Commerce and philosophy

"I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person." -Apology

An excerpt from Ezra Klein's new book, Why We're Polarized, explains how social media (which are commercial ventures) contribute to political polarization.  They cater to people's sense of their identity.  A flavor of Klein's excerpt (which is worth reading in its whole):

To post that article on Facebook is to make a statement about who you are, who your group is, and, just as important, who is excluded.
In political media, identity is affirmed and activated with slightly more oblique headlines. But the underlying dynamic is the same: This public figure that you and everyone in your group loathe said something awful. This poll came out saying you and your group are going to win or, better yet, that your out-group is going to lose. This slashing column explains why you’re right about everything and why your opponents are wrong.
[...]
When I entered journalism, the term of art for pieces infused with perspective was “opinion journalism.” The point of the work was to convey an opinion. Nowadays, I think a lot of it is closer to “identity journalism” — the effect of the work, given the social channels through which it’s consumed, is to reinforce an identity.
But an identity, once adopted, is harder to change than an opinion. An identity that binds you into a community you care about is costly and painful to abandon, and the mind will go to great lengths to avoid abandoning it. So the more media people see that encourages them to think of themselves as part of a group, and the more they publicly proclaim — through sharing and liking and following and subscribing — that they are part of a group, the deeper that identity roots and the more resistant the underlying views become to change.

The bad online social dynamics that result from this are all well-known and widely loathed by now, but it got this way because it was profitable for the social-media companies to form their algorithms in this direction.  It is, in other words, what the market demands, and they're meeting that demand.

In an intellectually bankrupt culture, the natural result is the highly-polarized toxicity.  (For reasons I've given time and time again, a very large share of the blame for this goes to what I now term a structural dishonesty in the intellectual culture of leftism; the only question for me is whether this structural dishonesty is subtle, or whether it is blatantly obvious.)  (Other examples of structural dishonesty would be authoritarian regimes, such as those in China and Iran, that censor and punish dissenting voices.  No question in these cases how blatantly obvious the dishonesty is.)

The point I'll jump right to: Commerce is neither good nor bad, per se.  It is how well-ordered the commerce is, vis-a-vis the needs and care of the soul.  I'm not really saying anything new here, but I think social media toxicity and polarization are explained by the principle involved.  Social media algorithms are directed toward user pleasure or utility, but the dollar - the bottom line - does not discriminate between the higher and lower pleasures.  A pleasure that is triggered by having one's prejudices reaffirmed is a lower - base and ignoble - pleasure.  A pleasure related to the perfection of one's intellectual capacity is a higher pleasure.

For example: if you spend all of your cable news viewing time only on Fox News, or only on CNN, you get your political-identitarian preferences satisfied, and the companies'/advertisers' bottom lines get served, but the effects are blatantly toxic.  (I regard MSDNC as a lower level (akin to the sewer if the other two are the gutter) of 'news and opinion' presentation entirely - pleasurable to the toxic/twitterized/AOC left, and repulsive to just about anyone else.)  If, on the other hand, your interest is in dialectic - of obtaining the widest story or context or breadth of opinion or input - then you'll divide your time between these sources as well as plenty of other diversified non-cable-news sources.

J.S. Mill not only famously distinguished between the higher and lower pleasures - captured in his famous phrase "Better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" - but (and this is part of the wider context with which this higher/lower distinction has to be dialectically integrated) he also said of opinion polarization:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form. (On Liberty)

Not only is this essentially a formulation of the Dennett/Rapoport Rules a century-plus in advance, it's also a principle I hope over time, with thorough-enough research, to be able to exemplify in my own philosophic practice.  Tying these points together with a figure much-smeared in blatant defiance of Mill/Dennett/Rapoport, Ayn Rand, let's have a look at what Rand has to say about money (a point where she seems to be especially smeared by her enemies if not sometimes or often merely innocently misunderstood by others):

So you think that money is the root of all evil? . . . Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? [...] 

