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Challenge: Explain Objectivism While Standing on One Foot
As the story goes, the great Rabbi Hillel, whose life spanned the birth of Christ, was asked by a Gentile to explain the Torah while he stood on one foot. In other words, “give me the condensed version.”
Hillel’s response has since been identified as the Golden Rule:
“What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and study.”
Ever since a pro-life activist friend of mine described the problem of trying to converse with “objectivists” on her campus missions, I’ve been trying to figure out what “Objectivism” is. I won’t pretend to have done a lot of study on the subject, because, frankly, it sounds like some sort of materialist Gnosticism to me, but recently my curiosity was piqued again by Robert Tracinski’s article on The Federalist: Confessions of a Reluctant Culture Warrior.
Let’s be honest. It’s kind of thrilling when one of your occasional allies seems to concede some of your most cherished arguments. So I’m reading Tracinski’s article with Sally’s (as in When Harry Met Sally) diner enthusiasm:
“…my concern that the left was using the issue to secure the imprimatur of the state for homosexual relationships so they could then use anti-discrimination laws as a bludgeon against religious holdouts.”
Yes!
“Once you gain social and political power, you hold on to it by making your preferred views mandatory, a catechism everyone must affirm, while suppressing all heretical views. In this case, to gain social acceptance of homosexuality, you make the affirmation of gay marriages mandatory while officially suppressing any dissenting religious views.”
Yes! Yes!
The left’s operational concept of freedom is that you are allowed to do and say what you like—so long as you stay within a certain proscribed window of socially acceptable deviation. The purpose of the gay marriage campaign is simply to change the parameters of that window, extending it to include the gay, the queer, the transgendered—and to exclude anyone who thinks that homosexuality is a sin or who wants to preserve the traditional concept of marriage.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
And then, after saying some equally interesting and counter-narrative things about ShirtStorm, GamerGate, MetalGate, gendered toys, and the UVA rape haox (by golly, I think he’s onto a trend!), he spoils the whole mood by offering up Randian Objectivism as the answer.
Ugh. Just give up your God and religion, and we shall overcome the totalitarian Left. Ri-ight.
In the brief reading I have done on the subject, the most succinct (and humorous) explanation of Objectivism is:
There is no God; man is made in His image. /Go read Atlas Shrugged.
Sorry, I can’t remember who gets the attribution, however that last bit is my addition. Obviously it’s someone who’s not a fan.
I’m opening the floor to all comers, though. Anyone have a Twitter-length explanation for Objectivism? And maybe your explanation would benefit by contrasting it with other, better known philosophies — worldviews?
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I can because it’s an impossible bar to cross on entirely observable, rational grounds.
As a species we simply aren’t up to the task of living as Objectivists would have us live, which is merely one reason why religion is so successful and Objectivism is so boutique.
I think you mainly identify as an Objectivist for nostalgic reasons. The same reason that I really like Paul Ryan and it bothers me when people rag on him even though we probably don’t agree on much anymore.
Hmm. None other than Nathaniel Branden, first disciple of and concubine of Ayn Rand would disagree with your self-characterization as an Objectivist, then. Here is Branden’s list of principles:
Anybody who would willingly affirm this gibberish is nothing more than a cultist fanboy. To that extent, I’m glad to say that you’re probably not an Objectivist.
I’m not sure if you’re being serious here or cracking a joke. In case you are serious… NO. Not unless the surprise party involved an intent to damage someone.
You know, fraud today is actually illegal, but I don’t think there are too many arrests of infamous surprise birthday party planners.
It most certainly is NOT. Are you under the impression that to be a good salesman you have to lie and cheat people?
The proper job of a salesperson is to represent your product fairly and honestly, while showing your potential customers how they can benefit from it. In technical sales it’s also to help your customer determine requirements and to act as a bridge between customers and engineers.
Anyone who thinks being a salesman involves deceit and fraud is simply wrong. Of course there are deceitful salespeople out there. But then, there are accountants who embezzle from their clients, but I don’t think anyone would say being an accountant requires you to be an embezzler.
My father in law would have happily made a citizen’s arrest when someone sprung such a party on him.
Fred, may I ask whether your self-definition is an expression of your agreement with the principles of Objectivism only, or whether you are a member in good standing with one of the larger Objectivist communities?
I ask because I’ve formed the impression over the years that such communities can be extremely intolerant of any deviationism (and, yes, I fully mean any associations that word may conjure in the reader’s mind).
Are you sure he didn’t say these things sarcastically? Branden had a very public falling out with Rand. This sounds like something he might have said derisively after being excommunicated from her inner circle.
by the same token, we are not up to the task of living as Christianity would have us live, which is what makes Christs sacrifice necessary.
