In the interview with Cynthia Peikoff for 100 Voices, there is a new twist on Barbara Branden's visit with Ayn Rand in 1981. From Ms. Branden's biography, the meeting was happy and benevolent. What Ms. Branden fails to mention is that shortly after their meeting - not during the meeting - she sent a letter to Rand informing her that she was going to write a biography on her, and asked if she could have Rand's support or input on it. The whole episode left Rand disgusted; the point of the meeting was to gain some kind of validation that Ms. Branden could then exploit for her book. Nice going, Babs.
It's also worth noting that Rand was most unimpressed with Ms. Branden after their visit; there just wasn't much there.
I would also like to bring up Ms. Branden's account of Rand's appearance on the Donahue show in 1979. Ms. Branden hones in on one unpleasant episode in the show (see here starting at 8:15), where a woman begins her question by insulting Rand. Rather than defend Rand, Ms. Branden characterizes the episode as Rand attacking this "young girl" even though Rand explained why she would not sanction such a form of disrespect. It's telling, psychologically, that Ms. Branden would identify more with the "young girl" here.
Apparently, Ms. Branden's fear-motivated behavior during her years with Rand - "walking on eggshells" and all that - was a problem on Rand's part - just as Rand's reaction of disgust to Ms. Branden's 1981 vulture-style behavior was Rand's problem, she would expect us to believe.
Nathan's behavior in regard to Rand - from the mid-'60s up to the present day - can be described as nothing short of monstrous. Ms. Branden, meanwhile, might best be characterized as flaky - morally, emotionally, intellectually, etc. Given the behavior of these two vultures, I don't know how they can be believed about anything in regard to Ayn Rand absent independent corroboration and context. Short of that, the thought of entertaining their tales and insinuations is disgusting. Some of us got burned with their first round of biographies and memoirs back in the '80s before the Estate got around to issuing its devastating response (see James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics); never again.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Zons of Beetches
From the 100 Voices interview with Eugene Winick (p. 320):
Thank you, Ayn Rand. :-)
Do you remember [Rand] expressing her outage or joy about any legal doctrines or events that you explained to her?
I just remember that when there was something she was critical of she would have just about the same comment every time criticizing the parties who were involved. I can still hear her voice ringing in my ears, with her accent, saying "Those Zons of Beetches." She would hit the table with her hands. That's one of my strongest recollections of her, actually. "Those Zons of Beetches."
Thank you, Ayn Rand. :-)
Monday, December 13, 2010
A Thought on the Westboro Baptist Scum
(In light of the latest absolutely-despicable incident at Elizabeth Edwards's funeral.)
Come Fred Phelps's eventual demise, won't the explosion of retributory hate at his funeral be an awesome sight to behold? His group of scum are only a few people; imagine hundreds if not thousands showing up at his funeral to torment the scum-family, and perhaps millions all around the country speaking ill of the newly dead.
This would not be a case of two wrongs making a right; this would be poetic justice. Anger and indignation at their tactics doesn't begin to describe the non-violent retribution that can be visited upon them when their own time comes.
I guess those idiots never stopped to consider that.
(If there is a God, what might He think of a man who never exercised basic commonsensical respect for his fellow human beings? My sentiments are almost - almost - "Burn in Hell, Fred." But non-belief in a deity and the very same basic-respect principle don't allow for that. The rest of the country isn't likely to be that thoughtful about it, though - hence poetic justice in that regard. My sentiments are better stated as: "He'll have had it coming to him.")
Come Fred Phelps's eventual demise, won't the explosion of retributory hate at his funeral be an awesome sight to behold? His group of scum are only a few people; imagine hundreds if not thousands showing up at his funeral to torment the scum-family, and perhaps millions all around the country speaking ill of the newly dead.
This would not be a case of two wrongs making a right; this would be poetic justice. Anger and indignation at their tactics doesn't begin to describe the non-violent retribution that can be visited upon them when their own time comes.
I guess those idiots never stopped to consider that.
(If there is a God, what might He think of a man who never exercised basic commonsensical respect for his fellow human beings? My sentiments are almost - almost - "Burn in Hell, Fred." But non-belief in a deity and the very same basic-respect principle don't allow for that. The rest of the country isn't likely to be that thoughtful about it, though - hence poetic justice in that regard. My sentiments are better stated as: "He'll have had it coming to him.")
New Book Edited by Gotthelf and Lennox
It has come to my attention that Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand's Normative Theory, edited by quality Rand (and Aristotle) scholars Allen Gotthelf and James Lennox, is now out. One thing you can be sure of, with Gotthelf and Lennox as editors, is that the articles show a solid understanding of Rand's ideas, versus the usual go-out-their-way-to-misunderstand approach seen all over the place elsewhere. The blurb on the back cover from U. of Michigan's Peter Railton is a nice and unexpected touch.
The floodgates are opening . . .
The floodgates are opening . . .
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Hooliganism
There's no surer sign of the breakdown of our educational establishment than the way a nominally-educated group of people on a social "news" site like Reddit.com operate. Here is the list of items on that site with "Ayn Rand" in the title.
There is a term that floats around from time to time in Objectivist circles to describe the gleefully cynical, anti-seriousness, anti-ideas, anti-values mentality these people take, especially when the subject of their "criticism" is Ayn Rand. It's like an instinctive hatred of the good for being the good, but some kind of variation on that theme. The term floating around from time to time is: Nihilism. Now, there's only one dictionary definition of that term that might describe this anti-intellectual attitude. Arguably an updating of the lexicon is in order. There is, however, an existing term, one that Ayn Rand used herself to describe these twerps: Hooliganism.
For Hooligan-in-Chief, I would nominate Comprachico Leiter. "Hooliganism" describes perfectly his anti-intellectual attitude when the discussion turns toward anything capitalism-like. The latest instance of his hooliganism - well, the most obvious recent instance of hooliganism - is in this blog entry, titled "Kentucky Embarrasses Itself," which consists of all of the following:
Keep in mind that this claim is being made by a full professor of law and humanities at one of the nation's leading universities. This is not an isolated case among his blog entries. On numerous occasions he has spoken ill of this country and also of how "lost" and "hopeless" the situation is (as if there is no free will, or something - who the fuck knows).
One thing that is axiomatic to the intellectual hooligans is that capitalism is evil, and that America is a screwed-up country that needs to be more like the social democracies of Europe. What's more, they do not entertain a serious, informed discussion on the subject. The tactics - again, see the link to the reddit threads above - amount to ignorant sneers.
There is also one facet of reddit that contributes to a virtually-unchecked hooliganism: the "upvote/downvote" model. Countless times a substance-free one-liner races to the top, while an intelligent response is downvoted right to the bottom. The social-metaphysical cowardice this encourages is beyond fucked-up, and it has resulted over time in a "brain-drain" of sorts. I submit that it's a similar "brain-drain" phenomenon that explains the anti-capitalist, anti-Rand hooliganism in the humanities departments.
The ones with the best minds are the ones most amenable to Rand's ideas - but those folks are not in the humanities; they are out building businesses and paying taxes to support the Leiters. The incentive/reward functions are way different between these two avenues. In the humanities, technical and abstruse arguments with little discernible real-world import can garner big rewards. A Theory of Justice gets held up as a greater example of human achievement than the building of Microsoft. Rand referred to this crowd, too, as full of hooligans disguised as philosophy professors. (A much more undeservedly-polite expose of the intellectuals' anti-capitalist mentality is provided by Nozick. Leiter and his ilk are merely the most open, consistent and unapolegetic hooligans.)
Where, after all, do the reddit-style hooligans get their hooliganism from?
(The activist-equivalent of these hooligans can be found at anti-free-trade riots here in the States, or at anti-budget-tightening riots in France and England.)
The irony here is how these very same hooligans will decry the anti-intellectual nature of the religious right, as per Leiter's posting above. Leiter's hooliganism in this case consists in tarring all of America due to some idiots in Kentucky. (This by a guy who runs a leading philosophy blog, mind you.)
It is little wonder that the ordinary American feels caught between idiots and hooligans on all sides, be they fundie fucks in the south, or sneeringly elitist, anti-America, ivory tower fucks like Leiter pretending to educate our nation's youths.
(Lest any of you fucking hooligans accuse me of hooliganism for identifying you as fucking hooligans, please don't bother with your hooligan-like moral equivalence. You make me fucking sick.)
:-)
[ADDENDUM: After spending part of the last few days confronting a number of the nihilist-hooligans on reddit - an even worse intellectual shithole of a website than I had thought, I discovered - I think I can relate to the huge sense of discouragement and disappointment Rand experienced when the hooligans got a hold of Atlas in the most obscenely intellectually incompetent fashion - the most stubbornly, obstinately, awesomely-committed-to-misconception fashion. The little reddit hooligans running around aren't the same published hooligan-reviewers that so upset Rand, but the phenomenon in either case can be emotionally exhausting and draining to a pro-values, pro-reason, pro-capitalism advocate. I'm sure Rand was so disgusted with these . . . entities . . . that she would have wanted figuratively to wring their fucking necks. The stylistic issues in Atlas don't begin to compare to the gleeful-cognitive-failure issues in the hooligan-crowd. The proudly ignorant and irrational disrespect involved is so staggering that, just as a matter of mental health, one wants to sweep these fuckers out of a place of prominence in one's mind, and push forward like they're not even there. Indeed, that seems to be the hard-line attitude Rand (and Peikoff) took toward the myriad hooligan-critics in her life; I don't know how she'd have survived otherwise. For the moment, I have a sense of exhaustion - minor setback - but a valuable lesson learned: don't even bother with intellectual hooligans; they have nothing of value to offer. Fuck 'em!]
There is a term that floats around from time to time in Objectivist circles to describe the gleefully cynical, anti-seriousness, anti-ideas, anti-values mentality these people take, especially when the subject of their "criticism" is Ayn Rand. It's like an instinctive hatred of the good for being the good, but some kind of variation on that theme. The term floating around from time to time is: Nihilism. Now, there's only one dictionary definition of that term that might describe this anti-intellectual attitude. Arguably an updating of the lexicon is in order. There is, however, an existing term, one that Ayn Rand used herself to describe these twerps: Hooliganism.
For Hooligan-in-Chief, I would nominate Comprachico Leiter. "Hooliganism" describes perfectly his anti-intellectual attitude when the discussion turns toward anything capitalism-like. The latest instance of his hooliganism - well, the most obvious recent instance of hooliganism - is in this blog entry, titled "Kentucky Embarrasses Itself," which consists of all of the following:
What a pathetic country this is.
Keep in mind that this claim is being made by a full professor of law and humanities at one of the nation's leading universities. This is not an isolated case among his blog entries. On numerous occasions he has spoken ill of this country and also of how "lost" and "hopeless" the situation is (as if there is no free will, or something - who the fuck knows).
One thing that is axiomatic to the intellectual hooligans is that capitalism is evil, and that America is a screwed-up country that needs to be more like the social democracies of Europe. What's more, they do not entertain a serious, informed discussion on the subject. The tactics - again, see the link to the reddit threads above - amount to ignorant sneers.
There is also one facet of reddit that contributes to a virtually-unchecked hooliganism: the "upvote/downvote" model. Countless times a substance-free one-liner races to the top, while an intelligent response is downvoted right to the bottom. The social-metaphysical cowardice this encourages is beyond fucked-up, and it has resulted over time in a "brain-drain" of sorts. I submit that it's a similar "brain-drain" phenomenon that explains the anti-capitalist, anti-Rand hooliganism in the humanities departments.
The ones with the best minds are the ones most amenable to Rand's ideas - but those folks are not in the humanities; they are out building businesses and paying taxes to support the Leiters. The incentive/reward functions are way different between these two avenues. In the humanities, technical and abstruse arguments with little discernible real-world import can garner big rewards. A Theory of Justice gets held up as a greater example of human achievement than the building of Microsoft. Rand referred to this crowd, too, as full of hooligans disguised as philosophy professors. (A much more undeservedly-polite expose of the intellectuals' anti-capitalist mentality is provided by Nozick. Leiter and his ilk are merely the most open, consistent and unapolegetic hooligans.)
Where, after all, do the reddit-style hooligans get their hooliganism from?
(The activist-equivalent of these hooligans can be found at anti-free-trade riots here in the States, or at anti-budget-tightening riots in France and England.)
The irony here is how these very same hooligans will decry the anti-intellectual nature of the religious right, as per Leiter's posting above. Leiter's hooliganism in this case consists in tarring all of America due to some idiots in Kentucky. (This by a guy who runs a leading philosophy blog, mind you.)
It is little wonder that the ordinary American feels caught between idiots and hooligans on all sides, be they fundie fucks in the south, or sneeringly elitist, anti-America, ivory tower fucks like Leiter pretending to educate our nation's youths.
(Lest any of you fucking hooligans accuse me of hooliganism for identifying you as fucking hooligans, please don't bother with your hooligan-like moral equivalence. You make me fucking sick.)
:-)
[ADDENDUM: After spending part of the last few days confronting a number of the nihilist-hooligans on reddit - an even worse intellectual shithole of a website than I had thought, I discovered - I think I can relate to the huge sense of discouragement and disappointment Rand experienced when the hooligans got a hold of Atlas in the most obscenely intellectually incompetent fashion - the most stubbornly, obstinately, awesomely-committed-to-misconception fashion. The little reddit hooligans running around aren't the same published hooligan-reviewers that so upset Rand, but the phenomenon in either case can be emotionally exhausting and draining to a pro-values, pro-reason, pro-capitalism advocate. I'm sure Rand was so disgusted with these . . . entities . . . that she would have wanted figuratively to wring their fucking necks. The stylistic issues in Atlas don't begin to compare to the gleeful-cognitive-failure issues in the hooligan-crowd. The proudly ignorant and irrational disrespect involved is so staggering that, just as a matter of mental health, one wants to sweep these fuckers out of a place of prominence in one's mind, and push forward like they're not even there. Indeed, that seems to be the hard-line attitude Rand (and Peikoff) took toward the myriad hooligan-critics in her life; I don't know how she'd have survived otherwise. For the moment, I have a sense of exhaustion - minor setback - but a valuable lesson learned: don't even bother with intellectual hooligans; they have nothing of value to offer. Fuck 'em!]
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Soundbites for the Day
In "The Age of Envy," Ayn Rand writes: "Racism is an evil and primitive form of collectivism." (The New Left, 2nd rev. ed., p. 167) Question: is there any form of collectivism that isn't evil or primitive?
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The infallible sign that our public schools have failed: If the public schools did succeed in teaching students how to think, then why do we still have public schools?
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America needs Ayn Rand - and the haters can just go fuck themselves.
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The infallible sign that our public schools have failed: If the public schools did succeed in teaching students how to think, then why do we still have public schools?
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America needs Ayn Rand - and the haters can just go fuck themselves.
Friday, December 10, 2010
The Big Picture
I am approaching the point where my blog goes temporarily "silent" and I bang out the book for soon-as-possible publication. Much of the blogging has been for concretizing what's been developing in my mind over the past several months (ultimately, over my entire lifetime). The main, driving goal of all this is to get as strong a product as possible out there, in as short a time as possible. If ideas are the over-arching, driving force in human history - and they are - then getting Toward Utopia out there ASAP is an imperative.
