HAIGHT SPEECH

Apparently Kitty Genovese died in vain.

That is all.

Former Georgia congressman Bob Barr wants to run for President as the Libertarian Party candidate.  The first thing that ran through my mind on reading that was a wish that he could pick former Democratic senator Sam Nunn as his running-mate — just because the advertisements for the Barr / Nunn ticket would be a speck of humor in an otherwise utterly depressing election.

Several years ago, I heard the observation that the sign of a dominant political party in a democracy isn’t winning elections by huge margins. It’s consistently winning the close elections. That’s a sign that the winning party holds the support of the voters on the margin. In 2002 and 2004, the Republicans won the bulk of the close elections.

Now it’s 2008. And in that well-known bastion of liberalism, Mississippi.

I smell elephant roadkill, incoming.

I just noted a comment on an older post of mine accusing me, somewhat ungrammatically, of being a Republican and therefore an idiot. I find this sort of thing hilarious, because I’m not a Republican. In fact, I find myself wondering what definition of Republican people like that have in mind that they consider me to be one.

Is it party affiliation? I’m registered Democratic.

Is it who I plan to vote for in the election? Not John McCain, that’s for damn sure.

Is it which party I support financially? I don’t give a dime to the Republicans.

Is it supporting the campaign in Iraq? I think Bush has thoroughly botched it.

Is it being a religious nut? I’m a secularist.

My guess is that to people like this commenter, “Republican” simply means “Doesn’t agree with the left on everything.” If so, well, I’m guilty of that, but I prefer a different term to describe that — sane.

I haven’t had the time or inclination to blog much recently, but this is just too sweet to ignore. Apparently John McCain (whom I do not like very much and will neither support nor vote for) is having some issues with the campaign finance reform system that he himself has supported so vocally. He seems to think he has a constitutional right to back out of the system now that its spending limits are crimping his campaign.

Sorry, John-boy. You don’t get to deny my political freedom of speech and then claim its protection yourself. If one of the consequences of your rape of the First Amendment is the blocking of your path to the White House, I call that justice in action. Cry me a river, please — your anguish sustains me.

Or, putting the point more simply: <voice=”Nelson”>Ha ha!</voice>

Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of my favorite novels, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. There have been a lot of articles recently on the significance and influence of this book, which I won’t try to recap here. My own favorite such article is this one by Robert Tracinski.

Oddly enough, this year also marks the 20th anniversary of my own first encounter with Rand’s writing. Back in 1987 I was 16, a junior in high school, very intelligent but increasingly cynical. A girl I knew, and had kind of a crush on, spent about six months pestering me to read The Fountainhead. She said it was the “most rational thing” I would ever read, and she was more or less right. By the time I reached the scene where architecture student Howard Roark was explaining to the dean of his school why the Parthenon was badly designed, I was hooked. I ploughed through that 700 page book in three days, then hit the library.

There I found two other novels by Rand: a novelette called Anthem and a huge doorstop called Atlas Shrugged. Since I hadn’t done any schoolwork for the past few days on account of The Fountainhead I decided to do the responsible thing and check out the short one. That took about an hour, and I was back at the library the next day. The 1168 pages of Atlas took me five days, and boy did I not get any homework done. (Precious little sleep, for that matter — it was wonderful being young.) That summer I worked my way through most of the extant non-fiction, and never looked back. (Well, there was that unfortunate libertarian anarchist phase I went through in college, but I got better. Let us never speak of it again.)

Many people say that Rand’s writings changed their lives. I’m not sure I would go that far in my own case. I always valued reason and freedom. What Rand taught me was how right I was to do so, how to understand exactly what it was I was valuing, and how to defend those values in action. She showed me how to think systematically, a skill which has proven invaluable in my career as an engineer. And she taught me not to be ashamed of being happy, or of pursuing happiness.

Anne Speaking:

Sure sounds to me like her writings changed your life. I had a similar experience. I always valued freedom, individuation, and reason. But Rand gave me the words for it, and the justification down to the most elemental level. That certainty has made me more content, and made my life a more joyful journey.

Rand described her philosophy as one “for living on Earth”, and that’s exactly what it is. Properly understood and applied, I have found it leads to a happy and successful life. It’s true, and it works. What more could one ask for?

So, although I haven’t seen the girl since I graduated from high school, thank you Liz for pushing me into reading Rand. You were right, it was the most rational thing I’ve ever read, and 20 years later I’m still benefiting from it. And, more profoundly, thank you Ayn Rand for your insight, your courage and your inspiration. Well done.

Anne speaking:

But seriously, I had never heard of Ayn Rand until about 1993, which was when Kyle starting pestering me to read The Fountainhead (it only took me, what, 5 years into our marriage?) I went on to read Atlas, heeding Kyle’s advice to “read all of Galt’s speech. You think you know what he’s going to say, but you really don’t.” Good advice. Terrific books and an important philosophy that isn’t getting enough attention in schools or from humanity generally.

… you’re listening to a history lecture on the Reformation and you have to fight down the urge to ask the teacher why Superman didn’t do anything to stop the spread of Lutheranism.

