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How Randian website replied to polite explanation of traditionalism
Ed D. writes:
Yesterday you wrote about an Objectivist take on traditionalism that, although critical, did not distort or smear traditionalism as one would expect. Someone in the same thread tried to defend traditionalism, and you should see the responses he got. It looks as though the claws could only be retracted for so long.
LA replies:
Thanks for this. I broke my planned blogging hiatus to post this.
The traditionalist poster, Andy, was not being confrontational, was politely and reasonably describing a hypothetical, historically ethnically homogenous (and non-race-specific) society. A country like, say, China, which I assume is the ancestral homeland of Diana Hsieh, the site host. And in most of his comment Andy was talking about moral issues, not ethnicity. Yet Hsieh used the vilest language on him.
As I’ve said before, Randians, following Ayn Rand, are a type of Communist turned inside out. Totalitarians for individualism. Dictators for reason.
Alex K. writes:
Notice how hysterical the responses get—one Randian says Andy has accused non-whites of being less than human. Libertarianism is applied autism, but they can still be hyper-emotional and pitifully irrational.
* * *
We might as well quote the exchange here. Andy’s comments appear about half way through the thread. In his first comment, Andy quotes other commenters and replies. In the second he briefly describes the pattern of a traditionalist society.
Friday, April 17, 2009 at 12:18:08 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: Andy
E-mail: andy(at)nomail.com
J.T.:
“Madmax, that is frightening. However, I would bet that kind of racialist/nationalist thing will be much more likely to happen in Europe than in the U.S. Europe has a long history of racialism/tribalism (and in fact they have little other basis for having countries in the first place)”
I don’t see why that should be considered “frightening.” The United States has been the exception to the rule, and really only since 1965 when non-whiteness and non-Christianity have been pushed to the forefront. This country was 89% White in 1960.
Madmax:
“So Traditionalists believe that America must define itself as a white, European, Christian nation and only that will save the America Republic. In essence this is racial collectivism bolstered by socio-biology.”
It’s necessary, but not sufficient, for America’s continued existence. To call what someone like me, or like Auster, believes in “racial collectivism” is to say that race means nothing. Furthermore, it is to deny that human beings exist as anything more than detached, autonomous, rights-bearing individuals, interacting with other merely in commercial exchanges or ideological debates. Do you suggest that recognizing sexual differences should be call “sexual collectivism?”
Friday, April 17, 2009 at 12:45:36 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: Andy
“The Traditionalists want a non-egalitarian racialist authoritarian state but they want it based on Christianity.”
You’re taking great liberties here with that statement. Where do you get the idea that traditionalists want a Christian authoritarian state, presumably enforced by jack booted thugs.
Ideally the racialist aspect would not even have to be addressed, because a nation would spring forth from physically similar people who have a common culture, history, language, etc. These people would feel no need to admit alien people in any meaningful number to live among them and assert their alien identity. [LA comments: Please note that Andy is not proposing any political plan for current reality. He’s not saying that anyone should be kicked out of America, for example. He is simply describing the natural ethnocultural homogeneity (not absolute homogeneity in every case, but a broad homogeneity) that has characterized most of the historical societies that have ever existed, e.g., England, China, Japan, etc.]
Are manners and morality something you accept? Social convention has always existed without the need for coercive state enforcement. I think what you are saying here goes to the bottom of what a nation is. People who don’t see themselves as one people will not behave as one people. And 300 million autonomous, rights-exercising individuals, free to engage in any recreational and economic activity without moral judgment or government interference will never see themselves as a people. There has to be some framework before individual liberty for a nation to exist, let alone prosper. [Andy is describing a society with basic commonalities not just of ethnicity, but of culture, habits, and a shared moral sense, just as John Jay described the United States in Federalist Number 2, and said that America was blessed to have such commonality, which made social cohesion and self-government and liberty possible. So, his essentially repeating John Jay’s point is what makes Andy the lowest of the low in the eyes of the Randians, as you will see.]
Friday, April 17, 2009 at 12:52:29 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Andy: Go away, you racist turd. You’re not welcome here.
Friday, April 17, 2009 at 13:04:18 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: Andy
“Commenters are welcome to clearly state their own views, as well as to criticize opposing views and arguments. Unjust personal attacks are not welcome.”
From Diana Hsieh:
“Andy: Go away, you racist turd. You’re not welcome here.”
It would seem to me that according to the rules, I AM welcome here, and that based on your comment, you ARE NOT.
Although your comment could just be a joke, which I actually would find amusing.
Regardless, I feel no need to remain on your weblog. Good day.
Friday, April 17, 2009 at 14:25:49 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: feminizedwesternmale
E-mail: mac4ever(at)bellsouth.net
“Andy: Go away, you racist turd. You’re not welcome here.”
Ms Hsieh unknowingly and impudently displays effete snobbery, the very sine qua non of modern liberalism. Unfortunately, the joke is lost to her, and we will all suffer for her ilk’s spectaluarly narrow, “open-mindedness.”
Friday, April 17, 2009 at 16:01:16 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: Andrew Dalton
E-mail: andrew.s.dalton(at)gmail.com
URL: http://witchdoctorrepellent.blogspot.com
“Do you suggest that recognizing sexual differences should be call “sexual collectivism?” “
If it is given deep normative significance, as in the realm of morality (morality for men vs. morality for women), or in politics (rights of men vs. rights of women)—then yes.
At the root of such ideas would be the theory that there is no such thing as human nature (in the cognitive/intellectual sense), but rather a separate “men’s nature” and “women’s nature” that is irreducible and unbridgeable by reason. This is what the Islamists actually believe, for example.
And the only way that race could have a normative significance is if there were some qualitative, unbridgeable gap between, say, “white thinking” and “black thinking.” Note that this is a *much* higher hurdle of evidence than what is typically offered by racialists, which is statistical disparities between groups.
The Objectivist rejection of the normative significance of race is *not* dependent upon any assumption of equal distributions of abilities or outcomes among racial groups. (The leftists do assume this, which is why they are terrified of IQ tests and the like.) Rather, it is based on the recognition that there is a single cognitive nature of all humans (the capacity for thought and volition) that separates us from the other animals.
Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 0:35:28 mst
Comment ID: #17
Name: Dean Ericson
E-mail: dmericson(at)mac.com
Diana Hsieh started off this thread by requesting posters to “Please refrain from posting personal attacks[…]” only later to reply to another poster, “Andy: Go away, you racist turd. You’re not welcome here.” Diana’s behavior, as the moderator, is ridiculous and contemptible and marks this as a site not worthy of serious consideration.
-Dean Ericson
Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 2:43:38 mst
Comment ID: #18
Name: Sajid
In response to #17:
I’m sorry, but if someone comes here and starts making racist comments those are personal attacks to people who are not white. I am not white and a citizen of the US. If I feel that I don’t belong in the US because of my race then I feel that I am being de-humanized. In order to take Andy’s position seriously and argue against it I would first have to start by proving that I am human or good enough to be a worthy member of American society. This is EXTREMELY offensive to me personally.
Note also that other contributors to the original content of this blog are also not white and while I won’t presume to speak for them I can only imagine that such comments would also be extremely offensive to them personally.
Also, thanks Diana for sticking up for me and other people who have a genuine interest in being US citizens despite not being white.
Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 8:12:04 mst
Comment ID: #19
Name: Tony Donadio
E-mail: tdonadio(at)optonline.net
Andy wrote: “Ideally the racialist aspect would not even have to be addressed, because a nation would spring forth from physically similar people…”
In other words, racism wouldn’t be a “problem” because there wouldn’t be any of those “physically different” foreign folks around to make it one? And that’s your notion of an *ideal*? Sorry, but to Andy and his apologists: that is pure, unadulterated racism. It’s despicable, and Diana is more than justified in stating that she does not consider it welcome here.
[End of excerpt of Randian thread.]
* * *
Charles T. writes:
Well then, what does Miss Hsieh think about the traditional societies of Asia, such as Japan? Based on her own logic, this country should immediately start to embrace non-Japanese immigration to correct their racist tendencies. Anyone who opposes this can then be subjected to the brilliant social analysis of Miss Hsieh. Racist t__ds indeed. Miss Hsieh is incapable of conducting a reasonable discussion. Instead of engaging the poster named Andy, she deliberately insults him. She is guilty of the bigotry she so readily thinks she perceives in others.
The invitation to objective discourse is a myth. Cross the PC line and the debate becomes intensely personal.
Stephen T. writes:
It’s hysterically funny that the foul-mouthed Diana Hsieh should wish to censure anyone who believes in preserving/promoting racial and ethnic commonality. A glance at her bio shows that her life’s path has consisted of a rather well-plotted—or else incredibly coincidental—exodus AWAY from exposure to the teeming, non-white diversity of St. Louis and Boulder, where she once resided, to an idyllic, isolated farm outside bucolic Sedalia, Colorado, where she is presently domiciled: one of 284 residents, 94 percent of whom are white, zero percent black. (there are more horses in Sedalia than people.) You’ve come a long way, baby: Far away from the world you’d like everyone ito squat in and keep their mouth shut about … or else be called “racist turds” by you.
P.S. Photos on her website show that she’s a white woman married to an Asian man. And THAT, rather than any well-reasoned argument, is probably the basis for all this. For what it’s worth, I’ve found that such women are inevitably the most vile and vociferous haters of white European culture and of anyone defending or promoting it.
Mark Richardson writes:
Re the attitude of the Objectivist site to traditionalists: They don’t like us, but they recognise we exist. They’re concerned enough to discuss our prospects and to make some kind of analysis of what we believe (even if dealing with us roughly and dismissively at a personal level).
I still take this as a sign of progress, even if it’s the smallest of steps forward.
LA replies:
Also, anyone who came to the site, as I did, via an article and not the main page, where the photos are, seeing the name of the website, “Noodle Food,” would have even more reasons for assuming that the host is Chinese. Or was that stereotypical thinking on my part which is not allowed? Also, “Noodles” is the controlling metaphor of the site: Noodle Food, Noodle Foodlers, NoodleCaboodle.
LA writes:
How about this:
In connection with Stephen T.’s comments about Diana Hsieh’s place of residence, this occurs to me:
What is the secret of a successful, self-esteeming liberal life?
Location, location, location.
(posted at 1:30 a.m.)
John Hagan writes:
Predictably the Randians have closed down all further discussion of Traditionalism. I never thought much of Objectivism, or the Randians, and consider most of its practitioners dolts. This just confirms my views. These people are delusional, and intellectual children.
Hannon writes:
I added a comment to the Randian post on Hsieh’s blog and after a short span checked back and she had posted this:
This discussion of “traditionalism” is closed. I was hoping that it would simply wither away, but alas. Any further posts from the “traditionalists” will be deleted. Given my own choice of a husband, I find these views incredibly and personally offensive. They are unworthy of discussion, and I will not grant them a hearing on my property.
Exactly what was she hoping would wither away? Traditionalism itself? Or a few civilized comments that she felt threatened by? And she leans on her husband to bolster her case! There is another comment after hers from an anti-traditionalist so it looks like the ban is one-sided. Like a literary version of holding the guy down while the boss throws the punches.
Ah, rational discourse and tolerance. Are they on display in a glass case somewhere?
From: Alan Roebuck
Subject: “You can’t handle the truth.”
I mean Diana H, not you. She is really a piece of work; see her latest, where she announces:
I’ve deleted the recent comments from the “traditionalists,” as promised. I would very much appreciate if their opponents would permit the thread to die by refraining from further comment.
There is a strain in white, middle class America that cannot bear the contemplation of certain unpleasant truths, and Objectivism promises that unpleasant reality can be disproved via their brand of rationality. But their system is far too brittle: With literally everything in the Cosmos riding on the complete validity of their rational system, even one anomaly cannot be admitted.
There may be a few Darwinian conservatives, but I see no Randian conservatives.
LA replies:
Diana Hsieh. writes:
“Given my own choice of a husband, I find these views incredibly and personally offensive.”
