Charles R. Anderson

Michael, The only way to encourage people to venture into new areas of thought is by creating a benevolent environment. Few people are willing to venture onto new ground if they believe any level of disagreement will be met with a pitiless attack. The environment in which any attempt to be innovative is guaranteed to be a painful event, encourages a mental timidity. When someone defies the barriers to thought, they are often met with derision for being so presumptuous. Often the fact that a genius preceded them is trotted out to prove that this is exactly what they are. Their argument, however, is ignored as an argument. Authority or simple derision are the answer. This creates a stultifying environment. The main reason why benevolence for others is so important is because it means that others at least start at a point of respect and value. When any society fosters this attitude of where the starting point is, then the trade of ideas and services is greatly facilitated. There need be no respect for evil and, indeed, if there is, then the good is undermined. But one does not leap to the assumption that someone is evil too readily or that their ideas are without value. If you do, then why would anyone want to share an idea with you or work for or with you? Why should they cast pearls and get nary a pork chop in return?

Paul, Thanks for the interest. I am looking forward to further discussions with you and to your comments.

Jody, I think your observation on fire is a very good one. There is a lot of science connected with the practical handling of fire. What is combustible, how do you handle fire to preserve it, how does it provide warmth and distribute that warmth, how do you avoid carbon monoxide poisioning in the cave, how do you use it to cook food, and how do you prevent uncontrolled fires, etc. Did the use of fire tend to push men out of caves into other dwellings designed to hold the warmth of the fire while supplying adequate oxygen and eliminating toxic fumes? Did people gather about in bigger groups because they had fire and exchange more ideas? Because people had a need to teach each other how to use fire, did they learn more about communicating. Did they find that sharing ideas was more useful? Did this sitting around a fire and sharing ideas start them on the road to discussing the earliest ideas of philosophy? Did they argue about the nature of fire and techniques for using it and then have to discuss how they knew anything about it? It sure appears to be a theoretician's delight to try to do philosophy without science and testing it against reality. The distance between a purely theoretical philosophy and arguing about how many angels are dancing on the head of a needle never seems very great to me. There are just too many ways to go wrong. So earlier, I said that science plays a crucial role in selecting the issues that philosophy will address. It also plays a critical role in testing a philosophy for its application to life as the philosophy develops. It helps to seal off mistaken pathways of thought. There is a tendency for the abstract-bound (the opposite of the concrete-bound) to oversimplify our past as well as our present. For instance, when thinking about benevolence and tolerance, you cannot underestimate the debt we owe to others for their prior and present contributions of thought. If we do value that little, then we can value the virtues of benevolence and tolerance little, but one should then also be willing to start life without fire and the wheel and face the trials of developing an understanding of both alone.

Marsha, Wow, I try to do some taxes and lab work and next thing I know I am a dozen comments behind on the Science thread! Thanks for joining me in the laugh. It really only seems funny to those of us who still think about reality, rather than just the theory of a dogma, that science and philosophy have a substantial working relationship. It probably also means that one has to have a sufficient self-esteem to be able to cope with knowing that you do not know all you need to know. Some people simply cannot live with uncertainty, so they pretend they have none. Somehow it does not seem frightening to me. It is just a consequence of living in a very richly complicated universe and leaves so many interesting quests for us. There are people who feel very nervous walking at night, even in areas with no crime. I have always thought that it was both peaceful and often has its own beauty. There are simply different proclivities for fear and different capabilities for handling the uncertainty that comes with a lowered visibility. Similarly, some people have to have a dogma that answers all questions. Strangely enough, they often know that the questions are not all answered and yet they pretend they are. How does that help? This is something I do not understand. By the way, your picture is very elegant and becoming.

Paul, Basically, it sounds as though we each have respect for the individuality of others and the complex interplay between individuals, their environment, and their history.

Paul, Thanks for your support! Having a philosophy with good, sound fundamental principles does not assure us that the understanding of our world will be simple. Our world is rich in complexity and full of nuance. We as individuals are exceedingly complex. An Objectivist must be determined to use reason to try to understand this rich complexity of reality and must not deny it. An Objectivist, above those of other philosophies, should not only be able to recognize the complexity of each person and their unique individuality, but they should welcome it. Unfortunately, there is a tendency on the part of many to look for intellectual short-cuts. There is a large school of Objectivists for whom the model of a person is at least too nearly spherical. If you mean essentially this when you talk of relative perspective, then we agree. I tend not to use the word relative in this context because of other connotations it carries with it. I have no desire to diminish the importance of understanding reality, I simply want to be responsible in my effort to understand it and realize that I cannot do this if I underestimate its complexity. I for one really enjoy its rich complexity.

Kevin, First, human relationships are so complex that I certainly do not think that science has or likely will reduce them to quantifiable measures which will allow us to easily assess their healthiness, except in the extreme cases of really good vs. really bad, maybe. Of course, comfort has its good points. I have never chosen to sleep on a bed of nails. Of course, there are many other aspects of mature marriages that are important. Among these are a really close friendship and a very close partnering, along with, usually, an on-going sexual relationship. I for one could not live happily without the sexual relationship. In all of these aspects, we are constantly still learning about each other. In fact, this is not only because we are complex to begin with, but it is also because we are both still developing as people. I have four sisters. I do not know any of them so well that they would not be cause for myriad discoveries about their nature and thoughts. At the end of four years of marriage, I had to have known my wife as well or better than I know any of my sisters. Each of my sisters is a relatively rational and productive person. Each is a pretty good person. I would not choose to have a romantic relationship with any of them, but they are certainly more worthy of love than the vast majority of women I have known. So, introspectively, I actually think that I am lucky to have found someone to love who is better for me than any of them would have been. So, it is not obvious to me that absolutely anyone with absolutely any wonderful sister would be unhealthy in loving her in a sexual manner and making her his life-partner. Now, I will really never have to worry about holding a political office. An atheist who is not revolted by thoughts of incest will never have such a problem!

These comments are primarily made as my thoughts about what Jonathan says about marriage above. Two people may take a civil contract out with a local government, which has many legal consequences. There are consequences with respect to sharing property, the raising of children, and roles to be played when one or the other is ill, among other consequences. Usually, people who marry intend to maintain a romantic relationship only with one another and the vows they make at a ceremony may state this. Certainly if one party has an outside affair, this is grounds for divorce if the other party wishes to make it so. However, the state does not itself run about checking up on each party to see if either has had an affair and then nullify the marriage in the name of the citizens of that government. We might talk of the sanctity of a marriage, but that is not provided by the legal contract. It is provided by the willing agreement of the marrying parties. They may do this in a church, as most people do. They may simply do this in their very private conversations. Especially if they do this as two independent and consenting adults, they are free to change the nature of their concept of their marriage, providing that both parties agree to do so. This is their business. It is not the business of every busy body who thinks he or she is qualified to dictate the nature of a relationship as complex and individual as a marriage. Your role is just that of a citizen and comes into play only when the married couple come into a state of legal disagreement. A failure to understand this is one of the reasons for the fury about same-sex marriages. People entangle their own religious views with the legal contract of marriage. It would be helpful if this term marriage were never used for the legal contract. That contract should be called what it is for everyone: civil union.

Philip Coates wrote: I grant that I have lumped in Ayn Rand's ideas on pyschology her with her strictly philosophical ideas. But I also do not think that you can entirely separate out the missing components of philosophy that apply to these issues. Furthermore, she did not adequately discuss such ideas as benevolence and tolerance on a philosophical level. When I say these things, I do not think that I am being critical of Ayn Rand. She did enough. She did far more than anyone can expect of anyone. But, I fundamentally disagree that Objectivism can be both a philosophy for living life and a closed system. That idea is absurd.

