Reidy

I watched the entire Johnson talk and came away unconvinced. The parts about India's mercantile tradition are convincing (as Sowell and Freidman pointed out years ago), but the rest is labored and implausible. His talk, and the various attempts cited here to rationalize Rand as a Christian, merely go to show that if you make up your mind firmly enough and set your standards of plausibility low enough, you can find something in common between any two notions. What would a pair of ideas have to look like to have NOTHING in common? The rationale for such attempts is often that it helps to sell ideas to people who would otherwise not have looked into them. I wonder what the evidence for this is. Time will tell about Hindu Objectivism, but Christian Objectivism goes back at least as far as E. Merrill Root in National Review in the late 50s, and it still hasn't gotten off the ground. I'm not optimistic about Johnson's synthesis. When I was in college during the Vietnam war / new left / hippie era, some Objectivists and Libertarians said that we could gain a following by aping these people's vocabulary ("liberation", "smash the state" etc.), mode of dress and musical tastes. It didn't happen. You'd go to a love-in and the Libertarians would be the ones wearing saddle shoes. More recently a lot of people expressed, in varying degrees of explicitness, the hope that Sciabarra's "Ayn Rand the Russian Radical" would bring the Derrida / Foucault crowd under the tent. Still waiting. Finally, Johnson's remarks about food preparation and service (everything at once in India vs. a fixed menu and order in the west - 31:15 ff) are dubious. Most main meals in the west follow a sequence of main course then dessert (primo, secondo and maybe dessert in Italian tradition), but it's hardly ever more elaborate than that. The practice of successive courses isn't as ancient as we might think. Everything at once, at even the most formal meals, was standard until the nineteenth century, when western Europe imported the separate-courses custom from Russia and called it "service Russe". Even today the west has a lively tradition of buffets, smorgasbords, potlucks, cafeterias, salad bars, hors d'oeuvre bars, dessert bars and food courts that don't bear out his strawman, and nearly all sit-down restaurants offer numerous options on their menus. To say that you are limited to what the cook has prepared is pretty much a tautology wherever you happen to be.

I share your dislike of various and implausible attempts to sell Rand as what she patently is not. Perhaps the weirdest to date is the Hindu Rand who came up recently here on OL (http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=14604&page=1entry216245 - #6ff). Somebody once told me that Objectivism and Tao, in their respective hearts of hearts, really come down to the same. She didn't go into detail, but I'm confident that if she had it would have sounded a lot like Johnson's talk.

You're right about OPAR, but that's no more offensive or self-destructive than Rand's calling academics "idiot-philosophers" in "Kant vs. Sullivan".

Lest you start having nightmares, six-foot spiders are physically impossible. Weight varies as the cube of linear dimension while supporting strength (cross-sectional area of muscles and bones [or whatever hard parts invertebrates have]) varies as the square. I.e. if a creature becomes ten times as tall, it becomes a thousand times as heavy but only a hundred times as strong. A six-foot spider is maybe 200 times as tall as the ones we know. It's 40,000 times as strong but 8,000,000 as heavy. It couldn't even draw a breath.

A couple of problems here. You conflate several different business models. Royal / ecclesiastical / noble patronage prevailed at least up to the Renaissance, but after that painting and sculpture became increasingly commercial fields with private patrons paying most of the bills. The transformation was pretty well complete by the time of the Romantics. Noble patronage for purposes of state is significantly different from private patronage for private enjoyment, even if the clients happen to be of the aristocracy. The Dutch and Flemish painters, including Rembrandt and Hals, worked mostly for private citizens long before Romanticism came along, so I'd say that the old model was not Romanticism's context. Modern art began, in the late nineteenth century, on the private-commerce model, but by the middle of the twentieth century it was largely paid for by governments, universities and foundations (the nobility of their day). Yes, modern art has its propagandistic strain. This is not new; you said yourself that indoctriniation was one of the functions of art centuries earlier. Among the Romantics and Neoclassics, Daumier, Delacroix and Goya come to mind as artists who made political statements.

