The importance of being earnest

One of the most useful intellectual skills to cultivate is the ability to enter into sympathetic engagement with any idea or argument you are considering. The only way to really understand what another person is saying is to listen closely, and the only way to listen closely is first to find, or at least pretend to find, some common ground between the other person and yourself. You need not maintain this sympathetic engagement, this provisional or illusionary agreement, for very long -- just long enough to absorb and grasp the points at issue.

On the other hand, an inability or an unwillingness to drop your guard and make room, even temporarily, for an idea that you may find distasteful is the main impediment to really understanding what other people are saying and, therefore, to being able to effectively refute what they say.

I thought of this today when flipping through a book that I admit to having bought in the expectation of a cheap laugh, and not for any intellectual merit that it may possess: Ayn Rand's Marginalia. That's right, her marginalia. In their continuing effort to publish every word that Ayn Rand ever committed to paper during the course of her 77 years, those in charge of her estate have published her private letters, her private journals, and yes, even the scribbled notes in the margins of books she was reading.

Supposedly, these notes give us an insight into Rand's brilliant mind at work. No doubt this was editor Robert Mayhew's intention, and no doubt this is how the collection of jottings will be received by her more uncritical admirers. Not being an admirer of Ayn Rand myself, I had a rather different reaction. I was simply amazed -- and amused -- at how consistently she failed to understand the most basic points points of the books in question.

In his introduction, Mayhew says he did not include many of Rand's positive comments because they were generally insubstantial. This collection, then, is not a representative sample of her reactions to her reading material. Even bearing this in mind, I found the fury and frustrated rage exhibited by Rand in these remarks to be extraordinary. Hardly a page goes by without encountering angry exclamation points, and even double and triple exclamation points, sometimes augmented by question marks in comic-book fashion. ("!!?!") The terms "God-damn" and "bastard" are unimaginatively and gratingly repeated. Repeatedly I came across another burst of venom to the effect that whatever sentence or paragraph Rand had just read is the worst, most horrible, most abysmal, most corrupt, most despicable thing she has ever, ever, ever encountered!!! The woman lived in a simmering stew of her own bile.

She came at the books she read, it would seem, not from the perspective of honestly and conscientiously trying to understand the author's position, but instead by assuming an adversarial and combative stance from the very start and then finding the most negative and malicious spin to put on the author's formulations. This approach enabled her to vent a considerable amount of rage. It does not seem to have aided her comprehension of the material in front of her.

To me this is most obvious in her treatment of The Abolition of Man, which, other than John Herman Randall's Aristotle and Ludwig von Mises's Bureaucracy, is the only book in this collection that I've read. (I suppose someday I should get around to reading Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which is considered a classic of free-market polemic -- though Rand of course finds it poisonously wrongheaded. The rest of the books, except for von Mises's Human Action and two books by Henry Hazlitt and John Hospers, are largely forgotten today.)

Lewis's book is hardly a difficult read. It was aimed at an educated but not highbrow segment of the public, and his cautions on the potential misuse of science seem chillingly prescient in these days of genetic engineering, animal cloning, and embryonic stem cell research. He develops his case methodically, building on the premise that man's power over nature translates into the power of some men over others. Rand furiously contests this idea, though she makes precious little argument against it, relying mainly on personal invective against Lewis himself, who is variously characterized as an "abysmal bastard ... monster ... mediocrity ... bastard ... old fool ... incredible, medieval monstrosity ... lousy bastard ... drivelling non-entity ... God-damn, beaten mystic ... abysmal caricature ... bastard ... abysmal scum." (These quotes give you the tenor of the master philosopher's coolly analytical mind.)

In one marginal note Rand scrawls, "This monster literally thinks that to give men new knowledge is to gain power (!) over them." Of course what Lewis says is that it is the holders and utilizers of new knowledge, who do not "give" it to others but use it for themselves, who gain de facto power over their fellow human beings. He is fearful of the emerging possibilities of "eugenics ... prenatal conditioning [and] education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology," which may someday be wielded by an elite he calls the Conditioners. "Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men." And "the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means ... the power of some men to make other men what they please." Should this come to pass, "the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the power of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique ... They [will] know how to produce conscience and [will] decide what kind of conscience they will produce."*

Lewis was clearly arguing against one possible vision of the future, the dystopia best fictionalized in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I find his points compelling, but of course they are debatable. In order to be properly debated, however, they must first be understood. Rand shows no interest in even trying to understand what Lewis is saying -- which is unfortunate, since recent headlines have made his concerns more relevant than ever.

