The Passion of James Valliant's Criticism


Neil Parille

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I would mention for the record that I contacted Ms. McElroy about my piece and suggested that she might find it interesting, given Valliant's praise of her review. (In fact, it was her suggestion, in a follow-up email, to post it.) After she posted it, I wrote her thanking her and mentioned in passing that my essays had generated some controvery with Valliant, including his accusations that I am dishonest.

With respect to Ms. McElroy's claim that "From a follow-up note, Mr. Parille clearly did know this [importing an infight] would be the case and he did not inform me ...for whatever reason," this assumes that I knew what would happen on her website. I did not (and still don't) know whether it is a moderated site, whether she planned to permit comments on the article or whatever.

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MY OPINION ABOUT ALL OF THIS

A far better course of action than Valliant's silly reasoning and his snippets from Rand's journals would have been to have just PUBLISHED THE UNEDITED JOURNALS! At least from November 1967 - whatever he chose to cite last in his book.

A far better course of action from whose standpoint? I'm of the opinion that there's no way Leonard Peikoff would have permitted those diaries to be published without such a surrounding rigamarole as Valliant provided. (There's been quite a bit of talk about the method of publication on the thread for Part II of Neil's analysis. See my post #24 and previous and following posts for views already expressed on the subject.)

We should of course remember as we interpret even the snippets we have from Rand's journals that Rand was intelligent - and had to realize, as she wrote in her journal, the high probability that what was in the journal would eventually be made public some time after her death. It happens. Given how Rand chose to portray the causes for the break, it is not unrealistic to be cautious about assuming that everything in those journals (even if we were to have the unedited version) comes from a totally disinterested observer.

Whether or not she realized "the high probability" of the diaries' contents eventually being made public (unless she burned them herself), your comment is anachronistic in this respect: the diaries which appear in Valliant's book were written before the break; they were written during the sequence of events which led up to the break. She didn't know, writing them, that the story was going to culminate the way we know, reading them, it did. In other words, she wasn't attempting to "portray the causes" for a break which hadn't yet happened.

Ellen

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Well, I will state again:

1) It would have been better to be honest and publish the actual journals - not highly edited excerpts. I understand why those controlling the journals resist this.

2) I will insist that in reading someone's journal, someone of sufficient fame that eventual publication is a possibility, we should remember that we should not just ASSUME that everything in the journal is exact truth. Just as with any book, etc... No anachronism there. This is just part of not being naive.

Alfonso

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Robert,

Thank you for posting that comment from Wendy McElroy.

Something is bothering the dickens out of me with it, though. Ms. McElroy is not a stupid woman. That is why her comments sound a bit too artificially naive. From what she wrote, it sounds like she had NO IDEA AT ALL that Valliant's book involved a controversy.

Heh.

She even reviewed the damn thing.

Gimmee a break.

Michael

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2) I will insist that in reading someone's journal, someone of sufficient fame that eventual publication is a possibility, we should remember that we should not just ASSUME that everything in the journal is exact truth. Just as with any book, etc... No anachronism there. This is just part of not being naive.

Alfonso, no quarrel on that point, only with your importing into the context prior to the break knowledge which she didn't have then of how the relationship between her and Nathaniel would end. She might have had an eye to the future, I grant. But she wasn't prescient. That was my point. Hell, she didn't even know he was lying to her. (And she certainly couldn't have anticipated, for instance, how naive she would look to me in her attempts to understand what was going on.)

Ellen

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Barbara:

>.it is something people do constantly, in moderate or extreme forms- that is, convince themselves that something is true, however unjustified or even outlandish it might be, and proceed to speak and act accordingly with an air of great certainty.

This phenomenon, known more widely as cognitive bias, is yet another reason why a critical approach - especially to one's own ideas - is imperative. Extremely difficult, yes. But imperative.

Ellen:

>I think that she wrote from utmost sincerity, that she believed what she was saying as she was writing it. And that if you want (make that "if one wants," generic) to understand Ayn Rand's psychology, an important feature to try to understand is the extent to which she did come to believe her own image of herself. It's necessary to be aware of this feature of her psychology really to grasp what's going on in her Journal entries re Nathaniel, how someone could be so "out of it" as to have written some of what she wrote while yet sincerely grappling to comprehend.

Here is perhaps the most poignant example from the diaries reproduced in PARC, where she rationalises why NB ended their affair for the younger Patrecia:

"I am convinced that the clearest and probably conscious fear in his mind was the fear of admitting that I was 'too much for him.'...I was too much for him - in every sense of the phrase and in a deeper sense than would apply to the type of men he despises. I want to stress this: I was and am too much for him. This is my full conviction, reached with the full power, logic, clarity and context of my mind..."

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Barbara:

>.it is something people do constantly, in moderate or extreme forms- that is, convince themselves that something is true, however unjustified or even outlandish it might be, and proceed to speak and act accordingly with an air of great certainty.

This phenomenon, known more widely as cognitive bias, is yet another reason why a critical approach - especially to one's own ideas - is imperative. Extremely difficult, yes. But imperative.

Agreed, Daniel. And to keep a critical approach to one's own ideas is infinitely more important than a critical approach to other people's ideas. Of course, one does not have to choose. But we can do ourselves a great deal more harm by stubbornly holding on to ideas of our own that we refuse to reexamine, than any damage done to us by the ideas of others. I'd say this even if the ideas we refuse to reexamine are true. Our failure to think twice damages both our selfesteem and our psycho-epistemology. Over time, it establishes in our psychology the attitude that in any perceived conflict between our self-image and truth, we cannot allow truth to be the winner.

