The Campaigns Go Negative

This is a hilarious parody of Alan Grayson's by-now-notorious "Taliban Dan" ad, aimed at an opponent who -- surprise, surprise! -- is leading him in the polls.

And then there is this, my favorite parody attack ad:

Seriously, though, folks, with the nation within sight of a serious fiscal crisis, isn't the current plague of negative campaigning simply irresponsible? One of the cliches of the punditry is that (a) people say in poll after poll that they hate negative ads, but (b) they work. I think this time (b) will turn out to be false. With the nation in sight of a serious fiscal crisis, most people will see these attack ads as something akin to fiddling while Rome burns. If your opponent has committed a felony, by all means expose it. Otherwise, talk about the issues! Update: Note the refinement/revision of the above that I introduce in response to a comment, below.

Barack Leviathan Obama

Penn Gilette (aka the greatest living political philosopher after the death of Nozick) has a heartfelt comment on this video:



It goes like this:



I think he has noted one major Dimension of Creepiness in this video. Whatzizname from the Red Hot Chili Peppers pledges, while kissing himself, to be of service to the Leader. Then, at the end, Demi Moore pledges "to be a servant to our President." That is indeed seriously creepy. But I noticed another Eeeeewww Factor, one that is closely related to this one.

What I noticed was the shot at the end, in which all these big-government-liberal celebrities, speaking in unison as cells in a big chessboard matrix, shrink and shrink until they finally become cells in the body of the Great Obama. (In case you can't bear to listen to all of this treacle-soggy bunk, fast forward to 3:45.) Every philosophy major will instantly recognize this as the title page of Hobbes' great defense of authoritarianism, in which Leviathan (the state) is represented as composed of the bodies of countless little people (click to enlarge):


What is all this supposed to mean, if anything? We do know what Hobbes meant. He thought that if we insist on using our individual moral judgments as to matters of justice, we are doomed to live through vicious religious wars, like the English Civil War, which was raging as he wrote his book. If you value your life, you must hand your brain over to the state. You might call this the Authoritarianism of Fear. That is clearly not what is going on in the Obama video.

Maybe what is going on there is the Authoritarianism, not of Fear, but of Cowardice -- because these pretty people are welcoming subjection and servility (which Hobbes thought was merely necessary and inescapable) as positively good. Maybe the idea is that as cells in the body of "that Mortall God, to which wee owe ... our peace and defence" they enrich their lives with meaning and transcendence by being absorbed into something greater than themselves.

The Latin quote on Hobbes' title page means "there is no power on Earth like Him." In the Bible this refers of course to the Creator of the Universe, but Hobbes is applying it to the state. He has a point there. It is easy to view states and state leaders in terms that are basically religious. That in fact is probably the normal way of viewing them. But the orthodox wisely regard it as a sin nonetheless. It's called idolatry.

P. S.: Did Penn actually say "all my friends are blowing him"? I might have mis-heard that.

Greenspan's Betrayal

A commenter points out that Bill Moyers has said that Allan Greenspan's contribution to the recent crash and the coming depression/recession can be blamed on the fact that he was once an friend and follower of Ayn Rand.

This is almost the exact opposite of the truth. Greenspan's conduct as Fed Chair was a betrayal of his earlier expressed views, a betrayal that libertarians and Randians have complained about many, many times over the decades.

The truth has been explained very by Richard Spencer here. In the early sixties, Greenspan wrote an excellent essay, believe it or not, defending the gold standard, on the grounds that it would prevent precisely those policies that he did pursue years later, after he had become our monetary dictator.

In that essay, he criticized a fateful move on the part of the Fed in 1927, when it decided

to assist Great Britain, who had been losing gold to us because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was politically unpalatable). The reasoning of the authorities involved was as follows: if the Federal Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain’s gold loss and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates.

The ‘Fed’ succeeded; it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world in the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market—triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in braking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed.

Greenspan's essay is still in print and still well worth reading.

What I find seriously spooky about it is that in it he is quite explicitly saying that policies substantially similar to the ones he later enacted eventually lead to speculative booms, crashes, and depressions. As Spencer points out, after Fed interest rates reached an all-time high of 19 % under Greenspan's predecessor, he eventually hammered them down to as low as 1 %. This is just the sort of speculation-triggering inflationism he warned about back when he was a Randian. Of course he was right the first time. These policies have indeed lead to disaster, and will continue to do so.

