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Anything Goes: Further Studies in American Foreign Policy (Veterans Day Edition)

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Pausing to observe American foreign policy in the making is like pausing to observe a car wreck on the highway: there’s no point in doing it, but there are times when it really can’t be helped. It’s always just the same gruesome scene, but today is Veteran’s Day, so there’s no averting one’s eyes from the mechanism that creates the veterans we’re supposed to be “celebrating.” In honor of that day, today’s blog post will be an exercise in decoding the euphemisms of war-talk, and translating them into our wholesome native tongue.

The lead story in yesterday’s New York Times was, “Obstacles Limit Targets and Pace of Strikes on ISIS.” Three passages in it are particularly instructive. Here’s the first:

President Obama’s decision last week to double the number of American trainers and advisers in Iraq, to about 3,000, and request more than $5 billion from Congress for military operations against the Islamic State was viewed as clear acknowledgment of the challenges in fighting a limited war. They are especially acute when Washington’s allies on the ground in Iraq and Syria need far more training to battle a formidable adversary that offers little in the way of clear targeting.

In an interview broadcast Sunday, Mr. Obama said he had made his decision, announced Friday, in order to accelerate the mission by taking a set of fresh, if incremental, steps toward greater involvement.

“What it signals is a new phase,” the president said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“What we knew was that phase one was getting an Iraqi government that was inclusive and credible, and we now have done that,” he said. “And so now what we’ve done is rather than just try to halt ISIL’s momentum, we’re now in a position to start going on some offense. The airstrikes have been very effective in degrading ISIL’s capabilities and slowing the advance that they were making. Now what we need is ground troops, Iraqi ground troops, that can start pushing them back.”

Here’s the second:

“The airstrikes are buying us time. They aren’t going to solve the problem by themselves,” said Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff and a former top commander in Iraq. “It’s going to take people on the ground, ground forces.”

General Odierno said the priority was developing “indigenous forces” to retake territory from ISIS. “Over time, if that’s not working, then we’re going to have to reassess, and we’ll have to decide whether we think it’s worth putting other forces in there, to include U.S. forces,” he said.

And here’s the third:

Senior American commanders are preaching patience and warning against trying to replay previous air campaigns on the shifting battlefield of Iraq.

“Every air campaign is different and can’t be a reflection of a past one,” said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey G. Lofgren of the Air Force, the deputy commander of coalition air forces in the Middle East. “A lot of people would like us to drop hundreds of bombs and make the problem go away, but it’s not that kind of war.”

The first passage tells us that we have entered a war that can only be won by the use of ground troops. The two possibilities for the use of grounds troops are either Iraqi troops or American troops. Iraqi troops cannot win the war, but the passage tells us that while we are doubling the military advisers we send to Iraq, we will not be sending American troops there. If this sounds like a classic case of willing the end but not willing the means, maybe it does because that’s what it is.

The second passage, asserted by a subordinate of the president, tells us that in fact, we will have to send American troops, whether the president likes it or not. This claim has the merit of willing the end and willing the necessary and available means to it. It has the demerit of contradicting what the president just supposedly said. It remains unclear whether Odierno is defying the president, in collusion with the president, or simply hasn’t gotten his story straight. The bottom line, however, is that what he says about the insertion of U.S. troops contradicts the president’s assurances that they won’t be sent.

As we all know, anything follows from a contradiction. So what the conjunction of Obama’s and Odierno’s claims amount to is: anything goes.

The third passage, asserted by a subordinate of the president’s subordinate, tells us simultaneously that the war’s course is unpredictable, inscrutable, and discontinuous with past experience–and that it is a war of a knowable and determinate kind, a fact known by past experience of wars of that kind.

That’s a contradiction, too. So the third passage, like the conjunction of the first two, underscores the same message: anything goes.

When it comes to the conduct of our foreign policy, what I think we’re being told is that anything goes. Given that, this video strikes me as the only fitting response to the absurdities of our military leaders.

 

I’d like to think that we’re bound to answer when they propose.

On a more serious note, in honor of Veterans Day (or more precisely, of the veterans themselves) please consider making a donation to the Walter Reed Society, or some comparable organization. Huge numbers of veterans still need our help–and at this rate, indefinitely will.