How does that tree in Distant Thoughts survive on a rock outcropping a hundred feet in the air? How did those two get up there? Why is he so bored with her? It's not as if his fashion sense is any better

It may not fix anything at all, but it touches on PDS's remarks in #3.

The current generation of Objectivists is getting around to it, as Rand hoped they would. The conference presentations at http://www.aynrandsociety.org/past-programs show several sessions on law-related topics from 2009 on: - The Normative Foundations of Intellectual Property: Two Perspectives - Rand and Punishment (unless this is about her kinky sex scenes) - The Philosophic Basis of the Separation of Church and State: Theory and History - Capitalism, Limited Government, and Morality - Rand and Nozick: Moral, Social and Political Thought - Ayn Rand's Theory of Rights Most or all of these are in preparation for a forthcoming volume on political philosophy in the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series (http://www.aynrandsociety.org/publications). The big Objectivist names in this field are Adam Mosoff (http://www.law.gmu.edu/faculty/directory/fulltime/mossoff_adam) at George Mason University law school and David Mayer at Capitol University (http://law.capital.edu/FacultyBio.aspx?ID=22633). These pages link to publication lists. (Rand also said that a serious theory of music awaited greater physiological knowledge. Has anyone heard of progress on this front?)

You do. You set out to catalog Rand's acknowledgements of Branden, which is a worthwhile task. I proposed some improvements. You don't have to adopt them. Some of the actual passages you request are: - For psychological mirroring you already quoted them. For Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8:4 1166a30; books 8 and 9 generally. - For the stolen concept, Branden quotes the relevant passage in his article. I don't have a page number. - For Barbara Branden's statement, a list of her posts to RoR is available at rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Branden. The particular quote would take some searching. Actually anyone interested in getting Objectivism's history straight cares about these questions and welcomes efforts such as yours. I don't have the CDs. I hope you find them.

Some historical notes: The passages from Atlas Shrugged on psychological visibility that you quote in #3 came several years before Branden invoked the notion, so they can't be acknowledgements of his work. The idea actually comes from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, as Branden himself noted. The stolen concept likewise appeared in Atlas Shrugged before Branden wrote or lectured about it, and he points this out in his 1963 article. Barbara Branden seems to be the coiner of "psycho-epistemology". She said this either here or on RoR several years ago, and she treated the topic at length in her Efficient Thinking lectures at NBI in 1960, the year before Rand used it in For the New Intellectual and three years before NB's article.

Though I haven't listened to the video, I recall that Sowell, Gilder and other libertarians have noted India's long traditions of learning, enterprise and saving which have helped emigrants to do well all over the world, including the US. Friedman once remarked, well before the deregulation of recent decades, that India was on its way to becoming the only country in the world not benefiting from these traditions. Sowell (I think) notes that Indians came to South Africa as slaves and, as Coloureds, lived under halfway apartheid for most of the twentieth century but have prospered anyway; they are wealthier on the average than whites. This is interesting in light of Rand's habit of citing India as the paradigm of the destructive effects of mysticism.

To answer Merlin Jetton's question: I thought that Beck's proposal to invoke government to stop a move by private businesses and his intellectually slovenly conflation of government power with private economic activity were reprehensible, and they caused me to lose respect for him. Inevitably somebody will say that the big broadcasters and cable providers are part of the mixed economy too. That is a reason to call for less regulation, not more.

Also Kay Bailey Hutchinson in 1994. It was a disaster for the prosecution and for Ann Richardson, the governor who was behind it all. The failure of the case against Hutchinson was one of the main reasons Richardson was voted out that year in favor of Bush. If she hadn't been so crooked he might have ended up as nothing more than a guy who once ran for governor and lost.

Also historically ignorant. The early-twentieth-century Progressives were noisily inimical to individual rights and freedoms. Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" is the best source on this. To see how they expressed their enimty in racial collectivism, try "Wrong on Race" by Bartlett or "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" by Woodward. I can't help thinking that this is why contemporary welfare/regulatory statists quit calling themselves liberals.

