OCON 2011

We returned from this year’s Objectivist Conferences a few days ago, so here I will post a few notes about it. I had a really wonderful time. The conference somehow seemed a little more subdued than the last OCON we attended (Boston, 2009), an atmosphere Lynne marked even more than I did, but it was still very inspiring and informative for me.

Yaron Brook set the theme—actually two themes—in his opening lecture: Objectivism is both radical and hard. This is not news, of course, but the two adjectives, radical and hard, kept resurfacing during the lectures. Ayn Rand’s discoveries may seem like common sense—indeed, my reaction, when I first devoured the novels and the non-fiction almost thirty years ago, was that it all seemed so obvious—but in fact the material is difficult and takes years to fully integrate. (I am nowhere near having fully integrated the material myself.) Ayn Rand did all the heavy lifting, but good scholarship is needed today: books, speakers, university positions, etc. And because we are badly outnumbered by the bad guys (i.e. collectivists, statists, and mystics), we who fight for reason and freedom must be excellent. We need to be fighters, to have fire in the belly, to be unafraid.

My “takeaway” from the conference is this. To flourish in life, it is enough to be right in my personal life. However, if I am to participate in a change in the culture—if I am to assist in arresting and reversing the momentum of the civilized world as it hurtles toward statism—it is not enough to simply be right. I must be able to demonstrate and convey the rightness of reason and rational self-interest. The task is nothing short of reversing at least two thousand years of moral inertia. I’ve been living my life and working hard at my job, but I need to accomplish more on this change-the-culture front.

One conference attendee asked an interesting question. Paraphrasing, it went something like this: “It has been said that great ideas are first ignored, then ridiculed, then opposed, then accepted. Where in this progression are we [i.e. Objectivism] now?” It seems pretty clear to me that we are well past the “ignored” stage and have moved into the “ridiculed” stage, perhaps even to the “opposed” stage. An increasing portion of the attention Ayn Rand is getting is serious; her ideas are often disagreed with, but they are represented more or less correctly quite often. This is tremendous progress. Naturally, there still exists an enormous hostility to Rand among certain mentalities, both on the left and the right, who reserve their most revolting vitriol for the ideas that they seem to recognize are the greatest threat to their irrationality (indeed, they are correct on this count), but it has an increasing tone of desperation. 

_____

On Independence Day, John Ridpath did a moving reading of Thomas Jefferson’s last letter, which was written in June 1826. (If you’ve ever heard Ridpath speak, you know how dramatic his deep, sonorous voice is.) The ailing Jefferson was writing to regretfully decline an invitation to attend a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of signing of the Declaration of Independence. The whole letter is amazing, and it includes this gem: 

May it [i.e. the Declaration] be to the world, what I believe it will be . . . the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves . . . All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.[1]

Amazing.

_____

In his lecture, “Individual Rights and Health Care Reform: A Patient’s Perspective,” John David Lewis shared his personal experiences that he had with a team of doctors during a recent serious illness, linking his observations to the wider ideas of freedom and individual rights. It is no surprise that doctors generally exhibit an extraordinary orientation to reality, a “deeply and profoundly Aristotelian approach,” as Dr. Lewis put it. The subjugation of doctors, other health care professionals, and patients to Washington bureaucrats is an evil that is almost too monstrous to fathom. Government rules are placed between minds and reality; they are obstructions, thwarting men’s abilities to judge and act. Government intervention is nothing short of an attack on life itself.

_____

I believe the gem of the conference for me was Thomas Shoebotham’s wonderful set of lectures, “Bach and the 19^th Century.” Shoebotham covered Bach’s background and major influences, such as Buxtehude and Pachelbel, as well as the foreign influences from Italy (Corelli and Vivaldi) and France (Lully and Rameau). He reviewed some technical material—counterpoint and fugue, the chaconne, the passacaglia, and the German chorale—then traced the influence that Bach’s music had on other composers, from Beethoven and Mozart, to Mendelssohn (who almost single-handedly revived Bach’s music from popular obscurity), to Chopin, Brahms, and Wagner. He made a lot of fascinating connections, and it was thrilling and very instructive to hear Shoebotham play excerpts on piano and cello, both instruments of which he plays quite proficiently.

