Wednesday, December 31, 2008
My Return, Postponed
I had major surgery - my second in two years - on December 19. Early results were so good that by this week I got back to standing and sitting most of the day. Big mistake. I am now under orders to spend most of my time, until a month after surgery, in bed. I have lots to blog about, but it all will have to wait until after January 20th (2009) or so.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Free Internet versus Free Internet
The Ayn Rand Institute has a great comment on The FCC’s Plan to Censor the Internet:
What's a QUANGO? What does "quasi-nongovernmental" mean? It means a government agency set up not to look like a government agency, to give a work-around to those pesky Enlightenment principles that get in the way of a government's ability to do what would surely become "controversial" if that government were to do it directly. For example, most Americans would have taken a dim view of an official US Government agency encouraging mortgage fraud - and so this was done through a pair of QUANGOs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Similarly, neither the British nor the American government wants to look like it has an official bureau of censorship - so it delegates the job of telling the Internet service providers what to ban, to QUANGOs, in the United Kingdom the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF,) and in the United States the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC.)
In the Wikipedia case, the IWF claimed that the cover of the 1976 rock album "Virgin Killer" was obscene because of "erotic posing" by a minor girl. I remember seeing the album in record store windows in the seventies, and thinking that the pose in the picture resembled the pose of the winged girl angels, naked as a symbol of innocence, that flank, on each side, the Virgin Mary on her way to Heaven, in paintings I've seen in North-Central Europe's Roman Catholic cathedrals and churches. But in close-up, the girl's pubic area is hidden behind what looks like cracks in a glass pane covering the picture. I finally remembered that "crack" is a vulgar term for the female genitalia, and figured out that the broken glass could be interpreted as suggesting a broken hymen. So now, a bad taste in puns, or bad taste in rock music, or both, is enough to get you banned from the British Internet. Who could have known?
In the United States, the NCMEC maintains a similar Internet blacklist, but in greater secrecy - and there is no way to find out if you're banned. To date, the NCMEC has avoided tangling with websites as visible as the Wikipedia, perhaps on the theory that a frog never jumps out of the pot if boiled slowly enough. But when the NCMEC gets to censor the government's "free" Internet, it won't be so bashful any more. And, given the choice of tax-funded "free" (but censored) Internet access, and open Internet access that you have to pay for every month, who will ever pay to find out what the NCMEC has seen fit to ban?
With the new administration unlikely to appoint any more Christianists to the Supreme Court, the prospect that the government will be able to impose this kind of berserk Christianist censorship directly on private ISPs in the United States is no longer on the horizon. So George W. Bush's lame-duck FCC found a wedge strategy to impose censorship anyway, figuring that the other party will never turn down a chance to skin the taxpayers for the cost of a "free" Internet (plus a service charge.) Will the suckers fall for it?
You can have either a free Internet with "free" as in "free speech," or a free Internet with "free" as in "free beer." It's one or the other, guys; you can't have both.
....as the history of radio and television has shown, once the government guarantees ‘free’ access to a communications medium, it will inevitably exercise control over its content--i.e., censorship.For a concrete example of where this is going, recall the recent incident in which a British QUANGO (quasi-nongovernmental organization,) on the strength of a picture of a supposedly suggestive rock album cover, cut off access not only to the picture of the album cover, but also to the text of the article about the album's history - and also disabled all British access to the editing and content uploading servers of the Wikipedia.
In fact, this plan already comes with censorship strings attached; the FCC has declared that this ‘free’ Internet must filter out pornography and other material deemed unsuitable for children. Not only will this prevent vast numbers of Americans from accessing content the government regards as inappropriate, but it will unavoidably lead to massive self-censorship by websites struggling to avoid government sanitization.
What's a QUANGO? What does "quasi-nongovernmental" mean? It means a government agency set up not to look like a government agency, to give a work-around to those pesky Enlightenment principles that get in the way of a government's ability to do what would surely become "controversial" if that government were to do it directly. For example, most Americans would have taken a dim view of an official US Government agency encouraging mortgage fraud - and so this was done through a pair of QUANGOs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Similarly, neither the British nor the American government wants to look like it has an official bureau of censorship - so it delegates the job of telling the Internet service providers what to ban, to QUANGOs, in the United Kingdom the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF,) and in the United States the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC.)
In the Wikipedia case, the IWF claimed that the cover of the 1976 rock album "Virgin Killer" was obscene because of "erotic posing" by a minor girl. I remember seeing the album in record store windows in the seventies, and thinking that the pose in the picture resembled the pose of the winged girl angels, naked as a symbol of innocence, that flank, on each side, the Virgin Mary on her way to Heaven, in paintings I've seen in North-Central Europe's Roman Catholic cathedrals and churches. But in close-up, the girl's pubic area is hidden behind what looks like cracks in a glass pane covering the picture. I finally remembered that "crack" is a vulgar term for the female genitalia, and figured out that the broken glass could be interpreted as suggesting a broken hymen. So now, a bad taste in puns, or bad taste in rock music, or both, is enough to get you banned from the British Internet. Who could have known?
In the United States, the NCMEC maintains a similar Internet blacklist, but in greater secrecy - and there is no way to find out if you're banned. To date, the NCMEC has avoided tangling with websites as visible as the Wikipedia, perhaps on the theory that a frog never jumps out of the pot if boiled slowly enough. But when the NCMEC gets to censor the government's "free" Internet, it won't be so bashful any more. And, given the choice of tax-funded "free" (but censored) Internet access, and open Internet access that you have to pay for every month, who will ever pay to find out what the NCMEC has seen fit to ban?
With the new administration unlikely to appoint any more Christianists to the Supreme Court, the prospect that the government will be able to impose this kind of berserk Christianist censorship directly on private ISPs in the United States is no longer on the horizon. So George W. Bush's lame-duck FCC found a wedge strategy to impose censorship anyway, figuring that the other party will never turn down a chance to skin the taxpayers for the cost of a "free" Internet (plus a service charge.) Will the suckers fall for it?
You can have either a free Internet with "free" as in "free speech," or a free Internet with "free" as in "free beer." It's one or the other, guys; you can't have both.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Wedge Strategy, Part 4: History and Implications
(This is the fourth and last part of a preliminary draft of an article on the Wedge Strategy of the "Christian Right" and similar ideological-political movements. Your comments, and especially objections, counterexamples, and suggestions for improvement, are strongly invited. Parts I, II, and III are linked to here.)
How effective are wedge strategies in action? The answer depends on what one wishes to accomplish. The Communists' "Popular Front" strategy of the 1930s and 40s was predicated on the Marxist presumption of economic determinism: the idea that it would be enough for a Marxist "vanguard" to change the economic and political situation - and then the minds of the masses would follow. A portfolio of wedge strategies would not change many minds, but to the Marxists, that was irrelevant as long as the "facts on the ground" were bent their way.
Through its various wedge strategies, the Popular Front strategy was indeed effective in bringing about an unprecedented collectivization of Western societies, including the United States. At the crest of this wave of collectivist economic policy in America, between 1951 and 1963, the top marginal US Income Tax rate was at 91-92%. Conscription into "National Service" - then mainly military - was not questioned. Most large industries were organized into fascist-style government-controlled cartels; the average American of that time could not imagine free competition in telephone service, transportation and travel, insurance, radio and television and so on. Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged in the first half of that decade; the America she depicted in her novel was recognizably close to the America in which that novel was written.
Yet the Marxists' belief in economic determinism proved itself false. With Earl Warren as Chief Justice, the Supreme Court, silent for two decades after FDR's court-packing scheme, re-asserted the principle of constitutional review. The dominance of Keynesian doctrines in economics, and of Behaviorism in psychology, were challenged, and in the next decade were overthrown. Classical Liberalism, in America re-branded as "Goldwater Conservatism," became a political current that forced America's "political center" to move away from collectivism. Other countries moved farther and faster away from the collectivism of the 1950s than even the United States; it was now America that found its own still too-mixed economy hard pressed to compete in the world. By 1991 the top income tax rate was down to 31%; the fascist cartels were history, replaced by vigorous competition; and university economics departments found it hard to find even token replacements for their Keynesian and Marxist emeriti.
America's moment of relative freedom did not last. The downfall of collectivism in America and in most of the rest of the world in the last third of the twentieth century was itself accomplished by Classical Liberals, and their Libertarian auxiliaries, by means of wedge strategies consciously copied from the "triumphant" collectivists of the same century's middle third. Wedge elements of Capitalism had been sold to supernaturalists, pragmatists, utilitarians and opportunists by peddling the incidental or illusory overlap between supernaturalism, collectivism, pragmatism, altruism and utilitarianism, and various corrupt versions (especially "Libertarianism") of Enlightenment individualism on the one hand, and Classical Liberalism on the other. The economic and political conditions had changed - but the ideas in the minds of most Americans did not change, or - worse - regressed even farther from anything compatible with reason and individual rights.
Thanks to three decades of technological progress and increasing economic freedom across the world, much of it due to the short-term success of those Classical Liberal wedge strategies (a little freedom goes a long way) many more people, everywhere in the world, are able to participate in open discussions of ideas. Some are changing their minds, but others see that the very freedoms that have opened their eyes, stand in contradiction to their own deepest beliefs, supernaturalist or altruist or collectivist or all three. They know that they've been had. They understand, if they are intelligent enough to grasp those facts, that the recent explosion of individual freedoms will not do what that the wedge strategists sold them. That it will NOT merely help them be more effective and authentic supernaturalists, altruists and collectivists. That it can be used by us, their individualist enemies, to try to take the minds of their children away from the supernaturalist, altruist and collectivist ideologies held by their parents. What the supernaturalists, altruists and collectivists of the world want, is the opposite of enlightenment individualism. What they want is Directive 10-289. And because, like the Communists of the Red Decades, they must keep their agendas hidden, wedge strategies are the only strategies they have. In the last two decades, they have used those strategies to make political and economic trends in America reverse course.
Should Objectivists, still a minuscule minority in America and in the world, try to change the trend back again, by using wedge strategies just like everyone else? Whether or not a wedge strategy will be effective, depends on what one aims to accomplish. A wedge strategy movement can accomplish a few decades of concrete political results. But a wedge strategy does not often change minds. And when old ideologies persist in most human minds, their concrete political embodiments will tend to return.
Ayn Rand wrote, "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason..." Activism only becomes Objectivist activism, when it is advocacy that demonstrates the efficacy of reason. Of course, when one demonstrates the efficacy of reason, by using reason effectively in advocating for a cause, one works well for that cause. But it is the demonstration of the efficacy of reason, and not merely advocating well for a good cause, that promotes Objectivism.
This means that the Objectivist must practice the opposite of the wedge strategy: not try to select positions that fit the listener's pre-existing ideology, but rather argue by deriving the objectively true position, by logic, from the facts of reality and from principles - Objectivist principles - grounded in the facts of reality. It means avoiding appeals to intuition, emotion, unintegrated concretes, and especially appeals to popular ideas that can provide alternative support for a concrete political position, but that are ultimately derived, not from objective facts of reality, but from tradition or faith.
The Marxists, and the supernaturalists, tried to change minds by changing the relations of power: with wedge strategies when those were available, with gulags and crusades and jihads when they were not. Our goals, including our political goals, are different. One cannot eliminate political initiation of force from the world, except by changing minds first. Marxists and supernaturalists consider the wedge strategy a useful shortcut. Objectivists identify the wedge strategy as a dead - dead as in "brain dead" - dead end.
How effective are wedge strategies in action? The answer depends on what one wishes to accomplish. The Communists' "Popular Front" strategy of the 1930s and 40s was predicated on the Marxist presumption of economic determinism: the idea that it would be enough for a Marxist "vanguard" to change the economic and political situation - and then the minds of the masses would follow. A portfolio of wedge strategies would not change many minds, but to the Marxists, that was irrelevant as long as the "facts on the ground" were bent their way.
Through its various wedge strategies, the Popular Front strategy was indeed effective in bringing about an unprecedented collectivization of Western societies, including the United States. At the crest of this wave of collectivist economic policy in America, between 1951 and 1963, the top marginal US Income Tax rate was at 91-92%. Conscription into "National Service" - then mainly military - was not questioned. Most large industries were organized into fascist-style government-controlled cartels; the average American of that time could not imagine free competition in telephone service, transportation and travel, insurance, radio and television and so on. Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged in the first half of that decade; the America she depicted in her novel was recognizably close to the America in which that novel was written.
Yet the Marxists' belief in economic determinism proved itself false. With Earl Warren as Chief Justice, the Supreme Court, silent for two decades after FDR's court-packing scheme, re-asserted the principle of constitutional review. The dominance of Keynesian doctrines in economics, and of Behaviorism in psychology, were challenged, and in the next decade were overthrown. Classical Liberalism, in America re-branded as "Goldwater Conservatism," became a political current that forced America's "political center" to move away from collectivism. Other countries moved farther and faster away from the collectivism of the 1950s than even the United States; it was now America that found its own still too-mixed economy hard pressed to compete in the world. By 1991 the top income tax rate was down to 31%; the fascist cartels were history, replaced by vigorous competition; and university economics departments found it hard to find even token replacements for their Keynesian and Marxist emeriti.
America's moment of relative freedom did not last. The downfall of collectivism in America and in most of the rest of the world in the last third of the twentieth century was itself accomplished by Classical Liberals, and their Libertarian auxiliaries, by means of wedge strategies consciously copied from the "triumphant" collectivists of the same century's middle third. Wedge elements of Capitalism had been sold to supernaturalists, pragmatists, utilitarians and opportunists by peddling the incidental or illusory overlap between supernaturalism, collectivism, pragmatism, altruism and utilitarianism, and various corrupt versions (especially "Libertarianism") of Enlightenment individualism on the one hand, and Classical Liberalism on the other. The economic and political conditions had changed - but the ideas in the minds of most Americans did not change, or - worse - regressed even farther from anything compatible with reason and individual rights.
Thanks to three decades of technological progress and increasing economic freedom across the world, much of it due to the short-term success of those Classical Liberal wedge strategies (a little freedom goes a long way) many more people, everywhere in the world, are able to participate in open discussions of ideas. Some are changing their minds, but others see that the very freedoms that have opened their eyes, stand in contradiction to their own deepest beliefs, supernaturalist or altruist or collectivist or all three. They know that they've been had. They understand, if they are intelligent enough to grasp those facts, that the recent explosion of individual freedoms will not do what that the wedge strategists sold them. That it will NOT merely help them be more effective and authentic supernaturalists, altruists and collectivists. That it can be used by us, their individualist enemies, to try to take the minds of their children away from the supernaturalist, altruist and collectivist ideologies held by their parents. What the supernaturalists, altruists and collectivists of the world want, is the opposite of enlightenment individualism. What they want is Directive 10-289. And because, like the Communists of the Red Decades, they must keep their agendas hidden, wedge strategies are the only strategies they have. In the last two decades, they have used those strategies to make political and economic trends in America reverse course.
Should Objectivists, still a minuscule minority in America and in the world, try to change the trend back again, by using wedge strategies just like everyone else? Whether or not a wedge strategy will be effective, depends on what one aims to accomplish. A wedge strategy movement can accomplish a few decades of concrete political results. But a wedge strategy does not often change minds. And when old ideologies persist in most human minds, their concrete political embodiments will tend to return.
Ayn Rand wrote, "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason..." Activism only becomes Objectivist activism, when it is advocacy that demonstrates the efficacy of reason. Of course, when one demonstrates the efficacy of reason, by using reason effectively in advocating for a cause, one works well for that cause. But it is the demonstration of the efficacy of reason, and not merely advocating well for a good cause, that promotes Objectivism.
This means that the Objectivist must practice the opposite of the wedge strategy: not try to select positions that fit the listener's pre-existing ideology, but rather argue by deriving the objectively true position, by logic, from the facts of reality and from principles - Objectivist principles - grounded in the facts of reality. It means avoiding appeals to intuition, emotion, unintegrated concretes, and especially appeals to popular ideas that can provide alternative support for a concrete political position, but that are ultimately derived, not from objective facts of reality, but from tradition or faith.
