Tag Archives: Objectivism

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.

Defining “emergency” (Part 1)

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I’m in the middle of editing, and writing a contribution for, Reason Papers’s forthcoming symposium on the epistemology, ethics, and politics of emergencies. (Though I’ll be contributing an essay to it, credit for the idea of the symposium goes to Carrie-Ann.) The topic turns out to be an amazingly interesting and fertile one, with ramifications in a number of directions, including the epistemology and semantics of definition; the application, scope, and stringency of moral principles; the scope and content of rights; the proper role of government; the rule of law; and so on.

The topic has been made particularly timely by a number of recent events–the recent Ebola outbreak; the state of emergency declared this past summer in Ferguson, Missouri after the riots; the states of emergency declared during Hurricane Sandy in 2012; the states of emergency that have been thought to obtain after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, etc. But those phenomena hardly exhaust the applications of ‘emergency’: once you start looking for emergencies, you find them everywhere, often in the most unlikely places. And then there are emergency-cognates, like disasters, catastrophes, crises, epidemics, and pandemics, as well as pseudo-emergencies of every kind.

At the most basic level, emergencies are events that are ontologically and normatively discontinuous from “normal” events. It’s part of the very concept of an emergency that it’s an exceptional sort of event, that it involves danger, and that it demands urgent attention and action. Given those facts, emergencies drastically affect the content and application of normative principles–epistemic, ethical, and political: principles that apply to ‘ordinary’ life don’t apply, or at least don’t apply in the same way, to emergencies. Ordinarily, we expect people to form their beliefs on the basis of the evidence for them–but in emergencies, guesses and hunches become acceptable. Ordinarily, we expect people not to kill, torture,  kidnap, steal from, trespass on, cheat, deceive, or manipulate others–but in the right kind of emergency (some would say) just about anything goes. Ordinarily, we’re governed by the rule of law, including constitutional law, but in emergencies, we either bend the rules, or are governed by open-ended edict or fiat. And so on.

Given this, emergencies give rise to a difficult dilemma in need of solution. On the one hand—call it the rigorist hand–there’s the danger that the invocation of “emergency exceptions” to moral principles serves as a rationalization or excuse for ad hoc exception-making. The concept of an “emergency” seems ill-defined and elastic, and “emergency exception” seems like a magic wand by which moral principles are undercut and effectively ignored. If we define “emergency” too broadly, every form of duress becomes an “emergency,” so that the concept loses its meaning, and emergency exceptions serve to subvert the stringency of the moral principles that are supposed to govern normal life. At a certain point, a moralist has to put his foot down and insist that duress requires the exertion of moral strength and endurance in the name of normality rather than exception-making in the name of abnormality. But the appeal to “emergencies” is one of the most seductive ways of evading this responsibility. From the rigorist perspective, then, emergencies are philosophically important primarily because we have to put them in their place. Emergencies, the rigorist insists, are marginal exceptions in life. We should cordon them off as essentially irrelevant to normal life, and focus our attention on the non-exceptional rules that govern normal life.

On the other hand—call it the pragmatist hand—there’s the danger that if we ignore emergencies, or minimize their significance or frequency, we ignore a real phenomenon that affects the proper application of moral principles. All principles, even the most stringent, apply within a specific and in-principle specifiable context. If we ignore the difference between emergencies and non-emergencies, we apply principles designed for one context to a context where they lack application. In doing so, we run the risk of sacrificing things of greater value to things of lesser value on the basis of a robotic commitment to empty verbal formulations masquerading as moral principles. In doing that, we risk the dangers of imposing pointless burdens on those suffering great duress, invoking “morality” as a pseudo-justification for our dogmatism. From this pragmatic perspective, we ought to take emergencies seriously because emergencies are an extreme instance of duress, and duress is a ubiquitous but easily-ignored part of our moral life. Goodness is fragile, and emergencies underscore that fact in an acute way.

The rigorist and pragmatic views are, of course, one-sided caricatures of possible positions. Each view gets something right, but each view ignores the merits of the other view, and thereby gets something wrong. A good dialectician would have to work through the two views, integrating their best insights, discarding what each view gets wrong, and fashioning an alternative to them that avoids the pitfalls of either view. The task would be to strike the mean between rigorist and pragmatist extremes.

I’ve argued elsewhere—very briefly and tentatively, in a footnote (p. 219 n.29)—that Ayn Rand appears to have been the first writer to have ‘thematized’ the topic of emergencies in twentieth-century English-speaking philosophy. (If I’m wrong about that, as I very well could be, I’d be interested to hear about it in the comments.) Her discussion appears in “The Ethics of Emergencies,” a 1963 essay published in her 1968 essay collection, The Virtue of Selfishness, and anthologized every now and then in philosophy textbooks. I have mixed feelings about the essay, as I do about much that Rand wrote.

On the “pro” side, I think she gets four or five things basically right.

