[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
The Atlas Shrugged film project, which had recently slid back into development hell, seems to be crawling back out. (Conical hat tip to AICN.)
Also note the reference to The Changeling, the film Jolie plans to do before Atlas; that’s a J. Michael Straczynski script.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Ill news this Bastille Day: the Atlas Shrugged movie is apparently shuffling right back into its old home: Development Hell.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
1. The Social Philosophy and Policy Center’s latest anthology is out this month (published simultaneously as the current issue of Social Philosophy & Policy and as a stand-alone book titled Freedom, Reason, and the Polis: Essays in Ancient Greek Political Philosophy), with chapters on various aspects of the classical political tradition by Carrie-Ann Biondi, Chris Bobonich, David Keyt, Richard Kraut, André Laks, Tony Long, Fred Miller, Gerasimos Santas, Chris Shields, Allan Silverman, C. C. W. Taylor, and your humble correspondent.
My own contribution is an essay titled “The Classical Roots of Radical Individualism,” in which I argue that on a variety of issues, from spontaneous order and the natural harmony of interests to hypothetical-imperative ethics and moralised conceptions of law, the libertarian tradition is developing themes from classical antiquity. Among the classical thinkers I discuss are Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, and Cicero; among the libertarians I discuss are Paine, Constant, Bastiat, Spencer, Andrews, Spooner, Tucker, Mises, Hayek, Rand, and Rothbard. In short, Austro-Athenian frenzy abounds!
2. The Alabama Philosophical Society (for which I’m vice-president this year and webmaster always) will meet about a month earlier than usual this fall, September 21-22, on the Gulf; the deadline for submitting a paper is thus likewise extra-early, August 7th. The keynote speaker is my old friend from IHS days, Andrew Melnyk. Details here. You don’t have to be an Alabamian to participate, so come on down!
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Tom Knapp’s remark yesterday that “[t]he big problem with [Ayn] Rand was that over time she made it a point to isolate herself from anyone and everyone who demonstrated the kind of character that might lead them to run up the bullshit 
flag on her when necessary” reminded me of a critical remark made about abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison by one of his contemporaries. I can’t remember the author or the exact wording and I haven’t been able to find it online (anyone out there recognise it? I believe I heard it quoted on a Knowledge Products tape, one of a batch that I unwisely lent to a friend years ago and never recovered), but it does an excellent job of summing up a dynamic that is evident not just with Garrison or Rand but with all too many other intellectual leaders. It went something like this:
“How to Create a Pope: Find someone in whom the habit of having been often correct in many things has prepared him to be convinced that he is always correct in all things, and bombard him with praise in these matters until you have succeeded in helping him so convince himself.”
On an unrelated note, I recently came across an autobiographical sketch of Rose Wilder Lane that I hadn’t seen before, apparently done as part of some 1930s WPA project.
Have you noticed how, when a good character is temporarily turned evil via magic or alien science or what have you, he or she generally tends to become much more self-confident? And so it is in Spider-man 3, which I finally saw last night.
This frequent association of evil with self-confidence suggests some deep confusion of values; and those who accept it thereby become susceptible, I fear, to one of two temptations: either to renounce self-confidence (in order to avoid being evil) or to embrace evil (in order to hold on to self-confidence). Such a perspective contrasts with the more salutary Platonic-Aristotelean-Thomistic understanding of evil as a lack, an absence, a falling short, a descent into weakness and inefficacy.
Even Tolkien seems to succumbs to the prevailing notion when he says of Frodo, at the moment when Frodo finally succumbs to the temptation of the Ring: “Then Frodo stirred and spoke with a clear voice, indeed with a voice clearer and more powerful than Sam had ever heard him use ….” I say “even” because Tolkien generally holds the opposite view: his heroes tend to grow more forceful with time, while his villains, corrupted by their own evil, become weaker and slimier. (That’s one reason I prefer the book version to the movie version of Saruman’s end; the movie gives him a grandiose ending befitting a grandiose villain, while the book reduces him to a sordid con man before finishing him off in a back alley.) And I say “seems” because the Ring is not really strengthening or liberating Frodo, though it offers the illusion of strength and liberation, like the Biblical serpent’s promise that “you shall be as gods.”