Preface In essays 4 and 5 of this series, I used the term tolerance in a manner close to that used by David Kelley in The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand - Truth and Toleration in Objectivism. At that time, I wrote of three forms that tolerance took: epistemological tolerance, tolerance of individuality, and political tolerance. Now, I would maintain that tolerance of individuality and political tolerance might be considered to be subsumed by the larger concept of benevolence. Some Objectivists seem to think that they fall under Justice and indeed, they do in part. I believe they fall completely under benevolence, however. As you should begin to see in these essays, I believe that benevolence and tolerance play a key role in one's being able to derive value from interactions with other people. In a society so bad that we are not justified in extending considerable benevolence to unknown or insufficiently known people and holding a tolerant view of ideas until we have carefully examined them, we should become hermits and retire from the society. If our review of the entire value of our society to us causes us to conclude that we are better off as a member of that society, then we should also be committed to regarding others with initial benevolence and their ideas with initial tolerance. As I will be using the term tolerance in this 6th essay and in the 7th essay, I am using it to refer to epistemological tolerance only. This is the most fundamentally important meaning of tolerance to my mind. In a real society the other two meanings are also very important. I am not convinced that we have to use the term tolerance to cover them however. We might be better off separating them out from the issues related to examining and evaluating ideas. It might be a more objectively defined set of concepts if we had separate clear words and concepts for each of these three distinctive ideas. If we did, the discussions among Objectivists in recent times might be less muddled. There is another problem with the discussions of tolerance and benevolence among those who call themselves Objectivists. Many Objectivists view society as primarily a threat and feel that they must constantly refuse the Sanction of the Victim. They are frankly obsessed by this. They refuse to understand that we live in a largely benevolent society which blesses us with a wealth of ideas which we have only to evaluate for ourselves. This is much easier than having to have formulated them entirely on our own. The thinking people who gave us these many gifts, some of them less than perfect and some seriously flawed, set the context which elevates benevolence and tolerance as virtues for us in our lives. While we must sometimes look not to provide the Sanction of the Victim in our lives, before we do that, we should view others in society with benevolence and their ideas with tolerance. Then we can objectively evaluate both the idea and the holder of the idea. If the idea is wrong, we should address that. If the person is massively evil, we must address that. Before we do either, however, we must make an objective evaluation as rational human beings while holding a large context of life in our society in mind. The present essay was posted in my blog Reasoned Thoughts on 24 February 2006. I have corrected two typographical errors from that original post. The Virtues of Benevolence and Tolerance In the context of the times and the society in which I live, benevolence and tolerance are important and intertwined virtues. As I have pointed out earlier, in a different society and in a different time, these virtues would be less important and might, if broadly applied, insure my death and that of those I love. In other words, in a violent and capricious society, they might simply constitute an unwise trust in unknown people and in unknown ideas. However, in America today and in a number of other areas of today's world, to adopt a malevolent view of others and to be intolerant of new and differing ideas, is to cut oneself off from the benefits of trade and friendships with others and will isolate oneself from knowledge to be gained by examining their ideas with fairness and thoroughness. To the extent that others, though personally unknown or little known to us, might reasonably be assessed as likely to be able to deliver values to us in the context of our time and our society, the rational man will approach such strangers with an assumption that their persons are of value as an enhancement to our own lives. This means that we have a benevolent assessment of our fellow man preceding our opportunity to evaluate them morally upon getting to know them. Without such a benevolent approach, it will in fact be much more difficult to get to know them, since they will reasonably be loath to entertain our company and unwilling to confide their thoughts to us. A benevolent approach to others is often a necessary prelude to our being able to make a rational assessment of someone previously unknown to us. If we are to benefit from the existence of this person, whether through commercial trade, an exchange or simply a gleaning of their knowledge and experiences, or the development of a great friendship, we must take the risk of first assuming the likelihood that we will find some value in them. It would not be reasonable to invest our time in getting to know another, if we thought before we knew them that we would find no value in them. The result of getting to know someone might be that we evaluate them as not a particularly rational person, but we might still have gained something of reasonable value for our effort. We might have learned something new that we would have been unlikely to have learned otherwise. But having learned this, we realize it is time to move on and invest any future time into getting to know someone else. We might realize that we have encountered a monster and devote some effort to thwarting their monstrous activities. On the other hand, we might find the love of our lives or develop a wonderful, lifelong friendship. Benevolence does not substitute for a rational judgment of others. It precedes that assessment and enables it. Toleration is a parallel to benevolence. As benevolence is to the unexamined person, so is tolerance to the unexamined idea. This concept is a bit more abstract and it is therefore a bit more difficult to grasp. Furthermore, as I have earlier noted in other essays, English dictionary definitions are inadequate and sometimes even self-contradictory for this word. Whereas benevolence enables us to know and evaluate other people and makes it possible for us to ultimately enjoy values created by other people, toleration enables us to know and evaluate the ideas of others and makes it ultimately possible for us to find such values as those ideas may have. Just as we ultimately assess the value of the people we encounter and invest the time to get to know, we also evaluate the ideas we encounter upon taking the time to understand and critically assess them. We will encounter many good ideas and many bad ideas. Toleration does not in any way require us to be kind to an evil or reality-denying idea. Toleration does depend upon an overall assessment that ideas are important, that many other people have spent a great deal of time and effort developing ideas, that some of the ideas they have developed are either right or will teach us that this line of thought leads to a deadend, and that examining the ideas of others will allow us to understand more than if we tried to develop every thought entirely on our own. Toleration 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. Tolerance is a virtue since we recognize that ideas are important, that valuable resources are required for their development, that many valuable ideas have been developed by others, and that a thorough understanding of our reality is not realistic in our own finite lifetime without reference to the many valuable ideas that others have developed. Tolerance offers us a path to gather up such valuable thoughts as others have had. Of course, randomly adopting other people's ideas would be foolish. Many irrational ideas have been developed, but without tolerance we will never be able to rationally identify the good ideas and differentiate them from the bad ideas. Without toleration, even the greatest genius will encounter many a brick wall he can only batter his head against, though someone else has climbed over it, burrowed under it, or outflanked it. Toleration does not require us to accept the validity of bad ideas. It does not require us to refrain from a constructive criticism of an idea found wanting. It does not necessitate backing down from evil. It simply enables a rational assessment of ideas. Many people who read the works of Ayn Rand, whose ideas are developments along directions substantially set by Aristotle and Enlightenment thinkers in many cases, and are yet very different from most of the ideas accepted by scholars at many of our traditionally accepted best universities, had to initially approach her ideas with a healthy sense of toleration. Having done so, they became convinced that Objectivism was the philosophy they should adopt and that they should invest much of their future efforts to further develop it. Some Objectivists thought they were Christians when they first encountered her works. Some were at least moderate socialists. Many had simply never thought much about some aspect or other of philosophy. They may not have thought about concept formation, about the mind-body dichotomy, about what their ultimate value was, or about the moral basis of Capitalism. But they had enough toleration for new ideas to read her work and to evaluate it. They may have learned a great deal in the process about how to evaluate an idea. Before they adopted many or almost all of her ideas, they most likely thought that ideas were important and that they might learn something by fairly examining the ideas of Ayn Rand. Of course, if they simply adopted her ideas without critically examining them in light of their own experiences in the world and using their best effort to evaluate them rationally, they are simply dogmatists and they are not really Objectivists. Because benevolence allows us to maximize the benefits of interactions with other good people and because most of the value of people is the result of their having good ideas, benevolence and toleration are closely tied together. If the society one lives in is good enough that benevolence is a major virtue, then it is good enough that tolerance is a major virtue. Each attains its status as a major virtue because approaching people and ideas with such a principled attitude enables one to acquire the greatest value from others and from their ideas. Neither should be held as a virtue simply as wishful thinking. How great a virtue each is is dependent upon how good the people around us are and how good their ideas are. But, if we did live in a world in which few people were of value to us and in which few of their ideas were of value, then we probably should become hermits. In America today, that would be a very sad choice, because many people, while not at all perfect, do offer us a very great value by virtue of how they live their lives and by virtue of the ideas they develop and contribute to us with little more effort on our part but that we examine them carefully. In historical terms, we live in a wonderful time with many good people and a proliferation of ideas, many of which have and continue to greatly enhance our understanding of our universe. This is not the time to be stingy with benevolence and toleration!