(1) Most fundamentally, she gets the basic framing issue right:

It is important to differentiate between the rules of conduct in an emergency situation and the rules of conduct in normal conditions of human existence. This does not mean a double standard of morality: the standard and the basic principles remain the same, but their application to either case requires precise definitions. (Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 54).

In other words, some principles straddle emergencies and non-emergencies, retaining their identity across both contexts, but taking different forms in the one context as opposed to the other. Good theorizing keeps both facts in mind. It’s not enough for a theorist to insist on the sameness of the principles that apply to emergencies and non-emergencies; she has to explain how a principle can prescribe opposite courses of action in emergencies as opposed to emergencies and yet be the same principle. Nor is it sufficient for a theorist to insist on the need for exception-clauses in emergencies, based on the dissimilarity of emergencies to non-emergencies. She has to explain why the exception clauses exemplify the general and universally applicable principles that apply to both contexts. In other words, if it’s wrong to lie in ordinary life, but right to lie in an emergency, what needs explanation is what single principle is exemplified in both contexts, and how that single principle demands truth-telling in the one case and lying in the other. The constraint seems to me a plausible one, even if Rand herself doesn’t explain exactly how it works, and even though most theorists (in my experience) seem to violate or ignore it.

Having said that, it’s worth adding that some philosophers have emphasized the constraint. For better or worse, Mill does so in the last few paragraphs of Utilitarianism. A more recent example is Alasdair MacIntyre’s trio of papers on moral dilemmas and truth-telling in Part II of Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006). Another interesting discussion is Thomas Hill’s “Making Exceptions Without Abandoning the Principle: or How a Kantian Might Think about Terrorism,” in Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (1992). There are, of course, many others.

I think Rand gets some other things right.

(2) She’s right, I think, that the philosophical literature misuses emergencies and moral dilemmas to the point of systematically indulging in fallacious appeals to the emotions in order to induce readers to accept otherwise under-argued moral claims. (Peter Singer’s drowning child example is a paradigm of this approach–an approach my graduate school roommate Patrick Kain once aptly dubbed “The Argument by Surely Operator,” as in, “Surely, we would all save the child…”  Interestingly and counter-intuitively, both Singer and Rand regard it as utterly uncontroversial that one has an obligation to save the drowning child, but neither of them has an argument for it. I have never, in twenty years of reading on the subject, seen or heard a bona fide argument for saving the child beyond table-pounding appeals to intuition, consensus, or plain old emotion.)

(3) Unlike much of the literature, Rand insists on defining “emergency.” It’s amazing how much of the literature discusses emergencies without ever defining the term.

(4) Again, unlike most of the contemporary analytic literature, Rand’s definition of “emergency” takes the form of a definition by genus and specific difference (“An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event that…”) rather than biconditional equivalence (“An emergency takes place if and only if…”). This is a large topic, but I tend to think that the traditional Aristotelian format for definitions has advantages over the newer analytic one. I’m also inclined to think that Rand’s definition of “emergencies” is basically right, while admitting that she says nothing in defense of it, and admitting that any any adequate defense of it would probably require revisions to it.

Unfortunately, I also find Rand’s essay seriously defective. I see at least seven or eight basic problems.

(1) For one thing, though the essay is titled “The Ethics of Emergencies,” it’s not primarily about the ethics of emergencies at all. In my edition, the essay is about eight pages long, and is about a variety of topics, none of them particularly well developed. Rand opens the essay with a page-and-a-half-long well-poisoning polemic against the misuse of emergency scenarios in ethics. Another four pages go to a paradoxically illuminating but ill-argued explication of the egoistic basis of human relationships. A mere page and a half discusses emergencies. Another half page concludes the polemic against the misuse of emergency scenarios in ethics, focusing on the role that such scenarios play in defending altruism. Despite the title of the essay, then, the discussion of emergencies ends up being a mere afterthought to, and application of, the claims about the egoistic basis of human relationships. The cumulative result is that the essay is torn between at least two different topics–relationships and emergencies–and fails to do justice to either topic.  For that reason, though I think the essay has some worthwhile things to say, it is, on the whole, a failure.

There are other serious failures of argumentation in it, failures that have essentially gone undiscussed in the “literature” on the subject, almost all of it written by writers sympathetic to Rand. (For a notable exception, read pp. 100-104 of Carrie-Ann’s 2008 Reason Papers review of Tara Smith’s Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics.)