Interstellar

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I saw “Interstellar” last night–somewhat pathetically, the third film I’ve managed to see in the theaters this calendar year. (The other two were “Omar” and “Atlas Shrugged 3.”) My advice: ignore the nay-saying critics and see it. I didn’t quite understand it, and haven’t quite digested it, but absolutely do not regret having seen the 10:30 pm showing, and staying until 1:20 am.

The two best reviews I read were A.O. Scott’s in The New York Times, and Dana Stevens’s in Slate.  The film does have some flaws, however,  and David Denby’s review in The New Yorker is a painless guide to them.

P.S., Before the feature presentation, I saw a preview for a forthcoming Ridley Scott film, “Exodus: Gods and Kings.” I’ll probably be there when it opens in December, but I’m kind of hoping we don’t get the ancient historical reprise of the other “Exodus” film.  I have to admit that one of these days, I’d really like to see a film version of the Exodus story as depicted from the Canaanite perspective: “Promised Land: Invasion of the Yahwists.” Rated NC-17 for violence and potentially unsettling political implications.

Postscript 2, November 12, 2014. Here’s an interesting real-life postscript to the movie, the European Space Agency’s successful landing of its spaceship Rosetta/Philae on Comet 67P/Churuyomov-Gerasimenko.

Postscript 3, November 16, 2014 (HERE BE SPOILERS): The ending of “Interstellar” seems preposterous to those of unschooled in the relevant physics, but from what I’ve been reading, it’s basically on-target (not that I know). I saw a piece by Neil deGrasse Tyson that gave a scientific thumbs-up to the film, but I lost track of it, so here’s a piece from Time that seems to come to the same conclusions.

Postscript 4, November 20, 2014 (MORE SPOILERS!). The commentary on “Interstellar” keeps coming, and I keep reading it. Here’s an  intelligent piece by Dennis Overbye, mostly focused on the science of the film.

By contrast, David Brooks, who focuses on the non-scientific elements of the film, is predictably vacuous, as he is on most subjects. Brooks is right that the film offers some insightful depictions of non-romantic love. But this gets things wildly wrong:

On top of that, there is an even more attenuated love. It’s the love humans have for their ancestors and the love they have for the unborn. In the movie, 12 apostles go out alone into space to look for habitable planets. They are sacrificing their lives so that canisters of frozen embryos can be born again in some place far away.

Nolan wants us to see the magnetic force of these attachments: The way attachments can exert a gravitational pull on people who are separated by vast distances or even by death. Their attention is riveted by the beloved. They hunger for reunion.

Actually, you could more plausibly argue that Nolan wants us to see the perversity of such attachments–attachments to potential beings that require the sacrifice of actual ones. Can we really love our distant and anonymous ancestors, much less love frozen embryos? The claim is simply preposterous, and ignores what the film is really about.

More Brooksoid blather:

Bloggers have noticed the religious symbols in the movie. There are those 12 apostles, and there’s a Noah’s ark. There is a fallen angel named Dr. Mann who turns satanic in an inverse Garden of Eden. The space project is named Lazarus. The heroine saves the world at age 33. There’s an infinitely greater and incorporeal intelligence offering merciful salvation.

The Audacity of Hope: Studies in American Foreign Policy

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From this morning’s New York Times, “Obama to Send 1,500 More Troops to Assist Iraq“:

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:

The case against the Objectivist Movement, redux: David Harriman on the shoals of integrity

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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.

It’s Alive! The Creatures from Aristotle’s Lagoon

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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).

By some great irony, I happened to open this morning’s New York Times Book Review and found a review there, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, of Armand Marie Leroi’s new book, Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. I found this passage from the review positively reinforcing:

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.

*The book was published a year before, and reviewed in Reason Papers about a month before, Gotthelf’s death; I don’t know whether he saw the review or not.

