Without people like Glenn Greenwald around, I would not have found inspiration to become The Ultimate Philosopher. Greenwald is someone with an (almost) unparalleled ability to condense issues down to their very essence. Consequently, he sees pretty much of all that counts as "mainstream narrative and debate" in this country as corrupted through and through, in some fashion or other. His approach to the whole Wikileaks/Assange farce is one such instance of this.
(From what I can tell, the very charismatic some-sort-of-genius-figure Glenn Beck is invoking America, Ah, America (tears) against the "threat" posed by Assange, nevermind what Judge Napolitano was saying on your very network not hours before. You know, America's News Network. You know, GOP figurehead Roger Ailes's brilliant Network-ized media experiment. You know, America and Democracy. And we all have a good laugh at that one.)
Greenwald recognizes what the whole farce the "left-right" "mainstream" discourse is in this country. The politicians are . . . politicians, you idiots!. You just can't expect to have serious, honest, principled, heartfelt debates from weasels, can you? Everything in politics these days is going to the highest bidders, and those very high bidders are the same ones running the media, so what better can you expect than the kind of media we're getting? There's a reason an Ultimate Commentator like Glenn Greenwald would not get any interviews on Fox News - because Greenwald is in the business of exposing in the nakedest terms the hypocrisy of our present-day political system, and Fox News is right in the middle of all that hypocrisy. Hence, The Media get the "Julian Assange - Terrorist!" discussions going. It's so obvious what's going on here to anyone who's paying attention. Greenwald, despite his credentials for intellectual integrity, just doesn't serve "the content needs" of Fox News, Inc. Network-ized, remember. Always remember that. "But how did things get to be the Network-ized way?" asks The Ultimate Philosopher, who knows about Rand and Hegel in addition to various and sundry other items of considerable interest and how they all interconnect.
Greenwald has come to the naked essence of matters concerning him as a constitutional attorney and a Jeffersonian at heart: the political system we have today is a farce of what the Framers envisioned for us. What we have here are two distinctive phenomena: (1) America, and (2) the political system currently situated within America. No one worth taking seriously is against America or at least the idea of America. But the politicians already know that and pander to that America-love to continue their farcical political games. We as a nation have forgotten the original lesson of America: keep your affairs from the hands of politicians as much as you possibly can. Rely on your selves and your communities, governed by some basic virtues like common sense. It's the whole notion of politicians as we know them that's against the ideals of America. But Greenwald also points out how the media establishment is in on the whole cynical farce, in which case the media as we know it - a vehicle of infotainment rather than enlightenment first and foremost - is also against the ideals of America, where the media is supposed to exercise an intellectual independence from the political system.
There's a way out of all this, says The Ultimate Philosopher. Does Greenwald see things at that great a level of generality and essence? Greenwald is describing the many symptoms of severe dysfunction in regard to his areas of expertise, in a better way than anyone else in his profession has described, but has he diagnosed the core problem with the country?
Is he aware of things beyond constitutional law and politics, such as philosophy or maybe Ayn Rand? Does he diagnose things at a level a philosopher would aim to diagnose it? I don't recall any time he has mentioned a specifically philosophical issue or demonstrated a familiarity with the great philosophers in his blog. He is just really good at what he specializes in, though.
What I'm saying is that my aim is to philosophize at the level that Dr. House diagnoses illness. Perfectionism and whatnot, at least on my part. (Dr. House is lost for the time being as a person, though; I don't admire his cynical-amoral methods.) Even if that doesn't make either of us popular or well-liked by the many.
[ADDENDUM: The mainstream media coverage and discourse in regard to the shootings in Arizona has been about as low as one would reasonably have come to expect with this country lately. The fact that Dingbat, a.k.a. Sarah Palin, is at the center of it all is confirmation of that point.]
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Randian Heroes as Perfectionists
I am coming to grips with what all I am prepared to say and what I am not yet prepared to say in my book. Tying my central perfectionist thesis to the issues that the leading academic philosophers - particularly those in epistemology - are concerned with, it just not going to be possible in this first book. I do not have the requisite training (from self or others) and context for it. I am quite rusty at my academic-style philosophizing after a decade away from graduate school. Further, my book is conceived as aiming squarely at the intelligent layperson; and the intelligent layperson is far removed from what Quine's "Two Dogmas" is all about. The perfectionist in me says this tying-in would make a good candidate for a second book, though.
My academic area of specialty was ethics and political philosophy. My grasp of these issues is a lot more sound than the issues that the likes of Quine, Kripke, Davidson and David Lewis specialize in. However, I think my perfectionist thesis is plenty good enough to blow away the competitors in the field of ethics, and that includes the leading "contemporary" moral philosopher, Rawls.
Ethical perfectionism is a synonym for eudaemonism, which is best defended in the "canon" literature by Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics. Up until about 30 years ago, the main alternatives in ethical theory (aside from forms of rejection of moral theories) were "utilitarianism" (or, more broadly, consequentialism) and "Kantianism" (or, more broadly, deontology). This alternative is what was being presented to students in college philosophy courses as the best that philosophers had to offer in the field of ethics. Pretty sad, huh? So, since that time, Aristotle and "virtue ethics" have surged into prominence, and as recent or contemporary literature is scoured for "virtue-ethical" positions within this Aristotelian tradition, Ayn Rand's name naturally comes up. Her ethical egoism is hardly dissimilar to ancient Greek and especially Aristotelian ethics on the matter of being self-centered in ethics, with virtue defined in terms of promoting self-actualization or eudaemonia or real happiness. Whether the academic literature has fully made the identification yet, eudaemonism and perfectionism and self-actualization and virtue ethics (with some kind of stress on the needs of the self foremost hierarchically) are synonymous because they all are descriptions of the same basic concept. As academic literature goes, David L. Norton's Personal Destinies is the best contemporary statement of eudaemonist or virtue ethics.
What really reveals someone's ignorance of Ayn Rand and of the history of philosophy, is comparing her ethics and her idealized heroes to Nietzsche's Ubermensch, usually package-dealt with some strawman claim that Rand, "like Nietzsche," is an elitist, and more likely than not looking for a moral justification (through hijacking Nietzsche, more or less) for capitalist exploitation. Yes, it's one of those eye-rollers students of Objectivism have been confronted with thousands of times. Why don't these idiots appreciate Rand for what she actually said, the students of Objectivism keep asking. (Good question, actually.) Further, it really reveals a lack of intellectual sophistication to hone in on similarities to Nietzsche rather than similarities to Aristotle.
(Let's say that Nietzschean-style "nihilism" is the main alternative modernity has to clinging on to religion-and-morality. I mean, that's what has plunged the political left into a deep-structural moral vacuum (see the '60s and its effects), and the right into fear that the world will collapse without a return to religion-and-morality (see the right from Buckley to today). Aristotelian-Thomistic-Lockean-Jeffersonian-Randian "natural-law" perfectionism is the third way that would give us the fix we need, but unfortunately there is massive ignorance of this tradition. So the typical little left-wing college know-it-all has a context where Nietzsche is taken to be a, or the, leading voice of the secular world, and where leftists succeeded in rewriting America's history into a class-war context rather than an individualist one, and compares Rand to other thinkers in that context. Really lame and so cliched, right?)
Randian heroes are perfectionists. Rand is clear about this in some of her Letters ca. 1946, so it gives some idea of where Rand was in her intellectual development at that time, and how she viewed the relation between moral perfection and traditional religion. (This was around the time she was most embroiled in discussions with Isabel Paterson about all the Big Issues - God, religion, morality - and "Pat" informed her that her ethics had a character all its own, simply distinct from the egoists Nietzsche and Stirner.) This is around the time she was also studying the history of philosophy, with emphasis on the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions; this was around the time that the significance of the "problem of universals" became known to Rand, and the time she made her earliest identifications leading to her theory of concepts. In her maturest stage of intellectual development, her ideas were far more Aristotelian or Thomistic than Nietzschean. This goes for her eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics.
The heroes represent what a eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics lived-out might look like. Her heroes were always reflections of her husband Frank or herself, and there's nothing of an "Ubermensch" character about them (either the heroes, Frank, or herself); they're just normal human beings reaching their full potentials through virtue (rationality), and doing so with an individualistic pride - like what America's supposed to be about, right?
My academic area of specialty was ethics and political philosophy. My grasp of these issues is a lot more sound than the issues that the likes of Quine, Kripke, Davidson and David Lewis specialize in. However, I think my perfectionist thesis is plenty good enough to blow away the competitors in the field of ethics, and that includes the leading "contemporary" moral philosopher, Rawls.
Ethical perfectionism is a synonym for eudaemonism, which is best defended in the "canon" literature by Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics. Up until about 30 years ago, the main alternatives in ethical theory (aside from forms of rejection of moral theories) were "utilitarianism" (or, more broadly, consequentialism) and "Kantianism" (or, more broadly, deontology). This alternative is what was being presented to students in college philosophy courses as the best that philosophers had to offer in the field of ethics. Pretty sad, huh? So, since that time, Aristotle and "virtue ethics" have surged into prominence, and as recent or contemporary literature is scoured for "virtue-ethical" positions within this Aristotelian tradition, Ayn Rand's name naturally comes up. Her ethical egoism is hardly dissimilar to ancient Greek and especially Aristotelian ethics on the matter of being self-centered in ethics, with virtue defined in terms of promoting self-actualization or eudaemonia or real happiness. Whether the academic literature has fully made the identification yet, eudaemonism and perfectionism and self-actualization and virtue ethics (with some kind of stress on the needs of the self foremost hierarchically) are synonymous because they all are descriptions of the same basic concept. As academic literature goes, David L. Norton's Personal Destinies is the best contemporary statement of eudaemonist or virtue ethics.
What really reveals someone's ignorance of Ayn Rand and of the history of philosophy, is comparing her ethics and her idealized heroes to Nietzsche's Ubermensch, usually package-dealt with some strawman claim that Rand, "like Nietzsche," is an elitist, and more likely than not looking for a moral justification (through hijacking Nietzsche, more or less) for capitalist exploitation. Yes, it's one of those eye-rollers students of Objectivism have been confronted with thousands of times. Why don't these idiots appreciate Rand for what she actually said, the students of Objectivism keep asking. (Good question, actually.) Further, it really reveals a lack of intellectual sophistication to hone in on similarities to Nietzsche rather than similarities to Aristotle.
(Let's say that Nietzschean-style "nihilism" is the main alternative modernity has to clinging on to religion-and-morality. I mean, that's what has plunged the political left into a deep-structural moral vacuum (see the '60s and its effects), and the right into fear that the world will collapse without a return to religion-and-morality (see the right from Buckley to today). Aristotelian-Thomistic-Lockean-Jeffersonian-Randian "natural-law" perfectionism is the third way that would give us the fix we need, but unfortunately there is massive ignorance of this tradition. So the typical little left-wing college know-it-all has a context where Nietzsche is taken to be a, or the, leading voice of the secular world, and where leftists succeeded in rewriting America's history into a class-war context rather than an individualist one, and compares Rand to other thinkers in that context. Really lame and so cliched, right?)
Randian heroes are perfectionists. Rand is clear about this in some of her Letters ca. 1946, so it gives some idea of where Rand was in her intellectual development at that time, and how she viewed the relation between moral perfection and traditional religion. (This was around the time she was most embroiled in discussions with Isabel Paterson about all the Big Issues - God, religion, morality - and "Pat" informed her that her ethics had a character all its own, simply distinct from the egoists Nietzsche and Stirner.) This is around the time she was also studying the history of philosophy, with emphasis on the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions; this was around the time that the significance of the "problem of universals" became known to Rand, and the time she made her earliest identifications leading to her theory of concepts. In her maturest stage of intellectual development, her ideas were far more Aristotelian or Thomistic than Nietzschean. This goes for her eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics.
The heroes represent what a eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics lived-out might look like. Her heroes were always reflections of her husband Frank or herself, and there's nothing of an "Ubermensch" character about them (either the heroes, Frank, or herself); they're just normal human beings reaching their full potentials through virtue (rationality), and doing so with an individualistic pride - like what America's supposed to be about, right?
Monday, January 10, 2011
Quine and Peikoff
It is now "conventional wisdom" over there in the hallowed halls of Analytic Philosophy (like there's something in Analytic Philosophy that isn't "conventional wisdom"?) that Harvard's Willard van Orman Quine was probably the most significant philosopher of the last half of the 20th century. This is due more to "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) than any other Quine article, and it is that very article where the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction comes under attack. It also happens that Leonard Peikoff wrote an article attacking the distinction, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," (1967) in The Objectivist, which was under the editorship and squarely under the philosophical guidance of Ayn Rand. The basic Objectivist package-deal here - a good package deal, as it happens - is Ayn Rand's theory of concepts and Peikoff's essay on the analytic-synthetic distinction. If Rand and Peikoff basically do the same substantive work that Quine did, then they deserve every bit a spot up there among the most significant philosophers of the century.
I've read Peikoff and Rand and understand their arguments quite clearly. I've tried to read Quine and gave up trying to understand after a few pages. Here lies the fundamental difference between Objectivism and Analytic Philosophy. The practitioners' brains are simply wired/habituated to think, argue, and write differently. Academic philosophy journal articles excel in being highly technical and obscurantist. I think the model promotes a certain kind of elitism that essentially cuts off a lot of professional philosophers from rabble out there the Ayn Rand-types would appeal to. So the academic "conventional wisdom" is that it's hard to take Objectivism seriously unless or until its proponents put their ideas in academic peer-refereed journals - an effective device for separating the worth-taking-seriously from the "cranks."
Now that Objectivism is beginning to make notable inroads in the academic publishing realm, the infrastructure of the academic "conventional wisdom" on Rand is beginning to crumble. Further, Objectivism isn't the only philosophical movement that has leveled significant and notable criticisms against the analytic style of philosophy; Continental and Existentialist philosophy have also noted the detachment of analytic-style philosophy from the concerns of everyday people and life. The compounding factor here with Rand is that whispering she's an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism (/whisper), and the CW says that's a no-go. But then again, Rand's theory of concepts is of greater philosophical significance than her advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, based on her own insistence on the primacy of epistemology over politics and on the nature of the rule of fundamentality applied to philosophical hierarchy.
Rand was fundamentally an advocate of a neo-Aristotelian, non-Platonized form of reason. This puts her right there in the philosophical mainstream, as Aristotle-without-Plato is just what the mainstream has been yearning for, for who-knows-how-long now. (Aristotle is the Philosopher of Common Sense, see, and the conscientious philosophers try to emulate Aristotle by taking a humpty-dumpty they were handed from their forerunners and doing their best to merge it with common sense, somehow.) So the task ahead is to translate that message into terms the philosophically inclined can appreciate and understand.
There is a criticism of ITOE by Gary Merrill posted on Usenet in the early 1990s. ("Usenet? What's that? Is that like Twitter or somethin'?") Merrill's review hones in on Rand's polemical style, which does leave something to be desired, but he does not discuss the content of Rand's theory of concepts. If one focuses on Rand's polemical style, it does become a convenient way to dismiss her as a thinker. ("If she doesn't take much care with respect to other thinkers' ideas, how much care could she take in presenting her own?" Actually, that would be a pretty lame basis for dismissing a philosopher's views. They do tend to spend a lot more time on their own views than those of others, after all. Or is that not true in the very conventional-wisdom-like world of academic philosophy?) Anyway, he then hones in on Peikoff's "Analytic-Synthetic" essay as an example of the same bad tendencies he sees in Rand, because it is evidently ignorant of the fact that Quine's essay had attacked the distinction some 15 years before. "Peikoff is dishonest or incompetent, take your pick." Now, come on. Please.