I have a selfish/eudaemonic interest in seeing the culture and the world become healthy and functional, at or near the level of a Rand or a Kubrick himself. I have a benevolent, "unselfish," eudaemonic interest in people being happy and successful as a matter of course rather than as the exception. (There is also the economic benefit to everyone of everyone else being happy and successful - more inventions, better ideas, etc.) I would have said "as a matter of normal course," but the term "normal" doesn't mean statistical normalcy, in which half a populace still disbelieves in evolution and a full 80% at least is disgustingly ignorant of the big ideas. I mean normal as in proper functioning. A culture in which the mainstream "norm" is what we have now, is not a properly functioning culture.
Ayn Rand set out to remake the world in her own sense-of-life image. The time in which she did so was such a gutter-point in human history that it only amplifies her heroism. At the very moment she was singing the praises of the creative individual in The Fountainhead, millions of people were being shoved into ovens and gas chambers, as the ultimate culmination of the intellectuals' message: the denigration of the individual mind and spirit. This intellectual class still, to this day - if Comprachico Leiter is any indication - fills its subjects with anti-America, anti-individual, anti-capitalist, anti-clear-thought poison. The result is the low state of the culture and learning we see today. Where dingbats appear on presidential tickets. Where economic ignorance, protectionism, stagnationism and defeatism run opposite the reality of globalization, competition, and growth. Where "Ayn Rand" is a euphemism for anti-social greed and intellectual-outsider status.
My aim is to complete the work Rand started. Reading through her masterful "The Comprachicos" once again, one is struck by the profound sense of isolation from "the mainstream" Rand felt growing up. Her whole being screamed out against having to "adjust" to a dysfunctional society, which could only be a recipe for soul-killing cynicism. It certainly did not help in her case that her formative years included a staggeringly anti-man, anti-life Revolution in her home country. (The Bolshies still retained some level of respect for man; they didn't deliberately round up people by the millions and put them in gas chambers as a matter of goal and intention. They did that, in effect, on a smaller scale, against dissidents, but their aim was the "good of humanity" and the killing and imprisoning merely unpalatable means of doing so. The Nazis took the anti-man ethos fully and consistently: the aim was to kill the individual. Thanks a lot for endorsing that ethos, Heidegger.) I can say that anyone with their head screwed on straight today, looking out at the culture, has a profound sense of revulsion. Their whole sense-of-life screams out at the idiocy passing for respectability, for banality passing as attention-grabbing, for minutiae passing as profoundly interesting.
When Rand looked at the Left, she saw only hatred of achievement and success. (See "The Age of Envy.") It doesn't matter that some or many of those on the Left aren't even consciously aware of their hatred, of where their ideas lead. It doesn't matter that the Left "sees things" in different terms, under a different paradigm where it's the rich plutocratic oligarchy against the powerless working people who - get this - actually support the rich. The issue is deeper than that: what leads them to embrace that paradigm - all while ignoring, denouncing, denigrating and sneering at people like Ayn Rand and gleefully advertising their ignorance and anti-intellectualism in the process? That's where Rand cut to the fundamental: these folks have been conditioned from early on to resent all the values Rand fought for. Rand looked at the drugged-out hippie culture, for instance, with its axiomatic anti-capitalism and whim-worship, and could respond only with disgust and contempt.
(Contempt, I learned from Mary Ann Sures's reminiscences, was something Rand hated feeling - but is was the only appropriate response to an anti-values culture. The usual ignorant and hateful anti-Rand polemic is that she reveled in contempt at "the lower classes" or "the masses", as if the not-yet-redeemed Dominique (and not Roark) was Rand's own voice - all the while ignorant that the salvation of the masses would come from their liberation from those very same hateful polemicists - the so-called intellectuals. The thrust of Ayn Rand's writing was her hope for a world in which people didn't have to feel isolation from and contempt for the culture and the world in which they lived, ever again.)
In the hippies, Rand didn't even see hatred of the good; she saw, rather, nihilism - a departure from the whole process of celebrating the intellect or rational values. They might proclaim love for man but then turn around and declare that this means dropping out of capitalist society and living primitively, collectively. One could understand how, if the hippie generation looked to its intellectuals and educators for guidance and answers, they would find none, and give up. The real contempt Rand had here was for the intellectuals and educators who made the hippies, the nihilists and the haters possible.
I would like at this point to point out the default of the liberal intelligentsia in the realm of ideas. Hundreds of thousands of liberal educators, and millions upon millions of liberally-educated Democrats, pose as defenders of reason. Comparably speaking, this might well be true if the alternative is the "conservatives" and their religionism. But that is not the only alternative, of course - which begs the question: Why have all these millions of liberals failed to take the Randian alternative seriously? Since we are talking about a massive number of people, the reasons and explanations can vary widely, but what might some of them be? Here's one explanation: cowardice - cowardice as a product of a social-metaphysical fear of being marginalized by those whose minds they respect. They look at the intelligentsia - people who have studied ideas over a lifetime - and see that the intelligentsia must be right for ignoring Rand, whatever their own rational judgment might have told them. This cowardice, by the way, is a ruling feature of any politicized environment - as the academy surely is, not only in terms of inter-academy politics, but in terms of a general alignment with the political Left: in many instances (i.e., the public schools), academic sustenance depends on Democrat politicians being elected. And here we are back at the theme of "The Comprachicos" - the public schools' indoctrination of students along democratic-socialist lines.
In any case, whatever the reasons or causes in any given instance, the "intellectual class" in this country has failed in its responsibilities. Justice demands that we not reward and subsidize failure. We need an entire overhaul of our educational establishment. We need to undermine it as best we can, in every way we can, from the outside. We need to make it known just what happens when politicized, anti-individualist, anti-capitalist institutions take hold. The intellectual salvation the well-meaning liberals sought - a defense of reason all the way up to a solution to the problem of universals - was there in Rand the whole time, but politics got in the way. Well-meaning liberals who are not philosophers or particularly intellectual themselves might well not even know the issue; they figure that the professionals had it well in hand on who and what to study; they might not even know that the battle ultimately lies not in politics but in the realm of the mind.
The professional intellectuals, on the other hand, should know better. They devote their lives to study; they ostensibly devote their lives to intellectual curiosity. They claim to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff on any issue. (If that were true, they would know to separate the things in Rand's style they find objectionable and look at the substance. Rand's style is not a reason not to take her ideas seriously. [I would say just the opposite, by focusing on a fundamental of her style: her ability to condense vast bodies of observation, and to do so clearly. If the intellectuals don't like how she gores a sacred ox like Rawls, then they should be able easily to point out what the substantive problem is. Why should we take seriously a theory that subjects the activities of a Roark or a Galt to the evil Difference Principle? What the fuck is the attraction of a theory like that in the first place?!]) They claim to be open-minded. They claim this and that - and yet their not-getting-it problem with a thinker like Rand is pathological.
This is starting to run a bit long. Here's the gist: In today's culture, there is little more than the same ol' back-and-forth between two non-defined "sides" (Left and Right) over the most petty minutiae. The latest has to do with extending the Bush tax cuts for two years. In the long run, in the full scale, in the eye of history, this little squabble will mean next to nothing. It will be long forgotten so many years down the line. (Hell, in politics, little is remembered after a few months. Come '12, the Dems will forget or downplay Obama's sellout - "at least he's not the Republicans.") Of course it would be forgotten: people have only so much capacity in their minds to retain what is important. In the Big Picture, what is the most important thing - that which would transform the culture most fundamentally and long-term? It sure as shit isn't whether the Bush tax cuts are extended another two years. So what is it? It's a question too many folks would find too daunting to even ask, much less tackle. Many of them are so consumed by cynicism that they've given up asking. For some, even asking it never so much as occurred to them. (Thanks again, ya fucking Comprachicos.)
You have a big-picture-oriented right-wing that sees the course of America in fundamentally religious terms. They view the Founding through the lens of establishing a Christian Nation with belief in a Creator who endows us with our inalienable rights. They read into Jefferson this religious component while essentially evading everything else Jefferson said. This selective focus on religion is a compartmentalization - a phenomenon discussed by Rand and Peikoff as a form of disintegration. Jefferson is the most representative of the Founders and is the intellectual, spiritual, and sense-of-life father of what makes America great: reason. An otherwise big-picture-oriented right-wing that compartmentalizes and fails to grasp the basis of America's greatness, can't be the source of the right answers; being big-picture, the errors can only be that much more devastating if wrong. Methodologically this is corrupt and full of dangerously insidious evasions.
The Left, meanwhile, seems to offer little more intellectually than John Rawls's Theory of Justice - absent all deep structure in normative ethics, epistemology and metaphysics, of course. The Rawlsian Synthesis - a synthesis of good (liberty) and evil (socialism) - takes as axiomatic a publicized, politicized version of human existence in which political (read: government) processes are a routine part of life. The American sense of life rebels against that very notion: the people are fed up with politics and government. They cry out for a change they don't know how to get, or what such a change would look like, or how we would ever get there. The central players in politics - the politicians - are the exact antithesis of long-range thinking, of justice as a reward for virtue, of principles, of doing the right thing, of individualism, of the requirements of reason as a ruling guide in life. Now, given the long-run triumph of capitalism over socialism - we're still in the process of that triumph working itself out - the Left is now reduced to a blind, uncomprehending opposition to "the status quo," conceived as an oligarchic plutocracy the politicians - if only the right politicians can be elected - might protect the people from. Then they get disappointed when a politician's politician, Barack Obama, sells out on them in order to keep the gears of the System running as smoothly as possible. In short, the Left is helpless and their only known revolt is against a package deal of capitalism and plutocracy, or against right-wing idiocy, or both, or both wrapped in yet another package-deal.
It's clear that neither of these paradigmatic "sides" have the right values to offer long-run.
So, here's the question: Isn't it about time they - and everyone else caught in the middle of their mudslinging and cultural degeneracy in general - got with the program? Isn't it time they jumped on the team and came on in for the big win?
Yes, it is. But they need the right ideas for fuel. Toward Utopia will help provide that fuel. It will consolidate vast bodies of observations into accessible terms, and it will aim at anyone with a decent amount of intellectual curiosity. The title alone condenses and summarizes the whole shebang. There are things that will appeal immediately to the left, right and center; if there is anything that could be called an "Unstated American Consensus," Toward Utopia will finally state it, at last. (In the meantime, I recommend Rand's writings about America, especially "Don't Let it Go.")
After writing Atlas Shrugged, Rand wanted to write a nonfiction treatise on her philosophy, which she tentatively titled, Objectivism: A Philosophy for Living On Earth. The closest she got to writing such a treatise was her monograph, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. By the time her system became actualized as a full philosophy, it was left to Leonard Peikoff to present it in lecture form, in 1976. By that time, for various reasons, Rand just did not have the time to put it all in book form. Peikoff put it in book form in OPAR. (Everything came that much closer together with James Valliant's Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics; the amount of sense-of-life fuel provided by PARC's finally setting the record straight about Rand the person, is incalculable.) I see Toward Utopia merely as a natural implication of OPAR: if a society adopts the ideas therein, what else would we have? What else could we have?
Well?
I have a selfish/eudaemonic interest in seeing the culture and the world become healthy and functional, at or near the level of a Rand or a Kubrick himself. I have a benevolent, "unselfish," eudaemonic interest in people being happy and successful as a matter of course rather than as the exception. (There is also the economic benefit to everyone of everyone else being happy and successful - more inventions, better ideas, etc.) I would have said "as a matter of normal course," but the term "normal" doesn't mean statistical normalcy, in which half a populace still disbelieves in evolution and a full 80% at least is disgustingly ignorant of the big ideas. I mean normal as in proper functioning. A culture in which the mainstream "norm" is what we have now, is not a properly functioning culture.
Ayn Rand set out to remake the world in her own sense-of-life image. The time in which she did so was such a gutter-point in human history that it only amplifies her heroism. At the very moment she was singing the praises of the creative individual in The Fountainhead, millions of people were being shoved into ovens and gas chambers, as the ultimate culmination of the intellectuals' message: the denigration of the individual mind and spirit. This intellectual class still, to this day - if Comprachico Leiter is any indication - fills its subjects with anti-America, anti-individual, anti-capitalist, anti-clear-thought poison. The result is the low state of the culture and learning we see today. Where dingbats appear on presidential tickets. Where economic ignorance, protectionism, stagnationism and defeatism run opposite the reality of globalization, competition, and growth. Where "Ayn Rand" is a euphemism for anti-social greed and intellectual-outsider status.
My aim is to complete the work Rand started. Reading through her masterful "The Comprachicos" once again, one is struck by the profound sense of isolation from "the mainstream" Rand felt growing up. Her whole being screamed out against having to "adjust" to a dysfunctional society, which could only be a recipe for soul-killing cynicism. It certainly did not help in her case that her formative years included a staggeringly anti-man, anti-life Revolution in her home country. (The Bolshies still retained some level of respect for man; they didn't deliberately round up people by the millions and put them in gas chambers as a matter of goal and intention. They did that, in effect, on a smaller scale, against dissidents, but their aim was the "good of humanity" and the killing and imprisoning merely unpalatable means of doing so. The Nazis took the anti-man ethos fully and consistently: the aim was to kill the individual. Thanks a lot for endorsing that ethos, Heidegger.) I can say that anyone with their head screwed on straight today, looking out at the culture, has a profound sense of revulsion. Their whole sense-of-life screams out at the idiocy passing for respectability, for banality passing as attention-grabbing, for minutiae passing as profoundly interesting.
When Rand looked at the Left, she saw only hatred of achievement and success. (See "The Age of Envy.") It doesn't matter that some or many of those on the Left aren't even consciously aware of their hatred, of where their ideas lead. It doesn't matter that the Left "sees things" in different terms, under a different paradigm where it's the rich plutocratic oligarchy against the powerless working people who - get this - actually support the rich. The issue is deeper than that: what leads them to embrace that paradigm - all while ignoring, denouncing, denigrating and sneering at people like Ayn Rand and gleefully advertising their ignorance and anti-intellectualism in the process? That's where Rand cut to the fundamental: these folks have been conditioned from early on to resent all the values Rand fought for. Rand looked at the drugged-out hippie culture, for instance, with its axiomatic anti-capitalism and whim-worship, and could respond only with disgust and contempt.
(Contempt, I learned from Mary Ann Sures's reminiscences, was something Rand hated feeling - but is was the only appropriate response to an anti-values culture. The usual ignorant and hateful anti-Rand polemic is that she reveled in contempt at "the lower classes" or "the masses", as if the not-yet-redeemed Dominique (and not Roark) was Rand's own voice - all the while ignorant that the salvation of the masses would come from their liberation from those very same hateful polemicists - the so-called intellectuals. The thrust of Ayn Rand's writing was her hope for a world in which people didn't have to feel isolation from and contempt for the culture and the world in which they lived, ever again.)