(2) In discussing egoistic relationships, Rand repeatedly stresses that a rational egoist forms a hierarchy of values, incorporates other people’s well-being into that hierarchy, and then treats others well-being as part of his own. What she doesn’t explain is how or why anyone would do that. Yes, if you incorporate others’ well-being into your own, you come to treat their well-being as part of your own, and thereby promote their good while promoting your own. But why would an egoist do that? What benefit does an egoist get by making the initial choice? She doesn’t explain. Her failure to explain would, by itself, merely be an omission rather than a defect in her view (or in the essay), but having omitted a discussion of that crucial topic, she then goes on to make very strong claims about the structure that a rational hierarchy of values would have to take, as well as the actions that would have to follow from its adoption. But unless she specifies the benefit that an egoist gets from doing as she prescribes, she’s not entitled to such claims. What we need but don’t get in the essay is a derivation of other-regard from egoistic self-interest, not a rhetorical deflection of the accusation that egoists are mean people.

(3) Rand divides her discussion of other-regard into two parts: how an egoist deals with his intimates, and how he deals with strangers. As for intimates, she says, we incorporate their welfare into ours based on their past track record of virtue. Roughly speaking, the more virtuous they are, the more deeply integrated into our own welfare; the less virtuous, the less so. Though there’s deep truth in this claim, it’s also a gigantic oversimplification. But never mind that for now; let’s accept it ex hypothesi. One problem is that it explains how egoistic relationships continue, not how they come to be. I can continue to incorporate your welfare in my hierarchy of values based on your past track record insofar as you have a past track record (with me). But there has to be some initial point at which you lacked a track record (with me). How then do relationships begin?

The same problem applies even more problematically to strangers. A stranger by definition has no track record with another stranger. So we can’t incorporate the welfare of strangers into our own on the basis of their past track record of virtue. What then do we do? Rand acknowledges the problem here, and claims to deal with it, but what she says is very compressed and obscure (p. 53). We grant a stranger a “generalized respect and good will,” she says, on the basis of “the potential value he represents” (my italics). Later she describes the rationale for this respect and good will as “a consequence, an extension, a secondary projection” of one’s own self-esteem (p. 53, my italics).

There’s an intriguing idea lurking here, but taken at face value Rand’s claims are pretty puzzling. Why does a stranger “represent” any value to me at all, especially if I’ll never see him again? And why does he “represent” value rather than straightforwardly being valuable to me (or not being so)? Elsewhere, in the context of the debate about abortion, Rand derides the idea that potentialities are morally significant (“Of Living Death,” reprinted in The Voice of Reason). There, she says, the embryo and fetus are merely potential human beings, hence not rights-holders. Here, however, the argument asserts that a stranger is potentially valuable, hence valuable. The latter inference seems ad hoc, and the two claims together seem inconsistent. Rand doesn’t seem to have had a consistent position on the normative significance of potentialities, a problem, I suspect, that lies at the heart of the common accusation that she has no adequate ethical account of children, the family, and moral patients.

Finally, the language of “projection” is equivocal and potentially problematic. What does it mean? Here are some possibilities:

  • We project the value of the stranger in the Goodman-Quine sense of treating his being-valuable-to-us as a “projectible” predicate.
  • We project the value of the stranger in the Humean or Freudian sense of ascribing to him traits that belong to us.
  • We project the value of the stranger simply in the sense of expressing our self-value in relation to him, treating him as its proper object and beneficiary.
  • Some combination of the preceding.
  • None of the preceding.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t say a word to decide between the options.

(4) Rand rather arbitrarily asserts that we ought to give assistance to strangers only in emergencies, but she never explains either the restriction or the ought:

  • Why help only in emergencies (as opposed to elsewhere)?
  • Why help in emergencies at all (as opposed to not helping even there)?

Again, she says little or nothing to clarify.

(5) Rand equivocates as to whether helping strangers in an emergency is a moral obligation (an “ought”) or merely a permission (a “may”). Sometimes she suggests that we ought to help strangers in an emergency (as long as the risks to us are “minimal”), implying that anyone who doesn’t help is morally defective, or lacking in virtue (specifically, lacking in integrity). Sometimes she suggests that we may help others in an emergency if we wish, but only if we do so from a sense of good will, and only if we want to, implying that we are not defective if we don’t help. Both claims can’t be right, and the latter claim contradicts Rand’s insistence, elsewhere, that her Objectivist Ethics is an ethic of conditional “necessities,” according to which every morally right act is a conditional imperative necessitated by “the conditionality of life” (“Causality Versus Duty,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It). Prima facie, a necessitated permission is a contradiction in terms.

(6) Having told us that we ought only to assist strangers in an emergency, Rand abruptly contradicts this claim, and tells us that it’s permissible to assist strangers in cases of illness or poverty that aren’t emergencies (p. 55). What she’s saying here may be a concession to commonsense, but in the context of the essay, it really seems like nonsense. Either we help others only in emergencies, or we help others in emergencies and elsewhere. We can’t have our “only” and eat it. An additional problem here is that her definition of “emergency” leaves no clear way of conceptualizing medical emergencies. But medical emergencies are a paradigm case of emergencies.