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

A strawman version of Rand - e.g., this one in "the world's most popular philosophy [sic] blog" - would excise Rand's praise for money-making from the philosophic context in which it is embedded.  The context is indicated in part by the "see also" cross-references in the "money" link I've provided and quoted from, and is contained in full in the whole of the Lexicon - the virtue of rationality most fundamentally, and the virtue of productiveness more proximately.  I once encountered an online Rand-basher who quoted from the "money speech" (excerpted above) the following one line: "The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality."  (To treat this quotation in isolation from the wider context of Rand's work is par for the course for Rand-bashers.)  The strawman version hyperlinked above (also par for that loathsome course, and which also implicitly if not explicitly recklessly smears the Ayn Rand Society scholars (e.g.) as "imbeciles") characterizes Rand's ethics as being a money-grubbing one in stark contrast to Nietzsche's evident disdain for market values.  But Rand's philosophy was consistent between Atlas Shrugged (where one finds the "money speech") and her earlier novel The Fountainhead.  John Galt and Howard Roark are each in their own way Rand's concretized-in-art ideal men.  And as is well-known to readers of The Fountainhead, Roark was committed so much to his own creative vision that he turned down a major commission, resulting (for the time being) in his firm shutting its doors.  The wealthiest character in the novel, Gail Wynand, is a foil to the heroic Roark, a man ultimately destroyed by having pandered to the mob/his "livelihood."

Put another way: Roark (and by implication her other heroic figures) regarded money-making as virtuous as long as it was virtuous, i.e., expressed the higher nature and possibilities of humans, including creative independence and integrity.  Rand's commitment to such noble ideals, as against the base, is made explicit in her discussion of that "noble soul" passage from Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil Aphorism 287) with which she originally planned to introduce The Fountainhead and then reintroduced/discussed in its 25th anniversary edition.  The Randian hero is a lover of self in the Aristotelian sense (for Aristotle, the "noble soul" is the great-souled or magnanimous man), a connection that a leading Nietzsche translator and interpreter, Walter Kaufmann, drew in his editor's footnote to Aphorism 287.

Which is to say, to neatly tie the various themes of this post together, that to combat social media toxicity in particular and commercial crassness in general, the market participants could do considerably better to aspire to the ideals espoused by Aristotle, Nietzsche and Rand - and to aspire to greater virtue/nobility/wisdom/understanding/dialectic/etc. generally (as with Socrates, Mill, Rapoport and Dennett).

Randian Heroes as Perfectionists

I am coming to grips with what all I am prepared to say and what I am not yet prepared to say in my book. Tying my central perfectionist thesis to the issues that the leading academic philosophers - particularly those in epistemology - are concerned with, it just not going to be possible in this first book. I do not have the requisite training (from self or others) and context for it. I am quite rusty at my academic-style philosophizing after a decade away from graduate school. Further, my book is conceived as aiming squarely at the intelligent layperson; and the intelligent layperson is far removed from what Quine's "Two Dogmas" is all about. The perfectionist in me says this tying-in would make a good candidate for a second book, though.

My academic area of specialty was ethics and political philosophy. My grasp of these issues is a lot more sound than the issues that the likes of Quine, Kripke, Davidson and David Lewis specialize in. However, I think my perfectionist thesis is plenty good enough to blow away the competitors in the field of ethics, and that includes the leading "contemporary" moral philosopher, Rawls.

Ethical perfectionism is a synonym for eudaemonism, which is best defended in the "canon" literature by Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics. Up until about 30 years ago, the main alternatives in ethical theory (aside from forms of rejection of moral theories) were "utilitarianism" (or, more broadly, consequentialism) and "Kantianism" (or, more broadly, deontology). This alternative is what was being presented to students in college philosophy courses as the best that philosophers had to offer in the field of ethics. Pretty sad, huh? So, since that time, Aristotle and "virtue ethics" have surged into prominence, and as recent or contemporary literature is scoured for "virtue-ethical" positions within this Aristotelian tradition, Ayn Rand's name naturally comes up. Her ethical egoism is hardly dissimilar to ancient Greek and especially Aristotelian ethics on the matter of being self-centered in ethics, with virtue defined in terms of promoting self-actualization or eudaemonia or real happiness. Whether the academic literature has fully made the identification yet, eudaemonism and perfectionism and self-actualization and virtue ethics (with some kind of stress on the needs of the self foremost hierarchically) are synonymous because they all are descriptions of the same basic concept. As academic literature goes, David L. Norton's Personal Destinies is the best contemporary statement of eudaemonist or virtue ethics.

