The very premise of "the 1619 project"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/scumbag-steve

I haven't delved all that much into the details of NYT's "1619 project" but - given what I do know about how intellectually deranged and perverse the American left has gotten (due to the activities of the cancerous Academic Left) - it appears to have the markings of just yet another deranged and perverted (and let's face it: outright dishonest) leftist America-hating meme-fest.

The very premise is that (a) America was founded on slavery first and foremost (not genocide?) and subsequently (a1) racism - more specifically, "white supremacism" - is in America's DNA, its very oingoing formative or organizing principles, to employ Aristotelian-like language.

This kind of shit can be bewildering to ordinary non-leftist Americans just trying to go about their mundane American-Dream-related pursuits.  (The American Dream is a myth, leftists are most eager to inform us.)  It's an intimidating-sounding claim; you risk being called a racist or enabler of racism if you dare challenge it.  The leading left-leaning daily publication of record is on board with it (to its motherfucking shame - but hey, don't take my word for it).  It supposedly has some massive amount of research backing it up, from supposedly smart experts at universities.  What is the ordinary, unfucked-by-leftism person to make of this?

Well, you need to pick apart the logic of it before you can even assess the quality and relevance of the historical research.  For instance: what in the fuck kind of research is it that would establish that racist white supremacism is in America's DNA?  Is the DNA defined by the Constitution?  Slavery was originally in the constitution, so does that mean that it's there for good?  Of course not.  There was a genetic modification, if you will, that occurred around 1865 that outlawed slavery across the land.  What's more, it was a modification arising from the original genetic program: "all men created equal, with inalienable rights...."

This basically reduces the whole "1619" case to a charge of hypocrisy and/or mythologizing of America's greatness.  It's not really the Declaration and the Constitution and everything that these things ultimately made possible that defines America or its founding.  Ta-Nahesi Coates will have none of that (and that's the standard involved, if only implictly).  It's all and only - or primarily or fundamentally - about the slave trade and supposedly everything that flows from that up to the present day.  (If one could sum up America's Racial Problem in one phrase, it might be: the socioeconomic achievement gap between whites and nonwhites (excluding Asians and whoever else doesn't fit neatly into the white-supremacist-achievement-gap narrative).  Yes, there is an achievement gap, and there are numerous contributing factors to that, and the Academic Left has deemed it off-limits to even broach the subject of any inherent genetic differences that might contribute to such a gap.  It's the declaring-off-limits part that speaks volumes about the (lack of) intellectual honesty among the Academic Left; if there is unpleasant truth then it cannot be studied.  And we also know how the Academic Left dishonestly treats those who point to cultural differences such as those manifested in what I'll term the intact-nuclear-family gap.  And we already know about Google's refutation-by-firing of James Damore when he dared challenge the Orthodoxy, proving his point for him and betraying its "do no evil" slogan.   (It's hard to believe that the rationales provided by Google execs were in good faith, given the legitimately controversial nature of Damore's statement and the (clearly?) logically shoddy protests about its being "harmful and discriminatory."  CEO Sundar Pichai's statement in particular looks like a chickenshit attempt to have it both ways without addressing the real issue.  If the concern was that Damore couldn't be argued out of his position with reasons and evidence, then there should be some shred or other of evidence pointing to that; rather, what it looks like is that his critics are the ones who have issues with facing up to controversial yet reasoned arguments.  How is all this not obvious ffs?)

Is the claim that America wouldn't have been founded as it had been were it not for slavery?  Does this mean that the natural-rights theory of John Locke and others was irrelevant?  What about the cultural atmosphere of the Enlightenment?  Many of the key Framers were slaveholders, but also inclined toward philosophy.  What's more or truly fundamental?

Does it mean that America as we know it wouldn't be around if not for slavery?  That's a trivial claim; of course it wouldn't be; things would be somewhat different.  But "1619" purports to go beyond triviality: the notion is that slavery was so deeply embedded in the fabric of America during its founding and early years that you just can't understand the history of this period without this crucial element.  But again, how does one avoid triviality here?

After all, slavery was such a big deal that there was a Civil War fought over it, over half a million men killed.  No one disputes this.

But what do you do with that, if reinforcing the "1619" narrative is your aim?  If slavery is fundamental to America's DNA, then a civil war that eliminates slavery should basically spell the end of America in recognizable form.  But that didn't happen; instead, America extended its basic principles to all of its inhabitants (along racial lines, that is; the women's vote would wait for another half century).  That it was a big enough deal that it sparked the Civil War shows . . . what?  In fairness it shows that: (a) America does have this historical stain that was/is hard to remove, and (b) the North, at least, found it to be a really big deal to see slavery ended.  (The South, to its motherfucking discredit, kept up the racist act as much as it could get away with, for another 100 or so years.  Maybe it's the South and not some undifferentiated America that has more to answer for here?)

Maybe I've missed something here.  As I said, I haven't looked into the details of the history that NYT/1619 are presenting; I'm examining the conceptual logic of the claims involved, as is standard for a philosopher to do. (It only stands to reason, after all, that slavery was a big enough deal that a Civil War was fought over it; historical detail would only show how this is so, not that it is so.  But the historical picture also includes the Enlightenment, Locke, the principles of the Declaration - things the cancerous left works vigorously to undermine.)  And I also don't trust leftists to cover the subjects of (e.g.) America and capitalism honestly; they've squandered that trust through countless distortions and droppings of context, and oftentimes outright smears (be it of Rand, or Trump, or Amy Wax, or industry/industrialists).  (Here's one 1619 project headline, according to wikipedia: "American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation", essay by Matthew Desmond .  How can capitalism as such be brutal?  What if the arguments about brutality center around man's inhumanity to man, not around the private ownership of capital?  Do leftists honestly entertain such a proposition?  If so, I must have missed them doing so.  Are markets inherently brutal?  If so, then what does that have to do with the plantation per se?)  They've taken to hurling the term "racism" around so much that commonsense Americans are now onto their ridiculous charade and are fucking fed up with it (hence part of why Trump got elected).  Perhaps most significantly, I don't trust the Academic Left to engage in a serious and responsible dialectic with their critics; it is chock-full of anticapitalist, America-hating scum whose agenda is to fundamentally transform America into . . . well, probably whatever shitshow the Deep Blue States appear to be headed toward unobstructed by those pesky (most likely "racist") Republicans.

That's the context within which one should consider any such thing as the "1619 project" and what its proponents aim to say about America and its economic system.  Whatever honest reckoning is to be done with America's spotty history, I don't expect leftists to be involved in that.

In other words, unless I've missed something significant, the 1619 project is contemporary American leftist practice in a nutshell - which is to say, one-sided/context-dropping, selectively attentive/outraged, ideologically inbred, deranged, dishonest, avoidant of serious dialogue/engagement with critics, and - last but not least - chock full of hubris about leftist intellectual and moral superiority.

Rather than dishonestly whining about "America's racism" or capitalism's brutality," and seemingly calling for every which new tax-and-spend program as a solution (to shore up the failures of the previous tax-and-spend programs, as if this was the sort of shit the Framers had in mind for this country), how about the Academic Left get productive for a change and promote philosophy for (all, including black) children?  Then again, I can't trust them not to fuck that up big-time, either; they'd actually need to internalize philosophic practice themselves, first, and thereby stop being such loathsome leftist losers in the process.  And since when would any academy or school be required to any great extent to instill in kids a love of wisdom or a dialectical mindset, or to provide the necessary research sources?  From what I hear, kids these days are on YouTube nonstop, and there's lots of leads there.  They sure as shit aren't going to better their lives spending their time delving into things like the 1619 project, are they?

And where does the NYT go from here?  Phrased differently: What new low will they think of to sink to next?  Will it ever get around to taking a hint from the superior WSJ model?  (As far as opinion page content goes, if you believe that the general quality of NYT's is on par with WSJ's, chances are you're a fucking idiot.)

What this is, once you cut through all the bullshit, is the NYT and fellow lefties renewing their attacks on Donald Trump and his supporters.  It's Donald Trump and their supporters who "perpetuate racism" which includes denying racism is the problem the left claims it to be, which includes denying that the 1619 project is up to snuff historically and conceptually.  That's all this is about, because that's how leftists/allies/enablers today operate.

I'll also add this point: I've been pointing out that the Dems/leftists/allies/enablers have been recklessly smearing Trump and his supporters as racist.  But there's another category of dishonesty in addition to recklessness that may very well apply in many cases: deliberately smearing them, i.e., lying outright.  That's what Nancy Peloser does when she says Trump's border wall is "about making America white again."  It's what CNN and their ilk do when they deliberately omit the context of Trump's "fine people on both sides" statement in the wake of Charlottesville.  (How could they not deliberately omit the context?  The omission is too fucking blatant, too fucking selective not to be deliberately calculated; they went too far, showed their hand, and got caught, is all.  Fucking liars, plain and simple.)  And when the likes of CNN don't get contrite and admit their deception, they continue the deception (including the deception that they are a reliable, credible source for political news going forward), and their deception continues to be deliberate, blatant, and calculated = still fucking liars.  And so what does it tell you when the NYT behaves as slimily as many rightly suspect them to be behaving in regard to its 1619 project - when it unaccountably disregards its critics and stands by its selected 'historians' and authors?  How much more blatant does it have to be, before we can say they are lying outright to the American public (about their publication standards, if nothing else)?