Did anyone insult her husband? Did anyone insult the Chinese people? Not the last time I looked. It seems to me that Noodles commenter Andy’s positive description of naturally occurring ethnocultural homogeneity in a people was a great description of the Chinese people, the largest ethnic homogeneous population on earth, and one of the most talented and intelligent, of which Mr. Hsieh is presumably a product. If not for that ethnic homogeneity, developed and maintained over thousands of years, Mr. Hsieh’s very qualities, some of which must have been among the reasons that Diana chose to marry him, would not have existed. We are physical beings after all. But the Randians, who deny the existence of God, also seem to deny the physical and racial dimension of our humanity.
Except when it comes to Ayn Rand’s own heroes, every one of whom is “tall and gaunt,” “tall and slender,” a description that recurs about 137 times in the 1200 pages of Atlas Shrugged. Rand had an ideal male physical type that she was in love with and openly lusted after. Yet without the white race, particularly its northern European strain, that type would not have existed. Why does Ayn Rand get to have an ideal racial type and certain obvious racial preferences, but if the other people, like the commenter Andy, have their ethnic-racial preferences, they are contemptible and to be shunned?
If anyone posted comments at the Randian Noodles site that were deleted, send them along to me and I will post.
Alan Roebuck writes:
At Noodle Food, comment # 33 by Andrew Dalton back up my previous email. In it, he says:
So, there is an inevitable clash between Objectivism and conservatism (traditionalist or not). And this really is an unbridgeable gap—because the former values reason alone, while the latter makes appeals to gods or glands in order to avoid exposing many of its own doctrines to rational scrutiny.
Objectivists resemble Muslims in at least one important way: As with Islam, their doctrine requires them to have withering contempt for anyone who does not agree with all their premises. In this, they are children of their mother, Ayn Rand. Thus, good objectivists will never be worthy members of any conservative coalition.
(I had a brief fling with Objectivism many years ago. I was never an objectivist, but I seriously entertained the possibility that it could be the best worldview. So I have some knowledge of the tribe to which Diana H. belongs.)
LA replies:
There you have the unabashed, unembarrassed avowal of a reductive ideology: “Objectivism values reason alone.” ONLY reason. NOTHING else. All the world, in all its dimensions, is reduced to JUST reason.
But such is the power of ideology. Ideologies have the great attraction they have to their followers because of their simplifications. Communism reduces all values to equality of economic outcome. Modern liberalism reduces all values to the equal right to choice and satisfaction of desire. Islam reduces all values to the will of the totalitarian god Allah. Anti-Semitism reduces all values to Jew hatred. Randianism reduces all values to reason. In a complex world, having such a simple, all-inclusive answer allows people, in Andrew Dalton’s words, “to avoid exposing many of their doctrines to rational scrutiny.” The followers of the simplistic ideology can simply hate and dehumanize everyone who doesn’t follow their simplistic formula.
Kristor writes:
Yes. And scientism reduces everything to matter. The problem of reductionism is that it’s a form of idolatry; of loving the map more than the territory, the tidy ideal more than the wild anfractuous concrete being. It is the error of thinking that our ideas about things can ever be completely adequate.
LA replies:
I had to look that one up:
anfractuous: full of twists and turns; tortuous
The Latin etymology is here.
Mark Richardson writes:
One of the deleted comments was by me. In my comment, I was attempting to draw out Andrew Dalton’s beliefs further:
Andrew,
I was thinking about why you accept reason and will as defining points of human nature but not love, instinct, attachment or identity.
I might be wrong, but one logical reason would be that you only wish to recognise, as defining aspects of human nature, those qualities which leave the human self unencumbered (autonomous). Love, instinct, attachment and identity are qualities which tie us in important ways to something outside ourselves. They are also qualities which act on us in important ways without being self-selected.
The will and the reason, on the other hand, are the qualities we use to self-determine our actions.
So perhaps you are motivated to define human nature in a way that appears to you to promote human freedom, one in which the individual human self is unencumbered or unimpeded in its capacity to act as it chooses in the world.
There are plenty of moderns who do take this approach. I believe it to be misguided, as it wrongly attempts to make us free as abstracted, atomised individuals. We live as our “encumbered” selves and so the process of abstracting us to a reasoning, willing brain will be experienced as an alienation rather than as a freedom.
[end of comment]
He didn’t answer my arguments directly, but I did draw out his comment that “Objectivism values reason alone”—a stunning thing to write, which you’ve rightly criticised in your own comments.
Another comment which was deleted (was it Hannon’s?) was brief but good:
“Objectivists indeed!”
Most of the “Objectivists” seemed to be taking a highly subjective stance based on their own circumstances and interests: e.g. America should have open borders because that’s convenient to me, but it’s OK if the Japanese do otherwise; I’m offended because of whom I chose to marry etc.
A lot of perceived self-interest rather than political principle on display.
April 19
Hannon writes:
I feel better that you also had to look up anfractuous! At least once or twice a month I have to look up a word on VFR, usually one of yours.
I’m very glad to see Mark Richardson posting more often on your site. I follow his blog regularly and I think he is one of the most even-tempered and perspicacious writers around. By the way, the “Hannon” snippet he cites is not mine.
Bill Carpenter writes:
What is obvious to the non-Randian is that the Randians’ circumscribed view of what is rational is highly irrational, and bordering on insane.
Bill Carpenter continues:
Remember reading Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, where he discusses the brain’s function of excluding superfluous information? That is apparently a major function of ideology.
Roger D. writes:
I thought that Ayn Rand’s comment on the mini-series Roots might interest you:
What came across was a national legend, the creation of a myth about the black people in America, a myth in the best sense of the word… . The black people never had a mythology, at least not in this country… . They had no spiritual past in the way that Western civilization has a past in mythology (particularly Greek mythology), in religious stories, in the history of heroes. This kind of heritage gives you some idea of the nature of your society—not your own identity, but the meaning or the nature of the culture in which you live. That is what Roots has done for black people.
Who, today, in the Objectivist movement, discusses an ethnic group’s need for their own mythology?
LA replies:
So reason was not the ONLY value she posited for human beings and human society, but also race and a mythology and common identity to express the race. It looks as though Rand was not pure enough for the Randians! Maybe she should be posthumously expelled from the movement, while being duly showered with epithets like “racist t__d.” .