What really reveals someone's ignorance of Ayn Rand and of the history of philosophy, is comparing her ethics and her idealized heroes to Nietzsche's Ubermensch, usually package-dealt with some strawman claim that Rand, "like Nietzsche," is an elitist, and more likely than not looking for a moral justification (through hijacking Nietzsche, more or less) for capitalist exploitation. Yes, it's one of those eye-rollers students of Objectivism have been confronted with thousands of times. Why don't these idiots appreciate Rand for what she actually said, the students of Objectivism keep asking. (Good question, actually.) Further, it really reveals a lack of intellectual sophistication to hone in on similarities to Nietzsche rather than similarities to Aristotle.

(Let's say that Nietzschean-style "nihilism" is the main alternative modernity has to clinging on to religion-and-morality. I mean, that's what has plunged the political left into a deep-structural moral vacuum (see the '60s and its effects), and the right into fear that the world will collapse without a return to religion-and-morality (see the right from Buckley to today). Aristotelian-Thomistic-Lockean-Jeffersonian-Randian "natural-law" perfectionism is the third way that would give us the fix we need, but unfortunately there is massive ignorance of this tradition. So the typical little left-wing college know-it-all has a context where Nietzsche is taken to be a, or the, leading voice of the secular world, and where leftists succeeded in rewriting America's history into a class-war context rather than an individualist one, and compares Rand to other thinkers in that context. Really lame and so cliched, right?)

Randian heroes are perfectionists. Rand is clear about this in some of her Letters ca. 1946, so it gives some idea of where Rand was in her intellectual development at that time, and how she viewed the relation between moral perfection and traditional religion. (This was around the time she was most embroiled in discussions with Isabel Paterson about all the Big Issues - God, religion, morality - and "Pat" informed her that her ethics had a character all its own, simply distinct from the egoists Nietzsche and Stirner.) This is around the time she was also studying the history of philosophy, with emphasis on the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions; this was around the time that the significance of the "problem of universals" became known to Rand, and the time she made her earliest identifications leading to her theory of concepts. In her maturest stage of intellectual development, her ideas were far more Aristotelian or Thomistic than Nietzschean. This goes for her eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics.

The heroes represent what a eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics lived-out might look like. Her heroes were always reflections of her husband Frank or herself, and there's nothing of an "Ubermensch" character about them (either the heroes, Frank, or herself); they're just normal human beings reaching their full potentials through virtue (rationality), and doing so with an individualistic pride - like what America's supposed to be about, right?

More academic idiocy

The Distinguished Professor and his ilk seemingly can't avoid getting their digs in against Ayn Rand whenever possible. The DP - vile, creepy coward that he is - quotes a "senior philosopher" regarding the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

There is no question that SEP is fantastic, but if the recent entries I’ve noted are the new standard, there is an emphasis on something other than the importance of the possible entry that made SEP fantastic in the first place. The entry that set me off was the Ayn Rand one—the bibliography alone is one of the most embarrassing I’ve ever seen: outlets of questionable merit at best, etc.

I should mention right off the bat that my book will be out in some format or other within a matter of weeks. It will fucking blow away whatever "product" these academic jackasses have been churning out for decades. There will be a veritable bukkake of egg to be wiped off these people's smug faces, it will be so embarrassing to them and their tired old pretentious ways. (I will only mention at this point that the book will vastly exceed the scope and effectiveness of that of the tentative outline I made back in February.)

As to the "outlets of questionable merit," we can cut the bullshit and translate that snooty weasel-wording into: "Not from the most elite academic presses." Best as I can determine, that means: Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, and Princeton University Press. According to the Distinguished Professor, Cambridge University Press doesn't reliably produce "first-rate" material - and he would cite Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics as one example of why it doesn't.