And yes, to honestly criticize our own ideas is often very difficult indeed, for many reasons.

Barbara

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Neil,

The present ifeminists discussion board is a lightly moderated forum. It's actually part of Wendy McElroy's personal website, where for some months it operated by invitation only. These days, you have to have an account to post, but it's pretty easy to open one, and anyone who follows the link over from ifeminists can read what others have posted.

The board has been rather low in traffic. When an article appears on ifeminists, Wendy (or her husband Brad) will start a thread on the article. Sometimes no one posts in response.

Wendy operated at least two different ifeminist bulletin boards in the past. Each closed after the level of acrimony became unbearable to Wendy and Brad, the board was being mercilessly trolled, and the moderators were receiving threatening personal emails.

My understanding is that crazies in the left-wing feminist movement were primarily responsible for the first closure, and crazies in the men's rights movement were the bad actors the second time around. Compared to them, the most flamboyant wingnuts that Rand-land has to offer are merely irritating. Still, this history may help to explain why there is a lot of sensitivity about online acrimony at ifeminists.

Robert Campbell

PS. I'm not currently a member of the ifeminists board. I don't know whether Jim Valliant, Casey Fahy, et al. are members or not. On a cursory look through the lightly trafficked Ayn Rand threads I didn't see anything by them--but it was cursory.

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2) I will insist that in reading someone's journal, someone of sufficient fame that eventual publication is a possibility, we should remember that we should not just ASSUME that everything in the journal is exact truth. Just as with any book, etc... No anachronism there. This is just part of not being naive.

Alfonso, no quarrel on that point, only with your importing into the context prior to the break knowledge which she didn't have then of how the relationship between her and Nathaniel would end. She might have had an eye to the future, I grant. But she wasn't prescient. That was my point. Hell, she didn't even know he was lying to her. (And she certainly couldn't have anticipated, for instance, how naive she would look to me in her attempts to understand what was going on.)

Ellen

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Well, I'm not trying to import any of that into the context. I did not know it would be necessary to spell this out, but let me do so:

1) I am not assuming that Rand was prescient in any fashion, foreseeing the breakup, etc...

2) I am not assuming that Rand KNEW Branden was lying (but from the journals she did know that she was missing some piece of the puzzle.

3) I am simply indicating that not everybody is totally forthcoming and straightforwardly honestin their journals. Especially if future publication is thought to be a possibility. THAT IS ALL. No assumption of prophetic powers of Rand.

Alfonso

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Daniel,

The entry you quote above (here) is a perfect example of what I was talking about. It's also a perfect example of why I think that Leonard Peikoff wouldn't have permitted the diaries to be published without the sort of window-dressing camoflauge Valliant provides. I think that even Leonard Peikoff, though he can be pretty foolish, isn't so foolish as to be oblivious to how grandiose and unaware such an entry would sound to the Rand non-idolator.

Re the comments (Daniel's and Barbara's) about the difficulty of criticizing one's own ideas, the best scientists develop a habit of this sort of criticism (for instance, Darwin's attempts to find flaws in his own theories). I think that Rand as a writer practiced stern self-criticism. She was extremely demanding regarding the details of her work from a literary standpoint. But as a philosopher, she not only lacked the habit of self-criticism, she became quickly angered when others criticised. In his "Conversations with Ayn Rand," Hospers analogizes her way of doing philosophy to striding across the territory wearing seven-league boots. A lot of cracks can be overlooked by a seven-league-boot strider.

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Alfonso,

All clear now. ;-)

Ellen

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Daniel,

The entry you quote above (here) is a perfect example of what I was talking about. It's also a perfect example of why I think that Leonard Peikoff wouldn't have permitted the diaries to be published without the sort of window-dressing camoflauge Valliant provides. I think that even Leonard Peikoff, though he can be pretty foolish, isn't so foolish as to be oblivious to how grandiose and unaware such an entry would sound to the Rand non-idolator.

Re the comments (Daniel's and Barbara's) about the difficulty of criticizing one's own ideas, the best scientists develop a habit of this sort of criticism (for instance, Darwin's attempts to find flaws in his own theories). I think that Rand as a writer practiced stern self-criticism. She was extremely demanding regarding the details of her work from a literary standpoint. But as a philosopher, she not only lacked the habit of self-criticism, she became quickly angered when others criticised. In his "Conversations with Ayn Rand," Hospers analogizes her way of doing philosophy to striding across the territory wearing seven-league boots. A lot of cracks can be overlooked by a seven-league-boot strider.

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Alfonso,

All clear now. ;-)

Ellen

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Ellen -

I was hoping for a moment of high integrity leading to an unexpurgated publication of the journals - or, if they are not "publishable" (economics) then making them available in some form to scholars. Obviously that has not happened yet. Perhaps it will happen after the passing of the current generation.

Alfonso

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Alfonso,

There's just one minor point that should be mentioned.

Ellen is correct in saying that Rand did not know how the affair would end while she was writing the notes. However, one of Valliant's main allegations in PARC, hammered home time and time again, is that, at some point early on in writing those notes, Rand had de facto terminated the affair—she no longer wanted it—and was merely writing notes to herself to understand what had happened.

He is wrong but he is insistent—even strident—on this point.

Michael

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