Since the departure of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the former Iraqi prime minister, American officials have been far more vocal about blaming him for what is widely viewed as a dismal initial performance by the Iraqi military against the Islamic State. On Friday, Admiral Kirby said that the new Iraqi government under Mr. Abadi has shown a new willingness to work to engage Sunni groups, including in Anbar, and to train its soldiers to stand and fight.
“We did spend a lot of money and effort training the Iraqi Army,” Admiral Kirby said. “When we left them in 2011, we left them capable.” He said the Maliki government “squandered” the American military’s training of Iraqi troops, but expressed optimism that things will be different now. “This is a completely different game,” he said, pointing to a recent visit by Mr. Abadi to Anbar Province to engage Sunni leaders in the fight against the Islamic State.
Administration officials said they expect international allies will help in the training effort and announced a commitment Friday of 120 military personnel from Denmark to the cause.
As usual, American foreign policy mostly defies comment: the best case against it is simply to quote its champions, and leave it at that. I’d call Kirby’s comments a reductio, but there’s no room for a “reduction” to absurdity if you begin there. Read the rest of the article for lots more absurdity.
Perhaps our policy-makers would do better to stop thinking of warfare on the analogy of a game? When I was an undergraduate IR student back in the day, I used to wonder whether anyone honestly believed that warfare could be “modeled” on game theory. I mean, was trench warfare during World War I really just a series of iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas, as Robert Axelrod had supposedly “taught us”? (I’d be rich if I had a nickel for the number of times the Axelrodian mantra was recited to us.) We weren’t supposed to ask “naive” questions like that, so I mostly kept quiet. The older I get, I suppose, the more naive I get, and the more inclined to ask “dumb questions” about the verities I was once taught with such confidence (I’m happy to note that occasionally, one gets answers by this method). Of course, sometimes the naivete of youth is indistinguishable from the despair of middle age:
I realize that this post will only be inside baseball for people interested in the vicissitudes of and infighting within the Objectivist movement, but I’ll take that risk. Back in May, I took public issue with The Atlas Society’s invitation of David Harriman to The Atlas Summit, its summer 2014 event. That led to a predictably acrimonious argument at TAS’s site which ended with David Kelley’s issuing a snippy denunciation of me, and unceremoniously–or do I mean ceremoniously–closing down the combox.
My view is simple,and so far stands both unaddressed and unrefuted by Kelley and his associates. For twenty-five years, David Harriman made common cause with the most militantly dogmatic and defamation-happy elements of the Objectivist movement. And applied to ARI, “militantly dogmatic” and “defamation-happy” are literal descriptions, not exaggerations or metaphors. Like so many people associated with ARI–including people who spent decades attacking libertarians as “nihilists” but have now decided to make common cause with them–he’s recently done an abrupt and unexplained about-face, which TAS, in turn, has decided to accept at face value. My claim is that Harriman owes us a public accounting of, and apology for, his prior associations. Otherwise, he deserves condemnation and ostracism. Wrongdoing demands a response in kind. It can’t simply go ignored or excused.
In May, TAS had claimed that Harriman would appear on a panel at their summer event, and explain all. Here is a video of the event, if you have an hour of your life to waste on it, as I did the other day.
[November 20, 2014: For some reason, the video is no longer working, but you can still watch it via the Atlas Society site. I wouldn’t want to deprive you of the pleasure.]
[November 23, 2014: see note below.]
It’s no exaggeration to say that the panel consists of a very tedious hour of evasions and rationalizations. It doesn’t respond to a single issue I raised; the panelists simply pretend that the issues don’t exist. I’ve responded to the panel here, responding in turn to a like-minded post by Jonathan Smith somewhat before mine. The thread as a whole is 130+ comments long and began in March, well before the Harriman controversy. (I regret that the thread ended up being “hijacked” by the Harriman controversy, but feel free to blame that on Kelley, who attacked me, and then closed down the most obvious forum in which to respond. I wouldn’t have joined the discussion on the Atlas Summit at the Objectivist Living site* had I not become the topic of the discussion there without any effort on my part.) Post 43 (May 25) is my rejoinder to Kelley’s “response” to me just after he closed down the comments at TAS.
Outsiders may well be mystified by the vitriolic character of the rhetoric involved, but I think insiders should be able to figure out why things have reached this point. Suffice it to say that there’s twenty-five years of back story here–a quarter of a century of lies, evasions, and defamations, and with it, a quarter-century of bitterness and betrayal. There are also a series of cautionary tales here for anyone who gets his feet wet in the controversy:
Lesson 1: The Objectivist movement is a thoroughly neurotic affair, regardless of what camp of it one has in mind.
