More On Object-Oriented Philosophy

The other day I said I keep finding myself frustrated in my attempts to engage Object-Oriented Philosophy as a philosophy, rather than as an interesting blogsopheric phenomenon. In explaining why, I linked to a post by Levi Bryant titled "Mereological Considerations in Object-Oriented Ontology." In this post, Levi makes what I consider to be a very strange argument. He starts it off with this:

Now one of the criticisms that commonly emerges in response to object-oriented ontology is the critical question of why claims such as these are not dogmatic. What is it that authorizes these claims? Here my response to this challenge is not to adopt the hat of realist epistemology and make the case that we can represent the black boxes of other objects besides humans, but to show that arguments based on human black boxes are themselves speculative. First, the very fact that we have a debate as to what human black boxes contain (categories and forms of intuition, difference, power, etc), shows that we have no direct access to our own black boxes, but rather only arrive at claims about the black boxes presiding over the production of our outputs through indirect inferences. The sadly departed Levi-Strauss will claim that our black boxes contain structures of mind, Lacan will claim they contain the symbolic, Derrida the trace and differance, Foucault structures of power and discourse, Kant a priori categories and forms of intuition, and so on. The key point not to be missed is that our own black boxes are every bit as “withdrawn” as objects themselves. Second, by way of analogy we can make the point that speculation about what our black boxes contain are, as speculations, deeply prone to error. Take the example of computer black boxes. If I examine the output of a computer alone I might be led to make all sorts of erroneous influences. For example, when I notice that a blog contains italic and bold faced fonts I might be led to think there is a category in the programming that produces this output. However, the actual computer code that produces italics shares very little resemblance to a category or the font. The point here is that we can’t hit on accurate inferences about what black boxes contain, but that these black boxes are themselves objects of speculation and indirect inference that are not immanently or immediately accessible.

I'm sympathetic to much of this. Or at least, I'm sympathetic to the "anti-realist epistemology" part of it, and the talk of "black boxes." His computer example is a good one, because it demonstrates why introspection is problematic as a science of the mind or a science at all. All we have access to, introspectively, is output data, and even with some knowledge of the input data (though that knowledge is actually in the form of output data), there are an infinite number of ways that the black box could be configured to get from a particular input to a particular output. Or if not an infinite number, at least a whole lot, too many to place any confidence in introspective inference.

In this sense, then, I suppose it makes sense to say that our black boxes are "withdrawn." Of course, this makes for a very strange relationship: our black boxes are what we're using to understand/interpret black boxes, and therefore our black boxes withdraw from themselves. I don't know about you, but this would make me consider our black boxes as poor starting points for an analogy to other black boxes, but Levi does just that in the previous paragraph:

Apart from the thesis that the world is composed of objects– a thesis common to Harman, myself, Whitehead, and Latour –this anti-realist thesis about black boxes is at the heart of all genuinely object-oriented ontologies. Where object-oriented ontologies differ from anti-realist epistemologies is that where anti-realist epistemologies sees this input/output structure as unique to the human-world gap, object-oriented ontologies hold that this input/output relation is true of any and all relations between objects. The relation between a leaf and photons of sunlight is not structurally different than the relationship between humans and objects. Just as humans translate the world around them through their various black boxes, the leaf translates photons of sunlight, turning them into complex sugars.

If this input-output relationship is the same throughout the universe of objects, and not exclusive to human-world relations, whether the leaf's black box withdraws from itself too. And what would it mean to say that it does? Is not this difference between the black boxes of humans (and other animals) a difference that makes a difference, as Levi might say? And what about the "black boxes" that are involved in the relationship between heat energy and a compressed gas? Does the gas's black box withdraw from itself?

There seems to be something very different about the black boxes of humans and the black boxes of leaves and compressed gases, one that might actually underlie the withdrawing of our own black boxes and the other things that withdraw from us (which is to say, everything). Our black boxes reach out to other objects, and even, in a sense, to itself as an object, and it is in this reaching out that objects withdraw from us. It seems pretty clear that the black boxes of all animals reach out to some extent. Does the plants? It may be arguable, though I'm certainly not convinced. The same goes for single-celled organisms. But it seems well nigh nonsensical to say that the gas reaches out to the heat, and that the heat withdraws from the gas, or the gas's black box, or whatever it is that it withdraws from. What would this mean? I have no idea.

