the very same sonsabitches who gave us George W. Bush, Dick W. Cheney, and Sarah W. Palin.

If the GOP gave the slightest two shits about out-of-control federal power, they would have been calling for remedies to the war crimes of the Cheney/Bush era. But they haven't, for the simple reason that they have no principles whatsoever. The war crimes were committed by Their Side, so that's okay.

And let's not kid ourselves here: the GOP - just as with the Democrats - is all about serving the interests of an Establishment Elite, a corporatist oligarchy that is always looking for new ways to screw over the American People. That is how we got the fucking farce of a War on Terror that pours trillions of taxpayer dollars into the tried-and-true Military Industrial Complex with the taxpayers' fear-manufactured acquiescence. To sum up the 9-year-and-counting War on Terror: Osama bin Laden is still alive and sending out messages. That fact alone ought to be fucking mind-blowing to the American People.

But, alas, the American People have very short memories. That's the way of the sham that is human politics. Remember the GOP/FOX/Ailes/Palin-fomented paranoia as little as a year ago that was the Birther nonsense? All part of a strategy to discredit Obama and stoke fear in the American People. There is little doubt that it worked to a considerable extent. The very same GOP-voting crowd that believes in 2,000-year-old Resurrections, also disbelieves the evidence that Obama is an American-born citizen. This is the same crowd that turns a blind eye to America-conducted war crimes, mind you, despite all the overwhelming evidence. This is the same crowd - loosely aligned with the so-called Tea Party - that now professes to want to go back to America's roots. I guess that means shitting all over the pro-reason (read: anti-bullshit), pro-freedom philosopher, Thomas Jefferson, in the process.

This is what makes the whole Tea Party thing a sham. First off, the Tea Party phenomenon succeeds in conflating original American liberalism with ignorance, anti-intellectualism and paranoia. The American People - 50 percent of whom deny the reality of evolution in spite of the overwhelming evidence - supposedly want freedom from federal tyranny, too. The true voices of reason and freedom - i.e., people like Ayn Rand - get drowned out in all this. The GOP really doesn't give a shit about them. They will use them up and then spit them out after the election returns are in, so that they can go back to fucking us a la Bush, Cheney, Rove, Ailes, and Palin. In short, the Tea Party is just another cause for cynical opportunism by the GOP so that they might take back some power from the Democrats. Period.

The Tea Party, on its face, is a positive thing, reminiscent of founding American ideals. Distrust of government power. Advocacy of freedom from things like lawless torture and surveillance and people-killing wars of convenience. This also does not reflect maintream American opinion today. Mainstream American opinion is full of all kinds of falsehoods, lies, evasions, equivocations, cowardice, intellectual laziness, gullibility, inconsistency, politician-trusting, media-trusting, church-trusting, and any number of other intellectual vices. (For evidence: look at the completely stupid, unwarranted, and illiberal prohibition on marijuana, still supported by a majority that simply does not know any better.) This is what the GOP Establishment feeds off of, for one primary purpose: political power. The power to illegally kill, torture, and spy, and to enrich corporate sponsors at the expense of the people. And when it comes to totally credibility-destroying things like war crimes and the '08 Palin VP nod, the Establishment is full of nothing but fucking cowards who won't call it like it is for fear of alienating the voters/corporations that might get them elected.

Just remember this as we approach Nov. 2 and are told, once again, how we need Change in Washington.

Sunday Worship, 10/17/2010

"Because you're on the internet, dummy."

Jackass Leiter, Cont'd (Part 26)

You wanna know how the Academy fries the brains/minds of students? When they're taught by the likes of the Prestigious Jackass:

This is unbelievable. These Tea Party bozos (that's a nice word for them) who may get elected make George W. Bush look like a paragon of intellectual sobriety and moral acuity. That the response of large segments of the brain-dead electorate to the current crises of capitalism and American empire is to turn to crazies to the right of Bush is the clearest sign that all hope is lost in this increasingly dysfunctional country.

Whenever you get someone talking about how "all hope is lost" with a country such as ours, it is best to simply dump them into the intellectual wastebasket as useless and hopeless themselves. How is it that with all the Great Minds in Academia, they can't get a handle on the American People and brainwash them like they do fellow Academics? Why do they whine and complain so? Why so impotent to influence the minds of The People in the direction of whatever batshit-crazy capitalism-destroying scheme the Leiters of the world concoct? Why all the elitism and condescension? Why all the cynicism and pessimism and defeatism? (Defeatism is a psychological confession of weakness; pretty ironic for a Nietzsche devotee, eh?)

There's also a distinct anti-Americanism going on here. Elitist fucks like Leiter hate America. They really do. And that only makes sense: when Ayn Rand symbolizes all that is great about America, and when dipshits like Leiter blindly and irrationally hate her, it follows quite logically that they have a deep-seated hatred of America, A being A and whatnot.