The Marxists, and the supernaturalists, tried to change minds by changing the relations of power: with wedge strategies when those were available, with gulags and crusades and jihads when they were not. Our goals, including our political goals, are different. One cannot eliminate political initiation of force from the world, except by changing minds first. Marxists and supernaturalists consider the wedge strategy a useful shortcut. Objectivists identify the wedge strategy as a dead - dead as in "brain dead" - dead end.
American Shaman
The caption under a photograph at the center of the top of the front page of today's Wall Street Journal:
DIVINE INTERVENTION: Bishop Charles H. Ellis III held a special service Sunday at the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit, calling for people to pray for the U.S. auto makers as Washington negotiators worked to craft a bailout plan.At 62, I'm a bit old to start from scratch in some other country. Damn.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Censorship Express
Back when Ayn Rand wrote about "obscenity" laws in "Censorship, Local and Express," prosecutions were already on the wane, part of a general rebirth of freedom in America in the 1970s and 80s. When the Bush administration revived obscenity laws, there had been no prosecutions for nearly three decades. At the same time, the Christianist (ex-"Republican") majority in the US Congress jacked off the minimum penalty for possession of "obscene" drawings to five years without parole in federal prison - exactly the same as for buying photos, of actual children being raped, from the rapists. Now, a manga collector has been indicted for possession of "obscenity" and faces this penalty in a US Federal Court.
Please, no silly stuff that this is not really really Theocracy in action, because in a real Christian theocracy a reader of off-color Japanese comix would be burned at the stake, rather than face a mere five-year minimum prison sentence. Shall we thank the Environmentalists for keeping it that way, albeit only from fear of deforestation, which would surely follow if the US Government had to burn all the readers of politically incorrect books and comix with fires started from kindling? I'm not sure. In what I know of history, every regime that started by burning books got to burn human corpses before it was through.
Please, no silly stuff that this is not really really Theocracy in action, because in a real Christian theocracy a reader of off-color Japanese comix would be burned at the stake, rather than face a mere five-year minimum prison sentence. Shall we thank the Environmentalists for keeping it that way, albeit only from fear of deforestation, which would surely follow if the US Government had to burn all the readers of politically incorrect books and comix with fires started from kindling? I'm not sure. In what I know of history, every regime that started by burning books got to burn human corpses before it was through.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Wedge Strategy, Part III: Identification
(This is the third part of a preliminary draft of a four-part article on the Wedge Strategy of the "Christian Right" and similar ideological-political movements. Your comments, and especially objections, counterexamples, and suggestions for improvement, are strongly invited. Part I and Part II are linked to here.)
How does one identify a wedge strategy?
In general, the most effective tactic is to look for breaches of coherence, where coherence is expected. Thanks to pervasive pragmatism in American education and in American media culture, few Americans expect coherence, of anyone, in anything. Incoherence is so pervasive that it is no longer noticed even in contexts, such as political arguments, where coherence is essential. To recognize wedge strategies, it helps to have made a habit of using the techniques of what Ayn Rand, in "Philosophy: Who Needs IT," called "Philosophical Detection." Then look for discrepancies, and when the habit of philosophical detection is with you, they will jump out of the page: discrepancies between the message and the messenger; between the principle that is being implicitly or explicitly invoked, and the use that is made of that principle; between language and substance; between what is said and what is left unsaid, between what is said and what is implied. If you find A on on the exposed side of the discrepancy and B on the hidden, then you are dealing with a wedge strategy.
Between Message and Messenger
One of the earliest items in the training of every intellectual concerns the fallacy of ad hominem and related arguments. The intellectual learns to focus on the argument - and to ignore the identity of its source. This may well be why so often intellectuals appear almost eager to be taken in by a wedge argument. Who makes an argument is irrelevant to its validity, but it is not irrelevant to its uses.
When Ayn Rand was asked to help fight against "Social Justice," a totalitarian movement, cause A, she paid attention to the fact that the invitation had come from Dashiell Hammett, one of Hollywood's most notorious sympathizers with Communism - cause B. Then it was just a matter of completing the identification.
Similarly, the recent spate of wedge strategies from advocates of coercive religion was started with a demand to teach creationism, and then "intelligent design," in the schools in the name of "open debate" - the demand coming from the most adamant defenders of censorship, and of extripation from school curricula of any mention of, let alone open debate about, other topics relevant to school students' lives, especially of non-procreational sexualities and of sexual pleasure. This would have been an evident badge of a wedge strategy - even if Phillip E. Johnson had not already identified it overtly as such.
Between Principle and Goal
One of the weirder results of the recent California election was the passage, by referendum, of a prohibition against confining farm animals. The proposition was promoted by "animal rights" groups, and every ad mentioned that California is already the leading state in the production of free-range chickens and eggs. The implied appeal was to knowledge that products from free-range animals are tastier, and probably healthier for humans to eat, than their counterparts from confined animals. Many voters were hoping that, with confinement of farm animals prohibited, the supply of free-range meat and eggs would increase, making them more affordable. The implicit principle was that farm animals should serve as food for humans - yet the goal was to reduce the number of chickens and other farm animals slaughtered for human consumption in California, as a way station toward the total elimination of animals as a source of human food. This measure could have been stopped, by pointing out that free-range chickens were being used as a wedge issue toward the eventual prohibition of all meat farming, including the free-range kind.
Between Language and Substance
Wedge strategies of the "false-A" variant depend on language that seems to refer to a concept of A while referring to something else. Christianist false-A wedge strategies stand out by using common words such as "life," "freedom," "equality," "tolerance," "values," "principles" and so on, in reference to other, often opposite concepts. For example, the "Institute for Justice" has been waging, under the slogan of religious "freedom" and "equal treatment," a campaign to force states to eliminate the requirement, that organizations which act as agents of the state must respect the religious freedom of individuals to whom they provide services on behalf of the state, and provide equal treatment irrespective of those individuals' beliefs and practices, sexual identity and so on. (The IJ website describes this as follows: "the Institute for Justice litigates on behalf of private charities and religious organizations to protect the vital role they play in addressing the myriad social problems confronting America." This litigation is directed primarily against the requirement that, when acting as agents of the government and receiving government funding, such organizations may not discriminate against any clients of government programs on the basis of those clients' religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation and so on.) Thus a campaign to deny religious freedom and equal treatment by agents of the state to individuals - is packaged as a campaign to force respect for the "religious freedom" and "equal treatment" of religious organizations. (This is not meant to disparage the valuable work that the Institute for Justice has done for property rights. Those to whom property rights are at the top of their personal hierarchy of values, may have good reason to associate with that organization - but, like any Objectivist who associates with any non-Objectivist organization, need to be aware of wedge agendas and risks of compromise.)
Between the Said and the Hidden
Every wedge strategy depends on showing wedge issues on which A happens to agree with B - and on keeping issues on which they disagree hidden. Every successful counterattack against a wedge strategy involves bringing the hidden contradictions to light. For example, in my successful campaign against Proposition 4, which would have enabled parents to force a teenage woman to continue a pregnancy against her own judgment and will, in the name of "parental involvement," I wrote:
(Next - Wedge Strategy, Part 4: History and Implications)
How does one identify a wedge strategy?
In general, the most effective tactic is to look for breaches of coherence, where coherence is expected. Thanks to pervasive pragmatism in American education and in American media culture, few Americans expect coherence, of anyone, in anything. Incoherence is so pervasive that it is no longer noticed even in contexts, such as political arguments, where coherence is essential. To recognize wedge strategies, it helps to have made a habit of using the techniques of what Ayn Rand, in "Philosophy: Who Needs IT," called "Philosophical Detection." Then look for discrepancies, and when the habit of philosophical detection is with you, they will jump out of the page: discrepancies between the message and the messenger; between the principle that is being implicitly or explicitly invoked, and the use that is made of that principle; between language and substance; between what is said and what is left unsaid, between what is said and what is implied. If you find A on on the exposed side of the discrepancy and B on the hidden, then you are dealing with a wedge strategy.
Between Message and Messenger
One of the earliest items in the training of every intellectual concerns the fallacy of ad hominem and related arguments. The intellectual learns to focus on the argument - and to ignore the identity of its source. This may well be why so often intellectuals appear almost eager to be taken in by a wedge argument. Who makes an argument is irrelevant to its validity, but it is not irrelevant to its uses.
When Ayn Rand was asked to help fight against "Social Justice," a totalitarian movement, cause A, she paid attention to the fact that the invitation had come from Dashiell Hammett, one of Hollywood's most notorious sympathizers with Communism - cause B. Then it was just a matter of completing the identification.
Similarly, the recent spate of wedge strategies from advocates of coercive religion was started with a demand to teach creationism, and then "intelligent design," in the schools in the name of "open debate" - the demand coming from the most adamant defenders of censorship, and of extripation from school curricula of any mention of, let alone open debate about, other topics relevant to school students' lives, especially of non-procreational sexualities and of sexual pleasure. This would have been an evident badge of a wedge strategy - even if Phillip E. Johnson had not already identified it overtly as such.
Between Principle and Goal
One of the weirder results of the recent California election was the passage, by referendum, of a prohibition against confining farm animals. The proposition was promoted by "animal rights" groups, and every ad mentioned that California is already the leading state in the production of free-range chickens and eggs. The implied appeal was to knowledge that products from free-range animals are tastier, and probably healthier for humans to eat, than their counterparts from confined animals. Many voters were hoping that, with confinement of farm animals prohibited, the supply of free-range meat and eggs would increase, making them more affordable. The implicit principle was that farm animals should serve as food for humans - yet the goal was to reduce the number of chickens and other farm animals slaughtered for human consumption in California, as a way station toward the total elimination of animals as a source of human food. This measure could have been stopped, by pointing out that free-range chickens were being used as a wedge issue toward the eventual prohibition of all meat farming, including the free-range kind.
Between Language and Substance
Wedge strategies of the "false-A" variant depend on language that seems to refer to a concept of A while referring to something else. Christianist false-A wedge strategies stand out by using common words such as "life," "freedom," "equality," "tolerance," "values," "principles" and so on, in reference to other, often opposite concepts. For example, the "Institute for Justice" has been waging, under the slogan of religious "freedom" and "equal treatment," a campaign to force states to eliminate the requirement, that organizations which act as agents of the state must respect the religious freedom of individuals to whom they provide services on behalf of the state, and provide equal treatment irrespective of those individuals' beliefs and practices, sexual identity and so on. (The IJ website describes this as follows: "the Institute for Justice litigates on behalf of private charities and religious organizations to protect the vital role they play in addressing the myriad social problems confronting America." This litigation is directed primarily against the requirement that, when acting as agents of the government and receiving government funding, such organizations may not discriminate against any clients of government programs on the basis of those clients' religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation and so on.) Thus a campaign to deny religious freedom and equal treatment by agents of the state to individuals - is packaged as a campaign to force respect for the "religious freedom" and "equal treatment" of religious organizations. (This is not meant to disparage the valuable work that the Institute for Justice has done for property rights. Those to whom property rights are at the top of their personal hierarchy of values, may have good reason to associate with that organization - but, like any Objectivist who associates with any non-Objectivist organization, need to be aware of wedge agendas and risks of compromise.)
Between the Said and the Hidden
Every wedge strategy depends on showing wedge issues on which A happens to agree with B - and on keeping issues on which they disagree hidden. Every successful counterattack against a wedge strategy involves bringing the hidden contradictions to light. For example, in my successful campaign against Proposition 4, which would have enabled parents to force a teenage woman to continue a pregnancy against her own judgment and will, in the name of "parental involvement," I wrote:
If read carelessly enough, Prop. 4 seems to bar parental coercion of the young woman "through force (such as forcible confinement,) threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter." But this bar applies only to coercion intended to force the young woman to undergo an abortion. Prop. 4 conspicuously does not bar parents from using forcible confinement, or other "force, threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter" to force their daughter to continue her pregnancy, eventually forcing her to give birth against her will. This asymmetry effectively endorses parental force – against that pregnant young woman who wishes to set her life on a course that does not include giving birth in her teens. Those who hear Prop. 4 defended as a measure for parental involvement, should understand, before they vote, exactly what kind of parental involvement is being endorsed.It is by recognizing contradictions that one can (1) identify a wedge strategy, before one is induced to compromise one's own rational values; (2) neutralize the wedge strategy; and (3) counteract it.
(Next - Wedge Strategy, Part 4: History and Implications)
Friday, November 28, 2008
Contracts, Crime, and Individual Rights
Just before Thanksgiving, a federal jury here in LA convicted a Missouri woman of three misdemeanor charges of computer fraud for her involvement in creating a phony account on MySpace to trick a teenager, who later committed suicide.
Some people think that this case sets a bad precedent - that contractual fraud is different from more direct modalities of crime, and should not be subject to more than civil adjudication, damages, injunctions and so on - not a conviction for a crime. I disagree. Of course, criminal statutes should not be invoked to deal with mere disagreements about the terms of a contract, or with cases in which the injured party can sue and be adequately compensated through a civil verdict. But there are also cases where this is not possible - where the injured party cannot sue (in this case because she is dead,) where the contract clause protects third parties (such as fellow customers of the same service) and thus creates obstacles to recovery through civil damages (can you sue for violation of a contract between two other parties?) - and then criminal law can be and should be invoked.
What about a claim that the defendant did not understand the contract, or maybe did not even read it? In a free market, a contract evaluation service could provide legal advice on the meaning of a contract on a commercial basis. When millions of people sign identical contracts - as is the case with MySpace - the contract would only need to be evaluated once by the provider of the legal evaluation service, and so in a competitive market the cost of the service would be small enough to be worth buying even for users of cheap, or even otherwise free contractual services. I am not a lawyer, but I suppose that even with current regulations such legal evaluation services will emerge if contracts are enforced, and criminal responsibility is assigned when this is contextually appropriate. In the meantime, the jury in the case did the right thing by reducing the charges to misdemeanors instead of felonies.
Service providers, from MySpace to stock exchanges, do the right thing by making the use of their services conditional on compliance with terms that protect their customers from predation by other customers. And the government is right to invoke criminal law against those who deliberately or recklessly disregard those provisions, when third parties, who rely on those provisions of the service provider's contract to protect them, are harmed by the actions of those predators.
Some people think that this case sets a bad precedent - that contractual fraud is different from more direct modalities of crime, and should not be subject to more than civil adjudication, damages, injunctions and so on - not a conviction for a crime. I disagree. Of course, criminal statutes should not be invoked to deal with mere disagreements about the terms of a contract, or with cases in which the injured party can sue and be adequately compensated through a civil verdict. But there are also cases where this is not possible - where the injured party cannot sue (in this case because she is dead,) where the contract clause protects third parties (such as fellow customers of the same service) and thus creates obstacles to recovery through civil damages (can you sue for violation of a contract between two other parties?) - and then criminal law can be and should be invoked.
What about a claim that the defendant did not understand the contract, or maybe did not even read it? In a free market, a contract evaluation service could provide legal advice on the meaning of a contract on a commercial basis. When millions of people sign identical contracts - as is the case with MySpace - the contract would only need to be evaluated once by the provider of the legal evaluation service, and so in a competitive market the cost of the service would be small enough to be worth buying even for users of cheap, or even otherwise free contractual services. I am not a lawyer, but I suppose that even with current regulations such legal evaluation services will emerge if contracts are enforced, and criminal responsibility is assigned when this is contextually appropriate. In the meantime, the jury in the case did the right thing by reducing the charges to misdemeanors instead of felonies.
Service providers, from MySpace to stock exchanges, do the right thing by making the use of their services conditional on compliance with terms that protect their customers from predation by other customers. And the government is right to invoke criminal law against those who deliberately or recklessly disregard those provisions, when third parties, who rely on those provisions of the service provider's contract to protect them, are harmed by the actions of those predators.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
America's Turkey
Yoon's turkey was delicious. Our national turkey, though, was cooked according to a less careful recipe. As told in a New Yorker cartoon, "Thanksgiving recipes from the US Treasury Department," October 13, 2008, p. 12:
Turkey Stuffed with Seven Hundred Billion Dollars
Large Turkey
Seven hundred billion-dollar bills, crumpled
Place the crumpled bills inside the turkey. Roast until all that remains is a pile of ashes. Enjoy!
