Sunday Worship, 8/12/2012

A mere 4:20 in length...

Rand and the 'national narrative'

Once we take a comprehensive look at the state of America today compared to its state 60 years ago (while Atlas Shrugged was being composed), how much can we say - as many left-wing analysts contend - Rand has had a major influence over American culture?  Well, first, let's observe that Rand's vision of good human beings is symbolized by Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart.  The charge against her, though, is that her philosophy appeals primarily to Wall Street "banksters," if we're going to name people who are highly unfluential on the country's state of affairs.  Meanwhile, if you were to compare the lifestyles of the Wall Street "banksters" with those of real-life Objectivists (the ones who knew Rand, or listened to the Peikoff lecture courses, or attend the conferences, or have an "insider" level of familiarity with Objectivist teachings), you'd probably not find a whole lot of overlap.  Look at Peikoff himself.  He lives too much like an Aristotelian to behave like a shallow dickhead investment banker.

Say that a bunch of super-rich assholes decide they dig Rand because they like the "survival of the fittest idea" and think Rand is a great source for that idea (clue: Rand doesn't endorse that idea), and so they behave like assholes and screw the masses of Americans over.  I don't see how Rand is to be blamed for their intellectual faults.  Quite true; she estimated the intelligence of her typical reader to be that of a quality-college-educated history major with a considerable degree of interest in large-scale, long-range issues that philosophy is there to study.  She didn't expect her readers to be philosophy-autodidacts like herself, but she did expect a great deal of intellectual attentiveness; otherwise, what's the point of writing for the public?  So, given the sad state of education and much of mass culture in America today, the widespread anti-intellectualism or intellectual laziness, the widespread hypocrisy, the screaming injustices so many just come to accept as part of normal life, etc., Rand may very well have assumed too much of her (future) readers.

More to the point: These left-wing criticisms of Rand's purported intellectual influence are rife with bias.  Blaming Rand for the behavior of super-rich assholes is comparable in silliness to blaming Marx for the behavior of the Stalin regime, something that the very same left-wing critics wouldn't put up with for a minute.  It's that fucking stupid.

The idea is to have a country of people who behave like Aristotelians - intellectual curiosity (i.e., rationality in the Randian sense, which Rand-haters are clueless about) being the chief and fundamental virtue in human living, along with an emotional life characterized by benevolence.  (Hint: Rand was an uber-advocate of benevolence.  You can see it in her characterization of Roark.  "In the name of the best within us..." (Atlas)  So lefties, stop being so stupid and superficial about Rand, huh?  Get a clue or two.)

The bigger question these lefty critics or any other intellectuals ought to be concerned with is: What are the causes of our society not being a society of people who behave like Aristotelians, where a mind like Chomsky's is an exception rather than the rule?  Because that, after all, is the root of our ills today.  How can the publication of Atlas Shrugged come remotely close to playing a causal role in these ills?  It defies all common sense.  So what have these lefties been doing up there in that ivory tower, then, besides snubbing the business ethos? :-)

More to come, of course . . .

Next up: Dialectizin' with Aristotle?

Legalize It

UPDATE below

A Compelling Argument - one among many

A recommended link - I think you might be amazed by what transpires there in the possibly near future.  Hard to predict these kinds of things, though.

UPDATE: Some additional links: (1) Sagan (2) semantic priming

Possible motto: "If you're old enough (18) to serve and die for your country, you should be able to grow weed or buy it in a store."  That simple.

Vote for candidates who endorse legalization or against candidates who oppose it.  Get organized to sway the election if need be.  Exploit the potential of mass internet social media not under corporate content-control, to win with the power of ideas over million-dollar campaign contributions.  (I'm working on this latter part as we speak.  Plus this is just the beginning of popular reforms we desperately need to see in this country and worldwide.  Chief on the agenda are philosophical education, ecosystem preservation, mass cognitive creativity, and love.  "In the name of the best within us...")

Stay tuned for more . . .

Sight and Sound 2012 poll results released

It's an event for cinephiles somewhat akin (or perhaps not) to the World Cup for soccer/football fans.  In the British Film Institute magazine's survey of hundreds of critics and filmmakers conducted every ten years, Vertigo has unseated Citizen Kane from the long-held top spot.  These poll-results could very well lead to a new round of obsessive (pun intended) number-crunching by the very dedicated, as they did for me the last time around.  Or, one could just let others do all the number-crunching and save one the trouble.

Question(s) for the day

How many accomplished novelists do you know of, who later went on to pen fairly technical works on epistemology, the most difficult subject in philosophy?

Such a phenomenon seems highly unusual.  What qualities of mind would have to be involved to pull that sort of thing off?  Could such qualities go unappreciated by many people over a long period of time for one reason or another?

A question

Invariably it seems that reports of near-death experiences involve a tunnel with a bright light at the end, perhaps an angel or deceased family member coming to take them toward the light.

I have yet to hear of a near-death experience in which the subject was being led to the gates of hell.

Does this mean that, if these near-death experiences reflect the true reality of things - that there is an afterlife and it's bright and peaceful, etc. - then we don't have to worry or wonder about whether we'll go to hell?  Or, alternatively, does it mean that all those who had these near-death experiences were pure in spirit - that one needs to be pure in spirit in order to have these experiences?

Where did the conservative intellectuals go?

Today I've been researching this question.  The list of "conservative intellectuals, activists, and writers" at the wikipedia page (1st google result) is disappointing to say the least (and neither Rand, Hayek, nor Friedman - the most prominent intellectual figures listed there - were, or considered themselves, conservative; Rand was especially vehement about this whereas today's "conservatives" haven't taken the hint).  Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams are well into their retirement-age years.  How about anyone living today under, say, 65 years old who could qualify as a great conservative intellectual?  The field is catastrophically barren here.

Three years ago, Newt Gingrich (one reason the wikipedia list is so disappointing) lauded a 14-year-old Jonathan Krohn as the intellectual future of the Republican Party.  Not only has that not panned out (the intellectually precocious Krohn went on to read some philosophy and to realize how intellectually vacuous his earlier views were), but there's obviously something gone awry about a political party in which a 14-year-old is so highly touted by the adults (or is it "adults"?) in the room.

The second Google result quotes at length from a blog posting by jurist Richard Posner which paints quite the grim picture.  The original, in full - without paragraph break-ups - is here.

There was a time when modern American-style conservatism (or should I say, the package-deal under that label of some good and some not-so-good ideas) had appeal to me - at a couple years older than Jonathan Krohn was as a GOP celebrity.  This was somewhere around twenty years prior to that, a number of years before the GOP had definitively jumped the shark (the younger Bush's presidency).  It was also before I encountered a book titled Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which spelled the end of American-style conservatism as an intellectually viable force in my mind.  Note how Barry Goldwater went on to repudiate the recent incarnation of the GOP.

If you look at the GOP today, it is a party that remains politically viable due in great part to two factors: (1) The super-wealthy support them: call this the financial support network; (2) The grassroots base - call this the electoral support network - is comprised to an astonishing extent (as abundant polling data show) of very ignorant people, geographically tilted toward the South and demographically tilted toward the old.  These two forces meet at the leading media outlet for GOP memes: Fox News.  Much financial and intellectual (or is it anti-intellectual?) capital has been spent largely via this propagation source to oppose such things as climate science, same-sex marriage and healthcare reform, to call into question Obama's "American credentials," and to promote fiscal and foreign policies that have little empirical data in their favor.  I would not be surprised if a poll of registered Republicans, when asked whether Al Jazeera is a political party, media organization or terrorist organization, ended up in a three-way split.  It's that fucking bad.

