The Economic Left: Irrational Bigots?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here it is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A pox on both of their houses.

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

Republican Roulette

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

The Cultural-Conservative Right: Irrational Bigots?

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a detailed analysis, Lithwick sums it up thus:

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

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

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

Well?

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

The GOP Field (and Perry vs. Willingham)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog Resumption?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Glimpse into the Singularity?

I may have had a glimpse roughly a month or less ago. It was some far out stuff ("man"). I don't really know who else might have had a glimpse, but I think it might involve a lot of people sitting around and getting high on what would by that point be perfectly legal drugs, and laughing their asses off to the tunes and lyrics on the Best of Bond . . . James Bond 007 soundtrack compilation. In such a scenario, people would be looking at each other shit-faced and asking such questions as, "So this is process panentheism?" and laughing their asses off some more. A nearly universal bond of mutual trust might well have been established by this point, so paranoia and other "mindfuck" experiences on these unnamed by-then-legal drugs would not be an issue, or presumably wouldn't be. (I'm assuming some high-tech reverse-engineering of these drugs might have happened at this point such that that paranoia would be, ahem, weeded out of the whole consumption-and-effects process.) Also, the whole "keep plenty of good food and water handy" issue would be addressed one way or the other.

In other words, the questions have to be asked: would people in the Singularity look a lot like this, and do we all die laughing? Or, perhaps, do we all get a little bit "crazy" and begin dancing/raving to a certain early 1990s album with heavy Singularity-like themes?

Always remember: The dialectic embraces everything good.

Seriously.

[Currently listening/integrating: J.S. Bach, concertos, such as the one featured here. Dialectics, man.]

Problem and Solution #1: Understanding Aristotelianism

I don't claim to be a scholar of Aristotle; the extent of my Aristotle studies culminated in a graduate-level course on ancient philosophy in which I looked fairly indepth at his views on the nature of the soul. It told me a lot, specifically about his method of approach to philosophical questions.

If there's one thing that I find most dismaying among "students of philosophy" I encounter is the stunning level of inability to Get It about Aristotle. I can only attribute this to a remarkable failure of philosophy professors to Get It about Aristotle - for where else would these students learn such a remarkable failure (and have such a failure go uncorrected)?

I would say that failure to understand the essence of Aristotle or Aristotelianism could be chalked up to "inability to think in essentials," but perhaps the ability to think in essentials is the #1 core solution to all philosophical (and all human) problems, so going around and shouting from the rooftops, "Think in essentials, damn you!", while correctly stating the essence of, and solution to, the core human problem, it wouldn't help much. As I stated in my previous posting, thinking in essentials is not for amateurs and requires loads of practice or habituation.

(This is not to say that there aren't self-made amateurs - people, such as many a professor of "philosophy," who are led to the water of thinking in essentials and failed to integrate/drink. Some such professors go on to emulate certain non-Aristotelian "giants" of the field, but under the false impression that their non-Aristotelian heroes are where it's at philosophically. It comes as no surprise, then, that their students/victims would likewise fail to integrate.)

So when it comes to Aristotle, what is the thing that advanced student and amateur alike need to know more than anything else? If one were to examine his treatment of the subject of the soul in De Anima in light of the treatment of that subject in the history of philosophy (I'm looking right at Cartesian Dualism and all the subsequent confusions Descartes's approach spawned in modern analytic philosophy), what could one say most in praise of Aristotle?

The non-essentials "thinker," when hearing the name "Aristotle," will tend to hone right in on Aristotle's views concerning 55 unmoved movers, or his views on slavery and women, or his outmoded views on teleology, or his quasi-Platonic views on universals (assuming that's even a correct interpretation), or other such things that make Aristotle's views unacceptable to modern minds. It's like a clockwork pathology among students of "philosophy" to do this with Aristotle. If asked to distill the essence of Aristotle as a philosopher, however, I don't think they could do it in a hundred years. (Hell, we've had over 700 years since Aquinas reintroduced Aristotle to the Western intellectual tradition, and the point has been missed time and time again ever since (except by a few hearty philosopher such as Ayn Rand). It should make a perceptive student of philosophy ask why Aristotle's reputation has held up so well as it has.