Turkey Stuffed with Seven Hundred Billion Dollars
Large Turkey
Seven hundred billion-dollar bills, crumpled
Place the crumpled bills inside the turkey. Roast until all that remains is a pile of ashes. Enjoy!
My Thanksgiving Invocation
This was my invocation at our (Yoon, Sung Cho, Brian, Emily and me) Thanksgiving Day dinner today:
To the unknown great men who tamed fire and the horse, and invented the written word and the wheel,So maybe you can tell what I teach. Next year we'll hear what Yoon's list is.
To Aristotle and Euclid and Archimedes,
To Al Khwarizmi and Galileo and Newton,
To Ada Lovelace and Charles Darwin and Ayn Rand,
To Alan Turing and John von Neumann and Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie,
To Alan Kay, Grady Booch, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin,
Let us give thanks to them and to the Human race, for making this a world fit for the Human race to live on!
Monday, November 24, 2008
Obama Disappoints the Left - and it's a Good Thing, Too
The Chronicle of Higher Education has comments on its articles, and they tend to be more insightful than is usual in Blogosphere (yes, I know, that's damning with faint praise.) Here is a particularly hopeful (for rational readers) comment on a recent article about Obama's appointments to date:
Of course, there are also voters who voted for Obama only because McCain-Palin were serious about carrying out their promises - and Obama was obviously an opportunist, who would need policies that will work in the real world well enough to get him re-elected in 2012. Clinton revisited is not heaven, but astronomically better than Obama the candidate (or an "honorable" McCain-Palin administration) would have been.
More former Clinton administration officials (Summers was actually in the REAGAN administration too!), and avowed proponents of globalization and free trade. In other words, these appointments directly contradict every principle Obama ran on and every reason his supporters voted for him. Suckers.
Of course, there are also voters who voted for Obama only because McCain-Palin were serious about carrying out their promises - and Obama was obviously an opportunist, who would need policies that will work in the real world well enough to get him re-elected in 2012. Clinton revisited is not heaven, but astronomically better than Obama the candidate (or an "honorable" McCain-Palin administration) would have been.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Wedge Strategy, Part II: Variants
(This is the second part of a preliminary draft of a four-part article on the Wedge Strategy of the "Christian Right" and similar ideological-political movements. Your comments, and especially objections, counterexamples, and suggestions for improvement, are strongly invited. Part I is linked to here.)
Coercive ideologies can only engage directly a minority of Americans, and therefore their political, cultural and intellectual influence depends entirely on the use of wedge strategies. The Christianists in America, in particular, do not have any other strategy at all. Their temporary political triumphs are in all cases the result of wedge strategies, and can last only as long as those wedge strategies remain unexposed.
America is still individualist enough for wedge strategies to be aimed exclusively at individualist principles as ideology A. Thus opposition to coercive taxation is used to create wedge issues such as tax financing of abortions, or of medical research with embryonic stem cells. Opposition to mandatory attendance in government schools is used for wedge issues such as the teaching of the biological principle of evolution in those schools, or teaching facts about contraception and safety (as opposed to so-called "abstinence education") in sexuality classes. In the recent California elections, the wedge issue of education about homosexual as well as heterosexual sexuality and marriage played a significant part in the passage of Proposition 8, which amended the California constitution to abolish equal marriage for homosexuals.
Given that the wedge strategy is the only strategy available to the Christianist side, what about contexts where there is no actual wedge of overlap between the Christianists' goals and the principles of their opposition? In such contexts, the Christianists (or other coercive ideological movements in a largely individualist, Enlightenment-based culture) can only resort to wedge strategy variants that create the false appearance that a wedge does exist. This can be done by creating or reinforcing a misinterpretation of the opposition's (A's) principles, or by creating a misidentification of positions outside of ideology A as wedge issues between A and B, or by doing both simultaneously.
Variant 1: Misrepresenting A ("False-A")
Phillip E. Johnson's first campaign against secular culture, and the campaign with which the term "Wedge Strategy" is most closely associated, dealt not with a political issue but with an intellectual and cultural issue: naturalism as an indispensable foundation of natural science. Johnson's wedge strategy was to misrepresent the intellectual foundations of the scientific process, especially the fact that the scientist's thinking must be critical (so that previously accepted explanations may be replaced, when appropriate, with better-integrated explanations that can more completely account for available observations and measurements) and open to evidence (the scientist's meaning of "open minded.")
The false-A variant of the Wedge Strategy substitutes a false image of A in place of actual A. In the Christianist-Islamist campaign against naturalism, the requisite false-A already existed in the form of Kantian interpretations of the philosophy of science, particularly that of Thomas Kuhn, who argued that scientists' interpretations of their observations and measurements are driven less by what is needed to get to knowledge of reality (which according to Kant and Kuhn is in any case not possible) than by what he called "paradigms," frameworks of interpretation driven by subjective esthetic preferences and by intellectual fashion. While despised by actual scientists (see, for example, "The Non-Revolution of Thomas Kuhn," in physicist Steven Weinberg's "Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries," 2001) Kuhn's view of science became a staple of Pragmatist education "about science" in American schools, and was perfectly suited to the role of false-A for an anti-naturalist wedge strategy in American cultural politics.
Johnson's primary was to single out those scientific theories that most obviously embody the principle of naturalism (of accepting only those explanations grounded in measurement and observation of reality, and excluding those that appeal to processes, events, or concepts for which there is no natural evidence) for wedge statements, such as this one, which a Christianist Board of Education in Georgia ordered posted at the head of biology textbook chapters on evolution: "This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." The implicature is that, per Thomas Kuhn, the same evidence would be interpreted differently if the prevailing fashion in Kuhnian "paradigms" were different. And of course the anti-naturalists also supply the alternative, supernaturalist-friendly, "revolutionary paradigms:" "Creationism," and, for the more squeamish, "Intelligent Design."
The best defense against the false-A variant of the Wedge Strategy is what I will call the Miller Defense, devised by Kenneth R. Miller. Miller is a Roman Catholic, but philosophically a Maimonidean theist (Maimonidean theism insists that because religious scriptures and traditions are received indirectly, through fallible humans, while the natural universe was created directly by God Himself, the study of the natural universe provides a more reliable insight into what God wants Man to believe than any religious scripture or tradition; and that religious scriptures and traditions that contradict the findings of natural science must be reinterpreted as human parables and metaphors) who is not afraid to openly contradict even a Cardinal of his Church when the findings of science are unambiguous enough.
In response to the sticker requirement, Miller started his Biology textbook by writing, "Everything in science must be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." Thus, when the student encounters the same wording, pasted as a sticker at the head of one specific chapter of the textbook, where it would be redundant if it were not meant to mean something quite different from what it means to the scientist, the false-A game is unambiguously exposed for the scam that it is.
Variant 2: The False Wedge
Another variant of the wedge strategy involves the misrepresentation of a non-wedge issue as a wedge issue. This scam depends on a false, usually instrinsicist, pseudo-epistemology: it applies the form, but not the substance, of some principle of A out-of-context, as though it were not a principle derived by reason, to be applied in the context of the knowledge on which it is based, but rather some arbitrary, intrinsicist, quasi-religious mandate.
As one example, consider the recent attempt of the now thankfully terminated Christianist regime of George W. Bush, to prohibit "discrimination" against physicians who would base their choice of treatment of patients, not on the best interest of the patient, but on their own religious beliefs. (Even though the proposed regulation would have applied to private as well as tax-funded and government health-care organizations, that was not the essential issue: Even an Objectivist government would need to employ physicians in its armed forces, its jails, its embassies in countries where local medicine does not meet American standards and so on.)
Opposition to invidious discrimination in tax-funded and government jobs is a clear individualist (ideology A) principle. An employee's race or national origin or gender or sexual preference is so clearly irrelevant to performance in nearly all jobs, that a policy of NOT discriminating on the basis of such factors is an obvious component of the individualist worldview. In view of the ugly history of religion-based discrimination, conflict, and mass murder in much of the world through the ages, and especially in Christendom, a policy of non-discrimination on the basis of religion is also seen as implied by the same principles, and in most contexts it is.
The exceptional contexts are those in which the employee is forbidden by his religion to perform an essential part of his job. And it is an essential part of a physician's job to plan and carry out every patient's treatment, in that patient's own best interest as determined by objective medical science, subject only to the patient's own informed consent. A reasonable contract of employment would specify that, absent the patient's informed consent to be treated according to other criteria, such as the physician's (or perhaps the patient's own) religious beliefs, a physician bound by such beliefs must refer the patient to a colleague whose religious beliefs, if any, will not interfere with carrying out the objectively optimal medical treatment. If the physician's religion does not permit her to do even that, she should quit - and she cannot claim that the "religious discrimination" implicit in her employment contract is unreasonable or invidious.
The hinge of the false-wedge wedge strategy variant in this example is the subjectivists' denial of the fact that the optimal medical treatment, is the treatment that is based exclusively on objective knowledge, and not on non-objective factors such as the physician's religious beliefs. The proper defense is to state the alternatives clearly: treatment designed in the best interest of the patient on the basis of objective knowledge and the patient's own informed consent only, versus treatment with some options pre-eliminated on the basis of the physician's private religious faith - a private faith that some patients may share, but others don't. There is no way to answer this defense without a fatal exposure of ideology B.
Variant 3: The Combination Variant
The last variant of the wedge strategy combines mis-representation of A with a false-wedge issue. Consider wedge strategies based on so-called "parental rights." By creating a new individual with his or her own individual human rights, its parents take on the responsibility to finish the job in the child's own best interest. In a society with a minimal government limited to the protection of individual rights, the government will normally presume that parents act in the best interest of their children, and intervene only when this is clearly not the case. An application of the combination variant of the wedge strategy treats contextual non-interference in family matters not as a procedural principle, but as a "right" (thus misrepresenting the concept of rights in ideology A) and then uses it as an intrinsic, "God-given" unconditional mandate for "parental rights" or "family rights."
This specific false-wedge issue has been used by every anti-individualist ideology B in recent history.
The Communist government of Cuba used the argument from "parental rights" in the case of Elian Gonzales, a Cuban boy whose mother lost her life in bringing him to America. Elian's father, a Cuban Communist official, successfully persuaded an American judge to let him take Elian to Cuba.
Islamist parents claim a "parental right" to take their daughters to Islamic countries, where the girls are married, regardless of their own wishes, to husbands chosen for them by their parents.
In most American states, Christianist parental consent laws (sometimes disguised as "parental notification" laws) authorize parents to force a teenage woman to complete an unwanted pregnancy, against her will, also in the name of so-called "parental rights." (Where the anti-concept of "parental rights" is disguised, for example as mandatory "parental involvement," stripping away this disguise is an essential component of an effective response.)
The correct (if not always immediately effective) defense against the combination variant of the wedge strategy, is to point out that the pseudo-concept of "parental rights" mistakes a procedural principle for a right. That rights are not arbitrary fiats from "society" or from a God, but rather objective pre-conditions for living a life appropriate to a human being. That one of those pre-conditions is the freedom to live according to the judgment of one's own mind. That it is never in any individual's interest to be denied, while still a minor, his future right to live his adult life by his own judgment. And therefore, that it is never in a minor's best interest to be forced to spend the rest of his life under a totalitarian regime, or to be forced to marry a husband chosen for her without her informed consent, or to be forced to complete a pregnancy against her will. This argument will not always work against legislators and judges who praise each other for "Pragmatism," that is, for each other's indifference to principles and concepts. But those of our fellow citizens who may in time recognize the contradiction, may also in time question America's current official anti-ideology of Pragmatism, and its use of "rights," as in "parental rights," as a slogan instead of a concept.
(Next - Wedge Strategy, Part III: Identification)
Coercive ideologies can only engage directly a minority of Americans, and therefore their political, cultural and intellectual influence depends entirely on the use of wedge strategies. The Christianists in America, in particular, do not have any other strategy at all. Their temporary political triumphs are in all cases the result of wedge strategies, and can last only as long as those wedge strategies remain unexposed.
America is still individualist enough for wedge strategies to be aimed exclusively at individualist principles as ideology A. Thus opposition to coercive taxation is used to create wedge issues such as tax financing of abortions, or of medical research with embryonic stem cells. Opposition to mandatory attendance in government schools is used for wedge issues such as the teaching of the biological principle of evolution in those schools, or teaching facts about contraception and safety (as opposed to so-called "abstinence education") in sexuality classes. In the recent California elections, the wedge issue of education about homosexual as well as heterosexual sexuality and marriage played a significant part in the passage of Proposition 8, which amended the California constitution to abolish equal marriage for homosexuals.
Given that the wedge strategy is the only strategy available to the Christianist side, what about contexts where there is no actual wedge of overlap between the Christianists' goals and the principles of their opposition? In such contexts, the Christianists (or other coercive ideological movements in a largely individualist, Enlightenment-based culture) can only resort to wedge strategy variants that create the false appearance that a wedge does exist. This can be done by creating or reinforcing a misinterpretation of the opposition's (A's) principles, or by creating a misidentification of positions outside of ideology A as wedge issues between A and B, or by doing both simultaneously.
Variant 1: Misrepresenting A ("False-A")
Phillip E. Johnson's first campaign against secular culture, and the campaign with which the term "Wedge Strategy" is most closely associated, dealt not with a political issue but with an intellectual and cultural issue: naturalism as an indispensable foundation of natural science. Johnson's wedge strategy was to misrepresent the intellectual foundations of the scientific process, especially the fact that the scientist's thinking must be critical (so that previously accepted explanations may be replaced, when appropriate, with better-integrated explanations that can more completely account for available observations and measurements) and open to evidence (the scientist's meaning of "open minded.")
The false-A variant of the Wedge Strategy substitutes a false image of A in place of actual A. In the Christianist-Islamist campaign against naturalism, the requisite false-A already existed in the form of Kantian interpretations of the philosophy of science, particularly that of Thomas Kuhn, who argued that scientists' interpretations of their observations and measurements are driven less by what is needed to get to knowledge of reality (which according to Kant and Kuhn is in any case not possible) than by what he called "paradigms," frameworks of interpretation driven by subjective esthetic preferences and by intellectual fashion. While despised by actual scientists (see, for example, "The Non-Revolution of Thomas Kuhn," in physicist Steven Weinberg's "Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries," 2001) Kuhn's view of science became a staple of Pragmatist education "about science" in American schools, and was perfectly suited to the role of false-A for an anti-naturalist wedge strategy in American cultural politics.
Johnson's primary was to single out those scientific theories that most obviously embody the principle of naturalism (of accepting only those explanations grounded in measurement and observation of reality, and excluding those that appeal to processes, events, or concepts for which there is no natural evidence) for wedge statements, such as this one, which a Christianist Board of Education in Georgia ordered posted at the head of biology textbook chapters on evolution: "This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." The implicature is that, per Thomas Kuhn, the same evidence would be interpreted differently if the prevailing fashion in Kuhnian "paradigms" were different. And of course the anti-naturalists also supply the alternative, supernaturalist-friendly, "revolutionary paradigms:" "Creationism," and, for the more squeamish, "Intelligent Design."
The best defense against the false-A variant of the Wedge Strategy is what I will call the Miller Defense, devised by Kenneth R. Miller. Miller is a Roman Catholic, but philosophically a Maimonidean theist (Maimonidean theism insists that because religious scriptures and traditions are received indirectly, through fallible humans, while the natural universe was created directly by God Himself, the study of the natural universe provides a more reliable insight into what God wants Man to believe than any religious scripture or tradition; and that religious scriptures and traditions that contradict the findings of natural science must be reinterpreted as human parables and metaphors) who is not afraid to openly contradict even a Cardinal of his Church when the findings of science are unambiguous enough.