Which brings me to Levi's next paragraph:

So what is my argument here? My argument is that all things being equal, if we are speculating about our black boxes, if our claims about our black boxes are not “critical” claims but speculative claims, then there is no reason not to open the door to a generalized speculation that allows us to freely hypothesize about objects independent of humans and how their black boxes function. Notice the strategy of argument here. My move is not to argue, contra the last 200+ years of sophisticated anti-realist epistemology that somehow we have a mysterious immediate access to objects, but rather to show how the anti-realist position contains a speculative core at the heart of its thought.

Here is a leap from epistemology to metaphysics, and one that is difficult (in this case) to justify on its own, but is even more difficult to justify when the leap begins from an obviously flawed analogy. In addition to the problems above, the analogy seems to make all inquiry (save perhaps strictly analytic, in the "relation of ideas" sense, inquiry). It certainly makes science a "speculative" sort of inquiry. My initial reaction to Levi's reference to only Continental scholars was to point out that there is actually a science of our black box, one that uses a lot of different tools to open the black box up. Naturally, it doesn't get the whole black box, but it does illustrate a very fruitful reaction to withdrawn objects: science. That's how we understand what we understand about the leaf's "black box," the "black boxes" of compressed gases, and much of what we know about our own black box. Because our black boxes are withdrawn, we take a third-person perspective much as we would with the objects of the natural sciences. But with Levi's analogy, the sciences are now speculative in a way that is usually used precisely to contrast with empirical science.

I don't mean to imply that science is the only possible or only justified reaction to withdrawal. I'm merely suggesting that if science is speculative, what isn't? And if everything is speculative, is anything? What would non-speculative inquiry look like? And what's more, if we can actually access our black boxes by taking a third-person perspective, doesn't this again call the analogy, and therefore the argument and the leap, into question? A leaf can't pull back from a photon and take a third person perspective to see other aspects of it (and what would those aspects be, anyway? what about a photon is withdrawn from the leaf?). Again, this is because our black boxes reach out, whereas a leaf's probably doesn't.

As an aside, it might be productive in certain contexts to say that the leaf interprets the photon (though it's stretching the definition of interpretation to say so), but at that point, one has to ask what isn't interpretation, and if, as it seems this implies, everything is interpretation, why talk of objects at all?

Anyway, back to the analogy, and the argument: unless Levi can show that the black boxes of leaves and the black boxes of humans are qualitatively the same in a way that causes or invites withdrawal, his analogy fails completely. And I obviously think it does, because I think it is the qualitative difference between our black boxes and those of leaves, or at least gases --namely, the fact that our black boxes are projected into the world -- that underlies withdrawal.

Sartre and the Meaning of Life

Bill Vallicella of "Maverick Philosopher" has two posts purporting to critique Sartre's existentialism, titled "Sartre's Existentialism and the Meaning of Life" (Part 1, Part 2). They both contain quick summaries of Sartre's main ideas, and thus might be interesting to someone who's never encountered Sartre (and doesn't want to read the Wikipedia article on him), but they don't really contain a critique.

Why I say this will become clear in a moment, but first let me make a general point: disagreeing with someone is not the same as critiquing them. Students often have a difficult time grasping this point, believing that if they write why they disagree with position X, they've critiqued position X, but that's not how critique works. I can say, "I think abortion should be legal because women should have the right to choose what to do with their own bodies," but in doing so I haven't critiqued any arguments for the pro-life position, or even the pro-life position itself. I've simply set up my own position in contrast to it.

OK, on to Vallicella's posts, specifically the second one. After describing Sartre's distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-itself, and what this means for humanity, he writes (under the heading "critique"):

One problem, though, is that one cannot give the very fact that one exists in the first place a purpose. A healthy, well-situated adult can assign purpose to his waking life, but that he exists at all is not within the scope of his 'purposing.' I can no more 'purpose' my existence as a whole than I can cause my existence as a whole. I can do various things to maintain my existence. But I couldn't do these things if I didn't already (both logically and temporally) exist. The same goes for 'purposing': I cannot give my existence as a whole a purpose. I remain on Sartre's scheme a fundamentally purposeless purpose-positer. I cannot 'retroactively' give my life as a whole a purpose. At best I can give my lucid hours a purpose, albeit a merely subjective one. I cannot 'recuperate' my entire existence from purposelessness by assigning myself tasks in the present. For example, if I just now 'wake up' in authenticity to my radical freedom and assume the burden of making myself, this does nothing to rescue my past, all the way back to infancy, from purposelessness.