Meanwhile, Ayn Rand has the truth on her side, and when you've got truth on your side, it's not too difficult to sway people eventually. Try as the Academic Fucks might to import the failed European intellectual models into America, it's simply not gonna happen. Not if I have anything to say about it. America is gonna be just fine, no thanks to cynical dipshits like the Distinguished Professor. Nothing is fucked here, folks, nothing is fucked, they're just a bunch of fucking amateurs! Their inescapable choice in the coming years is to get their act together and jump on the team for the big win, or to be steamrolled under by the Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Randian juggernaut. Either/Or.

One thing that will happen - the immutable laws of economics dictate it - is that Academia as we know it will be crushed asunder. The "great unwashed" are fed up by the likes of the Jackass who simply refuse to engage pro-America, pro-individualist ideas in a fair and honest fashion. It's outright fucking bigotry - and therefore projection - for these elites to ignorantly and arrogantly bash Rand, America, and ordinary Americans who more or less foot the bill for these hateful elites. Good riddance!

[ADDENDUM: It cannot pass in silence that Leither plays a typical smear-game by associating right-wing blogger Pamela Geller with Ayn Rand. Can we name all the brainless idiots and bigots who are devotees of the ideas of Karl Marx? Let's start with Brian Leiter, why don't we. If Leiter had an ounce of intellectual courage, he'd name the best representatives of Randianism inside and outside of academia and then proceed to bash away or cower as he chooses. It so happens that not just Pamela Gellar is "devoted" to Ayn Rand; I, the Ultimate Philosopher and Singularity-starter, am also "devoted" to Ayn Rand. And I'd fucking kick Leiter's ass in a head-on debate about Rand. :-) ]

WTF Happened to Leonard Peikoff?

Diana and Paul Hsieh present an array of relevant facts relating to the recent silliness surrounding the "Peikoff-McCaskey schism" which threatens to splinter Objectivists into silly warring factions yet again. I'm ready to draw some conclusions here that are amply justified based on the available data.

First off, Peikoff has decided not to hold himself accountable for his behavior. The sum total of his "reasons" for issuing his "him or me" ultimatum are contained in an email which leaves a bunch of questions unanswered. McCaskey, for his part, is accountable for his doings and responds to inquiries. The fact that Peikoff would fail to respond to the Hshiehs' follow-up inquiries after maintaining a consistent correspondence with them prior to that is evidence of . . . well, what? Evasion? Arrogance? Incompetence? We just don't know. What we do know is that somehow Peikoff's "stature within Objectivism" is supposed to be some kind of undefined trump card he feels he can pull in any dispute.

Second, following Objectivist inductive method, what we have seen in this latest instance is an addition to previous behaviors on Peikoff's part that establish a pattern from which we can draw a generalization. For one thing, he pulled the same "I'm Ayn Rand's heir" card in the Peikoff-Kelley split of 1989. For another, Peikoff leaves questions unanswered but has decided that his judgment is final. Usually, when forming an objective judgment of something, you don't make a final determination while leaving questions hanging. That is the behavior of an authoritarian who expects people to go along or leave. How this is consonant with Objectivism, I haven't the faintest. This occurred not just with Peikoff-McCaskey and Peikoff-Kelley, but also with Peikoff-Reisman (1993). How many times do we need to see this pattern rear its ugly head before we conclude that Peikoff, for all his stature and accomplishments, isn't the be-all-and-end-all of the advancement of Objectivism today? (Besides, the be-all-and-end-all of Objectivism, the Prime Mover, remains Ayn Rand. It bears noting that the one great schism of which she was a part - the Rand-Branden split (1968) - was one where Rand was entirely justified given Branden's ghastly moral crimes against her and countless other Objectivists.)

Third, Peikoff's moral condemnation of McCaskey ("raises him one rung in Hell") is inexplicable based on every item of evidence that has come forth. There's no rationally-identified (or identifiable) context to this - for the simple reason that the judgment is contrary to the facts, i.e., false. But this appears to be a judgment for which Peikoff, again, has decided not to be accountable. The significant conclusion to draw from this is that this judgment-methodology (if there's even a methodology behind it) runs counter to the spirit and letter of Peikoff's own advice given in such outstanding courses as Understanding Objectivism.

There isn't room for agnosticism on this point: the facts establish that Peikoff has abdicated his credbility as a leader within the Objectivist movement. That may not come to much, considering how he has recently announced his official "retirement" from teaching Objectivism, but the fact that (due to his control over Ayn Rand's estate) he continues to hold sway over the ARI, self-described as the Center for the Advancement of Objectivism, shows that he continues to throw weight around in certain "Objectivist circles." Now, either he's "in retirement" or he isn't. This behavior resembles that of a diva who wants to have it his way or else, and expects everyone to simply understand, somehow.