More from City Journal (Manhattan Institute) discrediting the NYT assholes, as well as the various Academic Leftist 'historians' who refuse to criticize the assholes, i.e., who enable the assholes, i.e., who are assholes.  (A Duke 'historian' and her past misdeeds re the Lacrosse Team rape hoax is mentioned.  It's as good a time as any to mention a proven asshole in the Duke history department, Scumbag Nancy MacLean, who lies about libertarians and calls it history [and who also blurbs Scumbag Lisa Duggan's pseudo/anti-scholarly smear job of Rand]).  It's assholes and scumbags, every which way you look on the Academic Left, it seems.  I might not ever have believed it was this bad, had there not been a nonstop avalanche of evidence of it.

[Addendum 1/27: This helps to contextualize things more and makes the NYT project appear less destructive than I have been led to believe.  (The main objections by Wilentz and others are to Nikole Hannah-Jones' lead essay/toxic thesis.)  In any case what I take exception to is the notion - the very premise of the Project, as I've said - that white-on-black racism is in the nation's "DNA," however huge a problem it still is (and it is...).  (And if slavery/racism is America's Original Sin, are we in the territory of religious belief here, articles of faith?  Compare with Christian 'Original Sin' dogma.)  As I've been suggesting throughout this blog's history is that this and other huge problems is at root intellectual/philosophical, and I find the state of the debate on these problems to be deplorable in some degree or other.  A go-through of the SEP article on socialism has confronted me with the reality that the state of the public debate on this subject is pretty deplorable and that there is plenty of blame to go around (including the authors of the article themselves who almost come across as oblivious to the myriad counterpoints raised many times by defenders of capitalism or critics of socialism, including the much-despised/smeared Rand and her profound take on the human mind/intellect as the most important/powerful/valuable means of production).  I plan to have more to say on this before long; for now I'll just say that I have tempered my more or less sweeping view of socialists as low-intellectual-character shitbags as distinct from not-unusually-flawed human beings with limitations in knowledge and problem-solving.  Still, how to explain the debacle of 20th-century attempts at (state-planning) socialism in the face of critiques by Mises, Hayek and others; that debacle stems in great part by the attempt to forcibly impose a 'solution' on so many recalcitrant minds, when human problem-solving capacity was not up to the task of embracing the 'solution.'  (Actually, I still see big-time vice here on display in the anti-dialogue AOC & ilk, but this is a politician rather than scholar, i.e., she's low hanging fruit.)]

Is it "later than we think"?

For those of you reading this in the year 2100 (I think the human race will make it till then), a bit of perspective: this past week's American news was focused almost entirely on the "Boston Marathon Bombing" and the aftermath that left four dead and well over one hundred wounded.  Within 4 days of this terror attack, one of the two suspects (young Muslim males, as it happens) was dead and the other in custody.  This was the story for 4 days, seemingly 24/7 on the cable news channels.

I figure if that was the main story of the week, it was - all things considered - a slow news week.  Bombings of this sort still happen quite frequently around the world in the year 2013, but this was one that hit home, hence the wall-to-wall news coverage.  Boston went into lockdown mode for most of today, but in all seriousness, if this is the main - seemingly exclusive - focus of news coverage for an entire week, just in how bad a state is the world in the year 2013, really?  I have in mind here Steven Pinker's recent work on the decline in violence (percentage-wise) over the course of human history.  Despite the troubles and challenges we all still face at this point in history, we should certainly step back and take the long view of these things.

Some 2,500ish years ago, the human race - in existence pretty much in present form for some hundred thousand years - entered what may well be termed an adolescent phase, a phase of questioning and examining pre-existing beliefs, with philosophers leading the way.  Back then, it is true, a philosopher could be sentenced to death by hemlock, but that wouldn't happen today (not in the West, anyhow).  At most he'd be assessed a fine.  Fast forward some 2,300ish years, and modern republican democracy is established in America, and that ethos spreads to much of the rest of the world over that time.  Slavery is no longer considered acceptable, women enjoy equal social status with men.  (Again, in the West.)  The agricultural revolution of thousands of years ago, along with human intellectual progress since that time, paved the way for the industrial revolution of the modern republican-democratic era.  A system that came to be termed 'capitalism' emerged and, after failed experiments in socialist models of production, it now looks to be here to stay for the foreseeable future, with modifications here and there.  Now, it appears that some new revolution, bringing the human race to the next stage of advancement, is in its infancy.  Within a couple centuries, the population boomed to over 7 billion, and in recent decades the global rate of poverty has been falling more and more towards zero.  Nuclear technology, almost the moment it was developed, was used to end a world war some 7 decades ago, and hasn't been employed in wartime since.  Back during those times, a bomb killing three and injuring scores of others was merely a small subset of a single day's bloody events.

If one were to look at the dystopian science fiction that emerged in the postwar era and lasting until roughly the internet age, one got the impression that by 2013 the world might plausibly be engaged in more world-warring, or nuking one another (how about the future dystopia depicted in the Terminator film of 1984, produced during a period of intense nuclear buildup between the U.S. and the Soviet Union?).  We don't have the flying cars yet, but neither has a world resembling Orwell's 1984 even remotely been realized, despite concerns in recent years about a military-industrial "surveillance state" (concerns that, voiced as they have been, have kept such activities of the state in check).  Note that big cities such as Boston now have security cameras that can used to survey public spaces, which were instrumental to tracking down the two bombing suspects in a relatively very short amount of time; the cultural norm of today is that privacy is naturally expected in one's own home, but there's no expectation of privacy in public spaces.  So we have had advances in technology in combination with evolved legal norms that, other things being equal, have made undetected criminal behavior that much more difficult to carry out.

As has been widely noted, including here on this blog, the democratization of the world means less warring between states.  Dystopian totalitarian scenarios appear to be a thing of the past, arguably in no small part due to the very warnings from observant and conscientious authors such as Orwell (and Rand!), and other public intellectuals.

According to the cheesy dystopian '70s and '80s sci-fi (ever see Logan's Run?  Jenny Agutter was hot, at least), the average human being in the year 2013 might turn on the television and be witness to the surreal - say, like, an inhuman "game show" such as The Running Man.  Well, it turns out that humans these days aren't nearly so eager to see their fellow humans being hunted down in such a fashion.

Yes, a truly bad candidate appeared on the Republican presidential ticket 5 years ago, a sign the country might have been going insane.  But the candidate ended up discredited due to diligent commentary in the blogosphere and other media.  Sure, there's an obesity epidemic in America, but fat-shaming has become a thing as a consequence.  At least the problem isn't the other way, as in a world running out of food.  Yes, global warming appears to be the biggest problem facing humankind in the coming decades, but . . .

Getting back to that thing about what we might see turning on our television sets in the year 2013.  How many have noticed just how beautiful Hi-Def television is?  I'm talking especially in terms of form of presentation; the content can certainly be improved.  But there's got to be some kind of theorizing among those in the field of aesthetics about the nature of Hi-Def television, else they will have failed at doing what they're supposed to be doing.  And let's keep in mind that Hi-Def television was not at all envisioned back in the 1980s, certainly not in the cheesy sci-fi movies.  If it had been envisioned back then, there would be a huge fortune to be made by the envisioner(s).  Or the smartphones and digital pads.  Do human beings these days realize, all things considered, just how good people have it these days?  And let's not forget about the way the internet has exploded and evolved as a medium of information and communication, and can only continue to do so.  Now this thing called 3-D printing appears to be hitting scalability.

Given the course of human history over the past few decades, we may well be in near-Singularity mode (the technological singularity, at least) as it is, because we don't seem to have any really clear idea how the world will look 10 years from now.  If we could, then - again - some huge fortunes can be made based upon some good predictions.  Kurzweil defines the technological singularity as the point when super-intelligent machines are created, which is supposedly some decades down the line.  Supposedly, in principle, they can be created, despite the present barriers we face with regard to reverse-engineering the human brain.  (Biological theories of consciousness seem to be what the philosophers are converging upon.  I think they might have figured that out a lot sooner had they paid more attention to Aristotle . . . but what the F do I know.)  And I don't see what else we could converge toward culture-wise than the whole Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Randian-perfectivist paradigm.  Kurzweil has made his case in the technological realm; I believe I've amply demonstrated mine (here in this blog) for culture, at least in broad outline.

So where do we go from here?  Whatever it is, it ought to be really effing interesting.

