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.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
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.
Friday, September 19, 2008
The NSA Teams Up with the Chinese Government to Limit Internet Anonymity
The title (above this text on my blog - AR) links to an article by Bruce Schneier, one of the top two independent Internet security experts in the United States. The other of the two, Steve Bellovin, with whom I worked writing a course on Internet security back at Bell Labs, is also cited. Schneier's article is about the UN "IP Traceback" project. Don't miss the comments, one of which reads:
"I'm working on some infosec security projects based in China, and I enjoy telling my client "the Chinese government requires a liaison who can hand over all encryption keys on request." Then when they get the very serious "oh, yes, we're dealing with China" looks on their faces I say "...which is exactly the same requirement as in the U.S." Both the U.S. and China are considered 'surveillance societies....' .... the two nations look increasingly similar. But at least having our every blog post traced back to us keeps us safe from terrorism. Or something."
Adam Reed's full disclosure: One of my pre-tenure projects was to put together a professional program in computer and network security at Cal State LA, and to obtain NSA certification for this program. I have a briefcase from one of their more open events, which is simply labeled "The Symposium" with no other text. Their own anonymity they take very, very seriously indeed...
"I'm working on some infosec security projects based in China, and I enjoy telling my client "the Chinese government requires a liaison who can hand over all encryption keys on request." Then when they get the very serious "oh, yes, we're dealing with China" looks on their faces I say "...which is exactly the same requirement as in the U.S." Both the U.S. and China are considered 'surveillance societies....' .... the two nations look increasingly similar. But at least having our every blog post traced back to us keeps us safe from terrorism. Or something."
Adam Reed's full disclosure: One of my pre-tenure projects was to put together a professional program in computer and network security at Cal State LA, and to obtain NSA certification for this program. I have a briefcase from one of their more open events, which is simply labeled "The Symposium" with no other text. Their own anonymity they take very, very seriously indeed...
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Christianism and I, and How It All Became Personal
When the current wave of Christianist policy first washed over America, I was not among those who might later say that they did not know. I knew. I knew about women forced to bear defective infants because late-term abortions were prohibited. I knew about medical scientists forced to move overseas if they wanted to continue their work on therapeutic cloning and other newly prohibited technologies. I knew that government "recommendations" for prescriptions of pain medications had been "tightened," and that physicians who exceeded those "recommendations" were tried and imprisoned for drug-dealing. I knew that one renowned specialist was convicted on testimony about his "nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude" when explaining the government's "recommendations" to his patients, and so doctors, talking to patients in pain, now made an extra effort to sound sincere. But I was not any of those people, and so I did not go very far out of my way to speak out.
And if I had, what good would it have done? The suffering inflicted by our recent Administrations was not about to be condemned by the Christians, who make up the majority of my fellow citizens. Their belief, however nominal, is that suffering is a precious gift from God. If someone suffers, from oppression by our government or from any other cause, then either God has decided that the victim deserves to suffer, or God has graced the victim with an extra opportunity to earn salvation points with Jesus. A Solidarity movement (like the ones that brought down the Communist regimes of East-Central Europe) would have been, in Christian America, unthinkable. So how much could I have accomplished? And what would the payoff (or payback) have been? I had arthritis of the knees (and other joints) but the pain, even at its worst, was not beyond what could be relieved with over-the-counter pills. Otherwise, my life was (and is) very good.
And then one day, moving a big old computer monitor to the side to make room for a new LCD panel, I felt a spiral of pain around my right leg. It was evening, and so I took a sleeping pill and planned to call my doctor's nurse the next day. The next morning, as I got up from bed and sat down to scan my e-mail, the pain shot up to an intensity I had never imagined possible. The pain was so intense that all was overwhelmed: I could not work or think or focus my consciousness on anything besides the pain. My wife had already left the house for work, and I could not get up from the floor until the evening, when she came home and got me up and took me to a hospital emergency room.
It turned out that a ruptured disk in my spine had crushed my right sciatic nerve, amplifying the pain in my knee a thousand times and turning all sensation from the leg into amplified pain. After an injected shot, the physician wrote out a prescription, explaining that I was getting the strongest pain medication that he could prescribe for sciatica, and that it was limited to 20 pills per week, to prevent withdrawal symptoms when I no longer needed the pills and stopped taking them. Each pill started to work about 15 minutes after I took it, and after a few minutes of relief the pain began to grow again. It grow slowly, and for some two hours I still was able to think and work. At the end of two hours the total pain returned.
I was 3 weeks from the end of the quarter, teaching senior and graduate classes three nights a week, to students who worked full time in the day and then sat in my class from 6 to 10 PM. I was proud of my students, too proud to cancel their classes with just 3 weeks to go. I kept 14 of the pills for my morning chores and to fall asleep at night. I used the other six to cover my teaching hours. Looking at my colleagues, I saw that they knew, and would do the same. For the rest of the day and the week I was one with the pain, and could neither do or be anything else.