Great find. Thanks for sending.
Neil P. writes:
I’ve had a few run-ins with Diana Hsieh and she is, to put it bluntly, a little unhinged, even by Objectivist standards. She even praised this book, which I critique.
LA writes:
Last night in this entry I wrote the below comment in response to Randian Andrew Dalton’s words, “Objectivism values reason alone”:
There you have the unabashed, unembarrassed avowal of a reductive ideology: “Objectivism values reason alone.” ONLY reason. NOTHING else. All the world, in all its dimensions, is reduced to JUST reason.
But such is the power of ideology. Ideologies have the great attraction they have to their followers because of their simplifications. Communism reduces all values to equality of economic outcome. Modern liberalism reduces all values to the equal right to choice and satisfaction of desire. Islam reduces all values to the will of the totalitarian god Allah. Anti-Semitism reduces all values to Jew hatred. Randianism reduces all values to reason. In a complex world, having such a simple, all-inclusive answer allows people, in Andrew Dalton’s words, “to avoid exposing many of their doctrines to rational scrutiny.” The followers of the simplistic ideology can simply hate and dehumanize everyone who doesn’t follow their simplistic formula.
I e-mailed that comment to Diana Hsieh and Andrew Dalton last night.
Dalton replies to it today at his charmingly entitled blog. “Witch Doctor Repellent.”
Sunday, April 19, 2009
News flash to Lawrence Auster: Christianity is an ideology
That’s all I really have to say in response to this post, which was emailed to me and (heh) ended up in my spam box. (You can see the original exchange here, without Auster’s editorializing and omissions.)
When someone offers a moral/political worldview—any worldview—they can have no honest argument against ideology as such.
There is also no honest argument against reason itself; in such a case the arguers (here, blood-and-soil loving Yahweh-worshipers) have excluded themselves from the province of reason and therefore from any rational debate.
Good riddance, savages.
Posted by Andrew Dalton at 8:58 AM
Moi, reject reason? Of course I didn’t reject reason. I said that to say that reason is the ONLY value is a reductionist ideology. But, proving that Objectivism is indeed a reductionist ideology, Dalton takes my rejection of reductionism as a rejection of reason, and calls me a savage. He thus confirms what I said about the Randians: “The followers of the simplistic ideology … simply hate and dehumanize everyone who doesn’t follow their simplistic formula.”
Also, he calls Christianity an ideology, but offers no support for that statement; unless he simply means that any body of beliefs, regardless of its character, is an ideology, a definition so broad it is almost useless. But of course I was not speaking of ideology in that generic sense. I was speaking of it in the specialized, critical sense with which conservatives have always used the term.
But heck, what do I know? I reject Randianism, therefore I’m a savage.
Also, I just realized that that’s the meaning of Dalton’s blog’s title. People who disagree with Randianism are witch doctors.
By the way, some day I should make a collection of the various epithets that have been directed at me. The other day a David Duke supporter wrote to me and called me a “sand nigger,” whatever that is, though it sounds definitely sub human.
Dana writes:
It’s inconceivable that the statement about “Roots” is a quote from Rand and I can’t find it. I am an Objectivist and have read most of her books and most articles. Can you post my request for a citation on that? Thanks.
LA replies:
Dana, you’re right. That hadn’t occurred to me. The quote is so uncharacteristic of her that I agree with you, it is questionable and needs to be verified.
I’ve written to Roger D. to see if he has a source for it.
James M2 writes:
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged between them run nearly 1800 pages. Throughout those many pages, Rand eschews non-white characters, seemingly as a rule. Of course, the books were written between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, and the inclusion of non-whites was not necessary for the exposition of her philosophy. But amongst all these dozens and dozens of Caucasians she makes a single exception: A low level draftsman, at one of the firms which employed Howard Roark, is described as being Asian. I would think that if you take the time to describe the 50-plus characters who populate your novels and only once explicitly state that one is non-white, then you probably attached significance to your characterization of him as such. Could it be that Rand felt that Asians were particularly suited to tedious, minutia-heavy, technical tasks such as detailing an architectural drawing?
LA replies:
A quibble: the Asian was not a low level draftsman, but the firm’s specialist in turning out beautiful, artistic drawings of the designs to impress clients. That’s part of what makes it so shocking when Roark, in front of a client who is being shown the drawing of his house and is not satisfied with it, violently seizes the drawing and rapidly draws over it his original plan for the house which the firm had changed to make it more respectable.
Also, the Asian doesn’t appear in the book as a character; we are just told that an Asian does these drawings. So, in that sense, the actual characters in Rand’s novels remain 100 percent white.
I noticed last night that VFR reader Dean Ericson had commented at the Noodles Head thread. I wrote to him:
That Randian site is really something, huh?
He replied:
Something indeed, but not something so strange. In the summer of ‘79 I was sitting in the Steamboat Springs public library, taking a break from my promising career as a 21 year old ski-bum, when I happened to see in the paperback carousel next to me an intense, dark-eyed woman staring back, in an attitude of seeming exaltation, from a book cover bearing the provocative title, “The Virtue of Selfishness.” Naturally, I picked it out and began to read. Within about two pages I was hooked. Something in her withering, cocksure attitude, and all those scathing phrases emphasized by italics—what she was saying and how she said it—made my young blood thrill. Over the next three to four years I treated myself to a steady diet of Randiosity, the entire canon, fiction and non, moving on to Mises and his merry men, Hayek, Nock, Isabel Paterson, Rothbard, et cetera.
Time and experience have taken their toll on that youthful enthusiasm. At 51 years now I’ve come to have an appreciation for what was sound in Rand’s thinking while rejecting what was overwrought, unbalanced, and false. (Part of the credit for that is due to VFR and the many fine contributors to this site. Pardon the sycophancy.) [LA replies: It’s vile sycophancy.] Yet looking back I can understand the tremendous appeal of such an ideology, especially given the emotionally seductive device of fictional heroes triumphantly struggling against evil. Reading Rand, I went from ski-bum to ski-god—an aristocratic playboy on strike, you see, a model of rationality, a menace to mindless mystics everywhere. (It didn’t hurt that I was a tall and lanky Nordic type—something my Jewish girlfriend, all five feet and 98 pounds of her, finds irresistible as much as Rand ever did. But that’s getting off-topic.)
