The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out

[caroljane]

Ko-rect!

[Robert Campbell]

Another key quotation:

As Ayn Rand and I have argued at length, a society's philosophy is what shapes its actions and future. The DIM hypothesis, as I have pointed out several times, presupposes this viewpoint as its necessary foundation. Despite its causal primacy, however, philosophy taken by itself does not enable us to identify the essence of any particular society. The reason is that a society's philosophy cannot be discovered directly, simply by asking its people—whether the intellectuals and/or the general public—what they think in regard to fundamental questions. (p. 251)

Looks like he won't be inviting Robert Tracinski back for Old Home Week.

Robert Campbell

[Jonathan]

Hey! Lindsay Perigo is a Kantian!

Pigero is proving your point that he's an enraged Kantian. On this thread, KASS Music Gem: Beethoven's 9th, he praises Beethoven whom Rand Objectively identified to be a producer of evil music which propagates the Malevolent Universe Premise. Pigero gleefully quotes someone who quotes H. L. Mencken as saying that in Beethoven, "there was something olympian in his snarls and rages." You read that correctly! Snarls and rages, which Peikoff Objectively identified as being caused by Kant! So now we know why Pigero joins Beethoven in hating existence, and why he hates Rand (remember that Pigero thinks that Rand is a "moron" for disagreeing with his position that his favorite rage-filled Kantian music is "objectively superior").

J

[9thdoctor]

So now we know why Pigero joins Beethoven in hating existence, and why he hates Rand (remember that Pigero thinks that Rand is a "moron" for disagreeing with his position that his favorite rage-filled Kantian music is "objectively superior").

And don't forget Beethoven was an admirer of Kant, if that doesn't nail his coffin shut I don't know what ever could. The quote about starry skies above and moral law within was supposedly a favorite of the deaf master of malevolence.

[caroljane]

He was a communist too, and so obviously is Perigo==" alle menschen werden bruder" - it is right there in their own words being promoted openly!

[caroljane]

Well, Schiller's words or Goethe's or somebody's. Those German commies are all the same.

[Robert Campbell]

"Alle Menschen werden Brüder" comes from Schiller.

And Schiller was one of Ayn Rand's favorite playwrights. She'd read him in German.

This stuff gets remarkably tangled, doesn't it?

Robert Campbell

[caroljane]

Rothbard warned us about Mozart but we didn't listen. No wonder the world is in the state it's in.

[Robert Campbell]

Let us take as an example the Objectivist principle that the rise of unreason in a society leads to dictatorship (a principle on which I based an earlier book analyzing Hitler's takeover of the Weimar republic). And let us suppose that we know by some means that a substantial part of a given society increasingly accepts unreason. Philosophy by itself would then tell us the ultimate political fate of that society if it did not change its ideas. This is certainly not a vague generality, but a definite and frightening prediction. Despite this fact, however, the philosophic prediction as such necessarily leaves unanswered several questions of great interest to those living in a particular society. What kind of dictatorship will it be? Is any group in the still-free period the most dangerous threat to freedom-lovers now, and thus the most important enemy to fight? If so, it is necessarily an obvious group, such as statist politicians and their Hollywood retinue? … (p. 253)

Robert Campbell

[caroljane]

Let us take as an example the Objectivist principle that the rise of unreason in a society leads to dictatorship (a principle on which I based an earlier book analyzing Hitler's takeover of the Weimar republic). And let us suppose that we know by some means that a substantial part of given society increasingly accepts unreason. Philosophy by itself would then tell us the ultimate political fate of that society if it did not change its ideas. This is certainly not a vague generality, but a definite and frightening prediction. Despite this fact, however, the philosophic prediction as such necessarily leaves unanswered several questions of great interest to those living in a particular society. What kind of dictatorship will it be? Is any group in the still-free period the most dangerous threat to freedom-lovers now, and thus the most important enemy to fight? If so, it is necessarily an obvious group, such as statist politicians and their Hollywood retinue? … (p. 253)

\

Robert Campbell

"Let us suppose that we know by some means"....!!!

Let's not.

