Starbuckle

Harriman isn't really "facing my critics" if you count what he's allowing so far into the comments under his post. "Thanks for writing such a wonderful book," etc., is par. My own comment sent a day or two ago bringing up McCaskey didn't pass muster.

Robert Campbell wrote: "Critic, singular, since any fool will soon enough learn who it's directed at." Omigod. Did Campbell just call me any fool?? He will never continue to serve on the board after this!!!!

"Only Joe Rowlands can moderate an established user. He accused me of defending Christianity, not in any specific actual post, mind you, since I asked for a quote, but as a "feeling" he had about me. His literal words - a feeling." Even if you had been a professed Christian, why would it be an expellable offense? No wonder it's so moribund over there.

McCaskey shouldn't have uttered the adjective "unconventional" to characterize the historical account of Harriman's book before proceeding to his substantive criticism; but in the Book of Blunders, the lapse is relatively minor. The problem is not that it's so very misleading to anyone who gives a fair reading to McCaskey's comments at Amazon, but that it gives the folks like Harriman something to latch onto as a means of ignoring the rest of what the reviewer said. Which is lame. Very lame. I would even go so far as to call it lame-o.

Keer wrote: "Read this, Adam. It got me banned from RoR." How did it get you banned from RoR? What reason were you given? Not that it seems implausible to me that an RoR moderator would be unreasonable.

On the other hand, Harriman's new post is pretty lame. First he starts by announcing that he will "now begin to answer my critics," as if the occasion of a scholar responding to critics deserves some kind of special marking for its momentousness. Second, he zeroes in on that unfortunate word "unconventional" that McCaskey used in his Amazon review of LL to characterize Harriman's approach, while ignoring McCaskey's substantive criticisms. Third, Harriman is so far sidestepping the issue of whether it is appropriate for scholars to try to force critics whose criticisms he dislikes out of an organization with which he too is associated. Was Harriman justified in siccing Peikoff on McCaskey? Even when these guys pretend to be "open," they're closed. There are a few interesting details in the post about how Harriman approached his subject matter, but I don't see any direct response to "my critics."

Ninth says: "This may be a totally lame observation, but have you noticed the similarity between The Logical Leap and Theological Creep?" I had not noticed. Good God, that's lame. Weak. It is lame and it is weak.

I recently moved back closer to my family (same state). Just in time, I suppose. I'll take only Amtrak to visit the home town and, excepting dire emergency, never fly again (though a brother is on the other side of the country). I guess I'll switch from Amtrak to buses if they start groping passengers as a condition of getting on the train. If the buses fall into the obtrusive-security mesh, I might consider hitch-hiking. When I moved so far away originally, I figured the distance was no big deal, air travel being reasonably cheap and convenient. That was three months before 9/11.

"Well, of course, the original reporting was biased and grossly unfair and merely another example of the pervasive liberal bias that renders almost all news reporting in this country so biased and grossly unfair. After all, Bush is a Republican, the party of individual freedom and free enterprise. How could he do anything wrong? This is why the response to the original reporting is so biased and grossly unfair and merely another example of the pervasive liberal bias that renders almost all news reporting in this country so biased and so grossly unfair. "Excuse me for a moment; I have to go listen again and again and again to some mind-numbingly stupid speech by some fascist who is going to bring us back to the individual freedom and free enterprise that was taken away from us by liberals - the selfsame liberals who have rendered almost all the news reporting in this country so biased and grossly unfair." What is the point of this effusion?

Those interested in critique of Popper and his conception of the open society might like a paper by Veatch available from Mises.org (it's a pdf). I only skimmed it so far, but get the sense that Veatch doesn't distinguish sharply enough between Plato's "forms" (including a form or essence of human nature) and human nature as such, recognition of which doesn't require any Platonist framework. So there may be a certain false dichotomy operative. But Veatch seems to get the better of Popper. http://mises.org/literature.aspx?action=search&q=Popper

People create, people spectate. The Internet and other new media technology have made it a lot easier to create (or to market creations...or to discover classical music) than used to be the case. I don't see any horrific bifurcation between artistic creators and "mere" spectators, who certainly can be inspired by what is called "passive" observation of a work of art. I do see a false dichotomy between artists and "mere" businessmen, both of whom can be creative. The property-rights issue and the unexpected-public-annoyance issue seem somewhat beside the point. I wouldn't raise any objection to letting performers come into your store and yodel at the customers. I would be skeptical, though, about the suggestion that spectation somehow has to become more participatory and "creative" to be of greatest value. You might get an extra kick out of being called up out of the audience to be a juror in a show of "Night of January 16th," but is the extra fun you get a result of any original artistic contribution on your part to the play? Are you particularly ennobled or pitched to a higher level of transcendence thereby? It's just a novelty.