Rand, like Tolkien, expressed a Platonic-Aristotelean-Thomistic understanding of evil when she wrote in We the Living that our true enemy is not “a tall warrior in a steel helmet, a human dragon spitting fire,” but rather “[l]ittle puny things that wiggle,” or again in The Fountainhead that “men had been so mistaken about the shapes of their Devil – he was not single and big, he was many and smutty and small.” And I’ve blogged previously about Rand’s observation of the tendency of writers to smuggle the forbidden “fire of self-assertiveness” into their works in the form of the “fascinating villain or colorful rogue, who steals the story.”
Incidentally, one of the great benefits of Peikoff’s Ominous Parallels, for all it faults, lies in the way it undermines the popular (and dangerously seductive) image of the Nazis as, in effect, human dragons spitting fire, and reveals them instead as the puny wiggling things they were.
[cross posted at Liberty & Power]
Joseph Sobran suggests (conical hat tip to LRC) that people’s willingness to help or praise others refutes Darwinism and atheism, and defies Randian egoism. Let’s take these in turn.
Darwinism: Sobran seems to imagine that if Darwinism were true, people would be interested solely in their own narrow survival and would have no genuine concern for others. This is wrong on two different levels.
First, Sobran mistakenly assumes that Darwinism commits us to holding that all our mental contents, all our beliefs and desires, are there solely because they promote survival. Yet Darwinism implies nothing of the kind. Natural selection explains our possession of various capacities for learning, choosing, being influenced; but natural selection by itself does not guarantee that these capacities will be exercised solely in survival-conducing ways. How could it? My belief that 666 is the square root of 443556 isn’t there because that belief has survival value; there may be cases where it would, but I doubt that it ever has. Instead my belief that 666 is the square root of 443556 is the product of a general capacity to figure things out (i.e., reason), and that capacity has survival value.
Second, even if Darwinism did imply that all our mental contents are directly explainable by natural selection, it still wouldn’t follow that we should be surprised at the existence of genuine other-concern. Suppose (and this does not seem to be an especially heroic assumption) that creatures who are inclined to cooperate with one another are more likely on average to survive than those who aren’t. What more does one need by way of an evolutionary explanation? Has Sobran never read Spencer? Or Darwin himself?
Sobran thinks it should be a puzzle for the Darwinian why human beings express varieties of concern that other animals lack. But he himself offers the answer: reason. And as I noted above, this is a perfectly Darwinian-compatible explanation.
The weirdest section of Sobran’s article comes when he suggests that “killing your own children” (this is Sobran’s tendentious description of abortion; he seems to have forgotten that before a woman has given birth she has no “children”) “makes some sort of sense from an atheistic and Darwinian point of view,” since “[i]f survival is a ruthless competition, your kids are your competitors.” Um, Darwinian natural selection promotes traits that enhance the likelihood of reproduction; survival is selected for only insofar as it promotes reproduction. (Of course we can outwit natural selection, and a good thing too; the view, mysteriously popular among many religious conservatives, that we should bow to the purposes of our genes surely contradicts Genesis 1:26.)
Atheism: I was initially puzzled as to how Sobran’s argument was supposed to be relevant to atheism, until I realized that he is treating atheism and Darwinism as equivalents. But they aren’t. One can be a Darwinian without being an atheist (for this we have the assurance of no less an authority than Pope John Paul II), and one can likewise be an atheist without being a Darwinian (as all atheists were, prior to the 19th century, and as many have been since).
Randian egoism: Sobran treats Randian egoism as though it counseled against genuine concern for others. But Randian egoism says no such thing; its conception of self-interest is modeled on Aristotelean eudaimonia, and most definitely includes various forms of other-concern. There is a dispute in Randian circles as to whether such concern is related causally or constitutively to self-interest; but such concern remains genuine in either case. Egoism is a doctrine of the ground of our legitimate concerns, not of their scope. If egoism is Sobran’s basis for rejecting Rand, he should reject Thomas Aquinas for the same reason.