Seavey vs. Rand Video Redux

Even though this “Month of Ayn Rand” I declared saw me reading a Rand speech at Yale and mentioning her frequently (though not in as much depth as I’d planned) on this blog, it’s worth mentioning again that I’m not an Objectivist.  Indeed, as I noted last month, in this clip, at the four-minute mark, I ask Ayn Rand Institute head Yaron Brook if we really want more selfishness and can plausibly call the motivations of burglars and labor unions “altruistic” in anything other than a sense so linguistically idiosyncratic as to be obfuscatory.

I asked in my capacity as a four-time Stossel audience member, almost as prestigious an honor as multiple Oscars.  I also attended a taping about healthcare and one about food at which I actually made a comment in defense of Twinkie-eating, but the only time I spoke and made it into the final edit besides the Rand clip was my before-and-after double-comment the night of Obama’s State of the Union, with the URL of this very blog flashed under my talking head — ah, multimedia.  I can’t find my Obama-mocking comments online, but you can at least glimpse my head as Cato’s David Boaz starts talking in this clip from that same broadcast.

One day soon, I should really upgrade all my (notoriously limited) electronic media capacity so that I can easily do things like transfer my SOTU comments from DVD and/or VHS to online — and in general make fuller use of the mighty media power of Fox Business Network.

Face-to-face is good, too, of course (thus things like our impending religion debate at Lolita Bar between Richard Spencer and Helen Rittelmeyer), and the three nights in the middle of last week saw me at social/networking events run, respectively, by a Randian, a group of skeptics, and Institute for Humane Studies libertarians — the third at religious King’s College in the basement of the Empire State Building, presumably taking its name from the powerful being above us who always goes through one’s mind in that location, King Kong.

And on that note, I will turn my attention for most of the coming week of blog entries to movies, just in time for the Oscars.  Rand loved Hollywood and would no doubt have approved.

Huckabee vs. Ron Paul; Domestic Terror; Southern Women; DC

Today, with a Tea Party occurring at 11am in front of New York City Hall, I’m reminded that fat statist bastard Mike Huckabee said one reason he skipped the CPAC event this year is that the libertarians are taking it over, and they’re not real Republicans. He says he prefers the Tea Parties. Actually, I prefer libertarians, real Republicans, and Tea Parties to Huckabee. I’m a big-tent guy.

A plurality of CPAC attenders voted Ron Paul their favorite for 2012 presidential candidate (though plenty of other CPAC-goers greeted his victory with boos), so Huckabee may be factually correct, anyway. Glenn Greenwald thinks Huckabee is also more honest than most of the GOP, which only feigns anti-government sentiment when out of power. In response, I’d say that of course politicians love power more than principle — but unless one believes that hypocrisy itself is a sort of deadly radiation that directly kills American citizens, better (at least sometimes) to have imperfect government-limiters in power than honest government-expanders. At least the hypocrites may occasionally feel obliged to live up to their rhetoric, if only to keep up appearances. God help us, by contrast, if the Democrats ever live up to all their socialist promises.

But to look at the Paul/mainstream divide less cynically for a change: what if one is essentially moderate on military and security issues — and thus genuinely untroubled by the gulf between the Paulites and Cheneyans in that area, perhaps even seeing the two as balancing each other out in a relatively healthy way? Does that not perhaps make the acceptance of this ragtag coalition reasonable for a typical supporter? No party is unanimous, but it can “average out” to an acceptable coalitional message. It may prove useless for other reasons, but internal contradictions alone can’t be sufficient to damn any political party large enough to make a difference, especially in those cases where the contradictions capture some genuinely perplexing tensions — and let me just note again that all I really want are some damn budget cuts.

•••

There are always still-more-radical approaches to fighting the power than voting for Ron Paul, of course. It’s interesting that the daughter of that guy who flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin still calls her father a hero.

I’m not that radical/crazy/homicidal, but a quick Google search suggests I’m not the first to think that someone ought to write a “Ballad of Joe Stack” anti-government folk song about the incident. Lotta musicians in Austin, albeit mostly left-wing ones — but, hey, the left-wing ones could always do it ironically and then sit back and watch the resulting single sell surprisingly well in some other parts of Texas (I say all this solely in the interest of art — and politically, it’s worth noting Stack seems to have hated both government and capitalism, not unlike a lot of angry people who end up barricading their compounds, if you know what I mean, people who lately probably don’t seem nearly as strange to many cash-strapped Americans as they once did).

•••

Speaking of the South, I have in recent years dated a liberal lawyer from Virginia and, starting one year later, a conservative writer/editor from North Carolina (it’s not a strict rule that anyone who has dated me must eventually be a Lolita Bar debater, by the way, but the tally so far is five, those two among them, for those keeping track — and I don’t think that’s so many, given that we’ve done about sixty debates over a period of five years now, usually with two smart people who know me in each debate, and given my tendency to date only smart women — and let me add that “Lolita” stands for LOwer East Side near Little ITAly, just in case you suspected otherwise).

Anyway, at the risk of offending numerous people (but I’ll try to be fair even while brutally brief), the Virginian often charged that by being a right-leaning libertarian, I was no mere econ-loving man of the Enlightenment but in fact an enforcer of rigid traditionalist social hierarchies, especially regarding women, that I was insufficiently concerned with social justice, that I sound like a callous jerk sometimes on this blog, and that I was in effect rubbing shoulders with neo-Confederates and slavery apologists whose talk of being “libertarian” was a mere cover for a specific right-wing cultural agenda. I assured her I barely knew what she was talking about, my agenda being mainly dictated by supply and demand curves, and suggested her concerns might be rooted more in Southern experience than in my dry Northeastern bean-counting notions.

Then, a year later, the North Carolinian, who says she’s in some sense technically libertarian, began criticizing me precisely for not sufficiently valuing rigid social hierarchies, especially regarding women, for being too “reform”-minded, and for not being combative enough, and she even complained that the South’s history of slavery is often too glibly condemned by outsiders who consider it uniquely evil and manifestly un-Christian but fail to place it in historical context amidst various other old, oppressive social systems.