In the hippies, Rand didn't even see hatred of the good; she saw, rather, nihilism - a departure from the whole process of celebrating the intellect or rational values. They might proclaim love for man but then turn around and declare that this means dropping out of capitalist society and living primitively, collectively. One could understand how, if the hippie generation looked to its intellectuals and educators for guidance and answers, they would find none, and give up. The real contempt Rand had here was for the intellectuals and educators who made the hippies, the nihilists and the haters possible.
I would like at this point to point out the default of the liberal intelligentsia in the realm of ideas. Hundreds of thousands of liberal educators, and millions upon millions of liberally-educated Democrats, pose as defenders of reason. Comparably speaking, this might well be true if the alternative is the "conservatives" and their religionism. But that is not the only alternative, of course - which begs the question: Why have all these millions of liberals failed to take the Randian alternative seriously? Since we are talking about a massive number of people, the reasons and explanations can vary widely, but what might some of them be? Here's one explanation: cowardice - cowardice as a product of a social-metaphysical fear of being marginalized by those whose minds they respect. They look at the intelligentsia - people who have studied ideas over a lifetime - and see that the intelligentsia must be right for ignoring Rand, whatever their own rational judgment might have told them. This cowardice, by the way, is a ruling feature of any politicized environment - as the academy surely is, not only in terms of inter-academy politics, but in terms of a general alignment with the political Left: in many instances (i.e., the public schools), academic sustenance depends on Democrat politicians being elected. And here we are back at the theme of "The Comprachicos" - the public schools' indoctrination of students along democratic-socialist lines.
In any case, whatever the reasons or causes in any given instance, the "intellectual class" in this country has failed in its responsibilities. Justice demands that we not reward and subsidize failure. We need an entire overhaul of our educational establishment. We need to undermine it as best we can, in every way we can, from the outside. We need to make it known just what happens when politicized, anti-individualist, anti-capitalist institutions take hold. The intellectual salvation the well-meaning liberals sought - a defense of reason all the way up to a solution to the problem of universals - was there in Rand the whole time, but politics got in the way. Well-meaning liberals who are not philosophers or particularly intellectual themselves might well not even know the issue; they figure that the professionals had it well in hand on who and what to study; they might not even know that the battle ultimately lies not in politics but in the realm of the mind.
The professional intellectuals, on the other hand, should know better. They devote their lives to study; they ostensibly devote their lives to intellectual curiosity. They claim to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff on any issue. (If that were true, they would know to separate the things in Rand's style they find objectionable and look at the substance. Rand's style is not a reason not to take her ideas seriously. [I would say just the opposite, by focusing on a fundamental of her style: her ability to condense vast bodies of observation, and to do so clearly. If the intellectuals don't like how she gores a sacred ox like Rawls, then they should be able easily to point out what the substantive problem is. Why should we take seriously a theory that subjects the activities of a Roark or a Galt to the evil Difference Principle? What the fuck is the attraction of a theory like that in the first place?!]) They claim to be open-minded. They claim this and that - and yet their not-getting-it problem with a thinker like Rand is pathological.
This is starting to run a bit long. Here's the gist: In today's culture, there is little more than the same ol' back-and-forth between two non-defined "sides" (Left and Right) over the most petty minutiae. The latest has to do with extending the Bush tax cuts for two years. In the long run, in the full scale, in the eye of history, this little squabble will mean next to nothing. It will be long forgotten so many years down the line. (Hell, in politics, little is remembered after a few months. Come '12, the Dems will forget or downplay Obama's sellout - "at least he's not the Republicans.") Of course it would be forgotten: people have only so much capacity in their minds to retain what is important. In the Big Picture, what is the most important thing - that which would transform the culture most fundamentally and long-term? It sure as shit isn't whether the Bush tax cuts are extended another two years. So what is it? It's a question too many folks would find too daunting to even ask, much less tackle. Many of them are so consumed by cynicism that they've given up asking. For some, even asking it never so much as occurred to them. (Thanks again, ya fucking Comprachicos.)
You have a big-picture-oriented right-wing that sees the course of America in fundamentally religious terms. They view the Founding through the lens of establishing a Christian Nation with belief in a Creator who endows us with our inalienable rights. They read into Jefferson this religious component while essentially evading everything else Jefferson said. This selective focus on religion is a compartmentalization - a phenomenon discussed by Rand and Peikoff as a form of disintegration. Jefferson is the most representative of the Founders and is the intellectual, spiritual, and sense-of-life father of what makes America great: reason. An otherwise big-picture-oriented right-wing that compartmentalizes and fails to grasp the basis of America's greatness, can't be the source of the right answers; being big-picture, the errors can only be that much more devastating if wrong. Methodologically this is corrupt and full of dangerously insidious evasions.
The Left, meanwhile, seems to offer little more intellectually than John Rawls's Theory of Justice - absent all deep structure in normative ethics, epistemology and metaphysics, of course. The Rawlsian Synthesis - a synthesis of good (liberty) and evil (socialism) - takes as axiomatic a publicized, politicized version of human existence in which political (read: government) processes are a routine part of life. The American sense of life rebels against that very notion: the people are fed up with politics and government. They cry out for a change they don't know how to get, or what such a change would look like, or how we would ever get there. The central players in politics - the politicians - are the exact antithesis of long-range thinking, of justice as a reward for virtue, of principles, of doing the right thing, of individualism, of the requirements of reason as a ruling guide in life. Now, given the long-run triumph of capitalism over socialism - we're still in the process of that triumph working itself out - the Left is now reduced to a blind, uncomprehending opposition to "the status quo," conceived as an oligarchic plutocracy the politicians - if only the right politicians can be elected - might protect the people from. Then they get disappointed when a politician's politician, Barack Obama, sells out on them in order to keep the gears of the System running as smoothly as possible. In short, the Left is helpless and their only known revolt is against a package deal of capitalism and plutocracy, or against right-wing idiocy, or both, or both wrapped in yet another package-deal.
It's clear that neither of these paradigmatic "sides" have the right values to offer long-run.
So, here's the question: Isn't it about time they - and everyone else caught in the middle of their mudslinging and cultural degeneracy in general - got with the program? Isn't it time they jumped on the team and came on in for the big win?
Yes, it is. But they need the right ideas for fuel. Toward Utopia will help provide that fuel. It will consolidate vast bodies of observations into accessible terms, and it will aim at anyone with a decent amount of intellectual curiosity. The title alone condenses and summarizes the whole shebang. There are things that will appeal immediately to the left, right and center; if there is anything that could be called an "Unstated American Consensus," Toward Utopia will finally state it, at last. (In the meantime, I recommend Rand's writings about America, especially "Don't Let it Go.")
After writing Atlas Shrugged, Rand wanted to write a nonfiction treatise on her philosophy, which she tentatively titled, Objectivism: A Philosophy for Living On Earth. The closest she got to writing such a treatise was her monograph, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. By the time her system became actualized as a full philosophy, it was left to Leonard Peikoff to present it in lecture form, in 1976. By that time, for various reasons, Rand just did not have the time to put it all in book form. Peikoff put it in book form in OPAR. (Everything came that much closer together with James Valliant's Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics; the amount of sense-of-life fuel provided by PARC's finally setting the record straight about Rand the person, is incalculable.) I see Toward Utopia merely as a natural implication of OPAR: if a society adopts the ideas therein, what else would we have? What else could we have?
Well?
Thursday, December 9, 2010
The Effects of Nathaniel Branden's Dishonesty
"Honesty is the best policy."
This is a bromide that Ayn Rand spent countless hours concretizing and explaining in person and in her works. For 18 years, Nathaniel Branden stood next to Rand and listened to all those explanations, knew first-hand how they were irrefutable, knew how they were universally applicable and concretizable, etc. - and he evaded it all.
Human beings have free will, and as such, the course of history is not determined ahead of time. Let's imagine, if we can, an alternate historical path in which Nathaniel Branden remained an integrated being of theory of practice, which meant being honest to Ayn Rand (and all the other people he manipulated in those years). There was one basic value Rand sought and asked for in people: honesty. They could be confused or wayward or have all kinds of errors, but if they made a good-faith, conscientious effort to work them through, then that's the best she could have asked of someone. ("In the name of the best within us...")
As Rand's journals during her falling-out period with Branden show, she held up her end of things most admirably. She showed the utmost benevolence and attempted to understand this man she thought and trusted to be an adherent of his own teachings. The idea that a man who preached so vociferously and convincingly about the need for mind-body integration would lie straight to her face - while using her in effect as a psychotherapist, no less - would have been too horrifying for her to contemplate in the absence of evidence pointing in that direction. That left her having to grope desperately for explanations for this man's disintegration. (This motherfucker - who used Rand as a psychotherapist - tells the rest of the world that she knew nothing of psychology. The contradiction is so glaring that it takes a kind of suggestible human being - in other words, sociopath Branden's prey - to buy into it. What a fraud of a human being he is.) Perhaps this was a flaw on Rand's part: she was too trusting of people, expecting out of the sheer goodwill she brought to life that they would live up to the moral standards she did. Well, she - and the world - got burned.
Had Branden done the right thing and been honest, the historical progression of things would have been different. As many all-too-painfully know, the 1968 break-up and closing of NBI fractured the movement and set back the advancement of Objectivism as a cultural force for decades. The momentum that was gathering up through 1968 was halted. One could envision an alternate history in which Rand and Branden remained associates, NBI stayed together, and by the early to mid 1970s, the so-called libertarian movement would be much more fortified. The personalities-aspect that throws so many people off even in the realm of ideas (call it social metaphysics, perhaps, or an effect of comprachico-ization) would not have gotten in the way of such an intellectual juggernaut. You'd have a different coalescing of intellectual forces than what we had; the philosophical community would have had to focus more and more attention on Rand's ideas and arguments; the combination of Rand, Branden, Peikoff, Binswanger, the Dougs, Mack, Norton, Hospers, Nozick, Rothbard, Nobel Laureates Friedman and Hayek and the younger Friedman and Roy Childs and George H. Smith and on and on -- it would simply have been too much for the pro-Rawls segment of the academy to handle.
So, as a result of Nathaniel Branden's massive dishonesty, the progress of the pro-capitalist cause was set back by decades. Decades of delayed human progress. Do you fucking realize how many lives this cost, or how many people remained impoverished as a result? Billions, potentially. If sheer numbers dead or impoverished as a result of someone's dishonesty were the measure of evil, Branden might well be the most evil man who ever lived.
(Kant? The issue there is screamingly rationalistic psycho-epistemology, an inheritance from his rationalist and empiricist predecessors, only amplified. The case for his being evil or dishonest is ill-supported. With Branden there is no shadow of a doubt.)
This is not to say that Branden has blood on his hands; the causation for which he is responsible is his moral betrayals and the breakup of the Objectivist movement. This is, however, to say that widespread death and destruction can come from the bad decisions of just one person when that person is in a position to drastically affect the course of history. A genius-level philosopher is in just such a position, and it was Branden's relationship with and proximity to a genius-level philosopher that makes his actions so historically significant.
Potentially billions of lives lost or impoverished, due to one man's dishonest behaviors.
Thanks a lot, Nathan.
This is a bromide that Ayn Rand spent countless hours concretizing and explaining in person and in her works. For 18 years, Nathaniel Branden stood next to Rand and listened to all those explanations, knew first-hand how they were irrefutable, knew how they were universally applicable and concretizable, etc. - and he evaded it all.
Human beings have free will, and as such, the course of history is not determined ahead of time. Let's imagine, if we can, an alternate historical path in which Nathaniel Branden remained an integrated being of theory of practice, which meant being honest to Ayn Rand (and all the other people he manipulated in those years). There was one basic value Rand sought and asked for in people: honesty. They could be confused or wayward or have all kinds of errors, but if they made a good-faith, conscientious effort to work them through, then that's the best she could have asked of someone. ("In the name of the best within us...")
As Rand's journals during her falling-out period with Branden show, she held up her end of things most admirably. She showed the utmost benevolence and attempted to understand this man she thought and trusted to be an adherent of his own teachings. The idea that a man who preached so vociferously and convincingly about the need for mind-body integration would lie straight to her face - while using her in effect as a psychotherapist, no less - would have been too horrifying for her to contemplate in the absence of evidence pointing in that direction. That left her having to grope desperately for explanations for this man's disintegration. (This motherfucker - who used Rand as a psychotherapist - tells the rest of the world that she knew nothing of psychology. The contradiction is so glaring that it takes a kind of suggestible human being - in other words, sociopath Branden's prey - to buy into it. What a fraud of a human being he is.) Perhaps this was a flaw on Rand's part: she was too trusting of people, expecting out of the sheer goodwill she brought to life that they would live up to the moral standards she did. Well, she - and the world - got burned.
Had Branden done the right thing and been honest, the historical progression of things would have been different. As many all-too-painfully know, the 1968 break-up and closing of NBI fractured the movement and set back the advancement of Objectivism as a cultural force for decades. The momentum that was gathering up through 1968 was halted. One could envision an alternate history in which Rand and Branden remained associates, NBI stayed together, and by the early to mid 1970s, the so-called libertarian movement would be much more fortified. The personalities-aspect that throws so many people off even in the realm of ideas (call it social metaphysics, perhaps, or an effect of comprachico-ization) would not have gotten in the way of such an intellectual juggernaut. You'd have a different coalescing of intellectual forces than what we had; the philosophical community would have had to focus more and more attention on Rand's ideas and arguments; the combination of Rand, Branden, Peikoff, Binswanger, the Dougs, Mack, Norton, Hospers, Nozick, Rothbard, Nobel Laureates Friedman and Hayek and the younger Friedman and Roy Childs and George H. Smith and on and on -- it would simply have been too much for the pro-Rawls segment of the academy to handle.
So, as a result of Nathaniel Branden's massive dishonesty, the progress of the pro-capitalist cause was set back by decades. Decades of delayed human progress. Do you fucking realize how many lives this cost, or how many people remained impoverished as a result? Billions, potentially. If sheer numbers dead or impoverished as a result of someone's dishonesty were the measure of evil, Branden might well be the most evil man who ever lived.
(Kant? The issue there is screamingly rationalistic psycho-epistemology, an inheritance from his rationalist and empiricist predecessors, only amplified. The case for his being evil or dishonest is ill-supported. With Branden there is no shadow of a doubt.)
This is not to say that Branden has blood on his hands; the causation for which he is responsible is his moral betrayals and the breakup of the Objectivist movement. This is, however, to say that widespread death and destruction can come from the bad decisions of just one person when that person is in a position to drastically affect the course of history. A genius-level philosopher is in just such a position, and it was Branden's relationship with and proximity to a genius-level philosopher that makes his actions so historically significant.
Potentially billions of lives lost or impoverished, due to one man's dishonest behaviors.
Thanks a lot, Nathan.
A Treasure Trove of Rand-Related Media
Two pages of aural crack:
The Ayn Rand Media Library - Lectures and Interviews. I particularly enjoy Rand's method of answering questions in Q&As. "To start with, the package deal we are asked to accept here is the following: ..." - just one example of how she unrooted premises and assumptions contained in questions.