(I am curious, why hasn't the Distinguished Professor published a stand-alone book on Nietzsche from one of these most "elite" presses? Routledge surely qualifies as "second-tier" at best, correct? Leiter has an established "elite" publishing record and reputation in the field of law or philosophy of law, but is he really that "elite" a philosopher, pathologically elitist creep that he is?)

Now, as to those most elite of presses, I can cite books from those presses offering essentially the same substantive conclusions that Rand delivered: David Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton), Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness (Oxford), A. John Simmons's On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society (Princeton).

Now, let's comment on the cowardice, second-handerism and social metaphysics of "the caliber of outlet," shall we? Leiter as well as anyone knows that Nietzsche stood against a whole tradition of philosophy that was quite thoroughly academic in nature. The irony here, of course, is that the likes of Leiter, comfortably ensconced in academia, represent the very phenomenon Nietzsche was against. The politicking, the snootiness, the conformity to the established ways, the "Professor X says" over the "it is" . . . Nietzsche blasted right through all that. ("But it's the Parthenon!" And so it is.) Leiter as well as anyone should remember how tenured Princeton philosophy professor Walter Kaufmann (Critique of Religion and Philosophy) blasted through the whole charade that passed for philosophy as it was done in the mid-20th century. What exactly has changed, other than some sluggish progress in an Aristotelian direction?

Let's also further comment on the nature of the academic intelligentsia: for over 100 years, the academy was (still is? still?) fervently pro-socialistic, despite there being no sound basis on which to argue for socialism. We already know how Marxian pseudo-scientific anti-capitalist dialectics fell flat on its face. We know how socialism has proven to be a massive and utter failure, just as Mises predicted back in 1922. As the whole intellectual world was engulfed in socialistic ideology, Mises was a virtual lone voice of sanity - as was Ayn Rand later on when it came to philosophy as such (before being joined in that regard independently by Kaufmann in the '50s). The academy's reaction to Mises' absolutely sound argumentation: to ignore it.

Now, something about the sociological-institutional-psychological tendencies within the academy would explain this hostility to capitalism and to open and honest debate about it.

But it's not just about capitalism. Let's take another instance of the academy's failure: the stale, worn-out, dead-end debate up until only recently between "deontological" and "consequentialist" schools of ethics. I mean, before Anscombe's essay came along (concurrently with epochal works by Rand and Kaufmann), modern moral philosophy was truly a shithole, but it was academics doing the shitting, so I guess the only rational thing to do was to genuflect towards the academics, right? Their shitty works were, after all, being published by the elite academic presses, right?

One might conclude from the myriad failures of the academy when it comes to philosophy that academia stinks. Actually, no, academia per se does not stink. It is the academic humanities that (for the most part) stink. And I'm not talking only about the lit-crit wankers, the ultimate manifestation of the wafting stench. I'm talking about the default on philosophy by the academy, philosophy being the ultimate uniting discipline of the humanities (and, ultimately, of all fields). The main problem here is the lack of objective standards within the humanities despite (or because of?) the fact of peer-review methods - methods ostensibly similar to those found also within the hard sciences (which continue to make all kinds of strides while the Leiters and affiliated Senior Philosophers wallow in the muck and whine helplessly about Ayn Rand's continuing and expanding cultural influence). Only with a lack of objective standards do you get interminable debates about deontology-vs.-consequentialism and whether "social justice" should have a Rawlsian or more egalitarian flavor.

This is dysfunction, sickness and madness that urgently needs being called out as such, rather than being placated. It is exactly the same sort of madness that led to Marxism and socialism being the fad for decades in the intelligentsia - and which led directly and inevitably to decades of mass murder perpetrated by the governments of Russia, Germany, and China. When Ludwig von Mises is the lone voice of sanity ca. 1922, the ghastly and deadly period stretching from 1914 to 1945 (and stretching on into roughly the '70s in a somewhat less ghastly form) was inevitable. And the fucks like Leiter still, still, still refuse to learn the lesson or re-examine their unobjective premises.

