Metallic Randiacs Write Themselves

Now that that’s out of my system, time to change the subject. A lot. And frequently.

Slow Hand

Haven’t mentioned the guitar in a while, but there’s been progress. On the acoustic, I’m starting to manage picking songs like Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bookends,” I’m even slowly writing a song that is called, so far, “Variations in C” because it mostly depends on my not having to move my hand from the basic C-chord position. But I’m also starting to hit barre chords with some consistency, which feels like a major hurdle. And on the bass, I’m doing a reasonable job on songs like Elvis Costello’s “Pump it Up,” which is fast and moves a lot. And I have to say that of all songs, who’d have thought I would find Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking” to be so much damn fun?

Last night, though, it’s like it all went away. Both hands felt like lead. The left just seemed to lag as I tried the run at the beginning of the Nancy Sinatra song, I was just kinda staring at it and thinking “What the hell’s wrong with you?” And the right hand was similarly clumsy--the fingernails, which are not all that long, kept hitting the strings when I didn’t want them to, imparting a heavy metallic clanging sound that was just plain ugly.

Two explanations present themselves: (1) it was just one of those nights, it happens; and (2) in fact I’ve always been that bad, or worse, but at last I’ve developed my awareness enough to realize it.

I leave it to you to speculate which of those is true.

Ou est le Randiacs?

Come on, people! In previous blog entries where I barely mentioned Ayn Rand, her supporters would pop up almost instantly, telling me how intellectually jejeune I was, how I didn’t know what I was talking about and really should just shut up please. So okay, I took that as a welcome challenge and responded. Worked hard, wrote an essay I’m proud of, and with the exception of a comment from a friend of mine who already agreed with me, there’s been no response--particularly, none from the Objectivist crowd.

Can it be? Have I so completely proven my point that they’ve all just given up and given in? Fabulous! I expect to see a plunge in sales of Atlas Shrugged any day now...

Writing the Boards Again

The other day I was describing myself to someone, somewhere, and for the umpteenth time said I was “a person of the theatre.” It takes umpteen times for me to notice things, but I finally stopped and said “You know, that’s really kinda true.” A couple days later, I took a project I’ve been planning to write as a movie, and instead began writing a new play. First time I’ve done any playwriting in just about ten years.

It feels amazingly good. So much fun to stretch that particular set of writing muscles again, and to remind myself of how a stage play works, and why.

And so far? This thing is writing itself. The first thirty pages have been just about effortless, and I’m loving what has emerged to date. Even had that loveliest of moments, early on, when I put two characters on stage together, thinking I was going to write the scene one way--but as soon as they were together, they took over and the scene became a whole different thing that instantly deepened and enriched the play.

As with Thereby, I feel like I’m not the captain, I’m just a passenger on this ride. That makes me one seriously happy writer.

Ayn Rand, Part Two

I sometimes wonder whether Ayn Rand was being deliberately inflammatory when she chose “selfishness” as the lynchpin of her prescription for human behavior. It’s something we’re all taught not to be as children (when we are, of course, massively selfish), so to be told by an adult that in fact that’s just what we should be, it spins our heads around a little. Which was probably exactly what Rand wanted. Oliver Stone was, of course, trying to do exactly the same thing when he wrote Gordon Gekko’s infamous “Greed is good” speech in Wall Street, although in Stone’s case, he was laying out a position his main character would eventually abandon.

In defense of the orthodoxy, then, here I come to take on Ayn Rand. And let me begin, again, by agreeing with her on something:

To take “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whims--by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know--is to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by one’s stale evasions), a robot knocking its stagnant brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see.

Clearly, then, when she advocates selfishness she is not advocating any kind of emotional selfishness where you childishly do whatever you feel like at any given moment. What she’s after is rational selfishness, where you reason out what’s best for you and then do that, boldly and without hesitation.