Very recently, this graph showing the relationship between favorite websites and political affiliation has been making the rounds.  I don't know how statistically reliable it is - it appears to be based on the Trendsetter app's user "likes" - but assuming it's reasonably accurate (and it looks quite accurate for reddit.com's placement), the most telling data point would be the location of the wikipedia logo.  This wouldn't even demonstrate how great Obama and the Dems are, instead of just how bad today's GOP and its candidates are in comparison.  (Keep in mind that book smarts and business smarts aren't the same; also keep in mind that plenty of business people support the Dems.)  If you look at the community of political philosophers, I'd expect the support for present-day American-style conservatism (not to be confused with, say, Hayekianism) to be close to (if not completely) nonexistent.

I will continue researching these Google results and encourage others to do likewise.

(EDIT: Note to self: try to keep the distinction between conservatism (and conservative intellectuals) and the GOP/Fox abundantly clear.)

(EDIT #2: The third Google result, a Wa-Post editorial, mentions Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning as a serious work.  Heck, it even scores 3.9 stars out of 5 at goodreads, way higher than similarly-titled Ann Coulter works score there.  A text search of the book brought up zero results for "Rawls" and one irrelevant result for "Chomsky," however.  So I'm skeptical about what "left" Goldberg is talking about.  Is this like writing a book on the crankery of libertarians by highlighting Ron Paul but not Robert Nozick?)

An exercise for the reader

Dialectic, ain't it fun?

Two statements from previous blog entries with an apparent logical tension between them:

(1) "Anyway, in a well-educated educated citizenry, this $46 trillion would not go almost entirely ignored while nearly everyone can tell you Ryan Seacrest is (but few could tell you who Immanuel Kant is, much less who Rawls, Nozick, or Chomsky are)." (May 7 2012)

(2) "In the tomes of Immanuel Kant, what do we have besides an elaborately worked-out system of interrelated ideas represented by words, words, words, without a clear tie to our concrete and everyday concerns? (Put the question the following way: what benefit would the layperson have in reading, or trying to read, the Critique of Pure Reason?)" (May 18 2012)

Exercise: reconcile these statements.

When it's Politics vs. Principles

There's political philosophy - where high-minded idealists discuss and debate the relative merits of Rawls, Nozick, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rand, Chomsky, Hayek, Marx, Mill, et al - and then there's politics, a practice that "in the real world" (read: as the practice is done today, not involving philosophers but - put politely - another subset of human beings) has next to zero connection to what's just, right, good, or honest.

Just one very recent case in point: a young idealistic Ron Paul supporter in Massachusetts receives a lesson in political practice from his state's GOP. Long story short, the corrupt assholes running the state party decided to change the rules mid-game to effectively exclude Ron Paul supporters from attending the national GOP convention later this year, after they had won the delegate positions fair and square.

This is a microcosm of politics today in its essence. You can see it everywhere. It's reflected in all the insider and pundit manners of speaking. It's reflected by the number of outright idiots who participate in the process, including elected representatives (another recent case in point). Political practice (at least in these United States) is, in short, broken.

This problem goes all the way back to when a democratic government sentenced Socrates to death by hemlock; his pupil in turn wrote a political treatise in dialogue form, envisioning a philosophically-enriched utopia. Many folks are resigned to politics being the way it has been practiced for so long, viewing philosophical proposals as impractical and unrealistic. That attitude strikes me as leading to a vicious cycle in which politics never improves. I don't accept this as inevitable, and there is one significant piece of historical data that backs me up on this: a real-life "philosopher-king", one who was not merely a lover of wisdom the way the U.S.'s third president would qualify as such (though this is another historical precedent of the sort I'm speaking of), but one who also made a notable contribution to the history of philosophical thought. So I don't consider politics to be a hopeless cause as such, but fixing broken political practice requires activity that goes well beyond participating in the prevailing travesty of civic activity.

One doesn't have to agree with the specifics of Plato's vision to agree with one central truth therein: a polity eminently worthy of one's participation requires a citizenry well-educated in what might be broadly termed the philosophical arts. That would not only result in an enriched polity, but enriched lives on the whole. And here's the practical question, posed in the name of the best within us: How do we get there from here?

To be continued . . .

How Corrupt is the Establishment?

And here I mean, how corrupt is the Establishment (the currently-prevailing corporate-media-political complex), intellectually? If you were to look at the circus that passes for "political news" these days, how would you evaluate it by intellectual standards? If the very cultural backdrop of political news coverage these days is devoid of serious intellectual influence, then just how futile is it to expect serious positive political reforms? I'll offer as Exhibit A: The complete absence, in all major media outlets in the United States, of one of the most thought-provoking intellectual figures of our age. It's pathetic, and damning. We as a people cannot expect much of anything better in our mainstream institutions if things don't change big-time - intellectually. At least the internet by its nature will give non-Establishment figures a greater audience-share than before. So there's at least some hope there.

Cultural Death Watch

This week a number of high-budget, special-effects-intensive, probably-yet-another-Hollywood-remake shit sandwiches will be released. Or a great number of such have been released recently. Unless you are lucky enough to live in a large enough metropolitan area, however, you will not be seeing a movie named Moonrise Kingdom, just like you never saw a movie named The Tree of Life in theaters last year (since it was a direct-to-DVD release, even though it has Brad Pitt in the leading role FFS).

If you've paid a reasonable amount of attention to the American film scene in, oh, the past decade or so - in other words, if you are culturally literate enough to name more than a few movies made by, say, David Lynch - you'd recognize the name Wes Anderson, he of Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Along with such names as Lynch, Scorsese, Coen, Malick, and Paul Thomas Anderson, he is one of the most important cinema auteurs in the English-speaking world today. His latest effort, however, is not slated to be seen by more than some fraction of Americans. This new movie has received pretty much zilch by way of domestic publicity; being too busy on a number of matters to pay close attention to the movie releases around this time of year, I only happened to hear about it on a classical music / NPR radio station that devoted a segment to the music used in this and other Wes Anderson films. A song by Nico was used in The Royal Tenenbaums, for example. Who besides the minimally culturally literate have so much as heard of Nico? And who the fuck listens to these kinds of stations, anyway? Certainly not the ones shelling out good money for yet another predictable/formulaic Will Smith vehicle, or yet another Spiderman remake, or yet another rendition of 28 Days Later under a new title.

A people cannot survive on shit sandwiches.

On a completely unrelated matter, how's that 2012 presidential circus freakshow campaign working out for you so far?

Marriage and Equality

(I've not yet proof-read/edited the entry below, so be prepared for any grammatical errors. Tags will be added later, when I have the time/inclination to whittle tags down to the essentials.)

This is something of a follow-up to my last entry on the subject, in light of President Obama's (phony) evolution to support for what the cultural left now frames in terms of "marriage equality" (and the cultural right frames in terms of "redefining marriage"). In my last entry, I observed that the cultural Right, which has essentially staked its intellectual reputation on this issue, is out of arguments. The last, pathetic resort of these right-wingers is demagoguery about the "definition of marriage," which may well play in vast swaths of the Bible Belt which would - if they had their way - go back to criminalizing "sodomy." But the anti-"marriage equality"/"redefining marriage" side is losing - badly - in the courts, where reasoned arguments matter and irrelevant BS is disregarded. When Ted Olson, the lawyer representing the couples marginalized by California's Proposition 8, put the (conservative!) case for equal-protection in Newsweek more than two years ago, the debate - rationally speaking - was pretty much ended. On the rational merits, the opponents have been left to flail about helplessly.