Michael, I fully agree that tolerance of people has a context that needs to be considered. Some of the later essays in this series do consider context in some of its important aspects. I will point out that the nature of the society in which one lives is a factor in determining how benevolent and how tolerant one should be, for instance. Indeed, much of my reason for writing these essays was to set the context. The discussions prevalent among those who claim to be Objectivists and are associated with ARI commonly indicate a severe loss of context on their part. They think that tolerance is the acceptance of bad ideas and bad people. I maintain that this is not the case. I try to get them to look at the big picture of what tolerance and benevolence do for us in terms of improving our lives. Their idea is apparently that we live in a very bad society and that any bad idea is such a threat to us, that we must immediately crush it (maybe even before we know it to be a bad idea) and the person who made it. For them, tolerance is a floating concept. On the other hand, they are constantly trying to assert that they offer no Sanction of the Victim. The difference between them and me is clear. They are victims, primarily, while I am not primarily a victim. I understand that I am the net beneficiary of many wonderful gifts of knowledge and intelligent services by virtue of living in this society. I will also point out that constantly thinking of yourself as a victim is very unhealthy. We really have a strong need as humans to believe that we have some real control over the management of our lives. It is not possible to feel this when one is a victim or thinks this is the primary way to characterize one's relationship with others.

When I made my last comments in response to Marsha's comment on Peikoff's idea that philosophy deals with what everyone knows and it provides understanding of science, while science provides no understanding of philosophy, I was in a great hurry to leave. I will elaborate a bit now. Because philosophy has a purpose of providing us cognitive tools and principles for living our lives, the very questions that philosophy needs to answer are dependent upon the science of living things and the science of the environment in which they must live. Many philosophic issues could be discussed fairly reasonably based on the level of science known to the ancient Greeks, but some certainly could not be. Examples of how science should affect our handling of ethical issues are certainly to be easily found in our increased knowledge of the science of biochemistry and its effects upon brain function. This was not known to the Greeks. We can now say that some behaviours not conducive to the health of a person are not due to an ethical failing of the person, for instance. Peikoff has a major problem which requires that any new knowledge found by science will not have any impact upon philosophy. He maintains that Objectivism is both a philosophy for living life and it is a closed system. If both are true, then there must not be any impact of science upon philosophy, most especially none with regard to determining what issues philosophy needs to consider in order to serve its purpose of giving us cognitive tools and general principles for living our lives. Of course, in addition, his stance allows him to be ignorant of science and yet maiintain that he is doing his job as a philosopher well. Furthermore, Ayn Rand always said she was not a scientist, so Peikoff can only maintain that Objectivism is a complete system of philosophy if this fact is unimportant. It is mind-boggling how many problems the idea that Objectivism is both a philosophy for living and a closed system causes! It sure is an awkward situation Peikoff and his followers are in. No wonder they are always angry.

I think there has long been a tendency for Objectivists to think that romantic relationships were primarily about identifying the person of the opposite sex with the most Objectivist virtues. This was brought up by Barbara Branden on the Psychology of Romantic Love thread in the Branden Corner area. But in addition to this, there has been a tendency to assume that one's proper romantic partner is chosen exclusively by conscious choices. There has been little regard for the individuality of sexuality in people due to the complex interplay of their unique biochemistry, of their experiences, and of many years of preceding thought patterns. What has been regarded as healthy sexuality and healthy romantic interest has been very narrowly defined in an excessively rationalistic way. Real people are not so simple as these perfectly spherical cow models of many Objectivists. This is not to say that Objectivist ideas on romantic love are without merit. They have merit, but as a part of a much larger and more complex picture. Much of Kevin Haggerty's comment above makes good sense to me, but I have a couple of reservations on it. He said: He correctly identifies a factor in many adult relationships and romantic love in particular which is of great importance. Generally people in romantic love go through a period of very heightened interest in one another which is based on this factor. In time, this factor commonly decreases in strength and many relationships fail when that happens. In good relationships, this factor may often have given two lovers the needed time to develop other important aspects of their close and intimate relationship. These other factors then become the primary reason for the ongoing love of these two people. So, is it not possible that there might exist, if not adult romantic relationships, then adult sexual relationships between siblings in which the kind of other factors of intimacy and shared interests have leaped past the initial need for the kind of adult romance in its early stages that Kevin Haggerty is talking about? In other words, siblings might possibly skip this phase of a relationship and enter into the phase that largely replaces it in many long-term adult relationships. Then one's evaluation of the relationship should be based on those factors, which we cannot do in a general and across the board manner. The desire to make the leap between two initially different and substantially unknown people certainly is a factor that causes almost everyone to choose a non-incestuous relationship. However, I cannot agree with Kevin on the following either: My reasons above address part of my disagreement. In addition, I do not think it is a matter of instinct. It is mostly a reasonably conscious desire for the adventure of romance that Kevin properly pointed at in the above quote.