The trouble is, this viewpoint is every bit as naïve as socialism, in that both ignore certain inescapable facts about human nature. (And remember that Rand’s philosophy is at heart a violent reaction against socialism, born from her personal experiences with the Soviet revolution.) With socialism, people will always want to at least believe that one way or another, they’re a little bit better than their neighbor. True parity is impossible because no one would ever stand for it. Similarly, some of the people most likely to be attracted to Rand’s selfishness are, alas, also likely to ignore her distinction between emotional and rational selfishness, and decide that they’ve now got license to go ahead and do whatever they feel like at any given moment. Their actions become, to be sure, a distortion of what Rand was going for--but, perhaps because she chose a deliberately inflammatory word, Rand opens the door wide and lets absolutely everyone in, including all those who’ve been looking for an excuse to be emotionally selfish. Children, dressed as adults.

But it doesn’t stop there, because Rand doesn’t stop there.

To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that “the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure” is to declare that “the proper value is whatever you happen to value”—which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.

And in this manner, she attempts to abnegate the golden rule. Because if you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, then there are no ethical standards at play, only individual whims, which is exactly what Rand means when she refers to “ethical hedonists.” But, speaking only for myself because I’m the only person I can speak for, my definition of how I’d like to be treated by others, and how I in turn strive to treat them, is not generally dictated by my sense of what’s pleasurable--it is in fact guided by my sense of values.

Have I just locked myself into a circular definition? In the first part of this critique I defined myself as a relative relativist, with only one absolute: the golden rule. Now I say that the test against which I measure the golden rule is my own set of values, even though, as a relativist, I would seem to have none. It’s exactly this sort of thing that drove Rand crazy...

When a “desire,” regardless of its nature or cause, is taken as an ethical primary, and the gratification of any and all desires is taken as an ethical goal (such as “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”)--men have no choice but to hate, fear and fight one another, because their desires and their interests will necessarily clash.

(Here, by the way, she is directly taking on the school of philosophers known as the Utilitarians. Bentham, Mill, etc. Utilitarianism, as it happens, is a branch of what’s called Consequentialism—and I can’t help wondering whether her Objectivism is really just a different branch of Consequentialism, thus explaining her particular ire for the Utilitarians. Academic in-fighting, basically. But that’s a topic for another day.)

“The greatest happiness for the greatest number” comes pretty close to describing what lies at the heart of my own ethos, so I guess you could call me a Utilitarian. But in her dismissal of this point of view, I think she misses the mark badly--men’s desires and interests will only clash when their desires and interests are exclusive, i.e., when my desires are not the same as yours, yours are not the same as mine, and we then resort to fisticuffs to try and force the question of whose desires will win the day. But by definition, my desires also take into account yours--you can’t have “the greatest good for the greatest number” without constant attention to what others desire, and how your own desires can be slotted into those of others.

My approach, then, is inclusive; Rand’s is exclusive. I can’t help thinking that if one truly followed her approach, s/he would end up at exactly at the place Rand decries above: in conflict with others whose definition of their own self-interest, their own selfishness, does not agree with yours. Since consideration of others’ self-interest is considered harmful, then your own self-interest is all that’s left, and without that consideration of those around you, surely conflict becomes more likely rather than less. The only way around this problem would be enforced conformity: everyone on earth agreeing to the same definition of individual self-interest. And that doesn’t sound at all like the sort of freedom Rand is reaching for; in fact, it sounds like exactly the opposite.

But here’s where, for a moment, I agree with Rand again:

... no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man--or group or society or government--has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.

This seems self-evidently right, and for all my differences with Rand elsewhere, here we are matched up perfectly. But then she just has to take it further:

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence--to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

For one thing, she sneaks in a very sweeping declaration about property rights without further discussion of what she means (except to suggest that people go and read Atlas Shrugged). And since property rights more or less sit at the heart of every economic theory ever devised, then this particular question is of crucial importance. Not the sort of thing to be glossed over so casually.

Now on its face, the above statement about the purpose of government seems unassailable. But in short order, its ramifications are made clear:

When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism--with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never yet existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start.

