Vulcan's Mercy

THE "SMALL-O" OBJECTIVIST

In light of occasions over the past month that I have had to remark upon Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and its "students" -- as Rand preferred Objectivists to style themselves -- I should say something explicit about my thoughts on Rand and Objectivism.

I call myself a "small-o" objectivist for two reasons.  It is my belief that reality is objective.  In other words, all things exist in the manner they exist without regard to my knowledge of them or their nature.  So my belief as to what is real doesn't make anything real.  Therefore, I am an objectivist.

I also call myself an objectivist, because I have learned a great deal about philosophy from the writings of Ayn Rand and her better students.  If nothing else, I have learned of the need for philosophy which opened my eyes to Pope John Paul's encyclical Fides et Ratio.  More than that, because of the initial influence of Rand, I am a semi-nominalist (in the sense that universals don't exist except conceptually and therefore can be arbitrary in form) and a quasi-dualist (in that body and soul are distinct but exist within this world as an integrated whole).  Just as important, Rand firmed up my commonsense realism. Also I think her explication of ethics in terms of a hierarchy of values is useful, and her trader principle is a sound foundation for politics.  Finally, Rand earned my respect for propounding a moral philosophy in defense of the inherent decency of a capitalist society at time when the conservative movement was still nascent and so most defenders of capitalism fell back on execreble utilitarian arguments for the free market.

But I am not an Objectivist, or more properly, a student of Objectivism.  One obvious reason is that I am a Catholic and atheism is a metaphysical tenet of the philosophy.  Indeed, much of Rand's philosophy seems crafted around embracing the principles of the Enlightenment while cutting them loose from their Judeo-Christian anchor.  If Rand merely secularized these principles, that would be unobjectionable.  But she mandated the denial of God in order to rationally accept them; thus, she went beyond what philosophy could competently state.  Even worse, by doing so Rand made her philosophy susceptible to ideologizing by those of a totalitarian cast of mind.

Therefore, even without regard to its atheism, I would reject Objectivism because it tends to totalize the human condition -- i.e., the nature of man and his relationship to the universe -- in terms of Reason.  The problem is not so much the primacy Rand places upon Reason, but rather totalizing reduction of everything to fit within its scope.  Whatever aspect of reality that lies beyond Reason -- e.g., God -- is simply denied.  Thus, Objectivism readily collapses into that modern corruption of thought, the rationalistic reduction of reality to fit the parameters of the One Big Idea.  (I similarly critiqued the Copernican Principle as another example in my essay "History Matters".)

That said, the primacy of Reason in Objectivism is also a problem.  I have capitalized it with regard to Objectivism to distinguish it from the common understanding of what human reason is.  Human reason is more capacious than what Rand defines as capital-R Reason.  For her the only rational beliefs were those syllogistically reducible to first principles.  In other words, the only valid knowledge is that which is integrated into a single philosophical framework.  This is an excellent method for comprehending the physical realm of the universe, as science does so well, but the wheels fall off when this reductionism is applied to incontrovertible facts of our existence that are not comprehensible in terms of scientific first principles -- e.g., life, consciousness, and volition.  (See here for further discussion of the limits of scientific knowledge.)

Of course, human reason can grasp what life, consciousness, and volition are and take them as evidence of the existence of God.  Thus, reason can lead a person to knowledge of God.  But God is a concept incompatible with the Objectivist scheme, because He is not subject to capital-R Reason -- i.e., quasi-scientific metaphysical reduction.  And so, Objectivism denigrates any knowledge a person claims of God as contrary to Reason -- in a word, irrational.  More than that, Objectivists state that the root of evil is irrationality, and so a willful belief in God is an evil act.  It is this damnation of their fellow human beings for what they believe (as opposed to they actually say and do) that can give the practice of Objectivism a totalitarian quality.

The Objectivist restriction of human reason to capital-R Reason is a serious error.  That error is compounded by the failure to recognize that limits of knowledge obtainable through capital-R Reason.  Human reason is most effectively used when its limits are known and accounted for when taking a decision.  F.A. Hayek explained this well in The Road to Serfdom.  Facts are stubborn things, and if Reason does not permit their acknowledgment or anticipation, they will bite you in the ass.    Paradoxically, it is by understanding the limits of human reason, we obtain the best understanding of our world that is possible.  This is what I mean by my statement in the sidebar that Hayek trumps Rand.

So let me wrap up and say that I call myself an objectivist to acknowledge my debt to Ayn Rand, but I call myself a "small-o" objectivist to acknowledge my profound differences with Objectivism.