I’m not saying that getting attacked from both left and right proves I’m the sane middle ground here (as with healthcare legislation and bank bailouts, sometimes the left and right attack the middle because the middle genuinely sucks), nor even that I want the two of them to fight it out while I watch (though, again, I do organize debates), but merely that sometimes a brutha can’t get a break. That is my real message to the world. Write that down. I want that on my tombstone and, who knows, may well need one soon for all I know.

(Incidentally, the North Carolinian, Helen Rittelmeyer, notes an excellent summary by Fred Siegel of recent political corruption scandals in the New York area and beyond, lest we think the North is perfect. If you’re a liberal like the Virginian, Koli Mitra, you should read it as another reminder that government may not be a likely means of improving society — and Koli might well agree. I will admit government is generally more bearable than slavery, though.)

•••

Meanwhile, my favorite free-market Southern politician (who ironically used to work for Huckabee), Dan Greenberg, has won the National Review Institute’s Ideas Challenge award for 2010. His idea (or at least an idea of Ed Meese and some of his fellow conservative constitutional legal scholars that Dan would like to popularize): re-limit the federal government via a constitutional convention called by two thirds of state legislatures instead of waiting for Congress. David Boaz, another of Dan’s former bosses, has half-jokingly warned that the first Constitutional Convention did enough damage without risking another one, but Dan argues that the scope of the convention could be carefully limited by the states.

On a closely related note: If I can’t get budget cuts from the feds, I’d happily settle for a massive move toward the fifty states just ignoring Washington, DC (the way parts of China ignore Beijing). Let DC do nothing but make payments on the debt until it’s gone. There’d be plenty of government left over on the state level — and fifty times more experiment and diversity. This idea is no more radical than racking up a $13 trillion debt and then spending still more. And let me be clear that I am not invoking states’ rights as a backdoor means of oppressing the black man. To steal a joke from the leftist Yes Men: I personally am an abolitionist. You need not call me hero.

Tea Parties, Snow, Hackers, and Death

Tomorrow, Saturday, Feb. 27 — one year after the small first New York City Tea Party protest at City Hall that led to a gigantic, underreported Tea Party protest there a month or so later (both of which I attended) — there will be an 11am Tea Party anniversary rally, once more at City Hall.  If things are still cold and slushy from the snowfall of the past twenty-four hours, though, I fear attendance may be more along the lines of the smaller first protest.  I will be with them in spirit but physically somewhere warm and dry — but, y’know, you should go, because why should I suffer?

I should note, once again, that despite the attempts to label the Tea Partiers crazy or racist, I saw countless signs with Rand quotes and anti-spending slogans at the events and no racist slogans (though with thousands of people at the larger rally, I’m sure you could find something awful if you insisted on trying — though not as easily as, say, finding anti-Semitic slogans at antiwar rallies).

If you go tomorrow, in fact, consider wearing this snazzy Atlas Shrugged book cover t-shirt pointed out to me by Ali Kokmen (who is not an Objectivist and indeed isn’t even sure he approves of Rand’s fondness for James Bond, arguably not her most shocking position).

I’ll say this for print books, even though I’m one of those people who thinks paper is doomed sooner or later: At least books on paper can’t be hacked, as this site recently was, and my apologies if it takes me and my able webmaster a while to delete some of the freaky-looking but mercifully infrequent glyphs now scattered in my old entries.

A grim reminder how much snow we got: I think I may technically have heard a man killed by the storm yesterday, or at least, after ACSH let us out of work early, I was near 69th and Fifth in Central Park at about 3:25pm, trudging home and a bit disturbed by the size of the slushy ice clumps falling like a meteor shower from the trees — and then I heard an immense and protracted “crack” that sounded exactly like a huge tree limb breaking off, learning only today that a man died at that time in that area due to a falling limb.  I heard no cries of alarm or anything but recall briefly thinking, “That sounded like a big, dangerous tree limb falling, and I’m glad I’m nearly out of the Park.”  Tomorrow, then, is likely to be better than yesterday.

Rand and God (and Muppets and Killdozer)

It’s disappointing that a movie of Atlas Shrugged with Angelina Jolie didn’t quite happen — and that we’ll never see the ad campaign that likely would have resulted, with Jolie accompanied by the question “WHO IS JOHN GALT?”  In what may be just an odd coincidence, Jolie is now being seen in ads for her upcoming action movie Salt, with the tagline “WHO IS SALT?”

While I await at least a TV miniseries version of the Rand story, at least I have a first edition, first printing of Atlas Shrugged (alas, without the dust jacket, so better to keep the copy than to make a few hundred on eBay) given to me by hippie-ish organic farmer and former Berkeley-dweller Valerie Jackson, ironically enough.   (The one I’ve been lugging around reading lately, though, is a paperback edition kindly provided to studio audience members after the Stossel episode about the book.)

Comparably ironic, perhaps, is the fact that although libertarians like the Institute for Humane Studies folk I’ll see tonight still gather on the lower floors of the Empire State Building — where Rand had her headquarters decades ago — libertarians now gather there thanks to the hospitality of the very-Christian institution King’s College (and they don’t mean “king of freight trains”).   This is no weirder, of course, than the fusionist combo of traditionalists and free-marketeers that makes up the broader conservative movement — but let’s not exaggerate the long-term logical necessity of the religious element of that coalition, regardless of its short-term electoral necessity.

I’ll grant that the most efficient four-word libertarian message in all of history was probably “Thou shalt not steal,” but I am not as convinced as one of my interlocutors at my Yale speech last week was that religious folk will always tend to be the anti-totalitarians and atheists (such as the Communists) to be the totalitarians.   Indeed, it strikes me that, in what should be a relief to secular conservatives everywhere, the time for making that generalization has clearly passed.

After all, authoritarian as China and Russia may be, the nastiest totalitarian regimes on the planet in this century arguably are motivated by faith.  The West threatens them precisely because it is secular, not, as one might have halfway-plausibly argued in the twentieth century, because the West is mostly-Christian.   If we were still in the midst of the Cold War, I’d almost sympathize with the view of some Straussians that intellectuals should “play along” with religion for the sake of its broader social effects — but I’d say that time is over.

Further, the stats apparently suggest that atheists (real ones, not, crucially, people who believe in God but mistakenly call themselves “atheists” because they have become estranged from their churches, an odd but apparently common American linguistic practice) are in fact the best-behaved, most law-abiding segment of the population, whether religionists like it or not.