Well, I might submit that during the Eighties and Nineties, we came relatively close to uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, and the result was disastrous. Rand, however, would probably respond that it was government’s interference in open markets that produced the abuses we have all seen. Her vision of capitalism is, after all, every bit as black-and-white as her vision of everything else is: pure unfettered capitalism, utterly unregulated, or nothing. If no other rights are possible without property rights, then it must follow that property rights must be defended fiercely above all else.

I tend to feel about capitalism the same way Churchill felt about democracy: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Rand, however, has clearly settled on capitalism as the be-all and end-all. But the trouble with any system that overtly appeals to man’s greed is that greed is a bottomless pit. You can never have enough of whatever you covet, as Charles MacKay demonstrates amply in the first chapter of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. (In which he discusses financial bubbles--remember please that he wrote it over 160 years ago, and we haven’t learned a thing since.)

Given the evidence before us with the current recession, I am more firmly convinced than ever that Rand is just plain wrong about the need for unfettered laissez-faire capitalism. What’s needed instead is managed capitalism, because otherwise you simply cannot check the greed of those who will, every time without fail, take advantage of unregulated markets to satisfy their bottomless greed. Rand might reply that the people who exploit markets and people for their own gain are simply criminals who deserve punishment, that even if they claim to be devoted Ayn Rand followers they are really just thugs taking advantage of what would otherwise be a perfectly good system.

Again, I say that this view is naïve. You simply cannot create a system that appeals to man’s greed and then tell him not to get too greedy. It won’t work. Without some mechanism that understands this, and sets limits, you will experience systemic crashes just like the one we’re suffering through now. Every time. Every. Damn. Time.

Are they criminals? Of course they’re criminals, and they deserve to be treated as such. But if markets are unregulated, how do you prosecute these people? The perpetrators of credit default swaps and all the other nonsense we’re suffering through now were behaving in a perfectly legal manner, in an unregulated sphere of the marketplace, and they came horrifyingly close to ruining the nation. (And may still --it ain’t over yet.) That is the result of Ayn Rand’s views about capitalism, which are the perfect end result of her entire Objectivist philosophy.

People have been buying Rand’s books by the thousands since the recession began. Yaron Brook, who runs the Ayn Rand Institute, recently said of this phenomenon,

As America faces a devastating economic crisis fundamentally caused by government policies, it is a hopeful sign for the future that increasing numbers of concerned Americans are turning to Atlas Shrugged and discovering Ayn Rand’s original morality of rational egoism and her uncompromising defense of laissez faire capitalism.

He’s got it completely backward. But if all these sales of her books somehow result in a groundswell movement where people actually try to implement Rand’s thinking on a national scale, well, to resort to a divinity she ridiculed, God help us.

Ayn Rand, Part One

At last, by popular non-demand, I present my critique of the ethos of Ayn Rand. All ye with Google Alerts, prepare to be offended. (‘Cause after all, no matter how reasonable I am, somebody’s gonna take offense...)

And please bear in mind that this is a blog entry, not a full-on essay. While I have in fact written point-by-point notes in refutation of (or agreement with) Rand’s various assertions, in this forum I’m only going to deal in broad strokes.

Let’s start with this: there is, in fact, a massive point of agreement between Ms. Rand and myself. In a presentation she delivered to the University of Wisconsin’s “Ethics in Our Time” symposium in 1961, Ms. Rand said:

“That which is required for the survival of man qua man” is an abstract principle that applies to every individual man. The task of applying this principle to a concrete, specific purpose--the purpose of living a life proper to a rational being--belongs to every individual man, and the life he has to lead is his own.

This is, in Rand’s words, a nearly perfect analogue to a principle I have often expressed (it is in fact the principal idea underlying just about everything I’ve ever written), which, in my own words, is that our lives are stories we are telling to ourselves, and that only we can tell our own stories--but that we must also resist the efforts of others to tell our stories for us. (Parents, bosses, governments, etc., it goes on all the time.)