So where does it go from here? I have in mind what the majority opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court might look like. Now, I admit that I am coming at this as an amateur at jurisprudence and substantive law. I am a layperson on these matters who can at least name some key Supreme Court cases. A (if not the) key precedent on the same-sex (")marriage(") issue is Lawrence v. Texas of 2003, and a key feature of our nation's Constitution coming to bear on the issue is a judicially-acceptable interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Now, the majority opinion I have in mind (again, I note I am an amateur layperson so my formulation may be inexact in legal terms) would go something like this: The Court will want to come to the "best compromise" on the issue, hedging so as not to piss off either side too much, and to do so without running too obviously into accusations of "cultural engineering" or "legislating from the bench" or "judicial activism" or other such euphemisms that either side of the political spectrum tends to engage in when it disapproves of a Supreme Court ruling, depending on the issue. In this case, the Court will not want to be seen as "redefining marriage," but at the same time needs to affirm what common decency affirms on the issue: a substantive equal protection of rights under the laws of the states. Noted same-sex (")marriage(") advocate Andrew Sullivan would object to a "separate-but-equal" solution, though we do have judicial precedent for such a thing (which, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), didn't last all that long). [EDIT: I have since been corrected that this case was one overturning a previous decision upholding the "separate but equal" solution.] The "separate-but-equal" solution in this case is the requirement, on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, that same-sex couples have all the same rights and protections under the law as man-woman couples, but that these equal substantive rights do not require that same-sex couples be able to get married under state law. The commonsensical "middle ground" solution that has occurred on a state-by-state basis is civil unions (though apparently, on a state-by-state basis, there still are substantive differences between marriages and civil unions, which render them unacceptable even under the "separate but equal" solution). If the Supreme Court were to go for the "best compromise," it would simply be this: states must have equal rights whether in the form of marriages or civil unions, and that form is left up to the individual states.

One particularly appealing feature of such a compromise is that the last, pathetic resort of the equality-opponents loses even its demagogic force, except perhaps in the very culturally backward states. This compromise does not "redefine marriage" at the federal level, leaving the definition of marriage up to the states. So on what basis, in the political atmosphere of 2010s America, would the equality-opponents have to object? They get to keep their semantic preferences, but they don't get to continue marginalizing same-sex couples under the guise of "protecting the definition of marriage."

I don't, however, think that it's really a matter of semantics in the more bigoted regions of our country. If it were, then those regions would have already allowed, at the minimum, civil unions for same-sex couples, but they don't. That leaves bad faith, malice, ignorance, stupidity, obfuscation of the relevant issues, misrepresentation of the real agenda, or other such ugly things as the explanation for this. (And President Obama should still be held to account for his past political pandering to such ugliness; I don't buy his "evolving on the issue" bullshit for a second, and Andrew Sullivan is out in la-la land if he thinks Obama is praiseworthy for (what is in fact) shifting with the political winds. He's a f'ing politician with no identifiable core save for strategic-tactical Alinskyism/Machiavellianism. This Sullivan admiringly characterizes as his "meep-meep" quality. Stick with Greenwald if you want bullshit- and la-la-land-free analysis of this president's actions. (Sullivan protests, but he's way too easy on the president regardless - definitely so if he doesn't call him out for being a core-less political calculator.))

Understanding Objectivism: Preliminary Thoughts

(I've not yet proof-read/edited the entry below, so be prepared for any grammatical errors. Tags will be added later, when I have the time/inclination to whittle tags down to the essentials.)

I've finished chapter 1 of the book version of Leonard Peikoff's lecture course. It has been many years since I heard the lectures in audio, but the first lecture does accord pretty well with my somewhat vague recollection of the audio lectures. (Arguably there are benefits as well as drawbacks to "absorbing" these lectures via the audio format; in any event, Peikoff, Michael Berliner and others evidently saw the benefits of putting these lectures in book form in addition to the audio.)

First off, I want to point out that these lectures are for "serious students of Objectivism." It is expected that one has familiarized oneself decently with the written Objectivist "canon," including Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991), or "OPAR," the "book adaptation" of the 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course endorsed by Rand and given in her presence. The Objectivism being discussed in the Understanding Objectivism (hereafter shortened to "UO") is far, far removed from the superficial, caricature-ish version you see being discussed in the mass media. It is also fairly removed from the Objectivism one is exposed to in the written canon, with the main exception of chapters 4 and 5 of OPAR. The primary focus of UO is on "chewing" Objectivist ideas in an active fashion - of making the Objectivist way of thinking part of one's internalized, first-hand mental practice, as distinct from the more "passive" approach involved in reading the literature. The purpose is to get the "serious student of Objectivism" to move on to becoming an "advanced" student of Objectivism, i.e., someone who could, independently of the canonical texts, arrive at the Objectivist ideas themselves the way Rand herself did. (As Peikoff points out in the first lecture, Rand did not learn Objectivism from reading Atlas Shrugged or from attending courses by Peikoff. It all had to come first-hand.) In any case, UO presupposes a considerable degree of familiarity with Objectivist ideas, so it is targeted not to newbies but those who've spent some time reading and thinking about the ideas. That is one chief barrier to just any ol' outsider profitably plunging right in and "getting" what it's all about. Absorption of ideas takes time - often on the order of years. This presents a further difficulty: those who don't take Objectivism all that seriously to begin with aren't going to be willing to invest that amount of time "chewing" Objectivist ideas and finding out just what there is of so much value to its practitioners. (Common sense would tell you that long-time Scientologists telling you that if only you would invest so much time (and money!) learning about their ideas will you come to see its profound value, is not going to be all that plausible on its face if you don't buy into it at the outset.)

So, that being said, what does UO offer listeners and/or readers? Above, I've alluded to the notion of actively "chewing" ideas and to the closely related notion of the Objectivist way of thinking. "Chewing" refers to the process of working over ideas extensively in one's mind before one is really ready to digest them. The audio version of UO is rougly 27 hours of doing just that. Fundamentally, the course deals with the proper method of thinking through or chewing ideas, as distinct from the content, which in the case of Objectivism is laid out in the canonical texts primarily by Rand and the Brandens pre-1968, and in Peikoff's 1976 course. The method consists in what I'll call a rigorous and systematic approach to "premise-checking," that is, of tying one's ideas to the concrete facts of reality as well as to the systematic whole of ideas that is the Objectivist system. Viewed as a method of thinking, Objectivism, therefore, serves as its own best protector: it demands that one be able, first-hand-, to validate one's ideas by the highest standards of fact and logic. Whether this makes the content of the "official Objectivist canon" just as impervious is a different question. Aside from some basics - namely, the axioms of existence, identity and consciousness, the fundamental reliability of sensory information and some minimal notion of volition as a presupposition of rational discourse - there is very little if anything that is obvious or indisputable. For instance, plenty of other thinkers besides Rand would look out on the same sensible reality that she does and arrive at different conclusions about ethics and politics than she did, and these matters are (or at least so Rand and Peikoff would argue) hierarchically dependent upon metaphysical and epistemological fundamentals. Which brings me to some important methodological observations for philosophers as such to take careful note of.

Central concepts within Objectivist methodology are: integration, context, and hierarchy. These concepts are so central to Objectivism, in fact, that you basically cannot separate method from content at this point. (Perhaps by now you are beginning to see how woefully inadequate the superficial mass-media treatments of Objectivism are; an article or book covering Objectivist ideas that make essentially no reference to these central concepts, or display not a clue about them, are probably not worth your time except as a cultural exercise.) These concepts are treated at considerable length in chapter 4 of OPAR. And, I would argue, these concepts are so closely related to one another that you can't separate them from one another. To properly integrate one's ideas is to respect both context and the hierarchy of ideas, and vice versa.