Earlier, Lewis develops the argument that basic moral values cannot be rationally defended but must be accepted as given, as part of the fabric of human nature, common to all communities and societies, though not always equally well-developed or implemented. This view, known as moral intuitionism, is a serious ethical position and one that has been defended by many prominent philosophers, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (It is enjoying something of a resurgence today.) Rand was vehemently opposed to this view, believing that it smacked of faith, which was, as she understood it, the archenemy of reason.

Lewis argues that in the realm of values, as in other realms of thought, you must begin with certain fundamental assumptions; "you cannot go on 'explaining away' forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things forever." Rand furiously rejects this idea, and you can practically hear her pen stabbing at the page as she writes, "By 'seeing through,' he means: 'rational understanding!' Oh, BS! -- and total BS!" But Lewis's entire point is that "rational understanding" must start somewhere, just as geometry or set theory must begin with certain axioms that cannot themselves be proven by the system in question. It takes more than declarations of "BS!" to vanquish this argument -- or, for that matter, any argument.

Rand is always telling the authors she reads what they "actually" are saying. Most of the time what she thinks they are "actually" saying bears no relationship whatsoever to anything they have written or even implied. With regard to Lewis, she says that his view boils down to the claim that the more we know, the more we are bound by reality: "Science shrinks the realm of his whim. (!!)" This is a thorough misunderstanding of Lewis's essay -- an essay, let me repeat, aimed at the intelligent general reader and not requiring any special expertise to to decipher.

Thus, although Ayn Rand's Marginalia hardly demonstrates the genius that Rand's admirers believe she possessed, it does unintentionally serve an instructional purpose. It shows how important it is to enter into a temporary but sincere sympathy with an author whose view you are trying to understand -- that is, if you are trying to understand it at all. To put it another way, in reading, it's important to be earnest -- to embrace a spirit of respect, honest consideration, and goodwill. You'll find those qualities in most serious thinkers. You will not find them, I'm afraid, in Ayn Rand's marginal notes.

P.S. Although it is not relevant to the above essay, I can't help sharing a few things in Ayn Rand's Marginalia that I found funny.

Rand the historian:

A book on the history of philosophy points out that Immanuel "Kant's sympathies were ... with a democracy, such as had just been established in North America." This is a well-known fact, evidenced by Kant's sympathetic writings on liberty and individual rights. But since Kant served as Rand's bogeyman, her avatar of evil, she cannot accept the statement. "Good God, no!" she exclaims in outraged ignorance.

Rand the self-aware:

In 1975 Rand filled out a newspaper quiz called "What's Your Love Quotient?" This embarrassing revelation should never have been printed, if only out of respect for the deceased author's memory. But for anyone familiar with Rand's long history of chronic, angry altercations with friends and followers, it is darkly amusing to read her answer to the first question: "Do you find it hard to take criticism?" Rand: "Not if it's rational."

Rand the lover of nature:

A newspaper piece on industrial pollution in Greece observes, "The beach at Marathon, where the Greeks fought the Persians in 490 B.C., is now pocked with tar and littered with refuse." Rand's astute comment: "So what?!"

Rand the lover of knowledge:

An article suggesting strategies for increasing the number of serious readers in America advocates promoting "the love of knowledge for its own sake." Rand underlines these words and writes in the margin: "So long as this continues, you'll never get the people's interest!" Love of knowledge for its own sake is apparently not a worthy goal for the committed Objectivist -- which perhaps explains why Rand was such a poor reader.

Rand the lover of literature:

The same article laments that "so many people can't see why any sensible person would want to own books." In one of her most bizarre outbursts, best-selling author Rand, who derived virtually all of her income from book royalties, exclaims: "I don't either!"

Well, at least I can partly agree with her on this one. I don't see why any sensible person would want to own Ayn Rand's books.

Except for a laugh, of course.

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* The synopses of The Abolition of Man provided by Marginalia's editor Robert Mayhew are sometimes inaccurate. For example, with a few words in square brackets Mayhew summarizes part of Lewis's argument in a quoted passage: "[Those who reject tradition] are not men at all: they are artefacts." But Mayhew has conflated two different sentences, which have two different subjects. The actual passage reads: "It is not that they [i.e., the Conditioners] are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts."