Ninth says: "My question (and I admit I didn't ask it well) is whether Peikoff could have gotten away with an excommunication then, especially if it played out as publicly as the McCaskey one has. This is in the time period when he did signings for Laissez Faire Books, imagine that!" Well, I think your question was clear enough, but I picked up on different parts of your statement. Mea minima culpa. ARI was founded in 1985, a few years after the publication of Ominous Parallels, so it's hard to know. The Internet is one factor that changes things. Just as it's harder for the MSM to sweep bullshit under the rug, so it is for the cultist arbiters in these obscure corners of the culture wars. Peikoff did have readers for the manuscript of Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and I remember that there was a report of some kind of back and forth with Binswanger, about an issue of conceptual heirarchy in the book. But I guess there was no animosity about it. Peikoff later rationalized his 1982 book signings for LFB, saying that Andrea Millen Rich had told him (I think) that there would be no anarchist books under her management, or that it was no longer a libertarian-in-bad-sense store, or something. Some time later Andrea responded to this assertion in an email that was posted on the Internet, in which she made clear that Peikoff in making any such assertion was not exactly evincing a comfortable relationship with the truth thereby. (My periphrasis, not hers.) Of course, nothing major changed about the libertarian movement or Laissez Faire Books over the next several years since Peikoff's book signings in 1982 except for the publication of The Passion of Ayn Rand, and Hessen's selling of Second Renaissance stock to LFB while simultanously giving the bio a glowing review in his mailing to the SR list. But now it was arch evil for Kelley (who was too charitable toward the bio in Peikoff's eyes) to give a talk to the LFB Supper Club to explain why Objectivism is the best foundation for political liberty. See the schism chronology here: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=776 Here is a response to an inquiry from Barbara Branden that Andrea gave about Peikoff's book signings for LFB: >Dear Barbara, >This is such an old story, dating back to 1982 or whenever it was when Leonard's book first came out. He did come down to LFB on Mercer Street for an autograph party. He never asked me if I were libertarian, and I assumed he knew that LFB was a libertarian bookshop. >As I remember, someone asked him later that evening why he had agreed to sign books for us and he said something to the effect that he would sign books for Attila the Hun in order to get his message out. That doesn't sound like he thought we were "no longer libertarian," does it? >A few months later he signed books for us again in New Orleans at the NCMR (Natl Cmte for Monetary Reform) hard-money investment conference (Jim Blanchard headed it), and hung around our booth for quite awhile in case people came over to chat with him. >Yes, he signed a book for me personally, as you describe. I'm in San Francisco at the moment so can't give you the exact wording. >Poor Leonard; this has haunted him for 20 years! Andrea< Archived here: http://www.dianahsieh.com/cgi-bin/blog/view.pl?entry=108259178750051950 The only reason I'm again dredging up all these old claims is that it's history and I like history. I like to study history and to refresh my memory of various dates and things. ###

Ninth writes: "Just a random thought related to this whole saga, imagine if someone, say George Walsh circa 1983, privately commented that Peikoff's rendition of history in The Ominous Parallels was 'unconventional.' That Kant's epistemology inexorably led to gas chambers, well, that's pretty far from how historians view what happened." Despite the Hegelian tone of the book, Peikoff would object that he is not arguing therein that the progress from A to B (although in his view it in fact happened) was "inexorable" (i.e., determined). An Amazon reader hacked away at McCaskey for using the word "conventional" to refer to the historical accounts from which he says McCaskey veers. But whether McCaskey's criticisms are right or wrong, it's clear that he has problems with Harriman's account on substantive grounds; he's not saying "unconventional, therefore suspect whether Harriman makes his case or not." McCaskey doesn't think Harriman makes his case. McCaskey might have predicted that some readers would make hay out of his reference to "conventional accounts," but his failure to cover every single base is not very relevant to the various historical, epistemological and socio-pathological matters being debated.