(An aside: My wise young interlocutor made the important point that some things labeled “faith” are believed due to a proven, empirically-verifiable track record — such as a long-term tendency for church hierarchies to dispense moral advice or encourage charity — but that’s precisely why, as I responded, it’s important not to bundle together under the single label “faith” things proven and things believed without any evidence at all.   I may know from long experience that my neighbor is good at billiards, but that doesn’t mean I also have to trust him when he says he’s convinced his dreams about the world coming to an end in 2012 are true.   In philosophy class, if people refused to use two different words for these things — such as “trust” and “faith” — we’d simply refer to faith-sub-1 and faith-sub-2 to make sure we separated the reliable from the made-up and didn’t let the reputation of one falsely enhance the rep of the other.)

Of course, even if one were not a Straussian but instead a Burkean — generally a good thing, in my book — one might argue that we simply can’t be in the business of trying to prise apart different aspects of religion, saying this part’s bunk and that part’s socially valuable and worth emulating and risking misidentifying which parts are which.   But are we so sure of that?   Would doing that really be that much weirder than all the other mind-boggling and often beneficial social transformations America has undergone over the past two centuries?   I predict we can handle it and that the experienced-vs.-imagined distinction suggested above is the obvious place to start — though those least able to cope with (or imagine) the resulting social transformations will of course be the first to declare such sorting unworkable and forbidden.   (Luckily, we can discuss some of this at Lolita Bar next Wednesday on the occasion of our Richard Spencer vs. Helen Rittelmeyer debate on the question “Is Christianity for Wimps?”)

P.S. As a reminder of where a life guided by supernatural fears can lead when they are not functioning as a productive goad to law-abiding and proper behavior, here are the Muppets in the terrifying video clip “Bear Wit Project” — though I think Rand would have been more troubled by the hint of anti-industrialism in the 1970s TV-movie thriller Killdozer.

Atlas Shrugged -- Others Uttered a Vague "Meh"

Ayn Rand’s novel about a collapsing, overregulated economy, Atlas Shrugged, sold over a half-million copies in 2009 alone — and that was over twice the previous one-year record, set in 2008, according to the Ayn Rand Institute.  This suggests that the narrative of our economic woes being caused by unregulated capitalist greed has not fully taken hold, thank goodness.  (Perhaps without all the bailout and stimulus spending it would have, and in some sense we’d be in worse shape, ideologically if not economically.)

And I’ve been reading Atlas myself, for the first time since college (having read it the same pivotal summer that I read several of her books plus Locke, Smith, Mill, the Constitution, the Declaration, Reason magazine, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and de Tocqueville for good measure).  Then, it was the collapse of Communism, not capitalism, that was the hot topic.  Even then I objected to some aspects of Rand, such as the suggestion that altruism must lead to forced redistribution instead of, as has often been the case historically, being the antidote to forced redistribution.  So, I was fully prepared to dislike Atlas now that I’m older and wiser — but I have to confess, at the risk of looking like a hopeless libertarian geek, that I like it even more now.

Despite people usually remembering Rand for her somewhat flat heroes, it’s all the weaseling, mushy-middle, business-oriented but non-capitalist, PR-obsessed, science-politicizing, continually-evasive, chronically-indecisive characters who seem so painfully, urgently real now — and who are not quite captured so well in any other novel of which I am aware, at least not in the sprawling, highly-relevant context of an increasingly hobbled economy.  The book is really more about evasion than heroism in some sense, and it’s the former that is harder to understand intuitively (at least for some of us).

The brain doesn’t like to dwell on the ugly details of evasive, self-contradictory thinking, obviously, whereas the basics of heroism are so intuitively appealing that someone even paid $1 million for a copy of Action Comics #1, as noted by this article, which, oddly enough, quotes the drummer from System of a Down, who is also apparently a comic book dealer.  (This is another reminder that I’d love to know how successful bands have to get before the members tend to quit their other jobs.  Is anyone from Metric working in a Montreal bookstore?  And come to think of it, don’t I love Metric songs like “Stadium Love” precisely because so much other 00s rock sounded wussy and evasive, even when feigning garage-rock wildness?)

If you feel that YOU cannot avoid the topic of evasive thinking and what to do about it, perhaps we can discuss it tonight shortly after 8pm with the group Drinking Skeptically, at the aptly-named bar the Four-Faced Liar in the Village.  And more Rand thoughts tomorrow.

Misfit vs. Misfit Debate Audio

Our recent (Feb. 3) Debate at Lolita Bar pitted two former members of the Misfits, Bobby Steele and Michale Graves, against each other on the question “Is the Music Business Bad for Music as an Art Form?”  Remember the event with us now, with photos by Monty Leman (showing, from left to right, me, Graves, Steele, and moderator Michel Evanchik) and an audio file courtesy of Michel Evanchik (with added music snippets by the debaters themselves: the Misfits song “Dig Up Her Bones” and the Undead song “Evening of Desire”).

(listen to the debate download the mp3.)

As if that weren’t intense enough, remember that Wednesday next week (March 3, at 8pm) we return to Lolita Bar for the mosh-like throwdown between Richard Spencer and Helen Rittelmeyer on the question “Is Christianity for Wimps?”  I think we know what Ayn Rand’s answer would have been, but use your own judgment.

Brief Foreign Policy Note: Dubai

I’m sure to many people it seems like too disturbing a topic to broach, but I must not be the only one over the past few days who’s been thinking, “Even if you find the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai troubling, isn’t it sort of nice to hear that it may have been done by the Mossad and Fatah working together?  Cooperation has to start somewhere.”

A side note: If overly-ecumenical Americans ever finally fuse Hannukah and Christmas into one holiday decades hence, I do not think they should call the combined celebration Hamas.

Brain Cancer, Retardation, Coma Communications, and Hypnosis

I’m attending a fundraising event tonight (at which one of my neighbors is singing) for a group that gives gifts to kids with brain cancer, which, since I’m a compassionate guy, reminded me of two other brain-problem-related stories that struck me recently, one from the news, one from my own experience.