Moyers' comments are one more example of the often-repeated myth that these events were caused by laissez-faire caplitalism, whereas they were caused by government intervention. In fact, critics of interventionism predicted it would do so, including even the Arch Intervener himself, in a earlier lifetime.

(Notice that the people who were suprised when the catastrophe struck were proponents of intervention, like Ben Stein and Paul Krugman. We on the other side had been warning it was coming for a while now, and were in large part well prepared for it.)

The story of Allan Greenspan is a very sad one and a very old one. Once upon a time he believed in freedom and the market, and in the principle that working and saving are virtues. Then one day Ronald Reagan offered him absolute power over the US money supply, and it corrupted him. He went over to the great Keynesian transvaluation, in which working and saving are less virtuous than consuming and spending.

As Ellsworth Toohey, villain of The Fountainhead, says to one of his victims, "Ever read Faust, Peter?" Political power is indeed a deal with the Devil.
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Added Later: On related themes see Harvard (!?) economist Jeffrey Miron. Also see the always-excellent George Reisman. Also check out this audio of Ron Paul commenting on the Greenspan betrayal. Finally, my friend the estimable Richard Epstein has weighed in.

It's Nietzsche's Birthday!

Today was Nietzsche's 164th birthday, and in my Nietzsche class we celebrated with a cake. This is UW student (and Nietzsche enthusiast) Andy Dibble cutting the cake. The picture on it represents Munch's great 1906 portrait of him. Two years ago I commented here on why people are still reading Fritz after all these years:

Surely there are many reasons. One is that he is one of the very few major philosophers who is just plain out-and-out fun to read. The only ones who even come close in this respect, in the whole history of philosophy, are Robert Nozick and Jose Ortega y Gasset.

Then there are the substantive reasons. Ortega says somewhere that, for most of us, the pleasure of reading is simply the pleasure of agreeing with someone. This is clearly not true of Nietsche. Whatever your views are, you will eventually see Nietzsche not merely disagreeing with you but actually ridiculing things you hold sacred. And making you laugh in spite of yourself.

Partly for that reason, I think that reading Nietzsche is actually good for your character. It's hard to imagine someone who has studied Nietzsche getting all shocked and huffy because someone disagrees with them. Students of Nietzsche are used to it. And more than that, they understand that it is actually good that there are radically different views out there. It creates space in which we can grow.

What! Nozick Agreed With Rawls?

It's nice to see an article in the popular press about one of my favorite philosophers. It would be even nicer if it were written by someone who really knows how to read. Well, I can't have everything, I guess.

The author, political science professor David Lewis Schaeffer, is writing about John Rawls (welfare state liberal, roughly) and Robert Nozick (libertarian) from a conservative point of view, complaining that the are really too much alike -- which, from his point of view, I guess they are. But what is the point of similarity that he sees?

From a conservative point of view, both advocate too much personal freedom. "Victimless" offenses, like using dangerous drugs or practicing prostitution, would be permitted, if they had their way. (It's actually not obvious that this is true of Rawls, but let it pass.) Where they differ, if at all, is on the issue of distributive justice. Amazingly, Schaeffer claims they agree here too.

As you may know, Rawls advocates the "Difference Principle," which says that inequalities of wealth and income are only to be permitted if they benefit the people who are the least well off. (For instance, they may be necessary incentives to induce talented people to produce these benefits for the least-well-off.) This requirement of benefiting the least well off could justify some sort of coercive redistribution of wealth, from those who have "too much" to those who have "too little." This idea is an example of what Nozick calls an "end-result principle." Regardless of the process by which you acquired what you have, if the result of the process does not fit this principle, you are liable to coercive redistribution.

Nozick's alternative is what he calls a "historical principle." Whether what you have is rightfully yours depends on past history. On his view, the "Entitlement Theory," you are entitled to your holdings if you acquired them in the right way (eg., by purchase and not by theft) from someone who was entitled to them (by this same principle). Since this rule is recursive, it goes back to the beginning of time unless it is qualified somehow. Of course, there have been people who acquired their holdings in the wrong way (eg., by theft). This brings in the Principle of Rectification, which requires that those who were wronged, or their heirs, be compensated for the wrongs they have suffered.