Here's the reason it's held up so well: Aristotle was the first known Western philosopher to have really perfected the art of thinking. Just as Miss Rand observed about Aristotle, it makes his errors irrelevant by comparison. His errors are quite inessential to understanding him as a philosopher. This is actually true for any other philosopher, when you apply the question of essentials to this or that thinker. And the essential here is: The philosopher's method of approach to this or that subject matter.

Aristotle's method of approach is what most impressed such perceptive thinkers as Aquinas, Hegel, and Rand. He is the father of dialectic as we now know it: the art of systematic integration, or context-keeping, or hierarchy-respecting. He was the first to really formalize the principles of right reasoning into a system, rightly-understood axioms and all.

(Contrary to the thinking of various amateurs, axioms are not "starting points" from which things get deduced. This is one respect in which too many students of "philosophy" misunderstand Rand/Objectivism on the nature of axioms. Axioms are, instead, distinguished by their being irreducible to anything further and yet which defeat their opponents in any attempt to deny them. They are not, however, "starting points." If anything can be called "starting points" in human knowledge, it's the evidence of the senses and the use of logic as applied to that evidence. In that regard, Aristotle was a perfector of dialectic, even if he did reach some conclusions which later proved faulty. And as a later perfector of dialectic, Ayn Rand, pointed out, axioms are "implicit" within every perception and thought from an early age, but many people don't even come to explicitly identify them later on. But they are contained within every act of thought, which is, as I understand it, what she meant by "implicit.")

Now, why is it that Aristotle (and Ayn Rand) have come to be so sorely misunderstood in terms of their essentials? I think it is because thinking in essentials is part of what it means to perfect the art of dialectic - in other words, you cannot perfect the art of dialectic unless you first learn to think in essentials. (I haven't thought thoroughly through whether thinking in essentials is perfecting the art of dialectic - but I think it is a necessary precondition for sure.) This is to say that, in the history of philosophy, perfecting the art of thinking in essentials has been a very rare phenomenon - and until it becomes less rare, the more the vicious circle of not understanding philosophers in terms of essentials would continue.

So, applying the approach of thinking in essentials to Aristotle, we get the following: Aristotle is best understood in virtue of his having perfected the art of dialectic, i.e., in virtue of his approach to subject matter, irrespective of the concrete conclusions he reached. He was, in other words, doing the best that he could with all the evidence at his avail. After all, isn't this what best makes sense of how important a philosopher is or should be? Had it been all about the 55 unmoved movers and shit, we'd never have gotten anywhere when it comes to the man. And rather than - like Descartes - dropping the context of what makes mind or the soul possible in connection with the body, he integrates one crucial real-world fact with his philosophizing: we don't actually observe any minds apart from physical bodies. (So "conceiving" of mind as "distinct from" body can only foster confusions. For Aristotle, mind is the form of a natural body organized a certain way. If Descartes's rationlistic-dualistic approach to the subject is what sets the tone for modern philosophizing, modern philosophizing is royally screwed. It's also no surprise in this context that Aristotle was all but set aside as Catholic dogma as modern philosophy proceeded forward. In this context, who is the real "king" of modern philosophy: Hume, or Kant? Are these two figures just different sides of the same parlor-game coin?)