Thus my Sartrean making of myself presupposes a substratum of facticity that is beyond the scope of my making. And if there is no God, then it is beyond the scope of any divine making as well. Thus the substratum and presupposition of my meaning-giving activities is itself meaningless, purposeless, absurd. Sartre might say that this is just the way things are. But it does not seem quite satisfying, does it? What good is it to say that we give our lives meaning if we cannot give the substratum of our meaning-giving activities meaning? At most, we give our lucid hours meaning. But the vast backdrop of our lucidity is darkness and absurdity

If Vallicella were offering an actual critique of Sartre, this would be a weird place to start, considering the fact that, for Sartre, this meaningless of life itself is precisely the point. If life itself, independent of my choosing, has meaning, then my choosing is not (absolutely) free. Therefore, while "Sartrean making of myself presupposes a substratum of facticity that is beyond the scope of my making," and "the substratum and presupposition of my meaning-giving activities is itself meaningless" is true, in that meaning only comes about through choice. For Sartre, this is a necessary condition of the freedom that is at the center of his thought. So instead of actually critiquing this position, Vallicella is simply disagreeing with it. As he puts it:

But it does not seem quite satisfying, does it? What good is it to say that we give our lives meaning if we cannot give the substratum of our meaning-giving activities meaning?

In other words, he just doesn't find Sartre's position personally satisfying, which is hardly a critique. Vallicella wants meaning in the substratum, and Sartre can't allow it. We have two opposed positions, but nothing approaching critique.

Vallicella next tackles Sartre's position that when one chooses for oneself, one chooses for all men. As Sartre puts it:

I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.

Vallicella writes:

A second problem concerns whether the central organizing purpose I choose is worthwhile. Whatever one chooses is open to doubt, and will be doubted by many. The choices I make are merely my choices and there is nothing to validate them objectively. We invent values and in so doing we invent the sense of our lives. We are creative like artists. (364) Aware of this, I must admit in all honesty that none of my choices can lay claim to being objectively worthwhile. Uncomfortable with this upshot, Sartre says repeatedly (e.g. 350) that when one chooses for oneself one chooses for all men. But he never, as far as I can see, gives any justification for the leap from oneself to all. He remains stuck in value subjectivism.

Vallicella's contention that Sartre, "never, as far as [he] can see, gives any justification for the leap from oneself to all" is odd since Vallicella cites Being and Nothingness and "Existentialism is a Humanism," in both of which Sartre gives this position and justifies it (extensively in the former). For example, Sartre writes in "Existentialism is a Humanism":

When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole.

In other words, we choose for all when we choose for ourselves because, by choosing, we indicate that we've decided the choice we've made is the best available one in that context. This necessarily implies that, for someone else in that context, it would also be the best available choice. Therefore, by choosing for ourselves, we choose for all. Sartre goes into much more detail in Being and Nothingness. In essence, if I'm acting in good faith, then I recognize that I'm responsible for the choices which make up my life, and therefore my life. If I were to make choices only for myself, and not for others, then one of two things would be true: either I am acting in bad faith, and therefore don't recognize that I am responsible for my choice, or I recognize that I am responsible for my choices, but don't feel that others should be able to choose as I do in the given context. Take stealing for example. If I choose to steal (for fun, say, not out of necessity), then presumably if the shoe were on the other foot, I wouldn't want someone to steal from me. So, either I fail to recognize that I'm responsible for my choice to steal (i.e., I'm acting in bad fath), or I don't feel that others should be able to choose what I have chosen because even though I've decided it's what's best for me in this context.

This is a pretty ingenious route out of "value subjectivism" into the sort of subjectivism that Sartre attributes to his existentialism, namely "that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity." If I am responsible for choosing not merely for myself but for all, then my values are not subjective in the pejorative sense, but only in the sense that there is no other way to get values but through choosing. I suspect that Vallicella would not be happy with that type of subjectivism either, as his distaste for the meaninglessness of life itself in Sartre suggests, but again, disagreeing with it is not critiquing it.