In response to the sticker requirement, Miller started his Biology textbook by writing, "Everything in science must be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." Thus, when the student encounters the same wording, pasted as a sticker at the head of one specific chapter of the textbook, where it would be redundant if it were not meant to mean something quite different from what it means to the scientist, the false-A game is unambiguously exposed for the scam that it is.
Variant 2: The False Wedge
Another variant of the wedge strategy involves the misrepresentation of a non-wedge issue as a wedge issue. This scam depends on a false, usually instrinsicist, pseudo-epistemology: it applies the form, but not the substance, of some principle of A out-of-context, as though it were not a principle derived by reason, to be applied in the context of the knowledge on which it is based, but rather some arbitrary, intrinsicist, quasi-religious mandate.
As one example, consider the recent attempt of the now thankfully terminated Christianist regime of George W. Bush, to prohibit "discrimination" against physicians who would base their choice of treatment of patients, not on the best interest of the patient, but on their own religious beliefs. (Even though the proposed regulation would have applied to private as well as tax-funded and government health-care organizations, that was not the essential issue: Even an Objectivist government would need to employ physicians in its armed forces, its jails, its embassies in countries where local medicine does not meet American standards and so on.)
Opposition to invidious discrimination in tax-funded and government jobs is a clear individualist (ideology A) principle. An employee's race or national origin or gender or sexual preference is so clearly irrelevant to performance in nearly all jobs, that a policy of NOT discriminating on the basis of such factors is an obvious component of the individualist worldview. In view of the ugly history of religion-based discrimination, conflict, and mass murder in much of the world through the ages, and especially in Christendom, a policy of non-discrimination on the basis of religion is also seen as implied by the same principles, and in most contexts it is.
The exceptional contexts are those in which the employee is forbidden by his religion to perform an essential part of his job. And it is an essential part of a physician's job to plan and carry out every patient's treatment, in that patient's own best interest as determined by objective medical science, subject only to the patient's own informed consent. A reasonable contract of employment would specify that, absent the patient's informed consent to be treated according to other criteria, such as the physician's (or perhaps the patient's own) religious beliefs, a physician bound by such beliefs must refer the patient to a colleague whose religious beliefs, if any, will not interfere with carrying out the objectively optimal medical treatment. If the physician's religion does not permit her to do even that, she should quit - and she cannot claim that the "religious discrimination" implicit in her employment contract is unreasonable or invidious.
The hinge of the false-wedge wedge strategy variant in this example is the subjectivists' denial of the fact that the optimal medical treatment, is the treatment that is based exclusively on objective knowledge, and not on non-objective factors such as the physician's religious beliefs. The proper defense is to state the alternatives clearly: treatment designed in the best interest of the patient on the basis of objective knowledge and the patient's own informed consent only, versus treatment with some options pre-eliminated on the basis of the physician's private religious faith - a private faith that some patients may share, but others don't. There is no way to answer this defense without a fatal exposure of ideology B.
Variant 3: The Combination Variant
The last variant of the wedge strategy combines mis-representation of A with a false-wedge issue. Consider wedge strategies based on so-called "parental rights." By creating a new individual with his or her own individual human rights, its parents take on the responsibility to finish the job in the child's own best interest. In a society with a minimal government limited to the protection of individual rights, the government will normally presume that parents act in the best interest of their children, and intervene only when this is clearly not the case. An application of the combination variant of the wedge strategy treats contextual non-interference in family matters not as a procedural principle, but as a "right" (thus misrepresenting the concept of rights in ideology A) and then uses it as an intrinsic, "God-given" unconditional mandate for "parental rights" or "family rights."
This specific false-wedge issue has been used by every anti-individualist ideology B in recent history.
The Communist government of Cuba used the argument from "parental rights" in the case of Elian Gonzales, a Cuban boy whose mother lost her life in bringing him to America. Elian's father, a Cuban Communist official, successfully persuaded an American judge to let him take Elian to Cuba.
Islamist parents claim a "parental right" to take their daughters to Islamic countries, where the girls are married, regardless of their own wishes, to husbands chosen for them by their parents.
In most American states, Christianist parental consent laws (sometimes disguised as "parental notification" laws) authorize parents to force a teenage woman to complete an unwanted pregnancy, against her will, also in the name of so-called "parental rights." (Where the anti-concept of "parental rights" is disguised, for example as mandatory "parental involvement," stripping away this disguise is an essential component of an effective response.)
The correct (if not always immediately effective) defense against the combination variant of the wedge strategy, is to point out that the pseudo-concept of "parental rights" mistakes a procedural principle for a right. That rights are not arbitrary fiats from "society" or from a God, but rather objective pre-conditions for living a life appropriate to a human being. That one of those pre-conditions is the freedom to live according to the judgment of one's own mind. That it is never in any individual's interest to be denied, while still a minor, his future right to live his adult life by his own judgment. And therefore, that it is never in a minor's best interest to be forced to spend the rest of his life under a totalitarian regime, or to be forced to marry a husband chosen for her without her informed consent, or to be forced to complete a pregnancy against her will. This argument will not always work against legislators and judges who praise each other for "Pragmatism," that is, for each other's indifference to principles and concepts. But those of our fellow citizens who may in time recognize the contradiction, may also in time question America's current official anti-ideology of Pragmatism, and its use of "rights," as in "parental rights," as a slogan instead of a concept.
(Next - Wedge Strategy, Part III: Identification)
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Environmentalism as Pragmatism Redux: Advocating an "Ignorance-Based Worldview."
In the just-past elections in California, the two Environmentalist "Propositions" on the ballot went down to overwhelming defeat. The game is up. Strangely enough, the enviruses themselves stopped pretending that their ideas were coherent even before that fact became obvious to California voters. Back in 2004 they already held a conference advocating for - no, this is not satire - an "Ignorance-Based Worldview."
Thanks to Aster, an e-mail friend, for the link above. Leonard Peikoff's point - that fighting the "disintegrationists" is, in relation to fighting the "misintegrationists," a waste of energy and time, because the disintegrationists are doing an eminently adequate job of self-elimination - is demonstrated again.
Thanks to Aster, an e-mail friend, for the link above. Leonard Peikoff's point - that fighting the "disintegrationists" is, in relation to fighting the "misintegrationists," a waste of energy and time, because the disintegrationists are doing an eminently adequate job of self-elimination - is demonstrated again.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Wedge Strategy, Part I: Essentials
(This is the first part of a preliminary draft of a four-part article on the Wedge Strategy of the "Christian Right" and similar ideological-political movements. Your comments, and especially objections, counterexamples, and suggestions for improvement, are strongly invited.)
The Wedge Strategy is a strategy in forensic rhetoric, applied by former UC Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, and by his disciples in the Christianist movement, to a wide range of Christianist activism on cultural, political and social issues. The Wedge Strategy takes its name from the shape of the intersection of two sets in a Venn diagram:
Before it was applied by Johnson to Christianist activism, the Wedge Strategy was used, under different names, by other intellectually marginal ideological movements. Under the name of "Popular Front," it was widely used, during the Red Decades of the 1930s and 40s, by Communist parties and Communist-controlled "Popular Front" organizations.
In the Venn diagram of the Wedge Strategy, set A is the set of implications of the ideas, principles, worldviews and ideologies held by a targeted individual such as a judge, or by most members of a targeted population or group. For example, set A might be the prior worldview of Americans targeted by Communist activism during the Red Decades. This prior American worldview was strongly individualistic, with an implied antipathy toward all collectivist and totalitarian movements.
Set B is the set of implications of the ideology that is being promoted by means of the given Wedge Strategy. In the case of "Popular Front" activism during the Red Decades, Set B would be the implications of the ideas being advanced by the Communist Party and promoted by its newspaper, The Daily Worker.
The Wedge consists of concrete issues ("Wedge issues") on which A and B, for their different reasons, may agree. For example, individualists ("A") opposed all manifestations of collectivism and totalitarianism. They despised the Communist Party and its "Daily Worker," and equally despised German National Socialism and its American version, Father Charles Coughlin's Social Justice movement and its eponymous periodical, "Social Justice." The Communists also opposed the "Social Justice" movement, their main competitor among people inclined to favor collectivist totalitarianism of either kind. This made opposition to Coughlin's Social Justice movement a useful wedge issue in the Communists' strategy.
The wedge strategy is an efficient political tactic. A wedge issue can give the advocates of marginal ideology B a relatively easy victory. As long as A's remain unaware that a wedge strategy is being used against them, B's will face no opposition from A's on such issues. B's may even find allies and co-workers among adherents of A. They will be able to convince some adherents of A that they are "not as bad" as their common enemy - for example, that Communism is not as objectionable as National Socialism.
In ideological strategy, wedge issues legitimize the consideration of principles drawn from ideology B as a guide to public policy. In the forensic context, a judge who agrees with the conclusion of a wedge-issue argument, but cannot identify the tacit principle on which his agreement with this conclusion is based, may accept the argument of ideology B as the recorded reason for his verdict. In public debate, if A is held by a significant fraction of its adherents tacitly rather than explicitly, the B's' wedge strategy will legitimize the doctrines of B among adherents of A: if we agree with them on issue after issue, then there seems to be no contradiction between their ideals and ours. They might even be the good guys, and their ideas may deserve to be heard, and to be included in the national consensus on legislation and public policy.
The same mechanism may gain adherents for B. Some A's might convert to B. Others will suppress criticism of B in the interest of the common cause. With criticism of B suppressed, B will have an improved shot at gaining adherents among the previously undecided.
Wedge strategies are covert. Even an otherwise consistent, principled advocate of A, who merely fails to recognize that a wedge strategy is being used against him, can be fooled by a wedge issue. To the extent that he uses his time and resources to work for a wedge issue endorsed by B, he will not spend his time and resources working toward those goals of A that conflict with B. Working together with advocates of B toward a common goal on the wedge issue, he becomes less likely to work against them on other issues. Even as he continues to think of himself as an effective worker for A, he actually works for B. He becomes what the Communists of the Red Decades called a "fellow traveler" - and, in private, "a useful idiot."
The principled response to a wedge issue, is to reject all participation in organizations and actions led by advocates of B. Once a wedge issue is in play, rational advocacy, of the principle of A that is being exploited by the wedge issue, must address and include some of the implications of A that are contrary to B, and that activists for B will shy away from and oppose.
In April 1940, Dashiell Hammett invited Ayn Rand to a fund-raising event for a Popular Front organization campaigning against Coughlin's "Social Justice." Rand's reply to Hammett ended like this:
I will call this the Ayn Rand defense. How would this defense be applied in 2008?
Wedge strategies are now the chosen instrument of an active Christianist movement. A neighbor is collecting signatures on a petition to the board of our local Public Library District. The petition asks that tax funds, money collected at gunpoint from mostly Christian taxpayers, should not be used to buy books that the Christians object to. The petition seems reasonable. It does not ask that "objectionable" books already on library shelves be removed. It does not ask the library to reject voluntary donations of such books from individuals and private organizations. It only proposes that Christian taxpayers should not be forced, at gunpoint, to pay for the propagation of ideas that they detest. What could possibly be wrong with that?
What is wrong is that it would insert consideration of religious correctness - ideology B - into public policy. So I might take my cue from Ayn Rand and say something like this:
(In Wedge Strategy, Part II, I will consider several variants of the wedge strategy and how they can be countered.)
The Wedge Strategy is a strategy in forensic rhetoric, applied by former UC Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, and by his disciples in the Christianist movement, to a wide range of Christianist activism on cultural, political and social issues. The Wedge Strategy takes its name from the shape of the intersection of two sets in a Venn diagram:
Before it was applied by Johnson to Christianist activism, the Wedge Strategy was used, under different names, by other intellectually marginal ideological movements. Under the name of "Popular Front," it was widely used, during the Red Decades of the 1930s and 40s, by Communist parties and Communist-controlled "Popular Front" organizations.In the Venn diagram of the Wedge Strategy, set A is the set of implications of the ideas, principles, worldviews and ideologies held by a targeted individual such as a judge, or by most members of a targeted population or group. For example, set A might be the prior worldview of Americans targeted by Communist activism during the Red Decades. This prior American worldview was strongly individualistic, with an implied antipathy toward all collectivist and totalitarian movements.
Set B is the set of implications of the ideology that is being promoted by means of the given Wedge Strategy. In the case of "Popular Front" activism during the Red Decades, Set B would be the implications of the ideas being advanced by the Communist Party and promoted by its newspaper, The Daily Worker.
The Wedge consists of concrete issues ("Wedge issues") on which A and B, for their different reasons, may agree. For example, individualists ("A") opposed all manifestations of collectivism and totalitarianism. They despised the Communist Party and its "Daily Worker," and equally despised German National Socialism and its American version, Father Charles Coughlin's Social Justice movement and its eponymous periodical, "Social Justice." The Communists also opposed the "Social Justice" movement, their main competitor among people inclined to favor collectivist totalitarianism of either kind. This made opposition to Coughlin's Social Justice movement a useful wedge issue in the Communists' strategy.
The wedge strategy is an efficient political tactic. A wedge issue can give the advocates of marginal ideology B a relatively easy victory. As long as A's remain unaware that a wedge strategy is being used against them, B's will face no opposition from A's on such issues. B's may even find allies and co-workers among adherents of A. They will be able to convince some adherents of A that they are "not as bad" as their common enemy - for example, that Communism is not as objectionable as National Socialism.
In ideological strategy, wedge issues legitimize the consideration of principles drawn from ideology B as a guide to public policy. In the forensic context, a judge who agrees with the conclusion of a wedge-issue argument, but cannot identify the tacit principle on which his agreement with this conclusion is based, may accept the argument of ideology B as the recorded reason for his verdict. In public debate, if A is held by a significant fraction of its adherents tacitly rather than explicitly, the B's' wedge strategy will legitimize the doctrines of B among adherents of A: if we agree with them on issue after issue, then there seems to be no contradiction between their ideals and ours. They might even be the good guys, and their ideas may deserve to be heard, and to be included in the national consensus on legislation and public policy.
The same mechanism may gain adherents for B. Some A's might convert to B. Others will suppress criticism of B in the interest of the common cause. With criticism of B suppressed, B will have an improved shot at gaining adherents among the previously undecided.
Wedge strategies are covert. Even an otherwise consistent, principled advocate of A, who merely fails to recognize that a wedge strategy is being used against him, can be fooled by a wedge issue. To the extent that he uses his time and resources to work for a wedge issue endorsed by B, he will not spend his time and resources working toward those goals of A that conflict with B. Working together with advocates of B toward a common goal on the wedge issue, he becomes less likely to work against them on other issues. Even as he continues to think of himself as an effective worker for A, he actually works for B. He becomes what the Communists of the Red Decades called a "fellow traveler" - and, in private, "a useful idiot."
The principled response to a wedge issue, is to reject all participation in organizations and actions led by advocates of B. Once a wedge issue is in play, rational advocacy, of the principle of A that is being exploited by the wedge issue, must address and include some of the implications of A that are contrary to B, and that activists for B will shy away from and oppose.
In April 1940, Dashiell Hammett invited Ayn Rand to a fund-raising event for a Popular Front organization campaigning against Coughlin's "Social Justice." Rand's reply to Hammett ended like this:
.... I do welcome anyone fighting against Coughlin's "Social Justice." But when you give a party to fight both "Social Justice" and The Daily Worker, count me in and I'll give you $7.00 per ticket, let alone $3.50. Not until then, Comrade, not until then.
I will call this the Ayn Rand defense. How would this defense be applied in 2008?
Wedge strategies are now the chosen instrument of an active Christianist movement. A neighbor is collecting signatures on a petition to the board of our local Public Library District. The petition asks that tax funds, money collected at gunpoint from mostly Christian taxpayers, should not be used to buy books that the Christians object to. The petition seems reasonable. It does not ask that "objectionable" books already on library shelves be removed. It does not ask the library to reject voluntary donations of such books from individuals and private organizations. It only proposes that Christian taxpayers should not be forced, at gunpoint, to pay for the propagation of ideas that they detest. What could possibly be wrong with that?