Video and Audio - All sorts of testimonials and analyses of Rand the person. A wonderful companion book is the newly-released 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand. Combined with the Letters and the Journals and the rest, you end up (assuming you aren't irreparably cynical, nihilistic or comprachico-ized) with a hero-worshipping attitude toward this wonderful human being. You end up nearly incredulous at how the widespread smears and misrepresentations and not-getting-it had gone on for SO FUCKING LONG! WHAT ON EARTH IS WRONG WITH ALL THOSE PEOPLE????? (Thanks a lot, again, Nathan, you screamingly vicious monster.)
I have what you could call a "soft" deadline on my book, but this material is just too good to pass up and not spend the extra time on; it will have been worth it.
The Ayn Rand Media Library - Lectures and Interviews. I particularly enjoy Rand's method of answering questions in Q&As. "To start with, the package deal we are asked to accept here is the following: ..." - just one example of how she unrooted premises and assumptions contained in questions.
Video and Audio - All sorts of testimonials and analyses of Rand the person. A wonderful companion book is the newly-released 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand. Combined with the Letters and the Journals and the rest, you end up (assuming you aren't irreparably cynical, nihilistic or comprachico-ized) with a hero-worshipping attitude toward this wonderful human being. You end up nearly incredulous at how the widespread smears and misrepresentations and not-getting-it had gone on for SO FUCKING LONG! WHAT ON EARTH IS WRONG WITH ALL THOSE PEOPLE????? (Thanks a lot, again, Nathan, you screamingly vicious monster.)
I have what you could call a "soft" deadline on my book, but this material is just too good to pass up and not spend the extra time on; it will have been worth it.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Methodological Issues in "Egoism and Rights"
On the subject of the relation between egoism and rights, the work of Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmusssen and Douglas Den Uyl stood out above the rest for pretty much three decades or so. The "Dougs" have spelled out the essence of the correct position in fullest detail, while Mack has offered valuable insights of his own in thinking about the issue, especially from a Randian angle, with his emphasis on the core moral notion that "man is an end in himself."
The basics of the difference between their two approaches is covered in an issue of Reason Papers. The gist is that Mack's approach is dualistic and Kant-inspired, which reflects his more hardcore-academic style, while theirs - following Aristotle and Rand - is integrative. Mack's work on this subject began with his own "Egoism and Rights" (1973, The Personalist) and culminating in a series of increasingly technical academic essays over the years; his most developed viewpoint is represented in "On the Fit Between Egoism and Rights" (1998, Reason Papers). The "Dougs" work culiminates in Liberty and Nature (1991) and Norms of Liberty (2006). Their characteristic style and content is represented well in the Reason Papers symposium in the first link above.
My own, article, "Egoism and Rights," (see link in "About Me" to your right) represents the "state of the art" on the subject in an academic format, stated in brief essentials. There are, also, some methodological concerns to address there.
Some relevant background: As I have had a fiercely independent sense of life from very early on, I have staunchly repudiated any forms of authoritarianism or other varieties of unreason, especially when associated in any way with Ayn Rand. I took Rand's central dictum, "Think for yourself," most seriously, and repudiated social metaphysics wherever I saw it. I saw an authoritarianism in the "ARI" brand of promoting Objectivism, which I saw at the time as being against careful, reasoned, dialogue-respecting activity. I took Rand's unscholarly polemics as representative of her overall style of doing philosophy. I was more ready to buy into the picture fostered by the apostates, the Brandens, and then David Kelley. The toxically effective smear-jobs perpetrated by the combination of the Branden accounts was effective at breeding a cynicism that nearly destroyed me (and, I'm sure, many others) in the end. The essential upshot: "If not even this woman lives up to her ideals, so much for ideals." Thanks a lot, Nathan.
Speaking of Nathan, he's a friend of Chris Matthew Sciabarra, editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, in which "Egoism and Rights" appeared in 2006. There were things I know now that I did not know at the time. Three significant things in particular: (1) James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics appeared in 2005, and it's like the veil had at last been lifted: You know what, Ayn Rand was pretty darn swell after all, and Nathan is an unspeakably unjust scumbag who single-handedly fueled a culture-wide ad hominem against Objectivism's founder. That man is persona non grata. (2) Evidence of lying and backstabbing behavior in 2006 by Chris Sciabarra against then-friends Diana Hsieh, Lindsay Perigo, and James Valliant, evidence that - to my knowledge - has gone unanswered and unrebutted to this day. (3) A falling-out, in 2006, between yours truly and JARS's associate editor, Robert Campbell, over a series of increasingly stupid things he was saying on public internet forums, debasing JARS's reputation in the process. (Last I checked a few months back, Campbell was spewing some nonsense about me "prostrating [my]self in front of Leonard Peikoff." This is what JARS has been reduced to. Purely coincidentally, the journal is now running well behind schedule.) All this was in addition to the fiasco over at the closely-aligned Objectivist Center (then re-named the Atlas Society), where TOC/TAS's director, David Kelley, a spineless pragmatist, took no stand on the Branden matter (Branden being a TOC/TAS speaker) in the wake of Valliant's book.
Anyway, before that, I was more friendly toward the JARS model, or what I thought it to be. It's respectful, responsible and scholarly dialogue, and as an added bonus, Rand and I win the argument! Also, the culture at ARI today is just different - it just has a different feel, sense-of-life even - than it was back in the days of Schwartz and his emulators. Less of an insular, sectarian, authoritarian and social-metaphysical vibe given off to the wary fiercely-independent type. (After all, these folks were quite terribly ignorant about Mack and the Dougs. I just fucking hate ignorance.)
Here's another piece of the puzzle: I'm one of the "fortunate" few to meet the following criteria: (1) Familiarity with academic-style philosophy; (2) Familiarity with Ayn Rand's ideas; (3) Familiarity with Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses; (4) Familiarity with Mack and the Dougs' work; (5) Background in economics; (6) Lots of intellectual curiosity. Combined, these put me in select company. A close match (to say the least) for all these criteria is Chris Sciabarra. The guy knows his stuff, whatever else you say about him - even if the stuff is presented in the terrible jargon and style of academia, which it is. Well, what finally got me interested in Peikoff's courses is their inclusion in the massive bibliography to Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995). From Peikoff, I was introduced to the history of philosophy - most wonderfully, to Aristotle - and then to the advanced courses in Objectivism. Those courses center around methodology.
Methodology was Sciabarra's central focus in writing Russian Radical; he thinks that Hegel and Marx have some useful insights on this subject. (For the kind of anti-dialoguing I instinctively rebelled against, there's John Ridpath's unfairly brutal "review" of the book in the ARI-aligned Intellectual Activist. If the only criterion were the presentation style, then he'd be spot-on. If it's that similarities to thinkers like Marx or Hegel are too preposterous to take seriously, then he needs an argument in the face of Sciabarra's evidence, and he never gives one. That's why I fucking hated the "accepted ARI style" of the time.) It's not surprising that any number of thinkers could all touch upon a similar point, when they've given such matters so much of their intellectual attention. Rand had a systematic approach to thinking, like Hegel did. There's something to be learned from that as we differentiate and integrate concretes like Rand, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Kant, Marx, etc. Ignoring the relevant similarities is a pro-ignorance strategy, and I just fucking hate ignorance.
Anyway, my intellectual curiosity led me to the Peikoff courses despite his Branden-and-Kelley-fostered image as an authoritarian cultist. The courses were, in time, a saving grace intellectually, on many levels. What the courses do show is that Rand's methodology is as sound as it needs to be, without ever having needed Hegel or Marx's dialectical methods to amplify or explain thing further. Anyone who knows Rand knows that she came up with a shit-ton of identifications independently of other thinkers; that's just how she rolled. What we don't get from Hegel or Marx is a path to a theory of induction. With Aristotle, of course, the similarities to Rand are much greater; the approach taken by the (neo-Aristotelian) Dougs is very close methodologically to Randian-Peikoffian integration. Plenty of other Rand scholars and Aristotle scholars have noted the deep similarities as well. In the Sciabarrian scheme, it only makes sense to mentally organize the concretes so that Aristotle has a lot higher "similarity-score" to Rand than do Hegel or Marx. Unfortunately, this is not an effect of the style and presentation of Russian Radical.
So, familiarity with the ideas of Mack, the Dougs, Rand, Peikoff and Sciabarra culminated in my article, "Egoism and Rights." This emerged from another, longer, unpublished piece trying to cover a lot more ground in limited space, the subject being ethics and how the concept of integration (e.g., theory-practice, fact-value, individual-social) applies there. Integration as a basic thematic and methodological concern made JARS a very friendly venue. Sciabarra's framing of the integration-theme was "a revolt against dualism." One result of a revolt against dualism is a revolt against Kant-emulating academic style, a product of rationalism, which is one fork of the rationalist-empiricist dichotomy that Peikoff spent most of Understanding Objectivism railing about. "Egoism and Rights" took one such example of academic dualism - in essence, "Rand is either a deontologist or consequentialist; She is an egoist; Egoism is consequentialist; Consequentialism is incompatible with rights; Therefore, egoism is incompatible with rights" - and subjected it to methodologically-informed refutation. Lost in that whole rationalistic deduction from a false alternative was Rand's actual views, which could be had by reading her own actual descriptions and depictions of egoistic behavior.
One methodological issue I want to mention here conerns what might have led me to state certain points the way I did. One thing that does not sit well with me now is how I talk about the rightful beneficiary of action being a derivative or less fundamental issue than the standard of value. The correct view would be to develop those points in unison - as Rand did. It would be correct to say that both the issue of the standard of value and the issue of the beneficiary are distinct conditions which both have to be met for judging a moral action or principle, but that neither condition precedes the other hierarchically. Perhaps a harmless-looking mistake to treat their relation as I did, but I'm a perfectionist, see, and harmless-looking little things can be insidious and damaging long-run. Much as I was on an "integration"-thematic kick at the time, it wasn't so well integrated with other, related methodological subjects - hierarchy, essentializing, reduction, context. Integration isn't done for its own sake, after all, but to aid in sound cognition and practical action.
Also, in the time since I wrote "Egoism and Rights," my concerns have shifted more toward the fundamental area Rand eventually shifted focus to - epistemology. The ethics stuff is a piece of cake by comparison at this point; of greater interest is how the ethics integrates with the whole hierarchical system of thought. (An epistemological-practical thematic unity I picked up on in the process: perfectionism.)
For its purpose, however, "Egoism and Rights" succeeds remarkably, through an essentializing, straightforward style (by academic-journal standards), considerable familiarity with Objectivist method, and a pretty much irrefutable take on Rand's "new concept of egoism." (This was well before I ever even noticed the extreme similarities between Rand's and Norton's eudaemonisms. Eudaemonism, of course, necessitates rights.) Even if it gets hierarchy wrong at a point, the important points still get out there.
More observations about "Egoism and Rights" as or when they occur...
The basics of the difference between their two approaches is covered in an issue of Reason Papers. The gist is that Mack's approach is dualistic and Kant-inspired, which reflects his more hardcore-academic style, while theirs - following Aristotle and Rand - is integrative. Mack's work on this subject began with his own "Egoism and Rights" (1973, The Personalist) and culminating in a series of increasingly technical academic essays over the years; his most developed viewpoint is represented in "On the Fit Between Egoism and Rights" (1998, Reason Papers). The "Dougs" work culiminates in Liberty and Nature (1991) and Norms of Liberty (2006). Their characteristic style and content is represented well in the Reason Papers symposium in the first link above.
My own, article, "Egoism and Rights," (see link in "About Me" to your right) represents the "state of the art" on the subject in an academic format, stated in brief essentials. There are, also, some methodological concerns to address there.
Some relevant background: As I have had a fiercely independent sense of life from very early on, I have staunchly repudiated any forms of authoritarianism or other varieties of unreason, especially when associated in any way with Ayn Rand. I took Rand's central dictum, "Think for yourself," most seriously, and repudiated social metaphysics wherever I saw it. I saw an authoritarianism in the "ARI" brand of promoting Objectivism, which I saw at the time as being against careful, reasoned, dialogue-respecting activity. I took Rand's unscholarly polemics as representative of her overall style of doing philosophy. I was more ready to buy into the picture fostered by the apostates, the Brandens, and then David Kelley. The toxically effective smear-jobs perpetrated by the combination of the Branden accounts was effective at breeding a cynicism that nearly destroyed me (and, I'm sure, many others) in the end. The essential upshot: "If not even this woman lives up to her ideals, so much for ideals." Thanks a lot, Nathan.
Speaking of Nathan, he's a friend of Chris Matthew Sciabarra, editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, in which "Egoism and Rights" appeared in 2006. There were things I know now that I did not know at the time. Three significant things in particular: (1) James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics appeared in 2005, and it's like the veil had at last been lifted: You know what, Ayn Rand was pretty darn swell after all, and Nathan is an unspeakably unjust scumbag who single-handedly fueled a culture-wide ad hominem against Objectivism's founder. That man is persona non grata. (2) Evidence of lying and backstabbing behavior in 2006 by Chris Sciabarra against then-friends Diana Hsieh, Lindsay Perigo, and James Valliant, evidence that - to my knowledge - has gone unanswered and unrebutted to this day. (3) A falling-out, in 2006, between yours truly and JARS's associate editor, Robert Campbell, over a series of increasingly stupid things he was saying on public internet forums, debasing JARS's reputation in the process. (Last I checked a few months back, Campbell was spewing some nonsense about me "prostrating [my]self in front of Leonard Peikoff." This is what JARS has been reduced to. Purely coincidentally, the journal is now running well behind schedule.) All this was in addition to the fiasco over at the closely-aligned Objectivist Center (then re-named the Atlas Society), where TOC/TAS's director, David Kelley, a spineless pragmatist, took no stand on the Branden matter (Branden being a TOC/TAS speaker) in the wake of Valliant's book.
Anyway, before that, I was more friendly toward the JARS model, or what I thought it to be. It's respectful, responsible and scholarly dialogue, and as an added bonus, Rand and I win the argument! Also, the culture at ARI today is just different - it just has a different feel, sense-of-life even - than it was back in the days of Schwartz and his emulators. Less of an insular, sectarian, authoritarian and social-metaphysical vibe given off to the wary fiercely-independent type. (After all, these folks were quite terribly ignorant about Mack and the Dougs. I just fucking hate ignorance.)
Here's another piece of the puzzle: I'm one of the "fortunate" few to meet the following criteria: (1) Familiarity with academic-style philosophy; (2) Familiarity with Ayn Rand's ideas; (3) Familiarity with Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses; (4) Familiarity with Mack and the Dougs' work; (5) Background in economics; (6) Lots of intellectual curiosity. Combined, these put me in select company. A close match (to say the least) for all these criteria is Chris Sciabarra. The guy knows his stuff, whatever else you say about him - even if the stuff is presented in the terrible jargon and style of academia, which it is. Well, what finally got me interested in Peikoff's courses is their inclusion in the massive bibliography to Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995). From Peikoff, I was introduced to the history of philosophy - most wonderfully, to Aristotle - and then to the advanced courses in Objectivism. Those courses center around methodology.
