Ayn Rand is one of the most influential political and social thinkers and writers, at least among the elite circles of political and economic power in the US, of the whole twentienth century. Yet, at the same time, she is considered by most serious philosophers and social thinkers to be a relatively insignificant
writer of mediocre novels which consist of nothing more than a few characters and a slender thread of
narration behind which lies a thinly veiled repackaging of unoriginal and, mostly uninteresting, philosophical theses.
I was inspired to conduct a somewhat in-depth analysis of this mysterious person’s actual philosophy
and opinions by some interesting articles which I’ve run across recently regarding the influence she, apparently, exercised over Alan Greenspan in particular, and by an article which I had recalled reading in Skeptic magazine about the “cult-like” qualities of the following that she inspired and continues to inspire.
Since I don’t have access to any of Rand’s writings, I will have to base myself on second-hand sources and, especially, on the writing of Nathaniel Braden (formerely her number two) and the Objectivist Society web site to help me along the way. Since her ideas are really quite elementary and derivative, in any case, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.
To begin with then, in the article in Skeptic magazine which I referred to above, Michael Shermer explains (or tries to):
What is it about Rand’s philosophy that so emotionally stimulates proponents and opponents alike? Before Atlas Shrugged was published, at a sales conference at Random House a salesman asked Rand if she could summarize the essence of her philosophy, called Objectivism, while standing on one foot. She did so as follows (1962):
1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality
2. Epistemology: Reason
3. Ethics: Self-interest
4. Politics: CapitalismIn other words, nature exists independent of human thought. Reason is the only method of perceiving this reality. All humans seek personal happiness and exist for their own sake, and should not sacrifice themselves to or be sacrificed by others. And laissez-faire capitalism is the best political-economic system for the first three to flourish, where “men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit,” and where “no man may initiate the use of physical force against others” (p. 1).
These four theses, then , may be considered the heart of Ayn Rand’s philosophy as simplified and narrowed down by she, herself, in her own words. The first problem arises immediately to the notice of anyone with a minimal philosophical background: Reason is a tool or, better yet, a property that characterizes the human mind. It is not an “epistemology” (theory of knowledge). Shermer puts it even more confusingly by writing that, “reason is the only method of perceiving …reality. But, obviously, reason does not perceive anything. If it could, there would be no reason for the existence of the senses of sight, taste, touch,smell and hearing.
In order to get a clarification on what Ms. Rand could possibly mean here, I did some searching among the Objectivist Society’s web pages. Here’s the relevant passage:
The facts of reality are knowable through a process of objective reasoning that begins with sensory perception and follows the laws of logic.
In other words, we’re dealing with good old-fashioned classical empiricism in the tradition of Locke, Hume and Berkeley (to whom she regrettably and reprehensibly refuses to acknowledge her indebtness). This kind of empiricism has been in retreat for the last forty years or so after the cognitive science revolution and recent discoveries in genetic research and the neurosciences. Such discoveries have demonstrated that an enormous amount of human knowledge is innate, resulting from an extraordinarily long and complex process of natural selection that endowed the human brain with the ability to distinguish, categorize, count and, even, show sophisticated esthetic preferences for objects and events from the earliest years of life.
Indeed, so-called neurological Darwinism or selectionism maintains, with substantial evidence to support it, that the brain comes prepackaged, at birth, with every possible configuration of synaptic networks hard-wired into it and that the only role of external social and environmental influences is to provide a mechanism for selecting which networks will survive and which will die out during the process of development and learning. And the only alternative neurobiological theory of human brain development to neural Darwinism, “instructionist constructivism” also presupposes that, as Joseph LeDoux puts it, “sinaptic connections are epigenetically determined, that is to say, through the interaction of genes and environment (internal and external).”
“Nobody would seriously maintain, today, that the brain is a blank slate, a tabula rasa waiting to be written on by experience.” Experience should be thought of as just another mode, along with genetic evolutionary factors, of connecting synapses in the brain. And, that being the case, the supposed dichotomy between nature and nurture becomes meaningless because it is impossibe to determine where nature breaks off and nurture begins to take over.
So, it is clear that the kind of extreme empirism that Ayn Rand espoused and promoted is:
- absolutley unoriginal and bears ancient roots which reach as far back as Democritus and which she doesn’t even bother to acknowledge.
- very probably falsified by modern evidence of the sciences as well as arguments such as Chomsky’s poverty of stimulus justifications for the innateness of language universals.
Rand calls her ethical system a system based on self-interest. Here again she seems to be claiming credit for the discovery of ideas which sail back into the winds of time all the way to Epicurianism and the ancient Greek hedonists. In most philosophical discussions, however, the term self-interest is commonly replaced nowadays by egoism. There are two different categories into which all egoist theories are divided: psychological (or descriptive) egoism and ethical (normative) egoism. Rand seems to adhere to both and, often, confuses the two by failing to make the distinction betwen them clear.
The fundamental failing with psychological egoism has to do with the question of sacrifice. If men are only interested (consciously or unconsciously) in enhancing their own welfare in the long term, how is it possible to explain the common occurence of an individual, who cannot swim, throwing himself into a stream in order to save the life of a complete stranger. The principle of reciprocal altruism (long-term cooperation) is ruled out because the individual making the sacrifice knows with a high degree of probability that he or she is going to die and therefore cannot be looking forward to benefiting in any way by commiting the action. The egoist might respond that the individual is not certain of his death and that he acts in his own interest by sparing himeself the guilt that would inevitably have arisen later on if he hadn’t acted sacrificially. But, the concept of guilt itself presupposes that the sacrificer had non-self-interested moral motivations in mind to start out with.
If the egoist continues to argue that the sacrificer is acting in his own interest because he is doing what he wants or prefers to do, then all intentional human action can be defined as self-interested and psychologial egoism becomes a trivially true, unfalsifiable thesis. If it’s trivially true in this manner, then it bomes impossible to distinguish morally between the case of a soldier who throws himslef on a grenade to prevent harm to others and another soldier who throws someone else on a grenade in order to save himself, since they are both acting according to perceived self-interest and are therefore equally morally justified, according to Rand’s version of ethical egoism.
But Ms. Rand seems not exactly sure of just where she stands on ethical issues, since she sometimes justifies her ethical egoism by invoking the Kantian principle that “all human beings should be treated as ends and never as means.” As usual, she refused to acknwledge her indebtedness to Kant for this fundamental principle. As Kelley L. Ross writes:
While Rand’s apologists now want to say that she knew this was from Kant, I haven’t yet heard the citation where she said so. Indeed, Rand typically never credited anyone but Aristotle as a worthy precedessor to herself. And although she had many reservations even about Aristotle, and while she condemned the ideas of many historical philosophers by name, referencing other philosophers from whom she may have derived ideas as much as from Aristotle never became part of her methodology. Kant is never mentioned in her writings except with demonization and caricature. Critics of Rand regard her manner, at times, as approaching plagarism — it certainly often involved ingratitude, as with her lack of tribute to Isabel Paterson, from whom she may have derived much knowledge — both Nathaniel and Barbara Branden note that Rand actually didn’t do much reading in philosophy herself (though now Rand apologists tend to say either that this is a lie or that Rand had already done as much reading as was necessary).
Moreoever, it is not clear, to me, how she reconciles this principle with her ethical egoism. It may quite often, and does quite often, serve one’s interest to act as a means to the facilitation of some desirable objective that benefits others and also oneself. Take the case of a diplomat who tries to negotiate the end of hostilities between his own nation and another with which it is at war. Surely an end to hostilities which benefits his own nation also benefits himeself. Even if it doesn’t benefit the nation, he still benefits, personally, by being rewarded financially and socially for attempting to act as the means to a resolution of conflicts.
Which brings me to Rand’s philosophy of economics, such as it is. Rand’s actual ideas of free-market capitalism are based on a fundamental misundertanding of the doctrine of classical liberalism as originally formulated by Adam Smith, and restated by F.A. Hayek among others. Rand’s market actors are not the normal citizens with limited knowledge liable to selfish and irrational considerations who end up being disciplined by the rationalizing invisible hand of the market through voluntary exchange. Rand’s brand of capitalism is much more utopion and profoundly elitist. The system, in order to work, must involve hyper-rational demigods thoroughly steeped in Randian doctrines and teachings.
As she has her paradigmatic capitalist superhero John Galt put it in Atlas Shrugged:
Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it.
It follows, therefore, that those with the most knowledge are most likely to prosper in Rand’s ideal laissez-fair economic system. Those who are ignorant cannot even survive, much less go on to acheive financial success. Rand removes the rationality from the market, as in traditional neo-liberal theories, and places it instead in her mecchanical/maniacal robot-like financial Ubermenschen.
