This nation's so-called leaders have lost all credibility

(Part of an ongoing series of expletive-ridden smackdowns, like shooting fish in a barrel.)

Today's theme: All our so-called leaders' intellectual and moral credibility, right down the shitter.  But why?

  

The latest item to spark this round of outrage contained a series of quotations from a group of completely idiotic fucks . . .

. . . on the House Science Committee!

The quotations have to be seen to be believed.  I had to do a double-take; was this The Onion?  It's gotta fucking be The Onion; one can hope.  Alas, I'm going to proceed on the assumption that these quotes aren't made up in the spirit of satire in order to illustrate the absurdity of our present political state of affairs, but rather that these elected national "leaders" are perfectly happy flushing all of their credibility straight down the shitter.

How did the nation come to this state, diagnostically speaking?  I'll get to that in a bit.  But first, a brief rundown of the problem.

Our nation's moral leaders are intellectually and morally vacuous.  We have a bunch of fucking clowns at the helm of the nation's slowly-sinking ship.  Could this be the "normal" state of affairs for this nation?  Has it always been this way?  Mark Twain, some 150 years ago or so, remarked on the idiocy that reigned in Washington, D.C.  (If you've seen the recently-released Lincoln, you will have observed how just nearly a full one-third of members of Congress in 1865 - the pro-slavery fucks - didn't give even the tiniest shit about their intellectual and moral credibility in the eyes of history.)  But it couldn't always have been this way, could it have?  Jefferson was a learned man, the president of the American Philosophical Society: a polymath, as was Ben Franklin.  The character and fortitude it took for the American revolutionaries and founders to do what they did almost surely couldn't be matched by today's crop of so-called leaders.  Things almost surely have devolved into something historically unparalleled in this nation.

(Whether it's unparalleled in all of history, well . . . they haven't shut down the centers of learning like the first fanatic Christian emperor did.  But we're setting the bar pretty low here, aren't we?)

It's no accident that Congress's approval rating is now sandwiched between those of pond-scum and rotten eggs.  One need only look at how the GOP has stacked the House anti-Science Committee with a bunch of ignorant fucking idiots.  I don't know what's more ludicrous, this or the Palin VP nod,

[Digression: I just watched the movie-dramatization of the Palin debacle, Game Change, and the conclusion I drew from this is that Julianne Moore went overboard portraying Palin in a sympathetic light, because the Palin-credibility thing is a humpty-dumpty that simply cannot be put back together again.  There's some idea going around about how actors cannot convincingly play characters smarter than they are themselves; this instance is like that idea in reverse, because Palin is manifestly beneath Moore's intelligence and character.  But the movie had to attract at least some viewers, right?  In any case, Palin is so intellectually corrupt and lazy that a reality-based sympathetic portrayal is hardly possible.  The only positive thing we can really tell about the half-term former governor - and something convincingly portrayed in the film - is that she is a decent mother to her children (when she isn't even so much as preparing them for higher schooling as she herself had in pursuing her degree in sports journalism, that is).  (EDIT: Also, one has to assume that she was making up that story [hey, whaddya know, Andrew Sullivan's calling card] about flying from Texas to Alaska after her water broke, as it would be reckless to put one's baby at risk like that.  Then again - scarily - her version of these events has an aura of plausibility to it.  I dunno what to say, other than that she's an idiot.)  All you need to know about Palin as a political figure (and by implication, John McCain) is that she plowed straight ahead with the VP candidacy knowing full well that she wasn't qualified for the job.  A revealing moment in the film occurs when McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt comforts Palin by informing her that President Reagan one said that trees cause pollution.  Hell, one knows something had already gone awry in modern GOP politics when a sitting president said something so fucking stupid.  It only snowballed from there, as the logic of such things would dictate.  Ayn Rand had warned anyone who would listen about the man's intellectual stature as far back as 1976.]

but if you wanted full and final confirmation that the GOP has gone way off the deep end, this is it.  It's like the GOP doesn't even care about its credibility anymore.  Can't the House GOP leadership exercise some kind of sanity-restoring veto here?  Can't someone on FOX News call these dipshits out?

The Democrats are hardly better.  Their monumental hypocrisy on the subject of President Obama's secret and judicially-unaccountable process of targeted assassination of American citizens is the tip of the massive iceberg.  The current bipartisan collusion to continue the absolutely insane War on Drugs as usual - when all readily-available data, common sense, and reason suggest an end or major revision - is unconscionable, and destroys whatever shred of credibility the Democrats might have had over the Republicans in the civil-liberties department.  (Does the President intend on continuing to enforce in all states the federal laws pertaining to schedule-1 controlled substances, as is his charge under the Constitution?  We still just don't know / blank out.)  Both parties have - by this juncture, openly and unapologetically - whored themselves out to the plutocrats, over and above their openly and unapologetically whoring themselves out for the Stupid Vote.  The prevailing consensus among our so-called leaders when it comes to accountability for torture is: blank out.  Our so-called leaders' proposed solution to our nation's looming $107-trillion fiscal trainwreck is: blank out.  (For those of you retrieving this verbiage in the year 2100 using your implanted bio-supercomputers: that figure is about six times the national GDP of 2013, which also means about six times the current outstanding gross federal debt.  Or: roughly 10 percent of all projected national GDP over the infinite future horizon.  10 percent of Americans' future production stream, set aside just to meet these obligations.)  Their assurances to the American taxpayers and citizens that more rounds of bailouts for the ethically-slimy plutocrats won't be needed again in the future rest upon: blank-out.  Their proposed solution to the emerging climate quagmire is: blank-out.  Their solution for how to keep America competitive in the era of globalization is: blank-out.  Their answer to the spectacle of lowest-return-on-expenditure-by-far for health care in the economically-advanced world is: blank-out.

Anyone picking up on an inductively-established pattern here?

