Rand is not relevant

Is Rand relevant, asks the Wall Street Journal?

Here’s my comment as submitted to the Journal.

It’s news to me that planning for one’s survival and flourishing is anything more than a human instinct, not a virtue, since what we ordinarily understand to be a virtue (cf. Kant) is always in excess of the pursuit of our self-interest, no matter what planning horizon is selected.

The only reason why planning for one’s survival and flourishing is virtuous is that it is virtuous to try not to burden others.

I am well aware that Rand professed to dislike Kant. The problem was that she may never have made the considerable effort that is required to understand Kant, and in fact anticipated a contemporary gesture of the CEO: a fashionable anti-intellectualism and contempt for writing that makes “unreadability” an argument against a text, convenient if you Kant read the text in the class.

I submitted careful and detailed status reports while wasting my spirit in an expense of shame in 1981, working for a “consulting” firm in Chicago in a building on Ohio street where porno films were also being made: but because I was young and thin and rather “cute”, I was by definition unimportant in data processing, where then and now horrible fat men have more technical authority. My status reports were termed “verbose” by a manager who operated on Randroid principles, destroying anyone who got in her way. It was here I wised up on how people learn, especially in graduate skewl, how to operate in the “real world”.

Rand anticipated today’s contemptible culture of self-reproducing celebrity, since she professed to be a philosopher while being bone ignorant of actual philosophical method: as a real philosopher, Sydney Hook, showed in an excessively gentlemanly review of Notes for a New Intellectual in 1962, Rand made an absurd substantive (“synthetic apriori” inference) from an “analytic apriori” axiom, to wit, a=a.

This wasn’t a matter of philosophical opinion. It was a matter of logic.

However, in today’s contemptible culture of self-reproducing celebrity, if you have money and media attention already, you get more. Rand had a knack for producing reams of the sort of trash people read at the beach, and it sold in the 1950s. Therefore, she was able to announce to a talk show host, in 1960, that she rilly wuz a filosofer or something.

Banks (!) have funded various thinktanks which promote her thought as part of a kulturkampf against the New Left which started in the 1970s.

As a result, a generation of Yuppies was unleashed on the economy which preferred “self-interest”: at the Princeton P-Rade in 1989, an annual ritual of that school’s alumni and graduating class, drunk members of the graduating class carried a sign reading “The Nation in Princeton’s Service: Wall Street here we come!”.

At Wall Street, those students and others pursued Holy Self Interest 24/7. They created overelaborate financial instruments using rocket science which have become today’s toxic mess, and graduates of deVry and Roosevelt University, not Princeton graduates, are paying the price.

It’s in Jack Welch’s self-interest (on the front page of Financial Times for 14 March) to write now that he was just kidding about “shareholder value and nothing else” in 1981, but it wasn’t in Bernie Madoff’s self-interest to admit wrong in a court of law.

But Bernie Madoff is the *mensch*. Jack Welch and Ayn Rand are role models only for the *schlemiel* and the *putz*.

Ode to Kruschschev in Love

An ode inspired by this post.

There is a young blogger named Krushschev in Love
Who thought to give Teddy Adorno a shove:
And thought it a joke to give him a poke.
Alas and alack, if you don’t do your homework
You’re apt to look like no end of a jerk:
And censorship, as well as the hardy perennial
“I Kant understand it: it is somebunny else’s fault, and stuff, and all”
Scarcely credit your case
And tend to blow up in your face.
Ayn Rand (brain of sand) invented this riposte:
It’s quite the thing to tell the talk show host:
Professor x is a bum, and he’s much too verbose.
The past is another country.
And in terms of le temps postmoderne
Galileo and Descartes were primitives,
And as far from being au fait
As Kaiser Wilhelm, or Jules Verne.
We do not look for fashionable views
In these arondissements, or these ancient mews:
Thus Adorno may have indeed shrunk from the homo,
Especially the queer who seeks to install fear
By being a jackbooted thug:
Teddy and Harvey Milk, and other queers of that latter-day ilk
Never encountered each other, not even in the dark, or in the queer park.
Therefore, argal, qed and in fine
We might say, whilst wearily sighin’,
Next time some sitzfleisch might behoove
That anonymous blogger, Krushschev in love.

10 March 2009 Edward G. Nilges. Moral rights done be assert, so be everybody be cool this is an original ode.

More on Rand as a philosophical problem, not a “philosopher”

While unsuccessfully participating in a group effort on wikipedia to get Ayn Rand undesignated as a “philosopher”, I developed a “recursive” definition of “philosopher” that can be generalized to any profession.

This is that you’re a “philosopher” if other philosophers speak with you as a member of the philosophical community.

Now, many pro-Rand people point to discussions of her work in philosophy journals as evidence that she is a philosopher from a wikipedian “neutral point of view”.

