In some respects, Rand is almost Soviet. Her habit of remaking the past in accordance with her wishes or needs of the present is most striking… Allied to this tendency to remodel the past was Rand’s megalomaniac notion that moral philosophy had been nothing but a tissue of sentimental error until she came along….In her expository writings, Rand’s style resembles that of Stalin. It is more catechism than argument, and bores into you in the manner of a drill. She has a habit of quoting herself as independent verification of what she says; reading her is like being cornered at a party by a man, intelligent but dull, who is determined to prove to you that right is on his side in the property dispute upon which he is now engaged and will omit no detail.
Category: Arts & Living
Man the unknown
In a recent review of two new Ayn Rand biographies Daniel J. Flynn makes the following observation:
Ayn Rand’s midcentury novels continue to strike a chord because they read as though culled from today’s headlines. Here, Rand’s “looters” raid government coffers to bail out their poorly performing industries; there, Rand’s “moochers” demand that the “producers” pay for their health care.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression the French Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel writes in his book Man the Unknown (1935) :
Moral sense is almost completely ignored by modern society. We have, in fact, suppressed its manifestations. All are imbued with irresponsibility. Those who discern good and evil, who are industrious and provident, remain poor and are looked upon as morons. The woman who has several children, who devotes herself to their education, instead of to her own career, is considered weak-minded. If a man saves a little money for his wife and the education of his children, this money is stolen from him by enterprising financiers. Or taken by the government and distributed to those who have been reduced to want by their own improvidence and the shortsightedness of manufacturers, bankers, and economists…
Man the Unknown is an extensive meditation on the implications of the fact that modern man finds himself in an environment and culture much different from that which shaped his biology for thousands of years. Although this book contains little that would have surprised contemporary readers, Carrel’s work is often reduced to discussion of specific passages concerning his views on eugenics and the treatment of dangerous criminals.
Alexis Carrel’s groundbreaking work on cellular senescence, extracorporeal perfusion and his strong interest in life extension and re-making mankind makes him one of the rare individuals that can be characterized as a “conservative transhumanist.”
Jonathan Bowden’s Mad
From the publisher who brought us a new and expanded edition of L.A. Rollins’ excellent “The Myth of Natural Rights” comes a rare little book by Jonathan Bowden called “Mad.” The book was originally published in 1989 but I have not been able to find much information about it. Before publication Nine-Banded Books announced it as a “Stirnerite belle letters.”
The logical positivist philosopher Hans Reichenbach wrote in his seminal work “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy”:
“The philosopher…appears incapable of mastering his desire to know. Throughout the history of philosophy we find the philosophical mind associated with the imagination of the poet; where the philosopher asked, the poet answers.”
A brief glance at a random page of Bowden’s Mad will suffice to identify the phenomenon that Reichenbach is talking about. The author identifies a dazzling number of relations between historical, sociological, political, and psychological phenomena without providing little epistemological clues about how he has established such wisdom. For example, we learn that “death is man’s cardinal reality: an act of danger, complete self-absorption, becoming, in the moment of transfiguration, complete self-negation.”………Right. Better to treat Mad as an powerful and imaginative form of literature!
Art exists for its own sake, and rarely benefits from being analyzed. As Bowden states himself, “science and art are brought into conflict by those who have the interests of neither near to their hearts.”
So I will suffice with quoting a number of representative passages from Mad to give you a taste of the book:
“Those who don’t lie down and die soon discover that happiness and intellect are at opposite sides of the pole.”
“Life’s essential fragility is preserved with due regard for its importance. We know that we’re perched on a knife-edge and the slightest oscillation kills us.”
“In essence life is conflict between those in control and those endeavoring to throw off control.”
And as the writer reminds us repeatedly, “sex is the mark of the beast married to the spirit of the divine.”
In what is my favorite passage of the book, the author’s knowledge of the history of human thought meets his bleak outlook on the human condition, culminating in the following deadpan, but dead-on statement:
“Prior to the establishment of a state, life is nasty, brutish and short. Nothing changes once a state’s created. Only the longevity of the participants alters. And even that’s arbitrary.”
There is structure to Bowden’s MADness. One detects an outlook on life similar to thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Stirner and Ragnar Redbeard. It should not be completely surprising, then, that Jonathan Bowden has become associated with the “New Right,” and less fortunate, petty party politics. Despite his interest in thinkers associated with esoteric Traditionalism such as Julius Evola, it seems that his elitist moment of distancing himself from mass politics still has to come.