So when I read a thread like that I understand these Randian folks and can make allowances for their sometimes misguided notions. What I won’t make allowances for are bad manners. When the host of a website dedicated, so they state, to the objective discussion of ideas, replies to a polite and reasonable post with a pugnacious, foul-mouthed taunt sounding like a sailor in a sandstorm, I say, STOP! I won’t waste time with that sort of trashy, modern juvenile infesting the web. Contrast that with VFR’s resident leftist, Ken Hechtman, who explains his views here—many of which we find loathsome—in a polite and reasonable manner, and he’s given a decent hearing in return. Those (Randians) who imagine themselves champions of civilization may pause to consider “civility” as a virtue on par with “selfishness.”
Terry Morris writes:
Humorous on one hand, sad and dangerous on the other, that Andrew Dalton has put his full faith in his own ability to reason properly and correctly, when all of human experience (as well as his own experience whether he cares to acknowledge it or not) hath shown that mankind is particularly disposed to reason incorrectly, as the faculty of reason without cultivation, without experience, and without revelation, is a miserable guide which often errs from ignorance, and more often from the impulse of passion.
His own words are his own undoing. To claim someone has rejected reason altogether on the basis that that person rejects the pitifully ignorant, sophomoric notion that reason alone is to be our sole and exclusive guide, and thus to count him a savage, is to reveal oneself as completely detached from genuine reason, not to mention humility. But as long as he’s managed to convince himself, I guess that’s all that matters as far as the poor soul is concerned.
LA replies:
I like your paraphrase of Mr. Jefferson.
Jack R. writes:
Andrew Dalton replied to you:
“When someone offers a moral/political worldview—any worldview—they can have no honest argument against ideology as such.”
You did not answer this. All you did was argue that Christianity is not an ideology which is a non answer (and very dubious). You advocate Traditionalism. Is Traditionalism not an ideology? Are all people who disagree with Traditionalism “ideologues” but not the Traditionalists themselves?
The reality is you are advancing an ideology just the same as Ayn Rand did. The question isn’t which is an ideology and which isn’t. The question is which one is right and true? That can be debated and the answer for the purposes of my e-mail to you is not relevant. But I find the fact that you exempt yourself from advancing an ideology to be dishonest.
LA replies:
As I’ve explained many times, ideology has two distinct meanings. The first meaning is any body of beliefs, ideas, proposals, etc. In that sense, traditionalism is an ideology. And even Christianity is an ideology, though that sounds weird, since I’ve never heard Christianity per se called an ideology. (However, in The New Science of Politics, chapter 5, Eric Voegelin speaks of Puritanism as a gnostic ideology.) The second meaning of ideology, which is usually the way it’s used by (traditional) conservatives, is a belief system that takes one part of the total structure of existence and artificially treats that one part as the whole, and then seeks to transform the world through the exaltation of that principle. Thus, using this second meaning of ideology, it is a truism among conservatives that (say) Jacobinism, Communism, liberalism, feminism, etc., are ideologies, because they reduce the world to one thing or set of things, and aim at transforming the world; but that conservatism is not an ideology, because it accepts and seeks to understand the world as is. It has no driving purpose toward some transformative goal. (This would not apply to some modern forms of conservatism, such as economism, which reduces the human world to the economy, or neoconservatism, which narrows the world to democracy and universal human sameness and seeks to create a single world of democracy loving people, ignoring everything that doesn’t fit into that scheme.)
Here’s a classic example of ideology. Marx said (approximately): “The idea is not to understand the world, but to change the world.”
In response to Marx’s idea, the conservative writer and thinker Thomas Molnar once said to me in conversation, “The idea is not to change the world, but to understand the world.”
The (traditional) conservative tries to understand the structure of the world and to harmonize his own being with it. The ideologue is profoundly dissatisfied with the world as it is and seeks to transform it.
So, in the first sense of the word, both Randianism and traditionalism are ideologies, and, yes, of course, it’s up to people to decide which is more true. But in the second sense of the word, Randianism is an ideology and traditionalism is not, because Randianism takes one part of the total structure of existence, reason, and treats that as the whole, and then seeks to transform the world through the exaltation of that one value and the demonization of all other values.
This doesn’t mean that conservatives don’t have goals to affect society. But these goals are generally seen as efforts to turn back liberal deformations of society and man, not to create a new society and a new man.
I hope this explanation satisfactorily addresses your questions.
April 20
In reply to Dana’s comment that she could find no source for Roger D.’s quote of Ayn Rand’s comment about Roots, and my request to Roger D. for a source, Roger replies:
See Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A, ed. Robert Mayhew (New York: New American Library, 2005), pp. 208-210. The words about Roots as mythology are on p. 209. Mayhew is a professor of philosophy at Seton Hall who works closely with the Ayn Rand Institute. I ran across the quotation while reviewing the book for The New Individualist.
LA replies:
Amazing! So she really said it. Thank you again for this.
It’s startlingly inconsistent with her philosophy which makes the individual human being and the individual’s reason the only reality and absolutely rejects any notion of race, ethnicity, or any sort of human collectivity. Do you think she was losing it in her last years? Though, in this case, “losing it” would mean that she was losing her extremist ideology and adopting a view more true to human reality.
Roger D. replies:
No, I don’t in the least think she was “losing it in her last years.” She was a woman of unusual perceptiveness, but her flashes of insight into the human condition often bewildered her merely logical followers, including me. The all-time winner in this regard was her casual remark that a woman should not be president. Despite her later extended explanation, many an Objectivist is still scratching his (and especially her) head about that one.
LA replies:
What explanation did she give for her remark about no woman president?
Though I’m not surprised. After all, while making her hero a woman who runs a railroad, she does NOT see Dagny as typical or representative of women. She clearly believes in a man-run world.
From: Dana
Subject: to the gas chambers, go
Ah, such an unjust characterization. In the Objectivist worldview no individual or government could ever have the power to send anyone to gas chambers even if they wanted to, nor does one single character in one single Rand book express anything that can be perceived of as wanting that power. Objectivism is characterized specifically by an abhorrence of coercion, whether by government or the “emotional blackmail” of the undeserving.