Now, can I give some more precise content to what it actually means to think in terms of essentials? That might be the whole Perfectivism project right there. I could only give a barest summary at this point. To think in essentials is to grasp what is most significant about some subject matter, to retain that, and to move on to bigger and better subject matter keeping the previous essentialized context retained in mind for future retrieval. This is how I think (though I need to think it through further to be definitively sure) I managed to grasp the essence of Aristotle as philosopher via his highly-useful approach to thinking about the nature of the soul (as contrasted to Descartes's confusion-filled rationalistic approach). I learned that applying the same approach to any and all other subject matter in philosophy, a shit-ton of confusions and dead-ends could be avoided, and all at minimal cost. The "minimal cost" part here concerns the principle of unit-economy identified by Miss Rand: essentializing is a process of condensation, of reducing a vast body of observations to a small but workable mental unit. By essentializing, one reduces these observations to the mental equivalent of a file folder, which may contain and therefore be broken down into sub-folders, or which may be a sub-folder that can be related or integrated with larger containing folders, and so forth. To do all this mentally requires being able to organize one's mental contents effectively so as to respect the unit-economizing nature of human cognition. (This all seems to elementary, and yet why does the point get so missed so badly? Why do amateurs, to this day, continue to hate on Rand for inessential, much less totally false, stuff?) Then there is that point - well-understood to advanced students of Objectivism - that to capture what is essential about some thing is to capture what is of fundamental importance about it - that which best explains the greatest number of observations or conclusions about it.

This is not to say that the principle of fundamentality or thinking in essentials (all of this is there in the Lexicon, by the way, for any students who are serious enough to go through and integrate its contents - I tire of linking to specific entries every time only for the context to get dropped by amateurs the next go-around) can be misapplied or misused. To take Immanuel Kant, for instance, it would be mistaken, as Rand did, to identify Kant in terms of his (real or alleged) conclusions, when it is his method of approach that is more fundamental. Kant's method was one of a "dialectic" of sorts, a way of trying to integrate all of the previous philosophy he had at his avail. (There didn't seem to be any Aristotle involved in this to a meaningful extent, and therein lies the problem.) In this regard, Hegel had a "better" (i.e., more Aristotle-informed) "fix" than what Kant provided, though Kant and Hegel still shared a basic methodological problem: rationalism. In other words, they applied the art of dialectic within a fundamentally broken context. How can the malady of rationalism best be described to the amateurs as well as advanced students out there? Well, perhaps like this: Rationalistic thinking processes are the equivalent to treating philosophy like a parlor game. I'll leave it at that for now; this entry has gone on long enough as it is. Exercise for a future time: how does thinking in essentials (or not doing so) integrate with rationalism-as-parlor-game?

Notes On Essentializing

[Yesterday's blog entry was apparently wiped out due to Google Blogger technical issues, but the core essence of it is still contained here. Ain't essentializing fun? :-) (Another term for essentializing is "unit-economy," but that's probably casting more pearls before so many swine.)]

One thing I've come to discover, on a repeat listen to Peikoff's Art of Thinking course, and as I set Ayn Rand's essay "The Objectivist Ethics" to outline form (based more or less on the outline-examples provided in the Appendix to The Art of Nonfiction), is that essentializing is NOT for amateurs - repeat, NOT FOR AMATEURS. Essentializing an essay such as "The Objectivist Ethics" in a proper fashion takes years of context-establishing and understanding, including at least several reads through of that essay as well as other literature; it's damn near impossible to expect an appropriate outline-summary from an amateur to Objectivism.

(Anyway, yes, I was able to boil Miss Rand's 30-ish page essay down to a useful 12-point essentialization. Point number 9, concerning the relation between life and happiness, is the most extensive, going up to several lines of summary. Many of the other points were relatively short. I see little point in posting the outline here, however. It's primarily for personal use and edification. It is available on request to students of Objectivism whom I know, though. The fucking amateurs - and I think they know who they are - can wither on the vine at this juncture for all I care; those unfortunate souls cannot or will not think in the true sense.)

On a totally related note - but not something amateurs could possibly grasp right away, either on its own, or in conjunction with the foregoing - is the following observation for the day: The dialectic did flourish in the 1960s - but (aside from the work done by Rand and at the NBI) not in philosophy. Just as today, the Philosophy Profession had defaulted on carrying the dialectical torch. But dialectic did have an outlet then - in popular culture.