According to Schaeffer, this is where Nozick suddenly morphs into Rawls:

Ironically, however, Nozick himself ultimately acknowledges that his entitlement theory is insufficient to refute demands for a redistributionist state, since it can never be demonstrated that existing holdings derive from an unbroken series of voluntary transfers... Hence, surprisingly, he ends up suggesting that something like Rawls’s difference principle is morally required after all, in the name of “rectification,” on the dubious premise that those currently least-well-off have the highest probability of being descended from previous victims of injustice.

In the next paragraph, Schaeffer suddenly upgrades Nozick's "suggesting" this into an "area of agreement with Rawls." Apparently it was something more than a suggestion, according to Schaeffer. Let's look at what Nozick actually says.

Beginning with the paragraph in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (p. 152) in which he introduces the idea of rectification, Nozick acknowledges a number of times that the problem of how this principle is to be specified and applied raises all sorts of difficult questions. Right away, he raises, as an issue he will not try to settle, this question: "How far must one go in wiping clean the historical slate of injustice?" In other words, maybe we should recognize a sort of moral statute of limitations. Maybe, if the injustice from which your holdings derive happened before a certain cut-off date, you owe nothing on their account.

For whatever it might be worth, my own view is that it is virtually inevitable that we do this. The further back in time we go in finding injustices, the more insoluble the difficulties in deciding what sort of compensation would be required to set it right.

In a note on the next page (p. 153 n.), however, Nozick raises the possibility of quite a different approach. Suppose that rectification means making the victim's heirs as well off as they would have been had the injustice not happened. Suppose, further, that there are several different ways things might have turned out. Which one should the rectifier bring about? Here, he says, we might use some end-result principle to choose between these states of affairs. We might bring about the scenario that would create the most happiness overall (utilitarianism), or we might bring about the one that benefits the people who are now worst off (the Difference Principle), and so forth.

Again, much later (pp. 230-231), he plays with yet another possibility. (One thing Nozick had a lot of is ideas.) Maybe, instead of trying to figure out how things might have been if really old injustices had not happened, we could substitute, as "a rough rule of thumb," something like the Difference Principle, on the theory that the least well off people are most likely to be the ones whose ancestors were treated badly (African slaves, dispossessed Indians, etc.). He admits, though, that "this particular example may well be implausible."

This last idea must be the one that Schaeffer is (mis)reporting.

Obviously, Nozick is not agreeing with Rawlsian redistribution, for at least two reasons. For one thing, he is not asserting that any of these three ideas. They are mutually inconsistent, so he can't believe them all, and he has not picked one. Also, even if he were to opt for the last, most Rawlsian-sounding, one, the point of the transfer payments that he would be recommending would be to rectify past wrongs. Nozick repeatedly points out that whether it is redistributive to take from Peter to give to Paul depends on what our reasons are for doing it. If the reason is historical, if we are trying to right past wrongs, then we are not redistributing. You are simply returning things to their real owner. If, on the other hand, regardless of what happened in the past, you just think Peter has "too much," then -- and only then -- you are redistributing. Nozick's reasons, if he were to opt for this third idea -- which he has not done! -- would be non-redistributive.

As I have suggested, I think the obviously best solution here is the simplest one: some sort of statute of limitations. Nothing that even looks Rawlsian about that!

Philosophy is the Major for You! (Maybe!)

As you probably know, given that you are here at all, I teach philosophy. For that reason, I was very interested when my son Nat, a philosophy major (No, really? What a coincidence!) sent me a link to this New York Times article last Sunday.

The stunning piece of news they are reporting: that the number of philosophy majors is on the rise. Throughout this great republic, the demand for philosophy courses exceeds supply. The Rutgers philosophy department will graduate a hundred majors this year.

What's going on? The main explanation they give, as I understand it, is that young Americans on the one hand and academic philosophers on the other are becoming more alike. On the one hand, students are becoming more and more interested in big questions about the world at large, such as the ethics of preemptive war. (This I suppose is yet another way in which the Iraq War era resembles the Vietnam War era.) On the other hand, philosophy is becoming more concrete and applied, focusing less and less on pondering ancient texts.