(7) Though I’m inclined to agree with her definition of “emergency,” she shows no awareness of how controversial it is, or of the most obvious objections that a reader might have to it (namely, that it seems too narrow). Even if I ended up agreeing with her definition, however, I’d have to disagree with her applications of it to cases.

(8) Rand conspicuously fails to meet her own adequacy-condition for a discussion of the subject, as described above.

For present purposes, as well as for purposes of my RP symposium contribution, I want to continue the task that Rand started–defining “emergency” by genus and specific difference. As I see it, the two basic definitional questions about emergencies are these:

(a) What are emergencies?

(b) Of what kinds of thing are emergencies properly predicated?

The two questions are verbally distinct but conceptually interconnected. Any answer to (a) probably constitutes an answer to (b), though I don’t think that the reverse is bound to be the case.

Rand defines an emergency as “an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible” (“Ethics of Emergencies,” p. 54). She adds, in elaboration of the definition, that “[i]n an emergency situation, men’s [sic] primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger, and restore normal conditions” (p. 54). Presumably by “men” she means “rational agents acting rationally”: men aren’t the only people who respond to emergencies, and some men fail to respond to them at all.

In any case, Rand takes “emergency” to contrast with “events that take place in normal conditions,” so that either (i) “emergency” and “normal-condition event” are correlatives, or (ii) “emergency” is defined in terms of (and as a basic deviation from) some conceptually prior notion of a “normal-condition event.” I’m inclined to think that (ii) is the case. If so, a great deal of the definition of “emergency” depends on spelling out that prior conception of metaphysical “normality.”

“Normality” is a notoriously difficult concept to define in a non-circular, non-statistical way.  The concept is one to which Rand often helps herself, and which bears some unclarified relation to what she elsewhere calls “the benevolent universe premise.” But it also finds its way fairly often into the non-Randian literature, whether in discussion of emergencies or other topics. Here’s one example from the scholarly literature on Aristotle’s ethics: The virtuous agent, Terence Irwin writes, “will correctly regard as dominant those rational and rigid states of character that secure complete happiness in moderately favourable external circumstances” (“Permanent Happiness: Aristotle and Solon,” in Aristotle’s Ethics: Critical Essays, p. 15, my italics). I take Irwin’s reference to “moderately favorable external circumstances” to pick out a concept similar to Rand’s notion of “normal-condition events.” “Favorable circumstances” seems to do analogous work for Aristotle as for Rand.

There’s a lot going on behind Rand’s definition–a lot of questions to be asked of it, and a lot of refinements to be made to it even on the most charitable reading. Here are a few questions that seem to me worth asking, and which I hope to address in my RP essay.

  1. Suppose that “emergency” is parasitic on some prior notion of metaphysical normality. What is metaphysical “normality,” and how is it to be conceptualized prior to and independently of “emergency”? On the other hand, if “metaphysical normality” and “emergency” are correlatives, is there some other concept that allows us to break free of the conceptual circle they form?
  2. Rand says that emergencies are unchosen, but why, or in what sense, can’t you bring an emergency on yourself? Does Rand mean that you can’t self-consciously bring about an emergency under that description (“I’m going to bring about an emergency right now”), or does she mean that you can’t chose to bring about an emergency, full stop? If I plan to commit suicide, and then start to enact the plan, is the enactment not an emergency even if it’s genuinely life-threatening? There’s something right about her claim, but it has to be made more precise and explicit than she makes it.
  3. Rand says that emergencies are “unexpected.” Does that mean that they’re unpredictable? If so, why, or in what sense, can’t they be predicted? Mutatis mutandis, the same follow-up questions apply here as in #3. If, for instance, I correctly predict a hurricane, and correctly predict that it will lead to fires in a certain city, is Rand’s point that the subsequent fires aren’t emergencies? Or is her point that while “fires” are predictable of the hurricane as event types, the corresponding event-tokens are unpredictable emergencies? In other words, what is expected (but not an emergency) is “fires resulting from the hurricane”; what is unexpected and is an emergency is, say, the particular fire that breaks out on Broad Street at 10:43 pm during the hurricane. If so, Rand’s view seems to imply that while the hurricane itself is not an emergency, unexpected micro-events caused by it could be.
  4. That, however, raises another set of questions. How predictable does an event have to be to qualify as “predictable”? I may not be able to predict that I’ll have a serious traffic accident today, but if I’m on the road and see a bus hurtling toward me–and have nowhere to go as it does–I may be able to predict, a few seconds before the event, that a serious traffic accident (construed as an emergency) is about to happen. Does that sort of predictability count or not? Here again, Rand’s definition needs some “chisholming.”
  5. What justifies the stricture that emergencies are “limited in time”? The claim seems plausible, but needs an argument. Among the considerations that make it plausible: human pre-history lasted a long time but involved an enormous degree of pain, suffering, and duress; we might be inclined to regard the latter phenomena as emergencies if we suffered them, but there is something problematic about describing hundreds of thousands of years of human history as one long “emergency.” Supposing that emergencies are limited in time, how are the limits set? After all, some wars (or totalitarian dictatorships) last decades or centuries, and create life-threatening conditions. Does Rand want to deny that wars or dictatorship are emergencies? (It’s worth remembering that her novel We the Living features a protagonist who lies and cheats her way through life in order to survive as best as she can under Soviet socialism.) Perhaps, as in the hurricane case, only unexpected micro-events within wars or dictatorships are emergencies, but the macro-events themselves are not. If so, recurring causal chains of emergencies under long-lasting emergency-prone conditions are not (qua chains) emergencies, even if they require massive adjustments to the adoption and practice of “normal” moral principles (as they obviously do). Similar issues arise about life in, say, prisons, concentration camps, totalitarian states, and epidemics–generally, of phenomena unfavorable to life but durably long. (For an interesting novelistic portrayal of life in an epidemic, I’d recommend reading or watching Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil. [Afterthought, October 23: Obviously, another one is Camus’ The Plague!]).
  6. Rand says that emergencies “create conditions that make human survival impossible.” Prima facie, this seems too strong. Most dictionaries tell us that emergencies threaten life, health, and/or property, or raise the probability of threats to survival.  Why insist on the strong modal claim–that emergencies create survival-impossible conditions? Further, does survival have to be threatened at all in an emergency? Imagine a case where someone gets her hand terribly stuck in a glass pickle jar, and calls 911. Is that an emergency? (That’s a real example described to me by a paramedic.) What about bathroom emergencies, e.g., desperately needing to use the bathroom but not being able to find one?
  7. Suppose that we accept Rand’s definition as stated. Does the definition entail that “emergency” and “non-emergency” is a proper distinction, i.e., mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive? Or is it compatible with the existence of borderline events between emergencies and non-emergencies, or events that fall into neither category?
  8. Suppose that emergency/non-emergency is a proper distinction. Is it a sufficiently  fine-grained distinction, or are there non-emergencies that are sufficiently like emergencies to justify our thinking of them as quasi-emergencies, and to justify our creating a precise, fine-grained vocabulary to describe them (e.g., ‘crises’)?