•First, I inadvertently found myself in a footrace with a short, seemingly developmentally disabled man last week.  He was walking rather slowly, but each time I moved to try and pass him, he would start speed-walking in a very panicky-seeming fashion until he was back in the lead and would then become calm again and slow down, eventually leading to me trying to make another dash around him.  At first I thought it might be a coincidence, but he kept doing it each time I moved as if to pass.  It was very important to him to stay in the lead, apparently (he seemed to make some exertion noises and was very warmly bundled up, looking a tad insecure).  I lost him at a stoplight, where he seemed transfixed for a time.  But in the end, no one really lost on that day.

(This in turn reminds me, as Michael Malice likes to do, of Rand’s comment in an interview that she admired the Charlie’s Angels TV series because she would prefer to watch beautiful women doing impossible things to watching the retard child who lives in the gutter.  On an unrelated note, here’s a story about a 500-pound fat woman doing something amazing, namely giving birth.)

•Second, that guy in a coma who was supposedly communicating via subtle finger movements — a claim of which James Randi was an early skeptical critic, as I noted back around Thanksgiving — has now been revealed by his doctors to be just a regular, uncommunicative guy in a coma.  His doctors now liken the “messages” that some people thought he was sending to the messages people believe they get from ouija boards, not realizing that they are subconsciously spelling out precisely the words they long to see.  That humans are so quick — eager, even — to engage in such self-deception is all the more reason that we have to be skeptical.  That which seems too good to be true — especially that which fits neatly into our preconceived expectations — may well be bunk, and there is no magic in pretending otherwise, only error.

Unless by magic one means stage magic, of course, which relies heavily on manipulating people’s expectations — just as stage hypnosis always relies heavily on weeding out the people who honestly admit that “nothing seems to be happening,” until the performer whittles his way down to the handful of people who can dupe themselves into thinking they must behave like chickens — or better yet, just the handful of dishonest people willing to play along and get some attention while up on stage.  There is no mind control — but there’s plenty of self-deception, conscious deceit, and just plain acting like a fool once given a handy social excuse.  Welcome to the human race.

"We the Living," Romney the Vulcan

With my Italian libertarian economist friend, I rewatched the very libertarian Italian movie We the Living, adapted in 1942 without Rand’s authorization (but with her retroactive approval decades later) from her early novel about a young woman in Rand’s native Soviet Union dreaming of escape and torn between two lovers, one anti-communist but driven to cynicism and despair, the other a principled but deluded Communist Party member. Even with the film’s truncation/ambiguity about the end of the original story, things do not go well.

Nor did things go well with the film’s original release — released (in two parts) with the approval of the authorities in Italy during WWII because it was anti-Soviet, it was yanked after a few weeks when the authorities realized its individualist message was anti-fascist as well (Mussolini’s goons apparently having been as slow to figure out that individualist messages are incompatible with fascism as were left-wing British rock critics who condemned Rush as proto-fascist).

We the Living may be the most normal-human-feeling Rand story of which I’m aware, particularly her willingness to make Andrei the Communist a surprisingly sympathetic character. Socialism, as depicted in Rand’s work, is an inexcusable, alien offense in the U.S. but a genuine tragedy in Mother Russia. The convincing scenes of Party meetings at the local university, with their air of participatory democracy (marred by out-of-sight executions and backroom deals), reminded me very much of the unintentionally poignant descriptions in American Bolshevik reporter John Reed’s writings of his experiences in the early Soviet Union, when people really believed that the spontaneous collective bridge-building and so forth that they were engaged in was a model for the freer and more spontaneous future they were creating (with only occasional hints in the Reed essays I read of drafts, food shortages, and other rapidly-widening cracks in the armor of the worker’s paradise).

Depicting Andrei as basically a good man actually does fit neatly into Rand’s thinking, though: She said repeatedly that one would be better off dealing with a principled Marxist, who at least feels obliged to render his thoughts coherent, than with a mush-minded welfare statist with no clear principles. The former offers the opportunity for rational persuasion, but the latter, as we know from everyday life in the U.S., is largely immune and can simply shift gears, in an almost postmodern fashion, when cornered. Indeed, the Rand speech I read to Yale students on Wednesday ended with the prediction that the mushy middle would not hold and that the future would belong to one or the other principled extreme: Objectivism or Communism (this inspired one student to ask if I’m an Objectivist and, when I said no, to follow up with the amusing question, “Well, then, are you a Communist?” — Rand greatly underestimated people’s willingness to muddle along somewhere in the middle, right up to and perhaps beyond the point of the welfare state’s collapse).

For my copy of the We the Living DVD, I should again thank Duncan Scott Productions and Patrick Reasonover (who is more a paleolibertarian than Objectivist, but we like paleolibertarian media guys). My Italian economist advisor notes, though, that the English subtitles on the film are a very loose, sometimes just flat-out wrong, translation, something that future distributors might want to revisit. When Andrei calls himself a traitor to Communism in the English subtitles toward the end, for instance, he actually says in the original Italian that he had been deluded.

P.S. In other video news that raises questions about coercion and freedom, I was amused to read that in an online video, the L.A. rapper who got into an altercation with Mitt Romney on a plane explains that he is not a “salmon” to be seized by a “condor grip” — and indeed that Romney has no right to use a “Vulcan grip” on people (hey, maybe he’s a Romnulan).

If Romney’s using sci-fi battle tactics on fellow passengers, one can only imagine the horrible showdown that will occur if he is ever seated next to Kevin Smith on a plane. At least he didn’t insist that anyone’s dog be transported on the roof of the plane.

More on Weasel Science: Smoking

Just one more example of rampant weasel language in the public presentation of science (to go on about it too much would be to steal material from my job): A tragedy now occurring in public health is the widespread condemnation and/or banning by all the purportedly most-responsible health authorities of “e-cigarettes,” which are (almost certainly) harmless nicotine inhalers that could likely save 400,000 American lives a year if they replaced regular burning-tobacco cigarettes (so you can have your Randian/conservative firestick in hand without having your head in the sand about health effects).