What people can’t stand about Objectivists is that we do not politely hold out the possibility that people who disagree with us could even possibly be correct. This is not, however as much an intrinsic part of Objectivism so much as it is the personality type of the people who espouse it. It’s my belief that Objectivism can and will only appeal to people on the high functioning end of the Asperger’s Syndrome spectrum, and I include myself in this group. It is cold and emotionless, systematic. It has no concern for people’s “feelings” about philosophy, law and government. I presume this makes people think we would somehow eradicate people who disagree with us if we were to somehow gain power over a government. The gas chambers were not caused by an appeal to the German peoples’ Reason, but to their emotions.
Objectivists believe that the “compromise” between incommensurable worldviews can only lead to the victory of the “immoral” one (for lack of a better term right now for the purposes of this discourse). Rand said ” in the compromise between meat and poison, Death always wins.” Look at what’s happened to Conservatism in the Us for example. By constantly treating the 1st premises of the Left with respect and granting the Left its “good intentions” on subjects like civil rights and entitlements, it has de facto adopted them and moved farther and farther to Left. The Left on the other hand NEVER grants the right respect for its first premises (it doesn’t even recognize that it’s opponents have an intellectual basis, in fact) and itself moves more and more to the Left, dragging the whole country with it. This has led specifically to the sort of “mixed economy” and “mixed government” that so precariously obtains in the US right now, one that appears to be teetering on the brink of collapse.
As for the people over at Noodlefood—while they may be “Objectivists”, they are also just mostly grad students. They aren’t exactly spokespeople for the Ayn Rand Institute. As such, I have detected a strong current of SWPL* culture there ( as it being called in the HBD blogosphere now), so while they would appear to agree much more with conservative than liberal thought, they are still of the elitist academic culture of the East coast and would seem to revile the culture and beliefs of the regular American from the same cultural place that any grad student Obama supporter does.
Respectfully,
Dana
*SWPL= the social class parodied at stuffwhitepeoplelike.com
LA replies:
Obviously Chambers (and I) did not mean literally that Rand had the intention or thought of mass murdering people. However, Chambers’s “gas chamber” statement also means a more than that Randians simply have no respect for others. The language used in John Galt’s speech about the looters, the “mystics of the spirit” (by which Rand means anyone who believes in God), and much stronger phrases to describe the villains in her universe, is not the language of cold reason; it is the language of overwhelming, pathological hatred. It is in the same family as the language that Lenin used about property owners, and that Hitler used about Jews, totally dehumanizing the object of one’s hate.
Also, the language of hatred in the speech is very atypical of Galt’s generally calm, affable style elsewhere, showing that in this speech Rand is not speaking in her character’s language, but in her language, breaking into his speech to unleash her uncontrolled passions and hatreds, a major artistic failing.
By the way, if I may ask, given my tough criticisms of Rand and Randians, how can you stand me?
LA continues:
Also, re your point about the people at Noodle Foods not being typical Objectivists, we can only take people as they manifest themselves to us. This is a Randian website, and the language of hatred its participants use about non-Randians is typical of other Randian websites with which VFR has had interactions, as well as typical of Rand’s own language. Therefore I don’t think the attitudes of Diana Hsieh and her commenters can be attributted merely to “a liberal elite grad school culture.”
Dana replies:
A longer response may come but in a nutshell I appreciate you for what you are right about and the topics you address and feel like all other people you are entitled to be wrong about everything else ;)
LA replies:
Fair enough. :-) A most human response.
Roger D. replies to LA’s last reply to him:
Rand held that the essence of the masculine sexual psychology is efficacy, while the essence of the feminine sexual psychology is man-worship. (Thus, the masculine sexual psychology is fundamentally identical to the psychology that lies at the base of human self-esteem, while the woman’s sexual psychology is unique to the sexual perspective.) Rand then argued that the president, even in a constitutional republic, was the nation’s leader, and in a real sense the boss of every man around him. A woman occupying such a position, she believed, would therefore be unable to look upon any man around her in a feminine way, and no psychologically healthy woman would want to put herself in that position for years on end. She made an exception for “Joan of Arc” situations, in which no capable man had stepped forward to handle a national crisis.
LA replies:
Interesting.
But … wasn’t Joan of Arc one of those horrible “mystics of the spirit” and “spiritual looters” who are the curse of mankind?
Given Rand’s total hatred of religious believers, what right does she have to uphold Joan of Arc as an outstanding figure? Rand’s (entirely normal and proper) admiration for Joan of Arc contradicts her reason-worshipping ideology which demonizes religious belief, just as the Darwinians’ constant references to teleology in evolution contradict the Darwinian theory which rigidly excludes teleology from evolution. In both cases, the person’s humanity (Rand’s admiration for the religiously inspired Joan, the Darwinians’ belief that life is purposeful) makes major exceptions to his ideology, a sure sign that the ideology is false and unsustainable.
By the way, for anyone living in or visiting New York, be sure to see the great Joan of Arc statue in the tiny Joan of Arc park at Riverside Drive in the low 90s.
Roger D. replies:
Rand loved Schiller, and I am sure she was thinking of his “Maid of Orleans,” not the historical Joan. She probably would have agreed with Professor Calvin Thomas of Columbia: “Voltaire saw in her one of the pious frauds of that Infamous he was bent on crushing; for her national mission he had little feeling, because of his fixed idea that nothing good could have come from the ages of superstition. Schiller saw in her, and was the first great poet to see what all the world sees now, the heroic deliverer of her country from a hated foreign invader. And so he threw down the gauntlet to his century and lifted the ludibrium of the French wits to the pedestal of an inspired savior of France…. It is Johanna’s [LA says: I assume this is the German name for Jeanne or Joan] love of country that gives her a measure of human interest, in spite of the supernaturalism that invests her. Were she not thus the representative of a passion that is intensely real, and that has come to be regarded, for better or for worse, as preeminently noble, she would now possess but very languid interest for the sublunary mind.”
