The outrage of September 11 and the tragedy of September 14, 2001 - and the choice of 2008.

It sets my teeth on edge whenever some timid weasel speaks of the Al Queda attacks of September 11, 2001 as a "tragedy." It was not a tragedy - which would mean something that was not the perpetrators' design. It was a massacre, a crime, an outrage. It was followed by a second outrage on September 13, when Christianist sociopaths Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson broadcast their endorsement of the perpetrators' "reasons" for the massacre. The real tragedy came on September 14, when President George W. Bush sponsored a "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance" at the Episcopal National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

I was born in Europe, where many a country has a thousand-year-old Established Church, and a solemn national memorial would have been held at its National Cathedral as a matter of course. The setting, hymns, and some perfunctory rituals would have been there to provide a link to national history and tradition - but the essential content was always secular, and addressed not to God but to all the citizens, whether atheist or devout, of the nation. This is what I expected - and got shocked. Bush's show, such as it was, was adressed not to Americans but to God - and it came across as a desperate attempt to convince Him and His believers across the world that America was not, contra bin Laden and Robertson and Falwell, a den of sinners deserving of additional Divine chastisment, but rather a nation of faithful believers in God, just as pious and self-sacrificing as the suicide terrorists who flew planes into buildings three days before; humbly begging God for forgiveness of whatever grievous sins had caused Him to withold His protection from America on that day.

There was a seemingly unending sequence of clerics of many different faiths, but their selection made it clear that this was not a memorial to all the Americans who had been murdered by the God-crazed killers. Religions that do not teach Man to shiver in fear of God - Humanists, Buddhists, Unitarians, Reconstructionist and Humanistic Jews - were not invited to speak, regardless of how many of their members had been murderd three days before. There was to be no dissent from a ritual of national abasement before the mystery of the Divine chastisement of His faithful, and from the promise that America was to be humble, self-sacrificing and God-fearing in the future, so as to avert a repetition of His wrath. One of the Islamic clerics invited to sermonize was a Wahabbi, of the religion (and the motivator) of the suicide fliers. This worthy cleric used the occasion to lecture Americans on the Sin of Pride.

There could have been no more total treason to America's Enlightenment foundations than this spectacle, directly out of the Dark Ages, of genuflexion to faith and self-sacrifice. Most of America's Founders believed in a God, having (in their time) no natural explanation for the apparent design of Man and of the world. But the intellectuals among them were Deists, believers in a God who created the world, and then set Nature to run its course without His further involvement. That "Men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights" was their way of saying, that every man had those rights by virtue of his nature as a man, and not by a grant or fiat from some religious book or political power. In 2001, it was America telling the world the opposite: that "liberty" (whatever that might mean, for it no longer meant individual rights) was not a matter of Man's nature, but a gift from a fickle God. And that Americans needed, and were going to, plead for this gift from God by abjuring reason and self-interest and by practicing self-sacrifice. And so this ceremony to erase, from Americans' minds and memory, the fact that what had been done to them on September 11 was done, by those 19 pious men, as an act of self-sacrifice to the God of their faith.

In the seven years since, the world learned that to our own religious gang - the one ruling an America that no longer recognizes individual rights as a matter of Man's nature - "liberty" now meant "democracy:" putting the people of each nation under the yoke of whatever regime that nation's majority (vox populi vox dei) would vote for. Even when that majority's choice was (as it predictably turned out to be in Iraq and Afghanistan) an Islamic Republic, where no human has any individual rights that the Shariah Police would need to recognize. And, to demonstrate to God that America was now a pious land of self-sacrifice for faith, the lives of American soldiers, of Americans, were sacrificed to set up and maintain the Islamic Republics that the local savages of Iraq and Afghanistan had voted into power. It was the new, pious government of America that had murdered these American soldiers, just as the dead of September 11 had been murdered by another religious gang, as a sacrifice to and for the rule of supernatural religion, and of its godly men, over the Earth.

