Charles R. Anderson

Thanks for the quote, Paul. Perhaps if I could always have been consistent in suspending my ideas and talked more to my daughters in this sort of dialog, one or more of them would be an Objectivist today. I have always thought myself pretty reasonable, but I seemed to them too passionately certain that Affirmative Action is evil discrimination, that minimum wage laws put poorly educated and young Americans out of work, that subsidies for corporations, farmers, and welfare receipients were wrong, etc. My daughters learned that some of these were right at school and were never able to accept that their teachers and friends were often wrong about such things. There was too much total passion in me for my ideas for them. It seems that that became the excuse to reject much of Objectivism. They developed the idea that Objectivism meant the passionate rejection of others, rather than that it meant the rejection of many of their ideas. This realization also played a role in my wanting to better understand tolerance, as I defined it in my comment above to Michael.

When I wrote this essay, I was still trying to formulate a definition of toleration or of tolerance for myself. I noted that many dictionary defiinitions were inadequate and some were outright contradictory. I have long felt uneasy about the definition of tolerance as a form of acceptance of people whose ideas we think are bad. It seems to me that while there are contexts in which we do put up with people having bad ideas, that that aspect should not name the essential and most important aspect of tolerance. I think my best definitions are those I came to develop finally in the essays called The Virtues of Benevolence and Tolerance and in Benevolence:People as Tolerance:Ideas. The shorter definition is then that tolerance is "the attitude that there is great value in the ideas developed by others and that to realize this value we should invest a considerable effort into rationally examining the ideas of others and fairly assessing their value." The consequence of this definition is that because we identify reason as our means of knowing reality and we recognize the facts that reality is complex, that our time and mental capability are both limited, and that others have devoted much time and effort to thinking and are willing to share their thoughts commonly at very reasonable cost with us, then only a fool would choose not to make the most of the many gifts others offer us. Our cost is simply to rationally assess and evaluate the ideas they have developed. We can commonly do this with much less of our time than it would have taken us to fully develop the same ideas on our own. The ideas of others are gifts given to us by others, which are of incalculable value. It is very irrational to deny this value in the aggregate in our relatively civilized present world. Of course, we must rationally reject the invalid ideas, but we do this in the context of appreciating the value of the many valid ideas we are given. It is also important to realize that a rational man is frequently inspired to develop a valid idea in response to an invalid idea. Sometimes, a choice is made of one of two choices that leads to the development of a wrong consequence. This development down the wrong pathway suggests that one go back and examine the consequences of making the other branching choice. In some cases, we really do benefit from the work the wrong choice maker did in demonstrating that he had chosen the wrong path. To illustrate this, consider the strong intellectual impact that the Soviet Union had upon the development of Ayn Rand's ideas down very different pathways. Or even consider the likelihood that when she considered Nietzsche's ideas, this may have caused her to chose a number of different paths. I encounter many such cases in my laboratory when solving materials problems. It can be very helpful to develop an idea to that point that it is shown to be wrong and find in the process that another branch point is revealed. On your observations on how people often become most angry when they feel that they have been beaten in the rational evaluation of ideas, I have seen this phenomena many, many times. I started to become very aware of it when I was in the 7th grade. As an undergraduate, it was very apparent when I had bull sessions with socialist anti-Vietnam War protestors at Brown. My Ph.D. thesis advisor, in many ways a man I admire, was sometimes terribly unable to admit being wrong. We would discuss an issue we disagreed on very reasonably until such time as he realized he was wrong, then he would very quickly blow-up. I always knew exactly when he understood that I was right! I would then quickly terminate the discussion and a day or two later he would do something really nice for me, but he would never, ever admit to being wrong. But he knew. He was just a more dramatic case than most people, but there are many others like this. Actually, most people are like this. A socialist almost never admits to being wrong. A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, or a Hindu will almost never admit to being wrong. It is a near universal truth that people even knowing that their core ideas cannot be validated by their arguments, will not admit to being wrong. Sad, but true. Fortunately, there are some areas of human endeavor in which admitting error is more acceptable.