First off, the criticism may well be self-defeating, for if Peikoff did launch a pretty definitive attack on the distinction without knowledge of Quine's essay or its significance, then that indicates a great deal of originality on Peikoff's part. Second, Peikoff was in a very unique position, that of being a Ph.D. from a respectable graduate program in philosophy and of having had Ayn Rand as a long-time mentor. He has described the mental turmoil the back-and-forth between Rand's methodology and theirs put him through. Now, in the time that Peikoff was in the academy, studying the history of philosophy with focus on "the status of the law of contradiction in classical logical ontology," there's no compelling reason to think Quine's essay or its significance had become well-known in philosophy. This is the time, remember, that academic philosophy was so dominated by positivism that Yale's Brand Blanshard wrote a whole book, Reason and Analysis (1962), covering this dominant tendency. This book Peikoff most definitely would have been familiar with (having been reviewed by Branden in The Objectivist), but I don't see a reason that he should have known about Quine's essay. Best as I can tell, Quine didn't begin to attain his status until about a generation (surprise, surprise?) after "Two Dogmas" appeared, and the field had been cleared.
I just find it noteworthy that the CW-pick for "most significant philosopher since Wittgenstein" and Ayn Rand's best student both attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction. Just like I find it noteworthy that - as the academics are now beginning to discover - Ayn Rand's ethics is the best legitimate heir to Aristotle's on the contemporary field. Just like her politics is the best legitimate heir to that of "lightweights" Locke, Jefferson and Spencer.
Anyway, we know what happens if the analytic-synthetic distinction goes. That means all the pretense surrounding Immanuel Kant crumbles. (I already know it crumbles when it comes to ethics - my "area of specialization" - given the clear and immense superiority of a eudaemonistic ethics over Kant's formalism.) But if that pretense deflates, . . . then what happens to the pretense surrounding the analytic-philosophy model, of which Kant was a supreme practitioner? Maybe if Quine had written in terms non-specialists could understand, we wouldn't even be so much as wondering whether Peikoff was or should have been familiar with "Two Dogmas"?
I've read Peikoff and Rand and understand their arguments quite clearly. I've tried to read Quine and gave up trying to understand after a few pages. Here lies the fundamental difference between Objectivism and Analytic Philosophy. The practitioners' brains are simply wired/habituated to think, argue, and write differently. Academic philosophy journal articles excel in being highly technical and obscurantist. I think the model promotes a certain kind of elitism that essentially cuts off a lot of professional philosophers from rabble out there the Ayn Rand-types would appeal to. So the academic "conventional wisdom" is that it's hard to take Objectivism seriously unless or until its proponents put their ideas in academic peer-refereed journals - an effective device for separating the worth-taking-seriously from the "cranks."
Now that Objectivism is beginning to make notable inroads in the academic publishing realm, the infrastructure of the academic "conventional wisdom" on Rand is beginning to crumble. Further, Objectivism isn't the only philosophical movement that has leveled significant and notable criticisms against the analytic style of philosophy; Continental and Existentialist philosophy have also noted the detachment of analytic-style philosophy from the concerns of everyday people and life. The compounding factor here with Rand is that whispering she's an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism (/whisper), and the CW says that's a no-go. But then again, Rand's theory of concepts is of greater philosophical significance than her advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, based on her own insistence on the primacy of epistemology over politics and on the nature of the rule of fundamentality applied to philosophical hierarchy.
Rand was fundamentally an advocate of a neo-Aristotelian, non-Platonized form of reason. This puts her right there in the philosophical mainstream, as Aristotle-without-Plato is just what the mainstream has been yearning for, for who-knows-how-long now. (Aristotle is the Philosopher of Common Sense, see, and the conscientious philosophers try to emulate Aristotle by taking a humpty-dumpty they were handed from their forerunners and doing their best to merge it with common sense, somehow.) So the task ahead is to translate that message into terms the philosophically inclined can appreciate and understand.
There is a criticism of ITOE by Gary Merrill posted on Usenet in the early 1990s. ("Usenet? What's that? Is that like Twitter or somethin'?") Merrill's review hones in on Rand's polemical style, which does leave something to be desired, but he does not discuss the content of Rand's theory of concepts. If one focuses on Rand's polemical style, it does become a convenient way to dismiss her as a thinker. ("If she doesn't take much care with respect to other thinkers' ideas, how much care could she take in presenting her own?" Actually, that would be a pretty lame basis for dismissing a philosopher's views. They do tend to spend a lot more time on their own views than those of others, after all. Or is that not true in the very conventional-wisdom-like world of academic philosophy?) Anyway, he then hones in on Peikoff's "Analytic-Synthetic" essay as an example of the same bad tendencies he sees in Rand, because it is evidently ignorant of the fact that Quine's essay had attacked the distinction some 15 years before. "Peikoff is dishonest or incompetent, take your pick." Now, come on. Please.
First off, the criticism may well be self-defeating, for if Peikoff did launch a pretty definitive attack on the distinction without knowledge of Quine's essay or its significance, then that indicates a great deal of originality on Peikoff's part. Second, Peikoff was in a very unique position, that of being a Ph.D. from a respectable graduate program in philosophy and of having had Ayn Rand as a long-time mentor. He has described the mental turmoil the back-and-forth between Rand's methodology and theirs put him through. Now, in the time that Peikoff was in the academy, studying the history of philosophy with focus on "the status of the law of contradiction in classical logical ontology," there's no compelling reason to think Quine's essay or its significance had become well-known in philosophy. This is the time, remember, that academic philosophy was so dominated by positivism that Yale's Brand Blanshard wrote a whole book, Reason and Analysis (1962), covering this dominant tendency. This book Peikoff most definitely would have been familiar with (having been reviewed by Branden in The Objectivist), but I don't see a reason that he should have known about Quine's essay. Best as I can tell, Quine didn't begin to attain his status until about a generation (surprise, surprise?) after "Two Dogmas" appeared, and the field had been cleared.
I just find it noteworthy that the CW-pick for "most significant philosopher since Wittgenstein" and Ayn Rand's best student both attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction. Just like I find it noteworthy that - as the academics are now beginning to discover - Ayn Rand's ethics is the best legitimate heir to Aristotle's on the contemporary field. Just like her politics is the best legitimate heir to that of "lightweights" Locke, Jefferson and Spencer.
Anyway, we know what happens if the analytic-synthetic distinction goes. That means all the pretense surrounding Immanuel Kant crumbles. (I already know it crumbles when it comes to ethics - my "area of specialization" - given the clear and immense superiority of a eudaemonistic ethics over Kant's formalism.) But if that pretense deflates, . . . then what happens to the pretense surrounding the analytic-philosophy model, of which Kant was a supreme practitioner? Maybe if Quine had written in terms non-specialists could understand, we wouldn't even be so much as wondering whether Peikoff was or should have been familiar with "Two Dogmas"?
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
Apollo 11 and Ted Williams vs. The Intellectual Misfits
The story of newly-employed radio man Ted Williams is stuff of the benevolent universe at the heart of the American sense of life. Contrast that story, however, with the blog entries following it at the Huffington Post link above, and you might get a sense of the very disgust Ayn Rand was feeling toward Apollo 11 naysayers when she wrote that most Randian of articles. (It might be outdone only by "The Comprachicos.")
One blogger turns the subject into a surreal joke. Another - citing "objective economic measures" - assures us that this glimmer of hope called the American Dream is illusory after all. (This particular specimen informs us that the media's treatment of the Ted Williams story is one of many "false, establishment-serving narratives.") A third points out God's role in all this.
This is what passes for commentary at the intellectually-superior-liberal Huffington Post.
Thanks a lot, modern philosophy.
One blogger turns the subject into a surreal joke. Another - citing "objective economic measures" - assures us that this glimmer of hope called the American Dream is illusory after all. (This particular specimen informs us that the media's treatment of the Ted Williams story is one of many "false, establishment-serving narratives.") A third points out God's role in all this.
This is what passes for commentary at the intellectually-superior-liberal Huffington Post.
Thanks a lot, modern philosophy.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Where Did the Singularity Begin?
While this blog is your headquarters for the Singularity, where did the Singularity actually begin? I'm referring, of course, to the real Singularity, the one signifying the maturation of the human race as such, and not just a technological maturity discussed by Kurzweil and the like. So . . .
Did it begin here?
Or was it here, perhaps?
Or here?
Or was it here?
Applying the Rule of Fundamentality, I'm leaning toward #2 right now. That is to say, the Singularity may have been gathering for quite a while now, just at a non-accelerated pace. Then again, did it begin some millions of years ago with the first rudiments of humanoid reason, and only show signs of acceleration with #2?
Also, why have Kurzweil and the like not delved into this at the greatest level of fundamentality available? Does technology just expand on its own, materialist-like, as an extrapolation of biology? Wherever might they have gotten that idea?
Did it begin here?
Or was it here, perhaps?
Or here?
Or was it here?
Applying the Rule of Fundamentality, I'm leaning toward #2 right now. That is to say, the Singularity may have been gathering for quite a while now, just at a non-accelerated pace. Then again, did it begin some millions of years ago with the first rudiments of humanoid reason, and only show signs of acceleration with #2?
Also, why have Kurzweil and the like not delved into this at the greatest level of fundamentality available? Does technology just expand on its own, materialist-like, as an extrapolation of biology? Wherever might they have gotten that idea?
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Why I Am the Ultimate Philosopher
[Some very-rough draft material for the book.]
A philosopher, more than anyone, sees things in the most fundamental, broadest-reaching, furthest-reaching form. A philosopher should be able to look throughout history and identify fundamental causal sequences that shape the course of history. "Fundamental" here is crucial: it does not identify the only causal sequence, but the causal sequence that best explains all the greatest number of other causal sequences. This is looking at things in fundamental-causal, not mono-causal, terms. Ideas most fundamentally shape the course of history, but they are not the only shape-r of history.
On this point, the message Rand and Peikoff give off is quite misleading to readers not well-versed in themes discussed in, say, Peikoff's The Art of Thinking course, say, lecture 3 where he talks about thinking in terms of fundamentals. Yes, if something thinks with a healthy psycho-epistemology to guide them, then they get the message that ideas are the fundamental and not only factor shaping history. But it is simply assuming too much cognitive efficacy on the part of the average reader to tell them, "Ideas are the fundamental shaping force in history." They'll just mistake fundamentality for monocausality, then look at the state of philosophy today and its irrelevance for most people's lives, and dismiss any such notion. What causes someone to mistake fundamentality for monocausality? An improper theory of concepts, of course!
People simply have not been given - until Ayn Rand developed her theory of concepts, or until someone presents an improved theory that would still be fundamentally similar to heres - a proper means of tying down the best of everyday commonsense cognition to the fundamental theoretical roots. As far as the "big philosophers in history" go, the closest anyone had come was Aristotle. But his moderate realism was not a fully satisfactory answer. Lacking such an answer, people will give up on philosophy as a guide to life. Ayn Rand has come closer than anyone else before to providing an accounting for that. What was the key to Rand's success in this department? Basically, dismissing basically the entirety of the modern philosophical tradition! What she did, instead, as she educated herself in the philosophical tradition, is compare the performance of the ancients as against the moderns, think in terms of the relevant essentials (for instance, Aristotle's views in astronomy, biology, physics, and politics are not the most relevant essentials in his way of thinking), and identify Aristotle as the man whose lead we need to follow in order to use philosophy as a means of improving our lives! So follow Aristotle's lead as best as you can, that's all.
Now, a crash course in fundamental-level causation in history:
The Greeks were going to be fine as long as Aristotle's works were preserved and disseminated. But those works got misplaced, and so for most of the next, oh, 1,500 years the dominant forces in intellectual life were Platonism and Christianity. Now, consider this: without Aristotle, and without Aquinas, where would the West be today? Think of how the Church ruled: all the greatest intellects were part of the church hierarchy, and Plato-Plotinus-Augustine were the most dominant intellectual forces until Aristotle's work was rediscovered (this was more fundamental than whether it would have been Aquinas or someone else making the reconciliation - it should not be called a synthesis, which is a goddamn modern term indicating the fusion of contradictory attributes [again, indicating a failure to find a proper theory of concepts]). Aristotle inserted a wedge fundamentally deadly to Church dominance: the independent use of secular reason as against received theocratic authoritarian dogma. The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution would follow in historically short order.
Science since the Renaissance has basically - at a practical level - provided all the solution we need to the "problem of induction." (We now just need to recognize the alignment of the theoretical and the practical in a proper theory of concepts.) The Church, meanwhile, in canonizing Aristotle, turned his ideas into a dogma. Along the way, no proper solution to the "problem of universals" had been presented. Philosophers, not seeing the relevant fundamentals about Aristotle, then set on a course of trying to "ground" natural science all over again.
Kant is Rand's chief whipping-boy among the moderns. I do not think Kant had malicious intentions in setting out to create his philosophy. Kant was merely the most impressive cashing-in - a dead end if you will - of the modern approach to philosophy. In Kant perhaps than anyone, you find the basic cleavage between ideas and the concerns of everyday common sense, i.e., between philosophy and life. Kant was an arch-rationalist in the more fundamentally relevant, i.e., psycho-epistemological sense. But Kant didn't do this all alone. This was an entrenched practice that Hume had perfected quite well himself - and admitted openly in his writings that he could not reconcile his philosophical ideas with his daily routine. But was this just Kant and Hume, or were they following other leads?
When first-time students of philosophy today are introduced to certain thinkers, who do they get? Descartes and Hume. But Descartes and Hume are terrible examples to follow psycho-epistemologically. Absolutely terrible. When students are introduced to this as how philosophy is done in this day and age, it is no wonder at all they'll lose interest. All "philosophers" do is raise idle questions and irrelevant problems. With Descartes and Hume are the models - yes. With Kant's style of exposition - yes.
Kant was a culmination of that cognitive model. Hegel is a mixed bag; he tries to be a synthetic middle-way between Aristotle and Kant, but the product looks even more rationalistic psycho-epistemologically than Kant. They're both about equally removed from common sense, each in their own way. One thing Hegel did recognize, though - and, again, this is before a proper theory of concepts was developed - was that his philosophy was the culmination of everything that came before. He was, up to that time, the "ultimate philosopher." When Rand formed her theory of concepts, she then became the "ultimate philosopher," and, too, recognized in some sense that her philosophy is the "culmination" of what came before - i.e., once all the alternatives have been eliminated. As already pointed out, Rand recognized the essential - that Aristotle had come closest - and proceeded to follow his essential lead: to the full integration of philosophy and life.
Rand singled out Kant as the chief modern villain because of his substantive conclusions, but those conclusions and his method were the culmination of a method of (psycho-epistemological) rationalism practiced by (arguably) all the major moderns. Rationalism is characterized, in Peikoff's terms, by the widespread detachment of philosophy from life. It's clear-cut in Hume. In his own way, Hume represents the culmination of that method. He hit his limit and could go no further. Hume and Kant - they're both terrible (i.e., anti-Aristotelian) models of doing philosophy. They both set the tone for the impressive-looking splitting-up ("distinction-making") of what is, in reality, self-identical. Oh, and Descartes was a master of that, too. Just all the splitting-up as such: what for? What is accomplished? The practical effect, in the end, is a split of philosophy from daily life.
Then there's Pragmatism, which Rand and Peikoff attribute to Kant. But do we get Pragmatism in its mature form without both Hume and Kant, much less all the other moderns helping to set the tone? With Descartes, Hume, Kant, and the Pragmatists, we get in all cases a non-Aristotelian interpretation of the world. This is thew fundamental-level problem with all of them. So bombard the American intellectual scene with Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Pragmatism (and some Marx and, up until only recently, Aristotle and Rand), and what do you get?