In her later years, Rand came to the realization that minimal laws are needed in order to allow the market to function without distortion and fraud. In other words, she came to the realization that the market is not, after all, an infallible mechanism for human salvation. From their to the realization that the market model is, in many cases (health care being the starkest example), completely inappropriate and counterproductive becasue it rewards the succesful treatment and amelioration of ills and discourages their prevention, would not have required all that great of a stretch of even her extremely closed mind.
Coming, finally, to Rand’s infallibilist epistomology, some excerpts from Michael Shermer’s article In Skeptic magazine are telling:
The cultic flaw in Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism is not in the use of reason, or in the emphasis on individuality, or in the belief that humans are self motivated, or in the conviction that capitalism is the ideal system. The fallacy in Objectivism is the belief that absolute knowledge [epistemological infallibilism]and final Truths are attainable through reason, and therefore there can be absolute right and wrong knowledge, and absolute moral and immoral thought and action. For Objectivists, once a principle has been discovered through reason to be True, that is the end of the discussion. If you disagree with the principle, then your reasoning is flawed. If your reasoning is flawed it can be corrected, but if it is not, you remain flawed and do not belong in the group. Excommunication is the final step for such unreformed heretics.
The doctrines of the Rand “Collective”, in other words, are permanently engraved in stone and unalterable, like the Ten Commandments. Once Rand has discovered a Truth, it is no longer subject to correction, modification or reevalaution, but obtains immediate nomological status as a law of nature which surpasses even the meager approximations of the physical sciences and mathematics.
Frightening stuff,indeed.
More from Shermer:
One of the closest to Rand was Nathaniel Branden, a young philosophy student who joined the Collective in the early days before Atlas Shrugged was published. In his autobiographical memoirs entitled Judgment Day (1989), Branden recalled: “There were implicit premises in our world to which everyone in our circle subscribed, and which we transmitted to our students at NBI.” Incredibly, and here is where the philosophical movement became a cult, they came to believe that (pp. 255-256):
* Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived.
* Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world.
* Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man’s life on earth.
* Once one is acquainted with Ayn Rand and/or her work, the measure of one’s virtue is intrinsically tied to the position one takes regarding her and/or it.
* No one can be a good Objectivist who does not admire what Ayn Rand admires and condemn what Ayn Rand condemns.
* No one can be a fully consistent individualist who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue.
* Since Ayn Rand has designated Nathaniel Branden as her “intellectual heir,” and has repeatedly proclaimed him to be an ideal exponent of her philosophy, he is to be accorded only marginally less reverence than Ayn Rand herself.
* But it is best not to say most of these things explicitly (excepting, perhaps, the first two items). One must always maintain that one arrives at one’s beliefs solely by reason.
How does all of this mesh with traditional definitions of the concept of “cult”? Well, here is one such definition:
a) Veneration of the Leader: Excessive glorification to the point of virtual sainthood or divinity.
b) Inerrancy of the Leader: Belief that he or she cannot be wrong.
c) Omniscience of the Leader: Acceptance of beliefs and pronouncements on virtually all subjects, from the philosophical to the trivial.
d) Persuasive Techniques: Methods used to recruit new followers and reinforce current beliefs.
e) Hidden Agendas: Potential recruits and the public are not given a full disclosure of the true nature of the group’s beliefs and plans.
f) Deceit: Recruits and followers are not told everything about the leader and the group’s inner circle, particularly flaws or potentially embarrassing events or circumstances.
g)Financial and/or Sexual Exploitation: Recruits and followers are persuaded to invest in the group, and the leader may develop sexual relations with one or more of the followers.
h)Absolute Truth: Belief that the leader and/or group has a method of discovering final knowledge on any number of subjects.
i) Absolute Morality: Belief that the leader and/or the group have developed a system of right and wrong thought and action applicable to members and nonmembers alike. Those who strictly follow the moral code may become and remain members, those who do not are dismissed or punished.
According to Shermer, Rand believed and practiced an absolutist morality in which:
Rand pronounced judgements on her followers of even the most trivial things. Rand had argued, for example, that musical taste could not be objectively defined, yet, as Barbara Branden observed, “if one of her young friends responded as she did to Rachmaninoff . . . she attached deep significance to their affinity.” By contrast, if a friend did not respond as she did to a certain piece or composer, Rand “left no doubt that she considered that person morally and psychologically reprehensible.” Branden recalled an evening when a friend of Rand’s remarked that he enjoyed the music of Richard Strauss. “When he left at the end of the evening, Ayn said, in a reaction becoming increasingly typical, ‘Now I understand why he and I can never be real soul mates. The distance in our sense of life is too great.’ Often, she did not wait until a friend had left to make such remarks” (p. 268).
Moreoever:
In what has become the most scandalous (and now oft-told) story in the brief history of the Objectivist movement, starting in 1953 and lasting until 1958 (and on and off for another decade after), Ayn Rand and her “intellectual heir” Nathaniel Branden, 25 years her junior, carried on a secret love affair known only to their respective spouses. The falling in love was not planned, but it was ultimately “reasonable” since the two of them were, de facto, the two greatest humans on the planet. “By the total logic of who we are–by the total logic of what love and sex mean–we had to love each other,” Rand told Barbara Branden and her own husband, Frank O’Connor.
Unbelievably, both Barbara and Frank accepted the affair, and agreed to allow Ayn and Nathaniel an afternoon and evening of sex and love once a week. “And so,” Barbara explained, “we all careened toward disaster.” The disaster finally came in 1968 when it became known to Rand that Branden had fallen in love with yet another woman, and had begun an affair with her. Even though the affair between Rand and Branden had long since dwindled, the master of the absolutist moral double-standard would not tolerate such a breach of ethical conduct. “Get that bastard down here!,” Rand screamed upon hearing the news, “or I’ll drag him here myself!” Branden, according to Barbara, slunk into Rand’s apartment to face the judgment day. “It’s finished, your whole act!” she told him. “I’ll tear down your facade as I built it up! I’ll denounce you publicly, I’ll destroy you as I created you! I don’t even care what it does to me. You won’t have the career I gave you, or the name, or the wealth, or the prestige. You’ll have nothing . . . .” The barrage continued for several minutes until she pronounced her final curse: “If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health–you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years!” (pp. 345-347).
Confusion reigned supreme in both the Collective and in the rank-and-file membership. Mail poured into the office, most of it supporting Rand (naturally, since they knew nothing of the first affair). Nathaniel received angry responses and even Barbara’s broker, an Objectivist, terminated her as his client. The ultimate extreme of such absolutist thinking was revealed several months later when, in the words of Barbara, “a half-demented former student of NBI had raised the question of whether or not it would be morally appropriate to assassinate Nathaniel because of the suffering he had caused Ayn; the man concluded that it should not be done on practical grounds, but would be morally legitimate.
It was the beginning of the long decline and fall of Rand’s tight grip over the Collective. One by one they sinned, the transgressions becoming more minor as the condemnations grew in fierceness. And one by one they left, or were asked to leave. In the end (Rand died in 1982) there remained only a handful of friends, and the designated executor of her estate, Leonard Peikoff (who presently carries on the cause through the Southern California based Ayn Rand Institute, “The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism”). While the cultic qualities of the group sabotaged the inner circle, there remained (and remains) a huge following of those who choose to ignore the indiscretions, infidelities, and moral inconsistencies of the founder, and focus instead on the positive aspects of the philosophy.
So, what lessons should be drawn from all of this, in my opinion?
- Epistemological infallibilism (the belief in the possibility of attaining absolute knowledge) combined with an warped ethical doctine based on alleged rational self-interest leads to a fundamentalist-like moral absolutism and totalitarianism. If absolute knowledge is possible and the contant practice of rational self-analysis is the way to arrive at such knowldege, then moral/rational self-interest dictates that the person(s) most experienced and developed in the use of such methods is/are necessarily to be considered as near- infallible with regard to morals or just about anything else.
- As Shermer puts it:
As long as it is understood that morality is a human construction influenced by human cultures, one can become more tolerant of other human belief systems, and thus other humans. But as soon as a group sets itself up to be the final moral arbiter of other people’s actions, especially when its members believe they have discovered absolute standards of right and wrong, it is the beginning of the end of tolerance and thus, reason and rationality. It is this characteristic more than any other that makes a cult, a religion, a nation, or any other group, dangerous to individual freedom. This was (and is) the biggest flaw in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, the unlikeliest cult in history. The historical development and ultimate destruction of her group and philosophy is the empirical evidence to support this logical analysis.
Third,
What separates science from all other human activities (and morality has never been successfully placed on a scientific basis), is its belief in the tentative nature of all conclusions. There are no final absolutes in science, only varying degrees of probability. Even scientific “facts” are just conclusions confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement, but never final assent. Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is the heart of its limitation. It is also its greatest strength.