Time Square

Last night I went to see Time Square at the Alamo downtown for "Music Monday." It was definitely fun, and the movie is as good as I remembered it being. Unfortunately, next week's "Music Monday" showing of Time Square will be the last, possibly ever, in 35 mm, as the Universal Studios fire last year destroyed all but one copy of the film. So Universal Studios let the Alamo use the film for a set number of dates, and after that, it goes back into storage will it will likely remain forever. So, if you're a fan of the movie, and you're in the Austin area, I definitely recommend checking it out next Monday. And if you've never seen the movie, you're missing out, because it's awesome, and it has one of the best soundtracks of any movie in the 80s.

Banging Against the Window

OK, so I've really been trying to engage the object-oriented ontology (OOO, God) lately, partly because the OOOers and I share some affinities -- mostly Husserl, though, I get the impression they dig Bergson too; wonder if they read James much? -- and because I have a soft spot for speculative, well, anything (when speculative and systematic philosophy became taboo, philosophy lost much of its vitality, its life and connection there to), but mostly because I'm fascinated by the internet's role in its development, and I want to see what a set of serious philosophical ideas (or a set of sets of ideas) that has in large part come out of the blogosphere ends up looking like.

The problem is that, each time I start to engage the OOOers ideas, I quickly become frustrated. You know that scene in Bee Movie in which Seinfeld's bee keeps banging up against the window and saying, "This time! This time! This time!"? That's how I feel. I can see what's on the other side of the pane, but every time I try to get there I run into something that's difficult to see, but that completely impedes my progress. I've been struggling to figure out exactly why this is. The most obvious reason, I think, is that I don't really know why anyone should care about OOO. It's in its infancy, to say the least, and the more I read of Harman, the more I feel like his monadology for the 21st century is pretty arbitrary (it's as though he just digs Leibniz more than, say, Spinoza), and seems to create more problems that it solves, particularly with causation, which for Harman, like for Leibniz, doesn't involve objects (or individual substances, or whatever) interacting, because they never actually interact. It seems to just push causation back a step. Or as one blogger put it:

[Graham's theory of vicarious causation] not only possesses almost no explanatory value of what causation might be, but actually invents in perhaps a non-Occamian profusion, a host of objects imagined to interact in ways that are yet revealed by their author.

But to ask of a philosophy in its infancy that it solve big problems seems a bit much, and maybe I'm just missing the positive motivations (the negative ones, like doing away with anthropomorphism, are clear, even if it's not clear why the things OOO rejects are bad), so I don't think this is the reason I feel like I'm banging into a window. I think it's something else: the OOOers and I seem to speak a different literary language. I find it striking that someone like Levi Bryant can write about the "black boxes" through which we interpret the input of experience, and mention only Continental thinkers (plus Kant, a pre-empirical science of the mind thinker):

The sadly departed Levi-Strauss will claim that our black boxes contain structures of mind, Lacan will claim they contain the symbolic, Derrida the trace and differance, Foucault structures of power and discourse, Kant a priori categories and forms of intuition, and so on. The key point not to be missed is that our own black boxes are every bit as “withdrawn” as objects themselves.

If this were the only example, it would seem odd, but not, for someone whose education slices through Continental and analytic philosophy, frustrating. But it's a pretty common phenomenon for many OOOers: they will say "everyone" or "no one," but what they mean is "everyone/no one in the Continental tradition." I can't help but feel like it limits the problems they address and the potential solutions they consider. But maybe that's just me.

Austin Coffee Houses

One of the things I like about Austin (there aren't many, to be sure) is the large number of non-Starbucks coffee shops and coffee bars throughout the city. The coffee's rarely all that good, but again, it's not Starbucks coffee, so you could do worse. I spent way too much time at four different coffee shops: JP's Java, because it's right on campus, Music Cafe, because it's near my apartment, Halcyon, because it's good for people watching and open late, and Hideout (pictured above), for reasons that I can't entirely explain.