Now, I assume the reader is at least minimally familiar with these concepts as discussed in the above links, if not the more indepth discussion in OPAR. So here's an important question that should arise at some point in a thoughtful person's mind: just who or what serious thinkers would disagree with the importance of properly integrating one's ideas, of maintaining (i.e., not dropping) context, of respecting the hierarchy of ideas? Aren't these of fundamental importance to the practice of philosophy as such? What makes Objectivism special in this regard? Why has this blogger in particular been on record for touting the historical importance of Rand as a thinker, particularly in regard to the need to properly integrate one's ideas? I think the answer is this: since these concepts are so fundamental to the practice of philosophy, what major figures in the history of philosophy have identified their fundamental importance? Remember, this is a matter of methodology, of the very practice of doing philosophy itself, of meta-philosophy perhaps. An historically-informed treatment of Rand's ideas points to deep methodological similarities in the so-called dialectical tradition, dialectics being understood as "the art of context-keeping." So it isn't like Rand is the first thinker to come along and realize that all ideas (all phenomena?) are embedded in a context and cannot be adequately understood apart from that context. Indeed, I'd say any great thinker in history paid scrupulous attention, at least implicitly, to the context of statements and attempt to reconcile conflicting ideas by properly taking into account the widest possible context. Whether this has been explicitly formulated and acknowledged as a matter of philosophical method by others besides Rand, I do not know. What is significant here is that Rand, a widely read and "popular" philosopher, made these identifications - apparently independently of other historically significant thinkers - for the benefit of the layperson. Wouldn't it be nice if other "popular" thinkers and philosophers out there would make the same explicit identifications and thereby perhaps stem the tide of cultural decay?

This segues into another basic focus of the UO course: the role of philosophy in human existence, or the role of philosophy in daily living. From the very beginning of the first lecture, Peikoff addresses the matter of how one lives by a philosophy, particularly in a society from which one's philosophy is largely alien (as current society is with respect to Objectivism). He naturally moves on to the issue of how philosophy as such, not just Objectivist philosophy, can play a role in human life. Another chief idea in Objectivism is that philosophy - whether directly or indirectly, whether by adoption or by rejection or neglect - is the fundamental moving force in human life. (Rejecting or neglecting philosophy in one's life generates existential impoverishment in a number of ways.) The problem here is: how does one connect abstract ideas to the practice of concrete daily living? And here Peikoff sets up his number one target of destruction: rationalism. Now, it must be noted that "rationalism" has become a buzzword among longtime Objectivists and on online Objectivist forums, even though in the written canon it is hardly at all touched upon. This generates a problem in terms of how one properly defines, in fundamental terms, what the problem of rationalism is as Peikoff (and, presumably, Rand) understood it. How would one identify an idea, thought process, or person as "rationalistic"? Further, just how pervasive is the phenomenon of rationalism so identified? As to the latter question, Peikoff says that the problem is pervasive in a very large segment of individuals, including among students of Objectivism, and that it is a problem that can undercut and paralyze their thought processes, and in fact destroy their commitment to integration, context, and hierarchy, quite unbeknownst to them. Being that it is a serious and pervasive problem, and largely unidentified, we're in deep doo-doo if we don't unroot it and fix it. Peikoff emphasizes that this problem is so ingrained in so many people's thought processes that it presents a, if not the, chief obstacle to living - and living well - by a philosophy. Since thought and action are integrated phenomena in human beings, the problem of applying philosophical principles to daily living is primarily an intellectual problem.

So what is rationalism? It has some important similarities to rationalism in early modern philosophy (associated with Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz), but the sense in which it is used by Peikoff is more all-embracing than the term applied there, I think. It concerns one's habitual method of dealing with ideas, or one's "psycho-epistemology," and key to understanding Rand and Peikoff's criticism of most of the philosophical tradition is understanding their criticism from a methodological standpoint: they would insist that rationalism as method of thought is quite literally pervasive among intellectuals, i.e., among those who deal with the most abstract ideas. And, so, at last, what does this rationalism consist in? I would formulate the problem as follows: rationalism consists, in effect, of treating the map (our abstract system of ideas) in the same manner as one would treat the territory (concrete reality). Take a common lay-criticism of the practice of philosophy: that philosophers have their "head in the clouds," that all they do is play around with ideas in their heads, with little practical importance or application. Just what do philosophers do, anyway? How do they make their ideas relevant to practical daily living? What if, in effect, whether they realize it or not, their map is their territory, and so what makes sense in their territory has little if any connection to the real territory? After all, if we all have the same real territory to work with, why do philosophers, via their conceptual system-building, still disagree with one another (in some deep fashion that doesn't similar afflict the community of scientists)? Further, if rationalism is a fundamental methodological phenomenon, then might not David Hume be just as much a rationalist in this sense as Descartes? Does Hume start with some "floating" premises (premises not properly anchored in concrete reality, as much as he would insist on some doctrine of empiricism) and deduce from those premises conclusions that fly in the face of practical, real-world concerns? In the tomes of Immanuel Kant, what do we have besides an elaborately worked-out system of interrelated ideas represented by words, words, words, without a clear tie to our concrete and everyday concerns? (Put the question the following way: what benefit would the layperson have in reading, or trying to read, the Critique of Pure Reason?) Or, to take an example from more "practical" (ethical and/or political) philosophy, what territory does Rawls's A Theory of Justice map out?

But remember something I noted above: Peikoff says that the problem of rationalism, or of deducing to or from "floating ideas" not properly grounded in concrete reality, is a pervasive problem among many students of Objectivism as well as among the historical philosophers he and Rand love to heap their invective upon. Peikoff mentions having struggled with rationalism himself for over a decade. It is an affliction present in many intellectual types as such, due to hazards inherent in dealing with abstract ideas. They would identify the phenomenon in so simple a circumstance as a student of Objectivism reciting some tenet or argument in Objectivism and then failing to establish the truth of the claim first-hand apart from relating words to other words that they gleaned from a book.

I am quite sure that the problem of rationalism needs to be fleshed out much, much more than the summary treatment I've provided here, for the problem to become more apparent. The whole point of philosophy, the counter-objection would go, is to ensure that one's ideas are true, i.e., properly grounded in reality, and there's no clear reason to believe that Rand and Peikoff have done better at this than others, their identifications and protestations concerning methodology notwithstanding. My very strong impression is that, over the course of a few decades (namely the '50s through the '70s), Rand and Peikoff encountered countless instances among the students and thinkers, Objectivist and non-Objectivist alike, instances of what they came to identify as the problem of rationalism. UO is the only course/book that I know of where the problem is fleshed out indepth, but I'll need a refresher from reading the rest of it to really pinpoint what they have in mind.