Whatever it is, a figure like Rawls is emblematic of it. One thing Rawls does not do, is provide an integrated view of existence all the way to the fundamentals, metaphysics and epistemology. His project is, in his words, "political not metaphysical." If this is the philosopher most influential on the liberal intellengtsia in the last few decades, it's little wonder those on the left now feel helpless to implement the changes they want. Too few people listen to the intellectuals these days to be swayed by them, because the intellectuals have the reputation for being wankers and often elitist. Those of an intellectual bent on the Right are not impressed, because their opponents are reduced to arguing less-fundamental political matters and focusing on political change rather than a change to the soul. (This is not want Rawls intended, but it's the outcome of the intellectual process.) But focusing on political-level change without identifying the fundamental causes of the necessary intellectual change, represents a P/pragmatic influence. I take this to be the essence of Peikoff's distinction between "disintegration" or D (recall also how David Kelley ends up working with libertarian organizations to "help spread the word"), and varieties of integration that tie all ideas together systematically.
Meanwhile, if they would just recognize and understand the importance of a proper theory of concepts...
(To be continued?)
[ADDENDUM: Shooting right to the fundamental: So did the real Singularity begin here, or with Rand? Or with Kubrick, perhaps? Would that make for a catchy book title perhaps: The Singularity Began With Stanley Kubrick? But this title is more perfect than that one. Hmmmm....]
A philosopher, more than anyone, sees things in the most fundamental, broadest-reaching, furthest-reaching form. A philosopher should be able to look throughout history and identify fundamental causal sequences that shape the course of history. "Fundamental" here is crucial: it does not identify the only causal sequence, but the causal sequence that best explains all the greatest number of other causal sequences. This is looking at things in fundamental-causal, not mono-causal, terms. Ideas most fundamentally shape the course of history, but they are not the only shape-r of history.
On this point, the message Rand and Peikoff give off is quite misleading to readers not well-versed in themes discussed in, say, Peikoff's The Art of Thinking course, say, lecture 3 where he talks about thinking in terms of fundamentals. Yes, if something thinks with a healthy psycho-epistemology to guide them, then they get the message that ideas are the fundamental and not only factor shaping history. But it is simply assuming too much cognitive efficacy on the part of the average reader to tell them, "Ideas are the fundamental shaping force in history." They'll just mistake fundamentality for monocausality, then look at the state of philosophy today and its irrelevance for most people's lives, and dismiss any such notion. What causes someone to mistake fundamentality for monocausality? An improper theory of concepts, of course!
People simply have not been given - until Ayn Rand developed her theory of concepts, or until someone presents an improved theory that would still be fundamentally similar to heres - a proper means of tying down the best of everyday commonsense cognition to the fundamental theoretical roots. As far as the "big philosophers in history" go, the closest anyone had come was Aristotle. But his moderate realism was not a fully satisfactory answer. Lacking such an answer, people will give up on philosophy as a guide to life. Ayn Rand has come closer than anyone else before to providing an accounting for that. What was the key to Rand's success in this department? Basically, dismissing basically the entirety of the modern philosophical tradition! What she did, instead, as she educated herself in the philosophical tradition, is compare the performance of the ancients as against the moderns, think in terms of the relevant essentials (for instance, Aristotle's views in astronomy, biology, physics, and politics are not the most relevant essentials in his way of thinking), and identify Aristotle as the man whose lead we need to follow in order to use philosophy as a means of improving our lives! So follow Aristotle's lead as best as you can, that's all.
Now, a crash course in fundamental-level causation in history:
The Greeks were going to be fine as long as Aristotle's works were preserved and disseminated. But those works got misplaced, and so for most of the next, oh, 1,500 years the dominant forces in intellectual life were Platonism and Christianity. Now, consider this: without Aristotle, and without Aquinas, where would the West be today? Think of how the Church ruled: all the greatest intellects were part of the church hierarchy, and Plato-Plotinus-Augustine were the most dominant intellectual forces until Aristotle's work was rediscovered (this was more fundamental than whether it would have been Aquinas or someone else making the reconciliation - it should not be called a synthesis, which is a goddamn modern term indicating the fusion of contradictory attributes [again, indicating a failure to find a proper theory of concepts]). Aristotle inserted a wedge fundamentally deadly to Church dominance: the independent use of secular reason as against received theocratic authoritarian dogma. The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution would follow in historically short order.
Science since the Renaissance has basically - at a practical level - provided all the solution we need to the "problem of induction." (We now just need to recognize the alignment of the theoretical and the practical in a proper theory of concepts.) The Church, meanwhile, in canonizing Aristotle, turned his ideas into a dogma. Along the way, no proper solution to the "problem of universals" had been presented. Philosophers, not seeing the relevant fundamentals about Aristotle, then set on a course of trying to "ground" natural science all over again.
Kant is Rand's chief whipping-boy among the moderns. I do not think Kant had malicious intentions in setting out to create his philosophy. Kant was merely the most impressive cashing-in - a dead end if you will - of the modern approach to philosophy. In Kant perhaps than anyone, you find the basic cleavage between ideas and the concerns of everyday common sense, i.e., between philosophy and life. Kant was an arch-rationalist in the more fundamentally relevant, i.e., psycho-epistemological sense. But Kant didn't do this all alone. This was an entrenched practice that Hume had perfected quite well himself - and admitted openly in his writings that he could not reconcile his philosophical ideas with his daily routine. But was this just Kant and Hume, or were they following other leads?
When first-time students of philosophy today are introduced to certain thinkers, who do they get? Descartes and Hume. But Descartes and Hume are terrible examples to follow psycho-epistemologically. Absolutely terrible. When students are introduced to this as how philosophy is done in this day and age, it is no wonder at all they'll lose interest. All "philosophers" do is raise idle questions and irrelevant problems. With Descartes and Hume are the models - yes. With Kant's style of exposition - yes.
Kant was a culmination of that cognitive model. Hegel is a mixed bag; he tries to be a synthetic middle-way between Aristotle and Kant, but the product looks even more rationalistic psycho-epistemologically than Kant. They're both about equally removed from common sense, each in their own way. One thing Hegel did recognize, though - and, again, this is before a proper theory of concepts was developed - was that his philosophy was the culmination of everything that came before. He was, up to that time, the "ultimate philosopher." When Rand formed her theory of concepts, she then became the "ultimate philosopher," and, too, recognized in some sense that her philosophy is the "culmination" of what came before - i.e., once all the alternatives have been eliminated. As already pointed out, Rand recognized the essential - that Aristotle had come closest - and proceeded to follow his essential lead: to the full integration of philosophy and life.
Rand singled out Kant as the chief modern villain because of his substantive conclusions, but those conclusions and his method were the culmination of a method of (psycho-epistemological) rationalism practiced by (arguably) all the major moderns. Rationalism is characterized, in Peikoff's terms, by the widespread detachment of philosophy from life. It's clear-cut in Hume. In his own way, Hume represents the culmination of that method. He hit his limit and could go no further. Hume and Kant - they're both terrible (i.e., anti-Aristotelian) models of doing philosophy. They both set the tone for the impressive-looking splitting-up ("distinction-making") of what is, in reality, self-identical. Oh, and Descartes was a master of that, too. Just all the splitting-up as such: what for? What is accomplished? The practical effect, in the end, is a split of philosophy from daily life.
Then there's Pragmatism, which Rand and Peikoff attribute to Kant. But do we get Pragmatism in its mature form without both Hume and Kant, much less all the other moderns helping to set the tone? With Descartes, Hume, Kant, and the Pragmatists, we get in all cases a non-Aristotelian interpretation of the world. This is thew fundamental-level problem with all of them. So bombard the American intellectual scene with Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Pragmatism (and some Marx and, up until only recently, Aristotle and Rand), and what do you get?
Whatever it is, a figure like Rawls is emblematic of it. One thing Rawls does not do, is provide an integrated view of existence all the way to the fundamentals, metaphysics and epistemology. His project is, in his words, "political not metaphysical." If this is the philosopher most influential on the liberal intellengtsia in the last few decades, it's little wonder those on the left now feel helpless to implement the changes they want. Too few people listen to the intellectuals these days to be swayed by them, because the intellectuals have the reputation for being wankers and often elitist. Those of an intellectual bent on the Right are not impressed, because their opponents are reduced to arguing less-fundamental political matters and focusing on political change rather than a change to the soul. (This is not want Rawls intended, but it's the outcome of the intellectual process.) But focusing on political-level change without identifying the fundamental causes of the necessary intellectual change, represents a P/pragmatic influence. I take this to be the essence of Peikoff's distinction between "disintegration" or D (recall also how David Kelley ends up working with libertarian organizations to "help spread the word"), and varieties of integration that tie all ideas together systematically.
Meanwhile, if they would just recognize and understand the importance of a proper theory of concepts...
(To be continued?)
[ADDENDUM: Shooting right to the fundamental: So did the real Singularity begin here, or with Rand? Or with Kubrick, perhaps? Would that make for a catchy book title perhaps: The Singularity Began With Stanley Kubrick? But this title is more perfect than that one. Hmmmm....]
Saturday, January 1, 2011
The $6 Billion Plan to Fix America, Updated and Expanded
Here's the deal: $6 billion is hardly enough investment. The number needs to be expanded to more like $100 for every person in America, or $30 billion. The primary difference is the inclusion of Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism course, since methodology and first-hand thinking is at least as important as the content. If there's anything students of Objectivism might have learned by now, is that throwing the content out there, absent a means of integrating it, is darn near hopeless (aside from a frighteningly small number of exceptional cases). The contexts are just too far apart. The people out there need to be able to think. That, of course, requires a whole restructuring of our educational system, but first thing's first.
The essential books are 10 of the titles:
The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged
For the New Intellectual
The Virtue of Selfishness
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
The Romantic Manifesto
Philosophy: Who Needs It (we might need double or triple orders of this one)
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
The Ayn Rand Lexicon
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (by Leonard Peikoff)
Assume an average of $10 per book copy, plus $150-200 for the course, multiplied by 100 million sets distributed. That runs to $25-30 billion total.
Let's get it done.
Friday, December 31, 2010
The Intellectuals Need Rand
Okay, so the mainstream discourse in this country is an anti-intellectual cesspool. That's the problem. There's really no question that's the problem. It will do no good to idly harp on that problem over and over. We need to diagnose the problem's causes, and then work to solve it. I think we have some good idea on the diagnostic level: a culture-wide denigration of reason down to the very roots. We need a revolution - an intellectual one - from the ground up. For this to happen, it is an absolute imperative for the nation's best and brightest minds to adopt reason wholesale - not superficially, not ostensibly, not at-the-political-economic-level, but all the fucking way. All the way to Aristotle and Rand. There's just no way around it. The absolutism of reality offers no alternatives.
If you look out at the world right now - on the grand scale, on the big picture - you get the acute sense that we're on a crash course with disaster if things don't change pretty damn fast. It's a train wreck in slow motion. The locomotive is doing its thing, charging right ahead with the brakes barely being applied, and we see down the track some faint signs of the object with which the train would collide. We can't be sure just what it is, but it looks like it's there, and we have only so much time.
The intellectual class in this country - and make no mistake about it, for all this country's poor intellectual reputation around the world right now, we have the world's leading intellectuals right here in this country, because America is the breeding ground of greatness and leadership - sees the vast chasm separating their average worldview from that of the country's mainstream. They just don't know what to do about it. Well, good news: help can be on the way, if they're willing to accept it. They're going to have to clean up their acts first.
The silver lining with pragmatists is their willingness to shift course when they are, near-panic-stricken, under the impression their current course just isn't working. They can't say they know their current course isn't working; that isn't the pragmatist psycho-epistemology. They can only say that they can attach a probability to things, and when they get the impression that things are past 50/50, they've got to consider alternative courses of action. Well, now's the time to consider it. If there's one thing the liberal intellectuals in this country can be credited for, it's a pragmatic - and I mean this in a good sense, i.e., the concern with practicality and, therefore, reasonable, real-world, empirical, scientific input for decision-making - sensibility at root. There's a reason Dr. Peikoff finds a closer ally among the "liberals" than among the intellectually-defunct and deranged "conservatives." The "conservative" intellectual movement in this country delivered us the Dingbat, a strident ignorance, and a demand for regression into pre-modernist unreason. Dingbat is the final cashing-in, the final proof of the full-on intellectual and cognitive failure of the American Right.
When Rand delivered a lecture in 1961, titled "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age," she was addressing it primarily to the "liberals" in her audience who care about reason more than the "conservatives" do. She was, however, also speaking at a time when Marxism and socialism were at a peak of intellectual and political influence around the world. You have to look back and realize the surreal nature of a lot of it; her lecture was one year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and just a few years before America conscripted its young to go fight in what eventuated in a failed war. You had the President delivering an inaugural address asking Americans to accept a false dichotomy between receiving altruistic handouts or performing the altruistic handouts. You had the "liberals" clamoring for a "War on Poverty" just as capitalist economic growth was almost finishing the job for them.
(Poverty rates have since escalated, and the "liberals" are, inherently and fundamentally, at a loss to understand why. They turn to the economics community and get mixed answers at best from their vantage point. They just don't know. They've run out of answers.)
Rand's main goal was to try to get the "liberals" to recognize that their adherence to reason should lead them to reconsider the socialist-Marxist rewriting of capitalism's history. By then, however, the intellectual dominance of Marxism was too entrenched for that reconsideration to happen any time soon. The nature of intellectual entrenchment is, for the most part, a generational thing: many intellectuals have already formed a worldview by their 20s and it conditions and lenses their interpretation of everything. Practically speaking, the way around entrenchment is for the current generation to die off and be replaced.
Remember, however, the pragmatist silver lining: everything gets to be open to reconsideration. The pragmatic mindset is to eschew hard doctrines. Notice, further, that today's intellectual class is basically out of answers as to how to fix problems. They have no ideology to fall back on, like the Marxists did. They're adrift at sea without a rudder or compass. That's their cashing-in. They put their political eggs in the Obama basket and got just what they should have expected by placing their trust in politicians and government to fix problems. All they know is "at least he's not the Republicans," the Republicans being Bush, Cheney, and the Dingbat. That's what they get for thinking any significant fundamental change is going to originate at the political level.
They think - though they don't know - that the economic crisis we're going through is the result of too much "Republican," "right-wing" economic policy - knowing full well that politicians in Washington in recent memory have been from both parties, doing what politicians in an intellectually-bankrupt age could only be expected to do, and that is to sell influence to the highest bidder. So they can only guess that the current crisis has anything at all to do with smaller-government (much less "laissez faire" - are you fucking kidding me?) economic policies. They're awash in a sea of not knowing anything with any degree of certainty - certainly not in this day and age, when the economic data appear to point in all directions, some appearing to point in the pro-capitalist one, others appearing to point in the Euro-welfare-state one, a vanishingly small amount pointing toward the Marxist one. They don't have Marxism to point to like the intellectuals of the '30s did. They don't have any ideology at all that they find appealing. They only know - actually, here, they do know - that their opponents across the political aisle are intellectually defunct from beginning to end. They just haven't seriously considered any alternatives to get out of the cesspool they're sinking into.
If you look at today's political environment and asked to identify the two main alternatives, they are pragmatism on one side, and unreason on the other. A person of conviction, of reason, of love for America's founding ideals will say, "No, thanks."