So it looks like tomorrow, 4/20, at 4:20 p.m. (EST?) I go "on strike," which may very well contribute to the interesting-ness of whatever is to come.  I hardly have the faintest idea as to the what, when, where, how, etc.  We're just gonna have to find out, aren't we. ;-)

Wealth inequality and capitalism's enemies

Source: The Economist, 10/13/2012

There's some video from 2012 on wealth inequality in America that's gone viral.  Capitalism's enemies - thanks in good part to vast numbers of un-businessmanlike armchair academics - have proven, shall we say, resourceful at coming up with ways to smear capitalism.  The recent and developing narrative holds that capitalistic market principles, without benevolent government intervention, lead in action to ever-increasing inequality (and, presumably, as a result, ever-increasing impoverishment of the non-rich).  I addressed this narrative around this time last year, pointing to a study by a couple ivy-league economists showing that in the past 40 or so years, not only has world poverty declined, but so has world income inequality.  Do you think any such data proves inconvenient to the scummy leftists hell-bent on attacking capitalism?

I encountered the pictorial graph above from doing a Google image search on "world gini index."  The search results provide a dizzying array of charts and graphs that could be used by any number of unscrupulous apologists for this or that political-economic ideology to twist the narrative to their liking.  What hardly at all seems to ever come up is data that conflicts with the graph above concerning world income inequality.  What's more, one who delves into the literature on this subject has to look long and hard for satisfactory explanations for the trend of rising inequality in some nations (such as the U.S.), since what we get from left-wing pundits and bloggers is the usual anti-capitalist stuff, and from right-wing pundits and bloggers a lot of silence or indifference to the subject of inequality.  ("The poor in America are rich compared to the poor in the developing world," is a common right-wing response - one that doesn't address the trend of rising inequality and - nowadays - stagnation or decline in the incomes of the American non-rich.)

One OECD paper provides eight distinct explanations that - quite surprisingly to Yours Truly - minimize the role of globalization, even though in the very paragraph discussing globalization there is mention that "companies have been investing more and more in other countries"!

The Conference Board of Canada covers the subject indepth.  A CTRL-F on "skill" will bring you to a paragraph discussing the role of high-skilled labor relative to low-skilled labor in an increasingly globalizing economy:

Market forces, particularly skill-biased technical change (SBTC) and increased globalization, are creating a rising demand for highly skilled labour. Edward Lazear, chairman of the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisors, explained this in a 2006 speech: “In our technologically advanced society, skill has higher value than it does in a less technologically advanced society.”¹⁰ As developed countries import more low-skilled-intensive goods and export more skills-intensive goods, jobs in low-skilled industries are lost in those developed countries.

To provide a fuller context, the article goes on to state:

However, not all researchers agree that market forces are at the root of all or even most of the rising inequality. For instance, in a paper published in the Journal of Labor Economics, David Card and John DiNardo argue that “contrary to the impression conveyed by most of the recent literature, the SBTC hypothesis falls short as a unicausal explanation.”¹¹ An alternative explanation, put forward by economist Paul Krugman and others, is that the increase in inequality can be attributed to institutional forces, like declines in unionization rates, stagnating minimum wage rates, deregulation, and national policies that favour the wealthy.

(So, according even to at least one Nobel laureate, the trend is due in part to a shift away from less-capitalistic to more-capitalistic public policies.  What's unclear, to me, is how these policies don't reduce in more fundamental form to the influence of globalization.  From a businessman-like standpoint, non-unionized non-developed-country labor out-competes domestic unionized labor at the margins.  How are unions supposed to maintain their competitiveness in such a business climate?  Going to the benevolent government for help isn't going to stop the outflow of jobs.  But unionized labor is supposed to be more highly-skilled, right?  It all comes down to skill vs. cost, for one thing.  For another, given the dismal job America has been doing in the educational department, how can the U.S. see much growth in the highly-skilled industries?  Anyway, these are factors to consider that left-wing academics and the OWS crowd don't appear to pay much attention to, and certainly the failures of the American educational system don't reflect all that well on the educators.  (Whom are they going to blame for that?  It's not like the U.S. hasn't thrown enough money into its education system, before we even look at the fast-growing higher-ed-related student debt bubble.)  [EDIT 3/8/2013: I'm not satisfied with the analysis in this paragraph; needs more and better thinking to sort out what's what.  I can't escape the requirements of perfectivism!  For one thing, paying a mediocre (by MLB standards) ballplayer $1M a year to play third base for the Yankees is not going to help fill the team's need to be perennial playoff contenders, as much as paying $27M for its current third baseman does.  Same principle as it relates to the pay of unskilled vs. skilled labor, i.e., it's not a simple "skill vs. cost" equation, as companies usually need at least some people who produce what others can't, at any level of pay.  So what view am I supporting with this revision/edit, anyway?  Just why have unions gone into decline, aside from the easy Republican-are-meanies explanation?  Maybe I should defer to the specialist-economists for the time being....])

The Conference Board of Canada then uses two different world Gini index measures, one (not population-weighted) showing a rising Gini index (greater inequality) and the other (population weighted) showing a falling Gini index roughly in line with the graph above and with the findings of the two ivy-league economists. 

Now, as to capitalism's enemies, a few comments:

First, I don't know whether it's cognitive bias or intellectual dishonesty in any given case, but the opposition to capitalism seems to have become as much a dogmatic religion on the Left as the usual dogmatic religions have been so on the Right.  This isn't to say that the Right doesn't have its share of dogmatic ideologues on economics who in principle would never accept evidence that capitalism isn't so great.

Second, while the Gini index for America is somewhere in the 40s, depending on the specific measurement used, the world Gini index has been much higher than that for a very long time; where were the economic leftists all this time, decrying the world inequalities?  Why is it now such an issue to them?  If it's only because rising inequality accompanied by income stagnation among the non-rich hit home here in America that they started crying about it.  But think about it: decades ago, the income gap between the average American and the average person in China was so huge that it would take a certain cognitive selectiveness or - according to their on worldview - a staggering level of moral blindness to make a big deal about it all of a sudden now but not before.  That bespeaks of cognitive bias and/or disingenuousness about their real motives for concern about income inequalities.

Third, whatever people's ideological dispositions, the truly important thing is to get things right when it comes to the best economic institutions for people, what will make their (material) lives go best, and so on.  (It speaks to another cognitive bias of leftists that they are so heavily focused on material concerns to the exclusion of others.  Try watching MSNBC for a while and notice just how much time and attention is focused on economic concerns compared to their attention on, well, the spiritual ones.  Just have a look at the amount of attention paid these concerns in the works of the Left's favorite and most influential ideological figures.  When their attention does shift to the spiritual matters, it's often about how these matters should be removed from the public/government sphere but little in the way of how private citizens and communities could pick up the slack.  Anyway,...)  It's terribly important to get things right here because countless lives and well-beings hang in the balance.  If, based on a truly objective and comprehensive analysis, socialism (or, alternatively, capitalism) proved to be destructive of these ends, then honest people would certainly want to change their ideological affiliations for the sake of human betterment.  So.  In my case, I look at all the data that I've had available to me up to this point, and have to ask: could I honestly be an advocate of (socialism, or capitalism) at this point?

It's here that I should re-emphasize what my primary philosophical affiliation is, which goes deeper than politics and economics to the very core issues of human existence.  (I suppose, for a traditional Marxian, it doesn't go any deeper than the material aspects of our existence.)  My primary philosophical orientation is an Aristotelian and/or Randian one, that is to say a perfectivist or intellectualist-perfectionist one.  I think that a shit-ton of the problems facing the human condition can be dealt with most effectively, most economically, and most fundamentally at that level.  The intellect has primacy in human existence; it is the fundamental or primary driver of human affairs; the extent to which its potentialities are actualized is the extent to which human life is worth living (morally and existentially).  So, when, say, the schools are doing a piss-poor job of educating the students so that they can enter a high-skill profession, my primary focus is on fulfilling the needs of the intellect rather than calling for this or that change in economic policy.

That said, what can be said about the value of capitalism to human life, given the evidence?  Let's take the graph I posted above - the right side of it, that is.  Now, if a leftist were to interpret the data there for the time frame involved, I don't know what sensible anti-capitalist narrative could be constructed.  I might see some leftist ca. 1970 (assuming these data were readily available then) making the assertion that industrialization leads to greater and greater inequality - that, perhaps, the reason some countries industrialized was that in some way or other they exploited and impoverished the other countries.  (I do believe that this was in fact a commonly-employed leftist narrative for some time; hell, you can still hear it being used in opposition to "the multinational corporations" coming in to less-developed nations to "exploit" the labor and resources there, supposedly making the natives no better off while enriching the absentee corporate shareholders.)  But then things changed around 1970, and I don't know what an ideological leftist is supposed to make of it without looking like he or she is trying to interpret the data any which way possible as long as capitalism ends up looking bad.

What the data suggest to me, is that world inequality rose when some nations industrialized (or industrialized more) and others did not (or not as much).  Then, as more and more nations industrialized, particularly beginning around 1970, that world inequality basically leveled off (with a slight downward trend).  Also during that time, world population exploded, meaning not just rising incomes per capita but also many more capita.  And to cap it off, there appears nothing in this history that points toward some coming future push toward socialism, with this period being some necessary historical transition period exemplified by capitalism, as the traditional Marxian idea (a dogma, by this point?) would have it.