Finally, I would like to conclude with an observation that would have seemed shocking to me at the outset of this mini-analysis. Based on what I’ve read and learned about it so far, I have to concur with something that Whittaker Chambers wrote in his book-review of Atlas Shrugged in the 1950s: Ms. Rand’s
so-called philosophy smells of the concentration camp!!!
Since the time I originally wrote and posted this on DKos in ancient times, I’ve had the unfortunate ortunity to read through the online version of Rand’s dystopic fantasy “Anthem”. I have nothing significant to add to what I’ve written above with respect to the philosphical aspects of the work: there really are NO serious and substantive philosophical aspects of the work, period, notwithstanding pretensions to the contrary.
What Rand does is create a sort of straw-man universe of governement control over personal behavior and decisions arising out of welfarism and then proceeds to show how barren and depressing such a place would be to live in. But the univerese she creates rings hollow because this sort of control is not what welfarism and systems of social responsibility constructed along the lines of John Rawl’s idea of “justice as fairness” are all about. On the contary, the ultimate scope of limited and responsible governement intervention is to increase freedom and oppoortunity by eliminiating the barriers created by naturally distorting effects of luck and indeterminism in the markets and by class and group- orientend selection behavior in human societes (hierarchy, racism, sexsism etc..)
I find her writing to be arid and sterile to a bewildering degree. I’m bewildered, that is to say, how anyone could actually convince themsleves that this imaginationless charlatan can be put in the same category as George Orwell and the other masters of dystopia who created narratives which actually moved along dynalciamlly and brought personages to life on the printed page with powerful imagery and language.
Thumbs down!!!
Gilgamesh,
You should check out Arthur Silber’s blog, The Light of Reason. He writes with considerable experience and clarity on the whole issue of Objectivism, and its shortfalls, as he used to be heavily involved with that (but has since come to see things quite differently). His Objectivism/Ayn Rand essays can be found here.
Is that Arther Silber the former president of Harvard (or one of the Ivy League US schools) who got into some controvery for some statements he made about feminism (or somthing like that) about ten years ago?
Interesting, I’ll check out the link.
Hey Gil,
I think that’s John Silber you’re thinking of. Philosopher (Kantian ethics) and long-time controversial president of Boston University, which he ran (perhaps still does from behind the scenes) like a banana republic.
Yes, I’ve been living in Italy too long. Just after posting that comment, I remebered the name was John Silber. And thanks for reminding me that it was Boston University though, not Harvard. At least I was within the
same state and, practically, the same city.
Jeeze! If anyone from Harvard reads this and tracks you down, you’re toast!
No, I preemptively apologize for any potential misunderstanding in that regard. I should have just said that I had forgotten the name of the university—period!!
The Objectivism Mockery Page has a collection of links to sites mocking Objectivism.
And it’s just one of the resources you can find on the webpage Criticisms of Objectivism (or Ayn Rand), itself just one small facet of the ur-site (10+ years on the web!) Critiques Of Libertarianism.
There are whole forests full of material on the Web concerning Rand and Objectivism.
I haven’t seen the Mockery site, though. That could come in handy.
and was taken in by her preacherly certitude. I’ve outgrown a lot in 40 years, but it didn’t take long for me to ditch her pseudointellectual pimping for selfishness. I cannot understand how grown-ups can be taken in by her rudimentary thinking. That there are still has people who think she’s some kind of hero is astonishing!
One question for anyone who might have an MBA: Is this the kind of thinking that is taught in graduate schools of business? I’ve always wondered …
This is an excellent question which I’ve always wondered about myself. Where did the whole Yuppie phenomonon come from anyway?
Well, it may not have been that Rand was actually taight in the business schools but I do suspect that she was extremely influential in fostering the 1980’s “cult of the self” and “rugged individualism” with all its horendous consequences. This occured perhaps partly through the self-help movement of which Nathaniel Branden was a major part.
I can tell you that I, personally, first ran acroos Rand’s ideas through reading Branden after going throuhg the bookstore with books labeled “self-esteem” “self-regeneration in five east steps” and self-this and self-that.
They almost all mentioned Rand back then, at least as I recall, in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Greed is a drug more powerful than tobacco
a religion more slavish than cultish
a need more potent than sexuality
a force stronger than life itself
for there is never enough
for the greedy
I think its the kind of thinking that some business people adopt because it can serve as a justification for their ethical decisions (or lack there of). Not to say that all people in business are Objectivists, obviously.
You think it’s aposteriori justifcation, eh?? I tend to agree with that.
Ayn Rand was a fairly bright woman who was feeling guilty for being selfish. Her solution to dealing with her guilty conscience was to write long winded intellectualized justifications of selfishness, hoping to hide the concepts of selfishness and greed beneath a deep pile of multi-syllable camouflage.
Didn’t work. The basic thesis of justifying selfishness comes shining through no matter how many words are piled on to hide it.
Good analysis.
A friend gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
I was shocked as I read the disdain for the
less fortunate exemplified in this stupid book.
When I think of Ayn, I remember how she
disparaged poor people because of dust
in the corners of their homes and the
smell of cabbage in the air.
She is the dusty one and her books stink.
I am old enough to remember Rand, and was a reader of the Ayn Rand Newsletter, from well over 30 years ago.
Rand struck me as a product of her time. A depression-era person who went through the Second World War, and found herself washed up on the beach of an America in the grips of Red Scare hysteria.
Greed? You will meet few survivors of the Depression who were not given to some degree of hoarding and greed, for in this lay survival and reaction to privation, [in spite of Rand’s general position]. The Depression left a profound impression upon rich and poor alike. Randist views on greed and self interest are explainable as simple reactionism to hard times, simplistic as this sounds.
Rand’s fuming dismissal of egalitarianism in favor of objectivism is to me, something like Bentham, but without Bentham’s sly wit. Yet, in this harangue against egalitarianism and postulating how objectivism is superior, Rand reveals a touch of nihilism and that I think comes from the horror of World War 2. But again, unlike the realization of inability to change a grim situation unfolding, like in Camus’s “The Plague,” Rand does not carry on doggedly like Camus’s doctor, but instead starts whining, as if saying, “what good will come of supporting this or that country when they’ll only end up killing each other?” This is incredibly nihilistic, but unlike the German Ideological philosphers, Rand seems unable to to clarify upon her views. I don’t want to imagine what Rand might have done or written if she had understood “Thus Spake Zarathustra!
As for capitalism, I think Rand uses this a little more than a prop and tool to reassure the reader that there is nothing too far out in her ideas.
In a word, I find Rand “Jumbled.” Critical review of Rand is too easy. It is said of Karl Marx that if he had caught the drift of Schopenhauer instead of turning Hegel upside down, the history of the world would have been very different. I say if Rand had caught the drift of Berkeley and Spinoza or even Sartre she would have been a far happier person.
Good point about the relationship between extreme poverty and the development of unconsious habits of miserliness, hoarding and other mainfestations of selfishness.
I’ve always witness this phenomon in American surviors of the depression-era and the war such as one of my uncles.
But what really reinforced my own understading and appreciation of this phenomenon came about through comparing and contrasting the behavior of post-War Italian immigrants whom my mother (herself a first-generation post-war immigrant) associated with in the US.
The more deeply I exmained these people, the more I realized that the ones who had experienced the most extreme poverty while growing up in Italy (the paesani women who had grown up laboring in the fields, hacking away with a giant sickle 16 hours a day as in Tolsoy’s descittion of the serfs in Ruusia at the end of the 19th century) tended to be the most extaordinarily miserly cratures regardless of the degree of well-being that they had acheived in later life. One woman I knew quite well who owned a delciattesen and was doing quite well findcially, used to pick up lupinie beans, coldcuts and other things off the floor and put them back in the cans or in the racks wich they had fallen out of.
Raher than pay to see a dentist (which she could eaily afford), she used to pull out her own rotted teeth with a pair of pliars. She lived her life bitter and angry and she died having been abdandoned by her daughter and son-in-law who she mistreated and abused until the last day of her life.
Ayn Rand is the pseudo-intelletual counterpart of this woman. She felt this same generalized resentement and bitterness and she also felt that she needed someone to blame for the fact that she was not a member of the intelletcual and finacial elite of her time. So she developed a modest talent for writing and ised her imagination for the hideously evil purpose of scapegatoing the humanitraians, the altruists, the socialist and other do-gooders who got in the way of private enterprise and initiative and prevented the great indicuals in society (herself) from realizing their full potential.
I think that woman you describe is an excellent demonstration of why we need to attempt to end poverty (and by that, I mean ensure that no-one feels they must struggle and scrape for the basic necessities) by any means possible. The cost to our society and the citizens that live in it is simply too high.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, Gil. Structural functionalism tells us that we adopt those ideas that have the highest degree of functionality. We use those things that work best for us, in other words. Inefficient or flawed systems break down simply because human beings stop using them.