These thoughts originated earlier today while thinking about the oncoming train wrecks we're told about all the time (assuming we're paying attention): man-made global warming, peak oil production, a general American decline. Now, if we were to take off any political or ideological hats, ignore any political agendas and motives on either "side" of the debate about man-made global warming, the first thing to notice is that very few of us are scientists who have studied the issue in depth. The notion that more than a few of us have any expertise on the issue is like the notion that more than a few people have any expertise in the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The notion is ludicrous. What we do have, however, is a large and growing body of evidence that (a) the global mean temperatures are rising at a fast rate in geological terms, and (b) human-made emissions play a causal (not merely "correlative") role in helping this process along.
Now, if you were to look at the mainstream, cesspool-style debate on the issue, you have pragmatic liberals on one side, and fucking knuckle-draggers on the other. In what has to be one of the most jaw-dropping acts of projection any of us may ever see, the right-wing in this country, on this issue, accuses the other side of being driven by a political agenda. Sure enough, there is a political agenda going on on both sides, but any reasonable and intelligent person can abstract from the political agendas to look at the plain scientific facts of the matter. Doing that requires a minimal ability to distinguish descriptive statements from prescriptive ones. The right-wing charges (fears - and the fears are to some extent justified - but the main driving element here is fear, not justification) that the "liberals" are using climate science data as a reason to tax and control the American people more. I don't side with the "liberals" on the prescription, but their prescription is not hard to understand given the ruling paradigmatic mindset that if there is a problem, then the solution is government controls, taxes, etc. (I think we do need to be concerned that if - more likely, when - the scientifically-modeled global warming predictions materialize, that the industrialized nations are potentially open to class-level legal action of some kind, when peoples of non-industrialized nations are displaced by rising coastal waters and other bad stuff.) The "liberals'" error here is relatively minor next to the strident, screaming anti-science and anti-reason of the opposition. The opposition won't even get on board with the descriptive element, even though it is informed by the best science. They won't do it on the issue of evolution, so why in the hell would they do it on this issue?
So I think we as Americans should be willing to prepare ourselves for the worse - more warming, and, simultaneously, a peak and drop in petroleum production - and arm ourselves accordingly. I don't mean, of course, arming ourselves with guns, to prepare ourselves for the supposed "resource wars" some people are predicting. I mean arming ourselves cognitively and intellectually. The only way to do this, is to adopt and integrate the Randian method. There just isn't any other way. Reality doesn't allow for another way.
What the liberal intellectuals need to do, to get people of reason on their side and push the screamingly irrational right-wing into the status of irrelevant minority, is to get over their silly little aversion to Ayn Rand, and adopt reason in all its primacy over the political. If, as I think is the case, they're pragmatic enough to acknowledge the failures and problems with Big Government - not the least of which is how Big Government runs contrary to America's founding ideals - and look for serious alternatives, they might find that they have a chief ally in reason with Ayn Rand, the dreaded egoist-capitalist. The socio-political problems the liberals fear (yes, they have their own version of fear) from adopting a Randian social ethic (a) are not real concerns once you actually understand what she's saying, (b) are secondary and subordinate to the issue of reason, and (c) a culture of reason would make the whole issue moot. A culture of reason has much better means at its disposal to solve any and all problems, be it poverty, or global warming, or energy production, or even obstinate right-wing ignorance. The genuinely intellectual and intelligent elements on the political right today - the "economically conservative and socially libertarian" - are already on board with the Randian program whether they even know it or not.
It's the pragmatic liberal intellectuals who now need to step up and do their part to build the cultural bridge that can unite us as Americans, as a people of reason (and, therefore, of individualism, freedom, and capitalism). If they would only put down their defenses for a bit and do some intellectually curious and responsible investigation (this means not chuckling and dismissing Rand when, oh, like when she says "A is A" - believe me, by now I know pretty much every trick in the book people have for dismissing this and that about Rand - hell, I was prone in my own ways to that same kind of problem back in my naive stages), they'd recognize in Rand their greatest and most potent ally.
Time may well be running out.
(They should just do it, anyway. Rand's eventual status as world-historic thinker is inevitable. Better sooner than later. And, the left is out of ideas, besides.)
Let's get it done! :-)
[ADDENDUM: I'm considering making this my "sign off" post before going into heavy-duty writing of the book's manuscript. I won't give a timetable on a finish, but it should be really soon now. Time is, after all, of the essence. ;-) ]
If you look out at the world right now - on the grand scale, on the big picture - you get the acute sense that we're on a crash course with disaster if things don't change pretty damn fast. It's a train wreck in slow motion. The locomotive is doing its thing, charging right ahead with the brakes barely being applied, and we see down the track some faint signs of the object with which the train would collide. We can't be sure just what it is, but it looks like it's there, and we have only so much time.
The intellectual class in this country - and make no mistake about it, for all this country's poor intellectual reputation around the world right now, we have the world's leading intellectuals right here in this country, because America is the breeding ground of greatness and leadership - sees the vast chasm separating their average worldview from that of the country's mainstream. They just don't know what to do about it. Well, good news: help can be on the way, if they're willing to accept it. They're going to have to clean up their acts first.
The silver lining with pragmatists is their willingness to shift course when they are, near-panic-stricken, under the impression their current course just isn't working. They can't say they know their current course isn't working; that isn't the pragmatist psycho-epistemology. They can only say that they can attach a probability to things, and when they get the impression that things are past 50/50, they've got to consider alternative courses of action. Well, now's the time to consider it. If there's one thing the liberal intellectuals in this country can be credited for, it's a pragmatic - and I mean this in a good sense, i.e., the concern with practicality and, therefore, reasonable, real-world, empirical, scientific input for decision-making - sensibility at root. There's a reason Dr. Peikoff finds a closer ally among the "liberals" than among the intellectually-defunct and deranged "conservatives." The "conservative" intellectual movement in this country delivered us the Dingbat, a strident ignorance, and a demand for regression into pre-modernist unreason. Dingbat is the final cashing-in, the final proof of the full-on intellectual and cognitive failure of the American Right.
When Rand delivered a lecture in 1961, titled "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age," she was addressing it primarily to the "liberals" in her audience who care about reason more than the "conservatives" do. She was, however, also speaking at a time when Marxism and socialism were at a peak of intellectual and political influence around the world. You have to look back and realize the surreal nature of a lot of it; her lecture was one year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and just a few years before America conscripted its young to go fight in what eventuated in a failed war. You had the President delivering an inaugural address asking Americans to accept a false dichotomy between receiving altruistic handouts or performing the altruistic handouts. You had the "liberals" clamoring for a "War on Poverty" just as capitalist economic growth was almost finishing the job for them.
(Poverty rates have since escalated, and the "liberals" are, inherently and fundamentally, at a loss to understand why. They turn to the economics community and get mixed answers at best from their vantage point. They just don't know. They've run out of answers.)
Rand's main goal was to try to get the "liberals" to recognize that their adherence to reason should lead them to reconsider the socialist-Marxist rewriting of capitalism's history. By then, however, the intellectual dominance of Marxism was too entrenched for that reconsideration to happen any time soon. The nature of intellectual entrenchment is, for the most part, a generational thing: many intellectuals have already formed a worldview by their 20s and it conditions and lenses their interpretation of everything. Practically speaking, the way around entrenchment is for the current generation to die off and be replaced.
Remember, however, the pragmatist silver lining: everything gets to be open to reconsideration. The pragmatic mindset is to eschew hard doctrines. Notice, further, that today's intellectual class is basically out of answers as to how to fix problems. They have no ideology to fall back on, like the Marxists did. They're adrift at sea without a rudder or compass. That's their cashing-in. They put their political eggs in the Obama basket and got just what they should have expected by placing their trust in politicians and government to fix problems. All they know is "at least he's not the Republicans," the Republicans being Bush, Cheney, and the Dingbat. That's what they get for thinking any significant fundamental change is going to originate at the political level.
They think - though they don't know - that the economic crisis we're going through is the result of too much "Republican," "right-wing" economic policy - knowing full well that politicians in Washington in recent memory have been from both parties, doing what politicians in an intellectually-bankrupt age could only be expected to do, and that is to sell influence to the highest bidder. So they can only guess that the current crisis has anything at all to do with smaller-government (much less "laissez faire" - are you fucking kidding me?) economic policies. They're awash in a sea of not knowing anything with any degree of certainty - certainly not in this day and age, when the economic data appear to point in all directions, some appearing to point in the pro-capitalist one, others appearing to point in the Euro-welfare-state one, a vanishingly small amount pointing toward the Marxist one. They don't have Marxism to point to like the intellectuals of the '30s did. They don't have any ideology at all that they find appealing. They only know - actually, here, they do know - that their opponents across the political aisle are intellectually defunct from beginning to end. They just haven't seriously considered any alternatives to get out of the cesspool they're sinking into.
If you look at today's political environment and asked to identify the two main alternatives, they are pragmatism on one side, and unreason on the other. A person of conviction, of reason, of love for America's founding ideals will say, "No, thanks."
These thoughts originated earlier today while thinking about the oncoming train wrecks we're told about all the time (assuming we're paying attention): man-made global warming, peak oil production, a general American decline. Now, if we were to take off any political or ideological hats, ignore any political agendas and motives on either "side" of the debate about man-made global warming, the first thing to notice is that very few of us are scientists who have studied the issue in depth. The notion that more than a few of us have any expertise on the issue is like the notion that more than a few people have any expertise in the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The notion is ludicrous. What we do have, however, is a large and growing body of evidence that (a) the global mean temperatures are rising at a fast rate in geological terms, and (b) human-made emissions play a causal (not merely "correlative") role in helping this process along.
Now, if you were to look at the mainstream, cesspool-style debate on the issue, you have pragmatic liberals on one side, and fucking knuckle-draggers on the other. In what has to be one of the most jaw-dropping acts of projection any of us may ever see, the right-wing in this country, on this issue, accuses the other side of being driven by a political agenda. Sure enough, there is a political agenda going on on both sides, but any reasonable and intelligent person can abstract from the political agendas to look at the plain scientific facts of the matter. Doing that requires a minimal ability to distinguish descriptive statements from prescriptive ones. The right-wing charges (fears - and the fears are to some extent justified - but the main driving element here is fear, not justification) that the "liberals" are using climate science data as a reason to tax and control the American people more. I don't side with the "liberals" on the prescription, but their prescription is not hard to understand given the ruling paradigmatic mindset that if there is a problem, then the solution is government controls, taxes, etc. (I think we do need to be concerned that if - more likely, when - the scientifically-modeled global warming predictions materialize, that the industrialized nations are potentially open to class-level legal action of some kind, when peoples of non-industrialized nations are displaced by rising coastal waters and other bad stuff.) The "liberals'" error here is relatively minor next to the strident, screaming anti-science and anti-reason of the opposition. The opposition won't even get on board with the descriptive element, even though it is informed by the best science. They won't do it on the issue of evolution, so why in the hell would they do it on this issue?
So I think we as Americans should be willing to prepare ourselves for the worse - more warming, and, simultaneously, a peak and drop in petroleum production - and arm ourselves accordingly. I don't mean, of course, arming ourselves with guns, to prepare ourselves for the supposed "resource wars" some people are predicting. I mean arming ourselves cognitively and intellectually. The only way to do this, is to adopt and integrate the Randian method. There just isn't any other way. Reality doesn't allow for another way.
What the liberal intellectuals need to do, to get people of reason on their side and push the screamingly irrational right-wing into the status of irrelevant minority, is to get over their silly little aversion to Ayn Rand, and adopt reason in all its primacy over the political. If, as I think is the case, they're pragmatic enough to acknowledge the failures and problems with Big Government - not the least of which is how Big Government runs contrary to America's founding ideals - and look for serious alternatives, they might find that they have a chief ally in reason with Ayn Rand, the dreaded egoist-capitalist. The socio-political problems the liberals fear (yes, they have their own version of fear) from adopting a Randian social ethic (a) are not real concerns once you actually understand what she's saying, (b) are secondary and subordinate to the issue of reason, and (c) a culture of reason would make the whole issue moot. A culture of reason has much better means at its disposal to solve any and all problems, be it poverty, or global warming, or energy production, or even obstinate right-wing ignorance. The genuinely intellectual and intelligent elements on the political right today - the "economically conservative and socially libertarian" - are already on board with the Randian program whether they even know it or not.
It's the pragmatic liberal intellectuals who now need to step up and do their part to build the cultural bridge that can unite us as Americans, as a people of reason (and, therefore, of individualism, freedom, and capitalism). If they would only put down their defenses for a bit and do some intellectually curious and responsible investigation (this means not chuckling and dismissing Rand when, oh, like when she says "A is A" - believe me, by now I know pretty much every trick in the book people have for dismissing this and that about Rand - hell, I was prone in my own ways to that same kind of problem back in my naive stages), they'd recognize in Rand their greatest and most potent ally.
Time may well be running out.
(They should just do it, anyway. Rand's eventual status as world-historic thinker is inevitable. Better sooner than later. And, the left is out of ideas, besides.)
Let's get it done! :-)
[ADDENDUM: I'm considering making this my "sign off" post before going into heavy-duty writing of the book's manuscript. I won't give a timetable on a finish, but it should be really soon now. Time is, after all, of the essence. ;-) ]
America and Europe
These are only very preliminary thoughts to an investigation on a very important and difficult subject: what factors determine the course of nations.
One thing the left-liberals in this country enjoy doing is pointing to the welfare states of Europe as a model for America to adopt. None of it should sit at all well with either advanced students of economics or of Objectivism. The advanced student of economics is apt to root out whether variants of the "broken-window fallacy" or being committed - i.e., what is seen, vs. what is not seen? What are any of the hidden costs the welfare-state advocates are leaving out of their equation? Are they biased as many people tend to be; that is, do they look at the positive side of something they have an automatized positive reaction to, while managing not to notice the negatives? Have they considered the full context?
Just what is the full context? If you're limited to the level of political economy, you're dealing within a narrow context in regard to causal factors. Take, for instance, a favorite icon of the left, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, a linguist by profession, takes left-wing views on matter of political economy; his political ideal is something he calls "anarcho-syndicalism." If Chomsky is the genius many on the left claim he is, then we should hear a lot more from the left about the need to adopt an anarcho-syndicalist model rather than a welfare-state model. Why this schism between admiration for Chomsky's genius and the policies they support? Is it pragmatism? Why the pragmatism, if that's the case?
Besides, why do they go in for Chomsky's political-economic-level analysis of our popular culture? Manufacturing Consent is a left-wing bible, and in fact his analysis seems to provide a pretty comprehensive, over-arching explanation of how and why our national discourse is in the state that it's in right now. It would definitely (seem to) explain how and why a Dingbat has a prominent voice in our politics. Further, the popular culture, in the Chomsky-inspired analysis, is so infused through and through by the interests of a powerful moneyed elite that it overrides a lot of attempts at educating people about better ideas (e.g., the preferability of Euro-style welfare states). Americans these days are fat, dumb, apathetic, etc. - and the corporations only encourage all that more because of the profit involved and the interests of the moneyed elite that are served.
I don't know how exactly that's supposed to explain the popular appeal of, say, Creationism (as opposed to evolution) in the American landscape. Maybe the Chomsky-style explanation isn't meant to cover this, that, and everything - just a lot of things we see today. But then again, maybe the political-economic analysis can be refined or amended to account for that. It kinda gets squishy here.
How about the status of Ayn Rand in our mainstream culture? Here's where the analysis rather breaks down. The Chomsky-inspired analysis is that her ideas serve as useful fuel and rationalization for the moneyed elite's power-structure. Alan Greenspan, after all, was an inner-circle member and he helped to engineer the economic crisis which (supposedly) was a macrocosmic illustration of the moneyed elite's stranglehold on our political-economic system. That apparent explanation certainly looks convenient to a left-wing analysis, but the game here is one of guilt-by-association rather than one of understanding. Alan Greenspan is, after all, a pragmatist at root, which means his thought-processes and actions are not that of someone seriously well-versed in Rand's philosophy. So things start to really get squishy and squirmy here.