I’m curious what readers think about any or all of this. In later posts, I’ll offer some answers of my own.

P.S.: Here’s a directly relevant article from out of today’s New York Times science section: “Ethicist Calls CPR Too Risky in Ebola.” I have no specialized knowledge of the issue, but Fins’s advice strikes me as nearly self-evident. I also agree with Fins that the issue needs to be discussed more widely than it has.

I was, incidentally, somewhat surprised to discover that medical ethicists don’t just regard “self-sacrifice” as virtuous, but as a special virtue of its own. Does anyone know of a good argument for that?

I’m curious to know whether Arthur Caplan has an argument for the claim that it would be morally wrong for health care workers to invoke Fins’s advice in cases of patients who are asymptomatic for Ebola but have (or even may have) come into contact with an Ebola patient. It simply isn’t obvious to me that health care workers have a duty to resuscitate in cases where there is–symptoms or not–a reasonable basis for believing that someone might have Ebola. Medical ethicists seem to me in the bad habit of offering prescriptions about the risks that health care providers are obliged to bear without really being able to explain why they should or must bear them. Relatedly, it’s worth pointing out that you can’t prove that p by asserting that you “can’t help thinking that p must be true.”

Thoughts on “Atlas Shrugged, Part 3: Who is John Galt?”

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I just got back from watching the matinee showing of Atlas Shrugged Part 3 in Times Square with a few friends (and a girlfriend). Times Square is of course the qibla–the teleological Mecca–of Objectivism, but you wouldn’t have known it from this showing. Though the film opened just yesterday, no one in midtown Manhattan seemed interested enough to come to see it the afternoon after it opened. Kate and I walked right past the theater showing the film without even noticing that it was playing there. And we were specifically looking for it! As it happened, the film itself was playing in theater 23 of 25 on the abandoned sixth floor of the theater, and was attended (in our showing) by about a dozen people. Neither today’s nor yesterday’s New York Times ran either a review or even an ad for the film. In other words, unless you were looking for it, you’d never have known that it was playing. If that’s an indication of the film’s impact in Objectivism’s holy city, I don’t think it’s going to have much impact outside of that city. Sad but true.

Though I haven’t read it cover to cover in more than twenty years, I regard Atlas Shrugged as a great but flawed novel. And though I enjoyed part 1 of the Atlas Shrugged film sequence–mostly for the chemistry between its Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling) and Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler) characters–I don’t think any of the three films did justice to the novel, and didn’t enjoy the second two films at all. That’s not to say that any of the films deserved the savaging they got at the hands of hostile critics, but the bottom line is that they weren’t particularly good films. You might understand, appreciate, and enjoy them to some extent if you were familiar with and admired the novel, or if you had doctrinal sympathies with Objectivism or libertarianism. But otherwise, it seems to me that the films would strike the uninitiated viewer as uninteresting, uninspired, or preposterous. It pains me to say that, because I happen to know the filmmakers and I appreciate and respect the sincerity of their efforts. But the bottom line is, as a strictly aesthetic matter, the films–or the three films considered as one piece of art–are a failure.