**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:

Happy Halloween

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Halloween has, for as long as I can remember, been the only holiday I’ve ever been able to take seriously or wholeheartedly to celebrate. As an ex-Muslim, I have a certain affection for Ramadan, but Ramadan isn’t really a holiday, and unfortunately, none of the Muslim holidays (the Eids) are seasonal, seasonality being an essential property of a real holiday. (In fact, generally speaking, Muslims have trouble figuring out when exactly their holidays are supposed to take place–another liability of being a member of that faith.) Having spent a decade in a Jewish household, I have some affection for some of the Jewish holidays–Yom Kippur and Passover, though not Hannukah or Purim–but always with the mild alienation that accompanies the knowledge that a holiday is not one’s own: it’s hard to be inducted into a holiday tradition in your late 20s, as I was. I like the general ambience of Christmastime, at least in the NY/NJ Metro Area, but unfortunately, once you take the Christ out of Christmas, you take much of the meaning out of it as well–Christmas without Midnight Mass being an anemic affair, and Midnight Mass without Christ being close to a contradiction in terms. Not being a Christian, I find it hard to put Christ back into Christmas, mostly because I have trouble putting him anywhere at all.

The secular holidays are, I’m afraid, a sorry set of excuses for holidays. I’ve trashed Columbus Day on this blog, Independence Day on another, and I endorse Christopher Hitchens’s description of New Year’s Eve as the “worst night of the year” (and U2’s description of the Day as essentially unremarkable). Thanksgiving is too damn complicated, given its connection to family, and the political holidays (Presidents’ Day, MLK Day, Memorial Day, Veterans’ Day) are either too political, too contrived, and/or too somber to count as real holidays. Labor Day is a day off, not a holiday. It’s not the same thing.

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So what’s left? The purest, most innocent, most seasonally appropriate, most nostalgic, and most celebratory of all holidays, Halloween. I’ll concede this much: El dia de los muertos, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day are all perfectly respectable cousin-holidays to Halloween and fit for post-Halloween celebrations, but their value supervenes on that of Halloween; in and of themselves, they don’t quite cut it, at least for me. (Scary thought: only a philosopher could manage to use the words “supervene” and “Halloween” in the same sentence.) What all four holidays have in common is a properly autumnal and properly macabre preoccupation with mortality, which is the only point of having a holiday in the first place. The point of a holiday is to celebrate life  in the shadow of death–in the full knowledge that it’s there, lurking in the shadows and crevices of life, and in the full knowledge that though it’s there, we could care less.

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It’s a near tragic fact that Halloween itself almost went extinct. I have nostalgic memories of Halloween from childhood, but sometime in the mid-80s, Halloween’s luster was dimmed by a series of candy poisonings, razor-bladed apples, and other scares (or so we were led to believe); I distinctly remember when Halloween was cancelled–abolished, outlawed–in my town in the mid-80s. It took a long time for the holiday to recover from its de jure abolition, and  just as it seemed to have been doing so, it was cancelled two years in a row in the Metro Area for climatological reasons–for the freak snowstorm of 2011, and then for Hurricane Sandy in 2012. It made a comeback last year, and I’m hoping it makes a bigger one this year. All systems appear to be “go” for a comeback: Halloween falls on a Friday this year; the weather is supposed to be perfect; and judging from the neighborhoods I’ve seen across north Jersey, everyone–infants, adults, and everyone in-between–is more than ready to celebrate.

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Every holiday has an aesthetic, and needs artwork to match. In recent times, I’d nominate Tim Burton as the Master Artist of Halloween. Going further back in time, I might award that title to Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, or Washington Irving. (I know, I know: Poe or Hawthorne should be in there, but they do less for me. Feel free to come up with your own nominations and leave them in the comments.) Anyway, over the years I’ve been surprised to discover how many people–or at least, how many Americans between the ages of 20 and 50–have childhood  memories of listening to some version of Camille Saint-Saens’s little piece, “Danse Macabre,” around Halloween-time. I myself remember listening to a version of it playing over an animated “filmstrip” (remember those?) of dancing skeletons, care of my grade-school music teacher, Mrs. Davidson–to whom I’m eternally grateful. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a video version of the filmstrip anywhere. That said, there are lots of versions of “Danse Macabre” online; I couldn’t quite find the perfect one, but this one had the right quirkiness about it. Enjoy.

P.S., For a more musically satisfying version of “Danse Macabre,” check out Clara Cernat and Thierry Huillet’s version for violin and piano, just a click away once the preceding clip finishes.

P.S., October 31, 2014: Here’s an amusing piece from the Times’s “Friday Files,” on Halloween celebrations from back in the day–1895, 1914, and 1926.