What is wrong is that it would insert consideration of religious correctness - ideology B - into public policy. So I might take my cue from Ayn Rand and say something like this:
I do welcome anyone who fights against taxes. When you ask me to sign a petition to bar the use of tax funds for buying books that you consider blasphemous or obscene, and equally to bar the use of tax funds for buying additional copies of the Bible, or of the writings of St. Augustine, preferably by setting the libraries free from any tax subsidy whatsoever - then not only will I sign, but I will help you circulate that petition to the rest of the neighborhood and the town.
Not until then, Comrade (or maybe "Brother,") not until then.
(In Wedge Strategy, Part II, I will consider several variants of the wedge strategy and how they can be countered.)
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Again, a case for cloning
The New York Times reports:
I posted this comment:
Doctors in Berlin are reporting that they cured a man of AIDS by giving him transplanted blood stem cells from a person naturally resistant to the virus. ... the chances of finding a donor who is a good tissue match for the patient and also has the rare genetic mutation that confers resistance to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, are extremely small. Nonetheless, the man has been free of the virus for 20 months even though he is not using antiretroviral drugs, and the success in his case is evidence that a long-dreamed-of therapy for AIDS — injecting stem cells that have been genetically re-engineered with the mutation — might work.
....
Dr. Irvin S. Y. Chen, director of the AIDS Institute at U.C.L.A. , is working on using RNA “hairpin scissors” to cut out the bits of genetic material in blood stem cells that code for the receptors. The concept is working in monkeys, he said. Eventually, he hopes, it will be possible to inject them into humans after wiping out only part of the immune system with drugs.
I posted this comment:
Why not insert the DNA sequence that confers resistance to H.I.V. into the corresponding gene in a nucleus taken from the patient, then clone the stem cells? Unlike monkeying with monkey cells, there would be no need to harm the patient's immune system at all. Of course, the George W. Bush ban on therapeutic cloning will need to be repealed - or those who need the treatment will travel to an Atheist country like the Netherlands or the Czech Republic to be cured. It would be better for America to repeal this idiotic prohibition. Political stupidity is NOT a law of nature.
Adam Reed, Torrrance, California
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Objectivist Activism Report: The Defeat of Proposition 4
When I began my activism for the recent elections, the Christo-Fascists had placed two propositions for constitutional amendments on the ballot. All the pollsters were predicting that Proposition 4 would win, and Proposition 8 would lose. As I wrote at the time ("California Proposition 4 and the Self-Lobotomy of the Pragmatist Left," http://borntoidentify.blogspot.com/2008/10/california-proposition-4-and-self.html - October 8:) "the left have already handed a victory on Proposition 4 to the National-Christianist mob." The pollsters were wrong. I had not yet begun to fight. Or rather I had - I had been circulating OpEds against Proposition 4 to big-city newspapers of record, the Los Angeles Times and its counterparts in San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, and got nowhere. Those papers wanted leaders of organizations, and one thing that I did not commit resources for was to set up official organizations. Such organizations can make a significant difference, and I admire the organizational infrastructure that Diana and Paul Hsieh and Ari Armstrong created in Colorado. But this would have had to be a long-term effort that, in my personal context at the time, was not a realistic option.
So I went on to send my OpEds to county and local papers, and soon after my pessimistic blog post (above) my OpEds began to get published. The papers where my OpEds saw print included the Orange County Register, the largest such newspaper in California. I estimate that my OpEds reached about a million voters. Proposition 4 lost with 223,088 votes from the half-way mark. I consider it likely that my OpEds contributed to that result.
My OpEds were adapted to the context of each paper, but they had 3 things that I always made sure of:
1. A reference to Ayn Rand near the start, for example: 'Proposition 4 is the latest in a decades-long series of attempts to obliterate what the American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand called "the right of young people to set the course of their own lives."'
2. A concluding paragraph starting with a sentence grounded in Objectivist principles - for example, "Existing California law protects the young woman's right to set the course of her life by the judgment of her own mind."
3. Like all totalitarian appeals in still-individualist America, Proposition 4 used a wedge strategy on a wedge issue. I exposed the deception, and wrote the OpEd so that it could not be refuted without exposing the real agenda of Propsition 4. (I plan to write an article about wedge strategies and wedge issues shortly. It is needed because effective Objectivist activism requires being able to recognize this strategy and counteract it.)
My OpEds had two other effects. First, the official opposition, "Campaign for Teen Safety," had been running ads that reinforced the stereotype of young people as mindless risk-takers, thus feeding into the wedge strategy. After my OpEd in the Orange County Register, they re-focused on the deceptions in the proposition. My long affiliations with Planned Parenthood, and with the American Civil Liberties Union, may have helped give my approach a level of credibility and influence that I would not have had otherwise.
Second, several credible professional groups started taking off on specific instances of deception that I identified in my OpEd: lawyers about how difficult the phony "judicial bypass" actually was, health professionals about how even a family history of post-partum depression and suicide would not be enough for a medical exception, and so on. The same points started appearing in LTEs, in newspaper editorials against Proposition 4, and in television interviews with random members of the public. Still, the eventual defeat of Proposition 4 came as a pleasant surprise.
In the other case, opponents of Proposition 8, the second Christo-Fascist warhorse, managed to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. There was no effective Objectivist activism on the issue until an ARI/ARC release on October 30, too late to make a difference. The official GBLT leftists' campaign, and the behavior of many GLBT opponents of Proposition 8, fed right into the Christo-Fascists' wedge strategy. Worse, the left's positioning of the issue as a matter of collective "social justice" (where have we heard this before?) to an oppressed minority resulted in a near-war of competitive victimism between the "leaderships" of the GLBT "community" and of many African-American churches, with predictable results.
Compare and contrast.
So I went on to send my OpEds to county and local papers, and soon after my pessimistic blog post (above) my OpEds began to get published. The papers where my OpEds saw print included the Orange County Register, the largest such newspaper in California. I estimate that my OpEds reached about a million voters. Proposition 4 lost with 223,088 votes from the half-way mark. I consider it likely that my OpEds contributed to that result.
My OpEds were adapted to the context of each paper, but they had 3 things that I always made sure of:
1. A reference to Ayn Rand near the start, for example: 'Proposition 4 is the latest in a decades-long series of attempts to obliterate what the American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand called "the right of young people to set the course of their own lives."'
2. A concluding paragraph starting with a sentence grounded in Objectivist principles - for example, "Existing California law protects the young woman's right to set the course of her life by the judgment of her own mind."
3. Like all totalitarian appeals in still-individualist America, Proposition 4 used a wedge strategy on a wedge issue. I exposed the deception, and wrote the OpEd so that it could not be refuted without exposing the real agenda of Propsition 4. (I plan to write an article about wedge strategies and wedge issues shortly. It is needed because effective Objectivist activism requires being able to recognize this strategy and counteract it.)
My OpEds had two other effects. First, the official opposition, "Campaign for Teen Safety," had been running ads that reinforced the stereotype of young people as mindless risk-takers, thus feeding into the wedge strategy. After my OpEd in the Orange County Register, they re-focused on the deceptions in the proposition. My long affiliations with Planned Parenthood, and with the American Civil Liberties Union, may have helped give my approach a level of credibility and influence that I would not have had otherwise.
Second, several credible professional groups started taking off on specific instances of deception that I identified in my OpEd: lawyers about how difficult the phony "judicial bypass" actually was, health professionals about how even a family history of post-partum depression and suicide would not be enough for a medical exception, and so on. The same points started appearing in LTEs, in newspaper editorials against Proposition 4, and in television interviews with random members of the public. Still, the eventual defeat of Proposition 4 came as a pleasant surprise.
In the other case, opponents of Proposition 8, the second Christo-Fascist warhorse, managed to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. There was no effective Objectivist activism on the issue until an ARI/ARC release on October 30, too late to make a difference. The official GBLT leftists' campaign, and the behavior of many GLBT opponents of Proposition 8, fed right into the Christo-Fascists' wedge strategy. Worse, the left's positioning of the issue as a matter of collective "social justice" (where have we heard this before?) to an oppressed minority resulted in a near-war of competitive victimism between the "leaderships" of the GLBT "community" and of many African-American churches, with predictable results.
Compare and contrast.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Language, and the power that comes out of the barrel of a gun
From BB&T news release "BB&T to participate in U.S. Treasury program:"
We support the Treasury's efforts to stabilize the credit markets and restore confidence in the financial system," said BB&T Chairman and CEO John A. Allison.What he should have said:
"We intend to comply with every requirement of the Treasury's efforts to stabilize the credit markets and restore confidence in the financial system."I know: "multilingual" means knows how to use several languages; "product of American education" means doesn't know how to use even one. Too bad.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Counterproductive: A good idea badly argued.
In my work, I sometimes must give a student a failing grade for a badly argued case, even as that student is arguing for a good idea. I did not expect to see that kind of thing under the imprint of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, but here it is, in a blog entry by Thomas A. Bowden from ARC Media:
The quoted phrase, "evolving standards of decency," was applied, when written by Warren (in Trop v. Dulles, in 1958) not to the Constitution as a whole - as Bowden misleadingly insinuates - but to the meaning of "cruel and unusual" punishment as prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. "Cruel" and "unusual." Both of these concepts are, as Ayn Rand would say, contextual. Their meaning depends unavoidably on the context of, among other things, "evolving standards of decency." Surely an Objectivist, of all people, should know better than to mistake contextuality for social metaphysics.
What would be the effect of such an argument on a literate reader who does not already agree with Bowden's conclusion? The context of Warren's opinion is not particularly obscure (and I happen to be an inventor, scientist, and teacher of Information Systems; I never took so much as one course in law, much less in the history of constitutional law.) It would not be unreasonable to take, whatever was argued for in this manner, less than seriously. When, if ever, did an accurate idea need to be put forward with so bad an argument? In context, a sufficiently bad argument for almost any idea becomes, in its effect on the literate reader, an argument against it.
The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is a very good idea. I hope that in time its output will improve. But before that happens, it will need to do some heavy lifting in quality control.
Judicial liberals don’t dispute that a judge must bow to the “social will”—they simply divine it differently. As one liberal Justice declared, the Constitution “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”The first sentence of this paragraph is true. The second is false. The justice being quoted was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican who almost single-handedly revived the practice of constitutional review by the Supreme Court, some two decades after the FDR regime had silenced the court by the threat of "packing" its bench with compliant Socialists. Earlier in his article, Bowden writes:
Judges must never bow to social opinion, historical or current, when exercising judicial review. For example, laws that institutionalized government discrimination against blacks in military service and voting deserved to be struck down, even if political majorities in both the Founders’ generation and modern times favored such rights violations.Yes, they did deserve to be struck down. And who did the striking down? The same Chief Justice Earl Warren, who later in the same article becomes the un-named "liberal Justice" - one among those who "don’t dispute that a judge must bow to the “social will”—they simply divine it differently."
The quoted phrase, "evolving standards of decency," was applied, when written by Warren (in Trop v. Dulles, in 1958) not to the Constitution as a whole - as Bowden misleadingly insinuates - but to the meaning of "cruel and unusual" punishment as prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. "Cruel" and "unusual." Both of these concepts are, as Ayn Rand would say, contextual. Their meaning depends unavoidably on the context of, among other things, "evolving standards of decency." Surely an Objectivist, of all people, should know better than to mistake contextuality for social metaphysics.
What would be the effect of such an argument on a literate reader who does not already agree with Bowden's conclusion? The context of Warren's opinion is not particularly obscure (and I happen to be an inventor, scientist, and teacher of Information Systems; I never took so much as one course in law, much less in the history of constitutional law.) It would not be unreasonable to take, whatever was argued for in this manner, less than seriously. When, if ever, did an accurate idea need to be put forward with so bad an argument? In context, a sufficiently bad argument for almost any idea becomes, in its effect on the literate reader, an argument against it.
The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is a very good idea. I hope that in time its output will improve. But before that happens, it will need to do some heavy lifting in quality control.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
And now for some good news: San Francisco Proposition K
In the midst of the current avalanche of Ayn-Rand-bashing (blaming Rand for Greenspan's paper-money games, Obama's snide sound byte about "making selfishness a virtue") I just came across a quote which shows how far Ayn Rand's ideas have come in penetrating throughout America's culture. Here is the starting point of a political argument for San Francisco Proposition K in the coming elections: "When there is no victim, there is no crime...."
Back when "Atlas Shrugged" first came out in the late 1950s, the idea that governments exists solely and only to protect the individual rights of individuals, struck most Americans as bizarre. Even the "Classical Liberals," who came closest to Ayn Rand's principle of individual rights, advocated a panoply of laws "for the public good," and were among the fiercest advocates of, among other monstrosities, laws enforcing compulsory attendance in government schools. The idea that "when there is no victim, there is no crime" was revolutionary.
And here is how far Ayn Rand's idea has come: it appeared at the head of an argument coming from, of all places, Erika McDonald, San Francisco Green Party Spokesperson. Unfortunately, Ms. McDonald's party is not noted for ideological coherence. They are quite active in advocating for legislation to "protect the environment" and so on. The idea that only violations of individual rights are objectively crimes has gone far, but in the absence of logic, or even of simple conceptual consciousness, its words are merely a slogan and not a guide to right political action. Without an epistemology of reason, neither slogans of individual rights, nor agreement with self-realization as an ethical ideal, can be enough to affect the social praxis. (It may be time for Objectivist activists to balance the advocacy of Objectivist ideas in ethics and politics with more activism on logic and epistemology.)
As for San Francisco Proposition K, it aims to decriminalize prostitution in the city. Not a particularly interesting issue for me personally, since I'm happiest in romantic relationships that last for years or decades. Myself, I'd see no point in visiting San Francisco without my wife. Most customers of prostitutes are temporary refugees from Christian or gender-feminist antisexualism at home; the sex workers, pragmatist or nihilist rebels against the same, or women or gay men in revolt against the tyranny of the Christian patriarchal family order, and the occasional Hindu or Pagan practitioner of prostitution as a religious sacrament. It is, however - even Green Party spokespersons are occasionally right - a matter into which the government has no legitimate business inserting itself. And the enemies of Proposition K, both Christo-Fascists animated by antisexualism and anti-commercialism, and gender-feminist Socialist statists, equally animated by exactly the same antisexualism and anti-commercialism - both factions, as a matter of justice, deserve to lose. If you live in San Francisco, don't let the sheer loathsomeness of the presidential candidates keep you away from the polls. Go, and vote against Proposition 4, and against Proposition 8, and FOR Proposition K.
Back when "Atlas Shrugged" first came out in the late 1950s, the idea that governments exists solely and only to protect the individual rights of individuals, struck most Americans as bizarre. Even the "Classical Liberals," who came closest to Ayn Rand's principle of individual rights, advocated a panoply of laws "for the public good," and were among the fiercest advocates of, among other monstrosities, laws enforcing compulsory attendance in government schools. The idea that "when there is no victim, there is no crime" was revolutionary.
And here is how far Ayn Rand's idea has come: it appeared at the head of an argument coming from, of all places, Erika McDonald, San Francisco Green Party Spokesperson. Unfortunately, Ms. McDonald's party is not noted for ideological coherence. They are quite active in advocating for legislation to "protect the environment" and so on. The idea that only violations of individual rights are objectively crimes has gone far, but in the absence of logic, or even of simple conceptual consciousness, its words are merely a slogan and not a guide to right political action. Without an epistemology of reason, neither slogans of individual rights, nor agreement with self-realization as an ethical ideal, can be enough to affect the social praxis. (It may be time for Objectivist activists to balance the advocacy of Objectivist ideas in ethics and politics with more activism on logic and epistemology.)
