One of the people who was involved in the Milgram experiment wrote his own story.
In retrospect, I believe that my upbringing in a socialist-oriented family steeped in a class struggle view of society taught me that authorities would often have a different view of right and wrong than mine.
Atlas Shrugged is a classic tale of good versus evil.
The heroes are easily recognized by their strong profiles, high cheekbones and tendency to speech rather than speak. Heroes always know the precise angle to present their bodies so that the setting sun can highlight their virtues and their flat hips while the bright red glow of morality from the furnaces blazes in their Rearden Metal brooches and their steely blue eyes.
The villains, or looters, meanwhile (you can almost hear the boos from the cheap seats), are made of blancmange and have names like Tinky and Kip and Balph (Balph!) and Cuffy and Orren and Chick. The blancmanges don’t have profiles, they have pendulous jowls and sagging, tired features and, when they are not starting organizations with phony names like Friends of Global Progress, they stoop and they slouch and they deny everything that’s obvious and honest and true.
The blancmanges don’t have conversations either. They blubber nonsense about everything being self-evident and how it’s not their fault - it’s nobody’s fault. They have no independent thoughts of their own and they regurgitate half-digested ideas scavenged from the waste bucket of philosophy and they speak in unfinished sentences (the heroes always finish their sentences).
“It wasn’t real, was it?” said Mr Thompson.
“We seemed to have heard it,” said Tinky Holloway.
“We couldn’t help it,” said Chick Morrison.
“Who permitted it to hap-” he began in a rising voice but stopped ;
“We don’t have to believe it, do we?” cried James Taggart.
The overall effect is like a child’s pantomime where all the children boooo when the unshaven villain, in the stripey jumper and with a bag of swag over his shoulder, twirls his moustache as the lights grow dim and a badly played organ heralds his entrance on its lowest register.
There is no dialog in this book. In place of normal conversation, the heroes take it in turns to practice their oratory while the blancmanges barf out platitudes that can only have been retrieved from someone’s maiden aunt’s sick bucket after she’d had a little too much tincture of laudanum.
“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonestly; the man who respects it has earned it.”
The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden’s face, as if in salute and farewell.
When the heroes and looters actually do speak with each other it’s like some absurd Monty Python skit wherein the leprous townspeople, armed only with a bowl of radishes and a pound of liver, try to do battle with the Noble Paladins in Shining Armour mounted on Noble, Snorting Stallions only to be cut down one by snivelling one by the Paladins’ Virtuous Steel Blades. Terry Gilliam could not have drawn it better.
“All you want is production without men who are able to produce.”
“That…that’s just theory. That’s just a theoretical extreme.”
Even the adulterous sex is virtuous with the moral flame of righteousness reflecting in her chaste dampness and his thrusts like the pistons that power the engines of prosperity.
She lay back, conscious of nothing but the pleasure it gave her. Yet her mind kept racing. Broken bits of thought flew past her attention, like the telegraph poles by the track. Physical pleasure? - she thought. This is a train made of steel…running on rails of Rearden Metal…moved by the energy of burning oil and electric generators…it’s a physical sensation of physical movement…but is that the cause and the meaning of what I now feel?…Do they call it a low animal joy-this feeling that I would not care if the rail did break to bits under us now-it won’t-but I wouldn’t care, because I have experienced this? A low, physical, material, degrading pleasure of the body?
Oh, wait…maybe that really was about a train. It’s hard to know with these people - they live their whole lives in metaphor so it’s impossible to tell when reality begins…or if it ever does.
Perhaps passages like that help to explain why Ayn Rand is every budding libertarian’s favourite philosopher. Perhaps they got their first hard-on while imagining that Ayn was Dagny and Dagny was Ayn and that, when they closed their eyes, Ayn stood before them naked saying “I want you <insert name here>. I’m more of an animal than you think…[snip 100 pages]… If I’m asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with <insert your name here>.”
The only possible reason that the book is so popular among that kind of conservative is that, around age 19, they became confused between Ayn Rand’s prescription for a new Utopian Republic and Dagny’s high breasts and animal depravity. Now and forever, when they think of steel production, they become aroused by thoughts of themselves as Hank Rearden driving his train into Dagny Taggart’s tunnel.
I can’t count the number of times, on Usenet and on mailing lists, when a comment about cooperation causes a shotgun response, Earnestness set to Stun, with a one-line directive to “now go read Atlas Shrugged”. Just today, in the comments after an article about Ron Paul in the Times, someone grumbled about the fate of the dollar, sighed “Where is John Galt?” and resolved to buy gold presumably until the Industrial Philosopher Kings return.