The common cause of all these is our leaders' intellectual and moral vacuity.  The cause of that is an intellectually and morally vacant electorate.  The underlying cause of that is the widespread divorcing of life from philosophy.  The underlying cause of that is a profound failure of some kind or other on the part of the intellectuals to make philosophy relevant to living for the great majority of people.  The underlying cause of that is something the Intellectual Class may not want to hear, particularly given the (unpopular-among-them) leading source of the diagnosis.  (Hint: it has to do with a psycho-epistemological malady known in Objectivist circles as rationalism - in essence, the worship of floating abstractions; theoretical castles in the sky untethered from concrete, practical, everyday, inductively-integrated reality.)

I'd like to provide a case in point in this diagnostic exercise: John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.  By way of contrast I will pit this work against Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

The theme of Theory is, as best as I can determine, something which Rawls calls "justice as fairness": principles of justice are determined by a hypothetical procedure involving impartial (as in "behind a veil of ignorance" - think of the statue of the blindfolded woman with the scales) moral agents deciding upon reasonable terms for how the benefits and burdens of social cooperation will be distributed.  In Rawls's well-known theory - and not to belabor the point too much given the context of this blog entry - these agents would decide on principles that respect both libertarian and egalitarian concerns; the most controversial of these principles - again, what these hypothetical moral agents would supposedly agree upon as reasonable given their ignorance of the place they would occupy in the real world, so that they don't unfairly tip the scales in favor of one group (or representative individual) or other - is the Difference Principle, a "maximin" principle which ensures the most advantageous bundle of goods and opportunities possible for those in the least-advantageous position in the real-world society.  The underlying "fairness" premise for this is that the attainment of a great many of the goods and opportunities in people's lives is not effectively within their control; rather, this is greatly affected by factors such as innate talent-endowment (e.g., intelligence), upbringing, and economic circumstances.

In theory (ahem), this sounds reasonable enough, right?  It is, after all, the product of many years of thinking about social justice by a man who, as it turns out, is a professor of philosophy at Harvard University.  So this theory of justice-as-fairness should make a heck of splash on the American scene, right?  And not just in academic circles (where it has received huge amounts of attention), right?

It hasn't worked out that way.  Rawls's theory is hardly at all a factor in today's political culture.  This may be due to a combination of one or more of the following factors: (1) American culture is too anti-intellectual to appreciate the work of its best philosophers; (2) The academy has done a lackluster job of transmitting the content of this work to the public and its leaders; (3) The theory just doesn't hold up all that well under scrutiny - e.g., the criticism provided by Rawls's Harvard colleague Robert Nozick in Part Two of his libertarian treatise, Anarchy, State, and Utopia; (4) Rawls's theory holds little appeal in a nation founded on Jeffersonian-individualist ideals; (5) Translating this theory into real-world application may prove exceedingly difficult (which ties into point 3); Rawls's theory calls for a property-owning democracy, for instance, which might run into insuperable constitutional challenges among other things.  I think all of these factors sound plausible individually or in combination.

By contrast, the theme of Rand's Atlas Shrugged is "the role of the mind in man's existence."  (How many mediots could tell you what the theme of the novel is?)  In Aristotelian/perfectivist terms, this could be stated as: The common form of human flourishing is the activity of living thoughtfully and intelligently.  Any sound constitutional or legislative social policy needs to be centered around recognition of this inescapable reality.  Is Rawls, like Rand, appropriately laser-focused on this reality when formulating his theory of social justice?  Or does his theory mostly miss the point by focusing on things that aren't this fundamental?  Isn't a vociferous campaign to promote the maximal perfection of peoples' intellectual potentialities the way to go?  The basic preconditions for making that happen don't seem to rest upon a maximin principle arrived at from behind a hypothetical veil of ignorance, do they?

(Rest assured, Yours Truly will be hard at work - as time and interest permit, of course - trying to figure out how Rawls's theory might be beefed up along these lines so as to be rescued from irrelevance.  Perhaps the hypothetical agents behind the veil of ignorance would bargain for a maximin principle along intellectual-perfection lines?  How would that work?  What if philosophically-informed education from an early age involving habituation in the art of mental unit-economy is basically what it takes?  And since when is government-based coercion the preferred default approach to implementing principles of justice?  Where did that ever come from?  And if the parties bargaining behind the veil of ignorance are still informed morally speaking, would they approve of the coercion to make the purportedly desirable outcome happen?  If a real-world just society presupposes real-world virtuous people - ethics having hierarchical priority over politics, after all - would a just polity need government coercion to make happen what a just people would most likely have implemented already?  Perhaps this, in briefest essence - by appeal to eudaimonistic ethical principles, entailing the recognition of the social dimensions of self-actualization - is the way Rawls's theory could be, um, perfected upon?  Are you listening, "Bleeding Heart Libertarians," you who focus on the "just initial distribution of resources" while leaving out mention of the most important and productive resource of all: irreducibly-self-cultivated human intelligence?  Shooting fish in a barrel here, again?)

What might Aristotle say about these contrasting perspectives, and how might be "dialectically reconcile" them?  Put another way: which of these two thinkers is more Aristotle-like?  (One thing to look at in answering this is: which thinker is more systematic in addressing the fundamental questions of human existence?  Another thing to ask is: which thinker does a better job of responding to alternative viewpoints?  Here it's a complicated matter: Rand's polemical style is usually pretty bad (stemming from an otherwise understandable high estimation of herself as a thinker in all respects on all matters philosophical), while Rawls addresses libertarianism in the space of one paragraph in the most final culmination of his work, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001); in contrast, Nozick spent 50 pages addressing Rawls's theory in AS&U.  Is this what qualifies as "fair and balanced" in contemporary academic political philosophy?  One paragraph vs. 50 pages: which do you expect would challenge the reader's mind more?  It would have to be a damn good paragraph or a pretty lousy 50 pages for the epistemic jury to conclude that the prosecution/defense outdid the other side.)  And, most significantly for this here discussion, how would Aristotle go about transmitting his ideas in practically-workable terms to the general public?