Seven years after the tragedy of September 14 we live in a different America, a country made weaker and poorer by seven years of national self-sacrifice. Until this week, it looked like the next President, whoever he was, will be calling on Americans for more years of self-sacrifice; but neither of the two candidates would (and in this they both differ from the present occupant of the White House) actually and faithfully mean it. One of the candidates, John McCain, by legislation (especially McCain-Feingold) and by promising to appoint judges who will overturn Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, had appointed himself America's number-one enemy of the freedom of speech. So I planned to vote for the other, because doing so would count twice as much as not voting, against McCain and in defense of free speech. This week, McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate has given me, and all Americans who still live by reason, a reason to not even consider staying home on election day.

Sarah Palin is, to the Christianists and the Islamists of the world, an actual saint. In her last pregnancy, she learned that she was carrying a fetus with a genetic defect, one that will make the child, that this fetus could eventually become, forever incapable of fully human conceptual life. Sarah Palin, rejecting the option of abortion, decided to sacrifice a large fraction of the rest of her life to God's Will by completing that pregnancy, and deliberately giving birth to a genetically defective child. Even for George W. Bush, religious self-sacrifice is mainly something he orders and demands of others. For Sarah Palin, religous self-sacrifice is what she is - I was about to write "herself," but it is precisely her self that Sarah Palin, in total obedience to her faith, has sincerely done everything she could to strangle by her personal sacrifice to the Will of God.

John McCain is in his seventies, and in poor health. It is possible, and not altogether unlikely, that, if he were elected, his deteriorating health will prevent him from completing his full four years is office. And then the Presidency would fall into the hands of Sarah Palin, who will sacrifice America, just as she has deliberately sacrificed her own personal life, to the Will of God. This would be the end of Enlightenment America, at the hand of America's first fully theocratic head of government and state.

During my first years in America I was often asked why several European nations, allied with America against the spread of Communism, were ruled by nominally Socialist political parties. I explained that the European voter, given the choice between the Communist who sincerely believes in total redistribution, and a Socialist who tries to believe in it, but is actually sane enough to fail in his attempt to believe, no rational man would vote for the true believer, nor abstain and thus allow the true believer to win. Communism took seven decades to fizzle. The last time around, the Dark Age of godly self-sacrifice lasted seven centuries. Those who would bring it back must be stopped.

InLine Activism: A University Policy on Free Expression

In recent years, the university where I teach has been, like most non-elite universities, beset by religious extremists "witnessing to" - that is, harassing - secular people, with a particular animus against the campus GLBT organization. After one particularly nasty incident, when the Bible-thumpers invaded a meeting of the GLBT club and destroyed its banner, claiming afterward that their actions were legally protected religious symbolic speech, the Academic Senate decided to draft a University policy on free expression. The matter was referred to the Committee on Student Affairs.

Under similar circumstances some other Cal State campuses adopted grossly illiberal hate-speech policies, so I knew that this was an occasion for me to help draw the lines from an Enlightenment-based, Classical Liberal perspective informed by Objectivism. Committee work usually falls to pre-tenure faculty, and is quite time-consuming, but I volunteered to be vice-chair of the committee for the year. At the start, only I and one other member favored something other than a hate-speech code. By the end of the academic year - and much time spent in discussion and persuasion - the committee sent to the Senate a draft document that (except for boilerplate added by the University lawyer) was close to what I had hoped for.

As usually happens in University politics, the Executive Committee of the Senate did a Cortland on the document I had worked on. So on the second reading I proposed and argued for an amendment that replaced the draft on the floor - that is, the Executive Committee's Cortlandized version - with mine. My amendment passed, and my draft was adopted as an academic policy. Here it is:

Freedom Of Expression

Preamble

Exposure to the widest possible range of ideas, viewpoints, opinions and creative expression is an integral and indispensable part of a university education for life in a diverse global society. California State University, Los Angeles, supports the right of individual students, faculty, staff and student organizations to exercise free speech, including but not limited to artistic, political, and/or symbolic speech, provided only that such expression does not disrupt normal activities or infringe upon the rights of others. This policy establishes reasonable, non-discriminatory, content-neutral guidelines and procedures designed to protect the rights of speakers and non-speakers, respect the rights of faculty and staff in the classrooms, ensure fair access and due process for those who wish to use the university's public forums, and maintain a safe environment on the university campus.