Preface This 4th essay was posted on 19 March 2005 at my blog, Reasoned Thoughts. I have made no changes here. It is the first essay primarily on toleration and its critical role in a society of thinking men. In this essay, I use the concept of toleration as David Kelley did in The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism. In a later essay, I suggest that it might be beneficial, given the tendency of some so-called Objectivists to rationalize tolerance into an act of the sanction of evil, to reserve what I call epistemological tolerance within the realm of a refined concept of tolerance. The tolerance of individuality and political tolerance might then be thought of as aspects of benevolence. At this date, I have mixed thoughts about the possibility of getting people to accept such a change of definition and about why one should bother in the face of such unrealistic arguments. A note on the title: In a civilized society, rational men will exercise a high level of tolerance for others. I am not implying that a rational man must be tolerant of a massively irrational and dangerous person. However, in a civilized society, the majority of men are sufficiently rational and contribute enough of value to us, that we should be tolerant of them in recognition of the value they represent for us in our lives. On the other hand, when civilization breaks down, as it did in Communist China under Mao, in the USSR under Lenin and Stalin, and in Germany under Hitler, then very large numbers of men will not earn our tolerance. Rational Men Must be Tolerant of Others There are at least three major reasons why a rational man must practice tolerance with other human beings. These are: Tolerance makes it possible to learn from the efforts of other people. Without tolerance, others are not encouraged to put as much effort into thinking, since the fruit of their labor is too often viewed as evil. It becomes less risky not to think about anything prohibited and if they have thought about it, they had best not share the thought. Without tolerance one lives in the Dark Ages in Europe or the Middle East of the present. Tolerance is essential if we do not all wish to enter the world and spend our lives reinventing the wheel. Tolerance is also the great tool that makes it possible for us to challenge our own ideas with those of others. This makes it easier for us to identify our own errors of thought and correct them. Tolerance makes it possible for a group of thinkers to tackle a tough problem and take advantage of each person's different experience, interests, and thinking abilities to understand the whole of it, when each individual could only contribute a part of that understanding. I will call this epistemological tolerance. Individuals are very complex and highly differentiated. We are different biochemically and structurally. We have different experiences. We think in different ways and have a history of myriad unique choices behind us. We have different values. These differences add immensely to the richness of our experience with other people. Similarly, they make each of us a unique experience to others. Some of the value represented by each individual is precisely found in the uniqueness of each of us. As gold is more valuable than iron because it is more rare, each individual has more value because each is unique. But, of course, not all of our differences from one another are valued by others. Some of those differences may be viewed with mistrust, some with disdain, and some with repulsion. When a rational man practices tolerance with respect to the properties and values of others, he does not sign on to vouch for the value of each property or the morality of all of their choices. This form of tolerance recognizes the fact of reality that people are individuals. It recognizes that there is commonly much that is sufficiently good in the differences we find in others that we will generally profit in our interactions with them. I will call this the tolerance of individuality. Throughout the history of man, the political entities that have controlled men around the world have established various balancings of dogma versus individual initiatives in thought. They have also frequently sought to direct what values a man may seek and achieve. They have often favored men of one race, ethnic group, religion, cast, tribe, clan, or profession over others. In Europe, the Hundred Year's War, largely between Catholics and Protestants, caused untold misery until finally Europe realized a more live and let live philosophy held benefits for civilization. In a capitalist republic, the government does not favor one person over another for these reasons. In fact, a capitalist republic finds value in the differences among its people, since the many differences in interests and abilities allow the society the advantages of many specializations and open the door to a wealth of trading among its citizens. It is also recognized that when one group suppresses another group or any individual, the fighting and the discord are distractions at best and very often fatal to the continuance of either the government or the entire society. This form of tolerance is political tolerance. Each of these forms of tolerance are related to one another. They are each important to us as thinking individuals. Since Objectivists are thinking individuals, they should be foremost among those proclaiming toleration as a great benefit to each of us and to the societies in which we live. Objectivists are also a minority, who are not infrequently viewed as heretics. They are dependent upon others exercising the virtue of tolerance toward them. Taken together, the forms of tolerance allow us to develop and function fully as individuals. They allow us to trade ideas and values that raise the level of our civilization to much greater heights than is possible for a society or group of intolerant individuals. Dogma and rigid social custom are the enemies of tolerance. Rational thought directed at understanding reality and the celebration of the productive individual are the product of toleration. Toleration allows us to experiment with ideas and test them out. It offers us a rich complexity of theories and choices, while aiding us in our efforts to evaluate those theories and choices. It allows each man to draw on the individual insights of others. It is a major virtue whenever two or more individuals live and work together. There are dogmatic Objectivists (a contradiction in terms actually) who need very badly to understand these aspects of reality. Because reason is the individual's means of surviving and promoting his life, that which promotes reason is virtuous. Rationality is the most fundamental virtue. Tolerance is a major virtue because it recognizes that every other individual has the right of their own attempt to use reason, just as I have that right. Tolerance recognizes that it is the individual mind that must of its own volition choose to focus upon the creation of concepts and the use of principles to understand reality in all of its complexity. It is to be expected that individuals, even when highly committed to rational thought, will independently arrive at somewhat differing understandings of our complex existence. Tolerance recognizes individuality and allows us to take advantage of it to gain much greater insight of reality by evaluating the ideas generated by other creative and rational minds. What we gain in value makes us much more productive and much less primitive. We gain the advantage of living in a great civilization, provided we can also provide our society with a healthy respect for the rights of the individual. The concept of these rights and their exercise again requires us individually to be committed to tolerance. Among Objectivists, David Kelley has been the most effective spokesman for the importance of toleration. He has been especially concerned with toleration as a means to increase our knowledge. He has also recognized the virtue of independence in each individual. I highly recommend his book The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism to anyone interested in how people can work together to greatly improve their understanding of any subject they may have a common interest in. While he especially addresses issues of Objectivism, there is a great deal to think about and use from this book even for a small group of collaborators in a laboratory or in a factory. It is really about being more productive in thought and action than it is possible for a single individual to be acting alone. As I read this book, I kept thinking that it was a marvelously organized and thought out explanation of many principles that I had found essential to the maximization of productive output in the many groups of scientific and engineering collaborators that I had had through the years. In those groups, I had long worked hard to set such an atmosphere of tolerance in place. As this atmosphere grew, each such group became more productive. I tried to cultivate an atmosphere in which we maintained high standards for our output, but recognized that errors would be made as we sought solutions to the technical problems on which we worked, especially when we tried our hardest to be creative. Working together, we could makes leaps forward by taking advantage of our differing talents and help to correct each other's errors in a constructive way. In fact, we often learned from our errors. When we became comfortable that making an error was not likely to be viewed as evil or a sign of incompetence, ideas poured forth and our rate of solving difficult technical problems increased. It is surprising how often an idea with an error either contains a partial advance or somehow suggests the correct answer. Sometimes the wrong idea led to a test or experiment which proved it a dead end. Yet, that test provided us a clue to the right path to the answer to our problem. The idea that an error is evil is very wrongheaded. In fact, in certain contexts, making an error may actually be considered good. One does not make errors when not thinking. An error is made when one is thinking. Provided that one goes on to thoroughly evaluate the idea and test its validity rationally, the error is not evil and it may be the spur to the final correct identification of reality. In that context, it may be argued that the error served a good function. In that context, we can and should be less afraid of errors. They beat the alternative of stultification hands down.