Paul, I found the questions you have raised here very interesting. There are some aspects of your viewpoint that I might have phrased differently, but you are definitely onto an important issue. Even when you point out that operations of the two hemispheres are not entirely separated, it brings to mind the fact that these two approaches to learning and understanding reality are also not entirely separated. On the face of things, the formation of concepts and their manipulation by logic would appear to favor the strengths of those who are aural and reading learners, while the image manipulators would likely be those who learn and understand best with their hands on things. I have always found that a combination of the two works best for me, which seems an indirect way of suggesting that each path is a valid and useful one for understanding. I am inclined toward thinking that each approach will not infrequently construct models for the real world and manipulate those models and then return to the task of comparing them to reality. The model parts of the logical/conceptual manipulation approach (symbol seems ambiguous to me) begs to have its consequences checked against reality, primarily to check if the concepts were formed properly and if the logical manipulations were performed correctly. From this perspective, the set of concepts used is a model and must be constantly examined to see if the model does indeed successfully identify the properties of the entities of reality. The aim is that these concepts do this, but as a practical matter, many of our concepts, especially the more abstract ones, need to be treated as models. As for the manipulation of mental images as models, this is a bit more intuitive, but also in some cases it is also more directly a representation of reality. This can be both a strength and a weakness of this kind of thinking. To know when it is a strength and when it is carried too far, we often need to check it with the logical/conceptual approach to knowledge. I think that in some things this visual/image manipulation, when kept close to real entities and properties in form, is very powerful. When the images become too fanciful, they produce Gods and other such imaginary ideas. Many people will quite literally start turning even very abstract concepts into mental images. The good becomes God, being one example. As with many things, it can often be useful to have a second approach to solving a problem when one approach hits a snag. This is not to say that the logical/conceptual approach has to run into a brick wall, but in practice it sometimes will for most people sometimes. Sometimes the inspiration we get to solve the problem comes from the visual model manipulations we do, often buried more deeply in our minds than we are aware of. While I have said that higher level mental images can get us into trouble, it is also true that they can provide useful insights. They just need to be checked by other means very carefully. This at least is how I have introspectively analyzed what my mind does. I would very much welcome the perspective of others who have introspectively examined how their minds work. Of course, such knowledge as has been gained about this from scientific experiments would be interesting, but I know little about that. Thanks for starting this thought-provoking thread, Paul.

Michael, Our government claims to protect the weak while giving special interests subsidies and many advantages over less organized or weaker groups, but I do not see evidence that President Bush lied to us about Iraq. The CIA may have overestimated the weapons of mass destruction capability, but some of these weapons did exist. Saddam spirited them away to Syria with the help of the Russians and Syrians. He really was a threat to us. He was at war with us and he really did intend to renew and enhance his weapons programs when the economic embargo was lifted. He said he was at war with us and he acted on that by firing upon our planes. This has always been an act of war. It is also now clear that Saddam really was trying to collect uranium in African nations. It is also clear that he had relationships with a number of terrorists, offering some safe haven and some training as well. Saddam was a monster as well and the widespread rule of the Middle East by monsters was and is a major problem, causing very irrational religious views to have a fertile soil for acceptance by desperate people. The story you pointed to makes the valid point that the world's bullies must be stood up to. The socialists' cry that we were lied to is their wishful thinking, more than reality. The concern about oil was apparently more a general one for the stability of the Middle East than a desire to milk Iraq of its oil. There is no more oil coming out of Iraq now than there was under the economic embargo. If we are in Iraq to steal their oil, we are doing a terrible job. In fact, we should be removing more oil than we are, so there will be more jobs for Iraqis and more support for their government. The fact that the media is united in its claim that President Bush lied does not make it so. We need to look beyond the viewpoint and the agenda of this very untrustworthy group. Remember what they tell us about social security and universal government health care and judge who is likely to be more trustworthy, President Bush on defense issues or our media on most issues.

Michael wrote: Upon finally reading Barbara Branden's Passion of Ayn Rand, I have been very impressed by her writing quality and by her love of her subject. It constantly gives me the impression that it was a work of love for Ayn Rand, not one of hate, as it is too often misrepresented. She sees Ayn Rand as awesomely great, a passionate teacher, often wonderfully loving, but, realistically, also sometimes unable to perceive important aspects of her relationships with other people and sometimes impatient with others. If you love the fiction of Ayn Rand and her philosophy, you must be committed to making a realistic assessment of her personal life. To do less is to betray the philosophy, oneself, and Ayn Rand. It seems to me that Barbara tries very hard to live up to this purpose.

Paul, Thanks for your comment on 9 April. I am simply and profoundly pleased that you found something worth noting in my comments. Things are moving quickly here and it is hard to keep up!