I have a terrible habit of showing up at coffee houses when there's an event of some sort. Last week, there was a gallery opening when I decided to do some work at Music Cafe, so there I was dressed like, well, me, typing away on my laptop while everyone else was in their hyper-trendy best listening to an equally hyper-trendy guy do ironic renditions of 60s country songs. I also frequently forget that Mondays are open-mic poetry nights at Hideout, and end up half-listening to (mostly bad) poetry for an hour because I'm too lazy to get up and leave, and I'm afraid that if I leave during someone's poem they'll take it as a rejection, as though my obviously not paying attention isn't one.

There's no real point to this, other than to say that I obviously have a problem with coffee, and that for some reason, I like the atmosphere of coffee houses, even though there's no one coffee house atmosphere. Anyone in Austin who's been to the four coffee houses I listed above will know that they couldn't be more different from each other: JP's is intellectual to the point of being snobby, filled with faculty and grad students often having heady discussions about whatever it is they're studying; Music Cafe is South Austin chic; Halcyon is all about the Warehouse District nightlife, and being across from several trendy gay clubs, it's all about a very well-dressed nightlife at that; and Hideout is pseudo-Bohemian with its open-mic nights, its underground (though above the shop) improv theater in the back, and it's dirty couches. So I'm not really sure what I mean when I say that I like the "atmosphere" of coffee houses. I just can't think of any better way to explain it.

Forgetting Music

How little is required for pleasure! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines that even God sings songs. - Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

I've struggled with depression for most of my adulthood. I've had three major depressive episodes since I was 19, and in dysthymia for much of the time in between (my "depressive" days outnumber my non-depressive days, as an adult). Like anyone who's suffered from a debilitating disease for an extended period of time, I've developed coping mechanisms to make myself more productive. For example, I go for long walks by myself in the city, or alternatively, I find a wooded area, preferably one near a creek or small stream, with few signs of civilization, and sit beneath a tree for hours, sometimes with a book, sometimes just listening to the water flow. Usually if I do something like this, I will be more productive for a while afterward. It's something akin to rebooting, I think.

But the simplest and often the most effective coping mechanism I've found is listening to music. Putting on headphones and going about my day with rock, jazz, hip hop, and occasionally "roots" music, is incredibly helpful. Yet, for some reason, one of the symptoms of my depression seems to be forgetting about music. I will go months without listening to anything except when I'm in a store or restaurant with music playing. When I finally "remember" music, I'm always surprised at how it makes me feel. I don't mean "how it makes me feel" in the usual sense, but that it makes me feel. One of the persistent symptoms of depression is a lack of feeling, and music suddenly infuses my entire body with emotion, mostly positive, and it's a revelation. Why then, I wonder, do I always seem to forget music when I'm depressed?

How to Deal With New Atheists, or What's the Difference Between Richard Dawkins and Ayn Rand? The Accent

Last year I visited my parents for Christmas, and while I was there, my Italian mother (gifted with the Italian ability to guilt just about anyone into doing just about anything) talked me into going to church with her and my father. I hadn’t been in a church of any sort in more than a decade, and I’d never been in the sort of church they attend, a small, non-denominational church attended mostly by ex-Presbyterians, so I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. And nothing in my Catholic background could have prepared me for what I witnessed that Sunday morning: the service was basically a conversation, with the pastor talking to us like we were children (even speaking in that voice that most adults reserve for toddlers when explaining something difficult about the adult world); during musical interludes, the musicians (both of them) gave us mini-sermons on the meanings of the songs they were about to sing, using language that, to me at least, was only slightly distinguishable from Jabberwockian nonsense; and either before or after the service, almost ever person in attendance came up to me and offered to pray either for or with me.

What struck me the most about the experience, though, was not the service itself, but the “class” that took place before the service. This “class,” attended by most of the adults in the congregation, was supposed to be a sort of Bible study, headed by the pastor, but since it was the end of the year, the pastor spent most of the class issuing a challenge for the new year, and then opening the floor for discussion of the challenge. The challenge he gave them was to bring one person into the fold in the year to come. It wasn’t clear to me whether he meant one non-Christian or one non-believer, but it quickly became clear how the members of the congregation interpreted the challenge. Those who spoke up during the discussion all said they knew exactly who they were going to target, and not one of them mentioned a Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or otherwise non-Christian but religious acquaintance. They all spoke of atheists. So the discussion was almost entirely about how to speak to atheists about Christ.