Preface This is the third essay I am posting from my blog, Reasoned Thoughts. This essay was an important step in my elaborating my thoughts on the wealth of individuality in human beings, even before we consider their thinking patterns and much more so after we consider that. This bears strongly on the value that other people give us in their role as thinkers and simply by enriching our lives with their differing capabilities. It is also an important factor in understanding the sexuality of human beings, which is a topic I will keep on my blog and not import here. This essay was posted on 19 March 2005. There are no changes. The Individuality of a Thinking Human Being Of course, every human being is very distinguishable from anyone else. But those who think deeply and over sustained periods of time, both understand many more things and make many more judgments and choices. This increases their complexity immensely over that which they would have simply as the product of genetic code or as a result of the interaction of their genetic code with their environment to produce a biochemical system of great complexity. Even this baseline biochemical complexity is huge compared to that of engineering materials whose complexity I discussed in a previous essay. The body itself is a composite material, not with 2 or 6 chemicals in the mix as in an engineering material, but with tens of thousands of chemicals in the mix. In itself, this is nothing to make light of. Nonetheless, it is the operation of our mind that raises the level of complexity and of individuality of each thinking person to mind-boggling heights. Those of us who think are convolutions of convolutions of ideas and emotions in which the complexity grows exponentially. The more you think, the larger the time constant. Before thinking more about the effects of thinking upon one's richness of properties, I do not want to make light of the differences that exist in our complex biochemistries. We come into the world with many differences. We generally look different. Babies immediately have different temperaments from one another. My first daughter was impatient and demanding from at least her 2nd day of life, while my second daughter was laid back and quiet from her 2nd day of life. Those character differences have not changed over the course of about 20 years. We know that some babies develop allergies to certain foods, while others do not. Some people may die from eating nuts or fish, while most of us are fine. Some people are cured by a medicine, while someone else is killed by it. Some people survive yellow fever, while others do not. Some people have the cycle cell anemia adaptation to malaria, while most do not. Some people have a great sense of smell, while others do not. Some people feel tickled easily, some do not. Some people learn best visually, some learn best aurally. Some people can cut through the complexity of much detail and see what is essential to solve a very complex problem. Others are faster than they are at solving relatively simple and well-formed problems, but they cannot solve the creative problems that require them to isolate the essentials from a complex situation. Of course, some people can leap 38 inches off the ground, while others cannot. Some are quick sprinters, some are better in marathons. Some people are incredibly flexible, while others are stiff. Some have great rhythm and others are beat-impaired. Some enjoy the complexity of a great symphony, while others enjoy a screamer with a strong beat in the foreground. Some are more the slave of pheromones than are others. There are those only attracted to the opposite sex, those attracted only to members of the same sex, and some who are attracted to members of both sexes. Some are pessimists and some are optimists. Much of this differentiation is likely to be due to the wide ranging biochemical structures of each individual's body. While the music we like is also a function of our conscious choices, it may well be partially a function of our biochemistries as well. These biochemical differences are themselves important. By taking advantage of them, we can assemble teams of incredible athletes for football or swimming. We can figure that no matter how bad the epidemic, some part of the population will survive. Our differences may make one person better suited to be a soldier than another, one a better scientist, another a better farmer, another a better actor, et cetera. Of course, one may be better at any of these jobs with thought, but some require different temperaments than others, some quick thinking, and some deeper thinking with plenty of time. Some jobs are inherently aural, some inherently visual. Some suite a quiet person, some require someone very outgoing. Our differences rooted in our distinct biochemistries better enable us to specialize. This is somewhat analogous to building a technological society upon specialized engineering materials. You cannot build cities simply upon a single low-carbon alloy steel. It takes many specialized alloys, as well as many glasses, ceramics, semiconductors, inorganic compounds, and polymers. Similarly, we can take tremendous advantage of our biochemical differences to increase the likelihood that we can find the right person for the sales job, the bank manager job, the ladies hairdresser, the pharmacist, the teacher, the street paver, and the telephone lineman. We should not forget that many of these differences may actually have been selected by the evolutionary process because it was useful to man that there be a great range of natural abilities, temperaments, outlooks, and sexualities. As important as our biochemical differences may be, we add to these the tremendous differences in how we utilize such capability as each of our mind's holds. As we focus our attention upon identifying the nature of reality and from that investigation select our values, we more and more develop an individual nature. Some of this individuality comes from what aspects of reality we focus our effort upon. Some comes from how rigorously we critically evaluate what we think is true. The degree to which we can think independently is a key factor. Another is how well do we learn from what others have already learned. Everyone of us could spend his lifetime simply trying to reinvent the wheel or learning how to make flint weapons, if we did not learn from others. We also benefit from recognizing the advantages of trade for acquiring goods and services from those best able to provide them. We have to learn how to trade with others for their ideas, services, and goods, as well. This includes such complex issues as granting them the necessary freedom of conscience to develop their ideas and choose their values, so that we will have these available to us at a later time as potential trade items. Again, to make this possible, we need to extend the same sense of tolerance to them that we will need them to extend to us. We live in a complex world which we will inevitably make mistakes in trying to understand. So will our fellow man. If we are too eager to evaluate these errors as evil, then we will act to stamp out the development of new ideas, which often pick a path through errors to final enlightenment. Since the world is complex, the first person to understand something may have a hard time convincing everyone else that he does understand it. They may well react with intolerance for the heresy of the new idea, as they did when the idea that the earth was the center of the universe was challenged. They did this when bacteria were understood to cause many of the deaths previously attributed to the wise hand of God. We also benefit in our own rich mental complexity when we are cognizant that the very individuality of man causes others to sometimes irritate us, but also makes their mental efforts complementary to ours and improves the chances that they may have some ideas we may never have. Tolerance recognizes individuality. Intolerance defies that fact of reality. Tolerance aids the interactive process of learning with and from others, while intolerance is the path to dogma and ignorance. To the extent that a man wants to maximize the richness of his mind through understanding as much as possible about our complex reality and the complexity of others and their interactions, he will value the trade of ideas with others. To the extent that he recognizes the futility of having to figure out everything without help, he will value the individuality of others. He will grant them the freedom of conscience to make their own choices and to evaluate ideas in their way, because he knows he will benefit from at least some of the ideas of others to the extent of many lifetimes of learning on his own. Objectivists are likely to recognize this intellectual advantage given them by Ayn Rand, but they too often do not recognize that we have the advantage of many other life-enhancing ideas from many other people as well. They fail to note that if Americans did not have a very substantial commitment to tolerance, Ayn Rand's ideas would have been stamped out. She and all of her followers would have been hunted down and killed. Yet, how commonly they call Objectivism a closed philosophical system, which accommodates only those who are virtual clones of Ayn Rand and cannot make manifest their own individuality. The individualist thinker is not tolerated by them, though Objectivism supposedly values the individual life as the source of all value and the individual as the holder of all value. Well, the individual is the source of all reasoning! The individual is also the source of all error, but retains the ability to correct each error and to proceed to a pretty accurate perception of reality. Just as Ayn Rand made great advances over the philosophy of Aristotle, someday, one hopes that someone else will greatly advance Ayn Rand's understanding of philosophy. We should be tolerant enough that such an advance is allowed to happen and that we can recognize it when it has happened.