Thus, while "they are not men at all" does refer to the Conditioners (whom Mayhew somewhat inadequately labels "those who reject tradition"), the words "they are artefacts" refer to the Conditioners' helpless victims, who have been remade (via eugenics, prenatal conditioning, education and propaganda) into something no longer human.

Perhaps such inaccuracies are explained by a comment Mayhew makes in his introduction. A true acolyte, he unabashedly praises Rand, writing, "I do not recall a single case [in her marginalia] where what she said was unfair." It's good to know that when Rand railed against Lewis as a bastard, monster, scum, etc., she wasn't being unfair. Mayhew continues, "In fact, I was often filled with admiration for her patience, and for the strength of her stomach, in being able to go through some truly horrible book that she had decided was worth reading. (I, for one, could never have completed C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man.)"

I suppose if Mayhew wasn't actually able to read Lewis's book, he would have been hard-pressed to summarize it accurately.

Comments

[J. Goard]

Michael,

Can I assume you're familiar with the "hospital tree" anecdote?

[Michael Prescott]

Yes, the infamous "hospital tree!"

For those not in the know, when the elderly Ayn Rand was hospitalized and on heavy medication, she thought she saw a tree outside the window. Actually there was no tree; she was looking at an IV dispenser, which, in her confused state, she misinterpreted as tree branches. When some visitors gently informed her of this fact, she railed against them and accused them of trying to sabotage her confidence in her sense perceptions, or some such thing. For years afterward she would periodically return to the incident, bitterly describing this injustice done to her and haranguing her friends for their betrayal. Eventually her friends, who had remained steadfast through all sorts of abuse, could take no more and joined the long line of people who'd severed relations with the tempestuous author.

But sure, Ayn Rand could take criticism - if it was "rational."

Excellent point!

[Varenius]

Michael writes:

"Earlier, Lewis develops the argument that basic moral values cannot be rationally defended but must be accepted as given, as part of the fabric of human nature.... Rand was vehemently opposed to this view, believing that it smacked of faith, which was, as she understood it, the archenemy of reason."

The amusing thing is that Objectivism effectively makes the same assumption! It attempts to come up with rational justifications for moral values, but Objectivists ultimately must simply *accept* that these have an objective grounding. What other options are there under hard-core naturalism?

[Michael Prescott]

Very true.

Many people have pointed out that Rand's meta-ethical argument (presented in "The Objectivist Ethics," in her book The Virtue of Selfishness) contains numerous logical fallacies. Essentially she smuggles her pre-existing values (honesty, productiveness, rationality, etc.) into the argument by equivocating on the term "life."

She could hardly do otherwise, since if "life," in the sense of biological survival, is the standard of value, then anything goes, might makes right, and the survival of the fittest is the only ethical position. Rand, not wanting to take this stand, simply asserts that human life entails all the virtues that she prefers. She can't prove it; it is unprovable; she would have to derive an "ought" from an "is," which no one can do.

Incidentally, her whole biological argument rests on a falsehood, namely the claim that living creatures are motivated primarily by the instinct of survival. This is untrue, as any biologist could have told her. Living things are motivated by an instinct for procreation. Yes, they must survive long enough to reproduce; but they will take extreme risks to procreate and (in some cases) to defend their young. For some creatures, procreation equals death; the male black widow spider is devoured by his mate immediately after copulation; but he still copulates, because he is instinctively impelled to do so.

Thus, for the individual animal, survival is only an instrumental value, not the ultimate value (which is reproduction). Rand's entire argument founders on this simple point.

If she really wanted to derive her ethics from animal behavior, she would have had to conclude that bearing children is the ultimate purpose of life. By this standard she and her fictional heroes (all childless) were total failures!

[J. Goard]

More accurately: successful replicators (e.g., gene complexes) behave in ways conducive to successful replication. One major way in which this can happen is reproduction of the organism itself, but this is not the only way. To take an obvious example, social insects, most members do not themselves reproduce, but work and sacrifice themselves for the sake of what are likely to be their genetic siblings or close cousins. When it comes to humans, one must also realize that we are vehicles for memetic as well as genetic replicators. Just as we are "made" to court death in order to spread our genes, we are "made" to court death in order to spread our ideologies.