This work exists. In fact, it starts with a review of “Notes for the New Intelllectual” published in the New York Times in 1962 by a recognized American philosopher, Sidney Hook.

However, merely because philosophers have spoken about Rand’s ideas, and in effect, “to” her, does not mean that they are speaking to her as a colleague.

Sidney Hook was altogether too much the gentleman to deal with Rand in other than the most courteous tones, and, as such, he was one of the first such gentlemen to be savaged by the new barbarians, being joined later by British former PM Ted Heath who was subject to the abuse of another psychotic woman, Margaret Thatcher, and countless men to fall foul of bimbo feminists (as opposed to genuinely courageous feminists, mostly liberals, such as Germaine Greer).

However, in finding mistakes worthy of a dysfunctional student taking Philosophy 101 down at the community college, Hook was not treating Rand as an equal. Instead, he was courteously trying to give her the shove and end a budding philosophical career.

Rand was of philosophical interest to Hook for the same reason that Mein Kampf was of philosophical interest to Hannah Arendt: but Arendt, in taking Hitler’s evil or Eichmann’s banality into account, did not propose to treat either as a philosopher: whereas she was clearly ready to do so in the case of Martin Heidegger. Eichmann even read Kant, but from his reading of Kant, Eichmann found only justification for murder. While Heidegger had some Nazi tendencies, in his idiotic glorification of the simple grave and mostly silent bauern, Heidegger also seriously engaged Arendt on philosophy in a way Rand never engaged any already-recognizable philosopher.

Rand was unfamiliar with elementary philosophical taxonomy and vocabulary, including the four way categorization of statements into “analytic apriori” (the tautologies of logic and mathematics), “synthetic apriori” (a set of statements, empty according to some philosophers, which are necessarily true but also informative and significant: Kant gives as an example “time has one dimension, space has three”), analytic aposteriori (logical and mathematical truths known the wrong way, by examination of the world, such as the “four color theorem” before its truth), and synthetic aposteriori (the empirically determined truths of science).

Note: since when is it “elitist” to know something you can know for a few dollars in late charges at a good metropolitan public library, as Matt Damon’s “Good Will Hunting” so helpfully points out to the idiot grad student in the film of that name? Isn’t it far more elitist to bully people who’ve cracked a book?

Evidence for Rand’s ignorance is the fact that she thought to infer significant synthetic truths (such as the value of all capitalism all the time) from an analytic apriori statement, to wit, a=a.

Now, it is true that the “folk” definition of philosophy is “cracker barrel philosophy”, a conversation open to all, in which any kind of malarkey is permitted, and no-one is excluded based on their ignorance.

But this parliament of birds is not a profession to which one can announce one’s acceptance, because it’s just the grand total of all human bullshit, that is, conversations not part of a distinct profession. It could not be taught, since we’re born with the ability to talk utter nonsense.

Rand, like her fan Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of wikipedia along with Larry Sanger, believed herself to be a critic of the academy, which, like Wales, she felt placed too much emphasis on a corrupt system of certification. However, as I’ve related already, after succeeding as an undergraduate major in philosophy at a university for which I was overqualified, I was asked to teach Philosophy 210 (Logic) by the chair, without certification, but with the ability to explain analytic and synthetic apriori and aposteriori.

The supposedly corrupt system of certification may be in part corrupt, but cannot match the corruption of a “vast wasteland” of TV talk shows in which a “successful” writer could announce that she was a New Model philosopher. It merely is the legal, institutional expression of an underlying human reality in effect since Heraclitus saw only water, and subsequent philosophers have each engaged their mates or the past in conversation.

There’s no such thing as a real synonym for happiness

Linguists make the point that there’s no such thing as a true synonym. Any two words in a natural human language are two and not the same for a reason.

Now, usually, English teachers say that this is because of “denotation” (what in the world a word means) v “connotation” (the emotional and cognitive associations with the word). But this neglects usage: for example, the close “synonyms” “dead” and “deceased” are applied differently: animals are dead, not deceased.

I am thinking in this connection of the word “happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. The normal American meaning of this word is not utilitarian: it doesn’t mean the greatest good for the greatest number, since this would collide with an American notion of inalienable human rights, which, as such, cannot be sacrificed to the general “happiness”.

I’m aware we get, not happiness itself (or herself if we may be permitted to be both sexist, and mythological), but the right to pursue the gal. But what, exactly, is she?

Reagan seemed to redefine “happiness”, especially for “Reagan democrats”, as a sort of low-level comfort and personal gratification. The problem with this is that the Altruist (who exists whether or not you can stand her) doesn’t define her happiness as her low-level comfort and personal gratification.

Such people are logically possible, and, empirical humanity being what it is, they exist. These are sourpusses who refuse to step over dying babies on the way to Starbucks. They define their happiness socially.