As for San Francisco Proposition K, it aims to decriminalize prostitution in the city. Not a particularly interesting issue for me personally, since I'm happiest in romantic relationships that last for years or decades. Myself, I'd see no point in visiting San Francisco without my wife. Most customers of prostitutes are temporary refugees from Christian or gender-feminist antisexualism at home; the sex workers, pragmatist or nihilist rebels against the same, or women or gay men in revolt against the tyranny of the Christian patriarchal family order, and the occasional Hindu or Pagan practitioner of prostitution as a religious sacrament. It is, however - even Green Party spokespersons are occasionally right - a matter into which the government has no legitimate business inserting itself. And the enemies of Proposition K, both Christo-Fascists animated by antisexualism and anti-commercialism, and gender-feminist Socialist statists, equally animated by exactly the same antisexualism and anti-commercialism - both factions, as a matter of justice, deserve to lose. If you live in San Francisco, don't let the sheer loathsomeness of the presidential candidates keep you away from the polls. Go, and vote against Proposition 4, and against Proposition 8, and FOR Proposition K.
Friday, October 31, 2008
How I intend to vote
As I wrote in the previous post, I am likely to be one of the 30 million people to be murdered by the human cloning ban passed in 2001 by the then Christo-Fascist ("Republican") majority in Congress, and signed into law by President George W. Bush. As a matter of principled, personal justice, I will do everything I can to remove the Christo-Fascists and their collaborators from power. If there had been the least doubt about the Presidential result in California, I would not have hesitated to bring a barf bag with me into the voting booth, voted for Obama as a way of voting against McCain, and barfed afterward. Fortunately now it looks like I won't have to. Other than that, I will vote against every Republican on the ballot, and against every Christo-Fascist of any political party that I can vote against, and against their collaborators. I will vote against every Proposition that the Christo-Fascists favor, and for every Proposition that the Christo-Fascists, qua Christo-Fascists, oppose.
I must add that my specific adversaries, in the current political context, are only the Christian and Islamic religious Fascists: those who believe that they have a divine mandate to stifle my exercise of reason - the human means of survival. I consider all supernaturalism and all religious faith to be arbitrary and mistaken, but in the political context, the dividing line is between those who, whatever their religious beliefs, are willing to respect my individual right to act on the judgment of my own mind - and those who don't. In the debate on the cloning ban, some religious organizations - the United Church of Christ (Obama's church,) the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Rabbinical Council, and others - supported therapeutic cloning. I have strong disagreements with all of them, but in the context of the ongoing struggle against Islamo- and Christo- Fascisms, all of them are welcome to shake my hand as allies and friends. The others - those who collaborate with the Islamo- and Christo- Fascists to shackle science and hinder the exercise of reason - are enemies of my life, and of all Human life on Earth, and I will treat them accordingly.
I must add that my specific adversaries, in the current political context, are only the Christian and Islamic religious Fascists: those who believe that they have a divine mandate to stifle my exercise of reason - the human means of survival. I consider all supernaturalism and all religious faith to be arbitrary and mistaken, but in the political context, the dividing line is between those who, whatever their religious beliefs, are willing to respect my individual right to act on the judgment of my own mind - and those who don't. In the debate on the cloning ban, some religious organizations - the United Church of Christ (Obama's church,) the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Rabbinical Council, and others - supported therapeutic cloning. I have strong disagreements with all of them, but in the context of the ongoing struggle against Islamo- and Christo- Fascisms, all of them are welcome to shake my hand as allies and friends. The others - those who collaborate with the Islamo- and Christo- Fascists to shackle science and hinder the exercise of reason - are enemies of my life, and of all Human life on Earth, and I will treat them accordingly.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Election 2008: Why cloning still matters
I originally posted the article below in another forum, more than 3 years ago, in September 2005. Sadly, the democide continues, with 30 million people already murdered by the ongoing delay in the development of cloning-based organ replacement technologies. I am now 3 years older, with just 11 years to go before I'm living on what will be, statistically, borrowed time. And with every year of the on-going ban I become more likely to be one of those already murdered. There is no guarantee that even a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic president will reverse the ban on therapeutic cloning. There is only a certainty that a Christo-Fascist president, or a Christo-Fascist majority in either house of Congress, will continue the democide.
Why Cloning Really Matters (September 18, 2005)
I am about to discuss a topic of intense personal self-interest. I am 59 years old. My father died at 73 from heart failure. I have another 14 years before I start living, by biological prediction, on borrowed time. I follow medical news, of advances in treatment of organ failure, as though my life depended on it. Because it does.
On 28-Oct-2004, the Medical Procedure News section of News-Medical.Net published an article under the title "Fetal tissue restores lost sight from retinitis pigmentosa." It started, "Three years ago Elisabeth Bryant believed she would be blind for the rest of her life." Two and a half years ago she received a transplant of a sheet of retinal cells from an aborted fetus. Her vision has improved from 20:800 to 20:84 since, and she can see well enough to read, play computer games and check emails.
Bryant was the first of six patients in whom the lost function of an important organ was restored with fetal organ transplants. Some people have a problem with this:
One accusation of those opposed to using fetal tissue is that women might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives. "People are going to claim that we are promoting abortion," says Norman Radtke, the surgeon who carried out the transplants at the Norton Audubon Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. A few countries, such as the UK, already have clear guidelines to ensure this does not happen. "The guidelines are meant to prevent the deliberate conception and termination for treatment of a particular person," says Stephen Minger, head of the stem cell laboratory at King's College London.
In much of the world therapeutic cloning is banned because of the superstitious belief that embryos and fetuses -- even those without a developed brain -- are possessed of some ghostly version of a brainless, incorporeal consciousness. To the extent that any research on therapeutic cloning is permitted at all, it is permitted only to the point of collecting undifferentiated stem cells from a very early-stage embryo. Yet, as News-Medical notes, "the few attempts to treat degenerative eye diseases with stem cells in animals have failed, as have attempts to transplant unstructured groups of cells into the retina ... no one is anywhere near recreating the complex structure of the retina using stem cells."
Cloning is seldom mentioned in connection with the spectacular success of fetal retina transplants. Yet this proof-of-concept work bears heavily on the ethics of banning therapeutic cloning and the growing of cloned fetuses for transplants. The retina is literally the thinnest important organ in the human body. Because it is only a few cells thick, transplanting a retina from a genetically different fetus does not provoke the massive immune rejection that would greet a transplanted heart or liver or lung. Yet there is a natural way to prevent immune rejection from happening at all: grow a fetus from an embryo that was cloned from the patient for the express purpose of making organs for transplantation. For Homo sapiens, the animal that lives by the mind, there is surely nothing more natural than to use its intelligence to defeat death from organ failure.
We can now understand the perverse fear that free individuals blinded by retinitis pigmentosa, or their mothers or daughters or sisters, "might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives." If they were permitted to save their own sight, or the sight of a relative, they might get the idea of gestating a cloned fetus to save their own lives, or the lives of their relatives, from death by heart failure, by liver failure, by lung failure or by kidney failure. Hence therapeutic cloning -- even to save one's own life, or the life of a sibling or parent or child -- must be strictly prohibited by the authorities. If people are permitted to save their own lives, they might think that they individually, and not the state over them, are their own lives' proper owners. People in positions of power -- even if they themselves are free of superstitious beliefs about some ghostly consciousness in a brainless fetus -- cannot allow such a thing.
We do not know, at this point, to what stage of gestation, or post-gestation age, a fetus may need to be grown before a specific organ is harvested. However, unless the fetus becomes a conscious human, there is in objective ethics no conceivable problem with growing one to whatever stage is needed. As long as the fetus is surgically decorticated before its brain develops a capacity for consciousness, the fetus remains an artifact -- created by a free individual for a purpose of her choice -- and, having been decorticated, never becomes a person. So-called "ethical concerns" with therapeutic cloning are the politicians' mask -- an instrument for obtaining "popular assent" to mass murder.
Democide, as we know from history, does not require gas chambers or killing fields. It is enough to prevent the victims from doing what they would have done, if free, to continue their lives. In the great famine, Lenin murdered between 4 million and 9 million Ukrainian peasants by prohibiting, as contrary to Socialist Morality, the practice of trade in food. Through prohibiting what is required for men to keep on living, one can murder millions without the cost of gas or bullets or executioners. A less frequently discussed example is the current worldwide ban on DDT, by which some 50 million people have been murdered when denied the means to protect their lives from malaria. Let us calculate the dimensions of the democide that the ban on cloning amounts to.
In 2002 -- the most recent year for which government statistics are available -- 696,400 Americans died of heart failure, 124,770 of chronic lung failure, 73,247 of diabetes, 40,801 of kidney failure and 27,247 of liver failure. The total for these five is 762,465 deaths per year in the United States, out of a population of about 300 million. Half of the world's population, about 3 billion -- ten times the population of the United States -- live in countries advanced enough to use therapeutic cloning and fetal organ transplant technology if it were legal. The proportional estimate of death from failure of one of the above 5 major organs -- in advanced countries only -- is about 7.6 million. If only half of those deaths could be eventually prevented by application of cloning and fetal organ transplant technologies, then every year of delay in the development of those technologies results in 3.8 million preventable deaths. Therapeutic cloning was banned in the United States in July 2001. Shortly thereafter, under pressure from the Bush Administration, it was banned nearly everywhere around the world.
President Bush has promised to veto any repeal of the cloning ban as long as he remains in office. By the end of his presidency, the total number of people killed by the ban that delays medical research into human cloning will exceed 30 million. We are witnessing the third-largest democide in history.
Why Cloning Really Matters (September 18, 2005)
I am about to discuss a topic of intense personal self-interest. I am 59 years old. My father died at 73 from heart failure. I have another 14 years before I start living, by biological prediction, on borrowed time. I follow medical news, of advances in treatment of organ failure, as though my life depended on it. Because it does.
On 28-Oct-2004, the Medical Procedure News section of News-Medical.Net published an article under the title "Fetal tissue restores lost sight from retinitis pigmentosa." It started, "Three years ago Elisabeth Bryant believed she would be blind for the rest of her life." Two and a half years ago she received a transplant of a sheet of retinal cells from an aborted fetus. Her vision has improved from 20:800 to 20:84 since, and she can see well enough to read, play computer games and check emails.
Bryant was the first of six patients in whom the lost function of an important organ was restored with fetal organ transplants. Some people have a problem with this:
One accusation of those opposed to using fetal tissue is that women might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives. "People are going to claim that we are promoting abortion," says Norman Radtke, the surgeon who carried out the transplants at the Norton Audubon Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. A few countries, such as the UK, already have clear guidelines to ensure this does not happen. "The guidelines are meant to prevent the deliberate conception and termination for treatment of a particular person," says Stephen Minger, head of the stem cell laboratory at King's College London.
In much of the world therapeutic cloning is banned because of the superstitious belief that embryos and fetuses -- even those without a developed brain -- are possessed of some ghostly version of a brainless, incorporeal consciousness. To the extent that any research on therapeutic cloning is permitted at all, it is permitted only to the point of collecting undifferentiated stem cells from a very early-stage embryo. Yet, as News-Medical notes, "the few attempts to treat degenerative eye diseases with stem cells in animals have failed, as have attempts to transplant unstructured groups of cells into the retina ... no one is anywhere near recreating the complex structure of the retina using stem cells."
Cloning is seldom mentioned in connection with the spectacular success of fetal retina transplants. Yet this proof-of-concept work bears heavily on the ethics of banning therapeutic cloning and the growing of cloned fetuses for transplants. The retina is literally the thinnest important organ in the human body. Because it is only a few cells thick, transplanting a retina from a genetically different fetus does not provoke the massive immune rejection that would greet a transplanted heart or liver or lung. Yet there is a natural way to prevent immune rejection from happening at all: grow a fetus from an embryo that was cloned from the patient for the express purpose of making organs for transplantation. For Homo sapiens, the animal that lives by the mind, there is surely nothing more natural than to use its intelligence to defeat death from organ failure.
We can now understand the perverse fear that free individuals blinded by retinitis pigmentosa, or their mothers or daughters or sisters, "might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives." If they were permitted to save their own sight, or the sight of a relative, they might get the idea of gestating a cloned fetus to save their own lives, or the lives of their relatives, from death by heart failure, by liver failure, by lung failure or by kidney failure. Hence therapeutic cloning -- even to save one's own life, or the life of a sibling or parent or child -- must be strictly prohibited by the authorities. If people are permitted to save their own lives, they might think that they individually, and not the state over them, are their own lives' proper owners. People in positions of power -- even if they themselves are free of superstitious beliefs about some ghostly consciousness in a brainless fetus -- cannot allow such a thing.
We do not know, at this point, to what stage of gestation, or post-gestation age, a fetus may need to be grown before a specific organ is harvested. However, unless the fetus becomes a conscious human, there is in objective ethics no conceivable problem with growing one to whatever stage is needed. As long as the fetus is surgically decorticated before its brain develops a capacity for consciousness, the fetus remains an artifact -- created by a free individual for a purpose of her choice -- and, having been decorticated, never becomes a person. So-called "ethical concerns" with therapeutic cloning are the politicians' mask -- an instrument for obtaining "popular assent" to mass murder.
Democide, as we know from history, does not require gas chambers or killing fields. It is enough to prevent the victims from doing what they would have done, if free, to continue their lives. In the great famine, Lenin murdered between 4 million and 9 million Ukrainian peasants by prohibiting, as contrary to Socialist Morality, the practice of trade in food. Through prohibiting what is required for men to keep on living, one can murder millions without the cost of gas or bullets or executioners. A less frequently discussed example is the current worldwide ban on DDT, by which some 50 million people have been murdered when denied the means to protect their lives from malaria. Let us calculate the dimensions of the democide that the ban on cloning amounts to.
In 2002 -- the most recent year for which government statistics are available -- 696,400 Americans died of heart failure, 124,770 of chronic lung failure, 73,247 of diabetes, 40,801 of kidney failure and 27,247 of liver failure. The total for these five is 762,465 deaths per year in the United States, out of a population of about 300 million. Half of the world's population, about 3 billion -- ten times the population of the United States -- live in countries advanced enough to use therapeutic cloning and fetal organ transplant technology if it were legal. The proportional estimate of death from failure of one of the above 5 major organs -- in advanced countries only -- is about 7.6 million. If only half of those deaths could be eventually prevented by application of cloning and fetal organ transplant technologies, then every year of delay in the development of those technologies results in 3.8 million preventable deaths. Therapeutic cloning was banned in the United States in July 2001. Shortly thereafter, under pressure from the Bush Administration, it was banned nearly everywhere around the world.
President Bush has promised to veto any repeal of the cloning ban as long as he remains in office. By the end of his presidency, the total number of people killed by the ban that delays medical research into human cloning will exceed 30 million. We are witnessing the third-largest democide in history.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Darkness made visible in Michigan
Every time I think that I have seen the outer limit of America's ongoing headlong rush to the dark ages, I soon find that what I had hoped was the outer limit is seen by promoters of the new theocracy as a mere provocation:
Unregulated research. In America. Can you imagine that? What would Benjamin Franklin think?
The Kovacses want to give their embryos to science, but they cannot donate them in Michigan because a 1978 state law prohibits the destruction of embryos for research. Michigan voters on Nov. 4 will decide on a constitutional amendment that would allow researchers to create new stem cell lines using embryos that would otherwise be discarded.
The effort faces stiff opposition from Michigan Citizens Against Unrestricted Science & Experimentation, a coalition of interest groups that say Proposal 2's language is overly broad and that passage could lead to unregulated research and even human cloning.
Unregulated research. In America. Can you imagine that? What would Benjamin Franklin think?
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Greenspan, Philosophy, and Homo Economicus
I am braking my pre-election-political-activism hiatus from this blog because something happened today that merits blogging about.
Former US central banker Alan Greenspan, the public figure most closely - and falsely - associated in the minds of many Americans with the intellectual legacy of Ayn Rand, admitted his - and nearly the entire economic profession's - error in assuming that economic actors will act, automatically and intuitively, without any need for principled thought or for philosophy, in their actual self-interest. This has been the most fundamental assumption of economics for centuries: that Man is Homo Economicus, given to automatic optimization of his actions, in any context, for his own interest. According to the thesis of Homo Economicus, the economist need not concern himself with questions of cognition, conceptual skill, principles, epistemology. The Central Banker needs only to create a catallactic context in which economic actors can maximize their returns by acting as the Central Banker wishes them to act, and they will automatically do so.