_____

In “The Culture of ‘Package-Dealing’,” Peter Schwartz lectured upon the topic of anti-concepts, which are conceptual “package deals” that have the purpose of destroying legitimate concepts. They function by the implicit substitution of essentials by non-essentials. Classification by non-essential properties paralyses an unwitting mind, obstructing his ability to distinguish the proper referents to a concept from improper ones, and crucially, impairing his ability to identify what ought to be regarded as essential. 

A few examples that were given in the lecture will illustrate the idea. The term “judgmentalism,” for instance, obliterates rational judgment; all judgment, including that which is warranted and rational, is condemned under the sweeping rule that “one must not judge.” The concept of a “stakeholder” destroys that of a shareholder, diluting ownership—actual property rights—with the idea that many others have claims to “a piece of the pie.” The word “simplistic” obliterates principled thinking; the practice of integrating information and identifying fundamentals, as opposed to holding all facts as isolated and unrelated, is thus derided as unjustified over-simplification. The term “divisive” silences principled arguments against mainstream irrational ideas (e.g. multiculturalism).

And of course, the archetype of package deals is selfishness. In this case, a new word was not coined, but a new meaning supplanted the proper one. Selfishness should mean a rational and moral concern for one’s own life and values; it is a virtue. But today, selfishness has come to mean “a pursuit of desires at the expense of others.” This is a disastrous package deal. It lumps together the honest man who works for a living with the thug who picks pockets in a crowd. It blurs the distinction between the entrepreneur who opens a bottle of champagne to celebrate a success and the junkie who shoot heroin to temporarily satisfy an urge to escape his miserable existence. The life-sustaining virtue of long range self-interest is thus replaced by the notion that selfishness is hedonistic or predatory, which serves the purpose of destroying the virtue.

_____

Perhaps the most challenging and rewarding class I took was Jason Rheins course, “The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (part 2): Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” Rheins pointed out that it is Kant more than anybody else who in his ethics has influenced subsequent intellectuals. Rheins did an excellent job covering a lot of difficult material in only three sessions: Kant’s distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge and the epistemological division of the numenal and the phenomenal; the derivation of morality from “practical reason”; a contrast of Kant’s deontological (duty-based) ethics with axiological (value-based) ethics; the concepts of acting from duty as opposed to in accordance with duty, and the resulting moral significance of each; the distinction between moral imperatives that Kant called “hypothetical” from those he called “categorical”; and the “formula for humanity,” the “highest good.” I had had a basic idea of some of this material before, but this course provided a lot of clarification and depth.

_____

The one optional class that Lynne and I took together was John David Lewis’ course, “The History of Ancient Greece: The Early Fourth Century.” (We love Dr. Lewis. He is one of the most brilliant, impassioned, and courageous intellectuals alive today—a hero worthy of the Greeks that he knows so thoroughly. He greeted us warmly even though he hadn’t seen us in two years.) The material he covered was quite interesting—I know a fair amount about the 5^th century BC, but I was inclined to regard the 4^th century as nothing but a decline for Greece, which is a rather conventional viewpoint. Dr. Lewis sees this as a profound mistake, saying he can “make a good case that the 4^th century has it hands down over the 5^th!” When the facts are integrated properly, a few important ideas emerge. For one thing, Athens recovered rapidly after the Peloponnesian War, returning to prosperity—and crucially, when it constructed a second Athenian League, it faced and solved many of the problems that had plagued its first attempt with the Delian League in the previous century. (The Athenians did not have the concept of individual rights, of course, but many of their considerations struck remarkably close to a respect for freedom.) This period also saw the decline of statist Sparta, as its façade of invincibility—the “Spartan mirage”—crumbled to expose a rotten core. The Spartan decline corresponded to an ascendancy of Thebes, the great general Epaminondas, and the dramatic liberation of Messenia in 369 BC.