Just how does the left in the country see and grasp Rand? If they see and grasp things at the level of political economy, they're not going to have a firm grasp of anything there. They're just not. Further, the political-economic analysis of things in which a moneyed elite is manipulating and dumbing-down public opinion in order to best serve its interests, tends to be associated with thoughts that the American right suffers from intellectual inferiority. Again, they point to Europe as an example of greater enlightenment, because of their (apparent) advances over America in the areas the leftists and liberals find most important. (Didn't Rand say something about the realms "conservatives" and "liberals," respectively, find more important, and focus their policy concerns accordingly? I think it's in her essay, "Censorship: Local and Express." But only the Rand cultists could tell you about that essay.) But the fact of the matter is that Ayn Rand just doesn't fit into that picture of right-wing intellectual inferiority. In fact, it's really hard to pin down Ayn Rand as a right-wing figure at all. Not when she advocates the primacy of reason above all else.
Let's say that the average American is well-versed in Rand. Not just the novels and non-fiction writings, but the Peikoff stuff, too. (Rand explicitly said Peikoff was her best student, see. She explicitly said that his lecture courses are first-rate as presentations of her ideas.) The consequence is people who tend to think a lot more clearly, more efficiently, more well-integrated, etc. Assuming mind-body integration, this cognitive efficacy means lots of great existential results across all kinds of factors - economic, political, cultural, artistic, spiritual. So an America well-versed in Rand would be advanced beyond both present-day America and present-day Europe in a lot of ways. Psycho-epistemologically, they would be a lot healthier.
Just how does the average/mainstream European compare to the average/mainstream American, cognitively or psycho-epistemologically. Which of the two thought-processes are more logical and reality-oriented? Isn't that a more primary determinant of cultural, political, artistic and spiritual health? Moreover, does the standard left-liberal, or the standard Chomsky-style analysis broaden the investigation to this level of generality? If so, then do the nature of economic systems provide us with the level of generality, i.e., fundamentality that we need? I don't think Rand would have said that, given the primacy of ideas over economics. So how does America stack up to Europe in regard to average/mainstream cognition, and how does this factor into the left-liberal comparisons? Further, and very importantly, what fundamentally influences the course of a nation's average/mainstream cognitive or psycho-epistemological health?
I think that the left-liberals are onto one major facet of things, and that is the nature of cognitive processes dominant in various cultures. Is the dominant culture one that values reason over unreason? The American South gets flunking grades here, whereas the stridently irrationalist forms of religion are much less prominent in Europe now. That's one very significant difference right there. Predominant forms of religious belief here in the states poison scientific dialogue by poisoning cognitive processes - by reinforcing and rewarding cognitive failure.
Let's say that the nature of a culture or cultural mainstream is determined primarily and fundamentally by ideas. Now, look at the most dominant philosophical figures in the West - those whose ideas most influence those of the other philosophers, and down through the pyramidal structure of ideas, all the way down to the "man on the street." So we have Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, first and foremost. This threesome more than any others determines - as far as philosophy goes - the basic cultural structure of Western societies. Yeah, Europe has more extensive welfare states and less obvious dingbattery in their leading political figures. But aside from differences, the basic structure of both Europe and America is pretty similar. They both have welfare states, they both have (some meaningful semblance of) a rule of law, free elections, pretty advanced science disciplines, pretty good university systems, etc. You could say that Europe and America are more fundamentally similar to one another than to an Islamist theocracy.
But they're also different from one another in less basic terms. We mentioned only Plato, Arisotle, and Kant. What, then, about Jesus Christ? Was he a philosopher, or would he be considered some other kind of intellectual leader-figure? Perhaps Jesus - or the prevailing received idea of Jesus - is more aptly called a spiritual leader. And in the hierarchy of human life, where does the spirit rank? How does it rank in relation to the intellect? They're both fundamentally crucial aspects of a human being's soul. I haven't determined (yet) which is of more fundamental causal importance, but they're both really fundamental and interrelated. Now, take Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, and throw Jesus Christ into the mix, and what do you get?
Rand said that religion is a primitive form of philosophy - that it is a less-conceptually-refined, i.e., less-intellectually-advanced view about the nature of reality and humans' relation to it. So let's advance this thesis: Jesus Christ - more specifically, the role Jesus Christ plays in the lives of believers in Him - represents a primitivist influence on the West. People turn to Him to meet spiritual needs, at the expense of intellectual values. (The Thomist tradition is an uneasy hybrid. For all that intellectual rigor that goes into an ontological proof of God's existence, you'd think they'd get around to showing how the standard miracle-story of the Christ passes the philosophical sniff test. None of it holds up well under Kaufmann's withering examination, anyway.) So throw Jesus Christ into the mix in differing doses from one culture to the next, and cognitive health will vary accordingly. Now, with all their welfare states and whatnot, how are the Euros doing spiritually? (Oh. We're back at "Censorship: Local and Express" again.) Do we hear much of anything about that from the left-liberal Euro-peddlers? Just wondering. Because once religion is out, something has to fill the void. Anyway, I do hear that "happiness indices" rank average Euros higher than average Americans. So perhaps reason has ample spiritual value, after all.
Then again, maybe I haven't considered all the factors. One thing about those welfare states, by the way: homogenous and shrinking populations are probably easier to take care of via welfare states, than what's going on population-wise in the USA. I'm not clear on how that fits into the left-liberal Euro-pimping. After all, it's not apples and apples.
As I said, these are only very preliminary thoughts; this subject needs a lot more working-out....
One thing the left-liberals in this country enjoy doing is pointing to the welfare states of Europe as a model for America to adopt. None of it should sit at all well with either advanced students of economics or of Objectivism. The advanced student of economics is apt to root out whether variants of the "broken-window fallacy" or being committed - i.e., what is seen, vs. what is not seen? What are any of the hidden costs the welfare-state advocates are leaving out of their equation? Are they biased as many people tend to be; that is, do they look at the positive side of something they have an automatized positive reaction to, while managing not to notice the negatives? Have they considered the full context?
Just what is the full context? If you're limited to the level of political economy, you're dealing within a narrow context in regard to causal factors. Take, for instance, a favorite icon of the left, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, a linguist by profession, takes left-wing views on matter of political economy; his political ideal is something he calls "anarcho-syndicalism." If Chomsky is the genius many on the left claim he is, then we should hear a lot more from the left about the need to adopt an anarcho-syndicalist model rather than a welfare-state model. Why this schism between admiration for Chomsky's genius and the policies they support? Is it pragmatism? Why the pragmatism, if that's the case?
Besides, why do they go in for Chomsky's political-economic-level analysis of our popular culture? Manufacturing Consent is a left-wing bible, and in fact his analysis seems to provide a pretty comprehensive, over-arching explanation of how and why our national discourse is in the state that it's in right now. It would definitely (seem to) explain how and why a Dingbat has a prominent voice in our politics. Further, the popular culture, in the Chomsky-inspired analysis, is so infused through and through by the interests of a powerful moneyed elite that it overrides a lot of attempts at educating people about better ideas (e.g., the preferability of Euro-style welfare states). Americans these days are fat, dumb, apathetic, etc. - and the corporations only encourage all that more because of the profit involved and the interests of the moneyed elite that are served.
I don't know how exactly that's supposed to explain the popular appeal of, say, Creationism (as opposed to evolution) in the American landscape. Maybe the Chomsky-style explanation isn't meant to cover this, that, and everything - just a lot of things we see today. But then again, maybe the political-economic analysis can be refined or amended to account for that. It kinda gets squishy here.
How about the status of Ayn Rand in our mainstream culture? Here's where the analysis rather breaks down. The Chomsky-inspired analysis is that her ideas serve as useful fuel and rationalization for the moneyed elite's power-structure. Alan Greenspan, after all, was an inner-circle member and he helped to engineer the economic crisis which (supposedly) was a macrocosmic illustration of the moneyed elite's stranglehold on our political-economic system. That apparent explanation certainly looks convenient to a left-wing analysis, but the game here is one of guilt-by-association rather than one of understanding. Alan Greenspan is, after all, a pragmatist at root, which means his thought-processes and actions are not that of someone seriously well-versed in Rand's philosophy. So things start to really get squishy and squirmy here.
Just how does the left in the country see and grasp Rand? If they see and grasp things at the level of political economy, they're not going to have a firm grasp of anything there. They're just not. Further, the political-economic analysis of things in which a moneyed elite is manipulating and dumbing-down public opinion in order to best serve its interests, tends to be associated with thoughts that the American right suffers from intellectual inferiority. Again, they point to Europe as an example of greater enlightenment, because of their (apparent) advances over America in the areas the leftists and liberals find most important. (Didn't Rand say something about the realms "conservatives" and "liberals," respectively, find more important, and focus their policy concerns accordingly? I think it's in her essay, "Censorship: Local and Express." But only the Rand cultists could tell you about that essay.) But the fact of the matter is that Ayn Rand just doesn't fit into that picture of right-wing intellectual inferiority. In fact, it's really hard to pin down Ayn Rand as a right-wing figure at all. Not when she advocates the primacy of reason above all else.
Let's say that the average American is well-versed in Rand. Not just the novels and non-fiction writings, but the Peikoff stuff, too. (Rand explicitly said Peikoff was her best student, see. She explicitly said that his lecture courses are first-rate as presentations of her ideas.) The consequence is people who tend to think a lot more clearly, more efficiently, more well-integrated, etc. Assuming mind-body integration, this cognitive efficacy means lots of great existential results across all kinds of factors - economic, political, cultural, artistic, spiritual. So an America well-versed in Rand would be advanced beyond both present-day America and present-day Europe in a lot of ways. Psycho-epistemologically, they would be a lot healthier.
Just how does the average/mainstream European compare to the average/mainstream American, cognitively or psycho-epistemologically. Which of the two thought-processes are more logical and reality-oriented? Isn't that a more primary determinant of cultural, political, artistic and spiritual health? Moreover, does the standard left-liberal, or the standard Chomsky-style analysis broaden the investigation to this level of generality? If so, then do the nature of economic systems provide us with the level of generality, i.e., fundamentality that we need? I don't think Rand would have said that, given the primacy of ideas over economics. So how does America stack up to Europe in regard to average/mainstream cognition, and how does this factor into the left-liberal comparisons? Further, and very importantly, what fundamentally influences the course of a nation's average/mainstream cognitive or psycho-epistemological health?
I think that the left-liberals are onto one major facet of things, and that is the nature of cognitive processes dominant in various cultures. Is the dominant culture one that values reason over unreason? The American South gets flunking grades here, whereas the stridently irrationalist forms of religion are much less prominent in Europe now. That's one very significant difference right there. Predominant forms of religious belief here in the states poison scientific dialogue by poisoning cognitive processes - by reinforcing and rewarding cognitive failure.
Let's say that the nature of a culture or cultural mainstream is determined primarily and fundamentally by ideas. Now, look at the most dominant philosophical figures in the West - those whose ideas most influence those of the other philosophers, and down through the pyramidal structure of ideas, all the way down to the "man on the street." So we have Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, first and foremost. This threesome more than any others determines - as far as philosophy goes - the basic cultural structure of Western societies. Yeah, Europe has more extensive welfare states and less obvious dingbattery in their leading political figures. But aside from differences, the basic structure of both Europe and America is pretty similar. They both have welfare states, they both have (some meaningful semblance of) a rule of law, free elections, pretty advanced science disciplines, pretty good university systems, etc. You could say that Europe and America are more fundamentally similar to one another than to an Islamist theocracy.
But they're also different from one another in less basic terms. We mentioned only Plato, Arisotle, and Kant. What, then, about Jesus Christ? Was he a philosopher, or would he be considered some other kind of intellectual leader-figure? Perhaps Jesus - or the prevailing received idea of Jesus - is more aptly called a spiritual leader. And in the hierarchy of human life, where does the spirit rank? How does it rank in relation to the intellect? They're both fundamentally crucial aspects of a human being's soul. I haven't determined (yet) which is of more fundamental causal importance, but they're both really fundamental and interrelated. Now, take Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, and throw Jesus Christ into the mix, and what do you get?
Rand said that religion is a primitive form of philosophy - that it is a less-conceptually-refined, i.e., less-intellectually-advanced view about the nature of reality and humans' relation to it. So let's advance this thesis: Jesus Christ - more specifically, the role Jesus Christ plays in the lives of believers in Him - represents a primitivist influence on the West. People turn to Him to meet spiritual needs, at the expense of intellectual values. (The Thomist tradition is an uneasy hybrid. For all that intellectual rigor that goes into an ontological proof of God's existence, you'd think they'd get around to showing how the standard miracle-story of the Christ passes the philosophical sniff test. None of it holds up well under Kaufmann's withering examination, anyway.) So throw Jesus Christ into the mix in differing doses from one culture to the next, and cognitive health will vary accordingly. Now, with all their welfare states and whatnot, how are the Euros doing spiritually? (Oh. We're back at "Censorship: Local and Express" again.) Do we hear much of anything about that from the left-liberal Euro-peddlers? Just wondering. Because once religion is out, something has to fill the void. Anyway, I do hear that "happiness indices" rank average Euros higher than average Americans. So perhaps reason has ample spiritual value, after all.
Then again, maybe I haven't considered all the factors. One thing about those welfare states, by the way: homogenous and shrinking populations are probably easier to take care of via welfare states, than what's going on population-wise in the USA. I'm not clear on how that fits into the left-liberal Euro-pimping. After all, it's not apples and apples.
As I said, these are only very preliminary thoughts; this subject needs a lot more working-out....
Thursday, December 30, 2010
The New Rules, Cont'd
A number of people who have been introduced to the New Rules so far have - in what is now predictable and self-perpetuating fashion - engaged in an orgy of not getting it, of missing the point. Sigh. I already anticipated, going into it and posting it, what the point-missers would say about it. It's all too predictable what they would say about. It's not hard to think on the level that these epistemic savages think - either because it takes such little effort to think as they do, or it's just all too easy to figure out how the savages operate once widespread patterns of epistemic savagery are established. It's just not that hard at all to keep several steps ahead of mental savages. The only surprises they offer are from being even stupider on occasion than one is accustomed to them being.
Here's the essential fact of the matter: a shit-ton of popular-cultural commentary about Rand and Objectivism floating around in the cesspool we call the intellectual mainstream, is manifestly incompetent (manifest to those with a clue - need I even add this parenthetical?) and often downright vicious. There has to be some rational way to filter the healthy material from the cesspool-material. Epistemic sanity and justice demand it. The point - surely to be missed by the pathologically corrupted point-missers - is that there are ready-to-use devices to determine whether a criticism merits one's consideration. This relies on a basic principle of epistemic sanity applicable to anything, not just criticisms of Rand. On what basis should something be taken seriously, as signal rather than noise? To what should our limited cognitive resources be committed, amidst a sea of noise?
I can see the vicious circularity emerging here, and it quite easily explains the unending point-missing: To know how to apply standards of epistemic sanity, already presupposes a grasp of what the point-missers and the viciously incompetent critics never grasped in the first place. It is an apparent Catch-22 that requires oodles upon oodles of corrective action over time. The fact is that the intellectual mainstream of America today is such a standard-less cesspool that it actively resists instituting standards. Had the standards been instituted, Rand's status as a leading historical thinker would already have been established way back when. There's just simply no question about this point from the (lonely?) standpoint of those who get it ahead of most everyone else. The ideas are of such high and solidly reinforced merit, of such world-historic importance (as time can and will show), that one's attitude toward the filth-mongers can only rightly be the one I have expressed. The pathological point-missers and viciously incompetent critics will hurl accusations of elitism or cultism. And, in turn, they just have to be dismissed. That's just how it's gonna have to be for now. The only way out is time and education - no thanks to them.