Not only that: many people, such as German socialists, came to Amerika precisely because after the European revolution of 1848, they could no longer live in a Europe that had reconciled itself to the immiseration of most people (in conditions in Manchester documented famously by Friedrich Engels) so that a small bourgeois class could emerge. America, not caring much one way or the other owing to the safety-valve of the frontier, allowed these people to be unhappy because of the misery back in Europe that was being created in places like Chicago as more and more workers came there.

The right to pursue happiness therefore includes the right to be a misery ball until everyone is well-off.

This is “rational” in the sense that we can model it game-theoretically in a computer. A while back, the “beautiful mind”, John Nash, for whom I was privileged to work at Princeton, worked on a form of game theory in which some players act as “agents” for others. It is perfectly possible to model a game in which some participants refuse to “win” until some precondition such as another player winning occurs, and in the math, they need give no reason. In the real world, a parent might play so a child wins.

Nor can this be simply relabeled “winning” because its preconditioned on another player’s “winning”, and if you relabeled the Altruist’s defeat as a victory, you would have to discount the victory, and the satisfaction of the victor who allows the Altruist to be defeated.

(Who is John Galt? Like I care?)

There is no synonym for “happiness”. I was “happy” when Obama won in a pure Kantian sense since his victory didn’t do me any apparent good, but I felt it was best for the country. The fact that we have to make excuses for feeling this way, and the fact that at some middle-class jobs, giving evidence that you think this way is thoughtcrime, is obscene.

“Happiness” is nothing more than the bald name of what we severally pursue.

Sidney Who: A Note on the Destruction of Culture by Trashy Celebrity

In response to my post re Ayn Rand, “Why Ayn Rand REALLY Sucks”, a commenter asks “Sidney Who?”.

Rand is known, and recognized as a “philosopher”, by many more people than those who know Sidney Hook, or who could name five major philosophers. This is because Rand, after success in an unrelated field (writing screenplays, and trashy novels of the sort that are left in cheap hotels), told a talk show host in 1961 that she was a “philosopher”.

Several banks (!) decided to fund her as such to counteract the pernicious influence of socialists within the universities, even, perhaps, Sidney Hook, a major anti-communist but rather liberal philosopher. This was part of a kulturkampf not only against Communism and socialism but also against that very liberalism which had defeated Communism in Western Europe.

We know now how good banks (!) are at spreading lies and falsehoods: for example, AIG’s conduct, in essentially monetizing its credit rating, is now known to be completely fraudulent and a major cause of a depression which will destroy, not the bankers (who will become oh so precious English teachers, putting real ones out of work) but of the weakest members of society.

They sponsored Ms Rand with the result that she’s replaced the traditional pan-theon in the minds of pretentious Yuppies: but as I’ve maintained in wikipedia, a learned profession is a “recursive community”.

This is a group which exists independently of universities and the media although it uses the latter and is often employed by the former, which holds the informal power, as part of “civil society” to recognize new members by including them in a conversation.

It’s recursive because it defines “philosopher” based on a pre-existing recognition of a smaller set of philosophers, and I model it on mathematical recursion, where a non-circular definition can be made by defining a term for n elements and a succession rule.

Note that we can follow Habermas in definining “civil society” negatively as the precipitate, the residue, after you remove the market and institutions, such as the university, needful to represent groups in a market society, a precipitate, a residue, which cannot exist outside “society” but which is still distinct.

An interesting fact about this abstraction is that it recognizes individuals independent of certification. For example, the chair of my undergraduate philosophy department needed someone on an emergency basis to teach a section of Philosophy 210 (Logic) in the fall of 1974 owing to the untimely death of a faculty member. Since I was, apparently, a star student, I was selected although I had only a BA and was not in graduate school; I’d decided to enter the workplace as a computer programmer owing to the fact that a leading student/adjunct in the graduate section was an out and out thug.

Years later, when I was discussing the very idea of teaching in a university without a “union card” with the chair, and having taught at university without a master’s or doctorate more than once, the chair mentioned that about 300-odd professors in the United States do not, in fact, have a “union card”.

This is because a community can recognize an individual as more or less qualified.

But how does this apply to Rand? In 1961, she’d not been recognized by any American philosopher as having mastered any of the common expectations to which tyro philosophers or teachers of philosophy are subject. For example, and as Sidney Who pointed out, she’d not learned Philosophy 210 (Logic), for she believed that the tautologous identity a=a was somehow fecund, and that synthetic apriori conclusions could be derived from it.

Instead, having a bit of money and fame, she leveraged this, in a way that has become far more common latterly, into the unearned status of philosopher.

….thereby destroying the memory of a real philosopher, Sidney Hook, and today, in wikipedia, the reputation of a philosophy professor, Raymond Boisvert, who has questioned Rand’s chops: for when barbarians at the gate buy admission they like to bully the little people.