All her life, Rand struggled to reconcile her Enlightenment philosophy, which should have led her to take Voltaire’s view of Joan, as you say, against her Romanticist psychology, which in fact led her to side with Schiller.
LA replies:
It’s sometimes said in the blogosphere that the commenters at VFR are erudite, but when for the second time in three days I have to look up a word from a VFR commenter, I’m starting to wonder whether I’m not erudite enough for VFR.
From Wikipedia:
Ludibrium is a word derived from Latin ludus (plural ludi), meaning a plaything or a trivial game. In Latin ludibrium denotes an object of fun, and at the same time, of scorn and derision, and it also denotes a capricious game itself: e.g., ludibria ventis (Virgil), “the playthings of the winds,” ludibrium pelagis (Lucretius), “the plaything of the waves”; Ludibrio me adhuc habuisti (Plautus), “Until now you have been toying with me.”
Gintas writes:
Murray Rothbard wrote a short play about the cult of Ayn Rand, entitled “Mozart Was A Red”. Rothbard had first-hand experience with the cult. From Justin Raimondo’s introduction:
With her flowing cape, intense eyes, and long cigarette holder, Rand was the very picture of eccentricity; she sometimes wore a tricornered hat, and at one point carried a gold-knobbed cane. Her thick Russian accent added to the exoticism. It is a measure of Rand’s powerful personality—and the real key to understanding the Rand cult—that, after a while, many of her leading followers began to speak with a noticeable accent, although each and every one of them had been born in North America.
Kritor writes:
I love that word [LA says: I assume you mean reductionism.]. I learned it from CS Lewis. He uses it in, as I recall, his book, Miracles. As it happens he uses it in an argument that is directly applicable to the thread, and to the notion that an eliminative, “nothing but-ist” reductionism is almost always radically inadequate to reality. His argument is that, of all the religions he has studied, Christianity is the only one whose precepts do not all flow straightforwardly and logically from one or two basic principles. Most great religions, he argues, make a lot of internal sense. Prima facie they do, anyway. Christianity, by contrast, seems at first glance to be chock full of illogical tenets: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Real Presence, the Church as the Body of Christ, and so forth. But, the more you dig in to them, the more you find that the other great religions are all more logical and straightforward than real life actually is. They each end up neglecting to address some major facet of the overall situation. Christianity does not. It is, he says, just as complex, wild and unexpected, just as anfractuous [LA replies: there’s that word again!], as reality itself. Yet as one digs deeper into its mysteries, one finds that they hang together quite nicely. They make sense in a deeper way than one would have expected. It is therefore, he posits, the only one of the great religions that even gets out of the starting blocks as a candidate for the true religion. [LA replies: That is a great and true insight by Lewis. Reality is multileveled; Christianity articulates the multileveled nature of reality. And my saying that (according to the charming Andrew Dalton) makes me a “savage.”]
In my own studies, I have found that Christianity expresses all the truths that the other religions also express, so that it “covers” all the things they do; and it also expresses other truths, that they overlook, while avoiding the errors they make. It is far more complex than any of them. The truths of Taoism and Vedanta, for example, are covered in the Neo-Platonic bits of Christian theology. But these bits, while important, are just a small portion of the whole shebang.
This is why the commenter in that thread who characterized Christianity as an ideology is incorrect. Being a Christian, believing in the Creed, does not simplify everything for the believer. In Christianity, there is nothing for the believer anything like the sublime experience of the ideological true believer, when he realizes, “Yes! It all boils down to atoms/sex/individuation/freedom/random variation/rationality/equality/race/class warfare/market equilibrium/whatever/nothing.” No. For the Christian (as for any true mystic), the moment of revelation is more like, “Whoa! How very much more complex than I could have suspected, and how much more immense, and beautiful! I could never hope to encompass it, or to express it; yet here it is, I find, and has always been, at my own root and beginning; and everything I do expresses it, even though I cannot.”
Dana continues:
I think I appreciate you because I have a very strong background in philosophy and religion and ancient history and possibly I am tempered by that and the fact that I didn’t come to Rand until I was mature and has basically rejected all other systems of thought after long investigation.
I view Objectivism as simply my natural way of thinking, I always thought basically like Rand and didn’t know it, I didn’t read her until my 30s and was stunned to discover she existed and had been, from what I can tell, deliberately withheld from me.
I think Objectivism is the “religion” of the autistic. As a personal philosophy it’s not for everyone and is wholly incompatible with most humans’ natures. I would not expect regular people to embrace it—I want a government and system of laws based on it. It is my belief that an Objectivist/libertarian form of government would provide the incentives that would lead humans back to the traditional morality you espouse specifically because that morality and those values arose from generations of trial and error. It is apparent to me that a civilization with stable rule of law and ordered liberty requires a populace with certain character traits—thrift, honesty, continence, low preference for time savings, and that historically these traits have emerged from certain ethnes and traditions and not from others. Where I quibble with many traditionalists is that they seem to believe we can recover those traits by fiat or with the persuasion of words, whereas I think not only that incentives matter, but that sometimes the incentives that lead to the desired behavior do so indirectly.
Example: no one would question that the intent behind granting child support to women who had never been married to the fathers was good and arose only to make sure men took care of children they sired. [LA says: the preceding sentence is unclear.] No one seems to have remotely imagined the result of this heretofore unheard of policy would be an explosion of single motherhood CAUSED by the perverse malincentive of child support. Seems to me a traditionalist would either a) try to outlaw single motherhood or b) try to convince women not to become single mothers with words. My solution is to end one of the true incentives that provoked the epidemic (along with no fault divorce, welfare and a host of other horrors), child support from men who were never married to the women. I hope this example makes sense. If we removed that incentive, women would once again become afraid of getting pregnant out of wedlock and any attempt to shame them out of it could stand a chance to work because there would be actual real world consequences to point to, ie, poverty with no hope for unearned monetary support.
Rand thought the U.S. in the 19th century was the height of human civilization and the closest we have ever come to what she was talking about, albeit still mixed. She didn’t think this because she thought everyone that lived then was an Objectivist, she thought it because it was a time when people in the U.S. were most left alone by the government.