General provisions:

California State University, Los Angeles, supports the right of individual students, faculty, staff and student organizations to exercise all forms of expression and free speech including but not limited to artistic, political, and/or symbolic speech, provided that such activities do not prevent the university from carrying out other aspects of its mission, or infringe upon the rights of others.

Learning to respond to the widest possible range of free expression in a civil and responsible manner is an integral and indispensable part of a university education for life in a diverse global society. The university will not condone behavior that violates, by intimidation or force, the freedom of speech, choice, assembly, or movement of other individuals or organizations, or that restrains others' voluntary exposure to free expression and free speech.

Freedom of expression in the university does not extend to actions that are illegal under the constitutions, or under valid applicable laws, of the United States and of the State of California. This policy does not endorse, or relieve any person from legal liability for actions that amount to libel, slander, or infringement of intellectual property. All persons or groups engaging in activities on university property are subject to, and are expected to comply, with any applicable university policies and procedures.

Unless legally required to do so, CSULA does not support cooperation with individuals, organizations, or agencies that directly or indirectly investigate, surreptitiously monitor, infiltrate organizations or harass persons legitimately exercising their constitutional prerogatives of free speech and assembly.

The mention in this policy of certain means and contexts for freedom of expression shall not be construed to deny or disparage any aspect of freedom of expression by other means or in other contexts.

Whenever any provision of this policy is subject to interpretation, it shall be interpreted to maximize freedom of expression, consistent with the educational mission of the university and with the constitutions and laws of the United States and of the State of California.

Your comments are welcome.

Essential Issues: W's Birth-Control-Is-Abortion Directive

In recent article from Colorado, Bill Grant presents a pragmatist but secular take on Colorado Proposition 48 and on Bush's directive prohibiting "discrimination" by hospitals against doctors - physicians, surgeons, dentists, psychologists etc - who base their treatment decisons on their religious beliefs instead of scientific evidence and the best interest of the patient, avoid effective medications that may interfere with the implantation of a fertilized zygote and so on. Unfortunately, Grant assumes that the relationship between a doctor and a patient is inherently unfree, and the debate is about who is entitled to coerce whom:

.... religious radicals in the Bush administration have devised yet another way to undermine a woman’s reproductive freedom. Although doctors who refuse to perform abortions for reasons of conscience are already protected from discriminatory hiring practices, the administration proposes redefining abortion to include most forms of birth control and any procedure resulting in the termination of a fetus “between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.” Medical personnel who object to these procedures would be under no obligation to explain them to a patient, or refer her to a practitioner who would offer counsel .... This rule completely subordinates the rights of the patient to receive the most appropriate medical treatment to the personal beliefs of the medical staff.

The focus instead ought to be on the essential moral issues:

The doctor (at least here in California) works _in_ a hospital, but _for_ a patient - the doctor bills the patient, not the hospital, for services performed etc. But under the Bush regulation, the patient has no way to know which doctors (witch doctors?) will be making their treatment decisions on the basis of supernatural beliefs that have nothing to do with scientific medicine. The Bush regulations would have the effect of removing the moral requirement for the patient's informed consent - in a context in which no rational patient would give her consent (to pay for treatment decisions made on the basis of supernatural beliefs instead of science).

The other issue is that the regulation prohibits hospital organizations from limiting privileges - as any rational hospital board would insist - to professionals who will base their treatment decisions exclusively on science and a rational consideration of the best interest of the patient, and not on their supernatural religions. Even if I know and trust the owners and managers of a hospital, I cannot trust their institution - because Bush's criminal gang, pretending to be a legitimate government, will use force to prevent them from running their hospital according to the rational, principled judgement of their minds.

But of course it would take someone with an Enlightenment-based understanding of science, medicine, and individual rights to make these points. Trust a Pragmatist such as Grant to miss the essential moral issues entirely.