I would like to make an observation concerning methodology and the idea of Objectivism-as-its-own-protector. The way that Peikoff structured OPAR, for both epistemology and ethics, is to define the basic concepts - "concept" (chapter 3) and "value" (chapter 7), respectively - and devote a chapter to explaining these concepts before proceeding to matters of what I might call "application," particularly in the chapters on "objectivity" and "virtue," respectively. In each of the chapters of the latter sort, we are presented with general advice (along with some concrete examples) of how to conduct ourselves epistemically and ethically, respectively. In the later epistemology chapters (4 and 5) we are given "commonsense" advice concerning such things as arbitrary claims, or when a claim is assigned such values as "possible," "probable," "likely," and "certain," or when a claim is considered to have been properly proved as true. In the chapter on virtue (chapter 8) we are given an extensive discussion that is expanded to book-length in Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics. At least in the case of the ethics chapters, you have a division into meta-ethics or the discussion of the meaning of ethical terms (chapter 7 on "the good") on the one hand, and normative ethics or discussion of the content of ethical obligation (chapter 8 on virtue) on the other. Perhaps a similar sort of division needs to be made in the area of epistemology; perhaps what many professional specialists in epistemology are focused on are matters correctly classified as "meta-epistemological," while how to conduct oneself epistemically is a matter of "normative epistemology." I raise this possible division as food for thought. If the division is a valid one, then I think chapters 4 and 5 of OPAR are concerned with normative epistemology. This raises a further possibility: if Randian normative ethics can be plausibly described as a version of ethical perfect(ionism/ivism), then her doctrine concerning epistemic method might be considered a version of epistemic perfect(ionism/ivism). For some time I have viewed Objectivist methodology (mentioned above as a rigorous and systematic approach to premise-checking) in this light, and doing so has inspired me to approach philosophical subject-matter in general (and not just Objectivism) accordingly, as best as I can. Any such philosophizing can trump Objectivist content. Hence the term I've adopted: Perfectivism. :-)

Items for the Day

1. Why so aloof?

So, what have I been up to lately to occupy my time? In short: consulting various online information bases, e.g., wikipedia, reddit, rateyourmusic, acclaimedmusic, Scaruffi, Amazon, Oxford philosophy podcasts, Arts & Letters Daily, Greenwald, Sullivan, etc., really studying up on the world of Western classical music (next: rock, jazz and popular music), following lots of links, and vigorously applying the motto just below this blog's headline. (C'mon, whatever else you think of Rand, she's really right-on with this one.) How many of your "leading philosophers" out there today can lay claim to be doing all that? :-) (Next up: publishing the results of all this research ASARP.)

2. Mahler = the first supermusic?

That's the question that arose in my mind recently, since I absorbed his music more deeply and observed how it really seems to take music to the next level. That only prompted further curiosity about the rest of the world of classical music I had yet to "get," including especially Bach, Wagner, Bruckner, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich, or music I had been downgrading for not being robustly Romantic enough, e.g., Mozart. This also leads me further to question what I may have missed about the world of rock, jazz, and popular music. At the present time I have yet to find music that exceeds Mahler's in power and beauty, and there hardly seems any music since that matches it. From my experience the closest that comes to it in rock music, I believe, is work like Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer (emerging over time, as younger generations age, as the most acclaimed album of the rock era). I don't think it meets or exceeds Mahler, however, and my hope is that one day the younger music fans out there will see this, too (along with having a general education in philosophy / critical thinking).

3. Politics and the 2012 election

Unless either of the two major presidential candidates has the balls to address $46 trillion dollar fiscal elephant in the room that are the Medicare and Social Security trust funds, I may find it hard to get at all excited about this year's race. (We already know they won't touch things like long-term climate change and potential resource-depletion, issues a science-literate polity would be concerned about, with a ten-foot pole.) I've seen estimates go as high as $70 trillion.

[EDIT: Okay, so for those of you reading this in 3012, what does $46 trillion mean? Well, in 2012, the national debt is somewhere around $15 trillion, nearly the size of the U.S. economy (GDP). This figure is actually the "gross federal debt" figure which includes some $5 trillion or so which is owed by one part of government to another, namely, the money in the Social Security and Medicare "trust funds." The $15 trillion figure is what gets cited a lot in the media. It is widely considered a staggering sum perhaps never to be paid back, though we have a number of commentators telling to take into account the load of debt relative to GDP and put this in historical context. Alright then: At the end of World War II, the USA had a national debt of around 125% of GDP. What that dollar figure was in 1946 I have an admittedly vague idea, but it is somewhere around $100 billion. $100 billion in today's dollars would be less than one percent of GDP. That was money all owed to "the public," being that Social Security was in its infancy and Medicare had yet to be formed. Further, the USA at the end of World War II was in such a position relative to the rest of the world that the 25-year postwar boom was pretty much inevitable, and since that time real median living standards have only crept up slowly and are now almost stagnating, with an increasingly uneducated and undercapitalized populace, particularly relative to world standards. On top of that, now consider this: the $46 trillion dollar figure is a present value figure, that is, the estimated obligations to come due to these "trust funds" in the future comes to around 3 times our present GDP. Present value means the time-discounted value of a sum divided into equal payments over a period of time. We actually have to discount by two factors: the time discount (the rate of interest) and the inflation discount. In the case of the United States government, the assumed time period involved approaches "the infinite horizon," and over that same period the present value of expected accumulated future GDP comes out to somewhere around $1 quadrillion dollars. In other words, as things are on there present course, we are basically on the hook for about 4.6% of our nation's entire productive future to cover coming Social Security and Medicare obligations. This is in comparison to the approximately 1.5% of our nation's entire productive future committed to paying off the national debt. In non-discounted terms, this comes out to the hundreds of trillions, or perhaps more, some decades down the line - an amount that seems staggering to us now the way that $100 billion doesn't seem like so much to us now, the way it did in 1946. Anyway, bottom line: if we're going to be crippled by debt nearly equaling our current GDP, then what about the looming obligations presently valued at around 3 times our current GDP? Think what might happen if 1946 USA were on the hook for obligations coming due totaling around $400 billion in then-present value with an annual GDP of $80 billion? And without the ignorant and decadent citizenry that is the norm today?]

Anyway, in a well-educated educated citizenry, this $46 trillion would not go almost entirely ignored while nearly everyone can tell you who Ryan Seacrest is (but few could tell you who Immanuel Kant is, much less who Rawls, Nozick, or Chomsky are). And were it to be addressed more than nominally, you'd have one side, driven along by the Occupy Wall Streeters, blaming capitalism (not enough taxes) and another side blaming government (too many promises in face of domestic and global economic reality). I can see where the capitalism-blamers are coming from, and still think they've got some head in sand about some economic fundamentals, stuff that the likes of Krugman, Mankiw, Cowan or Caplan wouldn't buy into. As for who is to blame, it really all comes down to how ignorant and decadent the American public have gotten over the years; the consequent vices comes out in both private and public sectors. As to whether the GOP has dodged its political bullet by nominating Romney (the only GOP candidate besides John Huntsman minimally qualified to mount a serious challenge to President Obama), that certainly remains to be seen. The crazy is strong in the party (the birfer stuff still won't go away, for one thing, and its approach to science is now certifiably pathological), and never forget 2008: a "reasonable" candidate was nominated, and we still got a flaky, fundamentalist ignoramus proposed - with an actual straight face, mind you - as ready to have control of the red button. Now that's crazy. In fact, seeing what the party base might still have up its sleeve in the train-wreck department may be the only motivation for watching the whole electoral charade.

4. Is it just me... or was the internet just a lot smarter back in the days of Usenet? Try as one might, I don't think one could find the true equivalent to alt.philosophy in today's internet. (Anyone who remembers those days and uses reddit much for discussion knows that reddit's format simply doesn't cut it compared the Usenet's newsgroups.) Which begs the question: What happened?!

To Be Reviewed...

The Leonard Peikoff lecture course, Understanding Objectivism, now in (much-less-expensive) book form. To the question, What do Ayn Rand and Objectivism have to offer to the world of philosophy?, this is perhaps the most invaluable resource out there. It needs to be critically examined as part of any serious scholarly treatment of (rather culturally influential) Randian/Objectivist ideas. Then we'll see in much clearer and more well-developed terms whether reading and studying Ayn Rand's work is really worth our precious philosophical time.

