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Ayn Rand’s novel about a collapsing, overregulated economy, Atlas Shrugged, sold over a half-million copies in 2009 alone — and that was over twice the previous one-year record, set in 2008, according to the Ayn Rand Institute.  This suggests that the narrative of our economic woes being caused by unregulated capitalist greed has not fully taken hold, thank goodness.  (Perhaps without all the bailout and stimulus spending it would have, and in some sense we’d be in worse shape, ideologically if not economically.)

And I’ve been reading Atlas myself, for the first time since college (having read it the same pivotal summer that I read several of her books plus Locke, Smith, Mill, the Constitution, the Declaration, Reason magazine, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and de Tocqueville for good measure).  Then, it was the collapse of Communism, not capitalism, that was the hot topic.  Even then I objected to some aspects of Rand, such as the suggestion that altruism must lead to forced redistribution instead of, as has often been the case historically, being the antidote to forced redistribution.  So, I was fully prepared to dislike Atlas now that I’m older and wiser — but I have to confess, at the risk of looking like a hopeless libertarian geek, that I like it even more now.

Despite people usually remembering Rand for her somewhat flat heroes, it’s all the weaseling, mushy-middle, business-oriented but non-capitalist, PR-obsessed, science-politicizing, continually-evasive, chronically-indecisive characters who seem so painfully, urgently real now — and who are not quite captured so well in any other novel of which I am aware, at least not in the sprawling, highly-relevant context of an increasingly hobbled economy.  The book is really more about evasion than heroism in some sense, and it’s the former that is harder to understand intuitively (at least for some of us).

The brain doesn’t like to dwell on the ugly details of evasive, self-contradictory thinking, obviously, whereas the basics of heroism are so intuitively appealing that someone even paid $1 million for a copy of Action Comics #1, as noted by this article, which, oddly enough, quotes the drummer from System of a Down, who is also apparently a comic book dealer.  (This is another reminder that I’d love to know how successful bands have to get before the members tend to quit their other jobs.  Is anyone from Metric working in a Montreal bookstore?  And come to think of it, don’t I love Metric songs like “Stadium Love” precisely because so much other 00s rock sounded wussy and evasive, even when feigning garage-rock wildness?)

If you feel that YOU cannot avoid the topic of evasive thinking and what to do about it, perhaps we can discuss it tonight shortly after 8pm with the group Drinking Skeptically, at the aptly-named bar the Four-Faced Liar in the Village.  And more Rand thoughts tomorrow.

Our recent (Feb. 3) Debate at Lolita Bar pitted two former members of the Misfits, Bobby Steele and Michale Graves, against each other on the question “Is the Music Business Bad for Music as an Art Form?”  Remember the event with us now, with photos by Monty Leman (showing, from left to right, me, Graves, Steele, and moderator Michel Evanchik) and an audio file created by Monica Evanchik (with added music snippets by the debaters themselves: the Misfits song “Dig Up Her Bones” and the Undead song “Evening of Desire”).

(listen to the debate download the mp3.)

As if that weren’t intense enough, remember that Wednesday next week (March 3, at 8pm) we return to Lolita Bar for the mosh-like throwdown between Richard Spencer and Helen Rittelmeyer on the question “Is Christianity for Wimps?”  I think we know what Ayn Rand’s answer would have been, but use your own judgment.

I’m sure to many people it seems like too disturbing a topic to broach, but I must not be the only one over the past few days who’s been thinking, “Even if you find the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai troubling, isn’t it sort of nice to hear that it may have been done by the Mossad and Fatah working together?  Cooperation has to start somewhere.”

A side note: If overly-ecumenical Americans ever finally fuse Hannukah and Christmas into one holiday decades hence, I do not think they should call the combined celebration Hamas.

I’m attending a fundraising event tonight (at which one of my neighbors is singing) for a group that gives gifts to kids with brain cancer, which, since I’m a compassionate guy, reminded me of two other brain-problem-related stories that struck me recently, one from the news, one from my own experience.

•First, I inadvertently found myself in a footrace with a short, seemingly developmentally disabled man last week.  He was walking rather slowly, but each time I moved to try and pass him, he would start speed-walking in a very panicky-seeming fashion until he was back in the lead and would then become calm again and slow down, eventually leading to me trying to make another dash around him.  At first I thought it might be a coincidence, but he kept doing it each time I moved as if to pass.  It was very important to him to stay in the lead, apparently (he seemed to make some exertion noises and was very warmly bundled up, looking a tad insecure).  I lost him at a stoplight, where he seemed transfixed for a time.  But in the end, no one really lost on that day.