And a pair of kneepads on the reverse side

I think of ARI's book giveaways as free samples, a familiar, self-interested and often effective form of marketing. You don't get buyers until people decide that the product is worth money to them.

I wish she could have played Dominique.

I haven't read the book. (Have you? Has anybody? One early notice predicted that Piketty would have the highest bought-to-read ratio of any author since Stephen Hawking.) I haven't followed the reviews in any detail, and I've only skimmed Reisman's. That said, I can't help noticing how quickly Piketty's media stardom came and went. After all that smoochy-faced initial coverage one would have figured that he and his book would stay in vogue for at least a year, but they faded within months.

The misquote in #380 and #384 (as vs. the accurate quote in #382) is bad grammar ("person" is singular, "themselves" plural) and graceless, anachronistic feminist newspeak that would have been a discredit to Rand if she'd written it. (Branden, in "The Psychology of Pleasure" observes that the point applies equally to a woman.)

I agree with Brant in #372 that Rand didn't believe deep down that we can't read each people's character from their artistic tastes. My reason for saying this is that her more classic and foundational writings on art show no hesitation about such judgements. Consider "Philosophy and Sense of Life". In the first paragraphs, talking about the truth contained in myths and allegories, she writes: "One of such allegories, which men find particularly terrifying, is the myth of a supernatural recorder from whom nothing can be hidden, who lists all of a man's deeds - the good and the evil, the noble and the vile - and who confronts a man with that record on judgement day. "That myth is true, not existentially but psychologically. The merciless recorder is the integrating mechanism of a man's subconscious; the record is his sense of life." - or the final sentences of "Art and Sense of Life", which ran in The Objectivist a month later: " When one learns to translate the meaning of an art work into objective terms, one discovers that nothing is as potent as art in exposing the essence of a man's character. An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it." Note also that in her novels she shows an unquestioning confidence that she can read people's character by looking at them. A biographical hunch on my part is that the breakup with Branden is what brought about her later, agnostic position. He strung her along for several years. If he could do this to even as sharp an observer as herself - the thinking may have gone - maybe we can't read each other so reliably after all.

Several sources tell the story that Rand was most flattered when von Mises called her "the most courageous man in America", so maybe she would be pleased to hear this, too.

Never heard of Peikoff being a musician. What instrument does he play?

We can infer Rand's opinion of herself as a novelist from the fact that she publicly endorsed Who is Ayn Rand? Branden's chapter on literature indicates a high opinion indeed, including "In Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand has created more than a great novel. By any rational, objective literary standard - from the standpoint of plot-structure, suspense, drama, imaginativeness, evocative and communicative use of language, originality, scope of theme and subject, psychological profundity and philosophical richness - Atlas Shrugged is the climax of the novel form, carrying that form to unprecedented heights of intellectual and artistic power."

Which line was that?

I've been a guide at two of the three Wright buildings in #27 (quoted in #46), so I have predictably more affection for them than most here. The post makes its point largely by selecting unflattering photos, like those no-makeup ambush shots of tv and movie stars we see in the supermarket tabs. Ennis was much altered for the worse in the building (after Wright had moved back to Wisconsin and left his son in charge). As drawn it was far more delicate and angled to fit the landscape without so many opressive right angles. The jarring contrast between natural dark-grey concrete and off-white. The Hollyhock photo dates, I suspect, from during or shortly after the 2000-2005 restoration, when the lawn was neglected (and the lawn is the really ugly part of the photo). The jarring two-tone color scheme juxtaposes the original color (grey-green, above the cornice) with the inauthentic sandstone pink of an earlier restoration. Imagine all the stucco in grey-green. More importantly, see these buildings inside if you get a chance. Finally, German is a warehouse. It should be secure and well-insulated and should look it. By those criteria it succeeds.