Preface This essay was written because some who call themselves Objectivists believe that any mistake in correctly identifying reality is an act of immorality. In view of my understanding of the complexity of reality, mistakes in understanding it are inevitable. Human beings are not all geniuses and even geniuses have only finite time to devote to thought. Not all problems will yield to these limited thinking resources, especially those of a single person. Yet, those of us who love thinking and wish to apply it as fully as possible to living our lives, have to race against time. This means we cannot always dwell on one aspect of reality so long that we can always correctly understand it. Human beings are very finite, while the universe is huge! If we are not willing to make mistakes, we will not explore much of our universe. It is backwards to say that making a mistake is immoral, since that would mean that the only moral course is to timidly refrain from trying to understand reality. This is the ultimate stultification! It is also profoundly anti-life. I also make the point that the particularity and individuality of people is as likely to be an advantage as is something like the particularity of engineering materials. This essay was posted on 17 March 2005 on my blog, Reasoned Thoughts. I have made one minor editorial change in posting it here. The Complexity of Reality The complexity of reality seems a strangely abstract subject for an essay. Why is that of interest to an Objectivist or indeed to anyone? Well, because reality consists of particular existents, or to be less formal, of particular things. Among these things are us and we are extraordinarily particular, or as we say of people, we are very distinguishable as individuals. Now, if we are in the habit of underestimating the complexity of materials, tables, and cows, are we not much more likely to underestimate the complexity of people and their interactions? It is common for people to do just this and Objectivists are sometimes among the most shameless in oversimplifying everything in our quest for tight, simple, logical arguments. There is a real place for simplification, but we need to retain consciousness of how and why we have performed it in our thinking. As Ayn Rand astutely noted, concept formation depends upon a kind of simplification. It requires that we delete certain measurements of the attributes of things. A table is a table whether it has four legs or three. It may be 4 feet high or it may be 3 feet high. It may be 6 feet long or 12 feet long. Having the concept of a table is valuable to us. It allows us to say, "We need a table for our dining room." Having noted that, we can next consider the particular characteristics that this table should have. We want it to be high enough that we can sit comfortably in chairs around it and yet do not have to reach too high to gain access to our plates. The height of the table can be so chosen. We need to consider how many people should be able to eat at the table at one time. We need to be sure it will fit in the dining room. We had best think about whether it will fit through the doors, so we can put it there. So, as useful as the general concept of table is, we must in many cases put the dimensions of a particular table back into our thinking as we make use of the general concept of a table. As we do that and consider the materials from which it should be made and how they should be processed, we have an individual table again. Finally, as we use it, it will acquire its own set of particular scratches and stains. We live in a world of particular things. Particular things can be incredibly complicated. Sometimes this seems inconvenient, but actually it is often very essential to our modern technological control of our human environment. Consider the tools that man had to develop in order to gain enough control over the world that his life became less desperate than that of being the prey of lions, tigers, bears, bacteria, and viruses. Without tools, he was subject to the extremes of heat and cold, to the loss of water, and to starvation. At first he had to work very hard to make wood, stone, and bone tools. This was not easy. Making sharp and durable edges from stones is very difficult and tedious work and actually took a lot of skill. Working with wood in all of its varieties was never easy either. But, the varieties in which each material came, did make many applications of these materials possible. But, let us move on to the age of metal use. The four most common elements in the earth's crust are, starting with the most prevalent, oxygen, silicon, aluminum, and iron. Of these, iron was discovered about 2500 BC. But oxygen was discovered in 1774, silicon in 1824, and aluminum in 1825. For a long time after its discovery, aluminum was more expensive than gold, because it was so hard to unlock from its oxides and other mineral forms. There was no chance of an early Aluminum Age to preceed the Bronze Age. Aluminum was bound up in all kinds of rocks, schists, micas, and clays, but was never found as a vein of pure metal. Fortunately, copper and tin we also discovered in 5000 BC and 2100 BC, respectively. Copper and tin proved relatively easy to work with, so the Bronze Age preceeded the Iron Age. But, copper, tin, and iron are all very soft and of little use for structural purposes in their pure forms. To be useful, one has to have the right additives as in the case for iron and the right mixture of copper and tin in the case of bronze. In the modern era, we use a plethora of iron alloys. Most of these are useful for engineering purposes only when a host of processing conditions are carefully controlled. These alloys are rather complex and often have very individual characteristics that make them suited for the many different applications we have for them. First, for our more sophisticated uses, we make pure iron, which involves a good deal of processing, which was largely accomplished in the 1800s, but has continued to be improved up to the present time. We now have cast irons such as gray iron, ductile iron, compacted graphite iron, malleable iron, and many alloy cast irons. We have a host of carbon and low-alloy steels as cast steels, hot-rolled steels, cold-finished steels, extruded steels, spring steels, forged steels, bearing steels, dual-phase steels, and ultrahigh-strength steels. There are hardenable steels. There are steels optimized for high temperature use, for neutron radiation resistance, for low-temperature properties, for maximum fatigue resistance, to resist embrittlement in various environments, and to have high toughness. There are wrought tool steels, powder metallurgy tool steels, maraging steels, ferrous powder metallurgy steels, austenitic manganese steels, wrought stainless steels, cast stainless steels, elevated temperature stainless steels, wrought and powder metallurgy superalloys, polycrystalline cast superalloys, and directionally solidified and single-crystal superalloys. All of these are based on iron as the primary ingredient. These hundreds of alloys have a host of individual properties based upon their elemental ingredients, the temperatures they were heated to, the rates at which they were cooled, the manner in which they were beaten, and the order and sequence of all these processes. Iron is alloyed with carbon, manganese, chromium, nickel, vanadium, molybdenum, cobalt, titanium, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, boron, copper, niobium, zirconium, tungsten, tantalum, aluminum, nitrogen, beryllium, lanthanum, yttrium, hafnium, and selenium to produce various properties. Engineering metals are usually polycrystalline, with each crystallite called a grain and separated from other grains by a grain boundary. The crystallites consist mostly of very ordered planes of atoms stacked neatly with respect to one another. Iron has chemical phases with carbon called martinsite, austenite, and pearlite. Carbon can be distributed throughout the iron in clusters of graphite. The alloying elements may form various carbide chemical phases distributed in the alloy. The alloying elements may be found preferentially at the grain boundaries or at the metal surface. The size of the grains may be large or small. The grains may be elongated along one axis. The crystallites may have atomic vacancies, interstitial (extra, squeezed) atoms, dislocations (abrupt misalignments within crystallites), twin dislocations, and slip planes. There may also be various intermetallic phases in which the ratio of one element to another is locally precise, but different from areas around it. There is a wealth of possibilities. These materials have a level of complexity that provides us with a huge range of properties and hence of applications of each alloy. We are constantly discovering more useful alloys. Now, this is just iron alloys. We have copper, nickel, aluminum, titanium, cobalt, tungsten and many other alloys. We also have semiconductor, glass, ceramic, polymer, mineral and inorganic compound, and composite materials. We have thousands of materials and thousands of ways to process them and tens of thousands of ways to use them in thousands of different environments. From the standpoint of an analytical laboratory owner, we investigate materials all the time that are not quite what they are supposed to be. Many errors are made in processing materials to manufacture them to the complex recipes required for each material. Sometimes, fraud and shortcuts were the cause and there are moral implications, but mostly these materials are made well by men operating in a rational environment and still some errors arise. Generally, suspect materials are sent to us for analysis by people who want to produce a good product and they want our help in identifying what is wrong with the material. This is the moral action of rational men. As we proceed in our laboratories to analyze the material we learn more and more about it. Along that path of investigation, however, it is not uncommon for us to have a wrong idea about the implications of our data with respect to the properties of the material. Afterall, materials can be very complex. We simply keep adding up the data from our measurements and observations and try to formulate an idea of the material composition and structure which is compatible with the data we have acquired. Sometimes, we consult with the customer, since he often knows a great deal about his own material and how they have attempted to process it. Faced with all of the complexity of materials and with a considerable complexity in the experimental techniques we use to make measurements and to observe these materials, we have a great deal to sort out and keep track of. We commonly call on multiple members of our staff with training and experience in different fields, with various materials, and with the analytical techniques to make sense of all of the results. In the end, it is amazing how often we figure out what the material is and identify the problem and its cause. What a wonderful complexity. There is so much richness here that we can support an incredible technological society upon it. The individuality and distinguishability of our engineering materials supports our civilization and makes our lives more secure and more likely to be happy. It gives us many opportunities and many choices. So, if there is so much advantage in the individuality of materials, should we not suspect that there is at least as much advantage in a society of individual men and women? Could it not be that having people of different appearance, experience, athletic abilities, musical abilities, mixes of visual versus aural learning abilities, career interests, reading interests, acting abilities, math and science abilities, favorite sports, disease resistance, dreams, child-raising talents, philosophical beliefs, and sexualities is an advantage to all of the individuals in a society? I find it hard to believe that it would not be an advantage. However, I constantly observe that many people are certain that anyone different than themselves is not so good as they are. In fact, if they have a different philosophical belief they are likely to be considered evil. By losing sight of the complexity of reality, we lose sight of the reason that people make errors. Even geniuses make errors without having any evil intent. It is also common to condemn those who have a different sexual expression. Apparently, the idea that they are different is unacceptable. Such judgmental leaps are unfortunately not uncommon among Objectivists, just as they are not uncommon among people who identify themselves with less rational philosophies. Many people are sorely tempted to over-simplify reality and to define the good very tightly and narrowly. It makes thinking about topics easier. In fact, if we simplify enough, maybe we can reduce any complex situation into the equivalent of a situation Ayn Rand addressed and quote her to find the truth. Now we do not have to think for ourselves at all. How convenient. But, we may well have thrown context out the window. We may have made the error of not appreciating the complexity of the situation or person. A terrible consequence is that we lose sight of what makes us individuals and of all the value that comes from that individuality. We have lost the Individualism which is a cornerstone of Objectivism. We have lost much of the richness of experience that makes life so worth living.