What she and I both say, to put it yet another way, is that the responsibility for living our lives is only our own, and that when we simply follow the herd, or do what the herd tells us to do, very often we end up losing many of the things that are, or should be, most important to us.

If I agree with her on this important point, then why do I still, in general, disagree so strenuously with the Objectivist ethos? It all turns on two ideas: sacrifice and selfishness. First up, sacrifice.

As I have noted before, I believe I understand why she responded to any notion of individual sacrifice to a collective as vehemently as she did: she was born in Russia in 1905, watched the 1917 revolution unfold beneath the windows of her home in St. Petersburg, and had to endure the confiscation of her father’s pharmacy by the new Soviet government. The family fled to the Crimea, were nearly killed by bandits along the way, and when her father opened a new pharmacy in the Crimea, that too was confiscated. She escaped to the U.S. after college and vowed never to return. So obviously, she went through a long series of horrific experiences, and I cannot begrudge her violent reaction against anything that smacks of her personal experiences with a collective form of government.

After all of this, it’s no surprise that she loved the U.S. so much--and that she loved capitalism, which she elevated to something akin to a religion. It also led, I believe, to a fiercely Manichean worldview in which any sacrifice to the general welfare was deemed evil, and selfishness was elevated to the noblest of virtues.

There is a philosophical idea that I think applies here: it’s called bivalence, or “the exclusion of the middle.” It has to do with the notion that often, when trying to formulate a postulate, philosophers tend to push their ideas into either/or configurations: “Either X is true, or Y is true, but it is impossible for them to both be true.” But in the process, they end up excluding everything that might lie between X and Y. And since I am a firm believer that almost nothing in life is strictly black or white, I tend to have rather strong reactions to anyone who asserts otherwise.

(I have been accused of being a relativist, which is true enough, but not entirely true. When discussing the Terry Schiavo case with a fundamentalist Christian she trotted out the relativist argument, and asked whether I believe in anything absolute. My answer: yes, I do. The golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. No surprise, Ms. Rand takes exception to this notion, which I’ll get to in a little bit.)

The either/or-ness of Rand’s viewpoint is expressed constantly:

...”society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And--since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men--this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.

(And before continuing on, let me just note that the entity she calls “society” most definitely exists separate from the individual men of whom it is comprised. I’m in the midst of reading Charles MacKay’s 1841 masterpiece Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which is all about the ways in which group-think differs from the ways individuals think. The famous quote from his Preface sums up his viewpoint: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”)

I would also argue that there’s nothing ethical about her assertion that some men feel entitled to “pursue any whims (or atrocities)” they wish. This obviously goes on all the time (witness almost anything in the news today, from Somalia to Wall Street), but the whole point is that this sort of behavior is not ethical. And once it’s exposed, “society” frequently gets rather upset at just how unethical it all is. Witness the current mass anger at the nation’s financial institutions. Repeatedly, masses of people have woken from their slumber and demanded that the oligarchs change their ways. (And then, just as often, the oligarchs wait for the masses to go back to sleep again and start to slowly change things back—but they can never take it all back, and in this manner, century by century, change does indeed happen.)

Rand also writes:

An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

But what about fire? Fire, by her definition, would be both good and evil, simultaneously: it furthers life by warming us when the weather is cold, and by destroying organisms in food that might threaten us. But unleashed, fire obviously threatens life when it burns your house and perhaps you inside of it. But nowhere does Rand ever consider the vast range of things that might be both good and evil, depending upon the circumstances. Either/or is the only possibility she contemplates.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand has John Galt say:

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice--and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal.

So if I am not strictly rational (using only her definition) at all times, then I’m suicidal? I don’t think so. I do irrational things all the time. Lots of people do. To cite just one potent example: there was nothing rational about the hundreds of people who flocked to Ground Zero after September 11th, to try and help. Everyone knew there were toxins in the air, everyone knew there was a risk. But people wanted to help, and some have paid the price, but they felt it worth the price just to try to help. Rand would surely call this irrational and suicidal. I call it something else.