But if you look at the past couple hundred years, in the most fundamental terms employed in a neo-Aristotelian philosophy of history, what does this period show?  Something about the flourishing of human intellectual capacities not seen before in human history, perhaps?  It appears, unfortunately for Marxism, that a materialist conception of history could not account for such a historically revolutionary shift.  It probably comes as no surprise, however, to those familiar with a Kurzweilian-plus-Aristotelian understanding of history.  Of course, I'm always on the lookout for alternative explanations and theories that might best explain the available (or any new) evidence, but I'm not anticipating something much different than this (capitalism-friendly, neo-Aristotelian) one.

(After my previous posting, I had thought of making my next posting about the idea of "looking out for one another," though I don't know really what all there is to say about that beyond, "In a decent society people will look out for one another, should they fall on hard times or whatever, but it's not clear why the coercive force of government is necessary for that - certainly not as a default position."  So even in a capitalist society with some degree of income and wealth inequality, and some degree of economic instability and displacement associated with the process of "creative destruction," a virtuous/enlightened Jefferstotelian (Jeffersonian-Aristotelian) people would cooperatively engage (peacefully) to address individuals' Maslow-hierarchical needs as or when the need arises, in the most effective manner reasonably possible.  That would probably still involve the capitalists re-investing a great part of their earnings in business ventures, as they've already been doing aplenty in "other countries" as well as their own.  The primary key to a solution here is, as always, education - and what's needed first and foremost is a Jefferstotelian curriculum for the young'uns, not the usual array of leftist and socialist policy proposals (or the very un-Jefferstotelian right-wing ones, for that matter).)

Aristotle and Ayn Rand

These remarks should be taken as preliminary sketches until I've developed a greater familiarity with Aristotle's system of thought; my chief intellectual influence - by far - up to this point has been Ayn Rand, to the point that I could almost cite chapter and verse the Ayn Rand Lexicon like the back of my hand (to mix metaphors, or something).  My own direct reading of Aristotle is limited, and the greatest part of my exposure to the Philosopher (as St. Thomas Aquinas called him) is through secondary texts such as those of Mortimer Adler, Jonathan Barnes, Frederick Copleston, Jonathan Lear and (most significantly) Henry Babcock Veatch.

In my "Perfectivism: An Introduction," I list nearly twenty philosophical figures who are most representative of the basic idea, that of maximally actualizing or perfecting one's intellectual faculty as the most fundamental means, activity and constituent of human flourishing, self-actualization, or eudaimonia.  The idea is so simple, appealing, and irrefutable that it's amazing it hasn't taken over the world already.  (I plan in a future posting - hopefully before the April 20 "Ultimate Cliff" deadline I have set - to lay out a sketch of a vision of what a utopia based on perfectivist principles might look like.  You have to perform an extrapolation along the following lines: rather than one Aristotle- or Jefferson-caliber figure per nation the size of the United States, think of something like a million of them cultivated from an early age through training in the art of thinking, to the point that they have perfected the art of dialectic as I believe Aristotle did.)

Anyway, the two names I reference most in my introductory piece on Perfectivism are Aristotle and Rand.  Aristotle is probably the most canonized figure in the Western intellectual tradition, whereas the greatest extent of Rand's influence so far is on the American libertarian and conservative movements comprising mostly "ordinary folk," and, in the academy, on a relatively small and not-very-influential group of admirers known as the Ayn Rand Society.  So far, the most academically-significant work to emerge from this small group is Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics (Cambridge, 2006), which, as the publication date will tell you, came out nearly a full half-century after the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957.  There is a confluence of factors that led to this half-century gap which I will spend some time talking about here.

In discussing any Aristotle-Rand connection one cannot ignore the contributions of Allan Gotthelf, one of Rand's top students along with Leonard Peikoff and Harry Binswanger.  With Binswanger, he received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University in the mid-1970s, presumably alternating on a regular basis between the university and 36 E. 36th St. in Manhattan, where Miss Rand resided.  He was one of the participants in Rand's ca. 1970 epistemology workshops, which were transcribed and edited by Binswanger for the appendix to the second edition of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, published in 1990.  (Only 20 years between workshop and print publication - not too bad, I suppose.)  It is in those workshop excerpts that a member of the general public can get a glimpse into the world inhabited by her closest students, who were (quite understandably) in awe of her dialectical abilities based on some 25 years of nonstop thinking on philosophical matters.  (I do think that if the general public had the kind of access to Rand that her ironically-named "Collective" of the 1950s did, they would have "gotten" Atlas almost effortlessly and immediately.  Alas, it was not to be....)

Gotthelf and Binswanger share a similar philosophic focus: the teleological character of biological phenomena: Binswanger's doctoral thesis was titled The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, while Gotthelf's work on Aristotle's biology has played a significant role in reviving interest among contemporary philosophers (I don't know about biologists) in Aristotle's biological treatises, particularly in Aristotle's (oft-misunderstood) conception of telos or final causality.  Their and Rand's work has informed Tara Smith's chief work in meta-ethics, Viable Values (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).  A teleological conception of biological phenomena is at the heart of Rand's naturalistic meta-ethics, and probably at the heart of Aristotle's account of goodness as well.  Gotthelf, Binswanger and Smith certainly think there is a deeply significant connection between Rand and Aristotle in this regard.  In any event, Gotthelf's work in this area has received the most attention of these three and has been published by the most respected of academic presses (Oxford).

At the same time, Gotthelf is on record (in 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand) saying that being able to ask questions of Rand in her epistemology workshops was, quote, "the equivalent of having Aristotle in the room," unquote.  On the face of it, a leading scholar of Aristotle saying something like this about Ayn Rand should be an eyebrow-raiser.  Is there something he knows that we don't?  The best evidence we have to that effect is the transcribed epistemology workshops themselves.  Is the mind in action there the equivalent to Aristotle's?  (Leonard Peikoff is also on record, in The Art of Thinking, as saying that Rand had "the mind of Aristotle."  Binswanger, at a conference celebrating Rand, on the occasion of her 100th birthday I believe, said to the effect that Rand's genius was a one-in-a-generation phenomenon at the very least.  Her former chief associate, Nathaniel Branden, would probably also say things to this effect; keep in mind that in the Western intellectual landscape that existed in the 1950s - one that Branden went to great lengths to comb for promising, uh, leads - Rand stood out way above everyone else for him; I mean, there wasn't anyone remotely close to her genius in his estimation.  That part I can accept; whether that puts her on par with Aristotle, well....)

What was Aristotle's biographical context, and what was Rand's?  Let's investigate.

Aristotle had a well-to-do upbringing, and entered Plato's Academy at the age of 17.  He studied under Plato - one of Western philosophy's "Big Three" along with himself and Kant - for 20 years until Plato's death.  By age 37, he had had about the best training in philosophy one might reasonably expect to receive.  He went on to tutor Alexander the Great, found his own school (the Lyceum), write some treatises, and the rest is history.

Rand, by contrast, was born into a "bourgeois" family whose property was expropriated by the Soviets when she was still quite young.  She went to the university at Leningrad where she majored in history and took at least one course in philosophy under Prof. Lossky, a notable figure in the Russian philosophical tradition.  Rand's primary interest, however, was in being a writer of fiction.  Later, in her newsletter in 1963, she stated as the goal of her writing the portrayal of the ideal man, a goal for which she needed to develop a philosophy.  In any event, her philosophical pedigree, while perhaps impressive (some amount of exposure to Prof. Lossky during her time at the university), is hardly comparable to Aristotle's (twenty years at Plato's Academy).  What she lacked in academic pedigree she made up for in her writing, going on to compose two (arguably three) classics of literature, magnificent (if partly flawed - particularly in the case of Atlas - but an analysis here is for another day) novels that have already changed the course of history.  After she emigrated to America at the age of 21 and married her soul mate, Frank O'Connor, she proceeded in a largely autodidactic fashion, as suited her fiercely independent personality.  Her primary intellectual influence by the 1930s was Nietzsche, but her 1943 novel The Fountainhead showed that she had moved beyond Nietzsche's conception of heroic egoism and developed her own unique brand.

By that time, she had come under the tutelage (if it could be called that) of Isabel Paterson (how many ignorant internet thugs who hate on Rand have heard of her?), who taught Rand in the areas of history, economics, and political philosophy, and authored The God of the Machine, also published in 1943.  There was an extensive correspondence between the two women, amply documented in the most-delightful Letters of Ayn Rand.  (This book is another glimpse into the world that was Rand's - and it is awesome.  A+, "desert-island-book" quality.  Fact: you don't really have an idea about Rand the person if you haven't read this book carefully and thoroughly.)  In the course of their correspondence, Rand tells "Pat" in 1945 (right about the time she left New York for California, where she would go on to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of The Fountainhead [1949]) that she had just purchased a copy of The Basic Works of Aristotle, which copyright information indicates was published that year.  (Rand and "Pat" would have a falling out a few years later, apparently due to behaviors on Pat's part which Rand found deeply offensive.)  From that point on, Rand would become a full-time philosopher, more or less.  She was 40 years of age.