On a related note, perusing the Ayn Rand Lexicon, I see how her handling of Kant is not a good sign when it comes to assessing Rand's strength or maturity as a thinker. It is very amateurish, and not the least bit scholarly. Wouldn't a thinker such as Aristotle have done much better at interpreting a thinker like Kant? Why couldn't she be more like Aristotle, of whom she spoke so reverently (but probably understood just as amateurishly)? Or like Korsgaard, who has studied Kant indepeth and comes to much different conclusions about him?

On a further related note, why is the "scholarship" about Ayn Rand on so many left-progressive news-and-opinion sites so damn lousy? Who the F cares about a serial killer aspects of whom a very un-mature Rand spoke of in positive terms in her un-published journals - as it relates to her considered, mature, published thought? Or that she accepted social security and medicare benefits in light of her published (a) objections to such programs and (b) explanation for accepting government benefits? Selective out-of-context cherrypicking while ignoring or failing to seek out contrary evidence is not serious scholarship. These hit-pieces are by so-called journalists and not philosophy professors, yes, but does it really have to be that bad, that intellectually lazy, that anti-serious about ideas? (This means Rand is still on the hook for how she approached Kant.)

On a yet further related note, why would a "leading academic philosophy blog" give such crap any airtime whatsoever, even so much as airing the view that Ayn Rand's philosophy is inspired by a psychopath (with the implication that characters like Howard Roark are inspired by psychopaths)? (Sure enough, her reasoning about who should and who shouldn't accept government benefits is bizarre on the face of it and it's quite doubtful it could be supported by sound argument, but this was brought up on the "leading academic philosophy blog" in the first place because of her having accepted government support, and not because of her (published) reasoning behind it, of which the Leading Academic Philosophy Blogger, when calling her a "welfare queen," was nevertheless totally unaware. Hopefully these sorts of cheap, unfair hyper-partisan tactics aren't widespread in academic philosophy or the academy generally. We won't really know if Rand/Objectivism is worth studying until we apply fair, rigorous, disciplined, and scholarly standards (be they from inside or outside the academy) to her writings in the first place [see, e.g., here - a work which, by the way, is about Rand's eudaemonistic egoism - not about her comments on Immanuel Kant, or on a serial killer she never came anywhere near to writing about publicly, or about why only people who agree with her politics should accept government benefits - and which, by the way, comes out as very positive in favor of her ethical system; it looks like the ball is now in her critics' court should they choose to take up the task, unless they're content to leave it all up to Dr. Cullyer]. As to the Rand-admired-psychopaths stuff, it doesn't even merit comment, that's how ridiculous, malicious, context-flouting and manifestly unjust it is.)

On an even further related note, I'll also want to review Greg Swann's Man Alive!.

Fixing the World, Step 1

Can you imagine this piece of music playing synchronously all around the world on every loudspeaker available (think the Mozart moment in Shawshank multiplied by gadzoinks)? Can you just imagine?



(Composer Gustav Mahler's final statement to humanity. How widely could it be heard?)

The Economic Left: Irrational Bigots?

[See here for context re: this blog entry's headline title.]

It's no secret that left-liberals fancy themselves more intellectual, more informed, more enlightened, etc. than the population at large. Just look at the makeup of university faculties, after all. The people who spend the most time thinking about things just have this inevitable tendency to lean "left." (The illustrious thinker, Robert Nozick, thinks through why this is, and comes up with a fine explanation: there are plenty of thinkers out there who are also doers, namely, business-creators. You'd be hard-pressed to find Marxists teaching at business schools or running Fortune 500 companies. That requires a kind of smarts and skill-set that Marxists and the rest of their left-wing academic ilk either don't possess or don't much approve of. [I take an example like George Soros to be roughly like a Glenn Greenwaldian "voice of conscience" with extreme financial smarts. An example like Warren Buffett, I don't think would really reflect the left-ward bent in the academic humanities. You'd have to look to the economics departments to get a much closer match.] Of course, to be fair, it does cut both ways; I don't much admire, say, Wall Street philistines who are conspicuously out of touch with the more plausible grievances of the "Occupy" movement, or - put more generally - those who've allowed their own circumstances to bias them and blind them to certain realities.)

I just bracketed-parenthetically mentioned the economics departments. There, you don't see much of a left-ward bent at all; it's a very pragmatic - which is to say, quite centrist - profession. Several Nobel Laureates come from the "right." Many economists are out in the business world. There's this old adage, "those who can't do, teach." According to that adage, the ones who don't go out into the business world, can't do. Teaching is a kind of doing, though, and the adage over-generalizes anyway; it's intended to be partly humorous. But there is a ring of truth to it as well, because it applies to at least some academics - and if employment out in "the real world" is any indication of this, the hard sciences have the greatest number of "doers," the social sciences presumably less so (with economics among the social sciences boldly standing out as the least left-wing), and the humanities presumably even less so. I don't know the percentages, but it just intuitively rings true and Nozick's explanation makes plenty of sense.

This is all preface to the following observation: left-wing teachings when it comes to economic matters tend to be toxic. There's quite a lot of it that not even "mainstream liberals" in the economics profession would endorse. But certain memes get out there among left-wing thinkers and the connection between these memes and (a responsible reading of) the facts is tenuous. Now, take your typical liberal college student, place him or her in a large online social gathering to partake in meme-spreading, and what do you get? The reddit.com politics site. (I count this site as among my daily reads among several others, including the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.) This site is particularly a breeding-ground for "Occupy"-movement memes. The thing with the "Occupy" movement is there are some worthwhile or semi-worthwhile memes all mixed-up with some really toxic ones. I'd like to focus on a very toxic meme in particular, one based on shady numbers, having to do with wealth and income inequality.

The very Marx-inspired narrative feeding this toxic meme is one of continuous impoverishment and immiseration of "the working classes" and, seemingly, of ever-widening inequality, absent the democratically-controlled state stepping in to correct the problem. "Democracy before capitalism" is the basic political ethic going on here. Democracy, properly practiced, will work in the best interests of the People, while capitalism tends to devolve into plutocracy.

We've been bitten once already by Marx's prediction of the collapse of capitalism. (How many times do we need to be bitten before we figure out the real problem here?) Needing some theoretical modifications and looking for some semblance of intellectual leadership, the left these days has latched onto (most prominently) Noam Chomsky. While Chomsky is brilliant and authoritative on many things, and serves as a voice of conscience in the face of American wrong-doings and double-standards, that doesn't mean he's got his economic narrative correct. But he's a darling of the left in any event, and his pronouncements are treated accordingly. Taking his lead, the Economic Left - and its representative end-result on the politics reddit - filters and interprets economic data to fit its narrative-worldview.

Now, to throw a wrench into that whole inequality/immiseration narrative.

(I mean, shouldn't they have known better? Shouldn't they have seen this coming? Shouldn't they have been more objective and fact-oriented?)

Here it is:

(Clickable link in the image. To play the academic-credentialism game: the article is written by Maxim Pinkovskiy, Department of Economics, MIT, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Professor of Economics, Columbia University.)

The really "weird" (read: "counter-intuitive," with special emphasis on the scare qoutes) part about this is that world-scale inequality has fallen as globalization has expanded, and this fall has accelerated after 1990, i.e., after the fall of Communism and after NAFTA and GATT.

Now, why aren't international data on inequality in wealth and income ever cited by the Occupy crowd and their academic enablers? Is it because they're unaware of it? Is it because they've ignored it? Do they consider it irrelevant? Do they consider the data flawed? What might account for the Economic Left's failure to address the most comprehensive and global data set available?