After several years of absence from Solohq/RoR, it seems that my submissions are still going to be relegated to the "moderator q." (my besetting sin back then was a parody of Hshyster's attack on Sciabarra that one of the underlings there didn't like). I don't know whether the moderator team will condescend to let my new submission go through, so I'm cross-posting here just so my scribbling will be eternally preserved in the Inter-ether at least for the next day or two. * * * I don't understand the injunction to "remember, we are not discussing something Ayn Rand had written here..." What difference would the subject of the criticism make with respect to the legitimacy of abiding honest criticism? Whether a person should remain on the ARI board in the wake of such criticisms would depend on the manner in which the criticisms were made and the substance of them. I think we can all concede ARI's formal right to set whatever policies as an organization it wishes. Has this been disputed? But the issue is whether behaving like scared-rabbit cultists make any sense for an organization whose alleged raison d'etre is the promotion of individualism and reason. Peikoff, for his part, is being willfully irrational, and overtly contemptuous of anyone who could desire anything even remotely resembling an intelligible, appropriate reason for his push to oust McCaskey from the board. He as much as concedes that he couldn't care less about the substance of McCaskey's criticisms. Even after Peikoff's "explanatory" memo, we don't know anything about what makes those criticisms beyond the pale. Peikoff asserts that "reality obviously hasn't helped" anybody who still scratches his head at Peikoff's whim-worshiping conduct. This is true enough, I suppose. I haven't received any memos from "reality" telling me exactly why Peikoff is being so blatantly unreasonable, and even anti-reasonable, in his public posturing about McCaskey and the controversy over Peikoff's tantrums.

Mark Weiss writes: "With regard to Tibor Machan’s letter requesting Rand to write an article for his student newspaper, he is sadly mistaken about the ethics of the matter. The fact, as presented, is that he expected her to give away her time for free. If he had really understood Ayn Rand, he would have realized that she does not work for free. She is a Capitalist. She would obviously take offense to his badgering her with not one request, but repeated annoying requests for her services for no compensation. That she wrote him back at all was even amazing. He got the response he deserved." I don't know what account of the matter Weiss is responding to. I would say it's possible to respond to a request like Machan's while taking into account the sometime-obliviousness of youth. Machan also admits that his final angry letter to Rand was indisputably out of bounds, something he could never live down. See his autobiography A Man Without a Hobby for his fullest account of the whole thing. Well, it's out of print, so here's an excerpt: * * * IN THE fall of 1962 I left the Air Force and entered college. I had read about Claremont in National Review—in a column by Russell Kirk, who talked about how wonderful and independent the place was. So I contacted the admissions director, Emery Walker, and managed to gain admittance. But before starting school I also managed to gain an audience with Ayn Rand. I went to New York and met with her for about half an hour at her office. It was a wonderful experience. What stuck in my mind was how warm, calm, sensible and friendly Rand was. She showed none of the prickly traits I would later hear about. I remember saying to her that perhaps I liked her work because I, too, was a refugee from communism. She said she hoped this wasn’t the case, since her ideas were meant to have universal significance, not appeal only to those who shared her personal experiences. There was no badgering or finger wagging; she was like a sensible aunt or grandmother. I promised to send her a letter I had written to my friend the priest, concerning the struggles I had been having with religion, and when I got back to Washington I sent it off to her. Rand replied with a wonderful letter commenting on how mine, to the priest, exemplified her principle of the sanction of the victim—which it did. In it I had expressed dismay about a book Father Novicky gave me, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, with its denigration of the human desire to know (the desire that Aristotle, at the very beginning of his Metaphysics, states flatly is inherent in all of us). Rand wrote that she was “deeply impressed with the letter you wrote to the priest. If The Fountainhead has helped you to find a way out of such a terrible and tragic conflict, I am very happy to know it. Your letter to the priest projects, with startling accuracy, what an honest and intelligent young person would have to feel if he attempted to practice the altruist morality fully and conscientiously. “The most terrifying indictment of religious morality is contained in the following lines of yours: ‘The trouble is that I am always asking for the logic. And the more I will know the more I will want to know. What should I do[,] stop wanting to know?’ I hope that you realize fully to what extent you were on the premise which I call ‘the sanction of the victim.’ You were accepting as a sin the thing which was your greatest virtue and the greatest of all human virtues: your rationality, the desire to know and to under-stand. I am sure that you will never make that mistake again, but I want to stress, as the most important advice I can give you, that no matter what intellectual errors you may make in the future, do not ever accept the idea that rationality is evil or that it can ever be proper to discard your mind. So long as you hold this as an abso-lute, you will be safe, no matter what errors you make. But if one doubts or rejects one’s own mind, one commits an act of spiritual suicide and the greatest evil possible to man. I believe that you know it now.” I found her advice extremely sound and have tried my best to follow it. When I had been at CMC for a while and begun writing for the student newspaper to promulgate as best I could the ideas that I picked up from Rand and found sensible, a few of us on campus decided that we should start a 14-campus student newspaper filled with diverse intellectual ideas. I designed the logo—an abstract drawing of various shapes and lines—and we called the newspaper Contrast. I was also assigned the job of contacting Rand and asking her to write something for us. I was eager to comply for I was sure that her ideas would win readers for her works. She didn’t reply, although I wrote several letters. At one point I asked that she at least let me know why she couldn’t grant my request. In response to this I did receive a brief letter in which Rand observed that it “requires no philosophical knowledge, only common sense ethics and etiquette, to know that one does not ask for the free profes-sional services of any profession, whether doctors, lawyers or writers. If one permits oneself the breach of asking it, one has, at least, the decency to know that one is asking a favor—and one does not pretend that one is offering a value in return. And when one is refused, one does not demand to know the reason.” Ouch. Clearly Rand did not appreciate my persistence in the matter. I was hurt and then angry—why was this person unable to see the good will and supportiveness of my suggestion? But I didn’t give up, instead writing several more letters, explaining that she must have misunderstood me. For I had certainly meant to do only one thing, namely, get her ideas before student readers. I got no response to any of these efforts. One night my suite-mate Greg Smith, an outspoken leftist and fellow staff member of Contrast, asked about my progress with Rand. I explained that I hadn’t gotten anywhere. Thereupon he started to poke fun at me—“How do you like your rational hero now?” Goaded, after he left I jumped to my typewriter and dashed off a scathingly hostile letter. I was often jumping to my type-writer and dashing things off, but this time it was a very bad idea. In a typical passage I remonstrated against Rand for “criticizing the world and its inhabitants of wholesale irrationality (as true as this may be) [while continuing] to practice identical methods in dealing with those who address you, who seek your advice or who wish to clarify some points with you. This approach draws no distinction between those who consider your philosophy—Objectivism—good, and right, and those who are approaching it skeptically or antagonistically. You are making it quite difficult for the first group to create a better world for themselves.” The letter went on in a similar childish vein, sometimes getting rather nasty as it unloaded my pent-up anger. Not long after I sent this tirade, a letter arrived from Nathaniel Branden advising me that, “At Miss Rand’s request, all mail that comes to this office addressed to her is read by me. In the event that she receives crank and/or obscene letters, she has asked that these not be forwarded to her. As your letter is in the same moral category, it has not been forwarded to her.” He also warned me not to reprint Rand’s letter to me, lest I be the subject of litigation. “Please do not write to this office again. We do not wish to hear from you. I have instructed Mr. Peter Crosby, my Los Angeles rep-resentative, that you are not to be admitted to any lectures, should you attempt to attend.” I have never lived down this act, one that, as I realized very shortly after carrying it out—and even before experiencing the repercussions—was undoubtedly intemperate and insulting. Rand really owed me nothing except perhaps a bit of indulgence. And if I didn’t get even that much from her, so what? One finds surliness everywhere in the world, without lashing out as fiercely as I did. In my loneliness and confusion I was trying to gain some kind of support from Rand that she had no responsibility to offer me.# * * *