Dennis, You need not debate me of course, but you stated that I was merely re-stating TOC and David Kelley's position. While my position may be very similar to David's, since we talked about similar issues often in the late 60s and early 70s, I did not actually read any more of the TOC piece than you quoted. My viewpoints were formed during the Vietnam War, while I was there, and upon returning to Case Western Reserve University to finish my Ph.D. in physics, where many called me a baby-killer because I had reported for induction and gone to Vietnam. Of course, they did not bother to find out if I ever actually killed any babies or not. Generally, killing civilians during a war probably does more to strengthen the resolve of a people to support their government, good, bad, or indifferent, than anything else you can do. This is not good war-making policy. Whenever reasonable, it is best to avoid it. This is done not to be altruistic, but to effectively achieve the purpose of a war. In the case of Germany and Japan, we had long post-war occupations, with many deaths also, but we finished the war purposes off by reforming the countries and successfully making them less belligerent. During the war, we almost certainly did kill more civilians than was useful in prosecuting the purposes of the war. Some of that was the result of the relatively crude weapons available, some of it was anger in response to attacks on civiians by the Germans and the Japanese. War costs lives. It always has. In the Civil War we had battles in which there were 50,000 dead in a day. In WWI there were days when the casualties numbered 500,000! In Iraq the dead are about 2,300 last I noticed. In NY and Washington and PA, they were nearly 3,000. These are historically not large numbers. They are not pleasant numbers at all, but the way to avoid them seems to fall into one of 2 categories: 1) Nuke um all! 2) Peace at all costs! Well, if we Nuke um all, most Americans will be too disgusted to support their own government and the rest of the world will be terrified and identify us as the Great Satan. If we opt for peace at all costs, many a petty dictator or totalitarian government will step forward to intimidate us and take our freedoms. Some may hope our slavery is full of peace and love, but historically we know it will be a nightmare of whippings and parents afraid of what their children might tell the authorities about them. It always seems so clean and neat to take one of the simple positions 1 or 2, but real life does not allow that. The decisions are always much harder, but one that has to be made by every generation is that they are willing to put their lives on the line for their freedom and to insure that free people are respected as capable of maintaining those freedoms. You must face down the bullies. There is no option. On the other hand, it is always more effective to do it firmly, but while showing as much respect for human lives as possible. After all, we value freedom because we value human life. It is a means to the end of living a happy life. Most people respond to that respect with respect on their own. In Iraq, this is seen in the increasing number of instances in which the Iraqis themselves are providing information on the insurgents. Another thing: In Vietnam I knew a few Vietnamese and I generally liked them. I had no desire to kill Vietnamese people, unless they were themselves trying to subject others to communism. Our troops in Iraq do not themselves seem to want to follow the kind of vicious killing tactics you seem to be advocating. They tell stories of wanting themselves to see the Iraqi people live better and freer lives. They hope they are contributing to this purpose. Some of this may be altuism on their part, but some is also that they meet people they like and some is simply because most Americans are rather benevolent. Still further, they are warriors and most of them understand why they are fighting and what they want to accomplish. I would not push to convince them that they must become malevolent. Standing armies of malevolent soldiers are very dangerous to those who hire them. Of course, when you can kill an actual terrorist, or an actual thug who gassed Kurds and slaughtered Shiites simply because they were not Sunnis and therefore did not deserve to live, or the planter of an IED on a roadway, do so. So, you will not respond to this, but you cannot expect that I was going to let you call me an altuist and not respond. After all, I have made it a lifetime practice to face down the bullies.

The kind of small-minded bickering we see so often is a short-cut to virtue. One sees it all the time among Christians, or at least I have. The concern is not with trying to achieve something for oneself, but merely to try to position oneself as somehow better than someone else. They call it "Holier than Thou." There is a name for this among Objectivists. Someone coined one of those Objectivist icon names for this....... Social Metaphysician? Yea, that's it. It's a childish game. It also doesn't work. If it worked, some morning the practitioner would wake up and say, "I have proven I am better than x, y, and z, so I need not prove this any more." In my experience, these people are never able to do this. They must daily prove that they are better than someone else in some respect they claim is important. Sometimes, this is by claiming they slice an onion better. Not important you say? Oh, it is for the terminally insecure under-achiever! They will even take other's writings out of context or twist the meaning of their words until they are unrecognizable to manufacture their superiority out of nothing. Now, that is really desperate.

Mikee, I agree with your observation as well as with David Kelley's. I have written of the phenomena you commented on also on several occasions. Barbara, I also have written about this strange fear of uncertainty, though I did not connect it with maturity. I thought it was simply rationality. As long as we have unanswered questions, we will have uncertainty. If we were to become All Knowing, we would be as cursed as God. If we really always knew what tomorrow will bring, then life would become the ultimate boredom. I do not think it would be bearable. Perhaps our errant Objectivists would say that we know all there is to know about philosophy, but we do not know the weather for tomorrow or at least for next week. I suppose that would be enough uncertainty to satisfy very small minds. I, for one, actually like the quest to answer more substantial questions. Besides, even if the answers were all known by Ayn Rand, which was not the case, it would still be my duty to learn them for myself and check them with my experience for validity. I wonder that some proclaimed Objectivists do not seem to want to take that task on themselves. So in the quest for certainty, which few of us would want to actually achieve, many proclaimed Objectivists feel most comfortable with a received dogma. Perhaps they should proscribe the reading of the works of Ayn Rand, as Pope Gregory the Great did the Bible, so that no one will come up with an independent interpretation. They need a priesthood with ordination. No, they seem already to have that. By the way, when the reading of the Bible was proscribed, people stopped reading or even learning to read, which was the real reason for the Dark Ages. It was the immediate result of Christian dogma and the need to maintain it. Will ARI's dogma lead them to make such a drastic, but logical, choice in the future?