The favorite data of the Economic Left concern wealth and inequality here in the United States, which by all indications is increasing. There seems at least to be an awareness that globalization has something to do with it: many lower-skilled and manufacturing jobs have gone oversees. There's also the effects of illegal immigration taking American jerbs, though that's more of a right-wing meme. While the rich Americans retain residence here, their capital goes more and more abroad, they get the returns from that while the middle-class and poor do not, hence the widening income and wealth gap among Americans.

Left out of the intra-American discussions about the growing wealth and income gap is the effect of globalization on global wealth and income inequalities. It's probably of little consolation to Americans that their now-outsourced jobs improve the quality of lives of foreign workers, but it is nonetheless a fact that needs to be taken into account if we're to build a narrative, correct? If the narrative is "widening inequality in wealth and income," then you'd need to have the data to back that up, right? Some philosopher-level amount of intellectual curiosity should lead people to seek out and consider global data and not just data about Americans, yes?

From the way Chomsky and the reddit-hive-mind tell it, the multinational corporations, seeking Profit over People, ship the jobs oversees where people are exploitatively paid 15 cents an hour, pretty much a deadweight loss for all concerned except for the Evil Corporations/Stockholders. From the way they tell it, you'd expect inequality and immiseration on the world scale to be exacerbated by these turns of events. I mean, isn't that what capitalism without democratic intervention, is all about? That is, after all, the very narrative they push about the American historical experience prior to the New Deal. (Presumably, so the narrative goes, it's what's supposed to happen in any industrially-developing nation.) I strongly suspect we've already been bitten there, too.

The reality of the matter is that while many Americans have it tough and things might well get even worse in the future for them, a global-scale perspective will shed light on the reality of the matter: there are some billions of people around the world who are dirt poor, by American standards, willing to work for improved wages but still dirt cheap, by American standards. If enlightened cosmopolitanism and altruism are supposed to be our motives, we should be welcoming these developments. There seems to be something quite toxic here at work, though: a rejection of economic reality, a rejection driven by fear, envy, prejudice, what have you. Much the same as what happens on the Right when it comes to the Right's pet anti-reality issues.

That being said, there is something to the "Occupy" narrative that all pro-reality people should acknowledge: our government is bought by moneyed interests, and is corrupted accordingly. The People have a large part in letting this happen by electing unenlightened and cynical representatives. So, e.g., while budgetary reality says that deficit reduction will require (in part) raising taxes on the only people who have the money these days, the political reality is the insanity that this isn't even on the table at present (due to the Republicans, who have their own anti-reality narratives on fiscal matters. I.e., supply-side tax cuts make a lot more fiscal and economic sense when marginal tax rates are 70% than when they're in the 30s; and the deceptive "only 50 percent of the people pay taxes" meme should have been dead long ago).

A pox on both of their houses.

[ADDENDUM: A case in point of shady numbers, even applied to the "global" scale. ("On Monday the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a massive 400-page report surveying the state of inequality around the world. The report, United We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising reaffirms that inequality is now rising not just in the United States, but globally." Bold emphasis mine.) The study in this case involves the 34 OECD member countries - which doesn't include China or India (which make up more than a third of the world population) much less more than a hundred other nations. How exactly is that "global"?]

Republican Roulette

Sarah "Refudiate" Palin being at around 18% on Intrade twenty or so months out from the '12 election was insane enough, but it's now less than 9 months away from election day:

The Cultural-Conservative Right: Irrational Bigots?

[General blog-note: The "perfectivism" (or whatever it will be) book is still in the works, but taking considerably longer than originally expected. I guess there's no big surprise there. The project seems to keep on evolving/"perfecting" as new information is continually inducted/integrated. In any event, progress on the book is not advanced in a meaningful way, from what I can tell at this point, by significant amounts of blog-activity. But items of note will be posted from time to time.]

It looks like, with the crash and burn of the moronic Perry campaign, and the visceral unlikeability (among other things) of Newt Gingrich, the new darling of the conservative evangelical base of the GOP is Rick Santorum, of "gay marriage logically leads to interspecies marriage" infamy. The very fact that a fucking moron like Santorum is still in the race at this late a stage is undeniable proof that the GOP is intellectually bankrupt. (As if the fact that a fucking moron like Sarah Palin was VP nominee in 2008 wasn't proof enough!)

Anyway, same-sex marriage has been the pet issue of the religious right in the USA in the last decade; it's safe to say that this issue has been so important to the GOP's electoral politics that the Right essentially staked its intellectual credibility on this issue. How have they fared?

To get an idea, look at the following two perspectives on the recent court ruling striking down Prop. 8, one from Slate.com's Dahlia Lithwick, evidently a supporter of same-sex marriage rights, and Maggie Gallagher, a leading opponent:

Is That All You Got? How the proponents of a gay marriage ban just ran out of arguments.


Ninth Circuit to 7 Million California Voters: You Are Irrational Bigots

The first piece, by Lithwick, consists of more than a dozen paragraphs of substantive analysis, giving ample time to the dissenting judge's argument, noting that he cites as precedent a case known as Baker v. Nelson, then mentioning that the majority "suggests that Baker raises different questions and is less relevant than subsequent cases, including Romer v Evans." Lithwick then cites Western State University College of Law professor David Groshoff: "Baker's relevance in this debate more or less disappeared in Minnesota in 2001, and several years later nationwide, when sodomy laws no longer applied to consenting adults."

Meanwhile, Gallagher's piece essentially consists of all of the following as it relates to the case at hand:

Dishonestly, the court claimed it did not require any heightened scrutiny to reach this result.

The very timid dissent (“please don’t go after me!”) points out that Baker v. Nelson is ruling precedent and that the differences between same-sex and opposite sex couples in terms of the state’s interest in responsible procreation could be rationally related to a legitimate state interest.

That's it. That's enough, in Gallagher's mind, to oppose this decision. Now, I'm not an expert on law, so I don't know what "heightened scrutiny" refers to without googling it up. In any case, we're told that the court was dishonest in claiming it did not require heightened scrutiny. How is it dishonest? Gallagher doesn't say.

Gallagher does mention Baker v. Nelson, claiming that it is "ruling precedent," though does not so much as mention the other considerations brought up in Lithwick's piece. (The "please don't go after me" part of Gallagher's posting is actually quoted and linked from Lithwick's article, BTW; both agree that the minority judge's dissent was flimsy.) Is it because Gallagher doesn't acknowledge that those other considerations exist? Is it because she ignores them? Is it because she doesn't grasp what they're about? We just don't know. All we know is that she apparently thinks that precedents shouldn't ever be overturned, or at least this one ought not be. Why, we are not told. The whole point of the Prop. 8 trial, however, is in part to determine what legal merit or weight such precedents might carry, assuming they even come to bear on this case. The whole idea is for the Prop. 8 advocates to come up with compelling rationale for denying marriage rights to same-sex couples.

Lithwick's piece goes into detail as to why these arguments simply didn't hold up, namely because they don't rest on any good evidence. This is pretty much what ordinary common sense and political back-and-forth had figured out all along, as the Cultural Right threw up one shoddy argument after another. The Prop. 8 trial only formalized this debate under fair rules of argument and evidence, where hysterical 30-second ads and hit-and-run op-eds don't count. The Right, predictably, failed. What the commonsensical and informed people suspected - that the "arguments and evidence" presented against same-sex marriage are little more than intellectually-disreputable rationalizations built on disapproval of gay sexual relationships - is now quite solidly confirmed.