Finally, this stuff is just all too silly considering how far removed it is from the spirit of Ayn Rand herself. The "Objectivist movement," whatever advances it has made in recent years (capped off most notably by Tara Smith's 2006 Cambridge-published book, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics), it's simply not up to the standards that Ayn Rand or I would have demanded. The intellectual-cultural revolution Rand had foreseen could have happened a generation ago had a lot more people had their acts together. (This is one reason why Nathaniel Branden was and is such a fuck: were it not for his massively anti-Objectivist behaviors, the Revolution might well have happened by the 1970s. That is the power that ideas have over a culture, and how the course of those ideas can be affected for better or worse by a mighty few.) Fortunately, there is at least one person ready, able and willing to take up the torch in ways the current mainstream Objectivist movement has yet to even foresee, but of which Ayn Rand herself would have been proud. Thankfully, for all concerned, this business of Peikoff and his schisms will be left in the dust.

Know hope.

[A follow-up post is here.]

Bill O'Reilly: Pinhead for a Day

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

Oh, goodness gracious:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Sullivan: Mushy, Cont'd

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

Hmmmmm?

Andrew Sullivan: Mushy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Problem with Atlas Shrugged, Part 2

(continued from Part 1)

You know the standard ignorant claim that Objectivism - Ayn Rand's philosophy - is a philosophy by and for assholes. It is true, there are assholes in the Objectivist movement, but not, I have found, at any higher rate of incidence than the percentage of assholes in the population at large. The charge of asshole-ism is leveled not on the basis of the actual (sound) content of Objectivist ideas, or on the basis of the thoroughly non-asshole ideas of The Fountainhead. (Roark is just an architect, wanting to create according to his own standards. That's all. He's actually very cheery and friendly about it all. Just read the damn book and see for yourself.) No, the asshole-ism charge is based on the characters in Atlas Shrugged.

"But John Galt isn't an asshole!" Well, duh, he actually isn't one. Ayn Rand's intention is that John Galt be another fictional incarnation of the Ideal Man (more or less, Frank O'Connor with Ayn Rand's philosophical chops). So Roark and Galt are meant to be essentially similar applications of the same theme. Roark dynamiting the housing project he designed, and Galt going on strike and "stopping the motor of the world," are meant to be expressions of a man's right to exist for his own sake, to have exclusive right to the product of his own mind, whatever the needs or demands of the masses. This idea is absolutely and thoroughly sound. Galt, however, comes off as more of an asshole in how he goes about proving his point.

My main beef is not at all with the underlying philosophy in Atlas Shrugged, but in the execution. As Ayn Rand stressed the crucial importance of theory-practice integration, Atlas Shrugged, to work as a novel of ideas, needs to succeed in this integration if it is to succeed as a novel. Every element requires seamless integration with the others. A novel could feature a masterfully-orchestrated plot but that relates to form and technique, in distinction from the content. If the premises upon which the plot of a novel is built don't hold up, then the novel fails in its mission.

First off, let's have a look at The Speeches. I'm not talking just about the 3-hour radio address. (It actually runs to 3 hours and 20 minutes in the audiobook version. The amount of time it takes to sit through The Godfather, Part II - that's how long it takes to sit through Galt's radio address. It had better be as riveting, wouldn't you say?) Let's just take Francisco d'Anconia's "money speech." Now, this was not in the nature of a prepared address, like "This is John Galt Speaking." There, you needn't presume that Galt had given that address off-the-cuff; like Ayn Rand, he might well have taken two whole years to compose the text of it. We just don't know the details there. But with Francisco's money speech, you have something most definitely off-the-cuff.

What to say about the money speech? It's all fine and good in content, but what about the presentation of it? Have you seen the length of this thing on paper? It goes on for several pages. And it's spontaneous. It's spontaneous, and it arises out of a conversation at a party, and he goes on . . . and on . . . and on. This observation is not new to me at all. However, it is an observation that very few Objectivists and Rand-admirers want to come to grips with. If a character monologues for several pages on end, then so much the worse for literary tradition, so the argument goes. (One facepalm-moment in Leonard Peikoff's otherwise awesome Understanding Objectivism lecture course is a Q&A response where he says that the speeches were barely long enough. Facepalm facepalm facepalm. I'd dig up the exact reference but I don't have $300 and 20+ hours to spare right now. I think it was one of the later lectures.)