Why uninteresting, uninspired, or preposterous? In the case of part 3, the following flaws leap to mind:

  • John Galt was, to my mind, badly miscast. I didn’t find him forceful enough to be believable. (Some of my friends disagreed.)
  • Huge amounts of plot were excised. (To avoid spoilers, I won’t elaborate.) Some of the scenes that were included seemed to have been included in a pro forma way, out of a sense of fidelity to the plot of the novel, but were so abbreviated and elliptical as to be unintelligible to anyone who hadn’t read the novel.
  • Putting aside Laura Regan (who played Dagny Taggart), the dialogue was uninspired–preachy, pedantic and badly-delivered stuff that sounded more like standard-issue libertarian anti-government ranting than the actual dialogue of the novel. To a certain degree, I’ve had the uncomfortable feeling that all three films were made, not for a general audience and not for aesthetic purposes, but to turn the novel into a propaganda vehicle for the Rand-friendly elements of the Tea Party. I’ve also gotten the uncomfortable sense that the praise I’ve heard of the film (meaning the earlier two parts) is movement-motivated, an instance of circling the wagons rather than objective appraisal.
  •  The villains came across as cartoon-character buffoons rather than as adversaries worthy of the heroes’ struggle. That made the villains look stupid and contemptible (and all of the actors portraying the villains did a fairly good job of it), but also diminished the achievement of the heroes and adversely affected the credibility of the film itself. How could villains this preposterous achieve the positions of prominence that these villains had? And how hard would it be to defeat them if one were in the position of the heroes? (To be fair, this problem originates with the novel itself, but my point is that the film made it much worse.)
  • There are virtually no scenes in the film depicting the suffering of the average person in the street.
  • The film is, on the whole, far too “talky.” At least a third of the film takes place in Galt’s Gulch, and consists of dialogue. Huge parts of the rest of the film consist of dialogue. A narrator voices over large swatches of plot progression. But the novel is an action-packed thriller. As far as the film is concerned, there’s no action and no thrills. The dialogue plods along as a narrator tells you what’s supposed to be happening in the physical world. I felt uncharitable thinking this, but I couldn’t help remembering a line from the novel. In it, John Galt tells Dagny: “In this valley, Miss Taggart, we don’t tell, we show..” But in this film, Galt and his companions do just the reverse. They don’t show. They tell.
  • When they do act–e.g., when they stage their famous revolt near the end–the resistance they get from their would-be adversaries is feeble enough to inspire incredulous laughter in the audience. In interests of spoiler-avoidance, I won’t elaborate, but if you see the film I think you’ll know what I mean. I think you’ll also see that the ease of the heroes’ defeat of the villains mirrors the facile picture that so many Objectivists, libertarians, and conservatives have of the political left: as a bunch of reality-fearing, reason-evading weaklings and losers, incapable of thinking straight, making hard decisions, or managing even the smallest enterprise. (I’ve recently been reading the blog Neo-Neocon where this fatuous point of view gets a vigorous daily airing.) But surely this raises the question: in that case, why are these reality-averse liberals in power and defeating the political right at virtually every turn? Despite its best efforts, Atlas Shrugged 3 leaves the answer to that question a mystery, as do the sorts of people who spend large swatches of their time fulminating about “Barry Hussein Obama” and how much they hate his foreign crypto-Islamic ways.
  • There are some minor plot incoherences as well. How is it that as the world is crumbling and falling to pieces, everyone’s cell phone works perfectly and it’s still a cinch to hail a cab?

I could go on, but I won’t. The truth is that I don’t think anyone could have done better than the filmmakers did, and I think they deserve respect for having made what ended up being a quixotic attempt to produce the film. But I don’t think Atlas Shrugged can successfully be made in the early twenty-first century, and it probably won’t successfully be made for the next forty or fifty years, if that. Atlas Shrugged is, to my mind, too complex and idiosyncratic a novel to be made into a film right now; we simply lack the cultural synapses for such a film for the foreseeable future. Those of us who appreciate the novel do so because the author gave us 1,082 pages of nine-point print to lay out the complexities of plot, theme, and characterization. She also wrote two previous novels and a shelf’s worth of non-fiction to clarify what she had in mind–and she didn’t entirely clarify it.