The point of the Rules, for whoever is in a position to grasp it, is this: Either a commentary demonstrates having a basic clue, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it doesn't meet minimal criteria of respectability. A commentary that suggests Rand's philosophy is a basis for narcissism, for instance, is pathologically clueless. It takes extremes of cognitive cluelessness or downright viciousness. The fact that it gets randomly hurled out there for consumption does not obligate Rand's admirers to respond to it, much less pay it any heed. Such commentaries provide only one more indicator, one more data point, of something that does of practical necessity require paying some heed: the cultural and intellectual cesspool that is the mainstream.
(Exhibit A: Dingbat. Exhibit B: The sheer amount of ignorance, point-missing, and downright viciousness regarding Ayn Rand's ideas. These major data points have a common denominator. One thing I haven't determined is whether the overall mainstream cognitive dysfunction is better or worse now than in Rand's heyday. For one thing, I don't see a clownish figure from Rand's time comparable to the Dingbat. I mean, the Dingbat really does seem to represent new lows for this country. Jefferson would have palm to face today. Also, the Comprachicos have had two more generations to inflict their damage. Looking back (as best as I can) to the '60s, there seemed at least a semblance of seriousness about ideas qua ideas in the mainstream. I don't even see that right now, it's just that fucking bad. I don't know how else to explain the Dingbat phenomenon, or the endless stream of incompetent filth hurled around about the past century's most important philosopher. The Distinguished Professor in his own twisted way might be onto something here: an apparent widening gap between academic-level discourse and that of the mainstream. You see it in the academic-level discourse going on about Rand right now, compared to the utter viciousness out there in the mainstream dialogue. Compare also the chasm - seemingly widening, no less - between evolution or climate science and what passes for dialogue on these subjects in the political discourse. I don't know how the scientists can keep their wits about them with such insanity swirling all around. Then there's Greenwald documenting other kinds of absolute insanity on a daily basis, and none of it registers with more than a few who actually care. It's just so jaw-droppingly bad what's going on all over the place, and only a few notice that it's just that bad. I almost feel at times like just giving up on it all and checking out in some fashion, it's so fucking rotten. There, I said it.)
To essentialize the point further: There are world-historic and world-saving ideas in play right now. Those ideas are too good to be dragged down into "discourse" that is, in fact, a cesspool. (The steady and increasing flow of academic books on Rand is incontrovertible proof of this point.) The point, then, is to rise above the cesspool. That means treating cesspool-caliber commentary for what it is - i.e., to flush it.
I'm made too fucking disgusted by its cognitive presence, otherwise.
[ADDENDUM: One form of point-missing about the Rules is that they amount to a desire to silence debate, or - get this - that they "imply" that people can't or aren't allowed to hold ideas about Objectivism unless they first demonstrate familiarity with OPAR. Only cognitive sloppiness leads to such interpretation of the Rules. A careful reading of the Rules tells us, rather, that people can (and do) say whatever the hell they want about Rand or Objectivism - but that the mere fact of their utterances doesn't thereby entitle the utterances to rational consideration. Just because some article on Rand/Objectivism shows up in The New Yorker or on Slate.com - ostensibly reputable news and opinion outlets - doesn't mean it's entitled to rational consideration. If, say, the article so much as uses the term "narcissism" as applied to Rand/Objectivism, that's sound enough basis to dismiss it outright as intellectually fraudulent. The principle here isn't hard to figure out, if you've got a clue. By the way, to be consistent here, a number of Rand's criticisms of Kant can be tossed out on the same basis. Kant's ideas may well be fucked up, but "reality is unreal" is a silly attribution to him. But the portion of Rand's writings devoted to polemics were never the reason for her appeal or her importance in the first place. Should this point even require mention or explanation?]
Here's the essential fact of the matter: a shit-ton of popular-cultural commentary about Rand and Objectivism floating around in the cesspool we call the intellectual mainstream, is manifestly incompetent (manifest to those with a clue - need I even add this parenthetical?) and often downright vicious. There has to be some rational way to filter the healthy material from the cesspool-material. Epistemic sanity and justice demand it. The point - surely to be missed by the pathologically corrupted point-missers - is that there are ready-to-use devices to determine whether a criticism merits one's consideration. This relies on a basic principle of epistemic sanity applicable to anything, not just criticisms of Rand. On what basis should something be taken seriously, as signal rather than noise? To what should our limited cognitive resources be committed, amidst a sea of noise?
I can see the vicious circularity emerging here, and it quite easily explains the unending point-missing: To know how to apply standards of epistemic sanity, already presupposes a grasp of what the point-missers and the viciously incompetent critics never grasped in the first place. It is an apparent Catch-22 that requires oodles upon oodles of corrective action over time. The fact is that the intellectual mainstream of America today is such a standard-less cesspool that it actively resists instituting standards. Had the standards been instituted, Rand's status as a leading historical thinker would already have been established way back when. There's just simply no question about this point from the (lonely?) standpoint of those who get it ahead of most everyone else. The ideas are of such high and solidly reinforced merit, of such world-historic importance (as time can and will show), that one's attitude toward the filth-mongers can only rightly be the one I have expressed. The pathological point-missers and viciously incompetent critics will hurl accusations of elitism or cultism. And, in turn, they just have to be dismissed. That's just how it's gonna have to be for now. The only way out is time and education - no thanks to them.
The point of the Rules, for whoever is in a position to grasp it, is this: Either a commentary demonstrates having a basic clue, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it doesn't meet minimal criteria of respectability. A commentary that suggests Rand's philosophy is a basis for narcissism, for instance, is pathologically clueless. It takes extremes of cognitive cluelessness or downright viciousness. The fact that it gets randomly hurled out there for consumption does not obligate Rand's admirers to respond to it, much less pay it any heed. Such commentaries provide only one more indicator, one more data point, of something that does of practical necessity require paying some heed: the cultural and intellectual cesspool that is the mainstream.
(Exhibit A: Dingbat. Exhibit B: The sheer amount of ignorance, point-missing, and downright viciousness regarding Ayn Rand's ideas. These major data points have a common denominator. One thing I haven't determined is whether the overall mainstream cognitive dysfunction is better or worse now than in Rand's heyday. For one thing, I don't see a clownish figure from Rand's time comparable to the Dingbat. I mean, the Dingbat really does seem to represent new lows for this country. Jefferson would have palm to face today. Also, the Comprachicos have had two more generations to inflict their damage. Looking back (as best as I can) to the '60s, there seemed at least a semblance of seriousness about ideas qua ideas in the mainstream. I don't even see that right now, it's just that fucking bad. I don't know how else to explain the Dingbat phenomenon, or the endless stream of incompetent filth hurled around about the past century's most important philosopher. The Distinguished Professor in his own twisted way might be onto something here: an apparent widening gap between academic-level discourse and that of the mainstream. You see it in the academic-level discourse going on about Rand right now, compared to the utter viciousness out there in the mainstream dialogue. Compare also the chasm - seemingly widening, no less - between evolution or climate science and what passes for dialogue on these subjects in the political discourse. I don't know how the scientists can keep their wits about them with such insanity swirling all around. Then there's Greenwald documenting other kinds of absolute insanity on a daily basis, and none of it registers with more than a few who actually care. It's just so jaw-droppingly bad what's going on all over the place, and only a few notice that it's just that bad. I almost feel at times like just giving up on it all and checking out in some fashion, it's so fucking rotten. There, I said it.)
To essentialize the point further: There are world-historic and world-saving ideas in play right now. Those ideas are too good to be dragged down into "discourse" that is, in fact, a cesspool. (The steady and increasing flow of academic books on Rand is incontrovertible proof of this point.) The point, then, is to rise above the cesspool. That means treating cesspool-caliber commentary for what it is - i.e., to flush it.
I'm made too fucking disgusted by its cognitive presence, otherwise.
[ADDENDUM: One form of point-missing about the Rules is that they amount to a desire to silence debate, or - get this - that they "imply" that people can't or aren't allowed to hold ideas about Objectivism unless they first demonstrate familiarity with OPAR. Only cognitive sloppiness leads to such interpretation of the Rules. A careful reading of the Rules tells us, rather, that people can (and do) say whatever the hell they want about Rand or Objectivism - but that the mere fact of their utterances doesn't thereby entitle the utterances to rational consideration. Just because some article on Rand/Objectivism shows up in The New Yorker or on Slate.com - ostensibly reputable news and opinion outlets - doesn't mean it's entitled to rational consideration. If, say, the article so much as uses the term "narcissism" as applied to Rand/Objectivism, that's sound enough basis to dismiss it outright as intellectually fraudulent. The principle here isn't hard to figure out, if you've got a clue. By the way, to be consistent here, a number of Rand's criticisms of Kant can be tossed out on the same basis. Kant's ideas may well be fucked up, but "reality is unreal" is a silly attribution to him. But the portion of Rand's writings devoted to polemics were never the reason for her appeal or her importance in the first place. Should this point even require mention or explanation?]
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
New Rules for Rand Criticism
I have made the following integration: Approximately 99.9% of critical commentary out there on Ayn Rand can be summarily dismissed as lacking certain minimum qualifications. The chief minimum qualification I have in mind is a working familiarity with Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
That may not even be enough. I think the standards may have to be made more stringent than that, to ensure quality-control. As far as I'm concerned, a working familiarity with OPAR only gets you in the front door, onto the consideration list as it were. What would ensure quality control and prima facie status as someone with a clue is a familiarity with Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism course, and a familiarity with his advanced seminar course on OPAR would be a much-desired icing on the cake.
Short of that, it's pretty much a crap shoot whether you're getting commentary from someone with a clue. The minimum qualifications otherwise would make the number of qualified commentators verge on the vanishingly small. It would probably take, at minimum, some advanced training in philosophy, a solid background in Aristotelianism, and a keen awareness of Rand's place in the neo-Aristotelian tradition. Dougs Rasmussen and Den Uyl make the cut. That's about it. The number is frighteningly small in any event.
(I'll merely mention that the noteworthy academic commentary on Ayn Rand to date has been from those with a very favorable view of Rand overall. Pieces like Nozick's "On the Randian Argument" do not qualify as noteworthy even in this context; it's telling that the Dougs' response to that piece has never been answered, in over 30 years. There's a reason for that.)
One of Rand's associates interviewed for 100 Voices mentioned how Rand made her speeches in Atlas as lengthy as she did because she wanted to ensure that she would not be misunderstood, that she wanted to cover all the bases (in essentialized terms, of course). The interviewee goes on to mention how even that didn't help much - as evidenced by how intellectual thugs such as Whittaker "Gas" Chambers seemingly went out of their way to misunderstand it all, the fuckers. Clearly "familiarity" with the novels has guaranteed nothing by way of solid understanding in the popular culture. Too many goddamned hooligan thugs running around screwing up the discourse - and way too many without any philosophical sophistication whatsoever. Not to mention all the hooligan thugs that became cultist followers whom Rand wanted nothing to do with. (Not that you'd ever hear about her disdain for the cultists from the outsider thugs who call her a cult. Oh, in this context, Michael Shermer gets the boot unless or until he shapes up.)
It's also worth pointing out here that Understanding Objectivism served as a wake-up call to Objectivists who had been studying the printed works for years. There really was no substitute for years-on-end, first-hand interaction with Miss Rand. (I'll mention, as I have in the past, that John Hospers, a professionally-trained and widely-respected philosopher, was influenced tremendously by his own couple years of extensive interaction. You just never hear about that from the legions of neck-wringing-worthy thugs, now do you.) The Peikoff courses are the closest thing the general public has. When Peikoff introduced to Objectivist audiences the concept of rationalism and its insidiously destructive effects, it's like a veil had been lifted for many. (Hyper-rationalism is standard M.O. in academic philosophy, FWIW. There's a reason Rand found herself fundamentally at odds with the academy in her day. Perhaps it's getting better now with the modest influx of Aristotelian influence.) The concept of methodological integration is almost unknown outside of the circle of people familiar with these lectures. Not even "spiral progression of knowledge" appears in the Ayn Rand Lexicon, but it's partly definitive of a healthy, well-lubricated cognitive process.
To even so much as have a cognitively-clear, schmutz-free grasp of what Rand was ever getting at - and the clear thought is all hers, not her critics'; they only wish their cognitive processes were clear - requires a certain (re-)wiring of the mind/brain well removed from that of the mainstream "norm." (Did I also mention in a recent blog entry that Kubrick stood out far ahead of everyone else, and his cognitive processes were normal in the true sense of the term? The mainstream is a swamp.) The standard criticisms - you know how they go, they're so fucking cliche'd by now you can rattle 'em off like any old thug who doesn't engage in mental effort - have some kind of inbuilt misunderstanding-bias. None of that is surprising if the critics have been - unbeknownst to them - Comprachico-ized by the schools. That guarantees a lack of ability to handle serious ideas generally; the cognitive deficiency can only be multiplied when the ideas in question are Rand's. And no academic-level criticism is going to gain any headway without first making it past the quality-control committee at the Ayn Rand Society. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Distinguished Professor Leiter.
So, if you're one of those serious students of Objectivism who is sick and fucking tired of the same ol' same ol' about Rand wafting around in the culture, whenever you read some commentary or criticism that so much as suggests the critic doesn't know what he's talking about, just invoke the New Rules:
(1) Is the person familiar with OPAR? (This usually disqualifies the critic right off the bat.)
(2) Does the person demonstrate any philosophical sophistication otherwise? (Ditto.)
(3) Does the person demonstrate a seriousness about ideas, beyond snarky asides and punchy soundbites? (Ditto.)
That's gotta remove 99% of the stuff out there from serious consideration already. You may not even need to consider the contextually-optional Fourth Rule:
(4) Is the person familiar with Peikoff's major Objectivism courses? (This narrows the field way down.)
By the way, FYI: if you don't know what "contextually-optional" might refer to, you are disqualifed from serious consideration as Rand-critic. Ahhhh, ya see how easy it is to wipe away the otherwise aggravating mainstream and/or second-rate schmutz, once you've integrated and automatized the Rules? Go ahead, it's for your mental health - just wipe away "Gas" Chambers and Anne Hellish and the rest of their rationally-non-integratable ilk from your cognitive field of vision, like so much bug-splat from windshield, and pay them no further heed. It's very refreshing! :-)
(Follow-up here.)
[ADDENDUM: Or, as Peikoff in OPAR puts it, you treat the rationally-non-integratable like nothing has been said, or like the sounds of a parrot. Parrot goes "Randian ethics is narcissism!"; one is entitled to dismiss it out of hand, or label it as: Too Fucking Stupid to Take Seriously (TFSTTS). Strictly speaking, there is nothing of cognitive content there at all; pure noise with no referent. Likewise with such sound-emissions as "Capitalism leads to class stratification!" or "Reason rests on faith, too!" Thanks so very much for all that, Comprachicos.]
That may not even be enough. I think the standards may have to be made more stringent than that, to ensure quality-control. As far as I'm concerned, a working familiarity with OPAR only gets you in the front door, onto the consideration list as it were. What would ensure quality control and prima facie status as someone with a clue is a familiarity with Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism course, and a familiarity with his advanced seminar course on OPAR would be a much-desired icing on the cake.
Short of that, it's pretty much a crap shoot whether you're getting commentary from someone with a clue. The minimum qualifications otherwise would make the number of qualified commentators verge on the vanishingly small. It would probably take, at minimum, some advanced training in philosophy, a solid background in Aristotelianism, and a keen awareness of Rand's place in the neo-Aristotelian tradition. Dougs Rasmussen and Den Uyl make the cut. That's about it. The number is frighteningly small in any event.