What is wrong with this picture?
Ayn Rand's most profound insight is that Homo Sapiens does not have any kind of inborm "ethical intuition" or "economic instinct" that would enable humans to maintain and enhance our lives automatically. To act in the best interest of one's life requires cognition: focus, measurement, concepts, principles, logic. To do cognition right, requires philosophy: ontology, epistemology, ethics. Yet nothing, absolutely nothing in philosophy and cognition applicable to life on Earth is inborn, intuitive, or automatic.
The thesis of "Homo Economicus," the idea that right, self-interested action requires neither cognitive skill nor philosophical knowledge, was not truly tested until recent times. Between the birth of the science of economics, a child of the Enlightenment, and the last quarter of the twentieth century, few people were wealthy enough to influence economic calculations who did not have some education in conceptual thought. It was only the generation of what Randian philosopher Leonard Peikoff calls "Johnny can't think" that brought about the tragedy of a country whose citizens, bankers and business leaders would test the thesis of "Homo Economicus" upon themselves. Now that experiment is over. And we know the result: Rational self-interest is not automatic. It requires reason. It requires focus. It requires principles. And it requires philosophy.
Apart from "educators" raising a nation of Johnnies who can't think, the worst result of the anti-conceptual pseudo-philosophy of Pragmatism is that it brought philosophy into disrepute in America. Americans, bankers and all, and (especially) American economists, have come to believe that philosophy does not matter, that it is not needed in "real life." We are now living the result of that belief.
Ayn Rand asked, "Philosophy, Who Needs IT?" Alan Greenspan, I hope, just found out that he does. So does the science of Economics. So does America, and, come to think of it, so does the entire human civilization on Earth.
Former US central banker Alan Greenspan, the public figure most closely - and falsely - associated in the minds of many Americans with the intellectual legacy of Ayn Rand, admitted his - and nearly the entire economic profession's - error in assuming that economic actors will act, automatically and intuitively, without any need for principled thought or for philosophy, in their actual self-interest. This has been the most fundamental assumption of economics for centuries: that Man is Homo Economicus, given to automatic optimization of his actions, in any context, for his own interest. According to the thesis of Homo Economicus, the economist need not concern himself with questions of cognition, conceptual skill, principles, epistemology. The Central Banker needs only to create a catallactic context in which economic actors can maximize their returns by acting as the Central Banker wishes them to act, and they will automatically do so.
What is wrong with this picture?
Ayn Rand's most profound insight is that Homo Sapiens does not have any kind of inborm "ethical intuition" or "economic instinct" that would enable humans to maintain and enhance our lives automatically. To act in the best interest of one's life requires cognition: focus, measurement, concepts, principles, logic. To do cognition right, requires philosophy: ontology, epistemology, ethics. Yet nothing, absolutely nothing in philosophy and cognition applicable to life on Earth is inborn, intuitive, or automatic.
The thesis of "Homo Economicus," the idea that right, self-interested action requires neither cognitive skill nor philosophical knowledge, was not truly tested until recent times. Between the birth of the science of economics, a child of the Enlightenment, and the last quarter of the twentieth century, few people were wealthy enough to influence economic calculations who did not have some education in conceptual thought. It was only the generation of what Randian philosopher Leonard Peikoff calls "Johnny can't think" that brought about the tragedy of a country whose citizens, bankers and business leaders would test the thesis of "Homo Economicus" upon themselves. Now that experiment is over. And we know the result: Rational self-interest is not automatic. It requires reason. It requires focus. It requires principles. And it requires philosophy.
Apart from "educators" raising a nation of Johnnies who can't think, the worst result of the anti-conceptual pseudo-philosophy of Pragmatism is that it brought philosophy into disrepute in America. Americans, bankers and all, and (especially) American economists, have come to believe that philosophy does not matter, that it is not needed in "real life." We are now living the result of that belief.
Ayn Rand asked, "Philosophy, Who Needs IT?" Alan Greenspan, I hope, just found out that he does. So does the science of Economics. So does America, and, come to think of it, so does the entire human civilization on Earth.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Hiatus in blogging
I anticipate a hiatus in blogging until after the elections. The elections are an opportunity for Objectivist activism, and also a chance for me to make a real difference in my life and in the lives of people I value. Working with young people as a university teacher, I am directly aware of the threat posed by California Proposition 4 to their right to chart the course of their lives by the judgment of their own minds. And, more than any other matter in which I can make a difference, Proposition 4 is still too close to call. However small the number of minds I can change, I have a realistic hope of influencing the outcome. My OpEds on Proposition 4 have been printed in newspapers (the largest being the Orange County Register) covering 8 million people - but this is only one-sixth of California.
After the elections I'll blog about lessons learned and about strategy for the future.
After the elections I'll blog about lessons learned and about strategy for the future.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Bush-Appointed Judges Exempt Earmarks from First Amendment
The title (above this text on my blog) links to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a ruling by Bush-appointed Seventh Circuit judges. The ruling upholds a federal earmark grant of taxpayer funds for a Catholic university program of "opportunities for spiritual growth, including prayer services, Mass, course work, and retreats." With Theo-Republican judges, the United States is rapidly becoming one more banana republic, just like the one that first gave vent to an observation increasingly applicable under such "non-activist" courts: "Constitution c'est papier."
Friday, October 10, 2008
Adolf Hitler anticipates Sarah Palin
Jim Walker has an interesting page about matters related to the frequently heard allegation that Hitler was an Atheist. In everything that Hitler is known to have said or written, Herr Uber-Adolf always emphasizes his allegiance to Christianity and to the ideas of Jesus. The only source for Hitler's alleged anti-religious sentiments is the Martin Bormann version of Hitler's "Table Talk." The original notes by Heinrich Heim and Henry Piker, on which the Bormann version is supposedly based, were destroyed. And the problem with believing anything written by Martin Bormann, is that Martin Bormann was a notorious, pathological liar. Henry Piker wrote explicitly that "no confidence can be placed in Bormann's editing of it," and that the extant version is full of "Bormann's alterations, not authorised by me." There is, however, an alternative (and reasonably reliable) record of Hitler's private thoughts: Wagener, Otto. Hitler--Memoirs of a Confidant. Ed. by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. Trans. by Ruth Hein. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, c1985.
Here is Hitler's view of Socialism, Christianity and Jesus, from pp. 139-140 of those memoirs:
Change the German stuff to its middle-American equivalents. If the result sounds a lot like what we have been hearing lately from Sarah Palin - essentially everything, except only that Hitler was explicit about Christian Socialism while Palin sticks to euphemisms - it probably isn't plagiarism (I've never heard Palin accused of reading books from Yale University Press) - just similar minds thinking alike.
Here is Hitler's view of Socialism, Christianity and Jesus, from pp. 139-140 of those memoirs:
Socialism is a question of attitude toward life, of the ethical outlook on life of all who live together in a common ethnic or national space. Socialism is a Weltanschauung!
But in actual fact there is nothing new about this Weltanschauung. Whenever I read the New Testament Gospels and the revelations of various of the prophets and imagine myself back in the era of the Roman and late Hellenistic, as well as the Oriental world, I am astonished at all that has been made of the teachings of these divinely inspired men, especially Jesus Christ, which are so clear and unique, heightened to religiosity. They were the ones who created this new worldview which we now call socialism, they established it, they taught it and they lived it! But the communities that called themselves Christian churches did not understand it! Or if they did, they denied Christ and betrayed him! For they transformed the holy idea of Christian socialism into its opposite! They killed it, just as, at the time, the Jews nailed Jesus to the cross; they buried it, just as the body of Christ was buried. But they allowed Christ to be resurrected, instigating the belief that his teachings too, were reborn!
It is in this that the monstrous crime of these enemies of Christian socialism lies! What the basest hypocrisy they carry before them the cross-- the instrument of that murder which, in their thoughts, they commit over and over-- as a new divine sign of Christian awareness, and allow mankind to kneel to it. They even pretend to be preaching the teachings of Christ. But their lives and deeds are a constant blow against these teachings and their Creator and a defamation of God!
We are the first to exhume these teachings! Through us alone, and not until now, do these teachings celebrate their resurrection! Mary and Magdalene stood at the empty tomb. For they were seeking the dead man! But we intend to raise the treasures of the living Christ!
Herein lies the essential element of our mission: we must bring back to the German Volk the recognition of those teachings! For what did the falsification of the original concept of Christian love, of the community of fate before God and of socialism lead to? By their fruits ye shall know them! The suppression of freedom of opinion, the persecution of the true Christians, the vile mass murders of the Inquisition and the burning of witches, the armed campaigns against the people of free and true Christian faith, the destruction of towns and villages, the hauling away of their cattle and their goods, the destruction of their flourishing economies, and the condemnation of their leaders before tribunals, which, in their unrelenting hypocrisy, can only be described as balaphemous. That is the true face of those sanctimonious churches that have placed themselves between God and man, motivated by selfishness, personal greed for recognition and gain, and the ambition to maintain their high-handed willfulness against Christ's deep understanding of the necessity of a socialist community of men and nations. We must turn all the sentiments of the Volk, all its thinking, acting, even its beliefs, away from the anti-Christian, smug individualism of the past, from the egotism and stupid Phariseeism of personal arrogance, and we must educate the youth in particular in the spirit of those of Christ's words that we must interpret anew: love one another; be considerate of your fellow man; remember that each one of you is not alone a creature of God, but that you are all brothers! This youth will, with loathing and contempt, abandon those hypocrites who have Christ on their lips but the devil in their hearts, who give alms in order to remain undisturbed as they themselves throw their money around, who invoke the Fatherland as they fill their own purses by the toil of others, who preach peace and incite to war....
Change the German stuff to its middle-American equivalents. If the result sounds a lot like what we have been hearing lately from Sarah Palin - essentially everything, except only that Hitler was explicit about Christian Socialism while Palin sticks to euphemisms - it probably isn't plagiarism (I've never heard Palin accused of reading books from Yale University Press) - just similar minds thinking alike.
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
California Proposition 4 and the Self-Lobotomy of the Pragmatist Left
Our totalitarian Christianists are pushing not one but two constitutional amendments in the coming election: Proposition 8, which would outlaw marriage for Gays and Lesbians, and Proposition 4, which would mandate parental notification and impose a de-facto parental veto of young women's abortion plans. And because GLs vote, and 17-year-old women don't, the fund-raisers of the left have already handed a victory on the latter to the National-Christianist mob.
You would think that my University colleagues would have something to say about that. Most students at the university where I teach are the first generation of their families to attend college. Many of their parents are immigrants, often from collectivist cultures that have no notion of individual rights - nor sympathy with the American idea that a young woman has an individual right to chart the course of her own life. We know from statistics that some of our students were pregnant in their teens. If Proposition 4 had been law, some of the most talented would not be studying at a university. They would be working in a menial job, supporting an infant or child carried to term against their will.
But my University colleagues have been silent. Even to have a motive for speaking out would imply an endorsement of the principle of individual rights, and of the superiority of the American culture of individual rights against the collectivist cultures of the rest of the world and of the growing Christianist movement at home. It would contradict the dogma of multiculturalism, and this is what the Christianists appeal to and exploit.
No one, inside or outside a university, dares to identify the issue that separates a parental veto of abortion, from a requirement for parental consent to treatment at a tanning salon. I did try to do so in op-eds I sent to several newspapers, but none has been printed so far (Subsequent note: now one has been. See the bottom of this posting.) As I wrote in the submitted op-eds, Proposition 4 is the latest in a decades-long series of attempts to obliterate what the American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand called "the right of young people to set the course of their own lives." What a young woman does about an unintended pregnancy may affect the course of her life for the next 19 years. Most of those years will come after she becomes an independent adult. Those years - indispensable years in which to complete her education and start a productive life - are rightly hers to decide about. This puts her decision on abortion into a different category from short-term decisions whose consequences - like the risk of needing the care of a dermatologist after a visit to a tanning salon - are limited to the immediate future, when her parents will still be paying the bills. Her decision on abortion is rightly hers alone: she is the one, who will bear the burden of care for a child if she is forced to continue her pregnancy and to give birth against her will.
It is obvious why the more Christianist editors would reject my op-eds. But why would the supposedly secular ones? I suspect that it is because the principle here, is the principle of responsibility - and it is the Pragmatist left that has been fighting to sever the link between decisions and consequences. The Christianists know this, and they smell the blood from the secular Pragmatists' self-inflicted lobotomy.
Proposition 4 was written to deceive the voters into believing that it is "filled with caveats and exceptions." The young woman could seek a waiver from a court - but only by presenting "clear and convincing evidence" for her case. This is not the "preponderance of evidence" standard normally used in civil courts. "Clear and convincing" is a much more demanding standard, so demanding that it is used in civil courts to justify the imposition of punitive damages. No lawyer has ever met the standard of "clear and convincing evidence" without weeks, months or years of preparation. No lawyer that I know can even imagine this standard as something that a teenage girl might meet in a brief hearing held on a single day's notice.
Proposition 4 pretends to exempt from its requirements those young women whose pregnancy carries serious medical risks. But this exemption is limited to a risk of immediate death, or of "a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function." A non-immediate risk, even as severe as a family history of post-partum depression and suicide, would not qualify.
Proposition 4 also seems to create a narrow exception for young women who claim to have been severely abused by their parents. When such allegations are made, the notice may be delivered, with a written allegation of abuse, to a "grandparent, stepparent, foster parent, aunt, uncle, sibling, half-sibling, or first cousin." Most young women don't have foster parents or step-parents, and everyone else on this list is a blood relative of the young woman's parents, and is not likely to take the young woman's side against them. In some cultures the young woman's pregnancy is enough to discredit her. Few young women have adult relatives whom they can trust to keep the pregnancy secret from the rest of the family, even if that pregnancy resulted from abuse.
If read carelessly enough, Proposition 4 seems to bar parental coercion of the young woman "through force (such as forcible confinement,) threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter." But this bar applies only to coercion intended to force the young woman to undergo an abortion. Proposition 4 conspicuously does not bar parents from using forcible confinement, or other "force, threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter" to force their daughter to continue her pregnancy, eventually forcing her to give birth against her will. This asymmetry effectively endorses parental force - against that pregnant young woman who wishes to set her life on a course that does not include giving birth in her teens. As I wrote in the rejected op-eds: those who hear Proposition 4 defended as a measure for parental involvement, should understand, before they vote, exactly what kind of parental involvement is being endorsed.
Existing California law protects the young woman's individual right to set the course of her life by the judgment of her own mind. If Proposition 4 were to pass, that individual right will become California history. This is what happens when militant religion is given all the room in the world, by the secular side's self-inflicted philosophical lobotomy implicit in Pragmatism.
This November I will hold my nose and vote for the Democratic ticket, because I agree with Leonard Peikoff's analysis: a vote for the Republicans will bring even more Christo-Fascist oppression than we already live under today, and with Palin on the ticket, a realistic threat of National Christianist theocracy in the United States within the next 4 years. A Democratic victory will buy time for a counter-revolution. Perhaps as long as two decades' time. This is a fight in which we have no allies but zombies, and no weapon except our naked minds.
(P.S. The _Daily Breeze_, the local newspaper of the Coastal Southern Los Angeles County and nearby communities, covering a population of about 1.5 million people, just published the op-ed I sent them. Yippee!)
(P.P.S. Other versions of my OpEd were printed in the Press-Telegram (Long Beach and surrounding communities, population a half-million or so, and the Orange County Register, one of the world's largest newspapers, covering a county of 3 million people. And there are more left to try - I haven't covered all of California yet!)