So one can compare where Aristotle and Rand stood at 40 years of age: Aristotle had devoted all his adult life to studying philosophy under a titan, Plato.  Rand's primary achievement was in the world of fiction literature (in her non-native language, no less).

Anyone else see where this is going?

It was in the late 1940s that Rand, according to her story included in the "workshop" excerpts, that Rand had discussed the problem of universals with "a Thomist," which ignited in her thoughts her own eventual proposed solution in terms of measurement-omission as the basis for objective concept-formation.  It was in the 1950s that, after meeting young Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, she began work on the ideological centerpiece of Atlas, John Galt's three-hour-long radio address.  It took her two years to compose and polish The Speech.  It constituted the fullest integration of Rand's accumulated knowledge up to that point (age 50).

(I think of The Speech as a philosophical manifesto wedged into a dramatic novel; it may well be the best part of the novel, for if Galt had the intellectual wherewithal to compose that speech, he certainly could have organized a more effective strike, seeing as how his "strike" went publicly undeclared for 12 years from the time it began.  This may well be the most gaping hole in the conception of the plot.  It also quite easily explains how the novel - and especially the uber-masterful Speech - fell on so many deaf ears upon its publication, just as the Speech could only have fallen on so many Comprachico-ized deaf ears in the story itself.  Which reminds me: I want to examine eventually just how realistic the irrational nature of Atlas's dystopian culture actually is.  Is it a realistic America where the leading public intellectuals all in unison say that there are no absolutes, that we don't know anything, that we should renounce our happiness, etc. etc.?  What would be the plausible preconditions for such an American dystopia to come about?  Wasn't the actual intellectual muddle existing in her day enough of a target?  And how is it that pathological, non-absolutist pragmatism could be practiced so consistently by its adherents, or self-sacrifice upheld as an ideal by the very same people?  Something doesn't mesh here.  In any event, The Speech is a masterpiece of integration, a work of epic genius, even if it is filled with strawmen.  The novel as a whole, warts and all, is still a (flawed) masterpiece of integration for what it is given its premise.  Integration of ideas and plot, of plot elements, and so forth . . . logically culminating in Galt being the only person who could fix the generator being used to torture him.  Role of the mind in man's existence and all that....)

After Atlas is published, and the critical community goes out of its way not to understand what the novel is about, Rand sank into a two-year depression.  If the culture is that corrupt, she thought, what was the use?  How can one even proceed?  She eventually came to the conclusion that she had to become much more of an intellectual activist, beginning in 1960 on the premise that the culture was intellectually bankrupt.  (She was at least partly right about that.  Hell, the account is overdrawn to this day.)  Who were the public intellectuals of the time, and what were they advocating?  You have to imagine yourself in the early 1960s, where the leading "conservative" voice is William F. Buckley, whose National Review ran a preposterous review of Atlas.  The "liberals" were most interested in Keynesian economics, given their primary focus on economic rather than spiritual values.  The state of psychological theory of the time represented the existential crises of that age; Freud was still highly influential, while self-actualization psychology was in its infancy.  Erich Fromm's excellent, quasi-Aristotelian book, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947), was all too overlooked, and overshadowed by his later work, The Art of Loving (1957).  The nation and the world had just emerged from two mind-bogglingly destructive wars.  Nukes had been dropped on large populations.  Jews were murdered by the millions.  Meanwhile, as the psychologists and European existentialists were grappling with the whole "man's search for meaning" thing, the Anglo-American philosophical class was devoted to logic-chopping while ethical theory was in a period of prolongued stagnation.  (A couple decades prior to that, as The Fountainhead was reaching the ordinary plebs and Sartre's work grabbing the attention of European audiences, Anglo-American academic philosophy was grappling with the distinctively-British-flavored school of logical positivism.  Thanks a lot for that, Brits.)  On top of all that, a seemingly intellectually-crippled America was in the heat of the Cold War, on the brink of mutually-assured nuclear destruction, and just a few years away from the disaster that was the Vietnam War.

One asks again: who were the leading American public intellectuals of the time, and what were they advocating?  One very vocal and fiery public intellectual comes to mind, but it's not the name the Establishment fucks want to hear.  That figure aside, just who was there?  Just who was of the caliber and stature that would have drawn the ire and attention of that public intellectual?  One name does come to mind: John Kenneth Galbraith.  And wouldn't you know it, the Fiery One had very little if anything of note to say about him.  Wikipedia states, "he filled the role of public intellectual from the 1950s to the 1970s on matters of economics." (emphasis mine)  Yes, resolving problems of political economy was of major important (and still is: see the prominence of Paul Krugman in today's political debates), particularly in the face of the leading alternative of the day, Marx-inspired communism.  (Given the huge importance of political economy in 20th century intellectual life, Ludwig von Mises must count as a figure of towering importance who masterfully integrated what there was to know about economics up through the time he published Human Action in 1949.  Not that the Establishment fucks would yield on that point, mind you.  But just remember: without Mises, there would most likely be no Hayek as we've come to know him, and Hayek's influence on the economics profession goes without saying.)  But as important as political economy is, it is an extremely poor substitute for philosophy.  The breadth and depth of the Fiery One's contributions would - one would think - make the Fiery One of much greater importance and influence.  But that's the whole problem: if a society is approaching intellectual bankruptcy, it comes as no surprise that it would be focused more on matters of political economy than on matters of philosophy.  And what was the class of professional philosophers doing all this time?

I know of only a couple promising, uh, leads in this regard.  First off, Aristotle was not being studied all that much in the academic philosophical mainstream.  His works had been translated into English within only a half-century prior to this period of time.  Aristotle translator W.D. Ross had some fairly well-known commentaries on the Philosopher, but they appear to have had only some influence on the post-war philosophical profession.  (The main focus was logic and language, remember, with such things as ethics and metaphysics being widely considered dead or nearly-dead sciences.)  John Herman Randall's book on Aristotle came out in 1960, and was reviewed by the Fiery One, who managed to Get It about the importance and greatness of the Philosopher at a time when hardly anyone else did.  A notable exception is Henry Veatch, who published his Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics in 1962, which was received, apparently, by a small audience of Aristotle enthusiasts but few others.  (Why didn't the Fiery One receive it warmly?  Good question!  I don't know the answer.  What we have here is a failure to integrate.  [I just came up with that line with the help of a little self-propelled semantic priming, and I will most joyously use it, and quite often, in the future!  Yay! :-) ])  Over in England, Wittgenstein disciple and translator G.E.M. Anscombe had just published her seminal essay, "Modern Moral Philosophy," which would, in time, help revive the Aristotelian "virtue ethics" tradition in academic philosophy.  But it did not make much of a splash at the time, especially in public-intellectual terms; it was aimed at an academic readership (and the academy seems to be very conservative and slow-moving in its reception of new ideas, with eyebrow-raising exceptions [e.g., A Theory of Justice]).  So that, in a nutshell, was the state of Aristotle studies ca. 1962.  Is it any wonder there's been a huge disconnect between the academy and the wider culture?

Then, there is Nietzsche.  In an ominous parallel to the speed at which Rand has made inroads in the academy, Nietzsche didn't become a serious subject of academic study until the appearance of Walter Kaufmann's 1949 book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.

Now, as an aside/digression, there was one Stanley Kubrick, a filmmaker and noted perfectionist, who might well have fit the role of public intellectual in the 1960s as well as anyone.  There was his commentary on the insanity that was Cold War nuclear brinksmanship, which was Dr. Strangelove (1964).  Then came 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which drew in part upon Nietzsche's idea of man as a bridge between ape and 'superman,' although many viewers were apparently too philistinistic to grasp that connection.  (But integration is so damn fun, innit?  How could they fail to integrate?  Where were the philosophers and the public intellectuals, to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge, if the plebs weren't going to do it themselves?  Where the fuck were they?  Even the Fiery One, as listed co-author with Erika Holzer in a June 1969 movie review in The Objectivist, failed to Get It.  What goes around, comes around, I guess?  Guess who wouldn't have fucked this up, though.  More on that in just a bit.)  The rest of Kubrick's corpus of work is littered with masterpieces, but this blog entry isn't about Kubrick, exactly (although it is, kinda...).