But the health officials are shameless about saying, in effect, “e-cigarettes and smokeless tobacco are no safer than regular cigarettes,” even though that’s utterly false (and dooms millions to die) by any normal English-usage standards and can only be excused if taken to mean “e-cigarettes may have the same obscure random cancer dangers as the ambient ‘toxins’ some people worry about from breathing near plastic or any other paranoid hypothetical, and smokeless tobacco may present about 1% of the cancer risk regular cigarettes do, and since that means neither can technically be said to be perfectly safe with certainty, they are ‘equivalent’ in risk to tobacco smoke.  QED.”  (All of this sophistry is of course driven by hatred of the tobacco companies and thus considered morally excusable.)

What can you do when language has lost all meaning?  And the easy skeptical response of saying, “Those officials’ conclusions are based on science, not like Mormonism!  Yay!” simply doesn’t address the rather nuanced problem.  All you can do is work as an anti-junk-science crusader day after day and hope the world catches on eventually.

Skeptical of Skeptical Inquirer

Having learned nothing from the deluge of negative letters they got three years ago (including one from me that got printed) — which caused Skeptical Inquirer magazine to instantly downsize the second half of their planned two-issue, alarmist global warming coverage — the magazine now (in its March/April 2010 issue) unleashes three very short, very perfunctory, very snotty pieces lamenting pompously that we anti-scientific global warming doubters have not given up our campaign of baseless accusations against the well-established facts of climate science. I hope the magazine will once again discover that its readers do not assume that skeptic = climate alarmist (often quite the contrary).

One piece even goes on about climate skeptics not being real skeptics for about three pages before noting in passing that, oh, by the way, if there were, y’know, improprieties in climate research hinted at by that recent e-mail controversy thing, don’t worry because they will of course be dealt with in the time-honored fashion of good science — but that incident is of course no excuse for those ghouls who hate reason to feel encouraged that their nonsense (about the climate situation not being a crisis) should be taken seriously, etc.

There’s a (dare I say it) faith-in-the-scientists problem with organized skepticism — a tendency to think that because the scientific method in its pure form over time gets the best results (which is true), we can already trust the current scientific establishment to have reached sound final conclusions, even on things that aren’t well studied or quite within the speakers’ ostensible areas of expertise. This problem is not an excuse to valorize non-scientific thought nor to throw out all science (any more than the existence of residual mysteries about the universe is a blank check to believe in ghosts and werewolves), but it’s a real problem — akin to making the logical leap from the long-term efficiency of market processes to saying that we can trust in the wisdom of all currently-existing businesses.

The problem is certainly one relevant to my real job, combating unscientific nonsense that is mostly created by real, credentialed (but nonetheless agenda-driven and context-dropping) scientists. I mentioned the problem to a nice skeptic couple I know, and the scientist wife assured me that if there are errors, science quickly weeds them out. I simply don’t believe that anymore (at least not the quickly part, which is key, and not in highly politicized topic areas) — especially once certain rhetorical forms of context-dropping (such as flatly calling things “carcinogens(!)” that are really only “possible carcinogens to some rodents if administered in astonishingly high doses of no relevance to ordinary human exposures”) become so institutionalized that no one feels guilty about using them anymore, be they scientists or university PR departments seeking attention for the latest (likely irrelevant) research, let alone ratings-seeking reporters, who I’m almost starting to feel sorry for, given how irresponsible some of the scientists are. In science as in business: love the process, hate many of the practitioners is increasingly my attitude.

And I must say, I sure felt like I was at work while recently re-reading that passage in Atlas Shrugged in which Dagny tries to get the head of the government science center to admit to the meaninglessness of the center’s vaguely-worded statement condemning Rearden Metal as maybe-possibly-potentially dangerous in some as yet unknown way (my boss has had similar experiences trying to get National Cancer Institute heads to admit that they know industrial chemicals are not a significant source of cancer). Check out the wording of the FDA’s recent worried-sounding yet non-banning announcement regarding the harmless but paranoia-attracting chemical BPA if you don’t think government-fueled weasel-science is slow-motion-eroding industrial civilization before our eyes in much the same way. I worry.

Mother Teresa and Philosophy

Like some of the likely listeners at my Yale rendition of Rand’s “Faith and Force” speech tonight at Harkness Hall, Room 119 (6pm), my fellow conservative Gerard Perry does not share my complete skepticism about religion — and asks how I feel about Mother Teresa being honored with a U.S. Post Office stamp. I think any fair-minded person would agree that this is an unfortunate violation of the separation of church and state — and a case of coercers using stolen money to honor a crank, to boot. As Christopher Hitchens and others have lamented, Mother Teresa often eschewed modern medical assistance as ostentatious and overly materialistic, preferring in many cases to pray futilely over the dying or merely lay hands upon them. A tragic, morally warped figure who serves as a warning to us all of how not to live (one of the reasons I just signed up to attend the April 17 NECCS conference of skeptics here, featuring James Randi and others).

Meanwhile, for example, some of my materialistic, purportedly shallow colleagues at the American Council on Science and Health have literally done things like save a billion lives through improved agricultural techniques and eradicate smallpox from the planet even while being pilloried by ostensible defenders of Nature and/or God’s design — and all that struggle goes on when the more minor players on our Board aren’t merely helping to found hospitals and the like. Ah, what blinkered, cramped little lives the servants of science and industry lead! They’ll pay for it with eternal torture in the afterlife, I’m sure, and no one wants to be eternally tortured.

Of course, lest I exaggerate the divide, it’s worth noting my boss at ACSH is married to a religious man and that long-term co-existence is thus possible (fusionism!). Their daughter, I concede, did a nice job of splitting the difference by focusing on…philosophy. That makes sense to me. Philosophy is a fairly open-ended attempt to talk about truth in whatever language proves necessary to describe it — and wherever the ensuing arguments lead. Like few other disciplines, it is malleable enough to address whatever appear to be the new vexing issues of the day without requiring the jettisoning of the whole field’s methodology or underlying cosmological assumptions when surprises arise — as of course they always should unless one is very stubborn.

•••

In short, if there’s reason to believe there’s a God, the idea ought to be subsumable within philosophical language, just as the implications of a purely-material universe ought to be. Philosophy, bless it, is ready to handle anything — which is why people like me who are (in addition to being pretty rational) a tad stoic and not easily fazed are often drawn to it. If you tell engineers that we’ve just discovered all physical laws are really being faked via telekinesis, they’ll probably freak out, at least in the short term. Philosophers will calmly ask, for example, what ethical implications this revelation has for the permissible range of action of the telekinetics (if they change the laws of the universe at a whim, have we been wronged?).