What I would like to know is how a magnificent book such as Norton's Personal Destinies, published by Princeton University Press, still managed to become obscure within the profession. Here's a possible clue: back in the '70s, all the rage was about Rawls, and this wonderful book simply got drowned out by all the wanking to Rawls. The fundamental elements of a correct theory of justice are there in Norton, and don't require the silly rationalistic constructions of Rawls ("original position"; "veil of ignorance"; "reflective equilibrium"; "the natural lottery") where justice is divorced from productive achievement (which Ayn Rand regarded as man's noblest activity, but which really doesn't seem to play much of a role, if any, in Rawls's theory). Hell, how did Kaufmann's excellent Critique of Religion and Philosophy manage to fall into relative obscurity?

So isn't it really about fucking time that Aristotle, Mises, Rand, Kaufmann, Norton, and Rasmussen and Den Uyl got their full due amongst those people - the academic philosophers - charged with the sacred responsibility of doing philosophy as opposed to sneering, politicking and evading?

ADDENDUM: Note to self: study Henry Veatch to see if he should be added to this last list of greats.

Good academic books on ethics

To my "A-list" of books I would like to add two academic books of note: Natural Goodness by Philippa Foot, and The Sources of Normativity by Christine Korsgaard.

(Hmmm . . . some of the best contemporary moral theorizing has come from Ayn Rand, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Christine Korsgaard . . . noticing a pattern here?)

Foot is known in the academy as a leading proponent of the virtue-ethics approach to moral theory, but only recently (2001) penned Natural Goodness, the conclusions of which converge on Rand's own functional account of value discovered in the 1950s. (Yes, this implies that Rand should be taken at least as seriously within the academy as Foot is, which begs the obvious question: why hasn't she been? The answer cannot be that Rand is a weak philosopher - not if she discovered the essential substance of the same thing that leading academic philosophers are now propounding. Something else is going on that explains Rand's "outsider" status....)

Korsgaard is a leading advocate of a "neo-Kantian" approach to moral theory, which in her case is an updated (and much improved upon Kant!) account of normativity as residing in our capacity as autonomous agents and the need for an integrity to our practical identity as autonomous agents. The significant thing here is her overture to an Aristotelian idea of value or flourishing, with autonomy being the specific form in which human flourishing occurs. This is how she accounts for the sorts of value (and human responsiveness to value) in non-human animals. The work Korsgaard does here is first-rate, though unfortunately the Aristotelian implications are not fully pursued or spelled out to my satisfaction. She does explicitly recognize (as, again, Rand had already done in the '50s) that values arise from the phenomenon of life, and she points out the centrality of autonomy or self-reflective authority in human life, but the Aristotelian perfectionism and self-actualization is left unexplored. Autonomy might be an essential ingredient in what it is to function as a human, but it doesn't tell us anything about how to self-actualize and achieve happiness, which is the purpose of ethics (as Rand pointed out). We are left, at best, with a model of practical reasoning in which we "construct" our model of the good life, but without essential reference to our distinctive innate potentialities (an essential theme in Rand and Norton, in which self-actualization takes center stage and has logical priority over such things as - to use Korsgaardian/Kantian terminology - creating a public Kingdom of Ends).

(I find it also of interest that Foot and Korsgaard both discuss Nietzsche near the end of their works. In modern moral theory, Nietzsche is lurking there in the background. Nietzsche was a significant early influence on Rand, before she became a full-fledged Aristotelian. Norton delivers a commentary on Nietzsche under the heading of "critique of recent eudaemonisms." Nietzsche a eudaemonist? Well, in a sense, emphatically yes. Whether or not he considered the Ubermensch or self-actualization or self-perfection to be a moral imperative, these ideas are crucial to an understanding of eudaemonism rightly conceived. At the beginning of Rasmussen and Den Uyl's Norms of Liberty, there is a reference to Alasdair MacIntyre making the claim that the alternative modernity faces is that between Aristotle and Nietzsche. Perhaps the alternative is not so dichotomous. Lester Hunt has made some important connections here.)

In any event, these are two worthwhile recent products of the academy, the outcomes of conscientious and systematic efforts to trace our normative concepts to natural facts about us in our relation to the world. The award for greatest degree of systematization and fundamentality goes, however, to Ayn Rand - and it is only a matter of time before this fact is recognized within the academy itself.