Methodology was Sciabarra's central focus in writing Russian Radical; he thinks that Hegel and Marx have some useful insights on this subject. (For the kind of anti-dialoguing I instinctively rebelled against, there's John Ridpath's unfairly brutal "review" of the book in the ARI-aligned Intellectual Activist. If the only criterion were the presentation style, then he'd be spot-on. If it's that similarities to thinkers like Marx or Hegel are too preposterous to take seriously, then he needs an argument in the face of Sciabarra's evidence, and he never gives one. That's why I fucking hated the "accepted ARI style" of the time.) It's not surprising that any number of thinkers could all touch upon a similar point, when they've given such matters so much of their intellectual attention. Rand had a systematic approach to thinking, like Hegel did. There's something to be learned from that as we differentiate and integrate concretes like Rand, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Kant, Marx, etc. Ignoring the relevant similarities is a pro-ignorance strategy, and I just fucking hate ignorance.
Anyway, my intellectual curiosity led me to the Peikoff courses despite his Branden-and-Kelley-fostered image as an authoritarian cultist. The courses were, in time, a saving grace intellectually, on many levels. What the courses do show is that Rand's methodology is as sound as it needs to be, without ever having needed Hegel or Marx's dialectical methods to amplify or explain thing further. Anyone who knows Rand knows that she came up with a shit-ton of identifications independently of other thinkers; that's just how she rolled. What we don't get from Hegel or Marx is a path to a theory of induction. With Aristotle, of course, the similarities to Rand are much greater; the approach taken by the (neo-Aristotelian) Dougs is very close methodologically to Randian-Peikoffian integration. Plenty of other Rand scholars and Aristotle scholars have noted the deep similarities as well. In the Sciabarrian scheme, it only makes sense to mentally organize the concretes so that Aristotle has a lot higher "similarity-score" to Rand than do Hegel or Marx. Unfortunately, this is not an effect of the style and presentation of Russian Radical.
So, familiarity with the ideas of Mack, the Dougs, Rand, Peikoff and Sciabarra culminated in my article, "Egoism and Rights." This emerged from another, longer, unpublished piece trying to cover a lot more ground in limited space, the subject being ethics and how the concept of integration (e.g., theory-practice, fact-value, individual-social) applies there. Integration as a basic thematic and methodological concern made JARS a very friendly venue. Sciabarra's framing of the integration-theme was "a revolt against dualism." One result of a revolt against dualism is a revolt against Kant-emulating academic style, a product of rationalism, which is one fork of the rationalist-empiricist dichotomy that Peikoff spent most of Understanding Objectivism railing about. "Egoism and Rights" took one such example of academic dualism - in essence, "Rand is either a deontologist or consequentialist; She is an egoist; Egoism is consequentialist; Consequentialism is incompatible with rights; Therefore, egoism is incompatible with rights" - and subjected it to methodologically-informed refutation. Lost in that whole rationalistic deduction from a false alternative was Rand's actual views, which could be had by reading her own actual descriptions and depictions of egoistic behavior.
One methodological issue I want to mention here conerns what might have led me to state certain points the way I did. One thing that does not sit well with me now is how I talk about the rightful beneficiary of action being a derivative or less fundamental issue than the standard of value. The correct view would be to develop those points in unison - as Rand did. It would be correct to say that both the issue of the standard of value and the issue of the beneficiary are distinct conditions which both have to be met for judging a moral action or principle, but that neither condition precedes the other hierarchically. Perhaps a harmless-looking mistake to treat their relation as I did, but I'm a perfectionist, see, and harmless-looking little things can be insidious and damaging long-run. Much as I was on an "integration"-thematic kick at the time, it wasn't so well integrated with other, related methodological subjects - hierarchy, essentializing, reduction, context. Integration isn't done for its own sake, after all, but to aid in sound cognition and practical action.
Also, in the time since I wrote "Egoism and Rights," my concerns have shifted more toward the fundamental area Rand eventually shifted focus to - epistemology. The ethics stuff is a piece of cake by comparison at this point; of greater interest is how the ethics integrates with the whole hierarchical system of thought. (An epistemological-practical thematic unity I picked up on in the process: perfectionism.)
For its purpose, however, "Egoism and Rights" succeeds remarkably, through an essentializing, straightforward style (by academic-journal standards), considerable familiarity with Objectivist method, and a pretty much irrefutable take on Rand's "new concept of egoism." (This was well before I ever even noticed the extreme similarities between Rand's and Norton's eudaemonisms. Eudaemonism, of course, necessitates rights.) Even if it gets hierarchy wrong at a point, the important points still get out there.
More observations about "Egoism and Rights" as or when they occur...
Abolish the Public Schools ASAP
With the money saved, my $6 billion plan could be expanded into the hundreds of billions of dollars, annually. That's gotta be enough to ensure the entire Rand & Peikoff corpus and Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism course for every household in America - from the first year's saved funds alone. We'd be in Singularity mode so fucking fast it'd make everyone's head spin.
And I mean it!
An added bonus: a spectacular drop in the number of proudly ignorant, cynical, nihilistic little turds infesting popular culture, politics, the media and the interwebs. A spectacular rise in achievement, efficacy, fulfillment, and benevolent sense of life.
Comprachico Middle School in a nutshell:
And I mean it!
An added bonus: a spectacular drop in the number of proudly ignorant, cynical, nihilistic little turds infesting popular culture, politics, the media and the interwebs. A spectacular rise in achievement, efficacy, fulfillment, and benevolent sense of life.
Comprachico Middle School in a nutshell:
Thought of the Day Re: the Dingbat
From a Facebook thread:
"Refudiate" ----> "refute the plan". So much for that 4-year Journalism degree from Comprachico U.
Very Brief Note About Perfectionism
An essential aspect of perfectionism is thinking and living integrally.
Ayn Rand's Staggering Mental Efficacy
If people basically have a clue - I'm leaving out many academics in the Humanities - they can, in principle, recognize the astounding level of unit-economy and clarity in Ayn Rand's writing style. Not only is it clear; it also condenses vast bodies of observations into fundamental principles. She did this without having to write ponderous tomes exploring impractical minutiae in order to impress some small specialized cluster of academics.
Take such examples of hard-hitting writing as "The Objectivist Ethics," "Man's Rights," and "The Nature of Government," all available at the ARI website. There is nothing inessential; the presentation is compact; they say all they need to say for their purposes, no more and no less.
Rand's unique ability to essentialize philosophical principles in compact, popularly-accessible, commonsensical, unit-economizing form is - get this! - the basis on which the academic snobs dismiss Rand as "simplistic," "shallow," "unsophisticated," "demagogic," etc. I don't know what more you need to know about the academic culture in the Humanities, when a genuine intellectual virtue is invoked as a basis for dismissal. The sources of such criticism are so clueless and so out of it that the damage they cause to clear thinking is untold. (Giving these specimens less of the benefit of the doubt, the criticisms are most likely politically-motivated. Truly pathetic, reprehensible, discreditable, etc.) I understand why some people have reservations about bringing children into a world such as it is today - especially if that involves sending tens of thousands of dollars a year for four years to centers of higher learning where these spiritual butchers perform intellectual lobotomies and churn out the sort of cynical, anti-capitalism, anti-America, nihilistic little shits - little copies of themselves - that you find on such places as reddit.com and DailyKos. (Just observe a typical discussion thread about Ayn Rand in such environments. These "liberally-educated" little shits are so pathetically ignorant, bigoted, and cognitively stunted that it serves as indisputable proof they've been conditioned to think like shit. Come the Revolution, most everyone will find this phenomenon as eye-opening and horrifying as I do. Fucking Comprachicos! Sonsabitches! You'll all be cheering these sentiments in time, mark my words.)
Did I mention that Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the most important philosophical work of the 20th century? It sure beats the hell out of Rawls's A Theory of Justice. For proof, check out Rand's reduction of the concept "justice" in ITOE, then compare to the floating, hierarchy-disregarding mess that is Rawls's book.
And, hell, it was only an introduction. It could hardly compare to spending thousands of hours in conversation with Mrs. Logic herself - experiences which have blown away all those who came into close contact with her.* Even as academically-trained "mainstream" philosophers go, just check out the testimony from John Hospers about his extensive interaction with Rand. Blown. Away. He'll tell you all about Rand's unparalleled ability to reduce issues to their essentials - i.e., to apply the Rule of Fundamentality to any question.
Just RTFM and learn a thing or two, people. Start with the essays at ARI linked above and pay careful attention as you read, so as to get a clue as to what she is accomplishing in such a short space. The terms and concepts involved all have objectively-defined roots and interconnections within the cognitive hierarchy. Check out the online Ayn Rand Lexicon, or my list of essential writings. Repeat as necessary.
(* - The testimonies are much like those about Stanley Kubrick. Among famous 20th-century figures, Kubrick's thought processes resemble Rand's more closely than any others I know of. He was not only a libertarian [A Clockwork Orange] and a eudaemonist [2001], his basic method was holistic, reality-based integration of all relevant and essential elements; he was, in short, a perfectionist.)
Take such examples of hard-hitting writing as "The Objectivist Ethics," "Man's Rights," and "The Nature of Government," all available at the ARI website. There is nothing inessential; the presentation is compact; they say all they need to say for their purposes, no more and no less.
Rand's unique ability to essentialize philosophical principles in compact, popularly-accessible, commonsensical, unit-economizing form is - get this! - the basis on which the academic snobs dismiss Rand as "simplistic," "shallow," "unsophisticated," "demagogic," etc. I don't know what more you need to know about the academic culture in the Humanities, when a genuine intellectual virtue is invoked as a basis for dismissal. The sources of such criticism are so clueless and so out of it that the damage they cause to clear thinking is untold. (Giving these specimens less of the benefit of the doubt, the criticisms are most likely politically-motivated. Truly pathetic, reprehensible, discreditable, etc.) I understand why some people have reservations about bringing children into a world such as it is today - especially if that involves sending tens of thousands of dollars a year for four years to centers of higher learning where these spiritual butchers perform intellectual lobotomies and churn out the sort of cynical, anti-capitalism, anti-America, nihilistic little shits - little copies of themselves - that you find on such places as reddit.com and DailyKos. (Just observe a typical discussion thread about Ayn Rand in such environments. These "liberally-educated" little shits are so pathetically ignorant, bigoted, and cognitively stunted that it serves as indisputable proof they've been conditioned to think like shit. Come the Revolution, most everyone will find this phenomenon as eye-opening and horrifying as I do. Fucking Comprachicos! Sonsabitches! You'll all be cheering these sentiments in time, mark my words.)
Did I mention that Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the most important philosophical work of the 20th century? It sure beats the hell out of Rawls's A Theory of Justice. For proof, check out Rand's reduction of the concept "justice" in ITOE, then compare to the floating, hierarchy-disregarding mess that is Rawls's book.
And, hell, it was only an introduction. It could hardly compare to spending thousands of hours in conversation with Mrs. Logic herself - experiences which have blown away all those who came into close contact with her.* Even as academically-trained "mainstream" philosophers go, just check out the testimony from John Hospers about his extensive interaction with Rand. Blown. Away. He'll tell you all about Rand's unparalleled ability to reduce issues to their essentials - i.e., to apply the Rule of Fundamentality to any question.
Just RTFM and learn a thing or two, people. Start with the essays at ARI linked above and pay careful attention as you read, so as to get a clue as to what she is accomplishing in such a short space. The terms and concepts involved all have objectively-defined roots and interconnections within the cognitive hierarchy. Check out the online Ayn Rand Lexicon, or my list of essential writings. Repeat as necessary.
(* - The testimonies are much like those about Stanley Kubrick. Among famous 20th-century figures, Kubrick's thought processes resemble Rand's more closely than any others I know of. He was not only a libertarian [A Clockwork Orange] and a eudaemonist [2001], his basic method was holistic, reality-based integration of all relevant and essential elements; he was, in short, a perfectionist.)
Leonard Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism: Indispensable
Any quality education in Objectivism includes Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism (1983) lecture course. For anyone who listens to the course with functioning ears, Objectivism emerges as the most formidable philosophical system yet conceived.*
One of the basic functions of Peikoff's later (post-1970s) lecture courses is to teach people methods of thinking (i.e., the how as distinguished from the what) about Objectivism as well as about any other subject. The essential core of Objectivist method - a responsible (context-appropriate) approach to checking premises - makes Objectivism itself essentially impervious to refutation. Like induction itself, you couldn't even attempt to refute it without implicitly accept and affirming it. Induction is the essence of rational, reality-oriented thought; Rand identified basic principles of inductive reasoning - the most notable achievement being her theory of concepts - and those basic principles are the very basic principles of Objectivism itself. Objectivism is the method of induction applied to the fundamental issues of man and his relationship to existence.
(I'll also note that Rand had the most perfectionistic thought processes for a philosopher since Aristotle. Same basic idea: check premises responsibly, spiral progression of knowledge, respecting the hierarchy of knowledge, etc. As perfectionism is essentially related to virtue in ethics, so it is in epistemology; Rand's definition of intellectual virtue is her way of establishing a Virtue Epistemology. [Hell, is there any other kind of sound epistemology?] The academic mainstream is, like, totally in the dark on this stuff - and why is that?)
The semi-prohibitive thing when it comes to Peikoff's courses is cost. Many of his courses are in excess of $200 or $300. Fortunately, there is a discount for an internet-only edition of Understanding Objectivism, bringing the cost to a mere $150. Essential preconditions for listener preparedness would be familiarity with the basic literature of Objectivism, including most emphatically Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Also, while Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, or OPAR (1991), came out after Understanding Objectivism, it also is of immense preparatory help, since it is based on the earlier 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course endorsed by Rand.
Cognitive clarity and efficiency are central aspects of successful functioning in life; in that regard, $150 is a drop in the bucket. Familiarity with this course also makes for a good head start as our culture moves in the Randian direction in the coming years. If you have the additional money, Peikoff's advanced seminars on OPAR are the next step.
In the Utopia I envision for humanity's not-too-distant future, familiarity with Peikoff's courses or something of comparable caliber would be an essential qualification for university professors - hell, all university professors, and not just those in the Humanities. There's really no excuse for educators and intellectuals not to be familiar with this stuff. No fucking excuse at all. Their minds might well be blown at just how insidiously, damagingly rationalistic (or emotionalistic, or otherwise dysfunctional) their thought processes were all along. Then they, too, will thank Rand for showing them the way.
The future enlightenment of humanity depends on it.
(* - Widespread exposure to Peikoff's audio courses would work quite nicely in conjunction with my $6 billion plan to fix America.)
One of the basic functions of Peikoff's later (post-1970s) lecture courses is to teach people methods of thinking (i.e., the how as distinguished from the what) about Objectivism as well as about any other subject. The essential core of Objectivist method - a responsible (context-appropriate) approach to checking premises - makes Objectivism itself essentially impervious to refutation. Like induction itself, you couldn't even attempt to refute it without implicitly accept and affirming it. Induction is the essence of rational, reality-oriented thought; Rand identified basic principles of inductive reasoning - the most notable achievement being her theory of concepts - and those basic principles are the very basic principles of Objectivism itself. Objectivism is the method of induction applied to the fundamental issues of man and his relationship to existence.