P.S., November 1, 2014: Well, Halloween certainly made a comeback in my area. Here’s a link to a local news story about the house featured in my header (which I’ll keep up for the rest of the weekend). You probably don’t want to miss this extremely frightening 38 second video:

It does seem to me that the general character of Halloween has changed since my day (the 70s and 80s) to accommodate the helicopter-parent/over-regulatory/risk-averse sensibilities of the modern age. Carrie-Ann Biondi points out to me that in most north Jersey towns, Halloween has now, by municipal fiat, been ordered to take place between the hours of 6 pm and 8 pm. So if you trick-or-treat before 6 or after 8, you’re breaking the law. And true to form, around 7:45, the po-po came by to clear everyone off the streets. There was a huge, festive block party in one of the decorated neighborhoods of Glen Ridge–the crowd there was in the hundreds–but most of the other streets were empty. So the trend is now toward adult-“organized” partying rather than the old undirected play of yore. I suppose that adult-organized is safer–and as with anything with the word “adult” in it, certainly has more sex appeal–than old-fashioned trick-or-treating, but it does seem to me that something’s been lost.

I can’t end this rant without saying that our municipalities need some push-back as far as their over-regulation of ordinary life is concerned. Libertarians and others spend a lot of time complaining about the over-reaching powers of the federal government, but the truth is that municipalities need to be curtailed as much as any other branch of our over-zealous government. There doesn’t seem to be any aspect of life immune to the paternalism of municipal ordinance (and lots of ordinary life that needs more regulation than it gets). Maybe that’s an argument for spending less time on blogs and more in town council meetings, pushing back on the people in Town Hall who perpetually seem to want to push the rest of us a bit too far.

Incidentally, Kate Herrick points out to me that my anti-non-Halloween rant missed Easter–true enough–about which I’d say more or less what I said about Christmas.

One last PS: Some examples of the paternalism I mentioned before, care of Carrie-Ann Biondi:

1. Seven weird laws regulating Halloween from various places.

2.  Snowhill, Maryland reserves the right to re-schedule Halloween at will, and prohibits masks for anyone over the age of 12.

3. More age limits.

4. Yet another curfew, from Fishkill, New York.

I try to keep the language clean here at PoT, but honestly, these laws seem pretty fucked up to me.

Respondeo:

Refuse! Resist!

The first thing we do, let’s criticize all the lawyers

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I stick it to the lawyers’ guild at this discussion at Lawyerist.com. I’m responding to Sam Glover (and others), “Why Are Lawyers So Expensive? I’ll Tell You Why.” As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t.

Ironically, I’m the Pre-Law Advisor at Felician College.

I might add that some of my best friends are lawyers. Seriously.

Postscript, November 2, 2014: I was away for most of the weekend, so I didn’t visit Lawyerist.com to see how the Expensive-but-So-Totally-Worth-It lawyers had responded to my criticisms of their special pleading for their inflated fees. I just did.

In four days, the author of the piece, Sam Glover, who conspicuously “LOL’d” my initial comment, has backed off, shut up, and moved on without responding to anything I said. I’ve now asked another commenter, who admitted to increasing his fees on the basis of snap judgments of his clients’ “unrealistic expectations,” whether he’d be willing to universalize that judgment and allow service providers in other fields–doctors, therapists, mechanics, plumbers, educational institutions, insurance companies–to do the same without legal interference, oversight, or regulation. I’m morbidly curious to hear the answer.

It’s not that I lack respect for the legal profession as such. It’s a necessary and valuable profession with many noble practitioners. Nor do I much mind that such people have large incomes and live accordingly. What I mind is how many others of them are arrogant, misologistic sophists who thrive on the undeserved deference they get in our society, and who, despite their inflated egos, six-figure incomes, and delusional self-conceptions, cannot argue their way out of a paper bag. There are plenty of lawyers out there fitting that description, and a great number of them seem to congregate at Lawyerist.com. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them billed for being there–in which case I don’t mind giving them a run for their money. Unfortunately, I can’t bill for it, but philosophers don’t live by bread alone.

By the way, I should probably add that not only are some of my best friends lawyers, but so are some of my best former students!