Simply because a standard is impossible is not sufficient reason to abandon it.
“I believe” is simply a way of expressing which set of facts I accept as true based on the evidence available to me. For instance:
Those things you posit as “beliefs” aren’t facts, but conclusions.
Okay, so, no, I’m not a member of any groups. I occasionally visit the Objectivist Living message board, but that’s very rare.
So there’s basically two views. One is that Objectivism is a closed system. That’s the Leonard Peikoff view. The other is that Objectivism is an open system that can benefit from outside thought and influence.
Leonard Peikoff was Ayn Rand’s legal heir. She left everything to him. Peikoff forms the Ayn Rand Institute a couple of years after Rand died. Around 1990, he has a falling out with a guy named David Kelley over this open system/closed system thing.
David Kelley splits off and forms The Atlas Society. And they welcomed in all the old Rand associated (Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, et al.) who Rand had excommunicated (as it were) from the Movement.
So that’s where that is. It is what it is. There’s all kinds of high drama. I’m not part of it. What I’ve just said here is the extent of my knowledge of the situation.
Oh,to answer your question direction, it’s an expression of my agreement with the principles. I try to live my life by them. Objectivism is the softwear I run my life on, as it were.
Indeed he did have a falling-out with Rand. It had mostly to do with the fact that he couldn’t see his way to being sexually attracted to a woman who so closely resembled Helen Thomas while being married to another woman.
Branden did write these things in Judgment Day, and he wasn’t being sarcastic. He was elucidating the principles by which Rand’s inner circle conducted themselves.
Perhaps they are frequently conflated because we cannot entirely disentangle the two in practice. While most of us can imagine the two being completely disentangled in theory and most of us even believe that the world really works that way, in practice, human records of facts rely on humans’ prior beliefs.
For example, I can easily imagine that temperature is a reality that exists independent of what I believe about temperature, but as soon as I endeavor to measure an actual temperature, I rely on prior human beliefs about temperature, such as: temperature is going to influence my measurement device in a predictable, useful way; the (human-imposed) scale I’m using to measure the temperature is a meaningful one; etc.
So yeah, I imagine temperature (or any other physical quantity) “really existing” “out there”, independent of any of my opinions about temperature, but I also rely on my opinions about temperature to measure it.
The things that you’ve listed are sort of a mishmash of facts, beliefs and an unprovable negative.
There is plenty of evidence pointing to the fact that 1, 2 and 3 actually happened. We can test them. We can observe that they occurred or are representative of reality as we apprehend it.
4 is clearly a belief. There’s no evidence for it – and I would say that although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence it is a hard hurdle to clear.
5 is simply better stated as “there’s no evidence for Bigfoot’s existence.” I mean, I believe that too, but my belief is subject to being overturned the moment somebody presents us with body of the Bigfoot that they killed – so that is different in kind than belief or disbelief in an immortal soul.
Your disbelief in your own immortal soul is subject to being overturned the moment you die and find that you still exist, face-to-face with your Maker who demands an account of your life and how you spent it.
You realize of course that my belief is out of resignation and not joy, correct? I chalk it up as yet another one of the things over which I have no control. Like Woody Allen, I don’t fear death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
Anyways, I merely think that if people were clear-eyed about the likelihood of what happens to them after they die then people would plan more appropriately for the eventuality. But I could be wrong. Cities could burn and society could crumble. I doubt we’ll ever have a chance to find out.
Thanks Fred. I can think of many worse sets of principles by which one might try to live one’s life.
As I’ve intimated above, my major problem with Objectivism is its sense of certainty, primarily because I view many, perhaps most, of the world’s problems to be the result of the people acting with confidence on false principles and knowledge.
Anyway, FWIW, there are two books that forced me to do major rethinks (in my thirties, not as a youngster). One was Atlas Shrugged. The other was Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit. The latter is subtitled ‘The Errors of Socialism’, but it’s much more than that. It a powerful system for understanding the world as it is.
I try to live my life by them. Objectivism is the softwear I run my life on, as it were.
Fred, do you agree, then, with the Objectivist position that the mentally retarded have no rights? Ayn Rand didn’t think children should be exposed to the handicapped — do you agree with that? Also, how do you square the idea of non-aggression with the Objectivist endorsement of abortion up until the moment of birth? That would seem to be irrational, because it doesn’t rely upon embryology (a baby one day before birth is not notably different from a newborn baby), but rather relies upon the arbitrary distinction of location — that is, where a baby is determines whether or not it’s an individual. How is that rational?