(I'll also note that Rand had the most perfectionistic thought processes for a philosopher since Aristotle. Same basic idea: check premises responsibly, spiral progression of knowledge, respecting the hierarchy of knowledge, etc. As perfectionism is essentially related to virtue in ethics, so it is in epistemology; Rand's definition of intellectual virtue is her way of establishing a Virtue Epistemology. [Hell, is there any other kind of sound epistemology?] The academic mainstream is, like, totally in the dark on this stuff - and why is that?)
The semi-prohibitive thing when it comes to Peikoff's courses is cost. Many of his courses are in excess of $200 or $300. Fortunately, there is a discount for an internet-only edition of Understanding Objectivism, bringing the cost to a mere $150. Essential preconditions for listener preparedness would be familiarity with the basic literature of Objectivism, including most emphatically Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Also, while Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, or OPAR (1991), came out after Understanding Objectivism, it also is of immense preparatory help, since it is based on the earlier 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course endorsed by Rand.
Cognitive clarity and efficiency are central aspects of successful functioning in life; in that regard, $150 is a drop in the bucket. Familiarity with this course also makes for a good head start as our culture moves in the Randian direction in the coming years. If you have the additional money, Peikoff's advanced seminars on OPAR are the next step.
In the Utopia I envision for humanity's not-too-distant future, familiarity with Peikoff's courses or something of comparable caliber would be an essential qualification for university professors - hell, all university professors, and not just those in the Humanities. There's really no excuse for educators and intellectuals not to be familiar with this stuff. No fucking excuse at all. Their minds might well be blown at just how insidiously, damagingly rationalistic (or emotionalistic, or otherwise dysfunctional) their thought processes were all along. Then they, too, will thank Rand for showing them the way.
The future enlightenment of humanity depends on it.
(* - Widespread exposure to Peikoff's audio courses would work quite nicely in conjunction with my $6 billion plan to fix America.)
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Platonic Realism vs. Science, Evolution, Etc.
Question: How badly does Platonic Realism interfere with science, secularism, evolutionary biology, etc.?
The scientistic response to Platonic Realism (PR) is that it violates scientific principles - empirical observability and verifiability (I'll leave "falsifiability" aside for now), testability, explanatory power, and other related concepts.
It's safe to say that PR is anti-scientific because it violates a central principle of cognition as such: induction. A fully philosophically-worked-out theory of induction wasn't made possible until the 20th century; that theory itself, of course, would have to be inductively-based. Induction is axiomatic-level; to try to deny it is to reaffirm it. Plato's Realism by its very nature is not inductively-based, but pure floating abstraction in the most applicable and fitting sense. By consequence it has no explanatory power (philosophically, this irresolvable problem is stated in such terms as "problem of partaking," a nice precursor to Cartesian "mind-body problem" given the basic principle involved: the commonsense-impossible "interaction" between the supernatural and the natural). By being an intrinsically floating theory, it cannot be reduced to the perceptual, hence the reason there is no testability, observability, or verifiability.
The question that initially occurred to me in the context of this thread was whether PR is empirically false given the established theory of evolution. The question came to mind because in evolution there are no Eternal Forms, but always transitional forms, and that the form of Man (in scientific terms: human DNA) was not actualized until some point in time, which means the form of Man is contingent, finite, etc. I'm guessing - without having given the matter much thought at all yet - that there is a proposed workaround of some sort to shelter PR from this particular refutation. After all, we might simply say that it is arbitrary, referencing beings entirely beyond the realm of the empirical, making it empirically unverifiable as well as unfalsifiable.
And adept advocate of PR might say that its not being "empirical" is not a philosophical problem, and that philosophy needn't be beholden to science (rather than vice versa). But the more adept philosopher than that, will say that PR is nonetheless arbtirary and fails to be inductive.
Aristotle is in a weird limbo-area on all this. His philosophical method was admirably inductive, but he was still limited by his own variant of Plato's Realism, also known as Moderate Realism. The first, first question I asked myself in the context of this thread was, "What was holding Aristotle back from positing what Darwin did over 2,000 years later? Was he lacking in the relevant empirical observations?" (I'll note here that Ayn Rand did not given an opinion on the theory of evolution when the subject came up. My best guess is that she did not regard herself as someone in a position - such as that of a biologist - to render a verdict on the matter. However, biology was one of Aristotle's chief areas of focus.) The supposed positing of the seed of evolutionary theory would be based on a straightforward observation of similarity between man and very similar animals - it might well have to involve higher primates. But if Form is thought to be eternal and unchanging, then the very notion of humans and other primates having a common ancestor might not even occur.
I'll just note in passing that PR as well as Moderate (Aristotelian-Thomistic) Realism is all-too-convenient cover for creationist views about our origins. Indeed, the notion of there being such a thing as Eternal Form, absent a Creator, is weird, to say the least, and probably incoherent. Aquinas performed a most understandable integration in his context. Let not this inference stand in place of the other (cosmological and ontological) arguments for God's existence, however.
The very problems stated here are the main reason scientists have basically cast off philosophy as useless to their field. Post-Aquinas and the Scholastics - with Bacon and others - modern science, called "natural philosophy" at the time, took on its own form independent of philosophy. At the same time, it has also had remarkable practical success - way more success than the humanities have had, in the meantime. (The Humanities are so screwed up that there may well have been regression since that time.) Some (understandably ignorant) scientists have used this track record of comparative progress as a victory cry for science and a reason to dismiss philosophy.
Here's what happened with the development of science: Well, first, there was Aquinas bringing Aristotle back into the fold, bringing with him a revival of this-worldly concerns. This led to the Renaissance and to the scientific revolution. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, however, would have been of limited use, at best, in formulating the basic methods of the natural sciences. Now, simply as a matter of practical necessity, rational principles of natural philosophy had to be discovered and formulated - and they were. The basic methodological principle? Induction.
Induction is the basic method of learning and cognition. It involves a painstaking process of organizing sensory observations into a coherent generalizable whole, in which later observations and theories build upon the earlier ones. Einstein, for instance, had the same knowledge-base Newton had to work with, and then some. So in some important, crucial and relevant sense, Einstein's theories did not contradict Newton's. Newton wasn't all of a sudden overturned and repudiated; Newton was working from a more limited base of knowledge, is all.
This point might not matter much to the practical scientist - their working methods get results, and that's mainly what matters to them - but it does indicate a proper epistemological approach. Theories can turn out to be wrong; observations cannot; the role of epistemology is to determine what conclusions and theories are warranted given the knowledge-base, such that later conclusions do not contradict earlier ones. (Philosophy's role is to explain in underlying terms how it is that induction is practical; it has something to do with these things called identity and causation, concepts pretty darn well undermined by Pragmatism and plenty other bastardizations of inductivist method to come out of analytic philosophy in the last century-plus. Thanks a lot, Kant.)
The reason that science made leaps and bounds over philosophy in the last few hundred years is that science was based on induction, while philosophy was not. Philosophy, at the hands of Descartes and the rest, floundered; these thinkers failed to identify at root the principles of induction as applied to all areas, including philosophy itself. Their basic anti-inductive psycho-epistemological paradigm, emulated en masse by philosophers to this very day? Rationalism. (And a heaping dose of social metaphysics thrown in for good measure.) That paradigm, however, is about to change, thank Rand.
(Note: I write this without yet having read Harriman's The Logical Leap.)
The scientistic response to Platonic Realism (PR) is that it violates scientific principles - empirical observability and verifiability (I'll leave "falsifiability" aside for now), testability, explanatory power, and other related concepts.
It's safe to say that PR is anti-scientific because it violates a central principle of cognition as such: induction. A fully philosophically-worked-out theory of induction wasn't made possible until the 20th century; that theory itself, of course, would have to be inductively-based. Induction is axiomatic-level; to try to deny it is to reaffirm it. Plato's Realism by its very nature is not inductively-based, but pure floating abstraction in the most applicable and fitting sense. By consequence it has no explanatory power (philosophically, this irresolvable problem is stated in such terms as "problem of partaking," a nice precursor to Cartesian "mind-body problem" given the basic principle involved: the commonsense-impossible "interaction" between the supernatural and the natural). By being an intrinsically floating theory, it cannot be reduced to the perceptual, hence the reason there is no testability, observability, or verifiability.
The question that initially occurred to me in the context of this thread was whether PR is empirically false given the established theory of evolution. The question came to mind because in evolution there are no Eternal Forms, but always transitional forms, and that the form of Man (in scientific terms: human DNA) was not actualized until some point in time, which means the form of Man is contingent, finite, etc. I'm guessing - without having given the matter much thought at all yet - that there is a proposed workaround of some sort to shelter PR from this particular refutation. After all, we might simply say that it is arbitrary, referencing beings entirely beyond the realm of the empirical, making it empirically unverifiable as well as unfalsifiable.
And adept advocate of PR might say that its not being "empirical" is not a philosophical problem, and that philosophy needn't be beholden to science (rather than vice versa). But the more adept philosopher than that, will say that PR is nonetheless arbtirary and fails to be inductive.
Aristotle is in a weird limbo-area on all this. His philosophical method was admirably inductive, but he was still limited by his own variant of Plato's Realism, also known as Moderate Realism. The first, first question I asked myself in the context of this thread was, "What was holding Aristotle back from positing what Darwin did over 2,000 years later? Was he lacking in the relevant empirical observations?" (I'll note here that Ayn Rand did not given an opinion on the theory of evolution when the subject came up. My best guess is that she did not regard herself as someone in a position - such as that of a biologist - to render a verdict on the matter. However, biology was one of Aristotle's chief areas of focus.) The supposed positing of the seed of evolutionary theory would be based on a straightforward observation of similarity between man and very similar animals - it might well have to involve higher primates. But if Form is thought to be eternal and unchanging, then the very notion of humans and other primates having a common ancestor might not even occur.
I'll just note in passing that PR as well as Moderate (Aristotelian-Thomistic) Realism is all-too-convenient cover for creationist views about our origins. Indeed, the notion of there being such a thing as Eternal Form, absent a Creator, is weird, to say the least, and probably incoherent. Aquinas performed a most understandable integration in his context. Let not this inference stand in place of the other (cosmological and ontological) arguments for God's existence, however.
The very problems stated here are the main reason scientists have basically cast off philosophy as useless to their field. Post-Aquinas and the Scholastics - with Bacon and others - modern science, called "natural philosophy" at the time, took on its own form independent of philosophy. At the same time, it has also had remarkable practical success - way more success than the humanities have had, in the meantime. (The Humanities are so screwed up that there may well have been regression since that time.) Some (understandably ignorant) scientists have used this track record of comparative progress as a victory cry for science and a reason to dismiss philosophy.
Here's what happened with the development of science: Well, first, there was Aquinas bringing Aristotle back into the fold, bringing with him a revival of this-worldly concerns. This led to the Renaissance and to the scientific revolution. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, however, would have been of limited use, at best, in formulating the basic methods of the natural sciences. Now, simply as a matter of practical necessity, rational principles of natural philosophy had to be discovered and formulated - and they were. The basic methodological principle? Induction.
Induction is the basic method of learning and cognition. It involves a painstaking process of organizing sensory observations into a coherent generalizable whole, in which later observations and theories build upon the earlier ones. Einstein, for instance, had the same knowledge-base Newton had to work with, and then some. So in some important, crucial and relevant sense, Einstein's theories did not contradict Newton's. Newton wasn't all of a sudden overturned and repudiated; Newton was working from a more limited base of knowledge, is all.
This point might not matter much to the practical scientist - their working methods get results, and that's mainly what matters to them - but it does indicate a proper epistemological approach. Theories can turn out to be wrong; observations cannot; the role of epistemology is to determine what conclusions and theories are warranted given the knowledge-base, such that later conclusions do not contradict earlier ones. (Philosophy's role is to explain in underlying terms how it is that induction is practical; it has something to do with these things called identity and causation, concepts pretty darn well undermined by Pragmatism and plenty other bastardizations of inductivist method to come out of analytic philosophy in the last century-plus. Thanks a lot, Kant.)
The reason that science made leaps and bounds over philosophy in the last few hundred years is that science was based on induction, while philosophy was not. Philosophy, at the hands of Descartes and the rest, floundered; these thinkers failed to identify at root the principles of induction as applied to all areas, including philosophy itself. Their basic anti-inductive psycho-epistemological paradigm, emulated en masse by philosophers to this very day? Rationalism. (And a heaping dose of social metaphysics thrown in for good measure.) That paradigm, however, is about to change, thank Rand.
(Note: I write this without yet having read Harriman's The Logical Leap.)
Obama: Weak
The tax cut extension was a good idea, but Obama's rationale and rhetoric are quite telling. No one forced his hand on this, but he caved on his campaign pledges and (ridiculously) likened the GOP leadership to hostage-takers with whom he wouldn't negotiate . . . unless . . . always an "unless" with this guy . . . unless refusing to negotiate would bring harm to the hostage.
Great. Wonderful way to telegraph weakness to the Terrorists, innit?
[ADDENDUM: I guess strength in the Obama paradigm, when it comes to the Terrorists, is to continue the Cheney-era lawbreaking. If he wants to equate strength with cheating - this is what our political system today has come to, isn't it - he should just say so.]
[ADDENDUM #2: Ever the Machiavellian mentality, Obama played politics on these tax cut extensions. He waited for the November election returns before deciding on the issue. In the 2008 primaries, he told his left-wing DailyKos/reddit/ThinkProgress/Soros base what it wanted to hear, and now he screws them over. All the while, Obama's Machiavellianism seems to go over really well on the increasingly boring, short-term-oriented, small-fry-focused Daily Dish - an insidious effect of adopting a Hayekian over a Randian paradigm. WEAK!]
Great. Wonderful way to telegraph weakness to the Terrorists, innit?
[ADDENDUM: I guess strength in the Obama paradigm, when it comes to the Terrorists, is to continue the Cheney-era lawbreaking. If he wants to equate strength with cheating - this is what our political system today has come to, isn't it - he should just say so.]
[ADDENDUM #2: Ever the Machiavellian mentality, Obama played politics on these tax cut extensions. He waited for the November election returns before deciding on the issue. In the 2008 primaries, he told his left-wing DailyKos/reddit/ThinkProgress/Soros base what it wanted to hear, and now he screws them over. All the while, Obama's Machiavellianism seems to go over really well on the increasingly boring, short-term-oriented, small-fry-focused Daily Dish - an insidious effect of adopting a Hayekian over a Randian paradigm. WEAK!]
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Sunday worship, 12/5/2010
"It is a philistinic culture that does not appreciate the genius of Kayo Dot."
- The Ultimate Philosopher
- The Ultimate Philosopher
Friday, December 3, 2010
The Singularity Already Happened?
Once in a while, the Daily Dish has an especially interesting link. This one makes a case that the Singularity has already happened.
Oddly/interestingly enough, the 19th century on through right around WWI is that Golden Age in human history Miss Rand waxed so poetically about. Hell, come the early 1900s, the USA may well have been on the verge of utopia. Then, the assholes took over. I'm speaking, of course, of "progressive" pragmatists who had no answer to, or embraced, the fucking socialists (who'd already been chewed up and spit out by Mises, but his book was in German and so the readership was limited for a time). Having no answer to socialism, and facing economic crises, pragmatic experimentation with the American people's liberties set in. The results have been - seeing as the consequence has been a mixed economy (the legacy of pragmatism) - shall we say, mixed.