[Brant Gaede]

Let us take as an example the Objectivist principle that the rise of unreason in a society leads to dictatorship (a principle on which I based an earlier book analyzing Hitler's takeover of the Weimar republic). And let us suppose that we know by some means that a substantial part of given society increasingly accepts unreason. Philosophy by itself would then tell us the ultimate political fate of that society if it did not change its ideas. This is certainly not a vague generality, but a definite and frightening prediction. Despite this fact, however, the philosophic prediction as such necessarily leaves unanswered several questions of great interest to those living in a particular society. What kind of dictatorship will it be? Is any group in the still-free period the most dangerous threat to freedom-lovers now, and thus the most important enemy to fight? If so, it is necessarily an obvious group, such as statist politicians and their Hollywood retinue? … (p. 253)

\

Robert Campbell

That's no principle, Objectivist or otherwise. The "rise of unreason in a society" implies coming out of reason. How did that work? Reason causes unreason? True if one accepts LP's idea of the power of pjhilosophy, but that's then an obvious contradiction. People and their societies are much more complex than that. Hitler--and unreason if you will--came out of WWI and the Great Depression. Of course, previously there was a lot of unreason that led to the unreason of WWI, but that unreason in turn did not come out of reason but myriad other causes, one being philosophy. LP's previous book did not demonstrate the contrary. The crap since WWI is the triumph of inertia. The present-day economic difficulties will be solved by world-wide repudiations of fiat currencies--de facto default on private and public debt--and the creation of new fiat currencies. Philosophy will have little to do with that. Not past, present or future philosoiphy. What will not be defauted on will be political power and a lot of that power comes from the ability to pay for pork with essentially worthless paper. If elected Romney will not be able to stop the oncoming crash, but he will be blamed for it. The country is in chronic pain. How can a President get away with telling its citizens the country additionally needs a sharp dose of acute pain--that might have worked four years ago--to properly deal with the underlying situation? Today people will run through the streets with torches and pitchforks before putting up with that.

--Brant

Brant rant

[Robert Campbell]

Carol,

"Let us suppose that we know by some means" does come across as a rather loose formulation.

In this paragraph, Peikoff doesn't admit that his 1982 prophecy of doom (the United States will go fascist) is now being replaced with one that looks rather different (the United States will succumb to Christian theocracy).

Then again, both outcomes are M₂ from his point of view.

So maybe he doesn't think his 1982 prophecy was inaccurate.

Robert Campbell

[Robert Campbell]

The "rise of unreason in a society" implies coming out of reason. How did that work? Reason causes unreason?

Not through dialectical logic, you may be sure

Peikoff thinks that the rise of unreason in a society is the result of iron laws through which one of the five DIM "modes" succeeds another.

Still got some reading to do, about those iron laws...

Robert Campbell

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Robert,

I know statistics can be boring in philosophical matters, but does Peikoff cite any statistics or trends about mankind's drastically increased life expectancy, the huge population increase in the world, or any comparisons between the wealth the poor have in this America plunging toward totalitarian doom to the actual dirt-poor conditions in undeveloped nations, when he is discussing his DIM modes?

Or does he only do that when talking about capitalism?

Seems to me like you can't cut off capitalism from global DIM mode doom as an unmentioned exception. What I mean is that in some societies where religion flourishes, people do, too. And their flourishing is increasing over the decades, not decreasing, even as their religion grows.

According to the gloom-and-doom model, this should not be happening--and if it is, this is only due to some kind of capitalism, which will soon die off. Except it doesn't. Nor does the religion.

If we are dealing with fundamentals in DIM, when you look at statistics, it looks like there are places where some of those fundamentals just don't work like they are supposed to.

I'm not saying they don't work at all. But I went through Peikoff's DIM lectures a while back and it seemed to me at the time he left out some fundamentals (like the nature of power). I considered his model clever at the time for analyzing certain characteristics in a culture, but not universal since too much was not considered about human nature.

From the discussions I have read, my impression continues.

Michael

[Robert Campbell]

I know statistics can be boring in philosophical matters, but does Peikoff cite any statistics or trends about mankind's drastically increased life expectancy, the huge population increase in the world, or any comparisons between the wealth the poor have in this America plunging toward totalitarian doom to the actual dirt-poor conditions in undeveloped nations, when he is discussing his DIM modes?

Or does he only do that when talking about capitalism?

Michael,

Since I'm not finished yet, I skimmed the remainder of the book.

Didn't see anything that resembled economic statistics.

There certainly haven't been any in the portion that I've read.

Peikoff seems to be saying that philosophy determines the form of "cultural products" (the four kinds he picked for this book are literary forms, educational procedures, theories in physics, and systems of political thought), and that these in turn shape a society or a culture.

So if the prevailing cultural mode as revealed in a wide range of cultural products—the five modes being the two D's, the I, and the two M's—undermines capitalism, capitalism can't do anything about it.