Crime and emergencies (part 2): reconciling self-defense and gun control

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For obvious reasons, people are talking a lot about guns nowadays. I’m a big fan of gun control, and make no bones about being one. It’s always seemed to me that gun control follows from a commitment to the idea of government as having a legitimate monopoly on the use of force, and not being an anarchist, I endorse the relevant commitment. I’m also committed to a right of self-defense, which in my view entails a right to the most efficacious means of self-defense compatible with the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. As far as life in the U.S. is concerned, as I see it, that entails a circumscribed (hence regulated) right to acquire firearms for purposes of self-defense. In other countries where guns are themselves scarce, I would have no objection to an outright ban on the acquisition of firearms by private citizens. But guns aren’t scarce in the United States, and there is no justified or realistic way of banning them outright. (For a discussion of the perils and problematics of weapons control, check out my inadvertently timely Reason Papers piece, “The Contested Legacies of Waco.” For an excellent discussion of the empirical issues regarding gun control, see James Jacobs, Can Gun Control Work?)

In a democracy, a political position is only as strong as the weakest link in the constituency that supports it. Put another way, a political position is only as strong as its supporters’ ability to deal with the strongest objection to it. One of the reasons why gun control has done so poorly in the U.S. (in the sense of not commanding adequate political support) is undoubtedly that the NRA has too much power. But another reason is the sheer cluelessness of so many of those who defend it.

The cluelessness concerns a relatively obvious question. Suppose you believe in the justifiability of gun control. Still, people have a right to self-defense. If there are lots of guns out there, and lots of criminals with the desire to use them against the innocent, how do we ensure that our justifiable desire to regulate the sale and acquisition of firearms doesn’t subvert the equally justifiable desire to sell or acquire them in the exercise of a right of self-defense? That’s a problem that requires a solution. It’s not a rhetorical question that one can evade or dismiss as having been manufactured by the NRA or Smith & Wesson.

I realize that the desire for self-defense can be abused or exaggerated via grandiose superhero fantasies, errors of probabilistic reasoning, confirmation bias, hasty generalization and so on, but so can the desire for regulation. When all is said and done, it is just patently obvious that if we have a right of self-defense, we need access to the means of its exercise, and if criminals have firearms, non-criminals need (regulated) access to them as well in order to defend themselves against armed criminals. But no. Defenders of gun control have decided that what we’re to do when faced with armed and dangerous criminals is to reach for our phones and call 911. Presumably, the criminals will give us the time to do this, and all will go well as we wait for the police to arrive. If we cannot manage to call 911, well then, we’re out of luck. We must acquiesce in whatever the criminals want and let them have their way. Even Hobbes doesn’t go as far as that in Leviathan, but that hasn’t stopped defenders of gun control from recommending subservience to the commands of those who wield force against the rest of us. The resort to quixotic, primitive denial of obvious facts about crime has, in certain quarters, become the epitome of “liberal” sophistication.

Consider a column in this morning’s New York Times by Gail Collins, easily the most clueless of the Times’s columnists. I happen to agree with much of what she says in defense of gun control. Then, predictably, we reach this set of claims:

And while we have many, many, many things to worry about these days, the prospect of an armed stranger breaking through the front door and murdering the family is not high on the list. Unless the intruder was actually a former abusive spouse or boyfriend, in which case a background check would have been extremely helpful in keeping him unarmed.

Really? How about an armed stranger breaking in through the back door? Or a window? Doesn’t it matter where one lives? Maybe Gail Collins feels safe in her neighborhood, but does that mean that everyone should feel equally safe in theirs?

As it happens, an intruder tried to break into my apartment this past Sunday night or Monday morning through the living room window. I was asleep in my unlocked bedroom a few yards away. He or they didn’t manage to break all the way in, and didn’t ever get inside; they just managed to cut the screen of the window with a box cutter, and then to discover that it probably wasn’t worth breaking into this particular apartment, possibly because there was so little in it worth stealing. That didn’t stop them (I’m assuming it was the same people) from successfully breaking into a number of other dwellings in my neighborhood that same night.