Just imagine extrapolating the 19th century onward. Where would we be now? Economic analysis - the competent capitalist stuff, not the incompetent or dishonest socialist stuff, or the pathologically-agnostic pragmatist stuff - says that we'd be way richer by now. One academic-style myth we should do away with, is this idea that human history is evolving toward something not all that capitalistic but rather some hybrid of capitalism and government controls. That myth is a legacy of pragmatism, which has this pathological tendency towards mixing, compromising, and reconciling. (When pragmatism dispenses with an accessible, stable, underlying causal reality and settles for "overlapping consensus" and other such buzzwords, the only result is a mixing of what's true and what's not true.) But let's just envision a world in which 40 percent of the country's resources aren't directed by fucking politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, and the rest of the pro-forced-stagnation crowd.
Now, it's a completely dishonest Marxist myth that prior to Big Government, America was having it pretty bad. One need only look at the progression between the Declaration of Independence to Henry Ford's assembly line to see the improvements for all classes of economic actors. What this says is that we shouldn't let the fucking Marxists dictate history to the rest of us - which is exactly what happened when those fucking Marxists took over the History (and other) departments. That has cost us decades of progress. So much for the "progressive," i.e., pragmatist-liberal, strategy of embracing A (freedom) and not-A (socialism) at the same time.
Now, my thesis is that the Singularity has begun, and that it began here. I have advertised this very blog as your headquarters for the Singularity. So what's all this stuff about a past Singularity? First off, Ray Kurzweil's concept of the Singularity centers around technology - and it's rather evident that we are headed into a true space-age of technology in the coming decades. I don't think it's relevant that this coming space-age is only a continuation of trends we've already had; the fact is that the past trends produced major technological advancement that had not reached the space-age tipping point that Kurzweil is talking about. What Kurzweil is talking about is such an advance over what we've seen already - given a geometric progression - that we can hardly imagine what humanity would look like a few generations from now.
So what's this business about the Singularity beginning here? Well, tying back into the 19th-century growth period, we have a record of the awesome success of the capitalistic system. The "new" Singularity is a return to that model. But going back to that model would merely be a consequence of a more fundamental underlying cause: a philosophical revolution. Kurzweil's prediction concerns technology; my conception of the Singularity is more all-encompassing and fundamentals-oriented than that. What we are looking at is an intellectual revolution.
We've had intellectual revolutions before, but not of the kind I'm talking about. Kant, for instance, initiated an intellectual revolution. Christianity represented an intellectual revolution. Marxism represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas (i.e., Aristotle) represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas aside, these revolutions were a false start, a fuck-up, a diversion, a regression, what have you. (Absolutely I consider the Christian era until Aquinas a regression compared to the ancient Greek era. I'd go so far as to say that because of the horrendous psycho-epistemology involved - the astonishing levels of denigration of the intellect - the West suffered roughly 1,500 lost years. Of course, with the denigration of this-worldly concerns involved, these Lost Years don't and shouldn't really matter to the medievalist mystics. Nice going, anti-reason assholes!) Now, with the help of Ayn Rand's philosophy - namely her theory of concepts and general methodology - we finally have a chance to get it right.
We are now at a tipping point, intellectually. We are now finally on the verge of getting our epistemological house in order. We are finally at a point, given our historical progression of fits and starts, of reaching intellectual maturity. Kurzweil's conception of the Singularity is one of technological maturity. Technology, however, is deadly in the hands of those empowered by a deadly worldview. With the intellectual maturity, we also get a moral maturity.
Given the history of human evolution, consider humanity's intellectual and moral maturation a matter of moving beyond a lesser stage of development or maturation. Religion is like the product of a child-level epistemology, one of dependence on authority, before a more critical or questioning stage comes about. That critical or questioning stage - analogous to adolescence in an individual - began some 2,500 years ago with the advent of Philosophy. The child-epistemology religion-attachment stays around during this period until the conflict is worked out; that working out is the onset or maturation or adulthood. (David L. Norton refers to the stage of maturation in an individual as eudaimonia.) The course of history, all the way from the primordial ooze up through the present day, is ample demonstration of this development.
I mean, isn't it obvious once you think about it?
The only issue now is how much ultimately-futile opposition, denial, sneering, fear-mongering, etc. is going to get in the way of this progress toward full maturation.
Oddly/interestingly enough, the 19th century on through right around WWI is that Golden Age in human history Miss Rand waxed so poetically about. Hell, come the early 1900s, the USA may well have been on the verge of utopia. Then, the assholes took over. I'm speaking, of course, of "progressive" pragmatists who had no answer to, or embraced, the fucking socialists (who'd already been chewed up and spit out by Mises, but his book was in German and so the readership was limited for a time). Having no answer to socialism, and facing economic crises, pragmatic experimentation with the American people's liberties set in. The results have been - seeing as the consequence has been a mixed economy (the legacy of pragmatism) - shall we say, mixed.
Just imagine extrapolating the 19th century onward. Where would we be now? Economic analysis - the competent capitalist stuff, not the incompetent or dishonest socialist stuff, or the pathologically-agnostic pragmatist stuff - says that we'd be way richer by now. One academic-style myth we should do away with, is this idea that human history is evolving toward something not all that capitalistic but rather some hybrid of capitalism and government controls. That myth is a legacy of pragmatism, which has this pathological tendency towards mixing, compromising, and reconciling. (When pragmatism dispenses with an accessible, stable, underlying causal reality and settles for "overlapping consensus" and other such buzzwords, the only result is a mixing of what's true and what's not true.) But let's just envision a world in which 40 percent of the country's resources aren't directed by fucking politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, and the rest of the pro-forced-stagnation crowd.
Now, it's a completely dishonest Marxist myth that prior to Big Government, America was having it pretty bad. One need only look at the progression between the Declaration of Independence to Henry Ford's assembly line to see the improvements for all classes of economic actors. What this says is that we shouldn't let the fucking Marxists dictate history to the rest of us - which is exactly what happened when those fucking Marxists took over the History (and other) departments. That has cost us decades of progress. So much for the "progressive," i.e., pragmatist-liberal, strategy of embracing A (freedom) and not-A (socialism) at the same time.
Now, my thesis is that the Singularity has begun, and that it began here. I have advertised this very blog as your headquarters for the Singularity. So what's all this stuff about a past Singularity? First off, Ray Kurzweil's concept of the Singularity centers around technology - and it's rather evident that we are headed into a true space-age of technology in the coming decades. I don't think it's relevant that this coming space-age is only a continuation of trends we've already had; the fact is that the past trends produced major technological advancement that had not reached the space-age tipping point that Kurzweil is talking about. What Kurzweil is talking about is such an advance over what we've seen already - given a geometric progression - that we can hardly imagine what humanity would look like a few generations from now.
So what's this business about the Singularity beginning here? Well, tying back into the 19th-century growth period, we have a record of the awesome success of the capitalistic system. The "new" Singularity is a return to that model. But going back to that model would merely be a consequence of a more fundamental underlying cause: a philosophical revolution. Kurzweil's prediction concerns technology; my conception of the Singularity is more all-encompassing and fundamentals-oriented than that. What we are looking at is an intellectual revolution.
We've had intellectual revolutions before, but not of the kind I'm talking about. Kant, for instance, initiated an intellectual revolution. Christianity represented an intellectual revolution. Marxism represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas (i.e., Aristotle) represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas aside, these revolutions were a false start, a fuck-up, a diversion, a regression, what have you. (Absolutely I consider the Christian era until Aquinas a regression compared to the ancient Greek era. I'd go so far as to say that because of the horrendous psycho-epistemology involved - the astonishing levels of denigration of the intellect - the West suffered roughly 1,500 lost years. Of course, with the denigration of this-worldly concerns involved, these Lost Years don't and shouldn't really matter to the medievalist mystics. Nice going, anti-reason assholes!) Now, with the help of Ayn Rand's philosophy - namely her theory of concepts and general methodology - we finally have a chance to get it right.
We are now at a tipping point, intellectually. We are now finally on the verge of getting our epistemological house in order. We are finally at a point, given our historical progression of fits and starts, of reaching intellectual maturity. Kurzweil's conception of the Singularity is one of technological maturity. Technology, however, is deadly in the hands of those empowered by a deadly worldview. With the intellectual maturity, we also get a moral maturity.
Given the history of human evolution, consider humanity's intellectual and moral maturation a matter of moving beyond a lesser stage of development or maturation. Religion is like the product of a child-level epistemology, one of dependence on authority, before a more critical or questioning stage comes about. That critical or questioning stage - analogous to adolescence in an individual - began some 2,500 years ago with the advent of Philosophy. The child-epistemology religion-attachment stays around during this period until the conflict is worked out; that working out is the onset or maturation or adulthood. (David L. Norton refers to the stage of maturation in an individual as eudaimonia.) The course of history, all the way from the primordial ooze up through the present day, is ample demonstration of this development.
I mean, isn't it obvious once you think about it?
The only issue now is how much ultimately-futile opposition, denial, sneering, fear-mongering, etc. is going to get in the way of this progress toward full maturation.
Conservatism vs. Liberty
I was provided these links in an email:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/018060.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017938.html
The sender said, "You rarely comment on the Conservative critiques of Rand. You focus more on the Leftist ones which is understandable. I was curious what you think of these arguments."
I'm the sort of "intellectual elitist" that is so disgusted with the Right as an (anti-)intellectual phenomenon, that I rarely expect to see much of any merit from those quarters. I figure that if the "conservatives" would crawl out of their intellectual cave, they'd stop being conservatives and be Jeffersonian or classical liberals instead. (I don't mind the term "libertarian" personally, but there's an awesome amount of baggage with that term when used in or around Objectivist circles. Rand's policy was to put the term in "scare quotes," indicating that she regarded it as an anti-concept - not at all surprising with terms applied in a political context. Me, I just take the term in its ordinary connotation and conclude that it's a matter of plain common sense to be a libertarian.) As it is, the history of the "conservative" movement starting with William F. Buckley is a disgrace to rational values. Buckley's monstrously incompetent treatment of Rand sets the tone. There's also that pesky matter of how religion of the sort embraced by Rightists is downright fucking toxic to rational values.
Once in a while, though, we get something resembling a carefully-reasoned critique of Jeffersonian-liberal values. Perhaps the most advanced critique goes under the heading of "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism." The above-provided links are a variant on the basic theme.
First, I'd like to point out the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on the subject of physical force, this excerpt in particular:
Now, to quote the last two paragraphs of the first link:
First, this part about everything being permitted if there is no God is intellectually disreputable and automatically creates suspicion about the author's intellectual caliber. The Euthyphro Dilemma suffices to show what's wrong with a divine-command basis for ethics. So already we have a fundamentally mistaken context informing this rationale for force - a faulty metaphysics, epistemology and meta-ethics. One can only guess how corrosive the effects of such a context will be in any particular case, but once you do go into flights of epistemological fancy on matters such as the basis of morality, who knows where the epistemological flights of fancy might pop up next.
(This is just one example of why conservatives have such a low reputation amongst philosophers.)
Anyway, putting aside the fucked-up underlying context, we have a seemingly serious criticism of the liberal ethos; it's nothing new, however. It's a reiteration of a standard Communitarian critique of liberalism that's been going through academia since the '70s, in response first and foremost to John Rawls's theory of justice. Now, readers of my blog might remember the time I slammed Rawls for his lack of respect for philosophical hierarchy - namely, how there's no deeper structure to his political philosophy. Rawls more than readily plays right into that criticism in such later essays as "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical." (Rand would just flip out if she heard of that title, wouldn't she?) The Communitarian criticism coincides with a rise in Virtue Ethics in the past few decades. An ethics of virtue would constitute part of the deeper structure but Rawls doesn't view virtue as being the concern of politics. (This is only slightly weird given that justice itself is a virtue. But Rawls's first statement about justice is that it's the first virtue of social institutions - consistent with his regarding justice as a political-level concern.)
Now, is virtue a concern of politics? Does it have any role at all in determining the basic social structure of socio-political liberalism? The relation between morality proper and politics is not an easy one to explain in a very brief space; for a lengthier treatment there is my article "Egoism and Rights". The gist of the relation is that man requires the use of reason to live qua man. Reason is a volitional capacity and does not operate under coercion. Under coercion you aren't the author of your actions; you've been effectively deprived of moral agency. To subject a reason-having being to force is, to that extent, to treat them not as a reason-having being, and to attempt to force the person into "good" is a contradiction for the reasons Rand explained. For a human being, the good must be chosen. (Think about the moral conscience of A Clockwork Orange.)
Now, one place where the conservative proposal to force human beings into virtue fails, is the failure to identify the place of force within the philosophical hierarchy. Why should force ever enter into any moral picture? What, if anything, is the proper use of force? Rand or a Jeffersonian liberal says that it enters the picture at the level of self-defense. Now, just observe the weasel-version of the concept of "self-defense" as used in the conservative pro-force proposal. "Society" would have a vital interest in forcing individuals as a matter of "self-defense." Apparently this is so whether or not we see society as deriving its moral value from the value provided to individuals.
(I take it for granted here that society is not prior to individuals in any morally-relevant sense and that moral directives of any sort derive from the living-requirements of individuals. If we don't even have that context, then the gap between the pro-force view and the individual-liberty view is simply too radical. We're assuming here that the individual-liberty view is being called into question on the grounds that it ultimately undercuts the best interest of individuals.)
The philosophical hierarchy being flouted in this instance concerns the distinction between "social" and "political." Social relationships are not the same as political ones. In the hierarchy of moral justification, sociality precedes political relations. The political relations are those relations formed for the purpose of regulating the use of force. Social relationships as such are not.
So, let's say that someone does non-virtuous things that or to his or her own detriment. Sure enough, this non-virtuous behavior does abuse the goodwill of the people - family, friends, community - who have a rational stake in the person's well-being. But having a rational stake in something doesn't warrant initiating force against someone to obtain or promote the value in question. There are plenty of non-coercive means that family, friends and community can use to deal with the person's self-detrimental behavior. The idea of resorting to force is pathological - perhaps a holdover from olden-times when force was a "natural" part of human life and its evil not recognized or understood.
As for "effects on society" of individual behavior, that's nebulous and could lead to who-knows-what. If we're going to appeal to a commonsensical guide like the common law, on the other hand, we need to establish demonstrable causal relationships between an individual's behavior and injury or damages to an identifiable victim. There had better be a really fucking good reason for restricting someone's freedom of action - and, sorry, "effects on society" doesn't cut it.
I mentioned above the justificatory hierarchy with respect to individuals, society, and polity. In that hierarchy, individuals precede the rest, as it is individual lives that are being acted out by moral agents. As Norton in Personal Destinies shows, ethical priority lies in self-actualization. This means that, even if we come into the world embedded in social relationships and are partly nurtured by those relationships, individuals are ethically prior to society. The common law reflects this individualism in regard to social causes and effects.
For socio-political purposes it is axiomatic that people have the right to live their own lives as they choose. They own their own lives. By what right does a society - a group of people - force a person other than in self-defense?