In 1958, Kaufmann wrote Critique of Religion and Philosophy, a fun read that has partly inspired me personally; it was, in part, a lament on the state of philosophy at the time.  There was positivism and then there was existentialism, split up and pursued on separate continents, with little in the way of integrating their respective concerns.  One was all about rigor and precision in the use of one's concepts, and the other was about the meaning of life.  (Guess who wouldn't have fucked up when it comes to integrating these two seemingly disparate, uh, strands.  Lotta strands, man.)  Anyway, Kaufmann was a leading light at Princeton, while Quine was the leading guy at Harvard.  (Why did the Fiery One and loyal student fail to integrate Quine into their critique of unfortunate tendencies in analytic philosophy?)  Meanwhile, at Yale, there was Brand Blanshard, author of Reason and Analysis (1962), which was favorably reviewed by Branden in The Objectivist Newsletter.  It has been regarded as a definitive takedown of early-Wittengenstein and Russell's approach to analysis culminating in logical positivism, but I have been told that - having appeared a decade after Quine's "Two Dogmas" - it was more like an autopsy/obituary for a dead patient.  At MIT, there was (and still is) Noam Chomsky, who was doing hugely significant and pioneering work . . . in linguistics, and later as a (the?) leading critic of U.S. foreign policy in the post-WWII era; unfortunately, his criticisms seem to have had little positive impact as of yet on America's often-morally-dubious conduct around the world.  And the ordinary folks aren't all that interested in linguistic theory, as much as they might be the very subjects of that theory.

So.  There's more or less the lay of the intellectual land in ca. 1960s America.  (See? Integration is fun! :-)  And, given that lay of the land, it's not a big wonder why Rand was so angry so much of the time in her intellectual and cultural commentaries.  The intellectual climate was, in short, dysfunctional, and the state of Aristotle studies at the time can be marked as Exhibit A.  (The state of Rand studies today can be marked as Exhibit A of today's intellectual and cultural dysfunction.)  As the intellectuals go, so goes the nation.  Vietnam was merely the cashing-in for that era; the cashing-in today is . . . sounds like a good exercise in integration for you, the reader, to figure that one out.  At least it's not Vietnam, so there's some sign of hope.

So, Rand, at 55 years of age, enters the public sphere and formulates ground-breaking theories in ethics ("The Objectivist Ethics"), politics ("What is Capitalism?"), cognitive method (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and, ultimately, Peikoff's Rand-authorized 1976 lecture course, The Philosophy of Objectivism), and aesthetics.  (It so happens that Prof. John Hospers, who was among other things an expert in aesthetics, found much of aesthetic value in Atlas.  Are there skeptical-but-curious minds out there that would like to know why?  One can hope.)  She then conducted her legendary workshops at age 65-ish, around the time she wrote her most developed work on aesthetics, "Art and Cognition," her fabulous and tightly-constructed article, "Apollo 11," and her uber-fiery "The Comprachicos."  Things kind of slowed down for her after that; by 1974 her newsletter had more or less ceased publication.  And that, in brief, is the intellectual life of Ayn Rand.

To recap: She started out as a novelist, began a serious study of philosophy at age 40, and ends up writing a technical monograph in epistemology (followed by a workshop attended by a now-leading Aristotle scholar) that may very well have garnered the attention of the Big Guy himself for its laserlike focus on the central importance of mental integration as the cardinal function of consciousness, the inescapable need for maintaining cognitive hierarchy and of keeping context, the nature of definition as identifying what is fundamental to a grouping of units, and - perhaps most revolutionary - her theory of induction as (essentially) integration.  Not too bad, really, for someone who just ten years prior had completed Atlas Shrugged.  The term "polymath" may very well be applicable to Ayn Rand.

The "polymath" designation is hardly new as applied to Aristotle.  Given the era in which he studied, he was able to found entirely new fields of study, particularly logic and biology, and more or less defined other areas of study (e.g., ethics) within philosophy proper.  Further, the intellectual and wider culture in which he lived was such as not to cause the sort of anger that 1960s culture caused in Rand.  There are defining differences in their respective cultures, however: slavery was the norm in ancient Greece, which on its own meant literacy and philosophical study was limited to a select few.  In our day, literacy levels are high enough that there is more of an immediate (rather than distant) potentiality for widespread intellectual flourishing.  (Perhaps this is why Rand was so aggravated by the culture of her time: the vast majority of people were in a better position to know better, and this potentiality was not being actualized.)  Despite these differences, Aristotle and Rand had one fundamental thing in common, though they differed in their respective measurements: they both held that the perfective pursuit of knowledge defined the good life for humans.  The intellect was of prime importance to them and to their philosophical projects.  In that regard, Rand would have made Aristotle proud.  Gotthelf, in prefatory remarks to his 2012 collection of essays on Aristotle's biology, identifies another fundamental similarity between these two thinkers: their biocentrism.  If one - contra various popular trends in modern philosophy - studies human being in terms of being a "teleologically-organized living whole," one might have more fruitful results in a number of philosophical areas, including ethics and philosophy of mind.

Where Rand fell very noticeably short, was in her polemics against other philosophers, especially Kant.  It's exceedingly difficult for me to imagine how trained philosophers could look at her comments on Kant and think that such comments would be worthy of an Aristotle-like mind.  (This is a double-edged sword: it is likewise exceedingly difficult for me to imagine how trained philosophers could so badly drop the ball on Rand!)  Aristotle simply would not have written the things that Rand wrote about Kant; he was too much of a master of dialectic for such amateurishness.  Now, I'm sure that one could explain, in terms of Rand's context, how she would have come to the conclusions about Kant that she did.  But I think it's not just a matter of her state of knowledge, but of her polemical sensibilities.  She had this tendency to view the history of philosophy in terms of heroes and villains, instead of in terms of "men of the mind" seeking solutions to tough problems.  That they were men of the mind should have been clue enough (one would think!) that they were not opponents in the grand scheme of things; if anything, they should have been viewed as allies walking in the same direction in the search for truth and enlightenment.

(Semi-lengthy digression: Even as much as I think Karl Marx is a sort of intellectually-dastardly figure whose influence has resulted in untold misery and destruction, one could quite readily explain how Marx, in his own context, formulated the bulk of the views he did.  (I think his "squaring" his theory of worker immiseration with the evidence of improvement in worker living standards, by pooh-poohing the evidence, is very eyebrow-raisingly suspect to say the least.  His idea of material/economic factors as the prime mover of human history is dead-end bankrupt.  His theory of economic value as based on the "socially necessary" labor that went into the production of commodities (and which serves as the basis for his concept of capitalist exploitation) is likewise bankrupt, unless one were to reduce all mind-factors to labor-factors, which would, in effect, render the labor-theory of value a useless tautology.)  If there was anyone to whom Rand should have directed her ire, it was Marx.  But since she - quite correctly - got it into her mind that it is philosophy and not political economy that is the prime mover of history, she - quite incorrectly - pegged Kant as the source from which a great many subsequent evils followed, since he had allegedly wiped out the relation between reason and reality.  But if she got that wrong in a hugely significant way, her analysis of modern history post-Kant fails.  She was on the path of the scent, however, given the way philosophy developed in his wake.  But let's just say that Hitler was a greater influence on the direction of Germany in the 1933-45 period than Kant was, even as much as Eichmann claimed to be a follower of Kant.  Hitler, after all, cited Nietzsche as inspiration, which was a product of his psychotic delusions and not of any reality of the matter.  Kant, meanwhile, was the author of such works as "What is Enlightenment?", which advises people to think for themselves rather than obey a dictator.  The causes of Nazi Germany have to be sought elsewhere, not the least of which was Hitler's psychoses.  The connection between Marx's ideas - e.g., the historical inevitability of the end of capitalism - and the horrors of Soviet Russia is, however, considerably more plausible, all Marxian apologetics and protestations notwithstanding.  Is it some kind of accident that the people of communist China met with a similar fate?  The connection between Marxist ideology and these horrific regimes demands further investigation.  Marx himself would have been horrified at what these people were doing in his name - he even said later in life that he wasn't "a Marxist" - but he planted the ideological seeds from which the tree of communism sprouted.  All that being said, there are some similarities between Marx and Rand that have been tentatively noted by some: they both fall within the "perfectionist" tradition, for instance.  There is also the issue of somewhat-relevant similarities in their methodologies as highlighted by Sciabarra. /digression, I'm starting to get bored with this.)

What can be said about Aristotle that cannot be said about the bulk of the figures mentioned above, and which explains his unparalleled greatness and influence?  I think it can be boiled to this: he just never fucked up.  Why?  Because he was an intellectual perfectionist/perfectivist.  (Committing errors, as Aristotle did, is not synonymous with fucking up.  Fucking up means committing egregious, perhaps idiotic, errors, through glaring lack of epistemic discipline.  Also, as Rand correctly pointed out, Aristotle's errors are irrelevant in comparison to his philosophic achievement.)  One of Aristotle's more well-known sayings is to the effect that (to paraphrase) "the smallest error is later multiplied a thousandfold."  Given the way history has proceeded since then, I can only say: No shit!  Rand's achilles heel - her polemical sensibility and temperament - soured her relation with the academy, even as much as she advanced a serious neo-Aristotelian system of thought.  But lack of epistemic discipline is so widespread - rampant even, and egregiously so - that, grading on a curve, Rand is legendarily disciplined.  Some thinkers just do a better job than others of being cognitively disciplined, is all.  The point of p/Perfectivism is to make Aristotle-level cognitive discipline the norm rather than the exception.