You'll notice that in The Fountainhead, the small number of lengthy speeches are confined to where they are most appropriate and realistic. Howard Roark gave his speech at just the right point in the novel, and with a crucial plot-purpose served. (The first trial in the novel, he produces his designs for the Stoddard Temple and says, "The defense rests." The second time around, he needed to make a speech.) The issue isn't so much a speech showing up in a literary work of fiction; it's whether it does the work it's supposed to do to advance a storyline. The Francisco "money speech" seems only like an opportunity for a character to become a mouthpiece. Again, I am not making any original observation or criticism concerning the "mouthpiece" nature of Atlas's characters. What I am doing is calling for Objectivists and Rand-admirers to check their premises about this "wonderful" novel, because ideas are that important. Ideas have consequences. If the underlying idea of a 15-minute money monologue almost right out of the blue is that This is how heroes behave, then we are potentially in for a heap of trouble.

Descending now into the world of the "ordinary" and "commonplace," what is the initial reaction a non-Objectivist reader has to this kind of speech in the middle of a novel? A question such an "ordinary" reader is almost certainly inclined to ask is: is this how people actually behave in real life? Can you seriously imagine someone going into a 15-minute monologue about how awesome money is, and not triggering a negative reaction? In ordinary parlance, the word that comes to such a reader's mind is: "Asshole."

And that, my friends, is how you get the standard swipe that "Objectivism is a philosophy for self-important assholes."

(to be continued)

The Problem with Atlas Shrugged, Part 1

In the last few days, I created a list of essential philosophy books. There is a lot of Ayn Rand-related material on there, but the most I can do Atlas Shrugged-wise is to include the CliffsNotes version by Andrew Bernstein. One person I showed this list to asked, "What about Atlas Shrugged?"; this posting is prompted in part by that query. Here's the deal: I really don't like Atlas Shrugged. Now to explain why.

First off, I should briefly summarize my intellectual context: when I first encountered Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, in junior year of high school, it was a life-changer. Overnight, I went from (primarily) a student of economics to (primarily) a student of philosophy. The moral certainty she displayed - and the moral certainty about principles that are true - is almost unheard-of in the history of ideas. There was nothing of this sort in the writings of Milton Friedman, my biggest intellectual "hero" up to that time.

Shortly thereafter, I read The Fountainhead, and didn't "get" it at its fundamental sense-of-life level. I was not versed either in fiction or in the arts. (My interest in the arts would emerge years later out of other life-changers: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the adagio movement to Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto, Op. 73.) I promptly went onto other books and thinkers featured in the Laissez Faire Books catalog at the time, most especially Murray Rothbard, whose own radical moral certainty was, I thought at the time, the logical extension of the principles I first encountered in Rand. So for a time, I delved into anarchistic theory and, eventually, found that there was so much left-anarchist theory out there that I soon lost interest in the subject of what an all-out dismantling of the State might lead to. My principles were firmly capitalistic, see.

It was around this time that I was taking my first college-level courses in philosophy (under the tutelage of a leading proponent of Intelligent Design theory, as it happens). At this time my thoughts were increasingly focused on the moral foundations of individual rights as distinct from the questions the Rothbard-types were preoccupied with (in short: how to apply rights theories to such questions as whether the State is legitimate, or whether libel ought to be legal *facepalm*). It was at this time that I followed promising leads in the LFB catalog to the works of Tibor Machan, Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl. I noticed at the same time that much of their work pointed back to . . . Ayn Rand. (Yes, I had read Jerome Tuccille's It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand during my Rothbardian-anarchist phase, and - like with the one-sided accounts of Rand presented by Nathaniel and Barbara Branden in their memoirs - I bought into the book's negative depictions of Rand and the "Collective." More on the nature of the "Collective" as we proceed....) And, so, I become familiarized with The Virtue of Selfishness and arrive at the essential moral-philosophical worldview that I hold to this day. (It was also right around this time that I encountered Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia which I also dug, though he was doing more "well, duh" kinds of leftist-ass-kicking without getting into the important issue of the foundations for rights themselves.)

What happened shortly thereafter was another "life-changing" event, and one that, in long-term retrospect, had profoundly negative effects on the course of my life. That event, occurring during the summer after graduating high school, was reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time.

Now, what we have in Atlas is one hell of an intellectual construction. At the time I was, to use a cliche, "blown away." Here we had, on virtually every page, a literal deconstruction of the hate-filled premises of the enemies of capitalism and individual rights. When Ayn Rand said that The Fountainhead was only an overture to Atlas Shrugged, she wasn't kidding! Rather than more subdued aesthetic cues, we get page after page of the most heavy-handed didacticism that a highly-intellectual young student of philosophy - particularly individualist-capitalist philosophy - eats right up. For the month that I was reading it, it was like I was in heaven. I was now ready to go out and emulate the heroic characters in this story.

Big fucking mistake.

(to be continued)