LA replies:
But of course I agree with you 100 percent on illegitimacy and welfare for illegitimacy. Why would you suggest otherwise? I have repeatedly said that illegitimacy as the single greatest cause of social/moral deterioration in America. I have excoriated conservatives for turning away from this issue, which used to be a (or the) top issue for them. Don’t you remember VFR’s passionate debate last September on Sarah Palin, and how I said that her nomination was a disaster for conservatism because it would lead conservatives—already had led them—to approve the Bristol Palin situation, thus destroying the conservative basis for resisting illegitimacy?
The position I took on Palin went against the entire conservative pro-Palin consensus at that time. Some conservatives and VFR readers were alienated from me as a result of it. And not just Christian conservatives. An English commenter named Simon Newman, who had been posting for some time at VFR as Simon N., and with whom I had had numerous cordial exchanges both online and in private e-mail, posted at Steve Sailer’s site a bizarre smear of me saying that I opposed births by white conservatives. He wrote :
A lot of Blue Staters do seem to really hate the idea of Red State breeders. This includes traditionalists like Lawrence Auster, condemning Palin for her daughter being pregnant at 17—by her fiance!!. But what could be more traditional than pregnant at 17, married at 18?.
After I wrote to Newman complaining about his ugly lie about me, he retracted the comment, but in a way that made it clear the retraction was only pro forma. I haven’t heard from him since.
So what was this about? Just as it became clear during the Bristol situation that the social/Christian conservatives had reduced conservatism to being anti-abortion, it became clear that the paleocons and white nationalists had reduced conservatism to being in favor of white births. The circumstances of those births were irrelevant. Marriage was irrelevant. Just white bodies were relevant.
While the anecdote may seem far afield from the topic of this thread, it is not. Because it shows us again how the basic error, in every ideological faction, is the inability or refusal to see the whole picture, followed by the reducing of the world to one simple issue, and the pushing of that one issue at the expense of all others. Why did Simon Newman suddenly tell a vicious and absurd lie about me? Because he had reduced the world to one simplistic value, white births, and, because I was opposing the conservative approval of illegitimacy, he suddenly saw me as an opponent of that value.
Dana replies:
If you read carefully—I was addressing SOLUTIONS, not problems—it’s the solutions where I disagree with conservatives and trads most, not discerning the problem. Man, do I agree, though, that conservatism is being defined wholly by opposition to abortion—the exclusive concern with a few “social conservative” issues like abortion is driving more economics minded people like me out of the Republican party. It’s not making me a Dem, mind you, it’s making me a homeless, voiceless non voter
Gintas writes:
Do you think this reductionism is related to Gnosticism? Doesn’t it seem like we live in the middle of a hunt for a single key to unlock all the mysteries of the universe? And, once found, everything else disappears from view, insignificant? Lewis, though, posited Christianity as a large key ring with a bulky array of keys, each of which deals with some level of the world.
LA replies:
Yes, it’s very much related to it. See Chapter Four of Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics: “Gnosticism—the Nature of Modernity.” Voegelin says that modernity in its various forms is a rebellion against the Christian articulation of reality into the transcendent and the immanent and an attempt to return the world to a less complex structure, a reality without the transcendent. But this can’t be done, because the transcendent has already been discovered, is already a part of human consciousness. Therefore the attempt to rid reality of the transcendent only results in the creation of substitute forms of transcendence, by squeezing transcendence into some immanent form.
Thus equality becomes a god (and inequality becomes the devil). Tolerance becomes a god (and intolerance becomes the devil). Personal freedom of choice becomes a god (and any restriction on freedom of choice becomes the devil). The economy becomes a god (and any non-economic values become the devil or at best contemptible and irrelevant). The German race becomes a god (and Jews become the devil). The black race becomes a god (and the white race becomes the devil). Diversity becomes a god (and [white] homogeneity becomes the devil). Sex becomes a god (and any restraint on sexuality becomes the devil). Female empowerment becomes a god (and [white] men become the devil). Materialist science, incarnated in Charles Darwin, becomes a god (and God becomes the devil). Randian reason, incarnated in John Galt, becomes a god (and God becomes the devil). And on and on. And each of these gnostic ideological movements hates the others (or many of the others), without seeing their shared commonality, as reductionist attacks on the order of being. This is a picture of modern society.
Jack R. replies to LA’s reply to him:
So many things to respond to. I’ll have to choose just a few.
…but that conservatism is not an ideology, because it accepts and seeks to understand the world as is.
Understanding the world based on the imaginings of a supernatural being and a mythology that believes that a carpenter—who is really God—walked on water and resurrected himself from the dead? If this is understanding the world, I’d rather be ignorant of it.
…because Randianism takes one part of the total structure of existence, reason, and treats that as the whole, and then seeks to transform the world through the exaltation of that one value and the demonization of all other values.
You couldn’t be more wrong and it is obvious that you have no understanding of Rand’s philosophic system. Objectivism is not reductionist or materialist or monist or any of the things you describe it as. But to debate this further would require massive time and energy. What you are describing is not Objectivism but what you view any ideology which rejects traditionalism and theism must be. Its a form of special pleading.
But these goals are generally seen as efforts to turn back liberal deformations of society and man, not to create a new society and a new man.
Oh I see. A non-“deformed” society that has as its foundation the belief in superstition and mythology and would enforce racial supremacism, Christian authoritarianism and male patriarchy. I know, I know, that’s not what you mean and not what you advocate and besides America was like that until the 1950s. Right. Its only the end-of-the-road on which you want us all to travel. I’d rather not take that trip.
Thank you for enlightening me as to your conception of “ideology.”
LA replies:
This is not my concept of ideology. It is the standard conservative view of the matter. Evidently Jack R. sees Christianity as an ideology in the same sense that, say, Communism is an ideology. That makes the concept so broad as to be useless.
Jack R. also sent another e-mail that was so stupid, hostile, and accusatory it wasn’t worth posting, though I did reply to a couple of his wild misconceptions privately, such as his complaint that to refer to followers of the philosophy of Ayn Rand as “Randians” is an insult and the moral equivalent of calling people “savages” and “racist t__ds.”
Note: this thread has reached maximum size, and is being continued in a new entry.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 18, 2009 03:40 PM | Send
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