During this discussion it became obvious that these people had little or no experience talking to atheists, about religion or anything else. A few days later, I mentioned this to my mother, and she suggested that I write an email to the pastor giving him ideas about how to speak to non-believers. For some reason, I took this quite seriously, and started thinking about what to include in the email. I knew up front that there is no one way to talk to atheists, because there is no one sort of atheist, so I decided focused my efforts on explaining how to talk to the most visible sort of atheist, the sort that most Christians now seem to associate with atheism in general, the “New Atheists.” The only problem was, in trying to explain how to talk to this sort of atheist, I came to the realization that I myself have no idea how to talk to them.

I had tried talking to new atheists in the past. My first instinct, as is often the case, was to try to talk to them philosophically. That is, I would want to talk about epistemology and metaphysics, pointing out that the “vulgar positivism,” as someone recently referred to it, that they espouse was deeply problematic philosophically, and that while they frequently claim to believe in nothing that is not verifiable by science, in doing so they were committing themselves to epistemological and metaphysical positions that are, by their very nature, not verifiable by science. What’s more, without at least some of those assumptions, nothing at all would be verifiable by science. In other words, the science upon which they are grounding all belief was itself grounded on metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that they were, if not simply ignorant of, then at least eliding entirely.

The philosophical approach, however, had been worse than fruitless. In fact, I had usually been met with ridicule, with the new atheists telling me that I was trying to sell them quasi-religious nonsense. When I was engaged, it was usually with platitudes and silly clichés about how there is no evidence for theism, therefore atheism is one of if not the most proven positions in the history of science, nay, in the history of the world! How does one answer that claim? Other than shaking one’s head in disbelief, I have no idea. So instead I abandoned philosophical approaches, and I tried to discuss with them the psychology of religious (or at least theistic) belief, the social and cultural aspects of religion, the history of religion, the primacy of morality over metaphysics in religion, etc., but again, to no avail. Intellectual arguments were obviously pointless. The atheists of my youth, who were intellectually curious and open-minded to a fault, were nowhere to be found among these new atheists.

It was clear that I needed a different approach, then, so next I tried practical arguments. I pointed out that new atheism, with its focus on attacking religion and its strong association between science and atheism, was doing a disservice both to atheism and to science. New atheists were playing right into the hands of the American Religious Right by confirming widely held stereotypes of atheists and deeply felt mistrust of them among many evangelicals and fundamentalists (see e.g. this video). If atheists are seen as arrogant, elitist, and out to get Christians and Christianity, as many Christians believe they are, then having someone like Dawkins, who is nothing if not arrogant and elitist, and whose rhetoric can easily be interpreted as showing that he and those who follow him really are out to get Christianity and Christians (whether they are or not), can only aid those leaders on the Religious Right who seek to exploit fear of atheism and secularism to further their agenda of intolerance and anti-science. Myers, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens are little better, and in some cases, even worse. What’s more, by turning science into a religious issue, they are providing fuel for the creationists in their Intelligent Design disguise. How can those fighting against attempts to put creationism in the science classroom argue that it should be excluded on religious ground when Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, and their many, many followers are arguing that evolution leads directly to atheism (without passing Go or collecting $200)? How can we hope to educate those who have been duped by creationist “intellectuals” and public figures, if we begin by attacking their most cherished beliefs? We can’t, and we won’t, and it’s not a coincidence that the Intelligent Design movement has gained momentum, and followers, as new atheists have become more and more the public face of atheism.

Again I was met with nothing but ridicule. I was labeled a “Neville Chamberlain” atheist, an appeaser on par with the appeasers of Hitler, and told that I was more concerned about the feelings of the religious majority than I was about the Truth. During one encounter with a Dawkins/Myers acolyte (at Netroots Nation '08), I was told, after stating my position that Dawkins and Myers were harmful to atheists, that my appeasing of the religious made him sick, and that he couldn't even look at me, much less discuss the issue any further. And at that point I was out of ideas. If neither intellectual nor practical arguments cant even spark discussion with, much less reflection in, new atheists, then my arsenal is bare.