The tale is ultimately tragic, however. The Greeks never quite solved the federalist problem; that is, they never quite resolved the desire for autonomia—autonomy and independence for the polis—with the practical benefits of a joint defense for all of Greece. This left them vulnerable for what was to come: the rise of Macedonia.

_____

Lynne and I both really enjoyed the unexpected surprise of meeting Luc Travers, a teacher at Van Damme Academy, and author of the book, Touching the Art. (Lynne has already read the book, and I have now moved it closer to the top of my pile!) Travers is infectiously enthusiastic, and he generously invited our daughters to his brief presentation (which turned into a standing-room-only performance) of his approach to art, which we all enjoyed.

_____

John Allison, who is one of the indefatigable champions of Objectivism and former chairman and CEO of BB&T, presented a lecture on “Teamwork and Independence,” which presented a view that is undoubtedly unconventional in the business world. In essence, Allison refuted the pat expression, “there is no ‘I’ in ‘team’.” (Those are my words, not Allison’s.) His system is meritorious, rewarding independent thinking, honesty, and productivity.

_____

Another important point for me to keep in mind, which came out in a lecture Dr. Brook and Don Watkins presented called “”The End of Big Government,” is that it is essential to differentiate capitalism from the mixed economy we have today. It is obvious to Objectivists that the mixed economy is not capitalism, but the general public is likely to believe it is, particularly since that is what they are told by their teachers and the news media.

It is thus crucial to demonstrate the win-win nature of unfettered capitalism and the trader principle. And of course, the deeper message is the morality of capitalism; at its root is the protection of individual rights, the elimination of initiated physical force in human relationships, the selfish pursuit of happiness for every person. After all, as Dr. Brook said, “We are the heirs of the Enlightenment.”

_____

I took Harry Binswanger’s class, “Principles,” which had a lot of challenging material that it will take me a while to mentally “chew” on. The basic issue regarding principled thinking is that of fundamentality, which is established from the perspective of hierarchical causal (and, I believe, logical) dependencies. Principles are vital tools of cognition; they offer a condensed view of all consequences to particular actions, and thus permit long-range thinking.

I would guess that much of Dr. Binswanger’s presentation is based upon material from his forthcoming book, which is still in the editing stage, so I am very much looking forward to its appearance. 

_____

One final note on the conference: I would be remiss not to mention the great time we had meeting some old friends and some new friends. On every morning but one, Lynne and I hit the hotel gym at oh-six-hundred hours, where we met two or three friends to do some CrossFit training. We had the pleasure of making some new acquaintances at an HBL get-together, had some nice conversations while milling about in the hotel lobby, and were thrilled to have lunch and dinner with some friends that we had previously only known online. We even went salsa dancing with a few friends one evening, which ended with a limousine ride back to the hotel. (I had fun, though I admit the deepest conceivable incompetence in salsa dancing, not to mention an utter inability to hear a single word of conversation in the din.)

NOTES

1. “Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman,” Monticello, June 24, 1826, Library of Congress, “http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/rcwltr.html”.

Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 9

(Note: This is Part 9 in the series started here. The previous installment is here. In each post, I comment on one of the fourteen points made by Dennis Prager in his article, “If There Is No God.”)

Dennis Prager’s Point #9:

If there is no God, humans and "other" animals are of equal value. Only if one posits that humans, not animals, are created in the image of God do humans have any greater intrinsic sanctity than baboons. This explains the movement among the secularized elite to equate humans and animals. [Note 1.]

I share Dennis Prager’s disdain for the “secularized elite,” which we have come to understand as being the left-leaning, subjectivist intellectual establishment. But I must point out that once again, he is conceding all ground to his enemies.