I'm more than happy to sound like a broken record here: as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation.  And when the Intellectual Class - the group of professional idea-merchants - manages to succeed to a dazzling extent at divorcing the world of ideas from the requirements of everyday living - you know, the common charge leveled against "heads-in-the-clouds philosophers" - the recipient populace is bound to be intellectually inept at doing what philosophically-informed people would do - e.g., maximally integrate mentally, and flourish.

Back to the original topic at hand: a citizenry-electorate gets basically the leadership it deserves.  An intellectually-deficient (ignorant; vicious) citizenry will quite logically end up with the sort of perverse national leadership we are witnessing today.  The leading case-in-point is not even the idiots on some House committee, but the President.  This president's pedigree is seemingly top-notch - once the president of the Harvard Law Review, for crying out loud - but you, reader, need to do a double-take here: Harvard.  Harvard liberalism.  John Rawls.  Not Aristotle.  Rawls.  Not systematic and integrated approach to philosophical questions - especially in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics - but predominant focus on political philosophy, which is hierarchically derivative of these areas of study.  It's no wonder that the President is abysmally, manifestly ignorant of arguably the nation's most influential public intellectual of the last half-century.  (Influential, not due to widespread understanding of Rand, per se - that is, understanding of Rand as she herself understood her own ideas - but due to the power of ideas and individual competence at propagating them, the competence in her case stemming from that very understanding.)

(I'll formulate one standard for understanding Ayn Rand as follows, as per the Huffington Post article I just linked: the Don Watkins Test.  It's not even as stringent as what I'd term the Leonard Peikoff Test, which maybe 1,000 people at most could pass; I might be off by an order of magnitude in either direction here.  Anyway: If the ARI's Don Watkins says you don't understand jackshit about Ayn Rand, then it's a safe bet that you don't understand jackshit about Ayn Rand.  (It doesn't hurt to have exposure to the right influences from early on. ;-)  Also, why doesn't Watkins have a tenured Ivy League professorship, like, yesterday?) And, as Watkins correctly implies, our President doesn't understand jackshit about Ayn Rand - and no thanks to his Harvard pedigree.  As I said in one of my earlier rants, Jefferson - who would philosophize circles around our current pathetic excuse for a leader (so, is he going to enforce those federal drug laws, or not?  just one straight fucking answer would be a welcome surprise) - wouldn't dare fail to understand Rand.  He'd most likely be conversant with the folks at the ARI to be doubly (perfectively?) sure he understood her well enough before speaking about her.  By the way, a pattern of pathological behavior, among the left-wing hit-piece artists most especially, is to smear Rand without so much as checking with the ARI for accuracy, comment, or input.  Leftist SCUM....)

So, um, I think I've run out of new material for now, on this particular topic.  There are only so many ways to say and prove that our political system is intellectual bankrupt.  As usual, it's up to you, reader, to integrate this material and act accordingly.  The task ahead is by no means easy, but in a way it is: all one has to do is think. (h/t Peikoff)  Oh, also: how Andrew Sullivan spends/wastes so much time covering the everyday minutiae pertaining to all this blatant idiocy, without seeking out the fundamental underlying cause, much less not going fucking bonkers, is beyond me.  Something something Orwell quote seeing what is in front of one's nose needing a constant struggle, or something.  Evidently, some just take that quote to heart more than others do, and end up blogging circles around them with much less verbiage.  If people only understood the power of philosophy - especially the best philosophy - to improve human affairs, they'd know where to look (hint: it's not the Dish).  The emerging challenge: figuring out how to get them to understand and look.  That $107 trillion fiscal cluster-fuck and sundry other problems could be solved easily if only they would.

Glenn Beck's new 'Utopia'

Source: glennbeck.com

Source: wikipedia

This post is for the purposes of having a little bit of fun, while tying the subject to deeper and more long-range issues.

On Thursday, Glenn Beck unveiled his blueprint for what he called Independence, USA (or alternatively, "Galt's Gulch").  Very shortly after I saw the image of the planned site (first image above), my mind went to the pictorial depiction(s) of Sir Thomas More's Utopia which was written nearly five centuries ago.  Inductively speaking, it's the same basic idea, in essence, particularly given both More and Beck's devout belief in a Divine Creator.  So I figured I'd poke a little bit of fun at the parallels, as I do above.

But more seriously, while I take great issue with Beck's various paranoia-spreading proclamations about our government - the Obama Administration in particular (ever heard of Agenda 21?  The U.N. plans to come take our guns away! or something to that effect; it's hard to keep track of all the efforts afoot at the highest levels to destroy the American Way of Life) - there is one thing that he gets that seemingly 80% of the rest of the nation does not: the American Framers were effing geniuses who set an example for how we can be a great nation once again.

Is his envisioned Independence town built on the same principles that America was founded upon?  Presumably so, given his unceasingly high praise of the Founders.  And it's called Independence, after all.

This idea has drawn derision from various quarters, including the usual predictable ones (left-wing smear websites), but let's examine the basic concept.  We'd have some kind of self-sustaining community built on Jeffersonian ideals.  Lifelong learning would presumably be at the center of the community ethos.  Derivatively, industry and creativity and entrepreneurship would be inculcated from a young age.  For those who are temporarily out of work due to the "creative destruction" of the free market, there would be a plan in place for (non-sacrificial) mutual aid, retraining, and so forth.  Sounds pretty nice, doesn't it?  Why isn't everyone else on board with the basic concept, huh?  Surely we wouldn't want to cut off our noses to spite our faces by shooting the messenger; that would be vicious.

Now, my envisioned utopia - which the very term 'Perfectivism' might well have tipped off some readers to - is more ambitious than that: it would not simply be confined to some village located somewhere in Redneck Central, TX (a red flag in terms of the desirability of living in this envisioned Independence village), because it would not be necessary to build it in one place.  Instead, it would be everywhere.  So what stands in the way of this?

