A couple of write-ups – 1, 2 – of the recent caffeinated philosophy event.
Tag Archives | Praxeology
The Tragic Rand
Will Wilkinson has a good anti-conflationist piece on Rand, here. (CHT Charles Johnson.) I posted the following quibble:
Excellent piece (and on related points see also my posts Ayn Rand’s Left-Libertarian Legacy and Ayn Rand and the Capitalist Class); but I think I disagree with you about the benevolent-universe premise; when she says that success is metaphysically normal, I don’t think she means this to entail that success (or even the possibility of success) is statistically normal. Admittedly I think she perhaps sometimes slides from the former to the latter in her later writings (as in her changing views on charity); but if so, that was a mistaken inference and doesn’t impugn the principle itself. By analogy (to make a Michael Thompson-y point): even if some plague caused most lions to be born with three legs, it would still be true that the lion is a four-legged animal or that being four-legged is normal for lions.
The Labyrinth of Fate, With Coffee
Puppets in Hell
I’m back from the APS – which was fun, as usual.
For those in the Auburn area, there’ll be another session of caffeinated philosophy tomorrow at 5:00 at the Gnu’s Room (next to Amsterdam Café, near the corner of Gay and Samford). This time I’ll be part of a roundtable discussing free will; check out the poster here.
Milton in Paradise Lost describes the fallen angels in Hell enjoying a similar discussion:
Others apart sat on a hill retir’d,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute;
And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.
But Milton’s fallen angels didn’t have the benefit of the Gnu’s Room’s excellent coffee, so I’m sure we’ll get it all sorted out.
The Perils of Low Time-Preference
Anne Heller’s new bio Ayn Rand and the World She Made comes out next month, but Amazon has already posted the first chapter, and it looks pretty interesting. If you think that after reading Barbara Branden and Chris Sciabarra there’s nothing new to learn about Rand’s early years, think again.
I was especially struck by this passage:
When Rand was five or so, she recalled, her mother came into the children’s playroom and found the floor littered with toys. She announced to Rand and Rand’s two-and-a-half-year-old sister, Natasha, that they would have to choose some of their toys to put away and some to keep and play with now; in a year, she told them, they could trade the toys they had kept for those they had put away.
Natasha held on to the toys she liked best, but Rand, imagining the pleasure she would get from having her favorite toys returned to her later, handed over her best-loved playthings, including a painted mechanical wind-up chicken she could describe vividly fifty years later.
When the time came to make the swap and Rand asked for her toys back, her mother looked amused, Rand recalled. Anna explained that she had given everything to an orphanage, on the premise that if her daughters had really wanted their toys they wouldn’t have relinquished them in the first place.
Yup, her mother couldn’t have done better if she was deliberately trying to create Ayn Rand.
Roosevelt’s Ghost
My grandmother always referred to FDR as “that man who killed all the little pigs.” (If you don’t know what she was referring to, click here.) Now there was a man who got warm fuzzies from seeing windows broken.
And now of course he’s back.
Rothbard on Aptheker on Slavery
At the Mises Institute today I was looking through the library and noticed Murray Rothbard’s copy of American Negro Slave Revolts, the 1943 study by Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker. One passage stood out because Rothbard had marked it with heavy lightning-bolt squiggles and marginal comments like “Right,” “Good,” “Great.”
Aptheker, discussing the claim that “cruelty was characteristic of the institution of American Negro slavery,” writes:
Many, perhaps most, writers on this subject have denied this and assert, on the contrary, that “kindliness [was] the rule” under the system. … A recent repetition of this idea urges the reader to bear in mind that “owners of slaves were hardly likely to be cruel or careless with expensive pieces of their own property,” just as most people do not abuse their horses or automobiles.
Aptheker goes on to provide ample empirical evidence to the contrary; but first he attacks the theoretical argument, and this is the section that excited Rothbard’s enthusiastic approval:
[T]he fatal error in the above proposition is the assumption that one may accurately compare any two pieces of property, even if they be so far apart and so distinct as is a horse from a human being.
There are, however, fundamental differences. Basic is the reasoning faculty which leads men, unlike automobiles, to compare, plan, hope, yearn, desire, hate, fear, which leads them to seek pleasure and shun pain, to spin dreams and build philosophies and struggle and gladly die for them. Human beings, in fine, or, at least, many human beings, do possess the glorious urge to improve themselves and their environment. And people who are beaten, branded, sold, degraded, denied a thousand and one privileges they see enjoyed by others will be discontented, and will plan, or at least, think of bettering their lot.
This was the slaveholders’ nightmare. This it was that led them to erect theologic, economic, social and ethnologic justifications for their system, that led them to build a most elaborate machine of physical repression and terrorization. For, and here was another crucial difference, most slaves were owned as investments, not as ornaments or commodities of consumption, as are most automobiles. Slaves were instruments of production, were means by which men who owned land were able to produce tobacco and rice and sugar and cotton to be sold and to return them a profit. Their existence had no meaning other than this for the employers. Profit must be gotten from these workers – whom the bosses owned – no matter what blood and sweat and tears this entailed, and the more profit the better.
When one combines the differences, then, he finds the slaves to have been not inanimate ornaments or instruments of pleasure, but thinking, living commercial investments, rational machines of production. It may be said, therefore, that cruelty was an innate, inextricable part of American Negro slavery, for these peculiar machines, possessed of the unique quality of human beings – reason – had to be maltreated, had to be made to suffer physical cruelty, had to be chained and lashed and beaten into producing for a profit. The latter was the reason for their existence and incorrigibility, protest, disobedience, discontent, rebelliousness were bad in themselves, and disastrous as examples. Instead of the slave’s value preventing cruelty, it was exactly because of that value, and that greater value he could produce – when forced – that cruelty existed. (pp. 132-133)
It occurs to me this Aptheker-Rothbard argument also raises a problem for Hans Hoppe’s contention that monarchs can be expected to be relatively benign because they take the attitude of private ownership toward the realms they rule.