Since the local police blotter hasn’t yet come out, I don’t know whether the intruders in question were armed, and don’t know whether anyone managed to confront them or get injured in the process. But people are regularly robbed in my neighborhood, and occasionally those robberies go wrong; when they do, the victims are sometimes shot. Rapes take place here with alarming frequency. The cars in the parking lot of my apartment complex have regularly been broken into during the year that I’ve lived here. On a more trivial but rather annoying note, my New York Times (like the Luddite I am, I still get the paper version) is stolen at least once every two weeks. Lesson: crime is real.

Though this Monday’s incident was my first break in in this particular neighborhood, it’s not the first time I’ve had to deal with a break-in. It’s the third. On one occasion, someone tried to break into my bedroom via the window as I was sleeping: the window in question was maybe a yard away from me, and it was unnerving to be awakened by the sound of someone forcing the window so close to my ear. I wasn’t armed, but I had no choice but to confront him. There really wasn’t time to find the phone and call the police. I guess I was threatening enough to scare him away—I must have been reading Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or something–but I’d rather have been armed. On another occasion, I happened on someone in the process of breaking into my car (luckily, he was too busy trying to steal it to notice me). In that case, I was able to call the police, and they happened to get there in less than a minute, but as they apprehended the suspect, he made it clear to everyone that he meant me harm beyond the theft of my car (he came out and said so). I’ve never been carjacked myself, but I’ve seen a carjacking take place at a hundred yards’ distance, and a good friend of mine has been carjacked. A distant friend of mine was put in the hospital after being robbed, and the spouse of someone I know was murdered in a robbery. (P.S., on a different note: I’ve also faced a menacing individual wielding a gun in a park–to this day I’m not sure whether the gun was real or fake–so I know what it’s like to be on the terror-laden receiving end of what seemed like imminent gun violence. Having a gun of my own would not have helped in that instance, and using one would probably have led to a blood bath.)

None of this (I think) is particularly remarkable as far as suburban New Jersey experience is concerned; I don’t think I’m some kind of wild statistical crime-experience outlier. What I don’t understand is why such experiences are so distant from people like Gail Collins as to be unreal to them. But alas, they’re not unreal. They happen, and they have to figure into the discussion about gun control with a degree of respect for the victims that liberals like Gail Collins conspicuously seem to lack.

Here is another example, also from The New York Times, admittedly at a higher level of sophistication and respect for facts than Collins’s column. It’s by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, and (at least indirectly) an erstwhile graduate school mentor of mine.

Our discussions typically start from the right to own a gun, go on to ask how, if at all, that right should be limited, and wind up with intractable disputes about the balance between the right and the harm that can come from exercising it. I suggest that we could make more progress if each of us asked a more direct and personal question: Should I own a gun?

A gun is a tool, and we choose tools based on their function. The primary function of a gun is to kill or injure people or animals. In the case of people, the only reason I might have to shoot them — or threaten to do so — is that they are immediately threatening serious harm. So a first question about owning a gun is whether I’m likely to be in a position to need one to protect human life. A closely related question is whether, if I were in such a position, the gun would be available and I would be able to use it effectively.

Unless you live in (or frequent) dangerous neighborhoods or have family or friends likely to threaten you, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need a gun for self-defense. Further, counterbalancing any such need is the fact that guns are dangerous. If I have one loaded and readily accessible in an emergency (and what good is it if I don’t?), then there’s a non-negligible chance that it will lead to great harm. A gun at hand can easily push a family quarrel, a wave of depression or a child’s curiosity in a fatal direction.

Gutting at least recognizes the possibility that those who live in dangerous neighborhoods may need a gun for self-defense. But he makes the point in passing, with grudging reluctance, and without feeling the need to ask some obvious questions about the implications of his own admission.

Gutting’s claim implies that if you do live in a “dangerous neighborhood” there is some likelihood that you might need a gun for self-defense (assuming that you get the training to use it, etc.) At least, it’s rational in some contexts to think you do. But what exactly is a “dangerous neighborhood”? A “dangerous neighborhood” is presumably where the armed criminals are. So where is that? And how does one figure it out?