But a film can’t do that. A film version of a great novel has to depict the author’s vision but leave implicit all of the background assumptions and inferences needed to make the film coherent and emotionally resonant. If the culture lacks that, the film simply won’t get off the ground. No actors will be found who are capable of depicting its characters’ personalities or expressing their dialogue. No scriptwriters will be found who can streamline the novel in a way that makes it a coherent film while doing justice to the original text. No composers will be found who can compose music adequate to its moods. No funding source will exist to capitalize the film project in a way that does justice to the epic vision of the novel. No audience will be found that can follow the plot of the film, appreciate its characters, grasp its theme, or revel in its sense of life.  And no critics will be found that can appreciate any element of what the film got right. What you’ll get, instead, is an unintentionally comic effort at creating an epic film on the cheap, which is what has happened in the case of Atlas Shrugged. For all these reasons and more, I think the Atlas Shrugged film project was practically destined to fail. Like so many things about Objectivism, it was half-baked, over-hyped, and premature.

The problem, incidentally, is not that Atlas Shrugged’s message is “politically unpopular.” Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was politically unpopular, too. But Passion of the Christ was a brilliant film that provoked the culture into a rage. By contrast, Atlas Shrugged is a dull film that has gone entirely (and justifiably) ignored. The difference is that we all, as a culture, know how to process the story of Christ’s rise, prophecy, and crucifixion. We know who Christ was, and what he stood for; we also know how we’re supposed to react to the vicissitudes in his life, and to those who persecute him. Whatever we think of the Crucifixion, we grasp what it symbolizes, and we’re familiar with the symbolism itself. Even those hostile to Passion of the Christ had to admit that they were, while watching Gibson’s film, in the presence of a work of art that in some sense did justice to the Gospels; the film had a gravity appropriate to its subject matter.

Atlas Shrugged lacks all of that. Almost no one knows how to process the story. No one knows who John Galt is, and no one has reason to care. Almost no one has any sympathy for the trials or tribulations he or his comrades endure, and no one can quite conceptualize who his persecutors are supposed to be aside from floating abstractions and rhetoric about cartoon-like “government regulators.” (Since we obviously need some government regulations, “government regulators” in the abstract do not usefully function as villains.) The symbolism of Atlas is too pagan to have caught on in our residually Christian culture. The result is that the film version of Atlas Shrugged lacks the gravity and intensity appropriate to its subject matter. The filmmakers took on a project that was too overwhelming in its scope and dimensions for almost anyone to have been able to pull it off–at least right now.

My suggestion to Rand-friendly film-makers would be to leave The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged alone, and try to make a successful re-make of We the Living, the only Ayn Rand novel that has so far successfully been turned into a film. It shouldn’t be that hard to go to St. Petersburg nowadays and do the job, even under the reign of Vladimir Putin. It would, obviously, be a more modest task than a film version of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, but that’s why it would have more of a chance of success. Few people in the world put any stock nowadays in Soviet socialism. We all hate the Soviets intensely enough to be receptive to a well-done anti-Soviet film like We the Living. The plot, theme, and characters are familiar enough to be depicted in early twenty-first film, but idiosyncratic enough to remain a challenge and retain their interest. Anyway, we’ve been beating the Nazis up in cinema for decades now. The time has come, at last, to beat up on the Soviets–and not Stalin’s Soviets, but Lenin’s, the ones closest to the Bolshevik Revolution itself. The original We the Living film is moving and beautiful, but it needs a specifically Russian update.

And if you regard We the Living as somehow philosophically light-weight, I’d suggest reading it again, asking some hard questions about the relationship between Kira and Andrei. Are they friends? Lovers? Would-be lovers? Are her feelings for him genuine, or entirely fabricated? If genuine, why? If fabricated, how is that possible? There’s a lot more there than has been discussed in the so-called “literature,” and a lot more than meets the eye.

Anyway, I can’t recommend anyone’s watching Atlas Shrugged, Part 3, or indeed any of the Atlas films, with the possible exception of part 1. (And of course, there’s no point in watching part 1 and leaving at that, so perhaps there’s no point in watching any of the films at all.) Fans will want to see it, if only to see what’s been made of their favorite novel. But I’m afraid no one else will, and no one else has good reason to. I doubt it will become an “underground sensation” in the way that Rand’s books have. I have a feeling it will just wither on the vine and fade away. That’s sad but inevitable, and the only thing we can do about it is ask why–which is what I’ve tried to do here.

(Thanks to Kate Herrick, Carrie-Ann Biondi, and Ray Raad for seeing the movie with me, and discussing it over dinner. As is probably obvious, I’ve expressed some of their observations here as though they were my own. None of them, however, is responsible for anything I’ve written in this post.)

The Objectivist movement: a repudiation

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It’s probably obvious to anyone who’s Googled me that I have a more-than-passing interest in the ideas of Ayn Rand. If you’ve noticed that much, you’ve probably noticed that I take Rand seriously, am highly influenced by her, and agree with a lot of things she said. I don’t any longer know whether my agreements with Rand qualify me as an “Objectivist,” but they’re substantial enough to be unusual among academic philosophers.