After a detailed analysis, Lithwick sums it up thus:

So there you have it: That’s the best case that can be made against gay marriage. An appeals court dissent that rests on the premise that states needn’t act rationally, or offer evidence of rationality, or even be rational in creating classifications, so long as someone publishes a study and someone else believes it. That’s the best they’ve got, it seems.

That is not legal argument or empirical evidence. It is the death rattle of a movement that has no legal argument or empirical evidence. Nobody disputes the fact that Americans opposed to gay marriage believe passionately in their ideas and arguments. But that doesn’t necessarily mean those arguments should win in a court. The best thing that could have happened in the Prop 8 case just happened. The dissent has no clothes.

Gallagher might interpret this statement to say: "Ninth Circuit to 7 Million California Voters: You Are Irrational Bigots."

Well?

What this goes to show, at the very least, is the importance of philosophy to a culture, in determining how well and how critically people think. Will the Right take a hint?

The GOP Field (and Perry vs. Willingham)

Intrade provides the current odds for the 2012 GOP nomination. It shows, in effect, that the choice in 2012 is between the status quo (which is bad enough as it is), and an even worse GOP candidate. Roughly, the odds break down as follows:

Perry - 39%
Romney - 30%
Palin - 8%
Huntsman - 7%
Bachmann - 5%
Paul - 3%

(This gives a total of about 92%, meaning the prediction market is holding out an 8% hope for someone else to jump into the fray.)

Romney is simply not popular with the party's base (given his liberal past and his Religious Incorrectness), which means it'll take a big-money Establishment push to make him viable. I don't see how he could be any more or less status-quo-ey a candidate than Obama. Bachmann is batshit crazy, and Palin is a Dingbat. Paul doesn't really stand any actual chance, and his run will be a repeat of '08. Huntsman is about the only candidate who doesn't look like crap. All in all, it's obviously a really slim field if you're looking for a quality candidate, and this is a problem the GOP has brought on itself.

To illustrate that problem, let's consider Rick Perry, the current front-runner. Everything I've seen and heard about the guy suggests to me that he's as dirty a politician as they come, and he's got all the anti-reason, anti-science credentials the southern party base craves these days. Already on the campaign trail he's said thoroughly dumb things and has gone back on things he wrote in his book only 9 months ago.

But the main thing that pops into my mind whenever I hear Rick Perry's name - the thing that most represents to me what Rick Perry is as a politician and a human being - is his handling of the Texas Forensic Science Commission's inquiry into the Cameron Todd Willingham case. Zack Beauchamp over at the Daily Dish sums it up nicely:

I doubt, sadly, that the Willingham case will have much of an influence on Perry's chances. The real reason to talk about it is to point out the absolute insanity of a situation where someone with Perry's record can be thought of a "serious" candidate. The man was complicit in covering up the truth about the execution of an almost-certainly innocent man. That's outrageous, and should be disqualifying. But it's not, which says a hell of a lot about American political culture. This problem - whatever its source - is something we ought to be highlighting.

My hope is that the Willingham case isn't kept under the rug like it has been so far, and that this issue dogs Perry throughout the campaign season. By the way, the Willingham case is not an isolated instance of Perry's complicity in his state's corrupt capital punishment system:

In the Hank Skinner case, Perry has actively fought DNA testing that could confirm the innocence (or guilt) of another Texas man on death row. Skinner was at one point hours from execution before the Supreme Court intervened (the intervening justice was Antonin Scalia, believe it or not). In Skinner’s case, the prosecution actually began to conduct DNA testing on crime scene evidence, then stopped when the first tests confirmed Skinner’s version of events. Perry again justified willful ignorance in this case by simply noting that he’s personally convinced of Skinner’s guilt.

It will also be interesting to see just how willfully ignorant the GOP primary voters could possibly be when it comes to these matters.

All in all, the 2012 election season is shaping up to be a nice, big shit sandwich.

Blog Resumption?

I may return to normal blogging soon; the insane "debt-ceiling debate" and the fiscal trainwreck ahead is tempting enough in its own right to comment on.

I'd like to mention a recent read that I found highly readable and "entertaining": Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. It's a great introduction for the layperson to the workings of a brilliant mind. (The footnotes themselves are hundreds of pages worth, compiled at the book's website.) I don't agree with some of his analyses on economics (namely, that corporations almost universally benefit at the expense of peoples), but he is nonetheless very perceptive about the dynamics of power in the world today, even were we to assume a pro-capitalist, pro-corporation-in-principle point of view. It is true: corporations have managed to buy elections and work in conjunction with states to exploit peoples around the world. It's not something Ayn Rand and other advocates of capitalism would support. I did catch two instances where Chomsky states facts in a misleading way: (1) That slaves as 3/5 persons is "in the Constitution." By the same token, Prohibition is "in the Constitution," but so what? (2) That under Clinton, the defense budget exceeded the Cold War average. But it certainly didn't as a share of GDP, even if it did in absolute terms. A ton of other facts he cites I simply am not up on, but I suspect some of them are stated misleadingly.

I also schlepped through Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment recently. I may have something substantive to say in reaction to he book in due course, beyond pointing out the fact that it's very dry and tedious, that it sets forth an intriguing theory of rights to freedom-and-wellbeing, and that it is argued very thoroughly. I just wish it were argued way more accessibly. Sigh.

I tried Nozick's Philosophical Explanations and The Examined Life; the former was not all that accessible, while the latter had a hard time holding my attention.

I also went through the post-1950 portion of Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made; among other things I discovered that a Daryn Kent was most likely the unnamed young woman "put on trial" as described in Barbara Branden's biography of Rand. Another thing I can't really do at this point is to form a coherent, context-sensitive picture of Rand the person based on all the things others have said about her. There are a total of 100 accounts in 100 Voices that conflict with some 100 or so accounts in Heller's book. If you see Rand the way Leonard Peikoff sees her, you see someone of staggering genius, insight, rationality, and character, who could argue anyone she met into a corner. If you see her as a good number of NBI-days ex-Objectivists and ex-close-associates see her, you see a domineering diva who's nonetheless a staggering genius. And it's all things other people have said. (Heller basically sides with the latter crowd, since she didn't have much of the former type to rely on as a source. She said she was denied access to the archives because she didn't agree with Rand's ideas; I think it had more to do with the fact that she was going to the Brandens as a leading source. Heller does get a good number of facts wrong that more meticulous fact-checking would correct, BTW.) The Ayn Rand I know is the Rand that appeared in print and in some public forums, including the Donahue show. The Rand I see on the Donahue show is one I find enjoyable to watch. The Ayn Rand that might be and ought to be is, of course, the Ayn Rand we'd all want to know, and there's a shit-ton of that Ayn Rand in her writings. (I still think she gets some things wrong about, e.g., Kant, and I'm still not up on what's great about the speech-filled dialogues in Atlas, but I'll spiral back to all this in due course.)

Heller's book is also very wordy and repetitive, for what that's worth. Anyway, for the latest Rand-related gossip, it's a "good" source. It's not clear Heller has anywhere near the kind of grasp of Objectivism that a student of Peikoff's does, which definitely makes a difference in how one might perceive Rand the person (e.g., with one's method of judgment). That's one big context about Peikoff that Heller simply misses. If Rand says in a general letter of recommendation that Peikoff has a "superlative" understanding of Objectivism, one would do well to study Peikoff's work carefully to understand the philosophy better, and it's pretty clear Heller didn't do that. I'm still waiting for that other shoe to drop, the "definitive" biography from the ARI.

And I think I still have a book in the works; it is evolving into I-don't-know-what at this point. I want it to be pretty excellent, though, even if not absolutely, ahem, perfect.

(Next up on the reading list: Mayhew-edited volumes of essays on The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged - here and here.)