There are a couple more quotations from Chapter 12, Identifying a Culture's Essence, that I find highly revealing about Peikoff's methodology. Will put these up later.

Robert Campbell

[9thdoctor]

The "rise of unreason in a society" implies coming out of reason. How did that work? Reason causes unreason?

Just review the Objectivist historical narrative: you’ve got Aquinas reintroducing reason, then a few centuries buildup to the Enlightenment, then Kant destroying the Enlightenment from within. Both Aquinas and Kant are singular figures, singular roughly in the sense Gibbon uses here:

The ruin of Paganism, in the age of Theodosius, is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition, and may therefore deserve to be considered as a singular event in the history of the human mind.

Edward Gibbon,

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

, Chapter 28

It makes sense in that you have to explain what caused the Enlightenment (hence the U.S. and capitalism) and what ended it. You’ll find (somewhere) Rand arguing that the more rational philosophy always wins out so long as there is freedom of speech, so what could ever beat the Enlightenment? A singular figure, Kant, who was a kind of Trojan horse bearing irrationality and evil under a veneer of reason. Aquinas could also be seen as a Trojan horse, BTW, but going the other way.

In this paragraph, Peikoff doesn't admit that his 1982 prophecy of doom (the United States will go fascist) is now being replaced with one that looks rather different (the United States will succumb to Christian theocracy).

He doesn’t have to. He can just invoke Sinclair Lewis’s line about how when fascism comes to the US...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dennis,

That's the image people who hold to the Christian theocracy story have of Palin.

They always seem to miss she's small government and her decidedly anti-Christian theocracy acts she did while in office.

I just think they don't like her image because she gives Christianity a wholesome efficacious look. And that scares them into thinking she's the bogeywoman.

Michael

[Robert Campbell]

ND,

Sarah Palin as Berzelius Windrip? Not quite.

You're right about Kant as a Trojan Horse, in this philosophy of history. As we've noted, Peikoff doesn't award a D to any pre-Kantian thinker, not even to David Hume. You're not allowed to start disintegrating, until Immanuel Kant has shown you the way

But I don't think Peikoff considers the onrushing Christian theocracy to be a form of fascism. For instance, he envisions a merger of Christian apocalyptics with environmentalist apocalyptics.

On that, however, I have more reading to do.

Robert Campbell

[caroljane]

Shayne Wissler wrote a review for Amazon, but they refused to print it, so he posted it on Solo,

[Robert Campbell]

Carol,

I'm puzzled about Amazon rejecting it, considering some of the nasty polemics they leave up for years.

And Shayne must not be doing well, if he's reduced to posting at SOLOP where all he can stir up is Perigo, Claudia, Gregster, cobwebs, and dust bunnies.

Money quote:

This book is filled with a lot of finger-pointing about bad trends. Are they bad trends? Sure. But the best way to stop a bad trend to clear a new path and just create something better. For example, Objectivists have been complaining for decades about the errors of theoretical physics. Why go on decade after decade merely complaining? Why not create a distinctively Objectivist theoretical physics? What's stopping them from doing this?

Uhh, maybe because Peikoff and Harriman lack the competence, and no one who possesses it is inclined to view contemporary physics and its problems the way they do?

Robert Campbell

PS. The item above Shayne's review is a Perigonian bloviation to the effect that Pam Geller is totally KASS and ARI and TAS totally aren't. I could come back in 5 years, if SOLOP is still up then, and predict the headlines...

[caroljane]

I am puzzled too, since there is a one start review, by someone who obviously did not read the book, who calls Peikoff a Bushian neocon. Maybe Shayne has enemies at Amazon, or the ARI has been complaining to them.

[caroljane]

Geller is KASS alright - Kalculatedly Angry, Slanderous, Solvent.

[Robert Campbell]

I am puzzled too, since there is a one star review, by someone who obviously did not read the book, who calls Peikoff a Bushian neocon. Maybe Shayne has enemies at Amazon, or the ARI has been complaining to them.

I saw the same uninformed rant that you mention. It's been up for a while.

Most likely ARI's been complaining.

Amazon should know better than to care what any ARIan says...

Robert Campbell

[caroljane]

How do Amazon apply their standards anyway? They posted George's review where he nailed McElroy for her plagiarism. That is surely more contentious than anything Shayne said,

[Robert Campbell]

No kidding about the higher level of contentious.

The difference, I suspect, is that Wendy McElroy hasn't been mau-mauing Amazon's management in the past.

Robert Campbell