Peikoff's The Art of Thinking, Lecture Six

My mind can sometimes wander when listening to something, especially in this distracting multimedia age, so perhaps I didn't focus just quite enough during this particular lecture (see blog entry title), which is on the subject of certainty. Peikoff does realize that his live audience for this lecture might be varying states of intellectual preparedness as well as attentiveness for each particular lecture, depending on their individual contexts. For some, the content might be very redundant; I think it was in my case, because I heard a lot of stating and restating of the obvious. Referring to an earlier lecture (No. 3, on thinking in essentials) from this course, I think the essence of this lecture can be boiled down to the following: Certainty does not require omniscience. So, can I be certain that this is what the lecture could be boiled down to, essentially? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

(One thing I am certain of: You can't refute perfectivism. ;-) )

Question for the Day

Does "Academic Freedom" mean the same thing to pathologically-biased left-wing parasites in the Humanities as it does to ordinary Americans?

I smell a stink of blatant hypocrisy here among leftist scum who whine about their "academic freedom" supposedly being under attack. Sure, in a better (i.e., more perfectivist) world, universities would have plenty-adequate policies concerning genuine academic freedom in the light of political differences. But the blatant hypocrisy involved here is what happens to all too many non-left-wingers in the academic Humanities - as anyone paying close attention knows happens. One need only look at the political makeup of the leading departments listed in the Leiter Report to figure out that one; the evidence of political bias and hypocrisy there is quite compelling - especially when you consider this piece of manifest intellectual dishonesty going unchallenged by those in the profession, and all under the guise of "academic freedom." Justice would dictate that "academic freedom" doesn't protect blatant, accountability-free dishonesty.

So, what exactly does the leftist-scum version of "academic freedom" ultimately amount to, anyway?

[ADDENDUM: As I have pointed out elsewhere: "Given the overwhelmingly compelling case for capitalism presented in the works of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, David Friedman, James Buchanan, George Reisman, John Hospers, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Loren Lomasky, David Schmidtz, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, not to mention the overwhelming, real-world, not-merely-theoretical, demonstrated superiority of capitalism in practice, the opposition to capitalism in the Intellectual Class is nothing short of pathological - quite frighteningly so, in fact. It's hard to expect the Intellectual Class to take Rand seriously when it hardly takes anything pro-capitalism seriously, which in turn makes it exceedingly difficult to take the Intellectual Class seriously." Hell, Rand and Mises alone are pretty much enough to make the slam-dunk case for capitalism; the fifteen or so other names are like adding a punctuation mark to the blatantly obvious. So, again, what does this say about the scummy Leiters of the world?]

Blissing Out

The latest in the soundscape-dialectic.

[ADDENDUM: Thought for the day: Dialectic must embrace everything (or, perhaps more precisely, it must embrace everything essential). This means not just the history of philosophy, which does indeed have a primacy of its own, but also the artistic world (music, films, etc.), and the business/economic world, and the scientific world, and the religious or spiritual world, and the sports world, and ... . Now, is there any other philosopher on today's scene saying (much less doing) that? (Currently listening: Miles Davis, "Sanctuary.")]

Slam-Dunk of the Day

I did a little browsing of Slavoj Zizek's recent release, Living in the End Times, the other day, and certain no-gloves-wearing thoughts regarding this Euro-fashionable, no-Mises-referencing, "post-capitalist" thinker came to mind. Then I found out that the essence of my views concerning this "thinker" had already been summarized quite well (though in nicer and more forgiving terms) here, saving yours truly the time and trouble of explaining my assessment.

(The sad part of the sordid story of this "thinker" is that he's apparently beloved among a certain left-oriented segment of ignorant college punks here and abroad, who most likely do not major in economics. [Sadder still, in connection with this observation, is that if you're not majoring in economics or a hard science in today's university setting, you're probably not getting your money's worth. As hard evidence of this, observe the effects of globalization on the employability of today's youts. Surely Zizek, without citing a single economist, could "explain" this trend in his unusually-irritating style. It probably has something to do with the likes of Ayn Rand being A and non-A at the same time and same respect, or some such complete and utter horseshit.])

Tearing the Academy a New Asshole: A Preview

I've actually touched on this issue already:

The Nature of the "Educators"

The integrating strand between the "educators'" evasions described therein and what the Leiters of the world are up to is almost too obvious to require further explanation.