In his mad quest for power, Pope Innocent III used the crusading fervor in Europe to lauch the Fourth Crusade, in which Constantinople was captured in 1204. He claimed the Lord left Peter the governance of the whole world, not just the Church. He then moved to gain control over all of the Kings of Europe. In southern France, however, the Catharists defied him, so he declared them allies of Satan. These Catharists, especially prevalent in Albigenses, were probably the most prosperous, educated, and industrious people of Europe at that time. Of course, prior to this Pope Gregory the Great had prohibited the laity from reading the scriptures, to prevent the people from misinterpreting them. The Catharists abstained from eating flesh or killing animals, they read the Bible themselves, condemned tithes, preached peace and nonresistance, aimed to return to an ideal of poverty and simplicity in principle, they refused to worship images, saints, angels, and the Virgin, did not believe the Trinity, the Incarnation, Resurrection and Ascension, denied the power of bells, crosses, and the bones of the saints, and denied the authority of the Pope. Clearly, these were really bad people! So Innocent III mounted a crusade against them in 1209. The immediate heretics, and anyone who lived in the same town, were killed man, woman, and child in the next 20 years. Before the end of the century, about 1 million were killed. Given the population of Europe then, this was a truly remarkable slaughter. Then recently Muslims in Afghanistan wished to use Sharia law to justify killing a man who had left the Muslim religion to become a Christian. This is certainly another good example of a religion most hating those who authorities beleive have gone astray. Compared to the Christian Church, ARI has accomplished an awful lot in only a few decades. The Christians were wracked with discension for hundreds of years, with Ecumenical Councils galore to vote on the official Christian Dogma. The Christianity of 500 AD was very different than that of 100AD. But here ARI has a received dogma already. They are way ahead of the game, or at least the Christians. But, like the Christians, they have a destiny of split off sects ahead of them. No doctrine will be adhered to by everyone. People are too independent minded for that to be in the future. Of course, TOC is already akin to the Protestant movement, in an anologous sort of way. Then there are those SOLO and Rebirth of Reason groups with a wide distribution of ideas in each. So, ARI determined their doctrine early, but they will have no luck in maintaining it as the belief of all Objectivists over time. Of course, there will likely be some who will prefer that doctrine going far into the future also. There are many Christian groups whose beliefs retain so little of the doctrines of the Christian Catholic Church of 500, that one hesitates to call them Christian at all. It is probably just a desire to fit into the umbrella of a Christian tradition in this country that causes such groups to call themselves Christian. If Objectivism ever does become the dominant philosophy of America, then such groups will most likely arise and call themselves Objectivist, whether ARI likes it or not.

Dennis, I understand that we should place a very high value on the lives of American soldiers, but we have to remember why their lives were put at risk in the first place. We are in a war with terrorists, who are frequently supported by a variety of Middle Eastern dictatorships or the political moral equivalent. The governments of these countries often terribly abuse their own people and they feed them misinformation constantly about the Western World and The United States. While such downtrodden and misinformed people cannot be protected very completely by us from the consequences of their ignorance and complicity in the actions of their governments, we can recognize that if the Middle East is to achieve a more rational manner of living, to become civilized, then we will want these downtrodden people to be receptive of the truth when it becomes more available to them. We will want them to demand more rational governments and then to contribute to the advance of their societies. If this cannot be achieved, then there was no reason to enter either Afganistan or Iraq. Given that this is the long-range purpose of the War on Terror, we can only lose by killing civilians unnecessarily. If some of our troops die to save the innocent or at least the simple-minded and uninformed, it is for the main reason we are there. The TOC quote you gave is entirely rational, given the purpose of the war. The most complete way to save the lives of American troops is to leave those areas where they are most in danger. We cannot do that in a way consistent with our need to take the war to the terrorists. The alternative is simply to wrack our own society with heinous security measures and still see the Sears Tower fall, bombs in NY subways, and the Golden Gate Bridge in ruins. We have to be aggressive, but we have to be aggressive with a view to our goals.