Supposedly, some "inherently corrupt" human nature stands in the way.  That's cynicism speaking.  I'm not a cynic; I'm an idealist.  And why am I an idealist?  Because I think that through education, people can become more civilized.  Further, if we have any meaningful adherence to the classic concept of free will, this is a real possibility open to us as a people.  If people are appropriately educated in the philosophical arts from an early age, then as they grow they find (a) little eudaimonic incentive in being vicious, and (b) the cultural mainstream of one's community would be such as to discourage misbehavior in a much more radically effective way than at present.  (And, even better, it wouldn't be a matter of conformity to the mainstream that would encourage virtue; it would be each person's own mind independently recognizing the desirability of virtue, as well as the not-conformist but understandable and desirable natural human sense of wanting to belong to a highly-functional and supportive community of people who've reached the same very-appealing conclusions about right living.)  So, the cynical response to such an ideal should easily fall by the wayside one we've framed this subject properly.  Moreover, the course of human history demonstrates that, as learning and knowledge advance and accumulate, this has a civilizing effect on people.  (Steven Pinker's recent work arrives more or less at the same conclusion.)

Moreover, we have the historical precedent of the Enlightenment and (imperfect by present standards) American Founding to point to as a guidepost.  As I've pointed out on this blog a few times already, this nation's third President was also president of the American Philosophical Society, a fairly close parallel to the original real-world "philosopher-kind," Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome in the 2nd century A.D.), who - unlike Jefferson - has the unique distinction of being a political ruler who also made a lasting contribution to the history of philosophy, with his stoic Meditations.  (Jefferson's most historically-significant philosophical insights derive from those of John Locke a century earlier; otherwise, his ethics were derivative of Epicurus and Epictetus as well as the historical Jesus of Nazareth.)

Thomas More's version of utopia - literally, "no place" - might be taken as a subtle satire on the very concept of utopia given the imperfections of human nature.  But this utopian theme runs all the way back to Plato's Republic.  (Is Jesus's 'Kingdom of Heaven' on earth a utopian ideal?  Supposedly we're corrupted by Original Sin, but once/if we all follow his lead, doesn't it sound like the result would be utopian?)  Some have suggested that Plato's Republic is also not to be taken seriously, that it could be implemented only by a select few philosopher-kings but not by society as a whole.  One thing to point out is that in Plato's time, literacy and learning were not as widespread and prevalent among the population-at-large as they are today (as abysmal as today's state might seem - and it is, by perfectivist standards).  The ordinary plebs just didn't have the knowledge, training, disposition, or sophistication to see how to rule wisely.  It must be kept in mind that Socrates was sentenced to death by a democratic majority - for something that he wouldn't be sentenced to death for today.  (Likewise, a heretic in the West today would not meet the same fate that Servetus met at the hands of that totalitarian fuck John Calvin and his beloved Inquisition.  See?  Progress.)

This utopian impulse (as it might be called) is not limited to Plato but runs throughout the history of philosophy.  The two most famous political philosophers of our era, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, seriously entertained the idea of utopia.  Kant's 'Kingdom of Ends' has a very utopian-sounding flavor to it.  Rand, of course, depicted her vision of a utopian society in part three of Atlas Shrugged, with the original "Galt's Gulch."  What might explain philosophers' tendency to entertain what the rest of those in their societies have tended to consider unrealistic?  After all, is it wise to entertain that which is unrealistic?  Here's where some confusions need to be cleared up.  First, it's been an unremarkable tendency among moral philosophers to think we have free will in a relevant sense.  Second, there's been a perhaps-more-remarkable tendency among philosophers to think that the rest of society can see the merits of learning and virtue just as they do - if they would just exercise their capacity for reason, dammit.  And various things have gotten in the way of people coming to see what they do, the widespread lack of the right education being a big one.  (See the mentality that produced Nazi Germany, even in the post-Enlightenment period of history - and I'm not speaking just of Hitler's psychoses or the dysfunctional state of the German intelligentsia which tended toward nationalism and socialism, Mises's refutations of state-socialist planning notwithstanding; see also the willingness of a critical mass of the German People to follow a charismatic "savior" even to the very gates of Hell.)  One thing that needn't stifle our human potentials for utopian living is the self-fulfilling cynicism that consumes so many people.  To combat that requires a change in attitude along with being presented a realistic blueprint for a path to utopia.

The Aristotelian utopia that I have proposed appears to provide such a realistic blueprint.  I want to clarify something, however: I don't even think that this utopia is specifically Aristotelian (or Randian, or Nortonian, or...), because it would be built upon a realistic citizenry-wide program of philosophical education in general.  I call it Aristotelian because, for one thing, my idea was sparked in good part by Prof. Homiak's essay on "An Aristotelian Life," but also because Aristotle is traditionally understood to have been most keen on the perfection of our intellectual capacity as the basic prerequisite for moral, aesthetic, spiritual and social improvement.  But at root, what people require is an education in critical thinking, and the rest (e.g., overcoming cognitive biases, which non-philosophically-informed psychologists seem to take as a given - as "naturally" ["normally"?] ingrained in our cognition) follows.  (Note, in contrast to a potential point-missing criticism, that this is not indoctrination, as that would be anathema to critical thinking.)  What's more, we have the tools and resources to make this happen with minimal investment.

So Beck is on the right track, but his proposal can be perfected so as to expand his ideal to everyone who is willing to open their minds to thinking as philosophers think.  It doesn't take native genius to make this happen, either; it takes the right sort of training to actualize the cognitive potentials that are already there.  What I see here, given the far-seeing philosophical perch upon which I rest, is a ("dialectical"; inductive) convergence that's been in the making in western culture (with some fits and starts here and there) for about 2,400 years now.  I call the eventual result the cultural singularity.

Given the priority of ethics over politics, the reforms required here - as much as they may require some measure of investment of public funds short-term - require a revolution in our ethical paradigm long-term, for which we have plenty historical literature to serve as promising, uh, leads.  And, given the priority of epistemology to ethics, what this ethical revolution presupposes is an intellectual revolution, and for that, all we need to do is follow the lead of the (best) philosophers in their quest for truth. As Peikoff said at the end of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (uh-oh, a messenger to be shot!), "To save the world is the simplest thing in the world.  All one has to do is think."

How could Glenn Beck - or anyone else, for that matter - possibly (coherently) disagree with that?