To claim, as Mr. Prager has, that men deserve special consideration only if they are created in God’s image is to imply that there is no natural reason - there are no facts - that justifies distinguishing men from other animals. This is exactly the position maintained by the subjectivists that he reviles. The only difference is that religionists, wishing to rescue mankind from being relegated to the status of lowly animals, proceed to invent a supernatural pretext; they regard men as divine beings, created and chosen by God as the stewards of the earth. Subjectivists refrain from fabricating this pretext, and thus regard men as mere animals, crass beings driven by their appetites and whims.

To see how both sides are mistaken - and to arrive at the correct perspective - it is instructive to recall the arguments of the “intrinsic/subjective/objective” trichotomy that I have written about elsewhere and is one of Ayn Rand’s important identifications.[Note 2.] Mr. Prager is precise in his term “intrinsic sanctity.” It is exactly the intrinsic value of man that he seeks to preserve - a value that is somehow an attribute of every man, apart from his relationship to the real world. It is a “sanctity” unsullied by the coarse considerations of the requirements of survival, and of living the life of a man qua man. In essence, the intrinsic value of man that Prager is attempting to secure is a divine one: eternal, other-worldly, inaccessible, akin to a Platonic Form.

A proper perspective is neither subjective nor intrinsic but objective. In this, we regard value as relating to all living organisms, and only to living organisms, for it is living entities that will exist or perish according to their natures and actions. For a living organism, its basic value is life, and each of its derivative values reflects this fundamental value in its capacity to contribute to or enhance the life of the organism. Crucially, it is from the perspective of each organism that value is determined.

In this last statement we see the sharp distinction between Prager’s “intrinsic sanctity” and objective value. In Prager’s view, the value of human beings exists as an intrinsic attribute - a value in itself, apart from any consideration of a valuer. It is a sort of reified universal imposed by a supernatural Creator, a stand-alone fact of the universe. As an implicit consequence, not only should a man recognize his superiority over animals, but a baboon (or lizard, worm, amoeba, tree) would necessarily defer to it; thus, built into each of God’s lower creatures would be a “sanctity” of its own life that was somehow less than that of a human.

Of course, that is nonsense. The value of human beings is not intrinsic; it is objective. For every living organism, from single-celled microbes to Homo Sapiens, its own life is the standard of value. A man’s regard of his own life as having sanctity is derived not from some divine proclamation - from the lucky chance of having been born among God’s chosen species - but from his nature as a living being. (To be more precise, a man’s value itself follows from his being a living organism; his regard of his own value follows from his being an organism with the ability to think and to be self-aware.)

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Prager left a clue that revealed how anti-scientific and anti-reason his perspective actually is. In the phrase “humans and ‘other’ animals,” Prager put quotes around the word “other,” as if humans are not animals at all. How deeply does he hold this idea? Can he really think that humans are not to be classified as part of the animal kingdom?

Humans are the rational animals. We have a perceptual apparatus that is similar to many of the higher mammals, but we also have a faculty that, as far as can be discerned, is utterly unique among all living things: a rational, reasoning mind that operates with free will.

The abilities to abstract and conceptualize, and to choose our actions, are far and away the most significant attributes of our species. Our conceptual faculty accounts not only for our survival, but for our ability to seek happiness. Human minds have created philosophy, science, mathematics; crop rotation, the printing press, the automobile, and the computer; Hamlet, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Parthenon, Falling Water, and the Empire State Building. By any objective standard, the human species is amazing and remarkable, “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”[Note 3.]

If subjectivists - seeing humans as automatons determined by social conditions and slavishly compelled by emotions - evade men’s true nature and consider us to be equal (or even “less than equal”) to other animals, they should be defeated on rational grounds. There is absolutely no reason to reach into the supernatural realm, as Mr. Prager has done, to find an excuse to shout the merits of man. As I have indicated, doing so has quite the opposite effect: it implicitly concedes that men have no value in reality.