In my view, Rand’s best ideas are to be found in what she wrote about epistemology and in the more abstract parts of her work on moral psychology, ethics, and aesthetics. Those parts of Rand strike me as deeper and more insightful than most of what I’ve encountered in analytic philosophy. But there are plenty of things in Rand and in her followers that strike me as weak and ill-argued. Apart from some suggestive remarks on causality and free will, I don’t think that Objectivism has a well-developed metaphysics, and ironically–despite its widespread notoriety–Objectivism’s political philosophy is to my mind, its weakest and least developed feature. In any case, the closer to the “ground” one gets–that is, to concrete, “applied” issues in ethics, politics, and aesthetics–the more problematic I think Rand’s views become. Frankly, some of her political views seem to me to border on insanity, and many of her aesthetic views are idiosyncratic and ill-argued, to say the least.

Of course, the same might be said of Nietzsche, Sartre, or Wittgenstein–which has never deterred philosophers from expressing enthusiasm for their work. Academic philosophers suffer from a rather strange double standard in this respect when it comes to Rand. People who haven’t read Rand feel free to dismiss her on the basis of vague rumors about what they think she said–and yet no one could legitimately dismiss Nietzsche, Sartre, or Wittgenstein even by offering up direct quotations of some of the utterly ridiculous things they actually said. It’s perfectly possible, after all, for a philosopher to have astute or even brilliant things to say in one domain, and to offer up rubbish in another. In fact, it happens all the time. Anyway, that–the brilliant/rubbish interpretation–happens to be my view of Rand. (I like Rand’s novels, but also have mixed feelings about them, and ultimately end up agreeing, in different ways, with both their most fervent enthusiasts and their most vehement critics.)

On the whole, I would dispute the idea that Rand left us a worked-out “system,” or that her followers have produced one. As I see it, what she left is a series of astute, under-appreciated, and ill-understood philosophical observations awaiting further development by competent philosophers. On this view, it’s premature to describe “Objectivism” as either true or false, since more of “it” exists in potentia than in actuality. (Ironically, Objectivism currently lacks the resources to spell out the latter insight, since it has no worked-out account of the metaphysics of potentiality and actuality.)

Having said that, my main purpose in writing this post is less to clarify my philosophical views on Objectivism than to issue a public repudiation of the Objectivist movement. A “public repudiation” might well sound self-serving or narcissistic to some ears, as though I regarded what I said in a blog post as making some major difference to the prospects of the movement. Since I know that it won’t, that isn’t my aim. Frankly, I’m not all that concerned about or interested in the “prospects of the Objectivist movement.” What I’m concerned about, given my evident interest in Rand, is the possibility of my being associated with it.

Depending on how you count them, the Objectivist movement has three or four institutional vehicles–the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), the Anthem Foundation, the Ayn Rand Society (ARS), and The Atlas Society (TAS) (previously the Institute for Objectivist Studies, then The Objectivist Center). Carrie-Ann Biondi and I briefly ran something we called the Institute for Objectivist Studies (IOS), which we conceived of as a successor to the original IOS (founded in 1990). Our IOS lasted seven or eight months, from March until October 2013. I’ve always kept my distance from ARI and Anthem, but was a dues-paying member of ARS from the early 1990s until 2012, and had an on-again, off-again relationship with TAS, most actively between 1991-1994, and then for one-year stints in 1997 and parts of 2012-2013. (The latter relationship is now permanently “off.”)

I won’t bother to rehearse all of the details involving the similarities, differences, and histories of the four institutions. Suffice it to say that I regard all of them as morally corrupt, and regard the very idea of an “Objectivist movement” as a pointless (and pernicious) waste of time. I’ve expressed my opposition to the idea of an Objectivist movement here. My objections to each of the four Objectivist institutions are scattered on websites across the Internet. I may bring them together some day and house them in one place, but the basic objection can be put in a few sentences: in my experience, none of the four Objectivist institutions I’ve mentioned is committed to an honest conception of intellectual inquiry. Some of them wear more impressive academic garb than others, but all of them operate within a “movement” mentality that relies on heavy doses of group-think, dogmatism, and on occasion, all-out intellectual dishonesty. A judicious person would think long and hard before accepting an invitation from any of them. Ultimately, I don’t think a judicious person would accept such an invitation at all.

This isn’t the place to make a full case against the Objectivist movement. Not having done so, I can’t claim to have convinced you of my belief in its problematic features. Having distanced myself from it, all I can do here is to underscore the need for caution–even outright suspicion–in dealing with it. As most people already know, the Objectivist movement has a bad reputation. I would just add that most of that reputation is well- earned and well-justified. My advice: do some assiduous research before you deal with it, and you’ll come to the same conclusion on your own. (And, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, if you’re already in the movement, get out while you can.) Meanwhile, caveat emptor. Let the would-be buyer beware.