Let's get 'er done, shall we? ;-)

(I mean, it's going to happen, sooner or later with the inevitable advance of worldwide knowledge-integration, as long as the human race doesn't wipe itself out first - just as with the technological singularity.  So why not sooner rather than later?  Countless lives - in terms of both survival and flourishing, both of which depend on actualizing intellectual potentials - hang in the balance, after all, and if you're like me, you feel a huge sense of urgency about this.  Well, do you?  Spread the word as best you know how, then.)

P.S. A realistic utopia would be a virtuous-capitalism (capitalism = private property rights with voluntary association), with mutual-aid institutions.  Beck's (and Rand [I think! - see Galt's discussion about the conditions on which one provides aid to (virtuous) others] and Nozick's) vision fits that description, while Plato's and More's does not.  For explicit criticism of the latter (socialist = collective ownership) sort on economic grounds, see Mises.

Aristotle and Ayn Rand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone else see where this is going?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The internet, philosophy, and the future

What follows is a series of interconnected facts, observations, and extemporaneous thoughts about the long-term future and the internet's place in it all.  Heroes will be touted, villains exposed, internet culture analyzed, large-scaled trends identified, and what have you.  It's gonna be fun, because integration is fun. :-)

Where to begin . . . I'll start out with Noam Chomsky, who co-authored (with Edward S. Herman - I've never heard of him, either) his most well-known work, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).  Since that time - particularly since the early-to-mid-1990s - Chomsky's analysis has become less and less applicable to the mass media as they have evolved since that time.  The principal and most revolutionary mass medium to emerge in that time is, of course, the internet (a series of tubes; A.K.A. the internets).  I needn't go into the transformational effects of this medium on our culture just so far, even without the culture-wide recognition of philosophy as the prime mover of cultural and historical evolution; suffice to say it has been a game-changer in the mass-media dynamic.

The primary benefits of the internet have included: a decentralizing of information command-and-control; vastly increased user-control over the content they are exposed to (there are downsides to this in the epistemic-closure department...); vastly enhanced interconnection of people and integration of information and knowledge; vastly enhanced information search along with vastly enhanced ease and speed of access.  Those are at least some benefits that come to mind off the top of my head.  The convergence of forces to which all this will lead is inevitable and will be the primary driver of what I and some others term the approaching Cultural Singularity.  This Singularity is driven by advances in technological infrastructure (which ties into the Technological Singularity on the horizon that Ray Kurzweil, Stanley Kubrick (way back in the '60s!), and others have been talking about) and the social-media-generated power of memes (ideas) to alter the intellectual and cultural discourse in major and often unpredictable ways.  Chomsky himself recognized the new power of social media in the wake of the Occupy movement.

What has yet to be figured out by the vast majority of people - if they had figured it out already I wouldn't be needing to type any of this stuff - is that in terms of ideas and memes, philosophy is the prime mover.

(If you're too lazy or proudly ignorant to click on and read the links I provide for your edification, this is probably not the blog for you.  Go fucking read what Rand said about philosophy, which serves as part of the background for what I say here.  That's what internet links are for, goddammit: to integrate seemingly disparate collections of information and knowledge that much more quickly and efficiently.  Hell, you could read through the entirety of this blog and pretty much have all this shit figured out as much as I do; I'm not that special.  Now Aristotle and Rand: they were truly special, way ahead of their times.  The whole point is for everyone to become that special as a social norm, beginning with a program of education formulated in great part already by ancient visionaries like Plato and Aristotle.)

Now, what is some prima facie evidence readily available to today's internet user of philosophy's fundamental importance?  I'll mark as Exhibit A the Getting to Philosophy phenomenon on wikipedia.  A number of people who have learned about this phenomenon have gone, "whoa," like it was something out of left field or what have you.

I have to digress at this point and talk a little bit about wikipedia's main founder, Jimmy Wales ("Jimbo" to a number of long-time internet acquaintances and students of Objectivism).  For those of us old enough to remember these things, there was some webpage way back when, probably 15 years ago now, where prominent students of Objectivism described how they got into Rand.  Jimbo describes how he encountered a copy (non-digital, of course) of The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z (1986, compiled and edited by Harry Binswanger), and never turned back.  Would that it were so for everyone....

A little digression-within-a-digression: Students of Peikoff's lecture courses, especially Understanding Objectivism, but also such courses as the Advanced OPAR Seminars and The Art of Thinking, have "never come back" from Objectivism as a way of thinking and living.  A curious mind - and any aspiring author who wants to conduct a serious study of Objectivism - will want to know why that is so.  Well, click on that link there a few lines above and find out for yourselves for only a few bucks.  Serious students of Objectivism used to have to shell out hundreds of bucks for this stuff and, again, never looked back.  (Digression-within-digression-within-digression: The reason that you will not see any serious and credible book criticizing Objectivism in the future - ever - is that material such as Peikoff's lecture courses, not to mention the growing academic secondary literature on Objectivism, will have to serve as research material for any serious, honest, credible, and competent commentary on Rand and Objectivism.  Given how inexpensively all this material is available for now, there are no excuses for students, researchers and authors not to listen to and absorb this material - to actually understand Objectivism as Objectivism's founder herself did.  And they all will find that - as a variety of cognitive and ethical perfectivism - Objectivism is, like an axiom, as irrefutable as any (dynamic) Aristotelianism on the world-historical scene.  This is why selectively-reality-oriented scumbags like Leiter and his vile little cronies are fucked right in the reputational poopchute unless they mend their ways.  That's just the way it is; don't shoot the quasi-anonymous cuss-word-slinging messenger, now [you FUCKS].  (Digression-thrice-removed: My word search counts 94 instances of the f-word on the front page of this blog going back to Nov. 24.  Only 94???  I shall redouble my efforts!  Walter didn't watch his buddies die face down in the muck so that these fucks could waltz around the internet spreading their anti-Aristotelian hate.  95 "fucks" now.  96.))