This principle applies to evolution, as well. Those species which have the highest degree of functionality, within a given environment, are the ones that survive.
Humans (as well as other creatures such as ants) form collectives because it allows the whole, the society, to thrive, thereby ensuring reproduction and the continued health of the collective. Human brains are hard-wired to act in this manner, as any evolutionary biologist would tell us.
If Rand’s “philosophy” were indeed true, humans would have become extinct the minute we became sentient.
This is sociology/biology/philosophy-101 stuff.
In Rand’s (gulp) defense, she attended the University of Petrograd at a time when phrenology was still in vogue, so I’m not sure how much of this stuff she was exposed to.
She was certainly an intelligent woman. It’s too bad she never took the time to revise her deeply flawed theories.
Yes, it is a little bit unfair to criticize her ideas by the standards of modern scientific and philophical knowlegde. In many ways, she was a product of her time, as we all are and that she be kept in mind.
However, given that she was an infallibilist about her most fudamantal beleifs (such as the central teaching about ethical egoism), it’s extremnely unlikely that she would have even considred the possibility of changing here position regardless of the evidence. And that’s the fundanmtal problem that pervades every aspect of her thinking.
She obviosuly beleived that her ideas would not only stand the test of time but that they wera the absolute, untimate and defifnitve truth. Such a belief in epistemologcial infallibility of even secitfic knowldege was already under heavy attack, and she should have been aware of that, goin all the way back to Pierr Duhem and Henri Poncare at the beginning of the 20th century. She tried to extend even into the realm of morals. That makes it certainly subject to criticism.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that the fundamental laws of mathematics themselves contradict her philosophy. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, for one.
Ummm…….yes, as a matter of fact!! I’m usually very reluctant to bring up Godel’s theorems because so many people (inlucing me for a long while) misinterpret them as refutations of scientific knowledge per se or in argument which somehow try to put scientific and religous knoedlge on an equel epistemlogoical level.
But, in this case, you’re quite right. If there is no such thing as absolute certainty even in the most certain of disciplines, then how do things stand with wacky clains to certainty regarding economics and ethics..
See, to me, that part of the theorem’s pretty clear. Godel does allow for absolutely verifiable logic, but he also proves that there are questions that a system “powerful enough to describe integer arithmetic” will not be able to answer. IE, there’s a limit to what you can verify with a specific set of axioms about that set of axioms. Eventually, you have to take something on faith, or accept it as a matter of definition, or whatever. But you can’t use it as a more general argument against scientific knowledge, as it does say that there are some things that can be proven. (Euclidean geometry seems to be the simplest example.)
I absolutely agree. But if you take the two theroems together the upshot is that any axiomatized system “powerful enough to compehend the basic laws of number theory” must be either incomplete (containing truth statmentes which cannot be proven within the system) or inconsistent. This demonstatrates that even within mathematics there are uncertainties (which truths cannot be proven?) and not that there are no certainties in mathematics.
And that’s the sense in which it is relevent to establsishing that infallibilism does not even apply in mathematics. The Chruch-Turing thesis (from which Godel’s theorm can ne derived) of undecidability brought this implication out much more clearly.
I quite agree. Anyone who continues to espouse a flawed argument, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is in need of an intervention.
There is one doctrine of Objectivisim that makes it incredibly obvious that it is, in fact, a cult, not a philosophy: anyone who disagrees with Objectivist doctrine, on even the smallest of points, is inherently and completely evil. And, more importantly, nothing can be debated or discussed with them until they bring themselves into line with Objectivist thinking.
What’s really amusing is that many books praised by Objectivists as proofs of their philosophy are actually condemnations of it. John C. Wright’s “golden age” science fiction books, for example, feature humans that seem to be perfect Objectivists… Until it’s revealed that their society only works because of massive, sentient computers in the core of Saturn that are, effectively, running a central planning economy by working out how to manipulate these “Objectivists” into doing the optimal thing.
I notice that you posted that at 04:13:46 AM EDT.
I read “Atlas Shrugged” in high school about 1960 (avoiding homework, not assigned) and found it remarkably unsatisfying as literature and mostly devoid of ideas. Since my main literature was either science fiction or westerns, that isn’t saying anything good about Rand.
Since then my only change in attitude on Atlas Shrugged has been to decide that as the basic religious document of a fundamentalist cult, it is dangerous. Thank you for explaining to me why I felt that way. I have never been able to stomach a second reading of her stuff.
Since I got my copy of “Guns, Germs and Steel” last week, I have been going through it, and Rand would have been horrified. Diamond’s Ch 14 called “From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy” describes the development of human society from bands, to tribes to chiefdoms and then the state. The driving force causing the changes is the population density, with chiefdoms being based on agriculture and “tribute” to a “Big Man” as the redistributive system to the state which advances tribute to formal taxes.
A Chiefdom exists because there are more than about 200 people in the society. Since that is the top number any one person can know, when there is a conflict in a society larger than that, people will often know only one person in the conflict and take his side. The result is a lot of killing unless there is a central authority to perform conflict resolution. The result is a central chief who performs police and judicial functions and is supported by tribute. As cities get even larger they grow into states with heriditary leaders and taxes. The chief is also given a monopoly on the right to use force.
Interestingly you also get laws, economic specialization and nonegalitarian societies. This includes the creation of slavery since human energy is the main source of energy to support and defend the society. There is also an ideology that grows up to justify a nonegalitarian society, and when organized and combined with writing it becomes into organized religion.
The result is a nonegalitarian society in which leaders, normally heriditary, perform conflict resolution, centralize decision-making, control economic redistribution, concentrate military power seize larger and more productive territories and replace smaller societies which cannot compete.
Diamonds chapter is a summary of a lot of anthropological studies and is absolutely fascinating. This one chapter is worth the book, and it didn’t appear in the TV series.
The chapters on the evolution and distribution of writing and on the evolution and distribution of technology are also fascinating reads.
It also makes a total hash of the idea that Objectivism could somehow be a replacement for the forms of society we have developed over the last 10,000 years. At about $12.00 for the paperback through Barnes and Noble I strongly suggest buying it.
Well, the anwer to your question is that I actually slept just fine. But I’m in Italy, so I’m 6 hours ahead of you if your on the East coast and 9 hours if your on the West.
So that it was actually 10:13 a.m (GMT + 1) when I posted.
Anyway, you get a four for mentioning Jared Diamond. I’m a very big fan actually and I’m very familiar with his most important ideas (even though I haven’t gotten the book yet) through artciles and intervues which are published in science magazines all over the place over heren. He’s quite well-known and highly respected here in Italy.
Thanks for the compliment.
If you are a fan of Jared Diamond, then you might enjoy the set of comments on Kevin Drum’s Political Animal aobut two weeks ago. 202 comments and they are the most informative discussion I have ever seen on blogs.
One “criticism” of Guns, Germs and Steel” was that it ended at about 1500 AD and did not do a good job of explaining why Europe has dominated much of the world over the last 500 years. I don’t think it was an especially good criticism, but someone recommended another book “Guns, Sails, & Empires: Technological innovation & European Expansion 1400 – 1700.” 162 pages and it addresses that specific criticism precisely. I got it Monday, and one reason I asked if you hadn’t been able to sleep was projection. I started reading Tueday and read it straight through.
Carlo Cipolla’s argument was that the expansion of Europe over the large oceans was caused by a combination of Mediteranean commercial motives growing out of Italy and Aragon together with the North Atalantic developements of effective cannon and sea-going ships. These two trends came together in the geographically logical place, Spain and Portugal with the Genoan Columbus brokering Mediteranean commerce and North Atlantic seagoing artillery platforms into trade across the Atlantic.
That explained to me why the discovery of North America by the Vikings led nowhere. There was no large set of commercial institutions pushing for expansion as there was later when the Portugese and Spaniards moved out into the high seas.
The technological key was the change from oars to sails. The mediterranean is a unique body of water that permits oared ships to conduct trade in luxury goods. Oared ships are good on a mild, protected sea with a lot of islands and coastline, but the same ships won’t succeed on the Atlantic or the Pacific.
The North atlantic caravels and carracks replaced muscle power with wind power, allowing high-seas travel. At the same time, the develpment of iron cannons changed battle at sea from ramming and melees to destruction of the enemy ships at a distance, again replacing human muscle power by the technology of chemical power in gunpowder. Cipola says that those highly destructive high seas ships dominated thge seas from when the Portugese entered Goa until the twentieth century.
But only the seas. Where there were already large populations the Europeans only controlled the seas and a few ports. Except for India, they didn’t conquer land empires. India was a special situation caused by the collapse of the Indian states.
Very interestingly, even as the West Europeans were moving out into the world at sea, the Ottoman Turks were attacking Eastern Europe on land quite successfully.