One could look at published rates of crime or look at crime blotters. But crime rates change and crime blotters are statistically unreliable snapshots of reported crimes during a given week. (And reported crime is not crime.) Further, criminals are not universally stupid or lacking in means of transportation: they have an entrepreneurial attitude toward criminality. No entrepreneur worth her salt would open a small business based on the kind of information that determines conventional attitudes toward “dangerous” or “safe” neighborhoods. Decisions of that kind require refined and intensive local knowledge and a measure of sheer guesswork. They’re also highly fallible. Given that, putting aside obvious mistakes or errors of judgment, there is no way to get on some epistemic high horse and proclaim that one ought only to open a psychotherapy office in a “psychotherapy-heavy neighborhood,” or a restaurant in a “dining-out neighborhood,” or a grocery store in a “grocery neighborhood.” Judgments about where to open a business are highly tentative and fluid, mostly vindicated by the results of the experiment rather than by some antecedent facts obviously available to everyone at t.

The same is true of crime. There is no such thing as a neighborhood that is “dangerous” now and forever. Danger fluctuates. Criminals migrate.  Yesterday’s dangerous neighborhood becomes safe. Yesterday’s safe neighborhood becomes dangerous. I am not sure where Gutting gets his armchair sociologist’s picture of “dangerous neighborhoods” sporting banners that say “Dangerous Neighborhood” above them. In my experience, such banners do not exist. If you want to insist on the concept of “dangerous neighborhood,” you’d have to say that the whole of the New York/New Jersey Metro Area is a “dangerous neighborhood.” I can’t think of any location in New Jersey that I would regard as somehow immune to criminal violence. If that’s so, Gutting’s “dangerous neighborhood” advice is a pious gun control vacuity. It gives no clear advice about where one can legitimately own a gun because it appeals to a concept that has no clear criteria of application.

I’ve visited neighborhoods in southwestern Vermont where people leave their doors unlocked at night or when they leave their homes because they regard themselves as living in “safe neighborhoods.” But their safe neighborhoods would become dangerous the moment it occurred to criminals that their inhabitants were complacent enough to regard their neighborhoods as “safe.” No one would be naïve enough to believe that Vermont is a crime-free zone. Crime takes place there. That it takes place more in some areas of the state than others doesn’t mean that those statistical distributions are facts of nature. They can change without warning. Most people would encourage people who don’t lock their doors to rethink their complacency. I’d do the same for those who think that guns are obviously superfluous in supposedly “safe” neighborhoods.

No neighborhood is so safe that you can, without further thought, leave yourself totally vulnerable to criminal depredation in one. Any neighborhood could be a dangerous one the day the right criminal shows up in it. So whether one “needs” a gun or not for self-defense is far more complicated a matter than Gutting admits. He himself piles up the complications for his view without seeing that they undercut the supposedly clear-cut claim he makes that most of us do not need guns.

Until defenders of gun control wise up and deal with the problem of crime as an unpredictable emergency that could strike anyone, gun control has no chance of success in this country. In this respect, its defenders are almost as much to blame for its political failure as its opponents.

Postscript, April 25, 2016: This article about crime in San Francisco is a nice confirmation of the point I make in the preceding few paragraphs, not that I’m suggesting that the criminals described in it should necessarily be shot.

O Canada

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Here’s a post worth reading by Mike Reid (Notes on Liberty), on recent events in Canada.

Despite its overt religiosity, I like their national anthem better than ours. I’d sing it in honor of them…but I doubt my singing would count as an honor to anyone.

Hey Canada: don’t let the bastards wear you down, eh?

P.S., a bit later the same day: A “resolutely Canadian” reader draws my attention to Justin Trudeau’s apt speech on the attacks, probably better than anything I can muster up right now, and also (unlike me) authentically Canadian. An excerpt:

In the days that follow, there will be questions, anger and perhaps confusion. This is natural, but we cannot let it get the better of us. Losing ourselves to fear and speculation is the intention of those who commit these heinous acts.

They mean to shake us. We will remain resolved.

They want us to forget ourselves. Instead, we should remember.

We should remember who we are. We are a proud democracy, a welcoming and peaceful nation, and a country of open arms and open hearts. We are a nation of fairness, justice and the rule of law.

We will not be intimidated into changing that.

If anything, these are the values and principles to which we must hold on even tighter. Our dedication to democracy and the institutions we have built is the foundation of our society. And a continued belief in both will guide us correctly into the future. Staying true to our values in a time of crisis will make us an example to the world.

I don’t usually think of Canada as an “example to the world,” but after the job we’ve done of it lately, I’m willing to give it a try.