Back to Jimbo: The method to the madness that went into creating the Lexicon is nothing new to serious long-time students of Objectivism: integration.  With that, there is a recognized hierarchy of knowledge   (a topic covered indepth in Understanding Objectivism and discussed in a segment of Chapter 4 of OPAR).  On top of this I'll make the observation that key concepts of methodology in Objectivism - integration, hierarchy, context, induction - are elements of a phenomenon known in more traditional terms as encyclopedic learning.  (I call it perfective learning.)  If you haven't drawn the connections already: Jimbo, an encyclopedic learner, found quite a home in the Lexicon, and later went on to found the leading encyclopedia on the internet, in which a "Getting to Philosophy" phenomenon is observed to be the norm, which is due unavoidably to the hierarchy of human knowledge.  Do you think this is all some kind of accident?  For some of us - especially those of us well-versed in the Randian Arts - this is all a no-brainer to figure out and comes as no surprise at all.  Philosophy is the most fundamental discipline with respect to the hierarchy of knowledge, the term-setter for all other fields of study, the integrator and uniter of all the disciplines, the primary, the fountainhead.  As Miss Rand puts it on p. 74 of ITOE:

If it should be asked, at this point: Who, then, is to keep order in the organization of man's conceptual vocabulary, suggest the changes or expansions of definitions, formulate the principles of cognition and the criteria of science, protect the objectivity of methods and of communications within and among the special sciences, and provide the guidelines for the integration of man's knowledge? -- the answer is: philosophy.  These, precisely, are the tasks of epistemology.  The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge.

(Question: why doesn't this appear in the Lexicon under the Philosophy entry?  Evidently the Lexicon needs further perfecting!)

To this I'll add the observation that Jimbo has advanced the cause of objective integration of human knowledge quite admirably; it helps to have a good philosophy informing one's habits and decisions, dunnit?  It's also an incontrovertible fact that Jimbo is perfectly normal - not some brain-numbed cultist the Leiters of the world wished would define Rand's avid readership - and a highly successful leader in business and culture.  He's the kind of person that the New Society of Reason can and ought to be modeled upon; all it takes is a sensible, not-excruciatingly-difficult-to-implement program of citizen education.

/digression

[As I'm a little tired now, I'll finish this posting later; I've given the curious and observant reader enough to chew on as it is, and all beyond any shadow of dispute at that.  And, yes, /r/philosophy (and, by implication, the contemporary Philosophy Profession) will be getting the Wednesday ass-fucking it's been begging for. :-D ]

To continue:

In The Psychology of Self-Esteem (1969), Nathaniel Branden wrote:

A man of self-esteem and sovereign consciousness deals with reality, with nature, with an objective universe of facts; he holds his mind as his tool of survival and develops his ability to think.  But the pscyho-epistemological dependent lives not in a universe of facts, but in a universe of people; people, not facts, are his reality; people, not reason, are his tool of survival.  It is on them that his consciousness must focus; reality is reality-as-perceived-by-them; it is they who he must understand or please or placate or deceive or maneuver or manipulate or obey.  It is his success at this task that becomes the gauge of his efficacy - of his competence at living. ... The temporary dimunition of his anxiety, which the approval of others offers him, is his substitute for self-esteem.  This is the phenomenon that I designate as "Social Metaphysics." ... Social metaphysics is the psychological syndrome that characterizes a person who holds the minds of other men, not objective reality, as his ultimate psycho-epistemological frame of reference.  (Mass-market paperpack, p. 179-80; original Branden article, "Social Metaphysics," appeared in the Nov. 1962 *Objectivist Newsletter*.)

So what does this have to do with anything I've been talking about?  Well, since every cognitive unit is interconnected with every other one: everything, of course.  Social metaphysics pervades - sometimes subtly, sometimes quite openly - so many aspects of human societies today that it would make Socrates and Aristotle fucking puke given the millennia humans have had to get their act together since their time.  What is even worse, even more disgusting, even more disgraceful, is when social metaphysics infiltrates and corrupts the world of philosophy.  Reddit's /r/philosophy subreddit is a microcosm of this deplorable phenomenon.

In the emerging age of social media, there are tools that people need in order to hone in on their likes and filter out their dislikes.  The Facebook "like" button is one such thing.  It aids people in organizing their mental and online content.  This sounds really nice in theory, but in practice - and when it comes to philosophy above all - no panacea has been achieved and none will be achieved given prevailing social-media formats.

The feature on reddit whereby users anonymously and unaccountably vote up or vote down content is the Achilles Heel of /r/philosophy.  It utterly destroys any defensible pretense to fairness, honesty, objectivity and related values.  The very notion that philosophical discourse should be subject to the mob-rule of such an upvote/downvote format is obscene.  It doesn't even matter what the popular prevailing views are, be it capitalism or be it socialism, eudaimonism or utilitarianism, Aristotelianism or Zizekism.  The inescable fact is that when philosophical discourse (i.e., the appearance of such) operates in effect under mob-rule (also known as "the hivemind" [cringe]), the very integrity of the discourse is shat all upon.  This is social metaphysics in a most ugly manifestation; what receives readership and attention is what is popular, not necessarily (and usually not) what is right.  There is one word eminently applicable to this phenomenon: evil, i.e., opposed to the requirements of successful human living.

Social media sites are crucial to the future flowering of culture and society, via the propagation of memes that survive or perish in the marketplace of ideas.  Reddit is today's leading example of such a social medium, in terms of subscribership and exposure.  Given the cultural primacy of philosophy, /r/philosophy becomes a particularly crucial focal point (at least for the moment...) in this context.  Its number of subscribers recently surpassed the 100,000 mark - almost surely far exceeding any other philosophy forums on the internet.  Users who go to /r/philosophy seeking wisdom have a reasonable presumption that what they are exposed to reflects the integrity of philosophical discourse.  If it fails to reflect this, then this constitutes an unnecessary, tragic and unconscionable stunting and delaying of intellectual - and therefore cultural - progress.