Preface I posted this essay on my blog Reasoned Thoughts on 29 November 2004. I wrote this essay in part because of issues on my mind from the recent Presidential campaign and partly because of attitudes prevalent among some people who think they are Objectivists. I am placing it here, with minor editing, because Michael Stuart Kelly said he had read many of my essays and thought they would be of value here. He also said that he had some doubts about some of my views, so please do not assume that he agrees with me on all points. In fact, I hope to hear from him and others about what and why they may disagree. I expect that the trade of ideas will be of value to me and will make my effort to post these essays worthwhile. I hope they will stimulate my readers' thinking. Finally, you will find that this and other essays will have some overlapping themes and ideas. The main topics that I have been trying to clarify my thinking on while writing these essays have been these: The Complexity of the World How a Dynamic Effort to Understand It will be Accompanied by Mistakes How Greatly We Benefit from the Thinking of Others The Requirement for Freedom of Conscience The Individuality and Complexity of the Thinking Man The Rational Need for Tolerance The Benefits of Benevolence These are highly interrelated topics. Many ideas have to be held in mind and organized if these inquiries are to be performed rationally. I have seen many, many instances in which this has not been done both in society at large and among those who call themselves Objectivists. In my own effort to understand these topics, there is an evolution of ideas, especially with respect to the objective and most efficacious way to develop the concept of tolerance. Our dictionary meanings of the word are often contradictory and this makes discussions of tolerance difficult. There is a good reason for this difficulty in any case: The topic is complicated and very abstract. Well, please judge my essays for yourself and feel wonderfully free to make your own counter-arguments. Freedom of Conscience In this note I will develop the reasons why society and each of us as individuals should allow others the widest possible range of freedom of conscience. The burden of proof lies heavily upon us and society to provide the most rational of reasons for any use of force on our part directed at limiting another’s freedom of conscience and of their developing their subsequent values in their own life. Everyone has the right to develop and manage their own life. Everyone is inherently unique and individual, so it is inappropriate to think that we can evaluate their choices and values for them. We would not be willing to accept their unhappiness upon our lives should we make a mistake with theirs. Only each of us as an individual has the right to stake his life and happiness upon his choices of values and his choice of actions to attain and secure his values. Yet, maybe as a consequence of this lack of consequences for making the wrong choices for others, many people seem to relish using their time and effort to prescribe and force choices upon others through societal norms and beyond to making them a matter of law. Meanwhile, they leave their own personal affairs under-attended. Curiously, some of these people point at each other’s under-attended affairs and note them as proof that others are incapable of caring for themselves, so the busybodies, acting through government, must do it for them. Of course, the affairs of others often seem simple to the casual observer. Yet, human interactions are extremely complex. Most of us appreciate this better in our own lives then when we assess the life choices of others. When each of us knows as much as we do about the complete fabric of our own life (to borrow a phrase from David Kelley), we cannot help but to see a huge complexity of activities and relationships. It is a never-ending intellectual and emotional challenge to handle it all. But this is what makes life so rich with value and interest. It also means that errors of choice are inevitable and not infrequent. The exercise of freedom of conscience allows each of us the means to discover, develop, and alter our lives until we achieve the conditions that make us happy. Each of us is necessarily experimenting with his own life. This gives others some opportunity to observe the results and to either follow or avoid those paths of others that they believe may be right or wrong for them. This may be a lifesaver or it may at least make others more efficient in finding the right path for their lives. Their evaluation of our actions in living our life does not necessarily affirm or deny the choices we have made for ourselves, however. Our choices are good, bad, or neutral in the context of our very rich individual lives and largely based upon a long string of daily choices and our differing natures. What is right for me may or may not be right for you. Now, you may be concerned that I am arguing for an ethics of moral relativism. I am not. Yet, I do not think we should confuse good and bad choices with moral principles. There are moral principles appropriate for a relatively solitary life in nature. These change somewhat for a man in a primitive society where the use of force is rampant with one tribe taking anything they can get from another by force. Again, the appropriate moral principles change for men living in a relatively free and civilized society. While our primary moral values are always based on the value of our own life and our need to use our ability to reason to maintain our life, the complete code of principles that we each have is very dependent upon our personal circumstance. A major component is determined by the kind of society in which we live. It is very important to understand that as individuals we are each so complex that we need still more moral principles to help us make the choices that apply only to our own personal pursuit of our own values. My detailed values differ from yours. My complete code of ethics starts with an Objectivist ethics, but it adds many, many principles that help me to cope with the complex choices in my own life. Some of these additional principles may be unique to me and probably are. Similarly, I expect that most thinking people will have some principles important to them that are not to me. If I try to prescribe what your choices should be in life, I may very well be at odds with some of your important moral principles. I would be messing with your freedom of conscience. You see, our freedom of conscience is as tied to our freedom of action and choice as our mind is tied to our body. Each individual needs freedom of conscience for the following reasons: To formulate an idea - Simple ideas do not require that a society recognize freedom of conscience, but life and our world are complicated. Complex ideas or those standing on an understanding of complex issues of reality need to be developed by many thinkers who can make their ideas known to one another without fear of suffering violence (or excommunication, in some circumstances) To experiment with that idea and its consequences - Many ideas require that experiments be performed to test them and to illuminate the productive paths for further development. If an idea is important, whether it deals exclusively with physics or it involves the interaction of many human beings, experimentation must in many ways be used to test theory, or fallible man can and will go far astray over time. To evaluate the results - When an idea is put to use, it is essential that many minds are free to evaluate and compare their evaluations so that more effort may be put in those directions which are fruitful and less into those that are deadends. To redevelop the idea or abandon it as a failure - This is the result of evaluating the truth and consequences of ideas. Those that have problems may be corrected or must be abandoned. To improve upon an accepted idea - The idea that is evaluated as resting substantially upon a true perception of reality and has demonstrable good consequences, may often be improved upon by others with other viewpoints and experiences either now or in the future. To question an accepted idea - It is usually an unpopular role to be the one who questions the truth of a generally accepted idea. But generally accepted ideas are often wrong and have very harmful consequences. The one who questions the bad idea performs a very valuable service to everyone else. We should all be very willing to provide for the general right of freedom of conscience in order that we can enjoy the great benefit the questioner of the generally accepted idea provides us in helping us to see the rut we are in. Our need to survive by using our minds makes it essential that we always err on the side of allowing others the maximum possible freedom of thought and choice. When we do this, we enrich our own lives. The result of giving others this freedom is a present in a civilized society and provides a future in which progress can be a constant expectation. In a free society, the consequences of others' bad thoughts and subsequent acted choices fall primarily upon themselves and little upon us. On the other hand, their good thoughts and subsequently acted choices often provide us critical help in understanding life and our world. This gift of understanding has always been the basis of human progress. It is why we no longer generally die before age 30. It is why we do not work hunting and farming from daylight to sundown. It is why we rarely need to worry that a marauding band of Vikings, Visigoths, or Turks will descend upon our home and carry away our wives and children. It is why we know about atoms, electrons, stars, silicon chips, magnetic tape and hard drives, structural steel, stressed concrete, jet engines, vaccines, constitutionally limited government, drugs to lower high blood pressure, x-rays, the novels of Ayn Rand, recorded music, combustion engines, long-life batteries, computers, and a host of other wonderful things. It is also why the world is full of interesting people, despite the fact that many people either choose or are forced to be uninteresting. Freedom of conscience, when allowed in a generous manner in a society, causes that society to flourish in ways we cannot imagine without standing back and actually observing its effects with wonder.