Then a thought struck me: where had I seen something like this before? Where had I seen a complete lack of intellectual curiosity coupled with a blind certainty and hostility to even the slightest dissent? Among the Randians, of course! For a Randian, there is only one correct conclusion, only one correct world-view, and any other possible viewpoint is to be ridiculed or ignored. Dissent, even among those who hold similar viewpoints (not simply other libertarians, but even Randians who dare to question one or more aspect of the Objectivist orthodoxy), cannot be tolerated. And there are deeper similarities between the Randians and the new atheists. They also share a seemingly willful philosophical naiveté, a distrust of anything even remotely speculative, a blind commitment to Reason (as embodied in the scientific method, for the new atheists) and objectivism broadly construed (in both cases, in the form of a strange rationalist-empiricist admixture), and a complete disinterest in history, either intellectual or cultural, except to the extent that it confirms their prejudices (e.g. there have been religious wars, therefore religion kills people). And I should have seen these similarities before, too, because there are more than a few fans of Rand among the new atheists.

Once I saw this obvious analogy between the New Atheists and Randians, I knew exactly how to deal with the New Atheists: ignore them. You can’t talk to a Randian. Talking to a Randian is like talking to a brick wall, only brick walls can produce an echo so that you at least know that it received the sound of your voice. When talking to a Randian, even that is too much to ask. And you certainly can’t convince him (they’re almost all male) that anything he believes is wrong, so the best way to deal with him is to simply ignore what him. This, then, is the best way to deal with the new atheists as well: ignore them. Granted, individually ignoring them doesn’t solve the problem of them being in the public eye. That is a different sort of problem. As long as their message is one designed to be maximally controversial, they will get media attention, their books will sell, they will attract followers among the Randian-type social and cultural malcontents, and they will be seen as the spokespeople for atheism, regardless of whether they are being engaged directly. This means that we, those atheists who find their message as appalling as those of the most intolerant religious zealots, shouldn’t stop publicly engaging their message -- it’s up to us to counteract its influence, and to clean up its mess -- but we should engage the ideas, not the people, because engaging the purveyors of the ideas is pointless, utterly so. They will simply shout us down with insults and frame us as traitors to our own cause. Pithy insults and fiery rhetoric will always beat out careful reasoning and thoughtful discussion in a world of sound-bites and short attention spans. So we should create an atmosphere in which the new atheists are essentially talking to themselves, either in the form of other new atheists, or in the form of the fundamentalists on the other side of the religious spectrum.

And this goes for those among the religious whose reaction to the new atheists is not simply a knee-jerk “Ooh, atheists are evil!” as well. They should feel, for the sake of dialogue between the religious and the a-religious, and for the sake of the promotion of science and science education, that the new atheists’ message must be engaged. But they shouldn’t feel the least bit compelled to engage it by engaging new atheists themselves, because doing so is as pointless for them as it is for us.

So when I finally wrote that letter to my parents’ pastor, it was short and sweet. I told him that he must recognize that “atheist” is not a homogenous category, and that there is therefore no one way to talk to us about religion or any other topic. I told him that he and his congregation should treat us like adult human beings, respecting us by engaging us in dialogue, rather than preaching or lecturing us about the wonders of Christ. Who knows, in actually discussing religion with us, they might learn something, and their minds might be changed too. But, I warned, if you or one of your parishioners should come across an atheist who answers anything you say with ridicule, the best thing you can do is move on to the next one, because with this sort of person, no meaningful dialogue is possible, no learning will take place on either side, and everyone’s time will be wasted.

A Few Only Slightly Connected Thoughts on Rand

1a.) This New York Times review of a new Ayn Rand biography has been getting pretty harsh treatment in the blogosphere. Most of the criticism is over this passage:

Brandon of Siris, D.A. Ridgely of Positive Liberty, Jonathan Adler of The Volokh Conspiracy, and several other conservative and libertarian bloggers have pointed out that nothing in this passage implies a contradiction. Brandon’s is the most thorough of these rebuttals.

1b.)Brian Leiter has also criticized Kirsch, the author of the review, for claiming that there is an affinity between the thought of Rand and Nietzsche. He writes:

I’ve always found the positive comparison of Rand to Nietzsche by Randians frustrating, because I’ve never seen any affinity between the two thinkers (they seem completely incompatible, in fact, as Leiter points out), but the comparison is so common that it’s not surprising to see Kirsch invoke it. Still, I’d love to see Rand-Nietzsche meme die, and articles like this in major publications do nothing to hasten that death.