As it happens - and probably not all that coincidentally - Ayn Rand and Objectivism are unpopular on reddit.  The usership there is well-known to be left-leaning.  Left-leaningness isn't a particularly troubling thing in itself; as long as people have a means of expressing their ideas on a level field of play, the better ideas have at least a chance to win out.  What destroys reddit as a propagator of true and rational intellectual memes is a leftward bias - a widely-enacted cognitive vice that has the effect of creating an atmosphere of epistemic closure.  For those of you who make fun of today's Right for its epistemic-closure tendencies, I submit that you haven't seen nothin' yet until you see the left-biased vileness that prevails on reddit's social-metaphysical/mob-rule discussion platform.  For those of you who think that closed-mindedness, willful ignorance and similar cognitive vices are exclusive or near-exclusive provinces of the Right, the Left is at least as capable of such.  What's so galling about this is the hypocrisy of it, seeing as how those on the Left tend to pride themselves so much on being fair and open-minded.  And it even goes all the way to the highest levels - university philosophy departments, academic "philosophy" blogs, etc. - and it is, at root, why so many people out in the real world don't take the academy seriously.

(I'll make this observation: left-liberals seem to be quite a bit better at being intellectually conscientious.  It is leftists - the kind of people who are attracted first and foremost to Marxism, and who in scary unison hysterically and ignorantly hate capitalism - that seem to behave in the scummiest ways and encourage similar behavior among their fellow leftists.  Not truth-seeking but politics seems to be a primary motivator of their M.O.  A further observation: these leftist scum seem to find a particular affinity with post-modernism and its countless post- offshoots.  Not even this stuff is taken seriously in the vast majority of university philosophy departments, and yet it does find its way into other departments of the Humanities, where leftist scum run rampant and ignorantly hate capitalism as if out of instinct.  Fuck 'em!  They richly deserve to be the first departments to have their funding cut in university-downsizing processes.)

Back to Rand and Objectivism, and their unpopularity on reddit.  The arbitrary, anonymous-cowardly downvoting of pro-Rand comments and threads on /r/philosophy is bad enough, before we even get to the issue of their not even understanding Objectivism.  People who understand Objectivism tend to overlap quite well with those who are familiar with Peikoff's lecture courses.  This doesn't register with the anonymous cowardly downvoters; what seems of central importance for these entities is that Rand advocated capitalism - and, as such, all manner of scummy behavior and injustice is permissible in their minds in order to stifle serious and honest debate about her ideas.  This phenomenon is quite wholly independent of who it is that advances pro-Rand arguments there, how nicely they advance them, how popular or unpopular they are, or how well-reasoned their arguments are.  No; this pathology goes deeper than that, and it's all-pervasive on reddit: the behavior is just as bad if not worse on /r/politics.  But any of this shit in /r/philosophy is already well beyond the pale by definition for reasons I gave above, which makes it oodles more pathological in a philosophy forum than anywhere else.  These people are in the wrong or in a state of ignorance and yet no effective mechanism exists for those who actually understand Objectivism to correct them with as much exposure to readers/subscribers as the Rand-hating comments have.  I mean, this situation - just like the unconscionable and indefensible Drug War - is fucking ridiculous.

A great part of reddit's usership is young people, many of them college-age.  Many of them come onto reddit thinking that social-metaphysical mob-rule is acceptable if not the norm.  How do so many young people come to absorb and adopt such a mentality?  Moreover, how do college-age people come to accept it?  Shouldn't higher standards of behavior be inculcated in them, if not from an early age, then at least by the time they are in college?  Are their professors - most importantly, the philosophy professors - doing much if anything to encourage cognitive virtue and discourage cognitive vice, so that they can understand this social-metaphysical epistemic chaos and insanity for what it is?  And why does Ayn Rand, in particular, elicit the worst of such pathologies?

I think these questions pretty much answer themselves at this point, no?  Individualism - i.e., intellectual, moral, and political independence - is all but ignored in the academic mainstream, after all.

What the various parties involved here need to do, as expeditiously as possible, is to get their fucking act together.  If they so much as neglect to dialogue with leading adherents of unpopular viewpoints, their long-term credibility is shot.  They will be seen as obstacles to, and not advocates of, a cultural renaissance in which all ideas are debated out in the open on a level field of play.  Aristotle wouldn't accept anything less.

I'd like to make a constructive recommendation here, one that would alleviate some of this pathology, and that is for reddit to adopt a format, for its intellectually-most-important subreddits, similar to that of Usenet.  Back in the days of Usenet, evasion and cowardice just did not and could not thrive, given the ways in which the format encouraged openness and accountability.  This is not to say that Usenet did not have its downsides, but they were quite manageable and tolerable in comparison to anonymous social-metaphysical cowards destroying the integrity of discourse by burying comments and threads they didn't like.  In my experience, the Usenet group humanities.philosophy.objectivism embodied pretty much what internet discourse could and should be (at least given certain unfortunate imperfections at the time in the way people conducted themselves).  Since that time (the 1990s), the format of internet discourse has arguably devolved, fracturing into scattered web-based forums and eventuating in such realms of social "discourse" as Twitter and the dead-end format (for integral intellectual discourse, that is) that is currently reddit's.  On h.p.o., a moderator had the job of doing very light patrolling, primarily for spam; otherwise, people could say whatever the hell they wanted with the only repercussion being that they might end up in someone else's killfile-filter.  (Is there any fucking reason such a filter-mechanism couldn't be made available to reddit users, in place of an unaccountable, social-metaphysical upvote/downvote feature?)  I would not be surprised if, in its heyday - the late '90s, roughly - h.p.o. was home to the highest-caliber discussion on Usenet.  That shit just kinda naturally happens when perfectivist philosophy is the subject of the forum, and especially when the forum participants understand said philosophy (as opposed to parroting what malicious third-rate hit-piece writers on scummy leftist websites assert about Rand and her ideas, and getting upvoted into greater reader-visibility for doing so).

Whatever it is, /r/philosophy is not philosophy in a truly integral sense of that term, just as being selectively reality-oriented does not make a person integrally virtuous in character.  It is a bastardization of philosophy, a form of false advertising.  It is manifestly and (because readily avoidable) unconscionably pathological.  Evasion of this problem by the relevant actors can and will (of course!) only exacerbate the problem.