You would think that my University colleagues would have something to say about that. Most students at the university where I teach are the first generation of their families to attend college. Many of their parents are immigrants, often from collectivist cultures that have no notion of individual rights - nor sympathy with the American idea that a young woman has an individual right to chart the course of her own life. We know from statistics that some of our students were pregnant in their teens. If Proposition 4 had been law, some of the most talented would not be studying at a university. They would be working in a menial job, supporting an infant or child carried to term against their will.
But my University colleagues have been silent. Even to have a motive for speaking out would imply an endorsement of the principle of individual rights, and of the superiority of the American culture of individual rights against the collectivist cultures of the rest of the world and of the growing Christianist movement at home. It would contradict the dogma of multiculturalism, and this is what the Christianists appeal to and exploit.
No one, inside or outside a university, dares to identify the issue that separates a parental veto of abortion, from a requirement for parental consent to treatment at a tanning salon. I did try to do so in op-eds I sent to several newspapers, but none has been printed so far (Subsequent note: now one has been. See the bottom of this posting.) As I wrote in the submitted op-eds, Proposition 4 is the latest in a decades-long series of attempts to obliterate what the American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand called "the right of young people to set the course of their own lives." What a young woman does about an unintended pregnancy may affect the course of her life for the next 19 years. Most of those years will come after she becomes an independent adult. Those years - indispensable years in which to complete her education and start a productive life - are rightly hers to decide about. This puts her decision on abortion into a different category from short-term decisions whose consequences - like the risk of needing the care of a dermatologist after a visit to a tanning salon - are limited to the immediate future, when her parents will still be paying the bills. Her decision on abortion is rightly hers alone: she is the one, who will bear the burden of care for a child if she is forced to continue her pregnancy and to give birth against her will.
It is obvious why the more Christianist editors would reject my op-eds. But why would the supposedly secular ones? I suspect that it is because the principle here, is the principle of responsibility - and it is the Pragmatist left that has been fighting to sever the link between decisions and consequences. The Christianists know this, and they smell the blood from the secular Pragmatists' self-inflicted lobotomy.
Proposition 4 was written to deceive the voters into believing that it is "filled with caveats and exceptions." The young woman could seek a waiver from a court - but only by presenting "clear and convincing evidence" for her case. This is not the "preponderance of evidence" standard normally used in civil courts. "Clear and convincing" is a much more demanding standard, so demanding that it is used in civil courts to justify the imposition of punitive damages. No lawyer has ever met the standard of "clear and convincing evidence" without weeks, months or years of preparation. No lawyer that I know can even imagine this standard as something that a teenage girl might meet in a brief hearing held on a single day's notice.
Proposition 4 pretends to exempt from its requirements those young women whose pregnancy carries serious medical risks. But this exemption is limited to a risk of immediate death, or of "a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function." A non-immediate risk, even as severe as a family history of post-partum depression and suicide, would not qualify.
Proposition 4 also seems to create a narrow exception for young women who claim to have been severely abused by their parents. When such allegations are made, the notice may be delivered, with a written allegation of abuse, to a "grandparent, stepparent, foster parent, aunt, uncle, sibling, half-sibling, or first cousin." Most young women don't have foster parents or step-parents, and everyone else on this list is a blood relative of the young woman's parents, and is not likely to take the young woman's side against them. In some cultures the young woman's pregnancy is enough to discredit her. Few young women have adult relatives whom they can trust to keep the pregnancy secret from the rest of the family, even if that pregnancy resulted from abuse.
If read carelessly enough, Proposition 4 seems to bar parental coercion of the young woman "through force (such as forcible confinement,) threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter." But this bar applies only to coercion intended to force the young woman to undergo an abortion. Proposition 4 conspicuously does not bar parents from using forcible confinement, or other "force, threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter" to force their daughter to continue her pregnancy, eventually forcing her to give birth against her will. This asymmetry effectively endorses parental force - against that pregnant young woman who wishes to set her life on a course that does not include giving birth in her teens. As I wrote in the rejected op-eds: those who hear Proposition 4 defended as a measure for parental involvement, should understand, before they vote, exactly what kind of parental involvement is being endorsed.
Existing California law protects the young woman's individual right to set the course of her life by the judgment of her own mind. If Proposition 4 were to pass, that individual right will become California history. This is what happens when militant religion is given all the room in the world, by the secular side's self-inflicted philosophical lobotomy implicit in Pragmatism.
This November I will hold my nose and vote for the Democratic ticket, because I agree with Leonard Peikoff's analysis: a vote for the Republicans will bring even more Christo-Fascist oppression than we already live under today, and with Palin on the ticket, a realistic threat of National Christianist theocracy in the United States within the next 4 years. A Democratic victory will buy time for a counter-revolution. Perhaps as long as two decades' time. This is a fight in which we have no allies but zombies, and no weapon except our naked minds.
(P.S. The _Daily Breeze_, the local newspaper of the Coastal Southern Los Angeles County and nearby communities, covering a population of about 1.5 million people, just published the op-ed I sent them. Yippee!)
(P.P.S. Other versions of my OpEd were printed in the Press-Telegram (Long Beach and surrounding communities, population a half-million or so, and the Orange County Register, one of the world's largest newspapers, covering a county of 3 million people. And there are more left to try - I haven't covered all of California yet!)
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Teaching Math from Logic in the Primary Grades
I recently read a posting entitled "Math Magic" by Lisa VanDamme on the blog of The Objective Standard. What VanDamme describes seems to be a slow re-invention of the elementary mathematics curriculum that I fondly remember from grade school in Poland, the Łukasiewicz curriculum. Łukasiewicz, a philosopher of logic and mathematics who would later write Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic (Oxford University Press, 1957,) was briefly (in 1919) Poland's minister of Education, which prompted him to write a radical, logic-based primary-school mathematics curriculum. The greatest difference between his curriculum and the usual one was the removal of almost all memorization, and its replacement with algorithms based on principles that the student already understood. For example, no memorizing the 9 times N multiplication table: the student learns to take 10 times N (already understood, easy) and subtract N. Of course, after calculating the result a few times the student remembers the result, at least as well as though it had been memorized - but also understands how getting this result was grounded in previously understood principles.
One beautiful thing was really understanding the logic of everyday algorithms. Learning to add and subtract minutes, hours of the day and days of the week - in first grade, I understood not only how to tell time, but also the logical principles of modulo arithmetic and number bases. Another was how quickly one could advance through concepts when no time was wasted on memorization: the Łukasiewicz curriculum, at least in the school I attended, got to analytic geometry and trigonometry in grade 4, calculus in grade 5. I don't know if the Łukasiewicz curriculum was ever translated into English, although it is the standard in Hungary, Japan etc.
One beautiful thing was really understanding the logic of everyday algorithms. Learning to add and subtract minutes, hours of the day and days of the week - in first grade, I understood not only how to tell time, but also the logical principles of modulo arithmetic and number bases. Another was how quickly one could advance through concepts when no time was wasted on memorization: the Łukasiewicz curriculum, at least in the school I attended, got to analytic geometry and trigonometry in grade 4, calculus in grade 5. I don't know if the Łukasiewicz curriculum was ever translated into English, although it is the standard in Hungary, Japan etc.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The History and Relevance of Enlightenment Ideas
The title (above this text on my blog - AR) is a link to a great panel about the History and Relevance of Enlightenment Ideas - 5 speakers, 1 hour and 34 minutes. Much to agree with, some to disagree, but mostly - useful insights from intelligent speakers. But a note to fora.com: next time, please post a list of speakers to copy and paste! Frank Furedi, Hirsi Ali, 3 others...
Another Economic Crisis. Another Age of Dictators?
It is now likely that ongoing government intervention will lengthen and exacerbate the current economic crisis, just as such intervention exacerbated the crash of 1929 into the Great Depression. The Great Depression led to the establishment of fascist, socialist, or mixed fascist-socialist regimes in most previously liberal countries, including the short-lived "New Deal" in the United States, the National Socialist regime in Germany, and a Socialist-Fascist civil war in Spain - an era known to historians as "The Age of Dictators." What, then, are the likely political consequences of the current crisis?
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Robert Heilbroner, the world's most eminent Marxist economist, examined the newly declassified record of the Soviet economy. The results disconfirmed, with the actual evidence of the facts of reality, the foundations of Marxist economics, and the ideology built on that foundation. Marxism, as a foundation for Socialism, was dead.
Marxism, for all its horrors, was an Enlightenment-based idea, and therefore subject to reality-based disconfirmation. As Heilbroner demonstrated from the evidence, "The crucial missing element (in Socialism) is not so much information, as Mises and Hayek argued, as it is the motivation to act on information." Marxist Socialism failed in reality, because it had inherited from Christendom its belief that men can be motivated by appeal to self-sacrifice. It failed because an economy for humans, an economy that works in reality, requires, as its foundation, a morality of self-interest. (This is yet another instance of a fact that was first derived from philosophical considerations by Ayn Rand, and later confirmed independently by a scientist's integration of relevant objective measurements of facts of reality.)
The spectre of the Twenty-First Century is the return of Socialism - that is, of economic systems based on an ideology of self-sacrifice - no longer on the basis of Marx's incomplete embrace of the Enlightenment, but on the basis of Christian "Imitatio Dei" - the original source of all ideologies of self-sacrifice, including Marxism. Economic crises - the previous Great Depression, and the one now around us - bring a popular demand to re-base the economy on a foundation of common morality, which for Christians, as for Marxists, refers to their (pseudo-)morality of self-sacrifice.
But it is a mistake to take the parallels too far. When the Great Depression had run its course, it did not take long for Americans (still animated, back then, by the Enlightenment ideas of America's Founding Fathers) to dump the Marxoid policies of the early FDR administrations and to return to something that at least pretended to be Capitalism. Socialism persisted the longest in Russia, in the world's most darkly mystical and, at its foundation, most deeply Christian culture. Today, the anti-intellectualism inculcated by a Pragmatist educational system has all but erased the ideas of the Enlightenment - America's founding ideas - from the culture of the majority of Americans. Kant, through Pragmatism, has limited Reason and given room to Faith. Leonard Peikoff demonstrates, in "The Ominous Parallels," how Kant's ideas led to National Socialism in Germany. Pragmatism, the dominant pseudo-philosophy of current American politics, is "Kant on Steroids." If a faith-based Fascism/Socialism were to take hold of America, then this time there will be no quick way out.
And so we come to the politics of the day.
In the last couple of weeks, Nick Provenzo and Diana Hsieh took the time to provoke some Christianists into writing and speaking their minds. The results show that the Christianists are fundamentally totalitarian: The theocratic Right lives by faith - and, as we have seen, responds to an argument mainly not with arguments but with wishes for and threats of violence, including murder - the argument from the fist and the knife. They are reason-proof (credo quoia absurdum) and evidence-proof. In their brains, arguments from reason and evidence invoke not thought, but resentment against the intellect for being capable of thought. It is this resentment of the intellect that is the direct cause of the appeal to violence in their responses - and in the policies that a McCain-Palin government would enact and enforce. The Christianists are as totalitarian as the Communists, the National Socialists and the Fascists of the previous century, or their Islamist contemporaries. But the Christianists, unlike the Islamists, are here in America and not mostly overseas. They wear Respectability. And one of them is the vice-presidential candidate to a presidential candidate who is in his seventies and in poor health - a probable replacement President.
The threat level from the far left is not much in comparison. The remaining Communists - Stalinists, Trotskyites, Castroites, Maoists and so on - are totalitarian. But they are, everywhere in America including the Democratic Party, a disreputable fringe. The left-totalitarians can vote and contribute to political organizations and post to left-wing blogs, but not one of them has been elected to political office, anywhere in America, in the last half-century or so. There is no symmetry of threat level here, except in fiction.
The Democratic Party is now, just as it was in the days of FDR, the party of Pragmatist compromise: then of compromise with Marxism, now of compromise with religion. But if religion is the new Marxism, then the Republicans - explicitly in Sarah Palin, implicitly in Senator McCain - are the Communist Party of our time. And if they win, America will be to the 21st Century what Soviet Russia, or National Socialist Germany, were to the 20th.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Robert Heilbroner, the world's most eminent Marxist economist, examined the newly declassified record of the Soviet economy. The results disconfirmed, with the actual evidence of the facts of reality, the foundations of Marxist economics, and the ideology built on that foundation. Marxism, as a foundation for Socialism, was dead.
Marxism, for all its horrors, was an Enlightenment-based idea, and therefore subject to reality-based disconfirmation. As Heilbroner demonstrated from the evidence, "The crucial missing element (in Socialism) is not so much information, as Mises and Hayek argued, as it is the motivation to act on information." Marxist Socialism failed in reality, because it had inherited from Christendom its belief that men can be motivated by appeal to self-sacrifice. It failed because an economy for humans, an economy that works in reality, requires, as its foundation, a morality of self-interest. (This is yet another instance of a fact that was first derived from philosophical considerations by Ayn Rand, and later confirmed independently by a scientist's integration of relevant objective measurements of facts of reality.)
The spectre of the Twenty-First Century is the return of Socialism - that is, of economic systems based on an ideology of self-sacrifice - no longer on the basis of Marx's incomplete embrace of the Enlightenment, but on the basis of Christian "Imitatio Dei" - the original source of all ideologies of self-sacrifice, including Marxism. Economic crises - the previous Great Depression, and the one now around us - bring a popular demand to re-base the economy on a foundation of common morality, which for Christians, as for Marxists, refers to their (pseudo-)morality of self-sacrifice.
But it is a mistake to take the parallels too far. When the Great Depression had run its course, it did not take long for Americans (still animated, back then, by the Enlightenment ideas of America's Founding Fathers) to dump the Marxoid policies of the early FDR administrations and to return to something that at least pretended to be Capitalism. Socialism persisted the longest in Russia, in the world's most darkly mystical and, at its foundation, most deeply Christian culture. Today, the anti-intellectualism inculcated by a Pragmatist educational system has all but erased the ideas of the Enlightenment - America's founding ideas - from the culture of the majority of Americans. Kant, through Pragmatism, has limited Reason and given room to Faith. Leonard Peikoff demonstrates, in "The Ominous Parallels," how Kant's ideas led to National Socialism in Germany. Pragmatism, the dominant pseudo-philosophy of current American politics, is "Kant on Steroids." If a faith-based Fascism/Socialism were to take hold of America, then this time there will be no quick way out.
And so we come to the politics of the day.
In the last couple of weeks, Nick Provenzo and Diana Hsieh took the time to provoke some Christianists into writing and speaking their minds. The results show that the Christianists are fundamentally totalitarian: The theocratic Right lives by faith - and, as we have seen, responds to an argument mainly not with arguments but with wishes for and threats of violence, including murder - the argument from the fist and the knife. They are reason-proof (credo quoia absurdum) and evidence-proof. In their brains, arguments from reason and evidence invoke not thought, but resentment against the intellect for being capable of thought. It is this resentment of the intellect that is the direct cause of the appeal to violence in their responses - and in the policies that a McCain-Palin government would enact and enforce. The Christianists are as totalitarian as the Communists, the National Socialists and the Fascists of the previous century, or their Islamist contemporaries. But the Christianists, unlike the Islamists, are here in America and not mostly overseas. They wear Respectability. And one of them is the vice-presidential candidate to a presidential candidate who is in his seventies and in poor health - a probable replacement President.
The threat level from the far left is not much in comparison. The remaining Communists - Stalinists, Trotskyites, Castroites, Maoists and so on - are totalitarian. But they are, everywhere in America including the Democratic Party, a disreputable fringe. The left-totalitarians can vote and contribute to political organizations and post to left-wing blogs, but not one of them has been elected to political office, anywhere in America, in the last half-century or so. There is no symmetry of threat level here, except in fiction.
The Democratic Party is now, just as it was in the days of FDR, the party of Pragmatist compromise: then of compromise with Marxism, now of compromise with religion. But if religion is the new Marxism, then the Republicans - explicitly in Sarah Palin, implicitly in Senator McCain - are the Communist Party of our time. And if they win, America will be to the 21st Century what Soviet Russia, or National Socialist Germany, were to the 20th.
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