The business of not conquering land empires (except by Jared Diamonds germs) changed when Europeans developed mobile rapid firing field artillery that dominated land battles.
A very interesting book. Written in 1965 by a Professor in Turin, republished by Barnes and Noble in 1996.
It also ties in with “The Emergence of the Modern European World” by Edward Whiting Fox (1991).
He writes of modern Europe since the 17th century as being two separate cultures, one land based revolving around France dominated by administrative buraucracies and armies, and the other sea-based dominated by commerce and trade and governments which are highly democratic. Commercial networks were more important than governments. The latter is centered on London, includes the North atlantic coast and the eastern coast of North America.
The difference between the two cultures is exemplified by the success of Louis XIV as an absolute monarch, while Charles I of England lost his head for attempting the same forms of centralized bureaucratic government.
Interestingly, Cipolla says the entire age of domination of the world by Europe ended when the British left India in 1948, and we are now in a whole new world. I suspect that this is true, and that this is what the American conservatives are reacting so strongly against. WW II was really the high-point, and world-wide everything his been (relatively speaking) downhill since then.
For myself, I think the end was actually WW I. Liberal constitutional government was the philosophy of the high point of Europe, and the growth of Empires in the late 19th century was a reaction to decline. Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and more recently, militant Islamicism have all been reactions to liberalism and the domination of Europe prior to WW I.
Which is a great deal more than you really wanted to know, I am sure. But I am in the middle of a bunch of exciting ideas and your interest in Jared Diamond suggested that you might share some of the excitement.
What I am missing right now is an understanding of what forces caused WW I. Industrialiam and Nationalism are key, but there is more. Whatever they are, we are now living in the world they created when WW I was over.
Would you say that the European Union is a post-nationalist developement? A political unification in which nationalism is swamped by commercialism? I haven’t seen anything written on it that uses those ideas, but considering the arc of ideas I just wrote, that would be a logical conclusion.
If so, then it would explain the animus our nationalistic American conservitives have for the European politicians and the dismay Europeans have displayed towards Bush and company. Antagonistic cultures. But I am just guessing here.
(1) Berkeley was an idealist, not an empiricist. (Remember Hume kicking a stone, “Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley?”)
(2) The term “radical empiricist” is more proper for Jamesian pragrmatism, which holds that our reason is a product of evolution–and thus the result of “backdoor” empirical input. See, for example, his book, Essays in Radical Empiricism (online edition)
None of which alters the main thrust of your piece a single whit.
In all seriosness, Berkeley was indeed an ontological idealist– he believed that all matter was ultimately mind-depenednt and, more specifically, depedent on the mind of god. But he was also an epistemological empiricist in the sense that he believed that all of our knowledge of the “apparent” phenomenal world (superficial as it was) comes through the senses. Thus, he did not reject Newton’s laws and he even formulated his own theory of vision.
Also, it was Samuel Johnson who “refuted” Berkeley’s idealism by kicking a rock.
On the second point, you are quite right. Radical empirism was, in fact, the position taken up by James and wuld probably be most aptly applied to the phenomenalists like Russel who belived that only apperance existed amd thus there was no dictintoin bewteen a real and apparent world.
Of course it was Johnson! That’s what I get for waiting so long for my first cup of coffee! (Just took my first sip.)
As a radical empiricist myself, I object to being lumped in together with others whose views differ significantly, who I have no wish to defend. The crucial point of radical empiricism is that our reason itself is shaped by empirical conditions–albeit over the very long haul.
Agreed. It’s the skepticism of Hume especially with reagrd to metaphyics and any knowdldge that could not be obtained throuhg the senses which led many to label him and “extreme” empiricist and try to distinguigh his proto-positivist views from those of Locke and other originators of empiricism and to what’s called constructive empiricism (Bas van Fraasen) in modern times.
Hume’s rejection of reason both appealed to me (in a logical sense, how could logic bootstrap itself from nothing?) and made me reject him out of hand. Surely there was something more to be said for our non-sensory knowledge? I never did buy the whole associationalist theories that the 17th-18th Century crowd had going for them. So reading James on Kant and Hume was very much an “of course!” experience for me.
Paul,
Overall, I also reject associationism as a philophical and/ir psyhcolgical explanation of how the mind works.
However, associationist ideas have been put to good use in computer science in the field of neural networks. And the study of nueral networks, in turn, has shed much new and and intersing light on how the mind works. So, at the very least, we can say that it is comletely wrong but has turned out to be rather useful (which goes against my general opposition to pragmatism 😉 or, we can say that there must be something correct in the theory eith regard to some aspects of the orgaxzition of the brain and “how the mind works”.
Sadly enouhg thouhg, as with all new discoveris, a whole philopical movement has grown up around the idea of parraarel distrubuited processins based EXCLUSIVELY on the association of ideas (similarities and diffrences of percpetion and so forth) called connectionism. I’ll get you the link in second. I alsways forget to get the link first.
Connectionism is a link to an entry from the Stanford Encycopedia of Philosophy explaining what is it,
it’s relation to associationism and it’s positive and negative points.
The entry is a bit biased in favor of connectionism, IMO, but it’s an interesting clarification.
I appreciate those who study philosophy addressing topics such as this.
I wrote a diary on the daily kos a two months ago, its my reaction, not as in depth of a criticism. But you may find it interesting.
some of the commentary about Ayn Rand by other Kossacks I found interesting…
I’ll take a look at it once I get the chance ;)…..
Great diary! I’ve always found Rand’s philosophy shallow, and poorly thought out. I think to understand its popularity, you have to place it in historical context. She fled Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, and saw her father’s family business taken over by the state. A lot of her ideas were a reaction to the leveling nature of communism. Her ideas found resonance with Americans horrified by the prospect of communism and statism. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, against the backdrop of the cold war. I don’t think her ideas would have found much of an audience in a different cultural and political context.
Oh dear, oh dear. Must I spend my golden years re-debunking the primary fallacy over and over? Yes!
From your quote taken from the Objectivist Society (who really ought to find some Kool-Aid they could all enjoy to our mutual benefits):
This is preciesely the wrong-headedness that brought an end to new knowledge about reality (the physical world) in ancient Greek times with Aristotle.
Because he relied on reason alone to derive all knowledge about Nature, he and the rest of Western so-called civ. came to a screeching hault (rhymes with Gault).
Sadly, even the best reasoner can’t reason her way into an electromagnetic spectrum; or an understanding of viral disease processes, treatments, and cures; or of genetic modification both natural and man-made, plate tectonics; or of the organization and function of the brain and its control over our senses and ta-da — REASON!
One must experiment; one must use empiricism; one must move on to the richer pastures (not so re-plowed ground) of inductive rather than deductive thinking. Synthesize, not only analyize. And go where pure reason has never gone before and never will go, either.
Etc.
It wasn’t until Francis Bacon spoke out against that fallacy in the block, and other fallacies, did the scientific method take hold, prosper, and set Western civ. once again on the path of discovering new knowledge that allows us to send shuttles into space, enjoy the benefits of medical and other technologies, and feed more people better and less expensively so that those same folks have more leisure time to live the good life.
Objectivism has no room for “what if?” What a dull, fixed, unrealistic place that is.
Why can’t everyone just read Ayn Rand when they’re in high school and get over her when they’re fully adult? Like god intended.
I’m glad you were able to read something of her writing, even if it was after writing a critique of her.
I read atlas shrugged, many years ago. I remember it as a celebration of the individual, and its condemnation of fascist state forces that would inhibit individual growth, development and achievement. There was the down side of course.
Rand’s views are not the different from social darwinism, in the sense of the strong dominating the weak. It is never enough that you exist, in this world of only the strong survive. And the criteria for judging individuals is always defined by those who have succeeded, making it impossible for nearly everyone to live up to the same standards.
Of course, the neo-corporatists, have taken individual achievement to a new level: money and power for the sake of greed. I doubt that Ayn Rand would have agreed.
The accumulation of power and money, at the expense of those less fortunate, at the expense of our environment, is actually a reversal of individual achievement. It is a form of suicide, on an individual and mass level.
“Cult” seems to hit the nail on the head. After reading your (and Shermer’s) comments, the thought came to mind that this is fundamentalism for atheists.
For the public here in the states, there is often a connection made between Rand and Nietzsche. How do you see the similarities and differences?
Nietzsche is a first rate prose stylist and writer and Rand … isn’t. I stumble along as best I may in German but even so the brillance is seen.
Rand is from the dee-dump School of English literature. It’s been decades since I read “Dionysus Up-Chucked” but, IIRC, her sentences have a montonous La-dee-dah-dee-dah-dee-dump for page after innumerable page. Labeling Rand’s characters ‘cardboard’ is an insult to boxes the world over. And the vist to the Promised Gulch? Oh, spare me. And let us not forget the glorious train-wreck of the ‘Train-Wreck’ scene; in which everyone is a vile collectivist ‘second-rater’ who deep in their hearts yearn to steal everything from everybody and – horrors! – have neglected to invest their capital in mutal funds chock-a-block with growth industries.