As I'm not here to do your thinking for you, I'll leave it to you, reader, to tie all these points together and act accordingly.  I've got other shit to do, after all.  (103 days and counting down till the shit hits the fan, or intellectual and cultural renaissance is underway....)

Establishment Philosophy vs. individualism

An exercise in the spiral:

If one googles 'individualism philosophy' one finds the same state of things, essentially, as what I pointed out nearly two years ago - a near-complete lack of interest among academic moral and political philosophers in individualism (and especially among the most "elite" of them - e.g., Oxford/NYU/Harvard's Derek Parfit, who also - mind-bogglingly - neglects Aristotle, eudaimonia, and virtue-ethics in his "state of the art," Oxford-published "magnus opus" on ethics).  This is a widespread corruption in the Intellectual Establishment, constituting an intellectual and moral betrayal of the American people and of the nation's founding ideals.  My observations remain as spot-on accurate now as they did then; spiral progression in the two years since has only further enhanced and solidified these findings.

I think the American people would like to know why this near-complete neglect of individualism is taking place in the Academic Establishment, wouldn't they?

There is an ominous parallel here to a culture- and polity-wide corruption in the Establishment - not in the universities (in this particular case) but in media and in government - when it comes to Noam Chomsky's near-complete absence from political discourse and exposure in (American) mass-media venues (outside of the internet, that is).

What I observe here are cultures of evasion, in which truth and justice are unpopular and inconvenient with regard to the status quo.

I don't think the Framers would stand for this status quo for one fucking second.

Do you?

As Walter Sobchak might very well have said, there's no reason - there's no FUCKing reason - for the national situation to be this way, or to stay this way.  One need only look at the complete failure of intellectual, moral, and political leadership in our nation's Legislative and Executive branches at doing the obviously-right fucking thing on cannabis legalization, to know our polity is a broken one.  I know it, you know it, and the American People (should damn well) know it.  Here we have overwhelming evidence and reasons for why cannabis should be legalized yesterday; we have a majority of the People showing support for its legalization according to polls; all logic, right, truth, and justice point in that direction; the de facto racist nature of the War on Drugs should sting at the conscience of everyone; the prison-industrial complex built up around this vicious War should likewise sting at everyone's consciousness; and, yet, no action from our national leaders.  The Democrat Establishment is no less corrupt in its ongoing support of this President despite the obviously-racist effects of the Drug Policies which he enforces (or does he?) and - worse - remains dubiously silent about in the face of all the evidence.

All this, no thanks to the Intellectual Class, and its culture of evasion and stagnation.  As the Intellectuals go, so goes the country - just as Rand said.

Do these Intellectuals even begin to wonder why even the leading one of their own, MIT's Prof. Chomsky, is nearly absent from America's public discourse?

It's their own fault, after all, having made philosophy almost totally irrelevant to ordinary citizens.

It so happens that Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom would be of more interest in meaning-of-life terms to the ordinary people, than would Quine's "Two Dogmas" article.  That's just a fact.  While that should (of course) not be construed to denigrate what Quine et al have been doing, it is a severe problem when meaning-of-life issues are neglected by the Philosophical Establishment in the process.  (The Existentialists and Rand were addressing fundamental meaning-of-life questions well over half a century ago, at a time that Academic Philosophy was going out of its way to be as irrelevant as ever to the People and is only now catching up in the meaning-of-life area - a task which can't even be addressed all that well as long as Rand and individualism remain largely neglected.  That's just a fact.)

Perhaps it's high (ahem) time that someone, somewhere, founded an alternate Academy, as individual philosophers did way back in the day - only perhaps the term "academy" should be dropped altogether given the disrepute that has been brought upon that term by institutional insiders, and replaced with something along the lines of "lyceum".  Just a hunch.

Am I wrong?

(Why does taking on an entire Philosophical Establishment feel like shooting fish in a barrel?  Is it supposed to feel that way?  Is that how Rand - who was decades ahead of her time in the virtue-ethics department - felt, too?  Is that why so many in the Establishment hate Rand?  A frightfully high number of these entities don't seem to give a shit what Gotthelf and the Ayn Rand Society have to say about her, either.  These aren't worthy fucking adversaries.  [A notable exception is one John M. Cooper of Princeton, a preeminent scholar of ancient philosophy and chair of a recent Ayn Rand Society program, "Ayn Rand as Aristotelian" (2005).  Perhaps the ancients had more noble ideas about how to carry out philosophical discourse and make it relevant to people's lives?])

P.S. Aw, fuck it; spiraling back to this subject, I'll go ahead and perfectively fortify my observations as follows: Prof. Leiter is a vicious piece of shit.  That motherfucker had better retract and apologize for his appalling treatement of Rand and Rand-scholars, or else.  (See item #9 here.)  One might think a simple concern about one's long-term intellectual and moral credibility would lead to such a retraction and apology, irrespective of my threat to go on strike beginning 4/20, because his (and his vile little cronies') credibility will be ruined long-term - whatever happens - if they don't.  Whatever his academic accomplishment, the man is a disgrace.  Maybe some of his colleagues could light a fire under his rotund posterior and improve their own reputations in the process.  The American People are not going to take kindly to this unbelievable shit once they find out what their most vocal intellectuals have been saying and doing these past years and decades to stonewall progress.  Once again: as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation.  (A recent Leiter entry has him whining about capitalism, yet again, whereas the solution to our nation's economic and existential problems lies in an Aristotelian eudaimonist intellectual perfection.  Why the fuck doesn't he at least advocate that?  [Of course, that would mean getting cornered like a rat for his treatment of Rand, all the same.  Maybe that's why?]  He complains all the goddamn time about America's intellectual and cultural dysfunction, but then shits all over Rand and capitalism without providing any real alternative answers.  Fuck 'em!)

P.P.S. reddit's /r/philosophy and I have a date Wednesday (tomorrow), baby!  Woo!!!