Lesson 2: In general, movements tend to be thoroughly neurotic affairs, regardless of the original intentions of their founders.
Lesson 3: When the founders of a movement are themselves deeply neurotic–and here I mean Rand, Nathaniel Branden, and the entire “Inner Circle” that surrounded them, especially in the 1960s–expect the latent neuroses of the movement to ramify and intensify in directions set by the founders, and then to be transmitted, like disease vectors, across the decades.
Lesson 4: Whatever one thinks of Objectivism as philosophy, it’s time to end the Objectivist movement. It serves no beneficial purpose that isn’t offset by the harms it does and the corruption it involves. And that applies to the whole movement, in both its ARI and TAS incarnations.
I’ve made the case for Lesson 4 twice before, once on this blog, and once on a different one. David Kelley has, malgre lui, made the case for me yet again.
The original IOS project was one of promise and hope. Unfortunately, if you wish to see its monument, you’ll have to look to the distant past for a glimpse of it in dusty archives, old-timers’ stories, and track-back machines. The present organization is a pale shadow or dull echo–or honestly, just a bad parody–of its predecessor. Personally, I don’t find it worth looking at, worth listening to, or worth interacting with. Neither, I think, should anyone reading this. An inside allusion, but: no one is obliged to play Eddie Willers to this pathetic “movement.” The Objectivist train has come to a halt. It’s time to get off and, as John Galt puts it, to go back to the world. It’s bad enough to “live for the sake of another man.” It’s worse, much worse, to live for a “movement” with less life in it than any human being, and less capacity for forward motion. That’s what the Objectivist movement has become. What remains is just to admit it.
*For clarity’s sake, I added the phrase “at the Objectivist Living site” and the word “there” in the same sentence a few hours after posting.
[Postscript,November 23, 2014: Apparently, you no longer can still watch the video via the Atlas Society site. If you try, as I just did,you get a message that says “This video is private.” Why the sudden need to make the video private? A few months ago, TAS was boasting about what their Atlas Summit panel presentation would reveal. Then they shut down the comments in which I predicted that it would reveal exactly nothing. Then I was proven right. Having been proven right, I decided to say so in public. All of a sudden, the loudly-heralded video that proved me right was quietly made “private.” Could it be that the champions of “Open Objectivism” are unwilling to bear public scrutiny–i.e., unwilling to “tolerate” the kind of critical discussion that takes place in the open?
Twenty-five years ago, in “A Question of Sanction,” David Kelley had criticized Peter Schwartz and others for advocating a policy of preaching to the converted, which he (Kelley) described, accurately enough, as “a sorry sort of ingrown activism.” Kelley has, I’m afraid, become heir to the attitudes he once criticized–and come to suborn the same attitudes in his “followers.” It’s a pathetic conclusion to what might have been an illustrious project and career.]
Postscript, November 6, 2014: This has nothing to do with Harriman-at-TAS, but is relevant to any chronicling of the malfeasances of the Objectivist movement. Having unfortunately let my JARS subscription lapse, I missed this revelation from Chris Sciabarra’s editorial to their July 2014 issue (also posted at his blog):
For several years, Allan Gotthelf and I exchanged correspondence, both before and after the 1995 publication of the first edition of my book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. I acknowledged his criticisms of my work in my book—indeed, it was he who provided the precise wording with which he felt most comfortable. But when the book was finally published, he felt obliged to tell me that he would do “scholarly battle against” my work and its “obfuscation” of the ideas of Ayn Rand (correspondence, 26 May 1996).
That battle sometimes took on a bit of partisan ugliness. When our journal was first published, we worked diligently to get it included in indexing and abstracting services across disciplines and geographic boundaries. Our efforts paid off considerably; we are now indexed and abstracted by nearly two dozen services in the humanities and social sciences. But getting JARS into The Philosopher’s Index was something that Allan Gotthelf opposed strongly. At a meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in December 1999, he took exception to the very idea of including The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies in The Philosopher’s Index. He could not outright oppose the inclusion of Rand scholarship per se in an index aimed at reaching academia, for he was a cofounder of The Ayn Rand Society, itself affiliated with the Eastern Division of the APA. But he made it very clear that, in his view, JARS was not a legitimate scholarly undertaking—despite the fact that several members of its founding advisory board had been officers of, and presenters to, the very society that he chaired. Nevertheless, as required, we submitted the first three issues of our journal to the Philosopher’s Information Center, and JARS was added to the Index immediately thereafter.