If you're looking for a few days of intellectual outrage tinged with humor, do something I did a few years back: first read some Richard Dawkins, and soon thereafter read Harry Binswanger's bizarrely point-missing "The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts".

[Michael Prescott]

I agree that your formulation is more accurate. Most animal behavior clearly does work this way, although I'm not sure if gene replication is the one and only explanation for all the varieties of behavior that occur.

When it comes to human behavior, I'm much less convinced. The whole sociobiology/evolutionary psychology approach, which argues that all we are and all we do can be traced to genetics, strikes me as oversimplified. A lot of it has the flavor of a Rudyard Kipling "Just So Story." Almost anything can be explained by this method, even contradictory things.

For instance, why are some males promiscuous? Because they are programmed to disseminate their genetic material as widely as possible. But then, why are some males monogamous? Because they are programmed to rear their offspring in order to maximize their offspring's survival chances.

So genetics "explains" both promiscuity and monogamy. But if it can explain mutually exclusive things, then does it really explain anything?

(There is also the consideration that if genetics determines behavior, then we have no free will. And if genetics determines what we consider right or wrong, then ethics is no more than rules of expediency to maximize the community's survival chances. I am skeptical of both these conclusions.)

[J. Goard]

"So genetics 'explains' both promiscuity and monogamy. But if it can explain mutually exclusive things, then does it really explain anything?"

(1) Why would you find problematic the belief that different strategies have developed for achieving a single goal? Hollow bones and dense bones are mutually exclusive too, but we think evolution explains both.

(2) Memetic-genetic interaction probably has a lot to do with monogamy. Put simply: belief systems will tend to replicate better if they include the desire for strong family identification, tradition, and passing down of wisdom. Such memetic selection should also (to a very large degree) drive the evolution of highly symbiotic genes. This is currently a major hypothesis concerning the extent of our capacities for long-term cultural transmission (language, music, literature, etc), and the speed with which they have apparently developed in our ancestors.

Not that this has much to do with the original Crazy Ayn thread, but hey...

[Michael Prescott]

To be honest, I'm not convinced that evolution (at least in the sense of Darwinism) provides a comprehensive explanation even of physical structures, let alone of psychological, social, and cultural features. I wrote a little about this on my old blog, at:

http://authormichaelprescott.blogspot.com/2005/02/evolving-position.html

My objections to evolutionary psychology are that it can be used to "explain" anything and everything; that it leads logically to a denial of free will; and that it reduces ethics to survival-based expediency. Like any reductionist approach, it has a dehumanizing effect - as evidenced by Robert Wright's book The Moral Animal, which ends up claiming that human beings are essentially "robots" controlled by their genes.

The attempt to reduce humans to the status of automatons is logically self-defeating. If our thoughts are merely the result of genetic programming, then our thinking cannot be assumed to bear any connection to reality. But in that case, we can't know anything ... including the fact that we are genetically programmed!

Or to put it another way, if our thinking is the product of genes and memes, then the theory of evolutionary psychology itself is the product of genes and memes - and no more likely to be true than any other arbitrary construct.

[Orson Olson]

Michael write: "if our thinking is the product of genes and memes, then the theory of evolutionary psychology itself is the product of genes and memes - and no more likely to be true than any other arbitrary construct."

But the very facts of evolution show that it is not an "arbitrary construct." It circumscribes the reality within which human will is expressed.

For instance, consider the fact that most women bear children, and of those caring for their very young children, it will almost never (ever) be a man. Why does this difference exists? Merely an "expression of free will" - women are ethical and men are not - hardly suffices. Rather, hormones, neuro-anatomy, genetics, and the typical experience of pregnancy and birthing - along with social conditioning, all are absent from men's experience. Thus, women are induced to become care-givers, not men.

Needless to say, Rand didn't have these expereiences. Had she done so, she would have been forced to confront her own historical subjective experieneces as a child of her parents. Parenting forces one into involuntary consciousness of what was done to oneself by one's parents. Of course, none of this means that Rand would have learned from it. Reading the Marginalia, one rather suspects not.

But Michael's dismissiveness of nature does not encourage us to consider these realities, just as Rand did not. But we ought to learn more.