Jenna, As I read a book, I check all the facts the writer claims are true against my own knowledge. There may be some that I have no knowledge of, but generally there are enough that, if I do that, I can develop an assessment of the writer's judgment. When I do not have independent knowledge of his description of the facts, I may look up those facts elsewhere or I may just file them away to be checked against future reading. I also study the author's use of logic carefully. Many writers are clearly very irrational and unable to use logic correctly. I also look for evaluative assessments. For instance, the writer might say that Jones does not know what he is talking about because Jones thinks people should exercise self-responsibility or some such argument. This argument means nothing to me if it reveals a wrong viewpoint. I examine the author's assumptions and their plausibility or certainty. I look to see if he has made it clear that he has made an assumption. I am also very wary of the argument from authority in many forms. If he says that Smith, the foremost authority on anthropology, says that all societies exhibit an abhorrence for incest, then I am not impressed, unless I know the work of Smith directly. Of course, I may know his work and find it frequently dubious. I also check his conclusions against my lifetime of conclusions. If his disagree with mine, but still seem plausibly to be backed up by the evidence he has marshalled, I have to closely re-check how I had come to my earlier conclusions and I will want to recheck his facts and his logical arguments. Some of these techniques are hard to apply to a book such as PARC, where I have limited knowledge of the historical events and people and where so many authors may be lacking in detachment. But, many of these techniques could be applied to PARC. For instance, Valliant makes a great many assumptions and every time the assumption is that which favors Ayn Rand as a virtuous and innocent woman and all fault resides in someone else. There is a systematic bias operating here. He states something as a fact for one argument, but states something different for another. If I grant his facts for the sake of argument, he proceeds in many cases to make a fallacious argument. Or in other cases, he proves a point, but then greatly exaggerates its significance. He often presents his arguments in a manner that mixes up the order of events. He very frequently states an interpretation of an event or a statement, though other interpretations suggest themselves to me and I find that these competing interpretations require evaluation, which he does not give them. Valliant's book could easily be used as a companion book to David Kelley's textbook on logic. The student would be asked to identify the many errors in logic and the many suppositions of fact on each page as an exercise. The student would be very busy. Then, they could also be asked to evaluate the book as a form of populist rhetoric. So, have a field day with this book. Peikoff's Fact and Value is more subtle, but you should be able to identify his fallacious arguments also.

Dennis, I knew a number of Objectivists in the 1960s who thought that America would be taken over by Objectivism in their lifetime. I always thought that was unlikely. I thought that Objectivism is at least as different from the common philosophy of hybrid Christianity, pragmatism, Enlightenment ideas, and socialism in America as Christianity was from the other religions at the time of its origin. Christianity took 500 years even to settle on its dogma and about that long to become the dominant religion in Southern Europe. We have the advantage of more rapid and widespread communication, especially now with the Internet connection. Still, this process of changing a society takes time. It also required time for religion and for socialism to self-destruct and pass from history or at least to wilt to the point that many people would actively look for an alternative. When people are satisfied by their present worldview, they do not shop for a change! Both religion and socialism are losing ground, and they are losing it rapidly in historical terms. Unfortunately, historical terms can be long compared to one mans lifetime. Is it inevitable that Objectivism will one day triumph? No. But a good idea can have a lot of staying power. Take Aristotle as an example. He was all but forgotten and yet made a comeback when the Christian church was much more dominant than it is now. The Enlightenment followed. The setbacks of socialism in Russia and China offer hope. The Environmentalist movement is likely to be temporary before everyone figures out that man is less likely to destroy the world than is now predicted. More and more, science is revealing that people are not equal in capability, which is a blow to egalitarianism. The Muslims are so over the top that they are generally giving religion a bad name. The large, all-welcoming super churches of today, the only ones growing, have essentially no Christian doctrine that they have retained. They are virtually secular. Catholics rarely actually live by church dogma. They practice birth control and have abortions in large numbers. The Christian church is more and more an ideological shadow. It mostly functions as a social club. People need and want values, but they cannot find them. Objectivism has them and I expect they will eventually be found. Objectivists do need to stop being so determined to alienate non-Objectivists before they can be effective in selling their ideas, however. Certainly the schisms and the excommunications have hurt, but the Christians had both of those also. There is plenty of hope left. It just was not realistic to expect that such a change of philosophy was going to occur in 50 years. I do not think David Kelley thought that Objectivism would be dominant in 50 years either. He surely hoped it would do more than it has, but his orientation was always toward training future professors of philosophy These professors would teach two generations of college students and then one might have an Objectivist society. Maybe. I always thought that 100 years was optimistic. I now think that another 100 years is optimistic. People will have to get beyond thinking of Objectivism as a closed system. This will require the passing of Peikoff and Schwartz and others of Ayn Rand's legacy group at ARI. Then, Objectivists will have to establish a track record of further development of the philosophy and also one of people living happier lives while practicing it. Objectivists will have to prove benevolent and tolerant. They will have to actually engage others in the discussion of ideas. They will have to do what Ed Hudgins is trying to do with his much maligned op eds and more. It would also help if Objectivists would write more good novels.

