Bertonneau contra Rand


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I think this sort of thing is bad and happens often: someone discovers, invents, or improves on some idea but is forgotten because he or she is either an outsider or linked to otherwise unpopular ideas and then someone more recent repeats the same work being totally ignorant of the earlier thinker (and is often touted as being a creative genius for it). The example that comes readily to mind is the recent discovery by many that the mainstream neoclassical equilibrium models of markets don't work -- things Austrians and others having been telling everyone who would listen about for decades now.

Dan,

That's a good example.

The fate of Herbert Spencer is another. I've written a teeny bit about that; Roderick Long has gone into it in much more depth.

Spencer was—to a large extent, still is—the subject of much motivated forgetting.

When Daniel Dennett mentioned one of Spencer's insights into behavioral evolution (this is in Darwin's Dangerous Idea), he had to spiritually delouse himself of undescribed political ideas, which he merely qualified as "callous, bordering on heinous."

Dennett's been gutsier than many others. Larry Arnhart once mentioned visiting Edward O. Wilson's lab and seeing a big poster of Spencer on one wall. You could read a lot of Wilson's writings and never see Spencer mentioned.

In times past, Hobbes and Hume were among those frequently regarded as unmentionable.

Sad stuff.

Robert Campbell

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Dan,

That's a good example.

The fate of Herbert Spencer is another. I've written a teeny bit about that; Roderick Long has gone into it in much more depth.

Spencer was—to a large extent, still is—the subject of much motivated forgetting.

Robert Campbell

Roderick Long

Herbert Spencer: The Defamation Continues

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long3.html

Long mentions my article "Will the Real Herbert Spencer Please Stand Up?" Originally published in Libertarian Review (Dec. 1978), this article is reprinted in Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies (Prometheus, 1991).

For a far more detailed analysis of Spencer's ideas, see my article in Libertarian Review, "Herbert Spencer's Theory of Causation," at: http://mises.org/journals/jls/5_2/5_2_1.pdf

Ghs

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I agree with everything else you say from the 2 pages I read, just your take on that one word. From the quotes I've seen it is just more of the same pretentious references and very little intellectual content or disputation.

What do you believe he's trying to get at -- aside from listing as many things as he can pick out that he doesn't like about Rand's big novel?

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For a far more detailed analysis of Spencer's ideas, see my article in Libertarian Review, "Herbert Spencer's Theory of Causation," at: http://mises.org/journals/jls/5_2/5_2_1.pdf

Ghs

Those who don't wish to wade through this rather dense article should skip to endnotes #6 and #7 (pp. 142-46), which deal with a number of smears and misrepresentations. Note #7, which constitutes a mini-essay in its own right, has the dubious distinction of being the longest endnote that I have ever written. :D

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For a far more detailed analysis of Spencer's ideas, see my article in Libertarian Review, "Herbert Spencer's Theory of Causation," at: http://mises.org/jou...s/5_2/5_2_1.pdf

Ghs

Those who don't wish to wade through this rather dense article should skip to endnotes #6 and #7 (pp. 142-46), which deal with a number of smears and misrepresentations. Note #7, which constitutes a mini-essay in its own right, has the dubious distinction of being the longest endnote that I have ever written. biggrin.gif

I read part of this essay of yours before and the material anthologized in one of your books. (I'd say that my first introduction to Spencer, but it wasn't. I'd already read part of The Man Versus the State in high school -- simply because of its title... I was desparately gobbling up everything I could get on anarchism at that time and that title seemed to fit the bill. Of course, it wasn't the individualist anarchist tome I was expecting, so I didn't read it all the way through at that time.)

Oh, I wanted to add: Have all of you here who have written on Spencer thought of putting together an anthology of recent essays devoted to Spencer? It seems like enough material is out there for a book or two. ("Recent" here meaning within the last several decades.)

Edited by Dan Ust
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George,

Sorry!

I should have mentioned your article "Will the Real Herbert Spencer Please Stand Up?," which I've read in the anthologized version, and even cited in the past. Havin' a Senior Moment here...

Your piece on Spencer and causation I wasn't aware of. Shall look it up.

Spencer makes a cameo appearance in my article on Rand, Comte, and altruism, and got a little more play in my Reason Papers review of a book where Mary Midgley ran over Rand.

Robert Campbell

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I agree with everything else you say from the 2 pages I read, just your take on that one word. From the quotes I've seen it is just more of the same pretentious references and very little intellectual content or disputation.

What do you believe he's trying to get at -- aside from listing as many things as he can pick out that he doesn't like about Rand's big novel?

My impression from the quotes and the first two pages was that he was trying to buttress the Whittaker Chambers article in Buckley's 'National Review' by making a bunch of pretentious allusions instead of giving pithy concise arguments. Hard to tell after 2 pages, and I lost interest feeling a G.H. Smithlike headache coming on.