I wonder how many of Ron Paul’s supporters have on their desk a framed, signed picture dedicated with “To Marcus. May you care about no-one but your self. With Love and Virtue, Ayn xxx” and a Heroines of Objectivism calendar on the back of their bathroom door? I’ll bet Greenspan had one.
I really wanted to like this book as I enjoyed The Fountainhead thoroughly. I had intended to write a mini review when I was about three hundred pages into it, while it was still just a fun ride on a moralistic steam train through Objectiville, but events conspired against me and I missed my stop. The book started to judder about a third of the way in and finally came off the rails on page 606 as Ayn, furiously shovelling coal and with whistle blowing, described, to the rhythm of a rickety train on an out-of-control track, why everyone who disagrees with her deserves to die…
The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence…
The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion “for a good cause”…
The woman in Roomette, Car No. 3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards,by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil…
[...skipping cars 4 through 15 until...]
The man in Bedroom A, Car No.16 was a humanitarian who had said “The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer”….
…and we are still only half way through our journey. Having now fallen into a ditch, the book ploughed on through some heavy mud until the surreal interlude where the publishers accidentally printed 60 pages of someone’s 10th grade homework on the subject “Why we must fear communism” (it turns out that From each according to his ability to each according to his needs was a terrible idea) and finally comes to rest, with a final mournful sigh, about 900 pages after the ending became obvious.
Still, there is a lot to like about Objectivism. Like many philosophies, it tries to scale a simple idea from a Personal Guide to a Virtuous Life up through an ethical system for interacting with one’s family, friends and business partners to a political recipe for Utopia.
At the first level , her moral philosophy is spot on. Colour me Objectivist when it comes to “What is the Good?” and of how to structure one’s hopes and dreams and, most importantly, actions to achieve The Good. It all gets a little shaky when ask our friends and family to earn the love we give them and then it totally falls apart when we imagine that we could structure our society around the idea that captains of industry and politicians are paragons of virtue (in the Ayn Rand sense).
In Ayn’s topsy-turvy world, successful businessmen would be successful precisely because they play by the rules and have a strict code of honour. Thy would channel their enlightened greed into production, commerce and other activities that benefit society accidentally but with supreme efficiency. Not once would they clear cut rain forests or dump plastics in the ocean or pollute rivers or poison thousands of Indians or any of the things that real businessmen do.
This is ultimately where the book, and the philosophy, gets it dead wrong. Sure we can all think of politicians and industrialists enlightened by self-interest but the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them and the James Taggarts and Wesley Mouches and Orren Boyles outnumber the Hank Reardens a thousand-fold. I am a dyed-in-the-wool elitist but even I would not trust the elite to decide who is or is not elite.
Perhaps, in 1957, when she wrote it, fear of communism and fascism and other collectivist disasters was very real and she saw herself as writing a cautionary tale against the submission of the needs of the individual to the needs of society. But that does not explain why she seems unable to distinguish between, say, the enforced starvation of one group for the benefit of another (usually more privileged) group and a government program to build schools. It also does not explain why so many modern day Objectivists equate income tax with slavery.
In Ayn Rand’s fairy tale, the collectivist Utopian dream of the looters ends in dystopia and apocalypse. It’s hard to imagine the Objectivist dream ending differently.
People often condemn others on partial information. Indeed, necessity
sometimes demands hasty judgment. We frequently don’t have enough time
to know the whole story. A short story called “The Last Judgment” by the
Czech author Karel Capek best captures the issue. A deceased criminal con-
fronts a divine tribunal to determine whether he will be sent to heaven or hell.
The tribunal consists of human judges. God, instead of his usual role as
judge, is the witness. God testifies about the defendant’s crimes but explains
the causes of the defendant’s behavior and declares that, under different cir-
cumstances, the defendant would have been an upstanding citizen. Neverthe-
less, the judges condemn the defendant to hell. Before facing his fate, the de-
fendant asks why God has not decided his fate: “Because I know everything.
If judges knew everything, absolutely everything, they couldn’t judge either:
they would understand everything and their hearts would ache. How could I
possibly judge you? Judges know only about your crimes but I know every-
thing about you. . . . And that’s why I cannot judge you.”
(thanks, Bob!)
When I was a young’un, I used to go swimming at Crystal Palace. It was a 90 minute bus ride but it was worth it because that was the only place that had Olympic-size diving boards.
I remember so clearly the day that I first stood on the edge of that 10 metre board and looked down and it was a long, long way to the water.
There’s a weird psychology game that goes on in dare situations like that. If you climb up to the top and just peek, you are allowed to come down again. Sure, your friends will make fun of you and call you a wuss but that’s OK. You can’t accept every dare.
But if you go to the very edge with your feet together, you are declaring to your friends… and to the world… and to yourself that you intend to dive off and that there will be no turning back.