And The Gault, hisself, has managed to get degrees in both Physics and Philosophy without learning anything about either discipline. The famous Static-Energy thingie is a Perpetual Motion Machine (Thermodynamics and the arcane concept of ‘Friction’ were not taught in his university, apparently); his knowledge of the latter completely encapsulates the course of Western Philosophy up to, and including, the first century BC.
This could go on endlessly.
Nietzsche was a first-rate scholar with deeply interesting ideas.
Rand was a third-rate scribbler with a melange of inchoate dogma.
Loved this comment, ROTFLMAO:
“Labeling Rand’s characters ‘cardboard’ is an insult to boxes the world over.”
I was thinking more about a philosophical “compare and contrast” versus Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch” than a stylistic comparison. Probably didn’t make myself clear… 😉
Looks like I am the philosopher on watch at the moment, so I’ll try to answer, if briefly.
From my point of view, Objectivism bears only a superficial resemblance to Nietzsche’s philosophy. First, Nietzsche seems to defend a process metaphysics according to which reality is fundamentally a flux of events upon which we superimpose tangible objects by acts of perception and in part, of will. Rand, by contrast, insists on an ultimate reality of mind-independent objects.
Second, for Nietzsche, reality can be defined in multiple ways depending on perspective, so human cognition can not be expected to yield fully objective answers. Such perspectivism is anathema to Rand, for whom Reason, correctly applied to the input of perception, leads to perfect representations of a mind-independent reality.
Third, while both are concerned with will, Nietzsche holds – consistently with his process metaphysics, his mentor Schopenhauer, and various Eastern outlooks – that will is a metaphysical force which ‘has’ human beings rather than the other way around. Furthermore, there is no real sense in which the will is free. This is alien to Rand, for whom humans not only have free will but “is a being of self-made soul.”
Fourth, Nietzsche’s ethics is consistently non-moralistic, whereas Rand, inconsistently it seems to me, tries to combine an advocacy of pure selfishness with an axiom of non-initiation of violence.
Hope that helps – though I hasten to stress that it’s extremely schematic and almost certainly contains debatable interpretations.
What a good idea! I often feel as I could use one of these (I’m an intellectual historian by trade). How much do you folks charge?
i’m afraid we’re out of your league. You will have to pay in EUROs since I’m in italy and, I think, Sirocco is also in Europe somewhere.
But not in the Eurozone, nor indeed in the EU.
A little fun with analogies:
Ayn Rand :: Philosophy
L. Ron Hubbard :: Psychology
By the way, as to the Übermensch, I think N. and R. agree that there is no such thing as present, but N. believes that there can and will be. What this means is that there will emerge a kind – possibly a separate sub-species but perhaps just a bunch of individuals – in whom creativity and self-discipline are both perfected qualities and not at odds as they tend to be in normal people. These will be highly aristocratic beings who disregard all traditional values, creating their own. In particular they will reject the ‘slave morality’ of kindness, meekness and so on that Nietzsche denounced as essentially a conspiracy of the weak to bind the strong. Nietzsche refuses to place any moral restrictions on such Übermensch, who are genuinely more valuable than the garden variety.
Rand does not have an equivalent concept, and if she did, she presumably would insist on non-initiation of violence even in their case. However, she agrees that there are inherently strong and weak individuals and that conventional morality is a conspiracy of the latter against the former. Nietzsche beef in this regard was primarily with Christianity, which he thought had destroyed the healthy pagan ethics of antiquity; hers may have been with Communism, which destroyed pre-revolutionary Russia and drove her to flee to the States.
ok, ok, a “philosophical” contrast and compare — Order Up! — but remember neither was a trained philosopher nor were they writing “Philosophy”, per se.
Adding to Sirocco’s excellant comments, with which I fully agree, a difference is easily seen in the Camel, Lion, and Child passage in Zarathustra.
Very roughly the Camel is one loading themselves with knowledge, the Lion flees to the desert and roars defiance, but it is the Child that is creative, artistic. The Child takes the knowledge of the Camel and the destructive force of the Lion combining them into playful, self-directed, construction; the Child says, in effect, “Look what I did! This is mine! What have you done?” not worried if someone has created something else from a similar set of Lego’s but, rather, willing to appreciate another’s work. Also, the Child will enjoy what is created but is perfectly willing to destroy the work in order to build something else from the blocks.
Rand, IMHO, gets to the Lion stage but never to the Child. She was too transfixed by her own thoughts ever to re-think and re-build.
That’s a very interesting observation. A lot of Randroids I’ve met have been obsessed with doing things “first”. If someone else has done something similar, or used the same tools, their motivation immediately evaporates. They don’t really want to make things better, or improve themselves or others. They’re just greedy, and want the biggest payoff possible, and see this as coming from doing something totally original. (Which also plays into their whole superman philosophy – doing something that no-one else can/could do) Unfortunately, they also tend to wind up totally directionless, always searching for something completely original, and never really accomplishing anything.
You know, that sounds an awful lot like the “Left Behind” books… Similar level of characterization, check. Similar level of hypocrisy, check. Similar lack of research, check. Similar flimsy attempt to justify a repulsive philosophy… Check.
Interesting question.
But first I have to take strong issue with your phrase “fundamentalist atheism”. I will stipulate, for the sake of discussion, that by fundamentalism you really intend “dogmatism”.
But “dogmatic atheism” is fundamentally (pun intended) an oxymoron. Atheism is quite simply the non-belief in the existence of certain (supernatural) entities whose existence cannot, by definition, be proved. Dogmatism implies that one is commited to certain beliefs (or non-beleifs as the case nmay be) despite confirmatory or falsificatory evidence which tends to either prove or disprove the beleif (or non-beleif) in question. Since religion is about faith and there can be no proof of the existence of god, dogmatic atheism is, as I said, an oxymoron.
I am no more a dogmatic atheist when I reject strongly the beleif in the existence of god than I am a dogmatic
a-invisible-giant-purple-octopus which controls the universe from an impossible to be proven meta-universe lying on the inside of its stomach lining.
As to Neitzche contro Rand:
The first thing to understand about Neitzsche is that he was fundamentally an asystematic, not to say anti-systematic, philosopher. This makes it extaordarily difficult to give a definitive account of his positions on particular matters. He was an extraodinarily talented writer and he often deliberately wrote in such a manner as to intentionally mislead ignorant people into radical misunderstandings and misinterpretations of his philosophy or philosphies.
As someone once put it, “Nietzhe is a mirror in which everyone sees their own reflection.” I think this is true to a large extent and I think he intended it that way.
With that said, I will try to summarize what I think are the similarietes and differences between the two.
The similairites are very few: they were both athiests
and they were both phsycological egoists. Pyhcological egoism is roughly the thesis that all of human behavior can ultimately be explained by subjetive psychological motivations.
However, in my interpetation of Nietzche, he was not an ethical egoist. Psyhcological egoism is a descriptive notion of the underlying motivations of human behavior. Ethical egoism is the normative notion that society should be organized (disorganized?) in such a way as to focus exclusively on the good of the individual.The ultimate source of moral authority, in this view, is the individual in all his subjective wisdom and knowledge of the universe.
This is cleraly the postio of Rand and the Randians.
Nietzche’s ethical vision is far more comlex. He was fundamentally an aesthetic elitist who divided morlaity btween two categories: master and slave morality. Needless to say, he inluded himself and the artitic and philosophical unbermencchen who would follow in hs tracks in the former category and eveyone else in the latter. Master morality,for Nietzhe, is best charactrized as the values of pre-Judeo-Christian antiquity, particulaly as exempliefied in auhtors like Homer and in the Greeks and Romans in gneral: honor, courage, fearlesness, strength of charater, strenghth of mind (not necceaeily phyical strength), beauty, nobility and so on. He was a cultural elitist who equated morality with the orgnzition of csocity in sich a way as to allow the formaiton of an elite class of artcistic and philosophcia ubermenechen for whom morilty would be and antiquited and effete notion. The ubermanechen would live beyond good and evil.
He despied and disdained the Chritian notions of pity, sacrifice (this point is indeed shared with Rand), charity, benevolence and tolerance, He also strongly rejected socialist ideas of egalitarisim
and the notions of univeral rights inplicit in liberal democracy.
So while I donìt think he was an ethical egoist, I DO belive his moral vision of the world was extremely dangerous and lends itself all too easily to the kinds if horrible interpretations (and misinterpetations) that followed upon his death. For akotihg Neitzhe set out to address and udience of philopshers and artists, moral ideas do not work that way: their are many madmen and moral monstrpisities in this world who beleive themslves to be philoppshers and artists in this world. They only require the slightest prextet for believing that they are superior in some way in order to provoke an absolutely enromous amount of chaos and destruction in the name of the “betterment” of mankind.