Academic philosophy has changed a lot since I got into it. I can't complain about these changes -- after I, I did participate in bringing them about! -- but I do want to put in one good word for studying ancient texts, a practice that I hope doesn't die out entirely. The mutual fund maestro Peter Lynch used to say that the strongest single influence on his investment wizardry was his philosophy major at Boston College. The idea was that in order to anticipate where, say, George Berkeley's argument is going it may do no good at all to look to what (you think) is true -- you need to find the thread and follow it. It's a matter of grasping the principle of a parallel universe and, wacky as it might seem, following that principle. Similarly, if you as an investor are going to outperform the market, you need to know where it is going next. In doing so, looking to what (you think) is true may be a distraction at best and at worst a prelude to disaster. You need to enter its sometimes weird little world and function there.

This can be a very useful skill to have when dealing with human beings. In general, studying philosophy can give you a whole range of skills that are transferable to other realms -- including the ability to analyze problems, write clearly, and argue a case. (For this reason, I've always said it is a much better pre-law-school major than political science, which for some reason is the usual choice.*) This in fact is simply the traditional, pre-twentieth century defense of a classical education. I think it works much better as a defense of studying philosophy than it did as a defense of studying Greek poetry.

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* Clearly, what people are thinking when they make this common mistake is that the one thing you need before you go to law school is to find out something about the subject matter of law school -- i.e., the law. Actuallhy, this is the one thing you obviously do not need. Law schools are very, very good at teaching you that stuff, and you will start getting it as soon as you arrive there, beginning on day one. What they are not so good at communicating (from day one) are the basic mental skills that are presupposed by what you will be doing there. For that, go to a discipline like philosophy.

Random Quotations

Below is a list of quotations I've compiled over the last couple of weeks. The only constraints are that I think all are of high quality, and also that I don't remember seeing any of them before two weeks ago.

What makes a good quotation? I think the only thing that all these have in common is a complete lack of unnecessary gestures. There are no wasted words, also no wasted ideas: no qualifications, no explanations, and no explicit argumentation or evidence.

This may explain why of all the authors below, selected at random, few are professors, and only two are philosophers. People who like to spell everything out are not quotable. (I can't think of any quotable statements by John Rawls. In fact, the very idea is comical, is it not?)

It also implies that quotable passages are in effect aphorisms. If other literary forms are islands and continents, aphorisms are mountain-peaks.

I don't think there is anything else the items below have in common. Some are clear, others are vague. Some are truisms, others are paradoxes (the opposite of a truism). Some are like a soothing lotion, others prick like a cactus-spine.

Anyway, here is the list:

"Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine. "
Lord Byron

"They never fail who die in a great cause."
Lord Byron

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Mohandas Gandhi

"Tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars."
Bertrand Russell, on the Romanitic admiration for wildness.

"Those who offer false consolation are false friends."
Christoper Hitchens (This one is quoted from memory and so is probably not accurate.)

"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."
Edward Abbey

“I know that I am prejudiced on this matter, but I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.”
Mark Twain

"If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."
Thomas Szasz

"Since everything ends badly for us in the inevitable catastrophe of death, it seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time; and that the second rule of life is to hurt as few people as possible in the course of doing so. There is no third rule."
Brendan Gill

"¿Y por qué no te callas?"
King Juan Carlos' actual words to Hugo Chavez. ¡Que viva el Rey!

"A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas. "
H. L. Mencken

"A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married. "
H. L. Mencken

"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. "
H. L. Mencken

"It is a sin to think evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake."
H. L. Mencken

... Uh-oh. If I allow H. L. Mencken quotes, the whole list will be his his stuff. I hereby ban them....

"There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation."
Jose Ortega y Gasset

"Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved."
Jose Ortega y Gasset

...Okay, Ortega will also take over the list if I let him in. I quess I'd better end it anyway...