There is a difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An evasion is the wedge-in-the-door to immorality. (There is actually an interesting psychological question here: how does one determine whether one is in fact on a course of evasion? I think the very raising of that question in a person's own mind is the chief saving grace, because it means the mind is calling itself to attention and signaling a course of caution.) At some point, the "educators" (or anyone else for that matter) lose the benefit of the doubt, when they demonstrate in action a vicious, base, ignoble, or cowardly tendency without a course correction.

Errors of knowledge are quite commonplace - much moreso throughout history - than breaches of morality. For there to be a breach of morality takes quite a bit. Intellectual dishonesty is a relatively rare - but real - phenomenon. And that's where such moral terms as "praise" or "blame" come in. If we observe some disastrous and deadly human-caused event in history, we can make objective, fact-based assessments as to whether the disaster was a result of lack of knowledge, or of evasion. (Socrates apparently held that it is lack of knowledge that leads to vice. But I think that is mistaken; lack of knowledge is either a product of a lack of information having been presented - or it is due to a willful refusal to face information that has been presented. In other words, a lack of knowledge can arise out of a freely-chosen decision.)

To apply this to the question of the Academy as it is today:

To wax Randian for a bit, if you want to gauge the health of a country, look at the state of its universities' philosophy departments. (If it doesn't have universities, much less philosophy departments, that signifies a more primitive state than what we have in America.) At present, Ayn Rand is what might be termed "dialectically alienated" from the Academy to a very large extent. There is the Ayn Rand Society, but it is at present still a small organization without a lot of what those in the Academy would regard as "big names." So to a large extent, Rand's ideas just aren't being talked about much in the academy - despite her affinity methodologically and substantively with Aristotle, and despite the profound human need for integration. A lot of this has to do with a conscious or unconscious bias against pro-capitalist ideas, something Nozick identified (though didn't quite fully diagnose) a few years back.

The Academy has many good people in it, doing quality work. It is just about the only place philosophers - lovers of wisdom - can make a living doing what they love doing. They are entrusted with a serious responsibility - of educating those of college age who will then go out and make of the world what they will. If they fail in some way at this responsibility, the real-world results are quite inevitable. We are seeing those results in all the crises we observe today. A lot of the philosophers lament this fact, and are at a loss for explanations or solutions.

The solution, of course, would be a better dialogue between advocates of Ayn Rand's ideas and the Academy as a whole. Ayn Rand's importance lies in the fact that her philosophy is so representative of America's founding ideals, and in the fact that her writings have influenced and inspired millions of Americans. It would be a default on the responsibilities of the philosophers were there to be a failure of communication between the Academy and the ideals upon which this country was built. But that is exactly what has been happening.

What turns this problem - this error of knowledge, if you will - into a breach of morality, is when leading figures in the Profession engage in the kind of smear tactics that Prof. Leiter engages in - and when the others in the profession sit by in silence. That sort of default is a moral one. And that is when we can begin assigning praise or blame - be it at an individual or (to some degree or other) an institutional level - for the state that both the philosophy profession and America at large are in currently.

There's really no excusing the sort of thing Leiter does when it comes to Rand and advocates of capitalism - and there's no excusing the behavior of academic philosophers who sit by and utter not a word of protest. It is the height of anti-philosophy to smear Rand the way way Leiter does. Rand herself did commit errors of knowledge - quite notably in her assessment of Kant the man, to name a most notorious instance. But Leiter's behavior is downright dishonest, and readers of his blog sanction that dishonesty with their silent complicity.

(More to come.)

Thoughts for the Day

(1) On the playlist:
Bernstein Conducts Sibelius
Camille Saint-Saens, Carnival of the Animals
Debussy, La Mer, etc.
Satie, Popular Piano Works (Ciccolini)
Holst, The Planets (Previn/RPO)
Howard Hanson, Symphony No. 4, etc. (Schwartz/SSO)

(2) On the short, short reading list: Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"

(3) Legalize it already. This is America, goddammit. The Framers wouldn't stand for one effing minute the present insanity called the "Drug War." I know it, you know it, and, deep down, the American people know it.