I counted myself a friend and colleague of Gotthelf’s during the period in question. I knew of his animus against JARS; at first I regarded it as partly justified but mostly overwrought, but eventually I came to regard it as pathological. That said, I had no idea that he’d worked to exclude JARS from The Philosopher’s Index (and I find it interesting that in more than a decades’ acquaintance with him, he never brought it up). I don’t think think Carrie-Ann knew that, either, and Carrie-Ann was (and is) an indexer/editor for The Philosopher’s Index. I draw attention to this issue because it’s of a piece with the Harriman affair, and also very much par for the course among movement-Objectivists: deliberate opacity as a permanent way of life for people who regard themselves as aspiring “public intellectuals” (in some cases without the modifier “aspiring,” but also, alas, without a public).
It all ought to be (but isn’t) a cautionary tale to the Matt Zwolinskis of the philosophy profession, who apparently operate on the premise that any association with any organization is justified, and any invitation from anyone is worth accepting–as long as you don’t look too hard at the agenda of the people you’re dealing with, and as long as you have a fabulous time doing whatever you’re doing (scroll down to the comments of this discussion). I guess if it came down to selling BHL to white supremacist organizations, then, there’d be no intelligible basis for demurral, right? Give it a shot, Matt. I’m sure they’d be happy to have you bless their next conference with your presence. Some of them are, after all, former libertarians. There’s always time to bring them back into the fold.
The truth is that when you interact with movement-Objectivism at, say, the APA what you’re doing is lending the movement respectability it doesn’t deserve, and couldn’t acquire in any other way. You’re also strengthening a series of front organizations who do what they can to exclude whomever they deem their ideological enemies from participation in the very events in which you might be participating. Feel free to say that you don’t care or have other priorities–I sympathize, because I did the same for so long–but it probably isn’t a good idea to invoke the accusation of “conspiracy theorizing” to deny that it’s happening, when, like Zwolinski, you conspicuously (and avowedly) have no idea what you’re talking about. And would rather not learn.
While making my way through B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity a few days ago, I happened across this passage at the beginning of the book, a characteristically blunt criticism of ancient Greek philosophy, and in particular, of Aristotle’s philosophy of science:
Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior. Greek physics and biology are now of historical interest only (no modern physicist or biologist would turn to Aristotle for help), but the dialogues of Plato are still assigned to students and cited as if they threw light on human behavior. Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs (p. 3).
Armand Marie Leroi is a scientist, and Aristotle is his hero. This conjunction is interesting because, in the official telling of modern science’s origins, Aristotle is hardly regarded as heroic. Instead he’s portrayed as the obstacle over which the early heroes of the scientific revolution — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo — had to leap in order to impose a genuinely explanatory methodology over the often deceptive input of sense perception.
This one, too:
…Leroi’s heart belongs to Aristotle, who not only was, like him, an enthusiastic student of biology, particularly of zoology, but who also, unlike Plato, was besotted by the world of appearances. Aristotle, as Leroi makes wonderfully clear, exemplifies one kind of scientific aptitude. He was an enthralled observer of the natural world, bedazzled by data, seeking causal explanations not in abstract numbers but in concrete details acquired through avid sense perception.
Likewise this bit of verbal behavior from Leroi himself:
“As I contemplate the elaborate tapestry of his [Aristotle’s] science, and compare it to ours, I conclude that we can now see his intentions and accomplishment more clearly than any previous age has seen them and that, if this is so, it is because we have caught up with him.”
A far cry from Skinner’s assessment, to say the least.
I haven’t read Leroi’s book myself, but while browsing it online, I was intrigued to discover that Leroi quotes from or cites recent work on Aristotle’s philosophy of science by (among others) Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox. I single those two scholars out because Gotthelf in particular had made it his life’s task to rehabilitate Aristotle’s reputation as an epistemologist, scientist, biologist, and philosopher of science in explicit opposition to mainstream views like Skinner’s; Lennox was his long-time associate and partner in the endeavor. Gotthelf tells the story of his engagement with Aristotle and lays out the case for intellectual rehabilitation in his 2012 book, Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology. Suffice it to say that for Gotthelf, it all began with Ayn Rand—specifically with Rand’s 1963 review of John Herman Randall’s 1960 book, Aristotle.* This passage from Rand’s review must surely have had something to do with it:
Above all, this book [Randall’s Aristotle] is important culturally, as a step in the right direction, as a recognition of the fact that the great physician needed by our dying science of philosophy is Aristotle–that if we are to emerge from the intellectual shambles of the present, we can do it only by means of an Aristotelian approach. (Review of Randall’s Aristotle, in The Voice of Reason, p. 12)
If Leroi’s defense of Aristotle is any indication, Gotthelf and Lennox seem to have succeeded at their task of making a scientist out of Aristotle–and of starting the first chest compressions on Philosophy.