On epistemology, they were at complete opposite poles. Rand, as I explained above, was an infallibist who believed that final and definitive truths could not only be attained but that she had in fact,effectively, attained them.
Nietzche was a “perspectivist” and radical skeptic who beleived that there are “no truths only interpretations.” He beleived that there was no correspondence between word and world and this leads inveitably to the idea that truth is fundmantally subjective. For if there is no correspondence between word and world, all we have is competing alternarive interprations which can be judged soley on conventialist, aesthetic criteria.
But the greatest problem with Nietzhe’s “perspectivism”, his own term BTW, is that it results in self-contradicion. Nietzche writes with authority about the absence of authority. Is he telling the truth or is it just a perspective?
The greatest difference between them is that Nietzche, though, for all his faults was a powerful thinker and an extremely talented poet. Though I think his proto-existentialism has thankfully run its course in philosophy and I no longer take such views seriouly these days, I still find extraodinary wisdom and ispiration in his aphorisms and in his other anecdotes and mental explorations (he was extemely underrated as a phschologist I almost forgot to add!!). Ayn Rand-…well, I’ìve laerdy given my opinion of her in the diary. Blechhhh!!
I feel compelled to add an important element a left out of my extraordinaily abbreviated analysis of Neitzche and I hope this serves to clear to a VERY common and popular misconception about him once and for all. This is not a diary about Nietzsche but the subject was touched on.
Nietzche, whatever his other defects, was not a nihilist nor even a pessimist!! Quite the contary: one of his fundamental cosmological ideas (for lack of a better term) was the eternal return of events. Nietzche was certainly profunfly mistaken in callign this a “scientific” idea but it is still very intereting to examine.
Neitzche asked us to conduct a thought experiment in which at the end of our lives, as we are lying on our deathbed approaching our last breath, a tiny angel or daemonic spirit (in the Greek sense) comes up and offers two options: total annihlation or the repetiton of the same life we had just finished living.This life would be a carbon-caopy of the previous one and the process would go on over and over ad infinitum. It would include all the suffereing, all the trials and tributlation, and the challenges faced and overcome, but also all the joys and satifications of the live that we are cosmologically predestined to live.
Nietzche’s answer is “YES”!! Da capo!! Sempre da capo!!
To put this in conntext, it helps to undatdn that Nietzche was also firmly, and I think rightly, convinced that Chritianity and all other relgious views
which looked to an after-life (what Nietzhe called “the
other-wordly”) were all funddmntally nihilsitic becuase they DID indeed reject THIS world and THIS life in favor of another one somwhere beyond and trascenent of our this one with its struggeles and harsh unrelenting challenges.
In contarast to the view which denigrates and minimizes this world to a position of temporay passagway to the REAL and etrenal life, Nietzhe says, “I want THIS world!!” I love it so much that I, who have suffered relentlessly, want to repeat it over and over ad infinitum.
Nihilism indeed!! This idea is one of the most life-affirming that has ever been invented in the history of human thought.
As I said, Nietzche is complex and contradictory and he intended it that way….
I liked “The Fountainhead” , which was an earlier and less “fundamentalist” book. But when I read “Atlas Shrugged”, the appeal died quickly. This book is 1400 pages, however, if you omit everything that is repeated ad-nasium, starting with the fourth re-itteration, it could have been easily cut down to 300 tops. By the time John Galt actually shows up you are sick to death of the prick.
Robert Anton Wilson briefly joined up, but left when seeing what dogmatic bullshit it was. He said by that time (60’s) she was tweaked out of her skull and paranoid of everyone.
She’s in tweaker pseudo-philosopher afterlife now, probably kicking it with Hitler while P.K. Dick sulks in a corner, wishing that Hunter S. Thompson would hurry up and visit from Acid afterlife. He dosn’t like the present company.
What an amazing and intelligent analysis.
I had exposure to Rands “philosophy” indirectly back in the late seventies when I was a therapy client of Nathaniel Branden. I went to Nathan never having read or heard anything of Rand..ok, yeah, I’d heard of her but I was interested in serious literature and a member of the SDS and somehow her books were never of interest to me. I hadn’t a clue as to what I was getting into. Also, Nathan was my first experience of ever going to see a shrink, having grown up blue collar that wasn’t part of ones agenda.
When Nathan insisted that all of his clients read Atlas, and Fountainhead, I went out and bought and read them. I was horrified! The stuff was just what I would call a “swimming pool book” basically a bodice ripper larded with slabs of hard dense rambling prose about “ideas” and filled with characters behaving in my opinion most illogically. When someone told me that Branden had been Rands “disciple” I immediately figured he must have been boning her and said so..why else would a young kid have hung out with that crazy old troll..everyone said “Oh no! You don’t understand. He was brilliant.He was like her son” Later, when Patricia had a bunch of us over to her house and made her dreaded “announcement” of the truth about Nathan and Ayn I was the only one who wasn’t surprised.
I did therapy with Nathan for about a year and left after a private meeting that he scheduled with me where he informed me that he really really liked me, and that I reminded him of Hank Rearden..(I am a woman and at the time I was a 23 year old woman)..hardly Hank Rearden. I was fairly well known at the time and the whole deal was just too weird for me so I said that I felt I’d learned a lot thank you very much and that I was done with therapy.
In my travels with the Objectivists, I met quite a few of the more prominent ones and I have never in all my life met a more passive/aggressive disfunctional bunch. Rand and her crew truly make my blood boil even all these years later. I blame her and her Straussian colleagues for foisting upon us the neo-con blight that is now devouring our government.
Good heavens!! That’s an absoluely horrifying experience!! !! Branden actually made a pass at you?? And then he also tried to indoctinate you into the “Society” (or whatever the heck it was called, my memory’s fried today for some reason)??
I was first exposed to Rand’s ideas through Branden’s books but I never met him personally. That’s a fascinating (albeit disturbing) tale you describe.
was that I had no idea what he was getting at..unitll mutual friends explained it later…I was never interested in him in the least,..I was like 23 he was an “old guy”..he was also way too straight arrow for my taste at the time. Seeing as how I make my living in popular culture..I couldn’t understand those who pay no attention or have no interest in any of it.
Welcome Gil, and thanks for this excellent diary.
I’ve been tinfoiling and googling about Synarchists recently, since (like Gandolfi) I think there appears to be some meat on the bone of these strange connections.
There is a hell of a lot to read out there, so your succinct review of Rand’s philosophy and the illuminating comments you have inspired give a solid platform for further research.
good to see you back here in the frog pond 🙂
Thanx Man!
I apprecaite the kind words and the support, Sven.
Howver, “NIT refugee” is certainly not an accurate description in my case. I was posting on Booman long before I started posting on NIT and I continued to post occasionally for a long while on all three forums (DKod, Boammand and NIT). Then I got very ill for about a month or back in May and June and stopped writing and posting diaries altogether on any subject.
When I stareted writing again, I simply felt more confortable psoting at NIT becasue it was (allegedly at least) a more international forum and I was enveloped in the Italian referenda on and the fatermath of the regional elections. But I had also developed a stonger sense of community over there simply becaue its smaller
and hence its difficult not to feel like you really know the people and have established long-lasting bonds with some of them (BOY was I wrong about that!!)..
Anyway, this is no place to discuss grievances with NIT. It’s too bad things had to go the way they did.
The key thing which compeleed me to fifnally decide to leave is that I came to the realitzation that I was radically lying to and deceiving myself by almost buying ino the argumnent that certain topics shoudn’t be touched on because they may have negative legal repercussion for the onwer(s) of a particlaur site.
NOOOOO!! NOOOOOOOOOO! and NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
I’m a radical libertarian who has always cheriehd the Millian thesis that even the most repulsive or false ideas must be heard and discused, for the only way they can ever be defeated if they are morally repulsive (Iìm not talking about Gandalfi here of course) or refuted if they are false is through the open confrontiation with logic and the truth.
I agree with that thesis. (I am also aware of your postings elsewhere which I have followed with interest)
I also prefer the open mechanics of sites such as this, which provide peer-rating for recommendation and elevation of diaries and comments, with the possibility of admonishment for trolling. It seems to work well, though trolls are scarcer than live turkeys on Boxing Day round here.
I too regard myself as Libertarian, though of a lightweight intellectual variety. Perhaps Compromised Libertarian would be more accurate.
I was shocked to find Rand described as Libertarian, and some of her pseudo-Gnostic views troubled my own leanings in that direction. But it is all a problem of words as placeholders for meaning. Which is why your carefully argued posts always make clear the substance behind the labels.
Might I ask if you have come across Synarchism in your philosophical delvings?