Kat and Michael, You have given me many a laugh and smile while reading this and when you were posting on SOLO HQ, though I arrived there after you were itemized. Thanks for the silly fun. If you two do not have a long and great love, then there is little hope for love in this world.

I love this statement from one of your comments above. This is the first and foremost act of the real hero in our world. Thank you.

Barbara, Thanks for repeating this post, which I had not seen earlier. You have described real love very well. Virtues are great, but love and friendships are more than a list of virtues. Intelligence, abilities, an interest in some shared activities, sexual compatibility, an ability to make one another feel better with a smile or a touch, and the ability to ignore some annoying traits, are among many other factors. People, especially interesting and intelligent people, are very complex. I think we need the companionship of such a complex friend and lover in many ways. Among them, it gives us a never-ending effort to understand someone other than ourself, which definitely helps to fight boredom! Marriage and romance by a list of virtues does not seem to work. It does not appear to be the approach Ayn Rand took to her marriage, though it comes close to being the impression she generally left to the readers of her novels. But this observation puts too much importance on what Ayn Rand did, since she was clearly not an expert on the establishment of fully satisfying loving relationships. I have often used the word richness myself to describe the value of enjoying a good friend or a lover. The friend/lover is complex and the exploration of their character and interests is exciting and rewarding. The development of the love between two such people is rich in subtlties, rewards, and challenge. Life in this world is immensely rich and fascinating. The love of a lover or a friend is a closer microcosm of that general richness. It is comfortable to have a sustained relationship with that somewhat more manageably understandable microcosm, though you know it will never actually be fully comprehended. In such a love, the appreciation of the total person should result in longer-lasting loving relationships. They may not last forever, but one should also expect that few will result in hateful separations. The fact that we see so many such hateful separations is probably evidence that much too often people are not as perceptive in understanding love as you are, Barbara.

The short answer is that without science we would not have the time to develop philosophy. But that is probably not what you have in mind. So, how about this: We need a philosophy to guide us in living life. There is no other reason to develop a philosophy. With no knowledge of the science of life, we cannot develop and test the ideas that are supposed to answer that need. Therefore, we cannot understand philosophy without science. So, Peikoff is wrong. The process of developing science and philosophy is an iterative one, with advances in each contributing to and making possible advances in the other field. This is another symptom of those Objectivists who insist on being simple-minded and refuse to check their premises against reality.

Love without tolerance soon turns to hate.

To clarify, I knew that Ayn Rand had problems maintaining personal relationships and that she did not always have the patience to allow others to formulate, try out, and evaluate their ideas as independent thinkers. I did not want to read PAR for the same reason that I do not enjoy a movie in which the best people all die. Or for the same reason that I did not go to the Vietnam War Memorial so nearby for many years after it was erected. These things are truly painful and I do not feel an obligation to inflict pain upon myself. So, I already understood that Ayn Rand was not a Randian hero, I just did not relish being present for all the awkward moments. PARC quotes Ayn Rand's journals where she notes that she should have ended her affair with Branden eight years earlier, or maybe never begun it, or that she was right to have begun it. So, for 8 years, she and Branden have had a relationship which they appear to have both pretended was of a much more heroic nature than it was. Perhaps, as she maintains, Branden was half a year slower in understanding this, or maybe he simply did not know how to end it, or he still thought too much of her to feel good about ending it, or who really knows what else. As Ayn Rand paints a picture of Branden waffling about, uncertain, and having deceived her, it is clear that she has deceived herself (apparently for 8 years at least) and that she is uncertain and has waffled greatly. She is responsible for pretending that Branden was more nearly one of her classical Randian heroes than he was, just as it is clear that she had pretended that Frank O'Connor was more of a hero than it seems he was. Ayn Rand is here seen playing fast and loose with reality. Her lack of understanding for human relationships is clear. Nathaniel Branden has noted this correctly. PAR correctly documents this. Still Ayn Rand had great ideas, which both Nathaniel and Barbara Branden have always strongly proclaimed. It is clear, however, that the Objectivism left to us by Ayn Rand does not even begin to adequately address very important topics relating to many human relationships. Romantic love, while often discussed, was inadequately developed and understood. Friendships were not understood and developed. Many social and organizational interactions of people were not understood. Questions of how an Objectivist society would operate were not addressed. Ayn Rand's basic philosophical principles are a very good starting point, but it is clear that she could not use them herself to live a happy life. It is clear that those who try to live life the way she did are not able to function well among others and tend to have similar relationship problems. Since Objectivism is supposed to be a philosophy for living life, it is clear that it is an incomplete philosophy. If it is a closed philosophy, then it is not a philosophy for living a happy life! So, PARC is a very important book. Not only does it prove that Ayn Rand had problems with personal relationships, but it also proves that: 1) she had a great capacity for deceiving herself about reality in her personal life, 2) she was dishonest in presenting her personal life to others, 3) her total understanding of her philosophy was inadequate for her to understand personal relationships, 4) her philosophy was not sufficiently developed with respect to personal relationships, 5) her philosophy could only be a principled start toward an Objectivist philosophy for living life, meaning for living happy lives. As a start it is a great one. I am not unappreciative of the wonderful value of her work. It was the work of a genius. But, the world did not become a Garden of Eden because of the work of Aristotle and neither did the great intellectual contributions of The Enlightenment bring on an immediate end to human suffering. It is absurd to believe that the life work of any genius is adequate to start and complete a substantially innovative philosophy of life. It is hardly surprising that many other people with different approaches to thinking, with different experiences, with different interests, and with much more thinking time to contribute, are critical to the more complete development of a philosophy for living life. Actually, philosophy for living will never be complete, if only because each person has to adapt it to his own life. So, the irony is that PARC is fundamentally anti-ARI! It is fundamentally pro-TOC and Objectivist Living. Talk about unintended consequences!

We are inevitably going to find out that we have not always been right! Our choice is with respect to being right. If we find out we were wrong, then it is a lot less embarrassing and a lot more gratifying to change our viewpoint immediately to one consistent with reality, than to pretend that we were right before. I have never understood how some people can continue to espouse an idea they know to be wrong simply because they are unwilling to admit they were wrong. This is the ultimate instance of social metaphysics and the ultimate putdown for reality. But this is a frequently observed phenomena. What is more, I cannot understand how it is that people are not grateful to someone who has helped them see an error they were making. What is there in life that is of more value than seeing reality as it is?

John - But doesn't it defy everything you know about human relationships that unless your spouse, your children, and your friends feel some real respect and appreciation, your relationships will surely be degraded in time? Let's face it, if you are constantly waiting for any opportunity to find fault with someone you love, you will find that fault. I once worked with a man who was generally a good man, but he had a bad flaw. You felt that when he was around, he was always probing your armor with a knife, always looking intensely for any fault or vulnerability. No one wants a relationship in which they are probed that way. Michael, When Anna and I lived in Cleveland, we regularly went to the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Ballet, and the Met Opera Company performances. I directly enjoyed the orchestra and the ballet, though I enjoyed them more with her company. But, I did not generally enjoy opera directly. Anna so much enjoyed it that she really glowed with happiness. That I enjoyed seeing immensely.