(I'll merely mention that the noteworthy academic commentary on Ayn Rand to date has been from those with a very favorable view of Rand overall. Pieces like Nozick's "On the Randian Argument" do not qualify as noteworthy even in this context; it's telling that the Dougs' response to that piece has never been answered, in over 30 years. There's a reason for that.)
One of Rand's associates interviewed for 100 Voices mentioned how Rand made her speeches in Atlas as lengthy as she did because she wanted to ensure that she would not be misunderstood, that she wanted to cover all the bases (in essentialized terms, of course). The interviewee goes on to mention how even that didn't help much - as evidenced by how intellectual thugs such as Whittaker "Gas" Chambers seemingly went out of their way to misunderstand it all, the fuckers. Clearly "familiarity" with the novels has guaranteed nothing by way of solid understanding in the popular culture. Too many goddamned hooligan thugs running around screwing up the discourse - and way too many without any philosophical sophistication whatsoever. Not to mention all the hooligan thugs that became cultist followers whom Rand wanted nothing to do with. (Not that you'd ever hear about her disdain for the cultists from the outsider thugs who call her a cult. Oh, in this context, Michael Shermer gets the boot unless or until he shapes up.)
It's also worth pointing out here that Understanding Objectivism served as a wake-up call to Objectivists who had been studying the printed works for years. There really was no substitute for years-on-end, first-hand interaction with Miss Rand. (I'll mention, as I have in the past, that John Hospers, a professionally-trained and widely-respected philosopher, was influenced tremendously by his own couple years of extensive interaction. You just never hear about that from the legions of neck-wringing-worthy thugs, now do you.) The Peikoff courses are the closest thing the general public has. When Peikoff introduced to Objectivist audiences the concept of rationalism and its insidiously destructive effects, it's like a veil had been lifted for many. (Hyper-rationalism is standard M.O. in academic philosophy, FWIW. There's a reason Rand found herself fundamentally at odds with the academy in her day. Perhaps it's getting better now with the modest influx of Aristotelian influence.) The concept of methodological integration is almost unknown outside of the circle of people familiar with these lectures. Not even "spiral progression of knowledge" appears in the Ayn Rand Lexicon, but it's partly definitive of a healthy, well-lubricated cognitive process.
To even so much as have a cognitively-clear, schmutz-free grasp of what Rand was ever getting at - and the clear thought is all hers, not her critics'; they only wish their cognitive processes were clear - requires a certain (re-)wiring of the mind/brain well removed from that of the mainstream "norm." (Did I also mention in a recent blog entry that Kubrick stood out far ahead of everyone else, and his cognitive processes were normal in the true sense of the term? The mainstream is a swamp.) The standard criticisms - you know how they go, they're so fucking cliche'd by now you can rattle 'em off like any old thug who doesn't engage in mental effort - have some kind of inbuilt misunderstanding-bias. None of that is surprising if the critics have been - unbeknownst to them - Comprachico-ized by the schools. That guarantees a lack of ability to handle serious ideas generally; the cognitive deficiency can only be multiplied when the ideas in question are Rand's. And no academic-level criticism is going to gain any headway without first making it past the quality-control committee at the Ayn Rand Society. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Distinguished Professor Leiter.
So, if you're one of those serious students of Objectivism who is sick and fucking tired of the same ol' same ol' about Rand wafting around in the culture, whenever you read some commentary or criticism that so much as suggests the critic doesn't know what he's talking about, just invoke the New Rules:
(1) Is the person familiar with OPAR? (This usually disqualifies the critic right off the bat.)
(2) Does the person demonstrate any philosophical sophistication otherwise? (Ditto.)
(3) Does the person demonstrate a seriousness about ideas, beyond snarky asides and punchy soundbites? (Ditto.)
That's gotta remove 99% of the stuff out there from serious consideration already. You may not even need to consider the contextually-optional Fourth Rule:
(4) Is the person familiar with Peikoff's major Objectivism courses? (This narrows the field way down.)
By the way, FYI: if you don't know what "contextually-optional" might refer to, you are disqualifed from serious consideration as Rand-critic. Ahhhh, ya see how easy it is to wipe away the otherwise aggravating mainstream and/or second-rate schmutz, once you've integrated and automatized the Rules? Go ahead, it's for your mental health - just wipe away "Gas" Chambers and Anne Hellish and the rest of their rationally-non-integratable ilk from your cognitive field of vision, like so much bug-splat from windshield, and pay them no further heed. It's very refreshing! :-)
(Follow-up here.)
[ADDENDUM: Or, as Peikoff in OPAR puts it, you treat the rationally-non-integratable like nothing has been said, or like the sounds of a parrot. Parrot goes "Randian ethics is narcissism!"; one is entitled to dismiss it out of hand, or label it as: Too Fucking Stupid to Take Seriously (TFSTTS). Strictly speaking, there is nothing of cognitive content there at all; pure noise with no referent. Likewise with such sound-emissions as "Capitalism leads to class stratification!" or "Reason rests on faith, too!" Thanks so very much for all that, Comprachicos.]
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
I Like It!
From an otherwise so fucking amateurish! article on present-day (")libertarianism(") at the New Yorker website:
Let's make it happen! :-)
Let's make it happen! :-)
Cultural Wasteland/GOP Primaries Watch
12 months out from the GOP primary debates, the field is beginning to clear, leaving Romney and the Dingbat in a close "race," way out ahead of the others.
I believe the Dingbat will make a run for it, just to see how far she can get, to see just what she can get away with. That would be so like her. The primary debates will be a rehash of Dingbat-Biden '08, with canned talking points and a constant stream of winks at the camera. The average GOP primary voter will simply be mesmerized just like with the '08 debates. I don't think she or her base realizes - or cares - just how badly she'd be pulverized in a general election. For her, the spectacle will be enough. The Establishment may try to buy Romney the nomination and a semi-respectable showing for the party in Nov. '12, while the Tea Partiers and the Dingbat-faithful will mount a counter-insurgency. It's going to be a debacle however it plays out.
The Left, meanwhile, seems to be capable of offering little more than the same ol' seething resentment toward capitalists and capitalist institutions. At least the pragmatistic, empty-suit Obama can be applauded for abandoning them to stew in their resentment.
What a shitty election it's going to be....
[ADDENDUM: Dish under-bloggers have documented yet another Dingbat lie. This isn't just another of the many "odd lies" that can be thrown onto the pile of 50 or so and counting. This is just a flat-out lie. Further, the fact that she corrected "refudiate" with "refute" instead of "repudiate" is ample proof of her proud ignorance of the English language. Why no one else seems to have caught onto this point is way beyond me. Is the culture really that low?]
I believe the Dingbat will make a run for it, just to see how far she can get, to see just what she can get away with. That would be so like her. The primary debates will be a rehash of Dingbat-Biden '08, with canned talking points and a constant stream of winks at the camera. The average GOP primary voter will simply be mesmerized just like with the '08 debates. I don't think she or her base realizes - or cares - just how badly she'd be pulverized in a general election. For her, the spectacle will be enough. The Establishment may try to buy Romney the nomination and a semi-respectable showing for the party in Nov. '12, while the Tea Partiers and the Dingbat-faithful will mount a counter-insurgency. It's going to be a debacle however it plays out.
The Left, meanwhile, seems to be capable of offering little more than the same ol' seething resentment toward capitalists and capitalist institutions. At least the pragmatistic, empty-suit Obama can be applauded for abandoning them to stew in their resentment.
What a shitty election it's going to be....
[ADDENDUM: Dish under-bloggers have documented yet another Dingbat lie. This isn't just another of the many "odd lies" that can be thrown onto the pile of 50 or so and counting. This is just a flat-out lie. Further, the fact that she corrected "refudiate" with "refute" instead of "repudiate" is ample proof of her proud ignorance of the English language. Why no one else seems to have caught onto this point is way beyond me. Is the culture really that low?]
Yaron Brook vs. Peter Schwartz
I just fucking knew this chicken would come home to roost at some point.
Here we have Dr. Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, giving a lecture at the Oxford Libertarian Society.
Here we have Peter Schwartz, some 20 years prior, chastising anyone who would give a lecture at any organization deemed to be "Libertarian."
It doesn't even matter what particular libertarian organization then-ARI speaker David Kelley spoke at; the very fact that he would speak to a "Libertarian" organization was enough to fall afoul of Schwartz's "sanction" policies. What qualified as a "Libertarian" organization by Peter Schwartz's criteria? Cutting through the bullshit, the simple answer is: Whatever the hell Peter Schwartz felt like labeling and condemning as "Libertarian." The very term "libertarian" itself is a no-no in Schwartz-land. It is evidenced simply by the way he would ever speak about anything having to do with that label. If you could ever sit through a reading of his signature piece, "Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty," (included in The Voice of Reason) you would find a mash-up of truly bad scholarship (some of which flies plainly in the face of the original meaning of things he quotes way out of context), weasel-wording, false integrations, hysterical hyperbole, and overall nonsense in place of substance. Never in his entire career of being the "Libertarianism" hatchet-man have I ever seen him offer anything remotely resembling clear-cut criteria for who merits his anti-"Libertarian" ire.
What amazes me is how he got away with this un-objective crap for so long. Many, many reasonable and intelligent people who left ARI and/or joined David Kelley in the early 1990s were flabbergasted that such anti-intellectual trash was being peddled in seriousness. Just what was the stick up this guy's (and many of his emulators') ass about the very mention of the word "libertarian"? (Schwartz always used "Libertarian" with a capital L. There's no clear or objective reasons that he would do so. I've always found him slimy for a number of reasons, and I'm guessing his reasons for doing so here are, likewise, slimy. The only effect - intended or not - is to confuse people and foment stupidity.) Yeah, we get the point about sanctioning evil, but what is this irrational hysteria posing as Objectivist thought?
It is also worth mentioning that since the time Schwartz was president of ARI, i.e., since Yaron Brook has taken over, the illogicality, the un-seriousness, the pointless sectarianism driving away good and reasonable people, has gone by the wayside in favor of actual quality and substance. Which particular libertarian organizations to speak to or work with has always been a matter of judgment and of context - things which the Schwartz approach shat all over. Schwartz is a fucking idiot and his signature piece will go down in infamy in the eyes of history. MARK MY WORDS.
(To be perfectly frank, the way Schwartz quotes and uses original sources screams of bad faith. The way he targets and selects material, most significantly from Murray Rothbard, rips it out of context, twists the meaning, applies non-sequiturs to the twisted out-of-context carefully-selected quotes . . . it just falls so far beyond the pale of intellectual responsibility that it discredits him on that basis alone. One thing it does do, is prey upon the most ridiculous misconceptions and ignorance about things people like Rothbard actually ever said. Another piece of anecdotal evidence: In Understanding Objectivism, Peikoff relates an incident in which an unnamed "libertarian" - Rothbard, it turns out - claimed the right to bash him over the head with a typewriter, as long as he, the basher, was the typewriter's rightful owner. He repeated this story on his radio show in the late '90s. This, of course, runs counter to everything Rothbard ever advocated. Now, I have ample reason to believe Peikoff's example rested upon an innocuous misunderstanding on his part. But for Schwartz to sit by and allow this stuff to be spread around in Objectivist circles for years . . . it's just too intellectually vicious to merit a benefit of the doubt, given his own knowledge of Rothbard's actual views.)
Now, the question is, how do the Schwartzophiles react to the news that the leading ARI spokesman today speaks in front of a group identifying itself by the dreaded L-word? If past experience with these assholes is any indication, the reaction will consist primarily of one thing: evasion. Fortunately, it looks like the worst of the Schwartzophiles have gone away as he has withered into relative obscurity since his loathsome signature-piece heyday.
Now, one might be inclined to ask, "How did such an idiot and second-rater manage to pull one over on so large a group of people otherwise committed - at least ostensibly - to reasonable and thoughtful discourse?" Does this really require a flight of imagination? We need only look at the case of Nathaniel Branden, who managed to pull off his shenanigans for years, and right to Ayn Rand's face, too. Throw in plenty of honest confusions on the issue from all corners, and throw in some groupthink dynamics - the record of behavior by many so-called Objectivists in this regard is far from enviable, and makes Miss Rand roll in her grave - and it's not hard to understand at all. The damage Branden did to the reputation of the Objectivist movement is untold; likewise with Schwartz's thoroughly stupid dumping-on anything he called "Libertarian."
By the way, it is most irrelevant here that Rand had little to nothing nice to say about the Libertarian Party or the political-types who eschew philosophy while adopting the "libertarian" label. A reasonable, commonsensical person can tell the difference between what she meant (she took the care to put the term in "scare quotes" so that we know she isn't identifying with a political label - not that the term cannot be reasonably and objectively applied in certain contexts) and the cognitive filth Schwartz was spewing. So if I so much as fucking hear about "Rand denouncing libertarians" or "libertarians this," and "libertarians that" with no clear cognitive context to it ever again, by god I just don't want to deal with it lest I scream. It's just too stupid to take seriously.
Meanwhile, congratulations to Yaron Brook for not going apeshit over a label. Have we finally moved past the screaming stupidity?
[Incidentally, I found this link to Brook's lecture after discovering a lecture by noted libertarian (oh dear) scholar Eric Mack. Unlike certain intellectual pipsqueaks who bash "L/libertarians" indiscriminately, his work is usually first-rate.]
Here we have Dr. Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, giving a lecture at the Oxford Libertarian Society.
Here we have Peter Schwartz, some 20 years prior, chastising anyone who would give a lecture at any organization deemed to be "Libertarian."
It doesn't even matter what particular libertarian organization then-ARI speaker David Kelley spoke at; the very fact that he would speak to a "Libertarian" organization was enough to fall afoul of Schwartz's "sanction" policies. What qualified as a "Libertarian" organization by Peter Schwartz's criteria? Cutting through the bullshit, the simple answer is: Whatever the hell Peter Schwartz felt like labeling and condemning as "Libertarian." The very term "libertarian" itself is a no-no in Schwartz-land. It is evidenced simply by the way he would ever speak about anything having to do with that label. If you could ever sit through a reading of his signature piece, "Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty," (included in The Voice of Reason) you would find a mash-up of truly bad scholarship (some of which flies plainly in the face of the original meaning of things he quotes way out of context), weasel-wording, false integrations, hysterical hyperbole, and overall nonsense in place of substance. Never in his entire career of being the "Libertarianism" hatchet-man have I ever seen him offer anything remotely resembling clear-cut criteria for who merits his anti-"Libertarian" ire.
What amazes me is how he got away with this un-objective crap for so long. Many, many reasonable and intelligent people who left ARI and/or joined David Kelley in the early 1990s were flabbergasted that such anti-intellectual trash was being peddled in seriousness. Just what was the stick up this guy's (and many of his emulators') ass about the very mention of the word "libertarian"? (Schwartz always used "Libertarian" with a capital L. There's no clear or objective reasons that he would do so. I've always found him slimy for a number of reasons, and I'm guessing his reasons for doing so here are, likewise, slimy. The only effect - intended or not - is to confuse people and foment stupidity.) Yeah, we get the point about sanctioning evil, but what is this irrational hysteria posing as Objectivist thought?
It is also worth mentioning that since the time Schwartz was president of ARI, i.e., since Yaron Brook has taken over, the illogicality, the un-seriousness, the pointless sectarianism driving away good and reasonable people, has gone by the wayside in favor of actual quality and substance. Which particular libertarian organizations to speak to or work with has always been a matter of judgment and of context - things which the Schwartz approach shat all over. Schwartz is a fucking idiot and his signature piece will go down in infamy in the eyes of history. MARK MY WORDS.