This post from Adventures in Bowling Green raises one of those questions that comes up over and over again — are Objectivists libertarians? (Or, putting the point slightly different, is the Objectivist politics libertarian?) Given Objectivism’s advocacy of strictly limited government, free markets and individual rights, this seems like a well-duh question. Yet Objectivists, as in the letter from Paul McKeever cited in the above-linked post, argue vehemently that we are not libertarians.

I think one of the reasons that neither side is ever convinced by the other on this issue is that, in a way, both sides are right. (In a deeper way, I think the Objectivist side is right, but hear me out.) The problem is that the term “libertarian” is being used in a different sense by the two sides.

Back in the 1990’s, Leonard Peikoff gave a lecture arguing that a certain class of terms was legitimately possessed of two different types of definition, one general and the other more restrictive. The terms he had in mind were, essentially, ones connected to human choice. One sense of the term would be broad and would refer to a whole range of possibilities, the other would be narrower and would refer to the part of the range that was fully consistent with reality. Here are some examples.

Ayn Rand famously defined a value as “that which one acts to gain and/or keep.” In other contexts, however, she speaks of some things that people act to gain and/or keep as disvalues, when those things are harmful to long-term survival and flourishing. Many people act to gain and/or keep drugs such as cocaine and heroin. In the general sense, these are values — they are ends chosen volitionally as the goal of actions. But because drug addiction is harmful, treating cocaine as a value winds up being inconsistent. Pursuing it undercuts your life, and thus undermines the necessary conditions for acting to gain and/or keep anything. So in the more restrictive sense, cocaine is not a value.

Or consider the concept “virtue”. Broadly, a virtue is a character trait or principle of action that a system of morality upholds as desirable or morally good. So is humility, for example, a virtue? In a sense, yes — Christianity upholds humility as a principle of action required for living a morally good life. But again, taken in full context, humility accepted and practiced consistently undercuts the necessary conditions for moral goodness. It fails to achieve its stated ends, and so in the more restrictive sense it is properly identified as a vice, not a virtue.

Or consider “egoism”. There is a sense in which the Objectivist ethics is one of a number of egoistic ethical systems, along with the egoisms of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Stirner, etc. All of these systems advocate that individuals act so as to maximize their own self-interest. But since the broad definition leaves open the questions of what exactly a person’s self-interest consists of, and what actions will maximize it, you can have an ethical system that advocates pursuing self-interest while simultaneously advocating specific means and ends that undercut what your interests actually are. The actual effects of following such a system, even though it may have been developed with a genuine desire to achieve the pursuit of self-interest, will be counter to that goal. The system is inconsistent and, in its actual effects, not egoistic. From this perspective, the Objectivist ethics is not an egoistic ethics; it is the only egoistic ethics — the only one which, if practiced consistently, will actually lead to maximizing your self-interest.

The application of this analysis to the question of the ‘libertarian-ness’ of the Objectivist politics should be obvious. Just as in the egoism case, there is a sense in which any political system which advocates liberty can be described as libertarian. In this broad sense, the Objectivist politics clearly qualifies. But in the full, consistent sense of the term, for a system of thought to be described as libertarian, it would have to lead to freedom if implemented consistently in practice. By that standard, libertarianism as understood by libertarians fails because of its lack of foundation. No politics can stand apart from a foundation, as McKeever discusses, and libertarianism explicitly eschews the need for such a foundation by treating the NIOF principle as axiomatic. So in the restrictive sense of the term, the Objectivist politics is actually the only libertarian politics, because only Objectivism provides the necessary foundations in ethics, epistemology and metaphysics for the successful defense of the value of liberty. Ironically, the problem with libertarianism is that it isn’t libertarian.

As is often the case with perennial questions, what we have here are two sides talking past each other. Libertarians classify Objectivist as libertarian in the broad, neutral sense of the term, and they are right to do so. But the broad, neutral sense of the term isn’t the relevant one. What we are interested in is the actual effects of ideas and actions when practiced with full consistency in reality. And from that point of view, cocaine is not a value — humility is not a virtue — Stirner’s The Ego And Its Own is not a good guide to successful living — and trying to defend freedom on a non-Objectivist basis will not work.

A friend of mine (hi, Oscar!) was wearing one of these Evil Mastermind shirts, and I just had to have one. I’m a software engineer by profession, with a somewhat acerbic personality, and ‘Your Code Is Suboptimal’ is probably going to turn into my new catch-phrase. Luckily, Eric Sink was giving them away free. Well, mostly.

The cost is that I have to have a picture taken of myself wearing the shirt and blog it (and give SourceForge permission to use the image). As an Objectivist, I try to adhere to the Trader Principle and fulfill my contracts. Herewith:

As a bonus, for the estimated three people reading this who don’t already know me personally, this is more or less what I look like. (The extent to which this does not look like me is the fault of my wife Anne and the GIMP. Figuring out which parts are me and which are her is left as an exercise to the reader.)

I give you the Israeli Defense Minister.