(Note: The next installment in the series is here.)

NOTES

1. Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god.

2. To capture the relevant idea, it is necessary to quote a relatively lengthy passage from Ayn Rand’s essay, “What is Capitalism?”

There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of “good” from beneficiaries, and the concept of “value” from valuer and purpose - claiming that the food is good in, by, and of itself.

The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an "emotional commitment.”

The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.

The objectivist theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of values. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man - and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man.

Ayn Rand, “What is Capitalism?” from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, pp. 21-22. [Italics are in the original.]

3. To be sure, it is the human mind that is behind the worst atrocities of history as well - slavery, the wars of conquest, inquisitions, persecutions, pogroms, and People’s States. But this consideration only emphasizes the importance of philosophy, and of getting our answers right.

It’s Not About Her

In reading LB’s essay Why I am an Objectivist, with which I wholly agree, some of my own reflections came to the fore, especially concerning the introduction of reason, selfishness, and individual rights to people who are not familiar with Ayn Rand’s works.  

In an important sense, Objectivism - the body of ideas - has nothing to do with Ayn Rand.  Don’t misunderstand me: the philosophical achievements are entirely hers, and Miss Rand deserves literally all the credit for Objectivism.  She single-handedly integrated and formulated every major and minor tenet of the philosophy; the sheer scope of her achievement is almost too staggering to believe could be accomplished by one person. 

Nevertheless, in terms of Objectivism’s content and its application to the real world, I think it is important to focus on the philosophy, not the the philosopher.  I care not a whit about the genesis of the philosophy.  Its truth would not change had it been articulated and refined by dozens of great men over the course of the last two thousand or so years, or (as it turned out to be) formulated by a single twentieth-century novelist.  The important thing is that the tenets of the philosophy hold true to reality, comprehensively and systematically - which is exactly what Objectivism does.

From the perspective of evaluating and applying Ayn Rand’s ideas, I invoke this popular expression: “it’s not about her.”  

Incidentally, I do not know but would guess that this must be the reason Miss Rand chose to call her philosophy “Objectivism” as opposed to say, “Randism.”  She had every reason to be immensely proud of her achievements, but she did not label her philosophy as Hank Rearden labeled Rearden Metal.  To call it Objectivism not only emphasizes its distinction from subjectivism and intrisicism, but reinforces its generality as a complete, reality-based philosophical system.  Ayn Rand was not an inventor; she was a discoverer.  As a novelist she created, but as a philosopher she identified.

I bring this point up because a few too many times I have seen the word “cult” associated with Ayn Rand, as if she were some sort of religious figure with a following of obedient disciples.  This is an absurd smear, and it is not without a certain irony - for if there is one characteristic that is sure to be found in every individual who truly grasps Miss Rand’s ideas, it would be a selfish independence of mind that makes such “cultish” following impossible.  

With this in mind, I would not wish to grant my intellectual foes a favor by contributing, however inadvertently, to the idea that Objectivists are followers of a “gospel according to Rand.”  When I argue points with friends and colleagues, I do not frame my statements in the form, “Well, Ayn Rand said...” or, “As an Objectivist, I believe that...”   Why should this convince anybody?  Listeners (or readers) who disagree with Ayn Rand to begin with will not be convinced by merely repeating her position on matters, and those who are unfamiliar with her work should not take her - or anyone else’s - word for it.  Anyone who is worth arguing with should care only about facts and their connections to principles.  Mentioning Ayn Rand every few sentences would do more harm than good.

An even more fundamental reason that I don’t speak or write that way is that I don’t think that way.  I simply don’t go around wondering, “What would Ayn Rand do?”  It’s perfectly true that when I read The Fountainhead twenty-five years ago, it changed my life.  I’ve read and re-read her fiction and non-fiction many times, and without question Miss Rand is my supreme intellectual hero.  But when I’m puzzling over something, I do not mine her works for the answer.  I look to reality for the answer.

As did she.