Then came the end of the academic quarter, and the operation. The surgeon prescribed a time-release pain killer, and warned me not to take it until after the operation. I took one on my way out of the pharmacy, and the pain withdrew into the background for the rest of the day. I still felt the pain, but now I was again able to feel other things, to think and to focus my mind and to live. This was what I should have been prescribed from my first day in pain. This was what I would have been prescribed, had American physicians been free to practice medicine without fear.
Two months after the operation the pain had gone down enough for me to stop taking the pills. I had the withdrawal symptoms: like two days of a mild flu. And to prevent this, I was forced to spend three weeks in indescribable pain?
And thus it was, that the cliches I had ignored for decades came to meaning in my life. I had not had enough interest in politics, and so politics took an interest in me. Only then was my consciousness raised, and the personal became political. And I started speaking the truth to power.
And if I had, what good would it have done? The suffering inflicted by our recent Administrations was not about to be condemned by the Christians, who make up the majority of my fellow citizens. Their belief, however nominal, is that suffering is a precious gift from God. If someone suffers, from oppression by our government or from any other cause, then either God has decided that the victim deserves to suffer, or God has graced the victim with an extra opportunity to earn salvation points with Jesus. A Solidarity movement (like the ones that brought down the Communist regimes of East-Central Europe) would have been, in Christian America, unthinkable. So how much could I have accomplished? And what would the payoff (or payback) have been? I had arthritis of the knees (and other joints) but the pain, even at its worst, was not beyond what could be relieved with over-the-counter pills. Otherwise, my life was (and is) very good.
And then one day, moving a big old computer monitor to the side to make room for a new LCD panel, I felt a spiral of pain around my right leg. It was evening, and so I took a sleeping pill and planned to call my doctor's nurse the next day. The next morning, as I got up from bed and sat down to scan my e-mail, the pain shot up to an intensity I had never imagined possible. The pain was so intense that all was overwhelmed: I could not work or think or focus my consciousness on anything besides the pain. My wife had already left the house for work, and I could not get up from the floor until the evening, when she came home and got me up and took me to a hospital emergency room.
It turned out that a ruptured disk in my spine had crushed my right sciatic nerve, amplifying the pain in my knee a thousand times and turning all sensation from the leg into amplified pain. After an injected shot, the physician wrote out a prescription, explaining that I was getting the strongest pain medication that he could prescribe for sciatica, and that it was limited to 20 pills per week, to prevent withdrawal symptoms when I no longer needed the pills and stopped taking them. Each pill started to work about 15 minutes after I took it, and after a few minutes of relief the pain began to grow again. It grow slowly, and for some two hours I still was able to think and work. At the end of two hours the total pain returned.
I was 3 weeks from the end of the quarter, teaching senior and graduate classes three nights a week, to students who worked full time in the day and then sat in my class from 6 to 10 PM. I was proud of my students, too proud to cancel their classes with just 3 weeks to go. I kept 14 of the pills for my morning chores and to fall asleep at night. I used the other six to cover my teaching hours. Looking at my colleagues, I saw that they knew, and would do the same. For the rest of the day and the week I was one with the pain, and could neither do or be anything else.
Then came the end of the academic quarter, and the operation. The surgeon prescribed a time-release pain killer, and warned me not to take it until after the operation. I took one on my way out of the pharmacy, and the pain withdrew into the background for the rest of the day. I still felt the pain, but now I was again able to feel other things, to think and to focus my mind and to live. This was what I should have been prescribed from my first day in pain. This was what I would have been prescribed, had American physicians been free to practice medicine without fear.
Two months after the operation the pain had gone down enough for me to stop taking the pills. I had the withdrawal symptoms: like two days of a mild flu. And to prevent this, I was forced to spend three weeks in indescribable pain?
And thus it was, that the cliches I had ignored for decades came to meaning in my life. I had not had enough interest in politics, and so politics took an interest in me. Only then was my consciousness raised, and the personal became political. And I started speaking the truth to power.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Listening to Heroes
Afghanistan's RAWA has been involved in principled resistance against the full spectrum of tyrants: Soviet-supported Socialists, US-supported (and later anti-American) Taliban, and now the US+NATO-imposed experiment in totalitarian democracy: an Iran-style Islamic Republic built on the corpses of American soldiers. RAWA are not Objectivists, but they are Enlightenment-based secularists, and in the context of Afghanistan's tribalist-supernaturalist culture, that's a enough to be heroes. They write:
So. One faith-based, sacrifice-based regime supporting another. And from Washington, our gang of elected traitors claims, of all things, that they stand for America.
The US "War on terrorism" removed the Taliban regime in October 2001, but it has not removed religious fundamentalism which is the main cause of all our miseries. In fact, by reinstalling the warlords in power in Afghanistan, the US administration is replacing one fundamentalist regime with another... Under the US-supported government, the sworn enemies of human rights, democracy and secularism have gripped their claws over our country and attempt to restore (probably meaning "re-impose" - AR) their religious fascism on our people.
So. One faith-based, sacrifice-based regime supporting another. And from Washington, our gang of elected traitors claims, of all things, that they stand for America.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
The Church's preposterously dishonest abuse of biology
According to a recent statement by Catholic bishops, "The Church recognizes that the obligation to protect unborn human life rests on the answer to two questions, neither of which is private or specifically religious.The first is a biological question: When does a new human life begin? When is there a new living organism of the human species, distinct from mother and father and ready to develop and mature if given a nurturing environment? While ancient thinkers had little verifiable knowledge to help them answer this question, today embryology textbooks confirm that a new human life begins at conception... The Catholic Church does not teach this as a matter of faith; it acknowledges it as a matter of objective fact."