As great as Rand is, she didn't quite measure up to Aristotle.  (Keep in mind, however, their respective intellectual histories.)  Had Aristotle been around to critique her (constructively, of course - not the shitty kind of criticism we see way too often), he would have been mostly very impressed but very dismayed by her polemical sensibilities, and would have, accordingly, led her in the right direction - and we'd have reached the damn Singularity already.  (Am I wrong?)  That's the way philosophy is supposed to be done, after all.  And that's the way it will be done in the future, with mind-blowing results.  I think that were Aristotle around today, he'd say the same thing.  In short: emulate Aristotle's approach (in one's own individual way, that is), and kick philosophical butt. :-)

P.S. As for any potential blog entry titled "Aristotle and Jefferson," what would there be to say?  They're both not merely polymaths, but gods.  Let's figure out, shall we, the historical accident(s) that led to Jefferson not being familiar with Aristotle until very-late age (when he acquired an English copy of the Politics, perhaps the last book he read in his lifetime), and make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen in the future.  Can you imagine how different the course of U.S. history would be if Jefferson had encountered Aristotle early in life?  Can you imagine?

Notes On Essentializing

[Yesterday's blog entry was apparently wiped out due to Google Blogger technical issues, but the core essence of it is still contained here. Ain't essentializing fun? :-) (Another term for essentializing is "unit-economy," but that's probably casting more pearls before so many swine.)]

One thing I've come to discover, on a repeat listen to Peikoff's Art of Thinking course, and as I set Ayn Rand's essay "The Objectivist Ethics" to outline form (based more or less on the outline-examples provided in the Appendix to The Art of Nonfiction), is that essentializing is NOT for amateurs - repeat, NOT FOR AMATEURS. Essentializing an essay such as "The Objectivist Ethics" in a proper fashion takes years of context-establishing and understanding, including at least several reads through of that essay as well as other literature; it's damn near impossible to expect an appropriate outline-summary from an amateur to Objectivism.

(Anyway, yes, I was able to boil Miss Rand's 30-ish page essay down to a useful 12-point essentialization. Point number 9, concerning the relation between life and happiness, is the most extensive, going up to several lines of summary. Many of the other points were relatively short. I see little point in posting the outline here, however. It's primarily for personal use and edification. It is available on request to students of Objectivism whom I know, though. The fucking amateurs - and I think they know who they are - can wither on the vine at this juncture for all I care; those unfortunate souls cannot or will not think in the true sense.)

On a totally related note - but not something amateurs could possibly grasp right away, either on its own, or in conjunction with the foregoing - is the following observation for the day: The dialectic did flourish in the 1960s - but (aside from the work done by Rand and at the NBI) not in philosophy. Just as today, the Philosophy Profession had defaulted on carrying the dialectical torch. But dialectic did have an outlet then - in popular culture.

Ayn Rand isn't Going Away, Ever

(Story here.)

The "educators" are going to have a real problem on their hands if they don't clean up their acts, and fast.

Perhaps you've heard of Ayn Rand or her Objectivist philosophy in the news, in blogs, and in real-time discussions a lot more lately than you did a few years back. There's a reason for this. It's called the power of ideas - especially when the ideas carry such a fascinating and compelling quality that they cannot but generate discussion. This is especially true in the case of the ideas of Ayn Rand.

One thing that Ayn Rand's way of thinking inspires other like-minded thinkers to do, is to think long-range, long-term. If you think long-range enough to search and consider this graph, for example, you find that her ideas just keep on growing, growing, growing over time. If you'll notice, this particular Google application only goes up through 2008. Ayn Rand-related discussion has risen quite markedly since then; I don't think there is any denying this. (Note that this graph refers to percentage, not volume.)

The great thing about this growing phenomenon, is that it gets ideas out there which - despite a constant stream of forest-missing, misrepresentations, distortions, and outright smears against them (including even from some leading "educators") - really cannot be refuted once they're actually understood. Ayn Rand's ideas are too perfectivist to succumb to the usual attacks. Given the Rand-haters' decades-long cognitive stagnation, this is a juggernaut they simply are not prepared to handle.

And you ain't seen nothin' yet.

:-)

[ADDENDUM: For advanced students of Objectivism: Peikoff/ARI and Sciabarra: A shining example of clashing contexts. Chew/integrate that one for a bit.]

[ADDENDUM #2: Focus!]

The Long-Term Trend

Analysis of historical causation is a difficult undertaking, and I can't offer anything close to a complete or fully-formed analysis here, but I think that when I write about something on this blog, I've probably given the subject enough thought to say something useful. So here goes.

First off, I'm confining this post to the subject of America's historical trends. Second, I'm very highly optimistic for this country's future. I think that the intellectual advancement this country desperately needs is only a matter of time. The existence of the internet just on its own pretty much ensures it, especially when resources like the Ayn Rand Lexicon and the collection of articles and essays, video and audio, and the Ayn Rand multimedia archive at the ARI website are made freely available. It's only a matter of time before a growing number of up-and-coming intellectuals discover the treasure trove of wisdom contained just in these resources alone, providing an effective counterweight to the rampant anti-intellectualism encountered on "infotainment" sites (e.g., YouTube). It's nice to see the ARI adapt to the information needs of young intellectuals in the internet age. The Lexicon, especially, being made available online serves as a marvelous corrective to the ridiculous, out-of-context, dis-integrative distortions of Rand's ideas that have floated around out there for way too long; the distorters simply cannot get away with that shit any longer and maintain a semblance of intellectual credibility.

Third, I'm certain beyond a reasonable doubt that Ayn Rand's ideas are the most effective vehicle we have today for advancing Aristotelianism (in the broad sense) in the contemporary world. This is not wishful thinking, fawning devotion, or anything of the sort, but a sober observation of reality. There's just no way that the parallels between Aristotle's systematizing empiricism and Ayn Rand's can go unnoticed, ignored, evaded, etc. for much longer. Certainly the Intellectual Class has the least excuse for continuing its policy of base, ignoble and vicious intellectual laziness (born of a pathological disregard of the capitalist ethos) in this area. The better intellectuals are waking up and getting with the program.

Fourth, my expectations of the future are conditioned by my understanding of past trends leading up to this point. Here's where the (again, incomplete) analysis of this country's historical trends begins.

In 1961, Miss Rand gave a lecture at the Ford Hall Forum, entitled "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age." As evidence of her thesis, I offer the fact that no other intellectual figure was remotely close to presenting the ethical positions she presented in a paper that same year, "The Objectivist Ethics." The fact is that (almost?) no one was presenting the robust neo-Aristotelian voice for America, in 1961, aside from Ayn Rand. Certainly no well-recognized public figure was doing so. The leading voices for "conservatism" at the time, Buckley and Goldwater, don't even compare.

In 1961, America was a year away from the Cuban Missile Crisis. The young people of today - especially the products of the intellectual hellholes known as the public schools - have almost no frame of reference for understanding what led to that crisis, assuming they could even tell you what it was (which is doubtful). The only concrete they know that might be in the same ballpark is 9/11. Otherwise, it's like a distant memory in our nation's consciousness. A nation beat into concrete-boundedness by its leading influential philosophies doesn't grasp things long-term, as distinct from a range-of-the moment mentality which observes a stream of ever-new concretes with no rational policy of integration to identify their nature or a wider pattern.

The insanity exemplified by the Cuban Missile Crisis, then, perhaps can't be communicated to today's intellectually-dysfunctional mainstream. Hell, the underlying nature of it probably couldn't be identified or communicated even back then, except by You-Know-Who. But people did experience the insanity first-hand, most concretely, urgently, and terrifyingly. What many observers at the time (or now) did not know, was that the crisis was an illustration of the power of ideas. The dominant ideology of the age, after all, was Marxism. Rand experienced first-hand the effects of Marxist ideology implemented fully and consistently, knew the principle involved, and watched as America floundered - intellectually bankrupt - in the face of this massive evil. It's amazing she managed through the insane intellectual vacuum of the time as well as she did.

At least Marxism is defunct and discredited now, in 2011, which helps feed my optimism for America's future intellectual and existential growth.

But is America any less intellectually bankrupt now than it was in 1961? Has the dominant mainstream mentality in America changed fundamentally in the last 50 years? True, the stage is much better set for a Randian-style intellectual revolution than it was 50 years ago - for one thing, there are a lot more people who think like Rand now than 50 years ago - but what's the present intellectual state of America as a whole? If you took our current crop of politicians, media figures, leading Ivy League academics, corporatists and the rest of the Washington Establishment, and placed them into the same situation President Kennedy faced in 1962, would they be just as ideologically helpless as he was? I think they would be. I think this is ample reason to think that - thus far - Miss Rand's ideas have actually had next to zero impact on policymaking in Washington (the ignorant shrieks of leftist scum notwithstanding).

Presidents Kennedy and Obama both exemplify the ethos of the cultural elites (in this sorry excuse for a culture): Pragmatism. The same pressure-group warfare and pull-peddling, which is an inevitable byproduct of cultural pragmatism, is characteristic of Washington now just as much as it was in 1961. The same "military-industrial complex" the outgoing president warned of in January of that year is still well in place, determining the country's direction. This is what happens when ideas are cynically forsaken for short-term advantage.