Ahhhh damn it!! You see, I put my own foot in it by not being clear enough: this is the BIGGEST sin in analtyic philosophy, for heaven’s sake. I would been flunked out of a first semester course in political philophy for writing something like that.
Sorry everybody who’s readinf this, I’m sinply not a political libertarian tout court (left or right) no matter how stretched the defintion. What I meant to write was that I’m a strong civil libertarian and a I take the very liberal interpetation of the First Amenedment in particlar.
I apprecaite the distinction between the libertarianism/anarchism (in the sense of Chomsky) that I think you are talking about and the Libertarianism movement that Ayn Rand is associated with.
Synarchism is synonymous with anarcho-syndicalism, if I mistake not. No?? If so, then, of course I’ve read some about the movement and its history but it’s not something I come across very often in philophical literature. This is almost certainly because I have’nt’ specifcally looked for it though.
Born of 19thC occultism/Kabbalah (Papus et al), adopted by German Fascists, connections to Nietsche etc, prominent supporters among international banking circles, major European industrial dynasties. Lord Beaverbrook alleged supporter, R.Murdoch and Conrad Black (Hollinger) were Beaverbrook’s disciples.
Trail moves over to US post-war with Rand, Leo Strauss and then onto to Wolfowitz, Cheney etc. (Not forgetting Kissinger and Hollinger, nor Preston Bush’s involvement with Hitler, nor the financing of Nazism by bankers in tune with Synarchism, or even the Carlyle Group – though here I am indulging in some fantasy probably. However the facts of these connections are out there)
In a somewhat loose nutshell, modern synarchism discards plural democracy in favour of elitist industrial/banking rule by the few, in which entire social fabrics are woven into totalitarian economies.
It is the ultimate religion of the super-rich. Sound familiar?
I confess my ignorance on the matter. You’re making some extraordinarily broad international and trans-historical assocations here, though. I obviously can’t simply the exitence of such associations on your word alone. I will conduct my own indepedent investigation into “synarchism” starting from its 19th century roots and take it from there.
I can ceratinly see how Leo Strauss might fit into this strain of thouhght. But I am profoundly convinced that Ayn Rand’s “philosophy”, for one, was a melange of bad ideas from various sources, as I illutarted in the artcile (and most sholars who have studied her agree with me) which she refused to acknoweldge. Otherwise, I wouldnìt have written this diary, would I?
I understand this view is very popular among LaRouchistas though: trilateral commision and secret societies?? No, I’m not quite that gullible, Sven….
has of course made a dog’s breakfast fantasy of the history, but the connections and credo remain. Putting Strauss as the mentor of Wolfowitz eg would be admitted by the man himself.
The question is: how much of the Leo Straussian worldview has been influenced by historical Synarchism and how much by other Germanic schools? From what I have read of historical Synarchistic worldviews there is quite a lot.
There’s an interesting bit of history at (sorry for scrappy link):
http://www.sianews.com/modules.phpname=News&file=article&sid=1007
You play interesting games, Gil 😉
Yeah, but just like in the real world of politics and social life, it’s extremely difficult to score the big points in these games without money and/or power of some kind. This applies as much to the left as to the right, hypocritically enough.
The subserviance to Rand (the ‘Ayn and Only’) of the supposed Individualistic Objectivists – excuse me – Students of Objectivism has baffled me for years.
Rand as a pseudo-Gnostic nails it.
And would have loved to work my way through what was probably an extremely interesting thread had I not been lost with this “Since I don’t have access to any of Rand’s writings”.
My God. You don’t have to live next door to a used bookstore to get access to Ayn’s writings. For the most part these were all mass market novels. There is such a thing as Amazon. And for the most part, until you become aware of the moral vacuum at their very heart, extremely readable. Start with the big two.
Atlas Shrugged
and The Fountainhead
And if you have not discovered the fundamental flaws in Ayn’s thinking move on to Anthem
Or you can make your way into the belly of the beast by consulting her entire bibliography Ayn Rand
But you will never understand the seductive power of Ayn second hand. Millions of teenagers have been turned into Objectivists (what Randians call themselves) and thence into College Republicans because they read one or both of these books and got enthralled. Critically writing about Ayn Rand without having read Ayn Rand is to miss the whole point. Ayn was never much of a philosopher but she was a hell of a good propagandist.
(Pay attention to the names of the heros, and more importantly to the names of the villains. Ayn never misses a chance to stick in the stiletto.)
Prisoners in high security prisons probably have “access to any of Rand’s writings”. Second hand analysis of Objectivism is in my eyes next to worthless. It is all language and emotion, it has little or nothing to do with facts and logic.
If you had read all the way to the bottom instead of jumoin to an immediate conclusion you wil not that I read throuhg Anthem in its publicly accesible on-line version.
I gave a very specific review of that book in the Italicized part of the diary. and the only thing I can say now, after having had this excruciatingly painful first-hand experience with Ayn’s “literature” is: please don’t ever force me to go through something like that again!!!! I promise to behave myself and be a good boy!!!
But if you still insist in torture, I think that waterboarding or something along those lines would be prefereble.
If you have not read the novels you will never understand the appeal. Of course Objectivism looks intellectually vacant in the light of day. But Objectivists are looking at it through a prism. And when it comes down to it a very convincing prism. And reading Anthem doesn’t do it, Anthem is what woke me up to the vacancy to start with. The Fountainhead is exactly that. It is the fountainhead of objectivism and you need to start there.
Seriously speaking, I understand your point. And I am curious to find out what explains the fascination behind her, even this is really a phsycological question much more than a philosophical one IMO.
I will try to get hold of a second-hand version translated into Italian if I ever get the chance. But it’s not all that easy over here. And I can’t use Amazon simply because I don’t own a credit card, like most people in Italy!!
Now just a second here. Are you seriously suggesting that I need to read all the works of L. Ron Hubbard in order to undertand that Scientology is a complete fraud constructed from a hodgepodge of horrendously stupid science fiction fantasy, outdated and deliberately distorted psychological theories from the 1950s and muddle-headed Eastern religious mush.
I can easily infer this knowledge from the thoughts and ideas expressed by its devoted disciples and folowers. By people who have been on the inside of the movement and know exactly what really took place and so on.
I don’t need to read books by the Reverend Moon to understand that Moon is a kook and a hoax.
I
Commenting on Anthem: <<I’m bewildered, that is to say, how anyone could actually convince themsleves that this imaginationless charlatan can be put in the same category as George Orwell and the other masters of dystopia who created narratives which actually moved along dynalciamlly and brought personages to life on the printed page with powerful imagery and language.>>
I think you picked the wrong book.
Try The Fountainhead. It has a remarkable history. In 1943, when people had other things on their mind, a 700-page “novel of ideas” is published (after numerous rejections), written by an immigrant from Russian who was at that time all but unknown. The book was never given a featured review and certainly got no attention in academic circles. It was destined to be another tree that falls in the forest.
But the Fountainhead found readers. It became a subterranean bestseller and still finds readers 60 years later.
And the reason is that the book possesses precisely what you found lacking in Anthem: A dynamical narrative style that develops a complex plot with deftly handled timing. The characters are vivid and sharply drawn, if larger than life.
I first read the Fountainhead in seventh grade. I read it cover to cover four times by eleventh grade, and along the way had read Atlas Shrugged as well, and about anything else by Rand that I could get my hands on.
Her style is not innovative; it is essentially the style of other novelists of the time, such as Sinclair Lewis, except that Lewis was never that good at managing a complex plot and his dialogue wasn’t as good.
I didn’t stay a big fan, although this post makes it seem that way. For me, Ayn Rand became an un-acquired taste, largely because I didn’t much care for her politics.
I also take issue with the notion that she was running a cult. It sounds to me like she surrounded herself with sycophants in the post-Atlas Shrugged years, which is a pathetic situation for all involved. But is it a cult? The impression I get is that to be a member of the inner circle, you essentially had to profess agreement with all of Rand’s opionions. That’s not the all-embracing commitment of a cult; the members of her Collective were free to do as they pleased outside of her salon. Alan Greenspan did not have to give up economics to spread the message of Objectivism, for example. And even those coercive elements that did exist in her salon ended with Rand’s death. It’s not a cult.
If you say it’s not a cult, you probably haven’t met many self-professed Objectivists. Most – by an overwhelming margin – believe that anything that isn’t “Objectivist” is inherently evil and bad.
And I would also add that a seemingly infinite number of ex-Objectivists who write about Rand and Objectivisim go sometimes into painstaking detail in their portrayal of the movement. These portrayals all remind me horrifiyingly of my own experience with Scentology—oh Yeah, THAT’s a cult—-and my investigation of other cultish phenomona.
A sampling of these sites are listed down in some of the first two or three comments.
Odd that the closet Randians seem to be coming so LATE into the discussion, isn’t it??