We philosophy buffs can handle the truth, in other words. I would not lose my mind if it turned out the universe were the product of a planning mind (heck, I’ll even tell you the one remotely-plausible argument I’ve heard for this position, which is the argument from the so-called Cosmic Anthropic Principle concerning the well-suitedness of this physical universe to molecule formation, not that I think it ultimately necessitates a Designer). I only wish I could convince my religious acquaintances (those who have not already permanently lost their minds) that they need not lose their minds if we conclude, after sober reflection, that the universe does not imply a Creator. They seem very anxious and insecure on that front as compared to all the skeptics I know.

Speaking of things poised between science and religion, by the way, in between the inflation-adjusted box office totals for biotech-oriented Jurassic Park and ancient-Hebrews-oriented Raiders of the Lost Ark (both Spielberg-directed) now sits Avatar, at #17 on the all-time box office hits list (with a diabolical $666 million in domestic ticket sales). It’s risen above Phantom Menace and The Graduate in the past week or so — how high will it go? This might, I suppose, be a good time to admit I was wrong about one empirical prediction: I thought Avatar would be a colossal money-loser.

Kevin Smith Too Fat to Fly

Here’s something with political ramifications we can discuss tonight at Manhattan Project (6:30 at Merchants NY East) or tomorrow after my Rand speech at Yale (6pm at Harkness Hall, Room 119): nerd-beloved director Kevin Smith was ousted from a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. A side effect of creeping health-nannyism, or exactly the kick in the lard-filled ass America needs? When in doubt, of course, I defer to the owners of the company — but a ticket is a contract. So many questions…so many future jokes at his own expense…

Book Selection of the Month: "Philosophy: Who Needs It" by Ayn Rand

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (February 2010): Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand (featuring the 1960 speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World”)

A fine anthology of philosophical essays and fiction snippets for the newcomer to Rand’s thinking, this collection contains in particular the aptly-titled speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World,” outlining in admirably clear terms the two means by which humans avoid moral and logical consequences — muscle and intellectual evasion.

Of course, I will myself be chopping out long, extra-crazy passages about the evils of altruism when I do my own rendition of the speech in two days (followed by two more renditions right here in New York City a couple months from now).  Michael Malice, who has called himself “more Rand than Rand,” has already chastised me for the planned excisions, saying, oh, sure, the speech has just been influential for fifty years and stood the test of time, so why not chop out the parts you don’t like to suit your own thinking?

Nonetheless, unless the Man (as opposed to man qua man) at Yale stops me, I will deliver the slightly-abbreviated speech at three locations, each on the fiftieth anniversary of the day of Rand originally gave it in that location:

•Yale University on February 17, 1960 (6pm Yale’s Harkness Hall, 100 Wall Street, Room 119, New Haven, CT)
•Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960
•Columbia University on May 5, 1960.

As I’ve noted before, these dates happen to fall on Ash Wednesday, Easter Sunday, and Cinco de Mayo, so I hope Catholics in particular will learn from the speech, despite their stubborn resistance to rational thought and skeptical analysis, knowing as they do that their entire worldview hangs like a shaking, dried leaf upon the outmost branch of human gullibility, unsupported by a scrap of evidence or an iota of common sense.  Religion of all stripes speaks to people — and to their travails — on an emotional level, just as the idea of the boogeyman in the closet or unicorns prancing in an unseen part of the local woods undeniably speaks to a five-year-old.  This is not truth, though.  This is not basic intellectual integrity.

I will endeavor to make that point on Wednesday, possibly to a room full of people with ash on their foreheads who believe that the occasional statue smeared with chicken blood by children or con artists has come to life and is weeping tears.  For shame.

Incidentally, I applied to — and was accepted to — the entire Ivy League back in the day except for Yale, which I had completely avoided applying to because I feared its famed divinity school would mean the campus was crawling with Christians (ha!  the Div School is, of course, instead full of pagans and Sofia-worshippers).  Ironically (due, some would argue, to divine  or Satanic intervention), years later I nonetheless ended up dating a Yale religious studies major, Helen Rittelmeyer, who at one point headed OSGaY (the Objectivist Study Group at Yale), the very same Yale Party of the Right branch essentially devoted to “deprogramming” Objectivists and responsible for hosting me this week — but I will attempt, in both my “performance” as Rand and any subsequent Q&A, to offer something of a middle ground, acknowledging both Rand’s strengths and weaknesses, which only I am fit to judge (having lived a life uniquely devoted to rationality and sober skepticism), as most fair-minded readers of this blog will readily agree.

Incidentally, Rand herself, admittedly waxing rationalistic but hitting on a fairly large grain of truth, said that the answer to the question in this book’s title is “everyone.”  That is, no one is truly without a philosophy — it’s just a question of whether one’s philosophy is coherent or a junk heap of contradictions.  Not that consistency is always less dangerous than a junk heap, of course.

A Brutal Valentine's Day with Ayn Rand

Examining Ayn Rand’s novels with fresh eyes all these years after reading them in college, I can’t help but be struck by how pervasive and obvious the (at least superficially unlibertarian) ethos of the “bdsm community” (fans of bondage, domination, and sexual sadism and masochism) is in her work. It’s an accusation routinely leveled at the obvious target of the actual sex scenes themselves — such as the quasi-rape by Howard Roark in The Fountainhead (usually dismissed by Rand’s fans on the technical grounds that it’s implied he knew she knew he knew she wanted it, etc., which is fair).

What’s more disturbing — and what escaped my notice when I was a naive young reader who hadn’t yet met various New York City-dwelling weirdoes over the course of years of living here — is just how often the bdsm aesthetic crops up in the non-sex scenes. It’s dismissible by those fans who might prefer it weren’t there, unmistakable to those who (whether we like it or not) now know what dark signs to watch for.