I discussed the wonderful wealth of people's differences because I was in many ways on a crusade to try to get people to understand the value of tolerance, the need to express one's individuality, the fact that people have value to us in part because of their differences, and because of my interest in sexuality. However, I by no means wish to give the impression that no two people share many values or traits. There is, however, a sad tendency for people to suppress their differences in an effort to find common ground and acceptance by others. This is very often unhealthy. It is great to find values and interests you share with others. Fortunately, this is in some ways easier now and in some ways it is harder. Because of the relatively advanced state of our society, we have the time and can access many more activities. There are many more people around us than there were hundreds of years ago and communication is much better. So, each of us is likely to be more different than people were historically. We do not all get up before dawn and work in the fields until darkness falls. We are more differentiated by activities. We are also more differentiated by knowledge. These things make it harder for a man to fit in with his immediate neighbor, but he has more neighbors and via the Internet, he can develop many friendships at a distance. Of course, these friendships are based on some common interests and values, but they may not cover the complete breadth of a person's character, values, and interests. I made a point recently on a list that one of the wonders of capitalism is that it enables people, as different as they are, to find a way to interact without the use of force with people with whom they may share values ranging from many to very few. In any other form of society, one is required either to suppress those whose values differ from your own or be suppressed by them. This is not a great choice! On your comments on thinking affecting biochemistry as a limited effect, I fully agree with you. It is limited and this makes the underlying effects of our differing biochemistries (genes, testosterone presently and in the womb, endorphin production, the physical organization of our nervous system, etc.) very important. In all this, I am taking a very broad brush when I write of our biochemistry. There is then the development of the mind by our choices and some measure of feedback to our biochemistry. While our mind has a great deal of control over our body, so too does our body exercise some control of our minds. At the least, it places some bounds on what our minds can do with our bodies without paying too high an emotional toll. We are wonderfully complex systems and it is really mind-boggling from the scientific standpoint. Scientists like to simplify and control systems to get and evaluate scientific knowledge. The human being as a system for scientific study is incredibly tough. Yes, I agree that intolerance is often a result of a lack of self-esteem. It is probably more generally a result of feeling threatened. In a primitive and violent society, everyone constantly feels threatened. Under these conditions, many people will feel intolerance, perhaps even including people of fairly sound self-esteem. With intolerant Objectivists, we see many who suffer a lack of self-esteem, but I also think that some may simply be mistaken in thinking that they live in a very hostile world and are constantly under attack. Certainly, there are elements of hostility for any Objectivist and I am sure that there are plenty who really do feel a great sense of threat from this. Some of the threat is real and, I am inclined to think, some of it is exaggerated. Clearly, the school of thought that every false idea is a great threat to myself as a person, is a manifestation of a kind of fear. People's fear levels differ greatly on many things. As a kid, I loved to play hard-hitting tackle football, while many other kids were afraid of being hurt. Many guys in college got medical deferments or went abroad to escape the Vietnam draft, while I reported for induction. Some people can face physical danger, but they cannot stand up to peer pressure. A person of my acquaintance is so terrified for the fate of Israel that her opinions of tolerance, benevolence, Objectivism as an open system, TOC, and David Kelley have recently changed greatly in response to that fear. She perceives ARI as more pro-Israel, so all of the ARI dogma is suddenly correct. People can be driven by fears, even those who claim to be absolutely committed to rationality.

Thanks Phil, Sure. Of course there is a great need for essentializing and I am not at all opposed to it. There are certainly many principles of metallurgy for instance that are very helpful in developing new alloys or heat treatments and suggest what alloying elements one might wish to add. Understanding many of the common features of various alloys helps greatly in troubleshooting the alloy that went bad as well. But in the end, we have to remember that the details are important also. Your comment about the power of simplifying so one can understand and feel powerful is a good one. As an undergraduate, I had a physics professor who could not understand why I was interested in imperfect materials. He could understand an interest in the perfect lattice of silicon with its beauty of simplicity, but why would one be interested in defects and disorder? That was dirty engineering stuff, as he put it. My response was that that was what makes materials more individual and useful. Even the perfect lattice of Si has to be doped to make it useful. I laughed, thinking back on this conversation, when a Nobel Prize in Physics was given for work on amorphous materials to Philip W. Anderson, Sir Nevil F. Mott, and John Hasbrouck van Vleck in 1977. The flurry of work on chaos theory was like justification also. Then Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1991 for his work in explaining aspects of liquid crystals and polymers, which are more complex materials systems. Of course I do not lose sight of the fact that much of the reason we do science is for the sake of developing technology. Science is not just done for the sake of knowledge to be stored away and pulled out every now and then and smiled at. We do it to improve our lives by gaining greater control of our environment. Oops, that can't be very PC!

Hi Kat, I am glad you enjoyed my levity with god. Too bad he could not laugh at my comment also! You know, there being no humor in what you already expect and know. There are so many problems with the concept of a god, male or female or unsexed, as god may be. I am sorry to have glazed your pretty eyes on the metallurgy. But as a scientist it seems a good illustration of physical systems which are complex, but nonetheless simple compared to human beings. The point is to encourage people to look at the context of the world we are trying to gain knowledge about. It is in the face of this complexity that we can marvel at our own ability to use reason to learn so much, but also appreciate the incredible value of all the thought handed to us by those who preceded us and who now surround us. This value of others to our life as thinking allies makes it important that we have an initial bias to treat them benevolently and to treat their ideas with the respect of objectively evaluating them.