The second link above provides little over and above the first one, but I want to add that Rand does offer a comprehensive vision of life that the run-of-the-mill libertarians do not. That comprehensive vision - in addition to a socio-political prohibition on the use of initiatory force - endorses an entire ethical system that defines virtuous behavior for individuals, and rests its ethical conclusions on a base of reason, the principles of which are defined by epistemology. If we envision a society based on Randian values, it is a peaceful, prosperous, rational, cooperative, benevolent, humane society - and, by necessary consequence, it is a society that eschews force as a solution to problems. If you respect reason at its root - and that means preserving hierarchy and rejecting false justifications for morality (e.g., God) - and are consistent in that respect for reason, it follows quite naturally and common-sensibly that you would reject the use of force against reason-having beings. This stuff really is a no-brainer.
The criticism that a libertarian social order is devoid of a deeper structure which helps to preserve the societal structure and unite people under common values, simply doesn't apply to thinkers like Rand. She would - and did - make the argument that you can't have a societal structure of lasting liberty without a deeper structure of reason.
To sum up:
The only rightful purpose of government is the defense and preservation of freedom.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/018060.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017938.html
The sender said, "You rarely comment on the Conservative critiques of Rand. You focus more on the Leftist ones which is understandable. I was curious what you think of these arguments."
I'm the sort of "intellectual elitist" that is so disgusted with the Right as an (anti-)intellectual phenomenon, that I rarely expect to see much of any merit from those quarters. I figure that if the "conservatives" would crawl out of their intellectual cave, they'd stop being conservatives and be Jeffersonian or classical liberals instead. (I don't mind the term "libertarian" personally, but there's an awesome amount of baggage with that term when used in or around Objectivist circles. Rand's policy was to put the term in "scare quotes," indicating that she regarded it as an anti-concept - not at all surprising with terms applied in a political context. Me, I just take the term in its ordinary connotation and conclude that it's a matter of plain common sense to be a libertarian.) As it is, the history of the "conservative" movement starting with William F. Buckley is a disgrace to rational values. Buckley's monstrously incompetent treatment of Rand sets the tone. There's also that pesky matter of how religion of the sort embraced by Rightists is downright fucking toxic to rational values.
Once in a while, though, we get something resembling a carefully-reasoned critique of Jeffersonian-liberal values. Perhaps the most advanced critique goes under the heading of "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism." The above-provided links are a variant on the basic theme.
First, I'd like to point out the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on the subject of physical force, this excerpt in particular:
An attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying man’s capacity to recognize the good, i.e., his capacity to value. Force invalidates and paralyzes a man’s judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one’s mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge.
Now, to quote the last two paragraphs of the first link:
The bottom line: the dictum, "Do whatever you like, so long as you don't hurt anyone else," does not suffice to order a society, because it does not suffice to order an individual life. There is a complex nexus of feedback relations between individual lives and the social order, of which the legal order is an aspect. Individual lives depend upon society, and constitute it. As they go, so it goes; and as it goes, so do they. To say this is no more than to say that if we are to live, we must do so together, and so must order our lives in respect to each other, and to our joint prosperity--not just across space, but across time.
Ordering lives across time, across generations, is the function of tradition. Libertarianism presupposes a vibrant moral tradition, that has informed a people from the bottom up, so that the net result of their unsupervised activities is social harmony, justice, prosperity. Where such a tradition perdures, the libertarian project can perhaps succeed. Where not, not. If you have no tradition, you have no nexus of support for your individual agency, and thus no true freedom to organize your activities toward your own ends. Rather, you have only raw lurching from one dire exigency to the next, with no notion of a fundamental moral order to inform your deliberations. Randian atheism demolishes the ontological basis for morality, and so cannot but destroy moral tradition, thus preventing the option of libertarianism. "If there is no God, then all is permitted"--including force, and fraud.
First, this part about everything being permitted if there is no God is intellectually disreputable and automatically creates suspicion about the author's intellectual caliber. The Euthyphro Dilemma suffices to show what's wrong with a divine-command basis for ethics. So already we have a fundamentally mistaken context informing this rationale for force - a faulty metaphysics, epistemology and meta-ethics. One can only guess how corrosive the effects of such a context will be in any particular case, but once you do go into flights of epistemological fancy on matters such as the basis of morality, who knows where the epistemological flights of fancy might pop up next.
(This is just one example of why conservatives have such a low reputation amongst philosophers.)
Anyway, putting aside the fucked-up underlying context, we have a seemingly serious criticism of the liberal ethos; it's nothing new, however. It's a reiteration of a standard Communitarian critique of liberalism that's been going through academia since the '70s, in response first and foremost to John Rawls's theory of justice. Now, readers of my blog might remember the time I slammed Rawls for his lack of respect for philosophical hierarchy - namely, how there's no deeper structure to his political philosophy. Rawls more than readily plays right into that criticism in such later essays as "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical." (Rand would just flip out if she heard of that title, wouldn't she?) The Communitarian criticism coincides with a rise in Virtue Ethics in the past few decades. An ethics of virtue would constitute part of the deeper structure but Rawls doesn't view virtue as being the concern of politics. (This is only slightly weird given that justice itself is a virtue. But Rawls's first statement about justice is that it's the first virtue of social institutions - consistent with his regarding justice as a political-level concern.)
Now, is virtue a concern of politics? Does it have any role at all in determining the basic social structure of socio-political liberalism? The relation between morality proper and politics is not an easy one to explain in a very brief space; for a lengthier treatment there is my article "Egoism and Rights". The gist of the relation is that man requires the use of reason to live qua man. Reason is a volitional capacity and does not operate under coercion. Under coercion you aren't the author of your actions; you've been effectively deprived of moral agency. To subject a reason-having being to force is, to that extent, to treat them not as a reason-having being, and to attempt to force the person into "good" is a contradiction for the reasons Rand explained. For a human being, the good must be chosen. (Think about the moral conscience of A Clockwork Orange.)
Now, one place where the conservative proposal to force human beings into virtue fails, is the failure to identify the place of force within the philosophical hierarchy. Why should force ever enter into any moral picture? What, if anything, is the proper use of force? Rand or a Jeffersonian liberal says that it enters the picture at the level of self-defense. Now, just observe the weasel-version of the concept of "self-defense" as used in the conservative pro-force proposal. "Society" would have a vital interest in forcing individuals as a matter of "self-defense." Apparently this is so whether or not we see society as deriving its moral value from the value provided to individuals.
(I take it for granted here that society is not prior to individuals in any morally-relevant sense and that moral directives of any sort derive from the living-requirements of individuals. If we don't even have that context, then the gap between the pro-force view and the individual-liberty view is simply too radical. We're assuming here that the individual-liberty view is being called into question on the grounds that it ultimately undercuts the best interest of individuals.)
The philosophical hierarchy being flouted in this instance concerns the distinction between "social" and "political." Social relationships are not the same as political ones. In the hierarchy of moral justification, sociality precedes political relations. The political relations are those relations formed for the purpose of regulating the use of force. Social relationships as such are not.
So, let's say that someone does non-virtuous things that or to his or her own detriment. Sure enough, this non-virtuous behavior does abuse the goodwill of the people - family, friends, community - who have a rational stake in the person's well-being. But having a rational stake in something doesn't warrant initiating force against someone to obtain or promote the value in question. There are plenty of non-coercive means that family, friends and community can use to deal with the person's self-detrimental behavior. The idea of resorting to force is pathological - perhaps a holdover from olden-times when force was a "natural" part of human life and its evil not recognized or understood.
As for "effects on society" of individual behavior, that's nebulous and could lead to who-knows-what. If we're going to appeal to a commonsensical guide like the common law, on the other hand, we need to establish demonstrable causal relationships between an individual's behavior and injury or damages to an identifiable victim. There had better be a really fucking good reason for restricting someone's freedom of action - and, sorry, "effects on society" doesn't cut it.
I mentioned above the justificatory hierarchy with respect to individuals, society, and polity. In that hierarchy, individuals precede the rest, as it is individual lives that are being acted out by moral agents. As Norton in Personal Destinies shows, ethical priority lies in self-actualization. This means that, even if we come into the world embedded in social relationships and are partly nurtured by those relationships, individuals are ethically prior to society. The common law reflects this individualism in regard to social causes and effects.
For socio-political purposes it is axiomatic that people have the right to live their own lives as they choose. They own their own lives. By what right does a society - a group of people - force a person other than in self-defense?
The second link above provides little over and above the first one, but I want to add that Rand does offer a comprehensive vision of life that the run-of-the-mill libertarians do not. That comprehensive vision - in addition to a socio-political prohibition on the use of initiatory force - endorses an entire ethical system that defines virtuous behavior for individuals, and rests its ethical conclusions on a base of reason, the principles of which are defined by epistemology. If we envision a society based on Randian values, it is a peaceful, prosperous, rational, cooperative, benevolent, humane society - and, by necessary consequence, it is a society that eschews force as a solution to problems. If you respect reason at its root - and that means preserving hierarchy and rejecting false justifications for morality (e.g., God) - and are consistent in that respect for reason, it follows quite naturally and common-sensibly that you would reject the use of force against reason-having beings. This stuff really is a no-brainer.
The criticism that a libertarian social order is devoid of a deeper structure which helps to preserve the societal structure and unite people under common values, simply doesn't apply to thinkers like Rand. She would - and did - make the argument that you can't have a societal structure of lasting liberty without a deeper structure of reason.
To sum up:
The only rightful purpose of government is the defense and preservation of freedom.
How Aristotle beats Plato and Kant
On the tail of my last posting, I'd like to take up - briefly, not in detail - the fundamental difference between Aristotle on the one hand and Plato and Kant on the other. In my last posting I made reference to Aristotle's defense of what I termed classical realism.
Classical realism is a basic metaphysical-epistemological principle affirmed by common sense (not the social-metaphysical version of "common sense" that should be dubbed "conventional wisdom" instead - the CW has it that Rand sucks as a philosopher, for instance, even though common sense says she was a dynamo) - namely, that the reality given to us via the senses is an irreducible primary. There's nothing beyond the reality observable by the senses, and no rational justification for thinking that there is. "Reality beyond the sensible" is codeword for intellectual charlatanism and hoodwinking, a boldfaced indulging in the arbitrary.
Reality - ultimate reality if you must - is knowable through the senses and reasoning derived from sensory observation. Aristotle affirmed this. Plato and Kant explicitly deny this.
In other words, only one-third of philosophy's acclaimed Big Three is on the side of the little guy.
If this is a microcosm of the history of western philosophy and its influence, then 2/3 of the supposed reasoning intellectual class has been wasting a hell of a lot of intellectual time and resources, and fostering a hell of a lot of misconceptions.
No wonder mainstream philosophy is such a shithole!
I'd say "this is truly, plainly pathetic" but then you must realize the historical context in which philosophy came about to begin with. First, remember that for some millions of years we were hardly above the level of the monkeys. Then . . . well, think of it like a geometric progression. Philosophy comes only recently in human history; it's hardly even had time to make its mark. But if you think of human evolution in the geometric-progression terms, you're also thinking in terms of progress along all sorts of lines - including philosophy. Even in philosophy, we are moving from a state of lesser wisdom to greater wisdom over the course of 2,500 years. Of course there would be big fuck-ups along the way. Hell, maybe even two out of three major philosophers would fuck up on so basic an issue as classical realism. As that is such a glaring and fundamental fuck-up, perhaps we can say that Plato and Kant were philosophy's two biggest, most influential fuck-ups.
(Note also that religion is a primitive form of philosophy; man in his evolution went through a religious period; then, we've had a philosophical period that has overlapped with the religious one for about the last 2,500 years; the religious period is nearing a close but guess which philosophers' ideas play right into the hands of (anti-realist) religious crowd? Perhaps we might consider these philosophers' metaphysics a remnant or vestige of the religious period, of pre-philosophical anti-realism.)
Aristotle, meanwhile, has only a record of success. The reintroduction of his ideas to the West paved the way for the Renaissance and modern science. The basic methodological orientation on which all rational endeavors such as science are built - induction - originated at the philosophical level with Aristotle (and was perfected with Rand). There's the eudaemonist ethics that is gradually winning over the profession today (some decades after Rand figured this very same thing out and formulated the one true system of "virtue ethics" the profession is more or less blindly groping toward). Everywhere Aristotle pops up, progress ensues.
Classical realism. It's like a basic no-BS litmus test. Aristotle passes. Plato and Kant fail. Simple as that.
Classical realism is a basic metaphysical-epistemological principle affirmed by common sense (not the social-metaphysical version of "common sense" that should be dubbed "conventional wisdom" instead - the CW has it that Rand sucks as a philosopher, for instance, even though common sense says she was a dynamo) - namely, that the reality given to us via the senses is an irreducible primary. There's nothing beyond the reality observable by the senses, and no rational justification for thinking that there is. "Reality beyond the sensible" is codeword for intellectual charlatanism and hoodwinking, a boldfaced indulging in the arbitrary.
Reality - ultimate reality if you must - is knowable through the senses and reasoning derived from sensory observation. Aristotle affirmed this. Plato and Kant explicitly deny this.
In other words, only one-third of philosophy's acclaimed Big Three is on the side of the little guy.
If this is a microcosm of the history of western philosophy and its influence, then 2/3 of the supposed reasoning intellectual class has been wasting a hell of a lot of intellectual time and resources, and fostering a hell of a lot of misconceptions.
No wonder mainstream philosophy is such a shithole!
I'd say "this is truly, plainly pathetic" but then you must realize the historical context in which philosophy came about to begin with. First, remember that for some millions of years we were hardly above the level of the monkeys. Then . . . well, think of it like a geometric progression. Philosophy comes only recently in human history; it's hardly even had time to make its mark. But if you think of human evolution in the geometric-progression terms, you're also thinking in terms of progress along all sorts of lines - including philosophy. Even in philosophy, we are moving from a state of lesser wisdom to greater wisdom over the course of 2,500 years. Of course there would be big fuck-ups along the way. Hell, maybe even two out of three major philosophers would fuck up on so basic an issue as classical realism. As that is such a glaring and fundamental fuck-up, perhaps we can say that Plato and Kant were philosophy's two biggest, most influential fuck-ups.
(Note also that religion is a primitive form of philosophy; man in his evolution went through a religious period; then, we've had a philosophical period that has overlapped with the religious one for about the last 2,500 years; the religious period is nearing a close but guess which philosophers' ideas play right into the hands of (anti-realist) religious crowd? Perhaps we might consider these philosophers' metaphysics a remnant or vestige of the religious period, of pre-philosophical anti-realism.)
Aristotle, meanwhile, has only a record of success. The reintroduction of his ideas to the West paved the way for the Renaissance and modern science. The basic methodological orientation on which all rational endeavors such as science are built - induction - originated at the philosophical level with Aristotle (and was perfected with Rand). There's the eudaemonist ethics that is gradually winning over the profession today (some decades after Rand figured this very same thing out and formulated the one true system of "virtue ethics" the profession is more or less blindly groping toward). Everywhere Aristotle pops up, progress ensues.
Classical realism. It's like a basic no-BS litmus test. Aristotle passes. Plato and Kant fail. Simple as that.
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