THE PITHY MAVERICK

Why am I a conservative?  The Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, states in two pithy paragraphs what it took me to say in my long essay "History Matters":

>>Conservatives take a sober and realistic (not pessimistic!) view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience. Potency is known through act and not through Lennonesque and Leninesque 'imagining.' (The allusion, of course, is to John Lennon's "Imagine.")

>>Liberals and leftists, by contrast, joined by many anarchists and libertarians, labor under the misapprehension that human beings are inherently good, and would achieve an optimal condition either through massive statist intervention, or the elimination of the state altogether. Strange bedfellows these, but lying together in the bed of a common illusion.<<

Amen.

WHY THOSE EGGHEADS ARE MORE EVIL THAN STALIN

I just read Diana Hsieh's recent essay "Marxist Dictators versus Marxist Intellectuals" at her Objectivist blog "Noodle Food".  Her argument is that tweed-jacketed Volvo-driving Marxist intellectuals are more evil than blood-soaked mass-murdering Marxist dictators, because:  "In the case of the Marxist intellectual, he did not just make the mass murder of Stalin possible, he also made that of Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot possible."

I suspect Ms. Hsieh doesn't have any children, otherwise she would be familiar with a youngster's penchant to rationalize his mischief with any excuse that is handy.  So it is with tyrants.  None of the great villians of the twentieth century needed Karl Marx to loose the carnage and wreckage they did upon the world.  His rotten ideology was handy to rationalize their lust for power, but it did not cause that lust.  The evil that Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc. wrought and slaughter of 150 million people was of their own making, period.  If Marxism or some variant hadn't provided the rationale, another ideology would have.

Take for example Saddam Hussein.  The Ba'athist party, the organization through which he formally operated his dictatorship in Iraq, was hybrid of fascism and Stalinism.  Do you really think  that absent the Ba'athist ideology Saddam would have never been a tyrant?  Of course not.  The man is evil through and through.  If there were no wicked creeds to rationalize his tyranny, he would have slaughtered, tortured, and maimed his fellow human beings in the name of sunshine and lollipops if necessary.

Even though Ms. Hsieh's ideological commitment to Objectivism has rationalistically blinded her to this essential fact about bloodthirsty tyrants, she is no moral monster.  She states that Marxist dictators are "absolutely 100% morally black"; it's just that those eggheads are even more evil for developing and promoting destructive ideas.  I'm not going to defend Marxist academics, writers, artists, and other fellow travelers.  They are evil, especially those who persist in advocating Marxism in light of the horrors revealed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other survivors of the gulag.  But their evil does not rank with that of mass-murdering tyrants pace Ms. Hsieh.

She says the Marxist intellectual is like "an uncle who approvingly nods and even offers helpful tips as his nephew rapes a young girl ... even if the nephew would have raped her anyway, the uncle is still morally guilty."  The difference, however, is that the uncle had the means to stop the brute.  What Marxist intellectual was in the position to put an end to the tyranny of any of the past century's great villains?  All Ms. Hsieh's argument does is to mitigate the guilt of those most evil men.

But such rationalistic flaws in thinking are to be expected when people like Ms. Hsieh totalize their relationship to the world by reducing their comprehension of it to an ideology.  (See "History Matters" for a greater explication of this modern phenomenon.)

WHAT ZOMBIES DON'T KNOW

Consciousness, what is it good for?  If all the science fiction geeks are right, then we will soon build machines that can think -- maybe even faster and better than humans.  If so, then high-level thinking doesn't require consciousness.  Put a thinking machine in the form of a human body, then you've got a robot.

If the Darwinists are correct, those ruthless genes of ours don't need us to be self-aware to propogate themselves through generation after generation of our bodies.  By that line of logic, mere material existence within the vast expanse of the cosmos doesn't require consciousness.  To reproduce we just don't need to know that we know.  A merely mechanical universe will work just fine with humans devoid of consciousness -- i.e., zombies.

Nevertheless, I am conscious of what I think, feel, and do.  I am conscious of the life I experience.  So what does a conscious creature like me know that a robot or a zombie doesn't?  Because I am conscious, I know that my fellow human beings are also conscious.  (Yes, I cannot know that directly, but that isn't critical to my point here.)  I know that other people are like me, and because I love myself, I can love that which is like me.  In this regard a zombie is invincibly ignorant.  He can never know love, and without knowledge of love ...

... More on this later.