Why Ayn Rand REALLY sucks

Ayn Rand really sucks. Sidney Hook, in an excessively kind review of her pretentious book of pseudo-philosophy “Notes for the New Intellectual” published in 1962, nailed her: for he used some elementary philosophical analysis to show that her central thesis, the “virtue of selfishness” is either just false, or true in an empty manner, as a tautology.

If “selfishness” is a virtue, then it is not just morally licit to step over a dying baby in the street, it’s virtuous and therefore a duty. Of course, it sounds strange to use the word “duty”, to which Rand was allergic owing to her hatred of Kant, in connection with Rand, but that’s part of the meaning of “virtue”. It is necessary to not be “altruistic”: altruism is redefined as vice.

In this connection, Jimmy Wales, the founder of wikipedia and a “Randroid”, is said to have divorced his first wife because she wanted to be a nurse, and to Wales, “nursing” is not virtuous since it is altruistic…a strange proposition indeed. Jimmy Wales is also using the altruistic-on-the-face-of-it work of unpaid volunteers to create and to edit content for his terribly flawed encyclopedia, but he then seems to have other volunteers bully the content creators, perhaps to punish the original creators for being so Clueless, so altruistic.

But it’s just false that stepping over dying babies could ever be virtuous in the sense that specific words aside, selfish behavior might be licit, but would never be placed in the same “set” of actions alongside already recognized altruistic acts.

That is: we can prove Rand wrong based on the Hook article.

Rand, in talking of altruism versus selfishness, is using the “intensional” meaning of the word. That is the meaning found in the dictionary which defines the word in terms of rough synonyms. Rand appears to claim that since altruism is motivated by pity, and because it weakens the self-reliance and therefore moral fibre of its object, altruism is bad, whereas selfishness (what Marx would call class antagonism) makes people work hard and creates wealth.

Surprisingly, Marx and Hegel would agree with Rand that antagonism creates culture, wealth and history. However, they (at a minimum Hegel) view the reproduction without limit of culture, wealth and history as not necessarily good, whereas Rand is committed whether she knows it or not to an end of history featuring, paradoxically, its reproduction, in fact in phenomena with which we’re familiar, including the endless solving of technical problems created by technology, small, proxy wars, and what T. S. Eliot called “distraction from distraction by distraction”.

But: the “extensional” meaning of a word is a list of things, or in the case of “altruism”, acts, which we consider “altruistic”. Rand is saying, I think that we need to avoid acts commonly thought to be in this set, and engage in acts in the set of “selfish” acts.

But: this removes the tag or attribute “good” from the list of acts in the altruism set and places it on the list of acts in the selfishness set.

The problem with this relabeling operation is that if it is not qualified by an appeal to “rational” selfishness, it leads to the war of all against all.

Rand seems to imagine that selfishness, or her favorite brand of “rational”, decaffeinated selfishness, doesn’t by definition create conflict, but “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is up for grabs” does just this.

Whereas if it is qualified as “rational”, Rand’s thesis is just a massive tautology, which recommends that we “so act as to help ourselves without so acting that we are labeled selfish bastards, and excluded from polite society, or are locked up in prison”.

Well, Rand was very impressed by the American Declaration of Independence, and its verbiage about the pursuit of “happiness”. She never paused to ask herself what “happiness” might be.

“Happiness” cannot be equated to “getting what I want” for the simple reason that, as G. E. Moore saw, words like “goodness” or “happiness” have no exact synonyms.

For example, “Goodness” can be replaced by “virtue” but if this is done, the extension of the designated set changes.

To see how this work, ask yourself if Shakespeare’s Brutus, who went along with the conspirators to assassinate Julius Caesar, was both “good” and “virtuous”. Reflecting on the Latin root of “virtue” as being strong for the right and of aristocratic lineage, we realize that although Brutus was virtuous, he was placed in Satan’s mouth, not by Shakespeare to be certain, but by a Dante whose works Shakespeare may have read. Dante put Brutus there because Dante believed that Brutus had caused the fall of the Roman republic.

In other words, Marc Antony isn’t kidding when he says “but Brutus is an honorable man”. Marc Antony knows, as does Shakespeare, that at the level of power politics, the virtuous man, unchecked by a constitution, can and will do wrong.

Brutus was virtuous without being good, because good men don’t destroy a Republic and replace it by an Empire that never figured out succession and that collapsed as a result.

In other words, there are no real synonyms in language, and the good is the good. It cannot be equated to self-interest, any more than “being good” could include being blind, as Brutus is blind, to the consequences of his actions.

Corrupted by Hollywood, maddened with false promises and before her tawdry success as a writer of turgid beach trash, soured with true miseries, Rand seems to have thought that philosophers go around cleverly redefining ordinary language: but since language is a system of differences they cannot.