Essential Issues: W's Iraq War

From a comment I posted on Diana Hsieh's NoodleFood:

1. Essential issues in the macro context of the Iraq war as a whole: The aim of this war was to replace a nasty but secular tyrant with whatever government the population of that country, without the benefit of an occupation long enough to change their culture, would vote into power, even when their predictable choice, in their unmodified cultural context, is an "Islamic Republic." That aim was contrary to the interests of every sane American, and of every sane human in a world threatened by the spread of those "Islamic Republics." The Islamists are enemies of Human life on Earth, and a war fought for the purpose of putting them into power, in Iraq or anywhere else, is a crime against America and against Humanity. The only people against whom that war is NOT a crime are those who are fighting against US soldiers out of loyalty to Islamist factions that happen to be out of power now (and think that the best way to get into power is by shooting at Americans,) or just want to get into Muslim heaven by killing infidels, or who shoot at Americans out of loyalty to the previous tyrant. And that includes everyone actually shooting at Americans there.

2. Essential issues in the context of the situation of individual Americans whose lives are at risk as a result of that war. There aren't any good guys shooting at Americans in Iraq, and a rational soldier will do whatever he needs to do to survive. This includes shooting in situations in which innocent people will also be killed. The moral responsibility for any civilian deaths in such a situation falls exclusively on whoever was trying to kill the soldiers who are shooting back. If the American soldiers were not there, those who are shooting at Americans now would NOT be living peaceful lives: they would be eagerly imposing tyranny or killing other innocent people, in Iraq or elsewhere.

Our Obscene Department of Theocratic Injustice

The course of justice, as conceived by Americans of the Enlightenment, went from evidence, to trial, to acquittal or punishment. By the end of the 19th century that conception of due process of law had become a fixture of American culture. But now, things have changed. Over time, our laws have mutated from prohibiting violations of individual rights to lists of arbitrary prohibitions of even completely harmless private behavior; from objective criteria to infinitely stretchable language; and in the last seven years into prohibitions based on nothing but faith-based fear of the exercise of those very rights, especially freedom of speech, that the founding fathers put at the top of their list of individual rights that the government was formed to protect. Punishment is now meted out even before there is any evidence of guilt, by means of official statements of spin, innuendo and outright lies designed to drive the designated victim of "law enforcement" to suicide, or at least a guilty plea that spares the government the trouble of presenting its case in court.

In the latest case, the victim was accused under an obscenity statute that, in the age before our current theocratic administration, most Americans thought would never be enforced again. Obscenity statues punish pure expression of thought. They do not involve in any way the protection of anyone against anything - certainly not against any conceivable violation of individual rights. The only function of these obscene laws is to protect "society" against the expression of ideas that our theocratic masters disapprove of. Yet the accusation of having had bad ideas in her head made the life of the accused woman into such hell that she pled guilty. To a charge that no honest judge could sustain after swearing to uphold the Constitution.

By punishing her first, the theocrats of DOJ have managed to avoid a test of the constitutionality of such laws. If the next President appoints more theocratic judges, as McCain has promised to do, such obscenity laws will never face an honest constitutional test. As Ayn Rand wrote, "not fire and brimstone but goo."

How Pragmatism Kills Enterprises and Nations

The most amazing thing about the Lucent swindle is how stupid it was. Rich McGinn doubled his income for two or three years at the height of the swindle. But what he lost was at least another decade as the CEO of what would still be, except for the swindle, a great and profitable enterprise. How could a man smart enough to hold his own when talking with Nobel Prize winners, and not only because he was their boss, do something so unbelievably stupid?