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I think the criticisms of Bertonneau's supposed pretensions are becoming a little overdone. Generally writers who want to wow us with their intellectual credentials don't open by citing someone as utterly unsnobbish as Colin Wilson. He also credits Rand, rightly, for nailing "much about late-twentieth century left-liberal piety, not least its addiction to righteous display." And his cataclysme a clef crack was both witty and accurate.

Edited by Daniel Barnes
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George Smith wrote: "Another obvious error is Bertonneau's claim that Rand 'never achieved a significant screen-credit; Warner Studios even farmed out the screenplay for The Fountainhead to someone else.' In fact, Rand wrote the screenplays to both 'The Fountainhead' and 'Love Letters.'"

Note how Bertonneau uses his false statement. When she appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Rand had most particularly wanted to testify about the communist propoganda in screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood's "The Best Years of Our Lives." Bertonneau clearly implies that her motive was envy of a more successful screenwriter's "Film Academy's accolades." "I assert," he then announces, "that Rand plausibly thought of Sherwood himself when she sent the adenoidal, second-rate playwright to his death in the Tunnel. The parallelism leads us to suspect that in the Tunnel episode Rand composes a cataclysme a clef." And in a triumph of tortured reasoning. he concludes: "And what then does Atlas become but a grand fantasy of godlike revenge, a theater of resentment assuaged, a daydream of limitless ego?"

I could say more, but I'm too busy thinking of King Pentheus in Euripides' Bacchae.

Barbara

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I don't think Ayn Rand had much to do with envy.

--Brant

Girard, from my readings, tends to see envy almost everywhere. As someone and I pointed out earlier, Girardians appear to be much like the caricature of Freudians -- that, in reducing whatever they're studying down to one particular cause that merely manifests in different ways in different arenas.

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Dan and Brant,

One of the psychoanalysts in the generation after Freud, Theodor Reik, "explained" romantic love as a reaction-formation against envy.

Maybe Reik was halfway to Girardianism already?

Robert Campbell

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Dan and Brant,

One of the psychoanalysts in the generation after Freud, Theodor Reik, "explained" romantic love as a reaction-formation against envy.

Maybe Reik was halfway to Girardianism already?

Robert Campbell

I've been trying to get through Reik's Mystery on the Mountain: The Drama of the Sinai Revelation for about three years now... That's his attempt to psychoanalyze Moses. I think probably you're right, since Reik is already depicting much of this -- religion, art, life -- in terms of guilt and envy. I wonder if Girard read Reik.

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By the way, someone in a Yahoo group had an interesting take on Girard:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LeftLibertarian2/message/26120

Note how he believes there might be some value to Girard's view on scapegoating and particular how the notion might be useful in the statist context.

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Dan and Brant,

One of the psychoanalysts in the generation after Freud, Theodor Reik, "explained" romantic love as a reaction-formation against envy.

Maybe Reik was halfway to Girardianism already?

We can assume envy is a human universal and if you haven't experienced it you'd have absolutely no idea what anyone is talking about talking about envy. It is a question of how you deal with your feelings.

I have little respect for psychiatry and none at all for anything attached to Sigmund Freud, self deluded and a fraud. God-like psychiatrists pretending to be doctors sticking ice picks into your brains, ordering hysterectomies for epileptics and so on and so forth.

--Brant

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Dan and Brant,

One of the psychoanalysts in the generation after Freud, Theodor Reik, "explained" romantic love as a reaction-formation against envy.

Maybe Reik was halfway to Girardianism already?

We can assume envy is a human universal and if you haven't experienced it you'd have absolutely no idea what anyone is talking about talking about envy. It is a question of how you deal with your feelings.

I have little respect for psychiatry and none at all for anything attached to Sigmund Freud, self deluded and a fraud. God-like psychiatrists pretending to be doctors sticking ice picks into your brains, ordering hysterectomies for epileptics and so on and so forth.

I do think envy is, if not universal, certainly widespread. I also think it does play a large role in society -- probably larger than most might admit. But I think the Girardians are making it into their do all, be all theory -- and I've seen them apply it to art, social institutions, and personal behavior. What's more, it seems that for Girardians if envy and scapegoating are the problems then Christianity is the solution and nothing else will do -- or as I wrote back in late 2008:

"Now, the usual take on this is sans Christianity, we'd all be scapegoating into the sunset. Of course, that Christians scapegoat seems unregistered, but I also wonder if Girard and his seconds believe that, accepting scapegoating is the central social problem to overcome if the only response is to accept the Jesus myth. In fact, I'd argue that this sort of scapegoating-transcendence narrative leaves scapegoating in place. In essence, humanity is stuck in scapegoating mode and only either divinity can change this or a dogma can hold it in abeyance."

I'm not sure I'd completely dismiss Freud or his Leibnizian notions, but I do think psychiatry as a profession is basically wrongheaded and no more than charlatans armed with the power to coerce anyone unfortunate enough to fall under their grasp. (What would I accept from Freud? Probably just the core notions that there are subconscious drives and that much of one's psychology is established early in life. These, however, are not astounding conclusions and predate Freud. I certainly disagree with his reading of just about everything in life into his theory of the psyche.)

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