It can take an eternity to finally screw your courage to the sticking place and take the plunge, but you know you are going to do it come what may. You go through umpteen false alarms of starting to lean into the dive and then realizing that the time is not yet ripe (and hoping your friends didn’t notice) until eventually you lean and then keep leaning and, with a tiny push! from your toes you are flying then falling falling falling with a rush of air and fear until boom! you are in the water and the thrill washes you clean.
As you break the surface and rise blinking into the sunlight you hear the yells of appreciation from your friends and the world is so great right at that moment that you wonder why you waited so long.
I’ve spent enough time on the edge now. Just one tiny push! and I fall into a new tomorrow.
Today is forecast to be Warmer than yesterday.
It’s a sign!
My lovely wife sent me this:
Mr. Whitson taught sixth-grade science. On the first day of class, he gave us a lecture about a creature called the cattywampus, an ill-adapted nocturnal animal that was wiped out during the Ice Age. He passed around a skull as he talked. We all took notes and later had a quiz.
When he returned my paper, I was shocked. There was a big red X through each of my answers. I had failed. There had to be some mistake! I had written down exactly what Mr. Whitson said. Then I realized that everyone in the class had failed. What had happened?
Very simple, Mr. Whitson explained. He had made up all the stuff about the cattywampus. There had never been any such animal. The information in our notes was, therefore, incorrect. Did we expect credit for incorrect answers?
Needless to say, we were outraged. What kind of test was this? And what kind of teacher?
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~leonghw/Courses/cattywampus.html
I wish I had had a teacher like that!
By an odd coincidence, I gave Dylan the lecture last night about how teachers are often wrong and you need to think critically about what they are telling you. Sometimes they make mistakes.
Sometimes you just heard them wrong. Either way, critical thinking helps you see through them.
For the second time in a week, I have written a post that I have deleted in an act of self-censorship.
A little while ago, Paul Graham had an essay about all those things that you are not allowed to say.
The Conformist Test
Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think whatever you’re told.
To be clear - the opinions that I censored are things that I often talk about with my peers. We had such a good time discussing one of those topics at the pub last week that I rushed home to blog about it but then, in an act of cowardice, found myself unable to push the publish button. It’s not my peers that I am afraid of. It’s liberal orthodoxy (it would probably offend conservative othodoxy too, but I don’t care so much about offending that).
Paul Graham goes on…
Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn’t do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.
If you believe everything you’re supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn’t also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s– or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.
How does an opinion rise to the level of orthodoxy when it is so obviously wrong? More to the point - how to we bring it down again?
It’s not easy being a blogger when all the best topics are forbidden.
I only had 15 minutes when I nipped into B&N during Jazz’s piano lesson and I wanted to pick up a copy of V for Vendetta for Dylan. Since he had dressed as him for Halloween, I thought it only fair that he read the book too.
I was distracted though by a display of mini hardback books by the door - ooh those clever marketing people! I am most cured of impulse book buying these days. I rarely buy books any more and the times when I would just walk past a bookshop and end up with three books on photography are long gone. But there was something about these books…they were calling my name like a tiny voice from the past.
The little books were on various subjects - physics, geometry, chemistry, about a dozen others - and I didn’t have much time so I just grabbed the philosophy one and the geometry one and rushed off to find V. On the way to the checkout I realised that I couldn’t go home with books for me and Dylan but nothing for Jazz so I picked up a quite beautiful Inuyasha book making this my biggest book purchase since 1999.
Oh my word, this book is fantastic. If you only ever read one book on philosophy, read this one. Every important point is illustrated with a joke and the jokes are hilarious. As I finish each chapter (all very short), I go do a stand up routine for my family to great applause. I am trying to pace my reading to make it last but it’s mostly unputdownable.
Here’s a sample joke, (adapted for my own nefarious purposes):
Atheist: Look! All the sheep on that hillside have been sheared!
Agnostic: Yes. On this side.
Read the introduction online. Then buy it. You’ll thank me for it even if you think posts on philosophy are too cerebral for a blog.
Still catching up on my book reviews here…
I have read a bunch of books about philosophers but I have never before read a book about philosophy. The trouble with reading about philosophers is that by that time you have slogged through 18 Greeks with similar sounding names they all blur into one and you can’t recall the difference between an atomist and an epicurean. It’s much easier to read about, say, ethics when it is all in one chapter.
Reading the book pretty much confirmed for me what Paul Graham said that the only thing 3000 years of philosophy has taught us is that there are limits to what we can know.
I am glad I read it but I won’t recommend it to anyone else.
The most disappointing thing was to read so many chapters about aesthetics, ethics, justice and morality and never once come across the word ‘evolution’. It seems a shocking oversight and I have written to Professor Grayling asking him to rectify that in a future edition.