Darn! The two-weeks rule I laid down at the beginning prohibited me from giving one of my favorite quotes, but what the heck here it is anyway:

"Those who fight for the future, live in it today."
Ayn Rand

Ortega Still Matters

What follows is based on part of an article on José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) I am writing for the Cato Institute's Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Actually, I am co-authoring it with the muy estimado y distinguido Dario Fernández-Morera. I've written a couple of other articles for the project, but it's been a while and I don't remember what they were about. Ortega writes with great charm, but reading him can be very disturbing, and I've been wondering how much of what he says is true. In particular, he liked to predict the future, and to analyze the present in ways that would indicate which way things would be going. By now, half a century after his death, one of the biggest questions about Ortega is: How close to being right was he? We know a thing or two about how things would go!

Ortega’s best-known work by far is The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930. In it, he describes a new sort of human being, which he calls the Mass Man. The Mass Man is the product of the unprecedented material abundance that European civilization achieved during the nineteenth century. This prosperity brought with it sudden increase in the size of the population, which in turn produced two effects which, combined, brought about devastating results. The new people inevitably have attained considerable political and social power. At the same time, it has proved impossible to educate them in the traditional manner, to subject their minds to the discipline of abstract standards, including those of tradition, logic, facts, or science. The mind of the Mass Man does not measure its internal experiences by any standard superior to the self. In politics, this unconstrained frame of mind expresses itself in the form of “direct action.” Its characteristic literary expression is the insult. Above all, the Mass Man has a powerful affinity for the state, as the state promises to provide two things on which the new human type places great value: security, and results without effort. The Mass Man treats the material abundance that created him as if it were the fruit of an Edenic tree, his for the plucking. He neither knows nor cares about the institutional framework that makes this abundance possible. Eventually, his indifference will kill this abundance off at its root.

Another persistent Ortegean theme is his fascination with “liberalism,” by which he meant the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century, an idea that he both admired and criticized. One of the most distinctive ideas in his critique of is his conviction that this sort of liberalism, even in this relatively freedom-friendly variety, has always been too indulgent and optimistic in its view of the state.

Liberalism [he says in the essay “Concord and Liberty”] has never been quite capable of grasping the significance of the fierce nature of the state. ... Let us admit that societies cannot exist without government and state authority; that government implies force (and other things, more objectionable but which it would take too long to enumerate); and that for this reason “participation in government is fundamentally degrading,” as Auguste Comte whose political theory was authoritarian, said...

Fundamentally, in Ortega’s view, the state is necessary, but it is a necessary evil. He held a similar view of society itself.

... What should we make of this? For the moment, I just want to make two comments, one on his gloomy analysis of the Mass Man, and the other about his comments on liberalism and the state.

Surely, the biggest single question is this: By now, we have long lived under the rule of the Mass Man. Is it turning out as he thought it would?

Here is one reason for thinking he was basically right, at least on one point. Most Americans reject in any form the idea that human beings evolved from other life forms. They must be dimly aware on some level that evolution is the basis of the biological sciences that have prolonged their lives, enhanced their comfort, and banished many of the terrors of the past, but they simply don't care. Scientists! What do they know? Polls show that this vertical invasion of barbarians is advancing year by year.

This is exactly the sort of mental "indocility" that Ortega complained of. You might wish to say that, in a way, things were no better in the past, and you would surely be right. Medieval peasants were no paragons of rationality, and were no doubt worse in this respect than the products of today's "public" education system. But Ortega would point out that the peasant was used to submitting his judgment to human authority, to the judgment of people he was convinced were his betters. He had no idea by what standards these mysterious people regulated their thoughts, but he did know that disciplined minds exist and that he could indirectly share in them by accepting their judgment. Today, this constraint has been removed. Well, good riddance to it! The alarming thing is that it has been replaced by -- nothing.

Ortega was very worried that science would not survive in this sort of environment. It the past, it would get along in European society with only the support of a determined minority of adepts, but minorities don't run things any longer. He may have been right about this.

At least that's how it looks to me right now. But maybe I'm just being momentarily overcome by the Ortegean gloom.

On the other point, I am more sure that Ortega has hit close to the mark. Liberalism, even in its more libertarian version, has always been under the spell of the notion that the state is some sort of club (social contract theory), that it is no more ethically problematic than any private association, such as a charitable foundation or a business corporation. This idea, so strange when you stop to think of it, is one for which we have already paid a terrible price, and will continue to do so. Reading Ortega is a healthy antidote. Who knows? Maybe there is a chance he will save us yet!