(This in turn reminds me, as Michael Malice likes to do, of Rand’s comment in an interview that she admired the Charlie’s Angels TV series because she would prefer to watch beautiful women doing impossible things to watching the retard child who lives in the gutter.  On an unrelated note, here’s a story about a 500-pound fat woman doing something amazing, namely giving birth.)

•Second, that guy in a coma who was supposedly communicating via subtle finger movements — a claim of which James Randi was an early skeptical critic, as I noted back around Thanksgiving — has now been revealed by his doctors to be just a regular, uncommunicative guy in a coma.  His doctors now liken the “messages” that some people thought he was sending to the messages people believe they get from ouija boards, not realizing that they are subconsciously spelling out precisely the words they long to see.  That humans are so quick — eager, even — to engage in such self-deception is all the more reason that we have to be skeptical.  That which seems too good to be true — especially that which fits neatly into our preconceived expectations — may well be bunk, and there is no magic in pretending otherwise, only error.

Unless by magic one means stage magic, of course, which relies heavily on manipulating people’s expectations — just as stage hypnosis always relies heavily on weeding out the people who honestly admit that “nothing seems to be happening,” until the performer whittles his way down to the handful of people who can dupe themselves into thinking they must behave like chickens — or better yet, just the handful of dishonest people willing to play along and get some attention while up on stage.  There is no mind control — but there’s plenty of self-deception, conscious deceit, and just plain acting like a fool once given a handy social excuse.  Welcome to the human race.

With my Italian libertarian economist friend, I rewatched the very libertarian Italian movie We the Living, adapted in 1942 without Rand’s authorization (but with her retroactive approval decades later) from her early novel about a young woman in Rand’s native Soviet Union dreaming of escape and torn between two lovers, one anti-communist but driven to cynicism and despair, the other a principled but deluded Communist Party member. Even with the film’s truncation/ambiguity about the end of the original story, things do not go well.

Nor did things go well with the film’s original release — released (in two parts) with the approval of the authorities in Italy during WWII because it was anti-Soviet, it was yanked after a few weeks when the authorities realized its individualist message was anti-fascist as well (Mussolini’s goons apparently having been as slow to figure out that individualist messages are incompatible with fascism as were left-wing British rock critics who condemned Rush as proto-fascist).

We the Living may be the most normal-human-feeling Rand story of which I’m aware, particularly her willingness to make Andrei the Communist a surprisingly sympathetic character. Socialism, as depicted in Rand’s work, is an inexcusable, alien offense in the U.S. but a genuine tragedy in Mother Russia. The convincing scenes of Party meetings at the local university, with their air of participatory democracy (marred by out-of-sight executions and backroom deals), reminded me very much of the unintentionally poignant descriptions in American Bolshevik reporter John Reed’s writings of his experiences in the early Soviet Union, when people really believed that the spontaneous collective bridge-building and so forth that they were engaged in was a model for the freer and more spontaneous future they were creating (with only occasional hints in the Reed essays I read of drafts, food shortages, and other rapidly-widening cracks in the armor of the worker’s paradise).

Depicting Andrei as basically a good man actually does fit neatly into Rand’s thinking, though: She said repeatedly that one would be better Read the rest of this entry »

Just one more example of rampant weasel language in the public presentation of science (to go on about it too much would be to steal material from my job): A tragedy now occurring in public health is the widespread condemnation and/or banning by all the purportedly most-responsible health authorities of “e-cigarettes,” which are (almost certainly) harmless nicotine inhalers that could likely save 400,000 American lives a year if they replaced regular burning-tobacco cigarettes (so you can have your Randian/conservative firestick in hand without having your head in the sand about health effects).

But the health officials are shameless about saying, in effect, “e-cigarettes and smokeless tobacco are no safer than regular cigarettes,” even though that’s utterly false (and dooms millions to die) by any normal English-usage standards and can only be excused if taken to mean “e-cigarettes may have the same obscure random cancer dangers as the ambient ‘toxins’ some people worry about from breathing near plastic or any other paranoid hypothetical, and smokeless tobacco may present about 1% of the cancer risk regular cigarettes do, and since that means neither can technically be said to be perfectly safe with certainty, they are ‘equivalent’ in risk to tobacco smoke.  QED.”  (All of this sophistry is of course driven by hatred of the tobacco companies and thus considered morally excusable.)