Paul, That was a very well done post. Thanks. tqk, Yes, there are many, many scientists who have difficulty being rational about the problem of mistakes. However, if they were commited to being right now, rather than pretending to be right when they were wrong, scientific progress would speed up a bit. The same is true with all other fields of study. Marsha, I do not know that I buy the idea that science did not exist before Aristotle and the philosophers of his time. Science has always been practiced as man figured out how to handle, make, and use fire. It was used as man figured out how to chip flint to make tools and weapons and how to identify other sources of flint that could be chipped like the previous flint was to make more tools. The components of science that consist of careful observation of reality and experimentation have been often neglected in the interest of the more theoretical approach that certainly speeded up progress since the Renaissance. This mathematical approach and formal prediction in an experiment with an observation of the result is a fine way of doing science, but in fact much science has always been done without all the formalism of this approach. If the caveman saw lightning strike a tree and upon nearing the tree felt warmth and then decided to take a burning branch from the tree and pile other wood around it and it burned bright and he could stand by it and still feel warm, then he made a number of scientific observations and hypotheses and he tested them. Now, cavemen may not have been very effective scientists and they certainly were amateurs, but they were doing science when they made these discoveries. It was very important science at that. It was the beginning of man learning that he could use his mind to control some aspects of his environment.

Another useful book for perspective on the issues of global warming is Meltdown by Patrick J. Michaels (CATO Institute, Washington, DC, 2004).

Michael, Thanks for your comments. I figure that there is a great deal of differential biochemistry going on in people from early in their lives. This unique personal biochemistry interacts with their life-long history of rational and irrational choices to give each individual a bewildering variety. I do not in any way wish to downplay the importance of the conscious choices people make or to suppose that one's consciousness is ineffective. However, our consciousness is tied to our unique body biochemistry in a very complex manner and we do not understand more than the most superficial aspects of it. Not only are we born with a unique biochemistry, but that biochemistry can change over a lifetime. Some things do tend to be constants, but others may change. For instance, puberty, childbirth, and menopause certainly can change a person's biochemistry and have a big impact upon their lives. Some people have more dominant senses of touch, some of smell, some of sight, some of hearing, and some of tongue movements. I suspect that some of the cause for this is individual differences in their biochemistry. By this, I simply mean all of the chemistry that makes a person work and live. In addition to the chemistry of the living human being as a background phenomenon due to the nature of human life, it is also clear that a person's thoughts actually have the power to change their biochemistry. The hard thinking person actually increases the number of certain biochemical structures in his brain, for instance. So now we really have a very complex system made individual at the moment of birth and developing along various complex pathways due to life events and due to one's thinking. I do not believe that all rational people would tend to become similar, which some people have tried to claim as an argument against rational behavior. They start different and they only become more different as they think, even as they think rationally. Some people simply want everyone else to be like them and for everyone else to love them. When others are not like them and do not love them, they can become very upset. These are people who cannot cope with the reality that just as they are a unique individual, so are other people. This desire that others be like them is one I have heard over and over among Objectivists. In many cases, they angrily reject the thought of finding any value in others who may have only slight disagreements with them. Every disagreement is of crisis proportions. They seek to gather together around a dogma that they can all agree on so they will not have to deal with differences. Differences in thought really scare them, so when they discover a difference of thought, they become unrealistically angry. This is fear and a lack of self-esteem acting up. This is not unique to certain Objectivists, however. There are also people who are racists due to their fears of differences. There are people who are homophobes due to their fears. There are many who gather around a church belief to clutch others who share their same viewpoint. There are many, many cults. There are people who simply feel great comfort in having many things agreed upon. They feel great comfort that marriage should have one and only one meaning. They feel great comfort in everyone following the latest fashions in dressing. They cling to corporate cultures, which often do not make sense. People are very commonly afraid of the differences between themselves and others. When those differences are not suppressed, they often dislike those who will not suppress them. On the other hand, they often have a great desire to be around others who will join them in suppressing their own differences. For instance, people differ very greatly in their sexuality, but they are usually pathetically commited to trying to appear to be normal in every way, or if different than normal, at least to be what everyone thinks they should be. That people are not so normal sexually is very clear on the Internet. This huge Internet sexual activity is all made possible by the belief that the individual is anonymous on the Internet or only dealing with those who share his sexual interests. On the Internet, they can explore their natural sexual variety with much less fear of being seen as different. In fact, they can seek out those few who are somewhat like them.