Now that is the most preposterous abuse of science that any of us are likely to see in a lifetime. Scientific knowledge is contextual. In the context of biochemistry, the embryo is indeed a separate organism: its DNA, and the peptides and proteins derived from that DNA, are distinct. But the physiology the fetus is, until birth, completely dependent for the requisites of life on the pregnant woman's organism. Physiologically the fetus is, until the moment of birth, part of the pregnant woman's body - part of a single functioning physiological system. Why does the Church take the perspective of biochemistry to be more "scientific," claiming that it ought to be imposed by the state, even on unbelievers, by force, as a matter of "natural law," and ignore the equally scientific - and much more directly relevant - perspective of physiology? Because the biochemistry fits the Church's prior doctrine, and physiology doesn't. Like the proverbial drunk with a lamp-post, the Church picks one bit of science, and ignores the rest, because it is using science for support - preferring this dishonest claim of support to objective illumination. This swindle - for that is what it is - is dishonest enough to disqualify the Church, even if one were to ignore its other crimes, from any claim to genuine moral authority. Either on abortion or on anything else.
Now that is the most preposterous abuse of science that any of us are likely to see in a lifetime. Scientific knowledge is contextual. In the context of biochemistry, the embryo is indeed a separate organism: its DNA, and the peptides and proteins derived from that DNA, are distinct. But the physiology the fetus is, until birth, completely dependent for the requisites of life on the pregnant woman's organism. Physiologically the fetus is, until the moment of birth, part of the pregnant woman's body - part of a single functioning physiological system. Why does the Church take the perspective of biochemistry to be more "scientific," claiming that it ought to be imposed by the state, even on unbelievers, by force, as a matter of "natural law," and ignore the equally scientific - and much more directly relevant - perspective of physiology? Because the biochemistry fits the Church's prior doctrine, and physiology doesn't. Like the proverbial drunk with a lamp-post, the Church picks one bit of science, and ignores the rest, because it is using science for support - preferring this dishonest claim of support to objective illumination. This swindle - for that is what it is - is dishonest enough to disqualify the Church, even if one were to ignore its other crimes, from any claim to genuine moral authority. Either on abortion or on anything else.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Sarah Palin: Still a Reality-Proof Advocate of Abstinence-"Education"
If Sarah Palin got her way, every child in America would receive the same kind of abstinence-"education" that Palin gave to her own children. As one woman wrote,
Theocratic politics is a new phenomenon in America, and so we don't have (yet) a scale of toxicity for its gradations. So I'll borrow the scale from the history of the left. George W. Bush is the theocon equivalent of a Social-Democrat. Sarah Palin, on the same scale, scores as a Maoist. The kind that saw the results of Mao's cultural revolution, as we are seeing the result of the Christianist revolution that Sarah Palin imposed on her family, and kept on believing, and kept on destroying every human life in his path.
This is just so sad.
This poor 17-year-old girl is now saddled with a baby, trapped in a marriage that is statistically doomed to fail, with pretty much no hope of a college education, a career, a future...
And all because her mother abdicated her responsibility as a parent by not teaching her child the basic biology of sex.
My mom taught me about responsible sex. It was awkward and uncomfortable, but she did it anyway. And she taught me about abortion, too, which was more awkward and uncomfortable, but she made it clear that in case of accidental pregnancy, she was my first stop. She'd take me to Planned Parenthood, she'd pay for the procedure, she'd hold my hand the whole time, she'd love me anyway, and she'd help me to get on with my life.
Too bad this kid didn't have my mom instead of hers. She could have had a future. Now she's just stuck.
Theocratic politics is a new phenomenon in America, and so we don't have (yet) a scale of toxicity for its gradations. So I'll borrow the scale from the history of the left. George W. Bush is the theocon equivalent of a Social-Democrat. Sarah Palin, on the same scale, scores as a Maoist. The kind that saw the results of Mao's cultural revolution, as we are seeing the result of the Christianist revolution that Sarah Palin imposed on her family, and kept on believing, and kept on destroying every human life in his path.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
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:
Your comments are welcome.
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.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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:
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.
.... 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.
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.
Friday, August 08, 2008
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."
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."
Sunday, August 03, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Disregard the false start (below; don't disregard the picture, though, it's still good.) Soon after the first post I got hit by a serious health incident (sciatica; pain; spine surgery etc.) and it took me a while to recover to the point where I have time to blog. In the meantime Aster decided to finalize her break with "Libertarianism" and to terminate her mailing list, which had gotten filled with that unfortunate mix of crackpots and poseurs that is "Libertarianism's" inevitable consequence. I am teaching at the University (where I work) this summer quarter, and attending the Ayn Rand Institute's OCON this week - and getting ready to blog my reactions to OCON, a recent foreign trip, new Romantic music and whatever else might come my way.
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