What can you do when language has lost all meaning?  And the easy skeptical response of saying, “Those officials’ conclusions are based on science, not like Mormonism!  Yay!” simply doesn’t address the rather nuanced problem.  All you can do is work as an anti-junk-science crusader day after day and hope the world catches on eventually.

Having learned nothing from the deluge of negative letters they got three years ago (including one from me that got printed) — which caused Skeptical Inquirer magazine to instantly downsize the second half of their planned two-issue, alarmist global warming coverage — the magazine now (in its March/April 2010 issue) unleashes three very short, very perfunctory, very snotty pieces lamenting pompously that we anti-scientific global warming doubters have not given up our campaign of baseless accusations against the well-established facts of climate science. I hope the magazine will once again discover that its readers do not assume that skeptic = climate alarmist (often quite the contrary).

One piece even goes on about climate skeptics not being real skeptics for about three pages before noting in passing that, oh, by the way, if there were, y’know, improprieties in climate research hinted at by that recent e-mail controversy thing, don’t worry because they will of course be dealt with in the time-honored fashion of good science — but that incident is of course no excuse for those ghouls who hate reason to feel encouraged that their nonsense (about the climate situation not being a crisis) should be taken seriously, etc.

There’s a (dare I say it) faith-in-the-scientists problem with organized skepticism — a tendency to think that because the scientific method in its pure form over time gets the best results (which is true), we can already trust the current scientific establishment to have reached sound final conclusions, even on things that aren’t well studied or quite within the speakers’ ostensible areas of expertise. This problem is not an excuse to valorize non-scientific thought nor to throw out all science (any more than the existence of residual mysteries about the universe is a blank check to believe in ghosts and werewolves), but it’s a real problem — akin to making the logical leap from the long-term efficiency of market processes to saying that we can trust in the wisdom of all currently-existing businesses.

The problem is certainly one relevant to my real job, combating unscientific nonsense that is mostly created by real, credentialed (but nonetheless agenda-driven and context-dropping) scientists. I mentioned the problem to a nice skeptic couple I know, and Read the rest of this entry »

Like some of the likely listeners at my Yale rendition of Rand’s “Faith and Force” speech tonight at Harkness Hall, Room 119 (6pm), my fellow conservative Gerard Perry does not share my complete skepticism about religion — and asks how I feel about Mother Teresa being honored with a U.S. Post Office stamp. I think any fair-minded person would agree that this is an unfortunate violation of the separation of church and state — and a case of coercers using stolen money to honor a crank, to boot. As Christopher Hitchens and others have lamented, Mother Teresa often eschewed modern medical assistance as ostentatious and overly materialistic, preferring in many cases to pray futilely over the dying or merely lay hands upon them. A tragic, morally warped figure who serves as a warning to us all of how not to live (one of the reasons I just signed up to attend the April 17 NECCS conference of skeptics here, featuring James Randi and others).

Meanwhile, for example, some of my materialistic, purportedly shallow colleagues at the American Council on Science and Health have literally done things like save a billion lives through improved agricultural techniques and eradicate smallpox from the planet even while being pilloried by ostensible defenders of Nature and/or God’s design — and all that struggle goes on when the more minor players on our Board aren’t merely helping to found hospitals and the like. Ah, what blinkered, cramped little lives the servants of science and industry lead! They’ll pay for it with eternal torture in the afterlife, I’m sure, and no one wants to be eternally tortured.

Of course, lest I exaggerate the divide, it’s worth noting my boss at ACSH is married to a religious man and that long-term co-existence is thus possible (fusionism!). Their daughter, I concede, did a nice job of splitting the difference by focusing on…philosophy. That makes sense to me. Philosophy is a fairly open-ended attempt to talk about truth in whatever language proves necessary to describe it — and wherever the ensuing arguments lead. Like few other disciplines, it is malleable enough to address whatever appear to be the new vexing issues of the day without requiring the jettisoning of the whole field’s methodology or underlying cosmological assumptions when surprises arise — as of course they always should unless one is very stubborn.