Again and again, the message is that instead of fostering mutual kindness, one ought to be proud to take a beating, metaphorical or literal, from someone as exalted and noble — as knowing — as oneself. Take the flashback moment, early in Atlas Shrugged, when a teenage Dagny tells a teenage Francisco that she may just give up and deliberately fail classes at school in order to be more popular, causing Francisco to slap her in the face immediately (not quite the proper non-coercive response):

What she felt was contained in an instant, while the ground rocked under her feet, in a single blast of emotion within her. She knew that she would have killed any other person who struck her; she felt the violent fury which would have given her the strength for it — and as violent a pleasure that Francisco had done it. She felt pleasure from the dull, hot pain in her cheek and from the taste of blood in the corner of her mouth. She felt pleasure in what she suddenly grasped about herself and about his motive.

She braced her feet…looking at him with a mocking smile of triumph.

“Did I hurt you as much as that?” she asked.

He looked astonished; the question and the smile were not those of a child. He answered, “Yes — if it pleases you.”

“It does.”

[When he offered to put cold water on her wounded lip, she] laughed, stepping back. “Oh, no. I want to keep it as it is. I hope it swells terribly. I like it.” [Later, she felt] that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

The description of Dagny’s pain on the tennis court as she forces Francisco to feel pain with her extraordinary playing against him, reveling in the thought that her exertions begin in her aching muscles and end in his, has a similarly violent quality to it.

If Rand were content to depict the characters beating the crap out of each other in merely-private conversation or in the bedroom, that would be one thing — of psychological but no great political interest — but her love of consensual brutality actually ends up affecting her depiction of economics, and in ways that should make libertarians worry about her ability to function as an effective proselytizer for capitalism. Just as the bdsm ethos, in the minds of its more hardcore or pathological practitioners, requires not just some painful-but-pleasant role-playing but a continual escalation in acts of cruelty until the participants are tested to their ostensible limits and then forced to discover new ones (albeit without actually having to, say, join the Marines, climb a mountain, learn the harpsichord, or do something genuinely productive), so too do the Atlas characters repeatedly express their sexually-charged admiration for each other’s willingness to drive such hard bargains that others are driven to the brink of bankruptcy.

Now, I’m not for a moment saying that capitalists shouldn’t be charging the highest prices they can get — that’s the whole idea. But I don’t feel the need — economists don’t feel the need — to justify the practice in part by showing how even the people on the rougher end of the deal can learn to take a sick thrill in being bested. It’s enough to observe that any voluntary exchange is presumably mutually beneficial by definition without turning it into some Germanic tableau of submission and domination. The kind-hearted Amish man selling pricey whoopee pies on the side of the road to beloved neighbors and tourist children with a few kind words of wisdom is as much a capitalist as the gruff tycoon telling a supplier that he’d better cut his prices in half or he’ll never get another large-volume aluminum siding deal in this town again, you little runt-bastard. Indeed, there’s nothing uncapitalist about saying we prefer the Amish guy, so long as we don’t enforce that preference via legal favoritism.

I prefer the Amish guy.

Poor Rand, I fear, was basically making the all too common mistake of embracing one’s enemies’ description of oneself. Just as a child who is told without reason by an abusive parent that he is no good may sometimes decide “Fine, then, I’m a bad seed!” and become worse — or gays decide that it is their role to mock all conventional ethics because they have (wrongly) been told repeatedly that the greatest sources of joy in their lives are unethical — so, too, does Rand seem, like some of the very characters she upbraids for this self-hating mental maneuver, to have thought, “If the Soviets of my childhood insist that only a cruel-hearted, cold person can be a capitalist — then I shall be cruel and cold! If only mercilessness works in business, then I will eroticize mercilessness!” This does capitalists an inadvertent disservice. They needn’t be sadists. Those who admire them needn’t be masochists.

•••

Sadists are the lowest form of human life, by definition, as I’ve said before — arguably the lowest form of life, period, given that non-human animals merely act on self-preserving instinct, not conscious malevolence. Just as one doesn’t need complex philosophy or psychological analysis to see that an avalanche that shatters one’s leg is, all else being equal, a worse outcome than a warm breeze on a sunny day — and marauding jackals keen to eat you a worse set of companions than a playful batch of puppies — so too is the world a worse place for having in it people who enjoy — or admire — the gratuitous infliction of suffering on others instead of the upward spiral of increasing mutual benefit possible from generous and compassionate cooperation.

The damage done by specifically-sexual sadists, of course, can be contained to some degree by their ritualistic dyadic relationships with willing partners, but (as Aristotle knew) we are creatures of habit, and unless cruelty can somehow be performed with cold, scientific detachment (itself arguably dehumanizing) it is likely to foster deformed characters whose ill-will will surface in places other than the bedroom (or boardroom). A friend of mine was rightly alarmed, I think, to read of Penn Jillette, who was casually making a freedom-of-thought point, saying that while rape is wrong, fantasizing about rape all day is harmless. If our fantasies affect our emotional makeup and in subtle ways our behavior, it’s not entirely clear Penn is correct on that point.

For the most devoted of Rand fans, it is crucial to take her at her word that all of her work is joyous and life-affirming, so they’ll likely hasten to deny the significance of this dark streak in her aesthetics and psyche — just as some to whom I’ve talked are (or in the old days often were) keen to deny the non-libertarian, more blatantly Nietzschean tone of her early works, such as the play The Night of January Sixteenth, in which the absent hero-capitalist is likened not to a peaceful trader but to a brutal master who gladly wields “a whip over the world” and would walk indifferent across victims’ corpses to reach his goal, hardly the libertarian ideal (yet the descriptor has its echo in more politically-neutral descriptions of Roark in The Fountainhead and a fainter, more tamed and scrupulously libertarian echo in the sadomasochistic interactions of the main Atlas characters). Rand began by liking a certain type of noble brute, I’d contend, then sublimated that into a (commendable) admiration for capitalists but without fully jettisoning her old, more savage aesthetics (and turn-ons, presumably).

(Highly devoted Rand fans will always insist she was very happy, too, of course, though we can legitimately question whether such a censorious, intolerant hardass seems happy. They’ll sometimes note that she danced around her office listening to ragtime music, but raise your hand if you think that would have been anything other than a terrifying spectacle.)