I watched "Our Man Flint" (or some of it) many years after first reading Barbara's review in a bound volume of Rand's publication. I found OMF silly and boring, but perhaps I'll give it another try some day.

I don't quite follow the view that Dominique's psyche and motivations are somehow unbelievable, even when most charitably viewed in terms of mythic archetypes. The question never came up for me in reading of Rand's novels until I encountered it in criticism. Certainly there are people in real life who don't like to share their values with anybody, because they fear these lesser souls will somehow "taint" those values by their appreciation or mis-appreciation (cf. Dominique's throwing a beloved sculpture down a shaft, to make sure nobody else ever sees it; a preview of her perspective on Roark). I once met someone who was a bit confounded when a singer he liked became more popular; he had had her more "to himself" before then. There may be many concerns involved, including fear that the newly popular one will suffer a loss of integrity. Roark proved that no matter how externally buffeted, he was going to be okay, and that there was really nothing to fear. Dominique realized this and said, "Okay, I'll stop trying to destroy you now." There may be only a few basic human motives, but the way these can be combined and sliced and diced in different individuals is infinite. Maybe if critics were more specific about when and how Dominique's actions and motivations become self-contradictory or unconvincing, I'd be more likely to agree. Is it a craft problem about portraying a certain kind of psychology; or, on the other hand, is the claim being made that nobody, period, could ever be motivated in the way that Dominique is motivated? Barbara claims that Dominique is implausible in virtue of the purportedly higher level of abstraction with which she is portrayed. How is this manifested? Most of Rand's major characters are portrayed in both very vivid and specific and very abstract ways. They're symbolic of a certain approach to life in addition to being sui generis. It's Galt whose portrayal seems way more abstract than that of others, not Dominique's.