•••

In short, if there’s reason to believe there’s a God, the idea ought to be subsumable within philosophical language, just as the implications of a Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something with political ramifications we can discuss tonight at Manhattan Project (6:30 at Merchants NY East) or tomorrow after my Rand speech at Yale (6pm at Harkness Hall, Room 119): nerd-beloved director Kevin Smith was ousted from a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. A side effect of creeping health-nannyism, or exactly the kick in the lard-filled ass America needs? When in doubt, of course, I defer to the owners of the company — but a ticket is a contract. So many questions…so many future jokes at his own expense…

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (February 2010): Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand (featuring the 1960 speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World”)

A fine anthology of philosophical essays and fiction snippets for the newcomer to Rand’s thinking, this collection contains in particular the aptly-titled speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World,” outlining in admirably clear terms the two means by which humans avoid moral and logical consequences — muscle and intellectual evasion.

Of course, I will myself be chopping out long, extra-crazy passages about the evils of altruism when I do my own rendition of the speech in two days (followed by two more renditions right here in New York City a couple months from now).  Michael Malice, who has called himself “more Rand than Rand,” has already chastised me for the planned excisions, saying, oh, sure, the speech has just been influential for fifty years and stood the test of time, so why not chop out the parts you don’t like to suit your own thinking?

Nonetheless, unless the Man (as opposed to man qua man) at Yale stops me, I will deliver the slightly-abbreviated speech at three locations, each on the fiftieth anniversary of the day of Rand originally gave it in that location:

•Yale University on February 17, 1960 (6pm Yale’s Harkness Hall, 100 Wall Street, Room 119, New Haven, CT)
•Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960
•Columbia University on May 5, 1960.

As I’ve noted before, these dates happen to fall on Ash Wednesday, Easter Sunday, and Cinco de Mayo, so I hope Catholics in particular will learn from the speech, despite their stubborn resistance to rational thought and skeptical Read the rest of this entry »

Examining Ayn Rand’s novels with fresh eyes all these years after reading them in college, I can’t help but be struck by how pervasive and obvious the (at least superficially unlibertarian) ethos of the “bdsm community” (fans of bondage, domination, and sexual sadism and masochism) is in her work. It’s an accusation routinely leveled at the obvious target of the actual sex scenes themselves — such as the quasi-rape by Howard Roark in The Fountainhead (usually dismissed by Rand’s fans on the technical grounds that it’s implied he knew she knew he knew she wanted it, etc., which is fair).

What’s more disturbing — and what escaped my notice when I was a naive young reader who hadn’t yet met various New York City-dwelling weirdoes over the course of years of living here — is just how often the bdsm aesthetic crops up in the non-sex scenes. It’s dismissible by those fans who might prefer it weren’t there, unmistakable to those who (whether we like it or not) now know what dark signs to watch for.

Again and again, the message is that instead of fostering mutual kindness, one ought to be proud to take a beating, metaphorical or literal, from someone as exalted and noble — as knowing — as oneself. Take the flashback moment, early in Atlas Shrugged, when a teenage Dagny tells a teenage Francisco that she may just give up and deliberately fail classes at school in order to be more popular, causing Francisco to slap her in the face immediately (not quite the proper non-coercive response):

What she felt was contained in an instant, while the ground rocked under her feet, in a single blast of emotion within her. She knew that she would have killed any other person who struck her; she felt the violent fury which would have given her the strength for it — and as violent a pleasure that Francisco had done it. She felt pleasure from the dull, hot pain in her cheek and from the taste of blood in the corner of her mouth. She felt pleasure in what she suddenly grasped about herself and about his motive.

She braced her feet…looking at him with a mocking smile of triumph.

“Did I hurt you as much as that?” she asked.

He looked astonished; the question and the smile were not those of a child. He answered, “Yes — if it pleases you.”

“It does.”

[When he offered to put cold water on her wounded lip, she] laughed, stepping back. “Oh, no. I want to keep it as it is. I hope it swells terribly. I like it.” [Later, she felt] that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

The description of Dagny’s pain on the tennis court as she forces Francisco to feel pain with her extraordinary playing against him, reveling in the thought that her exertions begin in her aching muscles and end in his, has a similarly violent quality to it.

If Rand were content to depict the characters beating the crap out of each other in merely-private conversation or in the bedroom, that would be one thing — of psychological but no great political interest — but her love of consensual brutality actually ends up affecting her depiction of economics, and in ways that should Read the rest of this entry »

With DC reburied under snow in the past few days, I was reminded that I recently asked my Austin-dwelling friend L.B. Deyo, who is notoriously opposed to effete and juvenile tendencies in the culture, the following question:

Tell me, L.B., how do we feel about multiple conservatives having themselves photographed sporting “snuggies” — the highly popular blankets with sleeves?  (I’m only two degrees removed, arguably less, from more than one person mentioned in this piece about it.)  And do you, I assume, own an official UT Austin snuggie, since they apparently exist and have been worn en masse to games?