(4) In the docket: At long last, the skewering the present insanity called the "philosophy" profession really deserves. The gloves are coming off. Remember: this is America, goddammit.

Song (and Color) for the Day

So, what color do you like?

(Shout-out to some real friends.)

[An added bonus.]

[Another bonus.]

Sunday Worship, 5/1/2011

A philosopher who stood head and shoulders above the rest:

Quote of the Day

"If [Andrei Tarkovsky's] Sculpting in Time could be distilled to a single message, it would be this: Content and conscience must come before technique—for any artist in any art form."
(Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Weekend Update

I'll start with one bit of good news: I feel quite rested, and that's a beautiful thing.

A dream I had before waking: I don't know all the details, but the home team had a something-and-goal at the 1-yard line. I don't think I was quarterback. I'm pretty sure I was running back. The QB was maybe a Cam Newton type, but I just don't know that for sure. Anyway, QB hands off to yours truly, and a sneak the ball in for a TOUCHDOWNNNN!!!!! I risk thousands of pounds of bodies piling up on me as I cross the goal line, but our team's training prepared us well for all that. I have no idea what stage of the game this was, but it meant great progress for the home team. I have little expertise when it comes to the psychology of dream states, but I hear that they can involve re-creations or integrations of past experiences, as well as a sort of mental prep for future scenarios. If that's the case, then I rather liked this particular dream sequence.

Here's hoping that all of us have a relaxing and enjoyable weekend! :-)

Update on the Perfectivism Saga

I originally planned my project as a book looking at the similarities between Ayn Rand and David L. Norton's ethical individualisms or eudaemonisms. The whole project has led to something way more than I had ever expected, of which a book would only be a part. Some readers of this blog may already know that I have roughly 20,000 words or 50ish pages' worth of manuscript, all in first rough draft form, composed in December of last year. It covers approximately 3 chapters' worth of material; the first chapter, which at the time I titled "Perfectionism," is a basic introduction to the idea I'm aiming at. Depending on the vibe I get I may post the first chapter here as preview for the public as well as prospective agents or publishers. But I just haven't figured that part out yet.

The good thing is that things have been getting back to a more even keel than they were a few days ago, but a number of things have also been keeping me on edge. So if there doesn't look like there's much activity going on in this blog, that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of progress going on. One pleasing aspect to all this is just how efficiently things have been moving along. "It's taken a hell of a lot of doing to get here, but it's been worth it." (Don't know who might have said that before and in what forms.) As time, interest, and what-have-you permit, I may take part in philosophy discussion over on reddit, but I really have quite a lot on my plate right now. It's all about prioritizing at this point. Shout-outs to all my for-real friends and others enjoying the ride. This really has been a most mind-blowing experience for me. :-)

[ADDENDUM: Just in the past few days, I've been adding names to the "perfectivism honor roll" along with Rand, Mises, et al, and the number of names keeps on expanding at a brisk pace. I'm having a tough time even sorting out who belongs and who doesn't at this point. Ain't integration fun?]

[ADDENDUM #2: Now that it isn't any secret at this point who Yours Truly is, I've re-opened my personal webpage for public viewing, which you should be able to, uh, Google up. It's already rather out-of-date on some things, so don't take it as state-of-the-art in the saga.]

Quote of the Day

"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain... The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love."
--Benjamin Britten

(I don't share that view, but I think I see where he's coming from.)

Playlist for the Day

Sibelius Symphonies 4 and 5 (Karajan/BPO/DG)
Nielsen Symphony No. 3 (Blomstedt/SFO/Decca)
Franz Schmidt, Symphony No. 4 (Welser-Most/LPO/EMI)
Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 (Haitink/RCO/Decca)

Scheduled for tomorrow:

Bruckner Symphony No. 9 (Walter/CSO/RCA)
Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 (Karajan/BPO/DG)
Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 (Karajan/BPO/DG)