When one peruses Objectivist sites, it’s remarkable how many Objectivists use characters from Rand’s books to illustrate principles and as role models (“Dagny would do this/not do this because…), rather than real people. It’s a bit creepy, and I see it as an indication of the unreal nature of Objectivism. People may fail to live up to Christianity, but we do have real stories of real saints who did indeed succeed and who model Christian living. In contrast, Objectivists cite make-believe characters.
Precisely, that’s my point. It’s out of your control (and mine) because it’s a question of objective fact.
It is not different in kind from the existence of Bigfoot. Either immortal souls really do exist, in objective reality, or I am mistaken in my belief about them. I could be wrong.
We disagree about a question of fact: do we have immortal souls? But we both agree on the basic premise that the question has a correct answer one way or the other, and that neither my hope nor your resignation can change that answer.
Ok, perhaps I should have said “outside the confines of an insane asylum or a faculty lounge,” but wouldn’t that be redundant?
My point is that your question regarding immortal souls is fundamentally unanswerable. We have no way of knowing the answer because we can’t test the hypothesis. This unknowable, untestable quality that it possesses makes me suspicious of it, as this is unlike any other phenomenon that we humans regularly encounter, which can be quantified in some fashion.
Also, I should point out that Christians wouldn’t simply take somebody’s word for it on anything else, but seem incurious to find out if their immortal soul actually exists. For instance, if I told you I had wrackspurts flying in and out of my head you might consider me… eccentric… and demand evidence.
Another problem I have is that behind every double standard lies an unconfessed single standard. Christians would never take at face value the claims of other religions but are perfectly fine with accepting their own claims uncritically.
Bigfoot is in some sense different. Bigfoot could exist. We can test for it. It would take only one specimen to overturn current understanding. In some sense we DO have control over it – we could scour the world looking for bigfoot, and once we had exhausted every hiding place possible where it might be hiding we could justifiably conclude that it does not exist.
One is well-compensated and the others are involuntary guests?
And we can confidently conclude that without exhausting every hiding place. Conclusion doesn’t imply absolute certainty, and requiring that would mean we are radical skeptics instead of rational skeptics.
If you don’t have absurd beliefs though, you can’t have strong religions, because otherwise you can’t signal your commitment to the group. Believing that “Thou shalt not kill” does nothing to signal you are a Catholic, but saying that use of condoms could send you to hell sends a very strong signal.
In this life, perhaps. The test occurs when we die.
Now granted if you are right, after I die I will no longer exist to experience my own non-existence, so while you will be proven right I will never have the opportunity to concede that you were right all along.
However if I am right, after your death you will realize I was right. And then I hope and pray we will meet in Heaven one day and when we do you’re buying the first round.
Seriously? How many Christians have you actually met?
Surely you’ve seen some of the threads where we debate creationism, or birth control, or whether Mormons are Christians, or the latest quote from Pope Francis. Christians are extremely critical of claims made by other Christians, sometimes to a fault.
But until then, there is no way to know it is true, and therefore it is outside the boundaries of reason and science, and therefore cannot be claimed as ‘fact’. Your own religious beliefs agree with that, which is why you are required to have ‘faith’. If the existence of the soul was a matter of objective, discoverable fact, you would not need faith to believe in a creator.
In any event, saying that something is a matter of objective reality because it either exists or doesn’t is nonsensical – the same argument could be used to claim that the existence of giant pink flying unicorns is a ‘fact’. Hey, they either exist or they don’t. Who’s to say?
All kinds. Charismatics, Catholics, Mormons, Lutherans, Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists. I was confirmed as a Lutheran. I can recite the Lord’s Prayer and Nicene Creed upon command.
I don’t mean disagreement over arcane points of dogma – I mean the central, bedrock tenets of the faith such as The Virgin Birth, the Divinity of Christ, the Forgiveness of Sins and the Resurrection.
I’ll leave debates regarding the Triune nature of the Lord, Transsubstantiation, Salvation by Grace and Jesus’ excellent adventures in the New World to others to debate.
I believe you are confusing metaphysics with epistemology. Fred quoted Ayn Rand above:
I’m trying to confirm my understanding of the first point, that “Reality exists as an objective absolute.” This seems to me both obvious and non-controversial, disputed as I said above only by academics and the insane (an overlapping set).
The existence of God, immortal souls, and Bigfoot all fall into the category of facts about reality, i.e. they either do or don’t exist “independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.”
The process of determining whether or not these things exist, and how reliable and certain this knowledge can be, are questions in the 2nd bucket: epistemology.