This was L.B.’s apt reply, which I do not think he will mind me reprinting, given the urgency of the issue:

The day I first heard that there was such a thing as a “crunchy con,” a “Birkenstocked Burkean,” I knew there was only darkness left, and no hope or light anywhere forever.

On a warmer note: Valentine’s Day with Ayn Rand tomorrow.

Well, the Phillips Foundation gathering scheduled for New York City today fell through because Washingtonians are afraid of snow — whereas little can stop the mighty engine of commerce that is my town, or at least there’s no need to worry that some residual slush will prevent unemployed bankers picking up their welfare checks and using them to buy martinis.

It is not a day without politics, though: Here’s my 2012 presidential candidate pick unless/until someone better than Gary Johnson — some Rand hero, perhaps — comes along. As usual, I’m not saying he’s perfect, but compared to the past, we could do worse than smart, market-friendly, anti-drugwar, and from the coveted and seducable interior West.

Speaking of 2012 and long-term political planning: Roland Emmerich (and the scriptwriter of Saving Private Ryan) will apparently be adapting Isaac Asimov’s revered sci-fi novel Foundation in big-budget 3D IMAX Avatar fashion. I have no idea if the result will bear much resemblance to the novel, which would basically entail multiple segments with different sets of near-identical, bland bureaucrat characters talking about how to run the galaxy through implausible centuries-out statistical planning (the “psychohistory” modeling that tantalized a young Paul Krugman). It would be funny if it were just three hours of IMAX 3D bureaucratic meetings, just to teach audiences a lesson.

But if ever there were a man, however absurd, who we can count on to turn a novel into something gigantic, eye-popping, and ridiculous, it is Roland Emmerich. On balance, I declare this: very good news. Bonus: The greater the emphasis on explosions, the fewer children come away with a Krugman-like fascination with centralized economic planning.

Pure geek addendum: It will be interesting to see if Trantor, in a bit of unfair reverse-chronology, gets likened by viewers to Coruscant, in much the same way that a hypothetical Lensmen movie, if it gets made one day, will probably strike people as being too much like next year’s Green Lantern movie.

As a libertarian colleague of mine once observed: “Greece — what a shithole of a country.” Why should this goat-dependent, chronically-socialistic nation be bailed out by the rest of Europe? It gave us many fine mythological metaphors such as Atlas, but in this case Western civilization may be best served by some shrugging. Like Atlantis before it, it may be best it sink beneath waves of public debt and financial ruin, eventually being separated into two domed cities, one ruled by Aquaman.

One of the economists responsible for spreading the idea, alluded to in yesterday’s entry, that we should abolish the Federal Reserve — no longer quite as obscure a position as it once was — was Murray Rothbard.  He was also a disgruntled former member of Ayn Rand’s circle who felt that, among other problems, Rand was rude to his wife — who refused to abandon her religious beliefs even after reading Rand’s ostensibly knock-down arguments against them.

Indeed, Rothbard satirized what he saw as the weirdness and dogmatism of the Rand circle in an informal play called Mozart Was a Red — an allusion to Rand’s strong and often idiosyncratic aesthetic convictions, revolving largely around whether artists expressed a positive or negative sense of life (I believe that in real life, Rand preferred the upbeat Mozart to the grim Beethoven, though Beethoven’s heavy brand of Romanticism is not so unlike her own, if you ask me).

Dimitri Cavalli suggested that we do a performance of Mozart Was a Red at Lolita Bar sometime, and while I think that might be appealing to too narrow an audience (or perhaps would be better performed at New York’s oxymoronic-sounding Objectivist Community Center, if they’re tolerant enough for it), I will make it up to you in two ways: linking to video of perhaps the only performance of the play and, more exciting, telling you that if all goes as planned, I will be doing an important bit of Rand-related performance art one week from today on the Yale campus: reading excerpts of her well-titled speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World” on the fiftieth anniversary of her own rendition of it there (at least if my Yale contacts get back to me with the finalized details).

Indeed, I plan to give the speech on all three of the campuses where she gave it fifty years ago, including Brooklyn College and finally Columbia, the three fiftieth-anniversary days happening to fall this year on Ash Wednesday, Easter Sunday, and Cinco de Mayo, which I did not plan to anger Catholics with an anti-faith speech.  It just worked out that way, the void working in mysterious ways.  More details as soon as I have them.