This passage from Rand’s review, in retrospect, has a kind of subtle interest to it:
The best parts of Professor Randall’s book are Chapters VIII, IX, and XI, particularly this last. In discussing the importance of Aristotle’s biological theory and the ‘biological motivation of Aristotle’s thought’, he brings out an aspect of Aristotle which has been featured too seldom in recent discussions and which is much more profound than the question of Aristotle’s ‘functionalism’: the central place given to living entities, to the phenomenon of life, in Aristotle’s philosophy.
For Aristotle, life is not an inexplicable, supernatural mystery, but a fact of nature. And consciousness is a natural attribute of living entities, their natural power, their specific mode of action—not an unaccountable element in a mechanistic universe, to be explained away somehow in terms of inanimate matter, nor a mystic miracle incompatible with physical reality, to be attributed to some occult source in another dimension. …
Life—and its highest form, man’s life—is the central fact in Aristotle’s view of reality. The best way to describe it is to say that Aristotle’s philosophy is “biocentric.” (pp. 10-11).
Granted, some of what Rand says here is debatable and slightly tendentious. For one thing, it’s unclear whether Aristotle has a word for or the concept of “consciousness”; so it’s unclear whether he could discuss consciousness under anything like that description. For another, as Goldstein aptly points out (and Jonathan Lear and others have pointed out before her), “Aristotle can’t be entirely naturalized.” The supernatural plays an obvious role in Plato, but there are gods in Aristotle, too.
That said, I do think Rand was on to something, and that she verbalized the insight long before it became fashionable to do so. I think she’s right about Randall’s book; those are the best chapters in it. She’s also right to emphasize the biological motivation and character of Aristotle’s thought, and was right that as of 1963, that part of Aristotle had gotten relatively little attention. (The sustained attention began with the pioneering work of David Balme in the 1970s.) On a more technical note, Rand is also right, I think, to suggest that the attempt to interpret Aristotle as a “functionalist” was an anachronistic red herring. And she’s also right that Aristotle has something to teach us about the “meaning of life,” whether in the sense of zoe or of bios or the relation between them.
I’ve been beating up a bit on Rand here lately, but I regard her valorization (and popularization) of Aristotle as both insightful and prescient. Among other things, it had the salutary and intended consequence of motivating a small cottage of industry of scholars to give Aristotle the scholarly attention he deserves, with a view to bringing what they learned with them into contemporary philosophy. The cottage industry I have in mind included Gotthelf and includes Lennox, of course, but it also includes Neera Badhwar, Jurgis Brakas, Roderick Long, Robert Mayhew, Kelly Rogers, and Fred Miller, and more recently, Greg Salmieri, Corinne Bloch, Monte Johnson, Mariska Leunissen, and PoT’s own Carrie-Ann Biondi.** In fact, a sociologist of knowledge would have an interesting story to tell about how we got from the sea creatures in Aristotle’s lagoon to Leroi’s book–via Aristotle, John Dewey, John Herman Randall, Ayn Rand, David Balme, B.F. Skinner, and Allan Gotthelf (and the other scholars I just mentioned). I wonder whether anyone will end up telling it.
Incidentally, Reason Papers is looking for a review of Leroi’s book. If you’d like to do the review, or know someone who might or would, please contact Carrie-Ann Biondi or me via the journal.
**This list consists of Aristotle scholars either (a) directly influenced by Rand to go into Aristotle scholarship, or (b) mentored by people highly influenced by Rand. Obviously, it’s not meant to be an exhaustive list of prominent Aristotle scholars, or confined to people necessarily influenced by Rand.
Postscript, December 8, 2014: I just noticed this interesting piece on Leroi’s book at Daily Beast from a few months back (hat-tip: Edward Feser). I was amused by this passage:
Some of his observations about animals appear equally bizarre. He reports that the European bison fires caustic dung when pursued and that the trunk of an elephant is in fact a snorkeling device that allows it to swim. He even claims that hen partridges conceive just by smelling the scent of males.
As the author later points out:
It was only fairly recently that two of Aristotle’s seemingly bizarre claims were actually confirmed….[E]lephants do occasionally use their trunks as snorkels while swimming.
Confirmation from Google Images, the omniscient source:
Policy of Truth 