It’s worth noting that one is playing with fire if pushing an ethos and aesthetic that may be readily absorbed without the crucial accompanying economic qualifiers and side constraints that render it safe. Certainly, with an early work such as January Sixteenth, one could reasonably come away, not with a newfound love of tolerance and individualism, but with the contrary idea that predators are cool. And predators may well be “cool” — I think there are real, hard-wired reasons most of us would rather look like hawks and wolves than like cows despite ironically often approximating such predatory-hunter looks by wearing leather. But predators are not good. And thus neither are people habituated to think like them. And Rand of all people should not be valorizing them. It’s almost as absurd as, say, a meekness-promoting Christian doing so.

There is no stupider or more destructive attitude — common though it certainly is — than the belief that being bad is an accomplishment. A Nietzschean who is indifferent to others’ suffering or to moral rules — the cad who prides himself on being a cad, for instance — is as much a dangerous yet pitiable fool as the gang member who proudly says, “Some old lady tried to teach me to read — so I took her wallet! I’m awesome!” I think we’ve all seen those moments in movies where some naive villain, soon to be defeated, mocks the heroes for being made “weak” by compassion and morals — not realizing these things flow from strength, not weakness. Well, I fear there are a lot of people out there as stupid as that villain — priding themselves on being nasty, gratuitously sarcastic, self-destructive, sadistic, callous, or just resolutely “unimpressed.” These are not our best and brightest, though some of them may move among our best and brightest and imagine themselves superior, like predators among prey.

Likewise, priding oneself on avoiding altruism or kindness or gentleness is misguided — perhaps in a neurological sense even “miswired.” Surely pain and pleasure evolved for the very purpose of guiding us away from things associated with the former and toward things associated with the latter, survival-enhancing signaling devices at the most basic level of our emotional makeup that also function as the foundations of socialization, via the empathy that leads us (all else being equal) to be made happy by the sight of happiness and distressed by the sight of others in pain.

People who don’t feel these things — or even have the polarities reversed (preferring suffering to happiness, etc.) — can be said prima facie to have something wrong with them (though they needn’t necessarily end up bad people), as surely as does a cat that gnaws off its own foot instead of eating its food. We obviously weren’t meant to function via constant conflict or suffering. We are (most of us) humans, not ghouls (and rationalizations about athlete-like testing of limits does little to diminish the fundamental ghoulishness of the bdsm ethos).

•••

Not surprisingly, from what I’ve seen — though I do not pretend to have made a scientific survey — the people you encounter who admit to a Rand-like streak of sexual cruelty tend to be creepy little toads with facial ticks and other obvious problems, possibly people drawn to the bdsm world in part by their social failure (or at least fear of social failure) in other circles: nerds who as children liked to pick wings off flies, impotent but violent men, sociopathic females, fat people of both genders. That’s not to say you don’t meet seemingly-nice people in New York-area intellectual circles who are “into that sort of thing,” though they often still have the facial ticks and other warning signs — or at least very odd aesthetics, such as one chubby computer programmer who I once saw enthuse to a room of mixed company, in all seriousness, about his desire to engage in a tableau of flagellation and then be served some really good waffles from the restaurant next door to his favorite downtown “dungeon.”

A big part of it all, I’m sure, is people wanting the superficial badges of accomplishment — injury, weariness — without actually accomplishing anything, like someone who has no hope of winning a boxing match and so decides instead to just prove he can lie there and take a lot of punches (even though good boxers are of course motivated by the desire to avoid taking punches, which is why their managers tell them “Great job, champ, he didn’t lay a glove on you,” not “I was hoping you’d bleed more, kid, but at least you won”).

Given the statistical rareness of such practices, why have I encountered several avowed practitioners in New York intellectual circles? My explanation — as usual — is another ringing endorsement of culturally-moderate libertarian bourgeois thinking: I suspect that the left and right intellectuals have so thoroughly convinced themselves that mainstream sex is evil and stupid (it being oppressive or depraved, depending on which side of the spectrum they’re approaching it from) that bdsm seems — in classic “hellfire club” fashion — to be an inviting snooty-elite escape from it all, and one they can always claim is marked by irony and detachment and thus not as dopey as the straightforward sex of the bourgeois — though the bourgeois do seem to manage the impressive hat-trick of mixing love, kindness, gentleness, emotional bonding, athletic achievement, and a fundamentally moral heightening of concern for the other person’s wishes that to some might seem a good deal more extraordinary than, say, enduring a punch in the face.

Camille Paglia (herself something of a Rand fan in her youth, and bi and tough) warned twenty years ago that there might be an increase in bdsm in our cultural future — that just as the Enlightenment unleashed not merely Rousseau but de Sade, so too might rising generations’ detachment from traditional morals reveal at first optimism (as with the Boomers), then apathy (Gen X), then perhaps a descent into cruelty (are the millennials statistically more vicious, I wonder?). The cult of victimology of the past few decades could so easily mutate into a cult of creating victims (“I didn’t suffer before, but now I suffer, so I’m special”), a mix of impulses derived in part from Romantic poets, Fight Club/Jackass, and years of valorizing the marginalized — none of it the ruggedness Rand is primarily interested in promoting.

One small film note for those reading this (perhaps with resentment) and themselves dreaming of a lifelong relationship of mutually-inflicted cruelty: I’ve been lamenting needless remakes and reboots lately, and the quickest turnaround ever in that department may now be upon us. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which featured Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as a couple trying to kill each other — and which was in theatres a mere five years ago — will reportedly be remade as Mr. and Mrs. Jones, with younger actors depicting the initial romance and wedding of an essentially identical couple. If your date seems to enjoy it a bit too much, keep in mind you may have a difficult romantic road ahead, possibly leading to a hospital or police station.

P.S. And despite all the implicit criticism and concerns above, I will read Ayn Rand’s essay “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World” this Wednesday (Feb. 17) at 6pm at Yale’s Harkness Hall, 100 Wall Street (the New Haven, CT one!), Room 119, thanks to the Party of the Right (POR) and the Objectivist Study Group at Yale (OSGaY). More about that essay in tomorrow’s President’s Day “Book Selection of the Month” blog entry.

P.P.S. We might also benefit from discussing some of these issues at Tuesday night’s 6:30pm Manhattan Project gathering of political folk at Merchants NY East or even at the March 3 (8pm) Debate at Lolita Bar, which will pit Richard Spencer against Helen Rittelmeyer on the vaguely-related question “Is Christianity for Wimps?” Wusses will not be driven from the audience or beaten with sticks.