The answer, I see now - after thinking about Tara Smith's lecture at the 2008 OCON - is Pragmatism. "Pragmatism," Charles Sanders Peirce wrote in 1903, "is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood." Or, in the form that McGinn may have learned and followed, that ideas have no meaning beyond "if I do x I experience y." And if indeed I do x and experience y, then according to Pragmatism the idea is true - it "works." Thus Pragmatism takes Kant one step farther. Kant allowed that there is a reality which is a source of our conscious experience; he only asserted that our knowledge is limited to and by the nature of that experience, so that we humans may never know, except perhaps by faith, rather than by reasoning from the experience of our senses, what that external reality truly is. According to Pragmatism, the only things that we can know at all are our experiences and actions. The pragmatist holds that it is meaningless even to talk about reality as something external to consciousness, or about our experience as being a result of something external to our own thoughts and actions. Therefore the pragmatist denies that one can meaningfully account for the regularities of our experience by induction or deduction of principles - of conceptual knowledge - about what reality (which to the pragmatist is a meaningless idea anyway) is and how it works.

So how does Pragmatism look from my own (hopefully Objectivist) perspective? From the perspective of my own integration of Objectivism with the available scientific knowledge of our day, it looks like Pragmatism strikes directly against, and if permitted to, destroys, Man's evolved means of survival: his conceptual faculty. Pragmatism destroys Man's species-specific ability to preserve and enhance our lives by discovering and using conceptual, principled knowledge. Pragmatism makes smart men stupid. Rich McGinn and the Lucent swindle is just one case in point.

Unfortunately, American schools have been inculcating Pragmatism into the American mind for the last half-century or more. Thus Pragmatism dominates American culture and American political life today, as no bad idea had ever dominated both the culture and the politics of any place in the Western world, at least since the Dark Age of Christian domination in both. Yet, except for critiques of Pragmatist John Dewey's destructive heritage in the field of education, I cannot recall any previous discussion of Pragmatist ideology, and of its wider effects, at any Objectivist conference before. Objectivists sometimes assume that because dishonest ideas are philosophically unimportant, they must also be existentially impotent - and Pragmatism is perhaps the most monumentally dishonest ideology in the entire history of philosophy. Yet Pragmatism is so pervasive in contemporary American culture and education that Tara Smith spent a good third of her lecture telling her listeners how to confront it, not even in society and politics, but in the ideas and habits inculcated by American education and culture into the minds of her (Objectivist!) listeners.

It is now a quarter-century since the graduates of the Pragmatist curricula that Ayn Rand wrote about in "The Comprachicos," and Leonard Peikoff spoke about in "Why Johnny Can't Think," reached middle-age and began to take control of American institutions: legislatures and courts and defense and police agencies and universities and corporations. And, looking at the results of their actions, one cannot miss the destruction brought about by Pragmatism.

Pragmatism in America is the source of policies and actions that have given American voters and leaders their current world-wide - and well-deserved - reputation for anti-intellectualism and stupidity. CEOs who destroy titanic enterprises by one unprincipled scheme or another are just the tip of the Pragmatist iceberg. In international policy and in war, it is American Pragmatism that brought America's and Mankind's worst enemies, the Islamists leaders of Islamic Republics, into power in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the Schools of Education and in the Philosophy Departments of America's universities, Pragmatism has given us professors who cannot tell the difference between religion and science: teachers who teach teachers to inculcate anticonceptual, anti-intellectual stupidity in American children. And when those children reach the universities, fields that require principled conceptual thought - like engineering and science - are mostly beyond their reach. America's high-technology industries depend for nearly all of their graduate-level high-technology workforce on people who immigrated to American universities from schools less ravaged by Pragmatism than ours. Republican presidential candidate McCain's proposed reduction or suspension of their immigration amounts to a plan for national suicide by Pragmatism.

And there is worse. Kant's agenda was to limit knowledge to make room for belief. Pragmatism is Kant on steroids: it reduces conceptual knowledge to zero, and gives religion all the room in the world. Pragmatism is the ultimate handmaiden of theocracy. And today, unfortunately, it is this combination of Pragmatism and theocracy that has become America's de-facto national political ideology.

If you are an American, as I am, be very afraid of American Pragmatism. And if you are also an Objectivist, or at least an advocate of America's previous, pre-Pragmatist, secular, Enlightenment-based original principles, then damn it and do something about it. The The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights: Activism website, is a good place to start.