A major difference, now, is that the country is on the hook for the ultimate effects of its long-term course to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars. Call it the Chickens' Homecoming if you like. Combine tens of trillions in fiscal obligations coming due with rampant anti-intellectualism and cynicism, and you get the state of things in America today.

If there is an account-overdrawn "end of the line" for pragmatism, this is it.

Put that way, the nation is arguably as intellectually bankrupt as it was in 1961.

This is hardly surprising if we take a long-term outlook on things. Given the nation's intellectual course over the past half-century, why should it be any different? The nation's Intellectual Class is defaulting now just as much as it was then. The Comprachicos are fucking up the minds of the young as much as ever. The country's politics are as devoid of ideas as ever. If one didn't know the actual long-term cause of our situation, one might despair of our country's situation and maybe even give up on this country's future. Some folks are doing just that.

But what got me interested in writing this post was the question: when did this country reach an absolute low-point intellectually? Given the "lag time" between the ideas formulated by the philosophers and their existential effects on a culture, could things have gotten even worse at some point between 1961's "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age" and now? If a nation's intellectual course is like a supertanker, then even the heroic efforts of an Ayn Rand can only do so much to arrest a slide toward oblivion. There's intellectual bankruptcy, and then there's INTELLECTUAL BANKRUPTCY. I think that if we actually did have the latter, we'd be doomed as a nation. A nation cannot survive if it has reached the capital-letters stage of intellectual bankruptcy.

This kind of analysis inevitably leads to creative imagination of counterfactual scenarios. Namely: what would this country's existential state be like now were it not for Ayn Rand? Let's say that young Alyssa Rosenbaum was murdered by the rabid Marxists back in Russia before she could get out. Who might possibly pick up the slack in this country? Among 20th-century intellectuals, who comes close to the qualities of mind and spirit exhibited by Ayn Rand? Who among them could possibly be compared to Aristotle as an intellectual, an Atlas that could effectively carry America forward on her shoulders? Without The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and all the rest, just how much of a gutter would we be in? Would someone step up to fill the void?

We will never know, given free will, but if we were to use the pro-capitalist intellectuals aside from Rand - led by Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard, and Nozick - as our signposts, what would we have today? For one thing, given the power of philosophy over economics, I think Rothbard and Nozick would, in this counterfactual world, be more prominent and influential than they actually are, given their philosophical bent. Rothbard's wide-ranging scholarship would still have led him to the "natural law" tradition, but he was an economist by training and profession and as such I don't think he would have come close to making the identifications in ethics and epistemology that Rand did, and therefore - given the primacy of philosophy to the course of a culture - Rothbard simply would not have provided the intellectual defense for capitalism we need. Nozick for his part would have done pretty much the same thing in the absence of Rand, and I don't see any evidence that he was Aristotelian enough to provide the intellectual defense we need, either. Hayek's defense of capitalism liberalism inasmuch as he put on a philosophical hat was downright insipid compared to Rand's. By the nature of non-insipidness and radicalism as a source of appeal to intellectuals who seek integration, a combination of Mises and Rothbard would probably be the most prominent defense of capitalism on offer in Rand's absence. That is to say, the defense would be primarily economic, with some middling philosophy thrown in.

That is to say, going forward from 2011, the counterfactual-America's course in absence of Ayn Rand's ideas and influence would probably not be pretty. There'd still be that tens of trillions of fiscal obligations coming due, rampant anti-intellectualism, an ever-entrenched out-of-touch Intellectual Class . . . and intellectual bankruptcy with no end in sight, no ideas to save us from potential ruin. The progress of Aristotelianism in the academy is happening too slowly; Aristotle's mainstream-assigned stature as one of the "Big Three" simply doesn't do justice to his actual Atlas-like stature. Too many folks miss the point about Aristotle as it is. And who knows how many more young intellectuals would be sucked in by Nietzsche and existentialism in Rand's absence....

So, back to the question raised earlier: was there a lowest point between 1961 and now? If you imagine being able to plot our intellectual course on a graph and draw a trend-curve, where does it hit the lowest gutter-point? Was there an "end of the line" we might be able to point to, the point where the chickens had most definitely come home to roost?

I'm thinking that things bottomed out for the country sometime between 1960 and 1980. There was the Cuban Missile Crisis, then Vietnam and the draft, then the Great Society programs, then the intellectually-bankrupt counter-culture which ran its course quickly soon enough, then Nixon and his wage-and-price controls, then the Democrats jumping into the gutter with McGovern, then Watergate, then Carter and his stagflation and malaise and lust in his heart and the Iran hostage crisis and detente with the Soviets. As much as Rand hated Reagan, he did appear to provide a welcome relief to all that, with his tax cuts and presidential change of tune toward the Commie bastards, while Rand's Reagan-related fears on the abortion front never materialized. This is far from saying that Reagan was some kind of panacea, much less by political standards, but starting with Reagan the country was showing some improvement for the better. Keep in mind that a nation's politicians are only a symptom, not a cause.

Culturally and politically, the era of the Nixon presidency pretty much did it for Rand. The atmosphere of the time made Rand too discouraged to continue cultural commentary via her newsletters. She remarked quite clearly during the 1970s that the culture had sunk too low to be worth commenting on regularly, and while she couldn't stand Reagan, she did note that the country did appear to be taking a promising turn to the Right. Something was changing for the better in the late 1970s. If I had to name some kind of lowest gutter-point, the trough on the trend-curve, it was probably the period from Watergate to the Carter presidency.

Now, one thing to note in this connection is Rand's observation that while the country was taking a turn to the Right starting in the mid-'70s, the Intellectuals were stuck in a McGovernite mentality, and that never before was the chasm between the Intellectuals and the American people so obvious. I'd say that this condition has pretty much held up ever since.

If there was a cashing-in, a chickens' homecoming, a gutter-point in the nation's intellectual condition, I'd have to say it was concretized by John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). The lasting prominence of this work among the nation's Intellectuals means basically a 40-year-and-counting gutter as far as that goes. The American people don't want, don't need, and don't care about A Theory of Justice. They haven't bought into the confiscate-and-redistribute ethos at its core. They're not interested in being told they are being unjust for not following its prescriptions to "correct for the contingencies of nature" through coercive confiscation and redistribution. They're not interested in McGovernism. If this be intellectualism, then the American people deserve at least some credit for being anti-intellectual. There's only so much fucking insanity flowing from the Ivory Tower that they can put up with. There's only so much bullshit rationalistic contrivance to justify un-American redistributive policies that they can handle. Absent a commonsensical Aristotelian alternative, you can't really blame Americans for their pragmatic rejection of the Intellectuals.

Once again, compare the Original Position getting its own whole entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia, with the truly fucking disgusting neglect of individualism there.

("[The intellectuals] are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social groups.")

I can hardly blame Miss Rand for her disgusted reaction ("An Untitled Letter") to the arrival of A Theory of Justice on the scene. Her "Untitled Letter" was by no means scholarly, but the author of "This is John Galt Speaking" had little patience for dignifying basically the same shit she already dispensed with quite adequately in her novels. In a big way it's a sense-of-life thing, whether one finds either individualistic achievement or coercive confiscation desirable and ennobling. How else do you expect someone with Rand's sense of life to react to Rawls's concept of justice? Does it really matter how nice a guy Rawls may have been, or how appealing his arguments are to academics, when none of it would get past John Galt's bullshit detectors?

I mean, if Rawls and Galt were ever to actually get into a dialogue, how does Galt not trounce and/or convert Rawls? Hell, just by getting people to adopt and absorb the ideas in Galt's radio address - namely, the encouragement to use one's mind to the fullest - the "Difference Principle" becomes a total irrelevancy. If Rawls's reputation means anything, he'd graciously concede this, repudiate A Theory of Justice, and jump on the Randian team to come on in for the big win. And that's how - short, short version - a neo-Aristotelian dialectic dispenses with and supersedes A Theory of Justice.

(This gets into another counterfactual analysis: if Rawls weren't so out-of-touch and got on the winning team early, and therefore never wrote A Theory of Justice, just how much sooner would we see the country advance to intellectual maturity? Just how much precious intellectual resources have been wasted due to A Theory of Justice throwing so many intellectuals off the scent? Just how much sooner would a Rand-Norton synthesis have happened? Just how much sooner would the professional Humanities gotten its act together? (For that matter, how much sooner would the intellectual revolution have happened had Nathaniel Branden not been so dishonest to Rand and to all his readers regarding their '68 break?))

So, to sum up: the long-term, large-scale trend over the last 50 years in America appears to have been dominated by a pragmatic non-intellectualism in combination with an out-of-touch intellectual class, with little cultural improvement on net over that time, with a trough sometime in the 1970s, and the stage much more well set for future improvement than it was 50 years ago, due to the effects of education over time and accompanying generational shift. Things are, at long last, actually looking bright! :-)