Robert CAmpbell writes: "If the Estate passes to Kira Peikoff, and she is not interested in becoming an Objectivist pope, there won't be anyone who can do what Leonard Peikoff just did to John McCaskey. It won't matter whether Harry Binswanger or David Harriman or Bob Mayhew or someone else wants to exercise such power." Omigod. This is, like, so naive. There is a ring, and whoever gets hold of this ring will have the ultimate power. That's a matter of lunging and jockeying, and authoritative pronouncing, not of last wills and testaments. Whosoever maneuvers in the most wiley way and authoritatively pronounces in the most emphatic and demanding way is going to be the bearer and wearer of that ring. One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the culture-darkness bind them.

Keer states that for Tracinski, the post-Passion jihad against David Kelley by Peikoff et al. was justified, even if the anti-McCAskey jihad is not justified. But Tracinski's statement in his recent essay about McCaskey is more ambiguous than that. He writes: "In this connection, I must say a few words about the smaller wing of the Objectivist movement that is gathered around David Kelley, who split from Peikoff twenty years ago under the banner of promoting a more 'tolerant' version of Objectivism. Though he was reacting, in part, to the same phenomenon—elements of dogmatism in the Objectivist movement—I think that Kelley and his followers have gotten the main issue wrong. In their view, the cause of dogmatism is excessive certainty, and the solution is a blanket 'toleration' of any dissenting view. In practice, this wing of the movement went out of its way to show just how many disreputable figures they were willing to tolerate, which has turned away many people who might have been looking for a reasonable alternative to ARI. "The real alternative, in my view, is not toleration but independence. The answer is not to loosen one's standards, but to use one's own independent standards." I think this retrospective re-criticism of Kelley and IOS is off the mark, as well as disingenuous. But Tracinski at least is willing here to note that the latest pathologies have NOT occurred in a historical vacuum. And if memory serves, his present gloss is light years milder that what he was spewing contra Kelley in the early 90s. Tracinski now flatly admits that Kelley was reacting "in part" to dogmatism in the Objectivist movement. So, we're back to the late 80s and early 90s, if not yet adding the 60s and Rand's own conduct to the history and bill of indictments. History is one of the non-minor contexts that ARI seeks to strike from consideration in its recent brain-deadeningly obfuscatory "reasonable" memo about why they just had to give McCaskey the shaft. "Don't listen to those people trying to confuse you with slanted takes on old conflicts," Yaron yabbles. Those ominous parallels are the mere past...let's MoveOn! I don't think the situation with respect to the orthodox or cultist Objectivist Remnant is as static or hopeless as some are suggesting. Yes, I agree that there will always be an Objectivist cult (and that Hseih, for example, is angling for position, hence her strange semi-openness to criticism of Peikoff plus authoritarian hyper-tweezing of the debate she will permit to occur on her site). Aren't there True Believer types (a la Hoffer) espousing every possible ideology under the sun? But the schisms keep happening because even many of the hitherto unreasonable or scared people who once chose to remain under the thumb of official institutions and leaders reach a breaking point at which they decide to become more independent, finally regarding their own self-respect as a worthy desideratum.

Engle: "One very important principle that you can be fortunate in learning from such study is that no one, and I mean no one, is immune from the con. That is the nature of it, how it works." Why do you assert this? Everything I've read about con artists, including Mauer's classic The Big Con, suggests that the most susceptible victims are those who want to get away with something themselves. The con artist looks for a certain kind of person, not just any person. Interesting analysis, generally, from Engle and Biggers. For some reason, many libertarians were susceptible to the Democratic con artist in the 2008 presidential campaign. I could understand a sheer protest vote, a la "the GOP must be punished for their betrayals," though it should have taken the form of declining to support either major-party candidate; but not a "let's give Obama a chance, he sounds reasonable" vote, in light of his track record and the revelatory stories and backgrounders on him that were being published.

Get on an NYC subway. Wait 20 minutes. Enjoy.

"Not one justified war in over two hundred years. Not one. The only possible exception being the Barbary pirates, if you want to call that a war. That means the Revolutionary War wasn't justified either..." So much for "empiricism."

Xray: "Nature 'forbids' nothing in that field, since 'nature' as such is completely indifferent to philosophical disputes. Also, humans are part of nature as well, and have survived for millenia with a world view based on errors and countless contradictions. [etc.]" You're being dishonest. If you have a substantive objection, make it.

I've known Chris since 1992 or so. He is one of the best guys ever. Over the past few years I have had little opportunity to talk to him, because of his increasing health problems. But once in a while I get an apologetic email that lets me know he's still alive.

Thank you. Sounds interesting.