She writes,

...let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life.

This is the crux of her argument against sacrifice, and for selfishness. Since living is the only possible ultimate value for any entity, then anything that threatens that living must ipso facto be evil. She continues:

The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end to itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.

(All italics, by the way, are Rand’s. Like all dogmatists, she is endlessly emphatic.)

To this I have to ask, why must this be exclusive? Why must one’s own happiness exclude any consideration of the happiness of others? Because, after all, sacrifice is not black and white. There are little sacrifices we make all the time that don’t in any way threaten our lives, and that therefore are not even considered in Rand’s ethos. A parent’s million sacrifice for his or her children is a prime example, one that most definitely leads to the continued existence of the human race as a whole and would therefore be, in Rand’s terms, most definitely good and not evil. Yet it involves sacrifice. How does she reconcile this? She doesn’t. It is never even addressed.

Rand’s hatred of sacrifice means that, if the world conducted itself according to her precepts, there could never be armies. But it also means that there could never be firefighters, or policemen. Doctors would never go near someone with a deadly communicable disease. A nuclear engineer would not make the crucial repair that might stop a meltdown. Their refusal to sacrifice would in fact result in the sacrifice of others, which is something that Rand says should never be done. This discrepancy is also never addressed. In fact, she writes...

Altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value--and it is logical that renunciation, resignation, self-denial, and every other form of suffering, including self-destruction, are the virtues it advocates. And, logically, these are the only things that the practitioners of altruism have achieved and are achieving now.

Nonsense. Absolute nonsense.

The flip side of her hatred of sacrifice is, of course, her promotion of selfishness. And since this is long enough already, I’ll save this side of the discussion for next time.

In Which Yet Another Thing is Railed Against

They bill it as a great service you're doing for the environment. Save paper! Save trees! Switch to paperless billing! Greater convenience for you, plus it's good for the environment! Win win win!

But of course the thing they really care about (and here I'm talking about anyone who sends you a bill) is that if they don't have to send a paper bill anymore, they save on the paper, the printing, the postage. It's cheaper for them--that's the only reason they suddenly care so much about the environment.

I tried to avoid paperless billing, simply because my particular bill-payment system depends on having a physical object in front of me in a particular place. The due date is written on the outside of the envelope, and once paid, it goes elsewhere. Simple, clean, effective. And if it's marginally worse for the environment, in this case I can live with that.

But when Bank of America started offering eBills, they seemed a handy way to create a backup plan. If the mail lost a bill, I'd see it when I logged onto BOA. Here's the thing, though...

Very often, in the fine print, when you sign up for an eBill through your bank, you simultaneously agree that paper bills will stop coming. This is particularly true with utility companies--they love that little trick.

Last month, after realizing that Bank of America is vicious and evil, I switched banks. All my eBills were, of course, left behind. I figured I'd just have to set up new eBilling with my new bank, which would be a pain, but it was worth it to be free of BOA.

The catch didn't occur to me till the deed was already done. How do you set up new eBilling if you don't have the account number? The account number would be written on any paper bill, but of course I haven't gotten a paper bill from those guys in months or years.

But wait, it gets better. I called the local natural-gas company this afternoon to (a) find out what the hell my damn account number is, and to (b) get them to put me back on paper billing. And what do you think they told me?

"To reinstate paper billing you'll have to contact the bank through which you instituted paperless billing." Yes, you read that right, the local utility that is the provider of the service claims they cannot send a paper bill, that I have to go through BOA to get a damn bill of any kind.

I tried calling BOA. They're closed.

I can't log in to the gas company's website, either--suddenly they don't recognize the password or user name I set up ages ago--won't even accept the account number they had just read off to me.

Paperless billing. To hell with the environment. It's only good for them, it does you no damn good at all. Don't believe the hype; a little convenience now could very well become massive inconvenience down the road.