Thanks for your comments, Kat. It is just baffling to me that anyone could presume that philosophy and the principles to live life by could be more simple than understanding, say, metal alloys. It has taken many very bright people about 150 years of work to understand maybe most of what one needs to know about the engineering of metal alloys. I make even this statement with trepidation, since more is constantly being learned. Metal alloys are complex systems, yet they are trivial compared to human beings. This suggests that if the principles of alloying metals have taken so long to understand, then it is very unlikely that the principles for life by much more complex living systems can be laid out in one lifetime by one great thinker. No, that is just wishful thinking. It is the thinking of people immersed in a sea of dangling abstractions due to a determination to ignore the concrete examples of reality which would provide them a better context. They are missing the Big Picture. It is as though they want to be God and know it all. Well, they are not God. What is more, who in their right mind would want to be God? God is damned to eternal boredom -- He knows it all already.

Michael, When we talk specifically about Ayn Rand, we do run into her attempts to mislead people with her pretense that Frank was a heroic man. Well, actually in a way he was. He endured a lot. But, Ayn Rand was not a conservative. Her ideal people were clearly not willing to live within the romantic and sexual conventions of their times. Nonetheless, Ayn Rand found it difficult to fully assert herself in her private and public life as one of her heroes. She tried to live parts of her life privately. If she had done this without the public deception, I would not be in the least critical of her. If she had said that her love life was her business and no one else's, that would have been fine. Unfortunately, she told active lies, which is a moral disappointment. In her time, if she had told others that she had a lover, this would have been harder on Frank. Of course, it also would have been a distraction from her ideas, which is what she wanted the focus to be on. I think she was wise to hide her affair. She simply should have done so by not talking about her love life.

Ciro, Of course in many aspects of our lives in America, people are fairly encouraged to speak their minds. Because American business encourages workers to speak up more than many workers in many other countries are, it is much more productive. The encouragement for people to speak about their lack of religious belief is less, so many people who do not believe in god never say so. Among those who call themselves Objectivists, many seem to be williing only to have those ideas which are in vogue at ARI, for instance. Of course, there are also many who are fearless. But, even the more self-assured people do not contribute after a time where the rancor becomes such a distraction that they simply cannot make much progress in discussions toward greater understanding of the issue. Some forums simply become boring for this reason. I have read over 100 posts by Holly Valliant, for instance, and I was constantly disappointed that I could not find a rationally argued point. I was really impressed, however, with her passion for a certain dogmatic viewpoint. Apparently that is all some people want to see.

There is a time to cite other sources. Certainly if one is engaged in academia and publishing in a refereed journal, citing sources is expected and part of the game. While Ayn Rand should have offered more credit to those whose ideas she used, she was generally an integrater of others ideas and she borrowed what fit consistently into her system of thought. She was primarily interested in constructing a broad ranging framework for thought and communicating that to people who were not specialists in various fields. I cannot find her greatly at fault for not immersing herself or her readers in neuroscience within the context of what she was trying to accomplish. But, given that she has provided a largely useful framework of thought, it is a great thing for specialists to examine her statements in each field and either further buttress them or correct them. In the process, I am sure that much will be added to Objectivism and some mistakes will be corrected.

Jonathan, I really do not understand the role of the public in a marriage except in so far as they are involved in adjudicating a legal contract in which there is a dispute between the parties involved. The purpose and the goals of a marriage are those of the married, not the remainder of the culture. It is true that many in the remaining culture would like to have a say in others marriages, but it is not different in kind from telling me what kind of car I must buy, what color I must paint my house, and what the minimum wage is that I can work for, except of course that marriage is even more important and intimate. What sexual positions I and my partner prefer is our business, how many children we choose to have is our business, and whether one of us chooses to leave the other should one of us have an affair is still again our business. No one has the right to tell me how I must make these choices. They do have the right to make such choices for themselves. The social contract is a legal contract. There may be a religious agreement as well, or there might be other private vows, but neither of these are likely to invite general involvement. I simply do not know what the basis of your claim is. It is simply that it would not be seemly for you to make a pass at another man's wife? That it is not good etiquette? Well, this is true, but you seem to be making a stronger statement of involvement. Anna and I do not think we invited you to have such an involvement in our marriage. Now, I am not saying that you are a bad fellow, but we just did not have any reason to invite you to play this role. Sorry to make this personal, but in the end the abstract considerations do boil down to the concretes that result. I would be appalled to have or share the responsibility to make such decisions relevant to your marriage or that of others. Please do not put me in such a difficult position.

Ellen, I was already resigned to missing you for a while. I just noted that you were not out to the loop yet and excitedly came to look at your latest post. What a disappointment to find that you were only taking leave of us. Well, I hope you have a great time, or had a great time if you read this when you get back. Of course, the great unwashed masses must wonder how anyone would have fun at a physics conference!