Bowden’s H.P. Lovecraft: Aryan Mystic is a typical example of New Right writing. Bowden rightly identifies Lovecraft’s “mechanistic” and “ultra-conservative” outlook on life but then drowns the good man in the obligatory occultist purple prose. And that is unfortunate because it is not hard to picture a unique and coherent Nietzschean/Lovecraftian worldview that is strictly positivist in its epistemology, and distinctly reactionary in its rejection of egalitarianism and democracy as an alternative to socialism, (classical) liberalism and contemporary conservatism. But as a book about Thinkers of the Right indicates, the Traditionalist Right is just not capable of “remaining true to the Earth,” as Nietzsche put it, and remains unified in its case against “materialism” and flirtations with mysticism.
In the same piece, Bowden draws attention to H.P. Lovecraft’s publication The Conservative. Despite the growing interest in Lovecraft’s writings, prevailing orthodoxy does not make it likely that someone will produce a complete and handsome collection of this vehicle of Lovecraft’s most reactionary thoughts anytime soon.
Nine-Banded Books, are you listening?!
John Rawls and the sin of merit
For those who have always suspected a strong religious undertone in the writings of John Rawls, the following piece by “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An interpretation based on the concept of community” they write:
…the moral and social convictions that the thesis expresses in religious form are related in complex and illuminating ways to the central ideas of Rawls’s later writings on moral and political theory.
Most illuminating is the continuity between Rawls’s older and later views on merit:
He sides with Augustine in denying that we can earn salvation by our own merit – by freely choosing virtue, or by works of any kind: “There is no merit before God. Nor should there be merit before Him. True community does not count the merits of its members. Merit is a concept rooted in sin, and well disposed of.
It should be no surprise then that some writers have identified Rawls as a cryptocalvinist:
My contention is that Rawls is not a philosopher, but a minister. Like his Calvinist forebears, he is trying to establish the kingdom of God on Earth. Unlike them, he doesn’t admit it….The great engineering problem of designing a system in which fallible humans can govern each other and get along simply does not exist in Rawls’ philosophy.
In another post the author proposes “the “ultracalvinist hypothesis”:
the proposition that the present-day belief system commonly called “progressive,” “multiculturalist,” “universalist,” “liberal,” “politically correct,” etc, is actually best considered as a sect of Christianity.
This perspective reflects a respectable Nietzschean tradition in which modern liberalism and socialism are not departures of religious thinking but the logical culmination of a religious / communitarian mindset. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this phenomenon is the highly puritan nature of contemporary “political correctness. “
John Rawls is often associated with rationalism but the concept of rationally in Rawls’s work is not that of the classical economist but that of the pre-Hobbesian moralist. His work offers little if any contribution to the scientific study of human nature or human interaction.
The New Deal disaster
The conventional wisdom is that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal got the United States out of the Great Depression. The most obvious objection to this view would be epistemological in nature. How do we know what would have happened without the New Deal? Strictly speaking, we cannot know this through empirical means. This feature of evaluating public policy presents a major problem for any kind of political consequentialism.
A related question is what constitutes a solution. How should a delayed recovery but healthier economy be compared to a faster recovery with negative consequences in the long run? It should not be assumed that the solution that produces the fastest recovery is the best solution.
On the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, David Gordon reviews Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.
Should the government create jobs because businessmen are too reluctant to invest?
Folsom ably dispatches this Keynesian canard. If businessmen were reluctant to invest, precisely the antibusiness attitude of the Roosevelt administration was in large part responsible. Roosevelt supported confiscatory rates of taxation; small wonder, then, that investors were reluctant to embark on new projects.
A similar point about regime uncertainty has been made by Robert Higgs.
But how to explain the popularity of Roosevelt?
…Folsom has a deeper explanation. Roosevelt manipulated welfare programs, especially jobs under the WPA, to gain votes…Folsom here uses to good advantage a long-forgotten book, Who Were the Eleven Million? by David Lawrence, the founder and editor of US News & World Report. Through a county-by-county analysis of the 1936 election, Lawrence showed that voting for Roosevelt varied directly with the patronage and jobs extended.
Gordon does find fault in Folsom’s book for ignoring the Austrian view of business cycles. This is interesting because in contemporary discussions about the current financial meltdown, the majority of “pro-market” economists do not seem to find much fault with the Fed either. But one does not have to completely subscribe to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) to observe the highly political role the Fed currently plays in the management of the crisis. Neither does one have to be an Austrian economist to question the rationale for central banking and a fiat currency.