2.) I last read Rand almost 12 years ago. I read The Fountainhead in high school, and found it boring, so I had no intention of reading anything else by Rand. But when I went off to college, I met a bunch of young Randians, and people were frequently suggesting, even demanding, that I read her books. My uncle, for example, upon hearing that I was majoring in philosophy, insisted that I would love Rand (I haven‘t read any of his book suggestions since!). Others thought I would love Rand because of my affinity for Nietzsche. So, I broke down and read Atlas Shrugged.

At the time, I was working as an undergraduate research assistant in a lab during the summer, and was in charge of running one of the lab’s many experiments. The experiment had to be run at the same time every day, and the cruel graduate student I was working under chose to run it at 7 am, so every morning I woke up way too early, showered, and then walked over to the lab armed only with my copy of Atlas Shrugged. I would start the experiment, and then sit and read for the 90 minutes the experiment ran. Reading for 90 minutes a day, it still took me an entire month to get through the book (Galt’s long speech was particularly slow going). That experiment and that book will forever be united in my memory as wholly unpleasant experiences.

I found the book to be worse than awful as a novel, and the philosophy it presented to be even worse than that, but thought that Rand’s obvious lack of talent as a novelist might get in the way of her presenting her philosophy, so I went to the library and checked out some of her philosophical works, The Virtue of Selfishness, i>Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I forced myself to read through all three, and came away even less impressed with her philosophy (if that was possible). My impressions of her philosophy ranged from finding it thoroughly uninteresting to being offended by it and horrified that she was so widely read. I sometimes wonder if, now that I’m older, my impression of her would be different were I to revisit her books, but my impression was so bad then that I don’t think it’s worth my time to find out.

3.) Anyway, since I haven’t read her or even thought about her work seriously in so long, I can’t really speak intelligently about her philosophy, but the much maligned passage in Kirsch’s review got me thinking about the issue of living the philosophical life that I wrote about last week. Did Rand live a life consistent with her philosophy? Kirsch was obviously trying to imply that she didn’t, but those more familiar with Rand’s work than I have been pretty vehement in insisting that he was wrong in the particular case he chose as an example. Still, Rand’s biographers often highlight the cultish atmosphere that surrounded her close followers, and that she herself promoted. Part of this cultish atmosphere was a complete lack of tolerance for dissent. It was Rand’s way or the highway, with she and her closest followers excommunicating even mildly dissenting members of her sect, and demanding that the remaining members cut off all contact with the excommunicated (even when they were close family members, or spouses!). As a philosopher whose most popular teaching is one of radical individualism, this does seem problematic, does it not?

Or maybe not. I wonder if the perception of Rand as a promoter of individualism is a mistaken one, and that her stifling of individual thought is therefore perfectly consistent with her philosophy. If I remember correctly, in Atlas Shrugged, the heroes, Dagny Taggert, Hank Rearden, and John Galt, all thought alike, and Taggert’s affinity for Rearden was largely due to the fact that their world-views were identical. What’s more, anyone who didn’t share that world view was treated quite harshly in the novel. So maybe Rand’s individualism has less to do with thought than with action: it is about the virtue of selfishness, and acting on one’s own behalf, rather than making up one’s own mind, because for Rand, when one uses reason properly, there is only one set of conclusions that one can possibly come to. If that’s the case, to the extent that Rand’s individualism has to do with thinking for oneself, it is not thinking originally, but coming to the right conclusions independent of the destructive ideas that dominate our culture.

Rural Post

I love this image from Old Picture of the Day (click for a larger view):

I'm not sure why I love it so much. It could be the details: the mud splatter on the coach, the fact that the coach has a front window (presumably because of the mud spatter; I can't imagine he drives fast enough to get bugs in his teeth), the curious look on the children, the leafless trees, etc. Or it could be that the whole scene reminds me a lot of what my hometown looked like when I was a young child, when many of the roads were still unpaved, and trees like the ones in the picture still dominated the landscape. Granted, the mail man wasn't driving around in a horse and buggy, but the picture still induces a distinct feeling of nostalgia in me, particularly since my hometown doesn't look anything like this picture anymore. You'd be hard pressed to find a dirt road, and the city has become incredibly overdeveloped, so that you have to go out of the city limits to find that many trees of that age in the same place (I'd guess those trees are 50-70 years old; they don't look like old growth).