(To be perfectly frank, the way Schwartz quotes and uses original sources screams of bad faith. The way he targets and selects material, most significantly from Murray Rothbard, rips it out of context, twists the meaning, applies non-sequiturs to the twisted out-of-context carefully-selected quotes . . . it just falls so far beyond the pale of intellectual responsibility that it discredits him on that basis alone. One thing it does do, is prey upon the most ridiculous misconceptions and ignorance about things people like Rothbard actually ever said. Another piece of anecdotal evidence: In Understanding Objectivism, Peikoff relates an incident in which an unnamed "libertarian" - Rothbard, it turns out - claimed the right to bash him over the head with a typewriter, as long as he, the basher, was the typewriter's rightful owner. He repeated this story on his radio show in the late '90s. This, of course, runs counter to everything Rothbard ever advocated. Now, I have ample reason to believe Peikoff's example rested upon an innocuous misunderstanding on his part. But for Schwartz to sit by and allow this stuff to be spread around in Objectivist circles for years . . . it's just too intellectually vicious to merit a benefit of the doubt, given his own knowledge of Rothbard's actual views.)
Now, the question is, how do the Schwartzophiles react to the news that the leading ARI spokesman today speaks in front of a group identifying itself by the dreaded L-word? If past experience with these assholes is any indication, the reaction will consist primarily of one thing: evasion. Fortunately, it looks like the worst of the Schwartzophiles have gone away as he has withered into relative obscurity since his loathsome signature-piece heyday.
Now, one might be inclined to ask, "How did such an idiot and second-rater manage to pull one over on so large a group of people otherwise committed - at least ostensibly - to reasonable and thoughtful discourse?" Does this really require a flight of imagination? We need only look at the case of Nathaniel Branden, who managed to pull off his shenanigans for years, and right to Ayn Rand's face, too. Throw in plenty of honest confusions on the issue from all corners, and throw in some groupthink dynamics - the record of behavior by many so-called Objectivists in this regard is far from enviable, and makes Miss Rand roll in her grave - and it's not hard to understand at all. The damage Branden did to the reputation of the Objectivist movement is untold; likewise with Schwartz's thoroughly stupid dumping-on anything he called "Libertarian."
By the way, it is most irrelevant here that Rand had little to nothing nice to say about the Libertarian Party or the political-types who eschew philosophy while adopting the "libertarian" label. A reasonable, commonsensical person can tell the difference between what she meant (she took the care to put the term in "scare quotes" so that we know she isn't identifying with a political label - not that the term cannot be reasonably and objectively applied in certain contexts) and the cognitive filth Schwartz was spewing. So if I so much as fucking hear about "Rand denouncing libertarians" or "libertarians this," and "libertarians that" with no clear cognitive context to it ever again, by god I just don't want to deal with it lest I scream. It's just too stupid to take seriously.
Meanwhile, congratulations to Yaron Brook for not going apeshit over a label. Have we finally moved past the screaming stupidity?
[Incidentally, I found this link to Brook's lecture after discovering a lecture by noted libertarian (oh dear) scholar Eric Mack. Unlike certain intellectual pipsqueaks who bash "L/libertarians" indiscriminately, his work is usually first-rate.]
Monday, December 27, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Christopher Nolan's Filmography
I've seen many of director Christopher Nolan's films by now. Here are my thoughts on each of them:
Following (1998)
The craft is really superb and the thematic elements are intriguing, but on the whole it comes off as very gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated.
Memento (2000)
The craft is really superb and the thematic elements are intriguing, but on the whole it comes off as very gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated.
Insomnia (2002)
The craft is really superb and the thematic elements are intriguing, but on the whole it comes off as very gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated.
Batman Begins (2005)
After feeling kinda cheated by previous Nolan efforts, I did not bother with this one. (What truly serious director does Batman, anyway?)
The Prestige (2006)
The craft is really superb and the thematic elements are intriguing, but on the whole it comes off as very gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated.
The Dark Knight (2008)
Watched this one because of all the high ratings on the internet sites. The craft is really superb and the thematic elements are intriguing, but on the whole it comes off as very gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated. (What truly serious director does Batman, anyway?)
Inception (2010)
Nolan's best effort yet, and while the craft is really superb and the thematic elements are certainly intriguing, on the whole it comes off as extremely, pointlessly gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated.
Overall assessment:
M. Night Shyamalan with more elaborate gimmicks. Emperor Nolan isn't wearing any clothes, you philistines!
[ADDENDUM: At some future point, when I've developed the full philosophical skills for it, I might do a comparison of Nolan's filmmaking style with Kant's philosophical style: a shit-ton of brilliant and elaborate gimmicks masking a whole lotta nothin', stuff people fall for all too easily, few with the guts to call out the whole fucking farce for what it is. Aristotle:Kant::Kubrick:Nolan. The Batman stuff should have been an obvious giveaway. Just remember, 46% of the electorate voted to put an ignorant philistine within a heartbeat of the presidency. Palin:Jefferson::Shit:Shinola.]
[ADDENDUM #2: Limbo? Really? Shared dreamspace? Seriously? 10 years of script development and we get these dead-ends? I don't know what's more laughably arbitrary, that or experience being constructed by a priori categories. I really don't. Coincidentally, the subjective-construction-of-experience stuff took 10 years to develop, too. Hell, this may well be a prime exercise in Kantian filmmaking. *facepalm*]
Following (1998)
The craft is really superb and the thematic elements are intriguing, but on the whole it comes off as very gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated.
Memento (2000)
The craft is really superb and the thematic elements are intriguing, but on the whole it comes off as very gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated.
Insomnia (2002)
The craft is really superb and the thematic elements are intriguing, but on the whole it comes off as very gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated.
Batman Begins (2005)
After feeling kinda cheated by previous Nolan efforts, I did not bother with this one. (What truly serious director does Batman, anyway?)
The Prestige (2006)
The craft is really superb and the thematic elements are intriguing, but on the whole it comes off as very gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated.
The Dark Knight (2008)
Watched this one because of all the high ratings on the internet sites. The craft is really superb and the thematic elements are intriguing, but on the whole it comes off as very gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated. (What truly serious director does Batman, anyway?)
Inception (2010)
Nolan's best effort yet, and while the craft is really superb and the thematic elements are certainly intriguing, on the whole it comes off as extremely, pointlessly gimmicky. In the end I felt kinda cheated.
Overall assessment:
M. Night Shyamalan with more elaborate gimmicks. Emperor Nolan isn't wearing any clothes, you philistines!
[ADDENDUM: At some future point, when I've developed the full philosophical skills for it, I might do a comparison of Nolan's filmmaking style with Kant's philosophical style: a shit-ton of brilliant and elaborate gimmicks masking a whole lotta nothin', stuff people fall for all too easily, few with the guts to call out the whole fucking farce for what it is. Aristotle:Kant::Kubrick:Nolan. The Batman stuff should have been an obvious giveaway. Just remember, 46% of the electorate voted to put an ignorant philistine within a heartbeat of the presidency. Palin:Jefferson::Shit:Shinola.]
[ADDENDUM #2: Limbo? Really? Shared dreamspace? Seriously? 10 years of script development and we get these dead-ends? I don't know what's more laughably arbitrary, that or experience being constructed by a priori categories. I really don't. Coincidentally, the subjective-construction-of-experience stuff took 10 years to develop, too. Hell, this may well be a prime exercise in Kantian filmmaking. *facepalm*]
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The "William Edward Hickman" Meme
An unbelievably dishonest anti-Rand meme making the rounds as of late has to do with her comments on William Edward Hickman in her early journals. The unscrupulousness of these smear-mongers knows no bounds. Simply too disgusting to dignify. What it does reveal is the soul and character of such individuals who spread these smear-memes with impunity, as well as the jaw-dropping cognitive-epistemological breakdown of those who buy into them. In absolute intellectual cesspools such as reddit.com, this lunacy is treated as axiomatic gospel.
Those Zons of Beetches!
Those Zons of Beetches!
Marxism: 160 Years of Bad Faith
Since capitalism is the only moral and practical social system in modern times, the leading attacks on it have to involve massive discounting of reality in favor of pre-established ideology. The leading Marxists, in particular - the rank and file may be a different story; I'm talking about the foremost intellectual figures - are the most vile offenders in this regard.
The accounts of Marx the person and of his life (i.e., he was pretty nasty) serve as a fitting backdrop to what he accomplished intellectually: the biggest smear-job against capitalism ever perpetrated. It is hard to believe that his extensive study of the economic value-theories of his time - it's pretty much all he ever spent his time doing - didn't lead him to significant problems with the labor theory of value, but it's not like that stopped him or anything. His conclusions were set in place by the time of The Communist Manifesto (1848). (Volume 1 of Capital came out in 1867.) The rest reeks of bad faith, a rationalization for the predetermined conclusions.
That's the thing about Marxism in its various transmutations: it just all has an air of bad faith about it. The "exploitation doctrine" is the core of Marxian and neo-Marxian economics, and the neo-versions had exploitation pretty well in mind irrespective of the failure of the labor theory of value.
Marxism as a "respectable" ideology, as an era, came pretty much to a close with the death of G.A. Cohen in 2009. Marxism had basically run its course, and Cohen was the last major dinosaur of the failed ideology. And all the way up through Cohen (before his death, "the most prominent Marxist of our time"), there is still the whole aura of bad faith.
One article in particular by Cohen struck me as especially obscene: "Incentives, Equality, and Community" in a collection titled Equal Freedom (ed. Stephen Darwall, 1995). The collection, by the way, consists of contributions from a number of those within an elite clique of academics clustering around John Rawls over the past few decades. These same names keep showing up if you explore the literature: Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, G.A. Cohen, Thomas Scanlon, Derek Parfit, Samuel Scheffler, Amartya Sen. Those are the "elites" in academia who've effectively decided for everyone what the most prestigious theories are in that arena. The manifestly vicious doctrine of egalitarianism plays a major role in their decades-long circle-jerk.
(I would just like to note here the chasm between the sense of life in Ayn Rand's essay "Apollo 11" and that of the cover of Nagel's Equality and Partiality. A commentary on Nagel's justificatory procedure will have to wait for some other time; best as I can make out, though, Nagel's notion of a "View from Nowhere" is very closely related to the moral structure of Rawls's "Original Position," and was almost surely deeply influenced by it. By the way, this stuff counts as "foundations" for Nagel, whereas Nozick's libertarian intuitions are "without foundations.")
Anyway, the gist of Cohen's "Incentives, Equality, and Community" is a response to standard incentive-arguments for tax cuts which run basically as follows: if taxes are cut for the wealthy, they will be inclined to work, save, and invest more. This might, in fact, be invoked on behalf of Rawls's (already-corrupt) Difference Principle; Cohen's argument is that even the Difference Principle doesn't go far enough to rectify capitalist injustice. In a characteristically Toohey-like ingenious twist, he turns the incentive argument in effect into an analogy to kidnappers holding your child for ransom. "If my taxes aren't cut, I'll withhold services" is translated by analogy into the kidnappers' demands: "If you don't give me money, I'll withhold your child from you."
(Actually, it's: "Children should be with their parents; if you don't pay the kidnapper, the child will not be with its parents; therefore, you should pay the kidnapper." The basic point is to make the argument for paying the kidnapper similar in structure to an argument for cutting taxes.)
This is the sort of grotesque rubbish that passes for "brilliant" and "academically respectable" argument. The only thing actually impressive about is the extent to which someone can be clever in such an evil cause. This wouldn't last for a single fucking second under the John Galt B.S. Test. Let's translate Cohen's strong-whiff-of-bad-faith argument into more naked terms: Galt's strikers are significantly and relevantly analogous, morally, to kidnappers.
(That article is merely a preview to the style and content of Cohen's full-book response to Nozickian arguments for capitalist property rights, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Gee - another slimy book cover.)
And people seriously wonder where in the real world Rand found inspiration for her villains?
The accounts of Marx the person and of his life (i.e., he was pretty nasty) serve as a fitting backdrop to what he accomplished intellectually: the biggest smear-job against capitalism ever perpetrated. It is hard to believe that his extensive study of the economic value-theories of his time - it's pretty much all he ever spent his time doing - didn't lead him to significant problems with the labor theory of value, but it's not like that stopped him or anything. His conclusions were set in place by the time of The Communist Manifesto (1848). (Volume 1 of Capital came out in 1867.) The rest reeks of bad faith, a rationalization for the predetermined conclusions.
That's the thing about Marxism in its various transmutations: it just all has an air of bad faith about it. The "exploitation doctrine" is the core of Marxian and neo-Marxian economics, and the neo-versions had exploitation pretty well in mind irrespective of the failure of the labor theory of value.
Marxism as a "respectable" ideology, as an era, came pretty much to a close with the death of G.A. Cohen in 2009. Marxism had basically run its course, and Cohen was the last major dinosaur of the failed ideology. And all the way up through Cohen (before his death, "the most prominent Marxist of our time"), there is still the whole aura of bad faith.
One article in particular by Cohen struck me as especially obscene: "Incentives, Equality, and Community" in a collection titled Equal Freedom (ed. Stephen Darwall, 1995). The collection, by the way, consists of contributions from a number of those within an elite clique of academics clustering around John Rawls over the past few decades. These same names keep showing up if you explore the literature: Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, G.A. Cohen, Thomas Scanlon, Derek Parfit, Samuel Scheffler, Amartya Sen. Those are the "elites" in academia who've effectively decided for everyone what the most prestigious theories are in that arena. The manifestly vicious doctrine of egalitarianism plays a major role in their decades-long circle-jerk.
(I would just like to note here the chasm between the sense of life in Ayn Rand's essay "Apollo 11" and that of the cover of Nagel's Equality and Partiality. A commentary on Nagel's justificatory procedure will have to wait for some other time; best as I can make out, though, Nagel's notion of a "View from Nowhere" is very closely related to the moral structure of Rawls's "Original Position," and was almost surely deeply influenced by it. By the way, this stuff counts as "foundations" for Nagel, whereas Nozick's libertarian intuitions are "without foundations.")
Anyway, the gist of Cohen's "Incentives, Equality, and Community" is a response to standard incentive-arguments for tax cuts which run basically as follows: if taxes are cut for the wealthy, they will be inclined to work, save, and invest more. This might, in fact, be invoked on behalf of Rawls's (already-corrupt) Difference Principle; Cohen's argument is that even the Difference Principle doesn't go far enough to rectify capitalist injustice. In a characteristically Toohey-like ingenious twist, he turns the incentive argument in effect into an analogy to kidnappers holding your child for ransom. "If my taxes aren't cut, I'll withhold services" is translated by analogy into the kidnappers' demands: "If you don't give me money, I'll withhold your child from you."
(Actually, it's: "Children should be with their parents; if you don't pay the kidnapper, the child will not be with its parents; therefore, you should pay the kidnapper." The basic point is to make the argument for paying the kidnapper similar in structure to an argument for cutting taxes.)
This is the sort of grotesque rubbish that passes for "brilliant" and "academically respectable" argument. The only thing actually impressive about is the extent to which someone can be clever in such an evil cause. This wouldn't last for a single fucking second under the John Galt B.S. Test. Let's translate Cohen's strong-whiff-of-bad-faith argument into more naked terms: Galt's strikers are significantly and relevantly analogous, morally, to kidnappers.
(That article is merely a preview to the style and content of Cohen's full-book response to Nozickian arguments for capitalist property rights, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Gee - another slimy book cover.)
And people seriously wonder where in the real world Rand found inspiration for her villains?
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