Speak for Yourself
Letters to the Editor, in the Winter, 2005, issue of The New Individualist
Volume 8, Numbers 9-10
Fall 2005 TNI
When my wife, Donna, handed me the latest issue of The New Individualist, I didn’t recognize it. The color, the feel of the paper, everything about this magazine promised something special—and then I opened it and started reading. Not only was I not disappointed, it just got better and better with each page. The articles were interesting and timely and the football game that I’d been watching just didn’t seem interesting anymore. I read it from cover to cover and my only disappointment was that I’d finished.
This is the magazine that I’ve always hoped we would publish, a magazine not for Objectivists, but for anyone interested in critical thinking. Thank you, Robert, I can’t wait for the next issue.
David M. Hurowitz
San Francisco, California
Thank you for an unusually enjoyable issue of The New Individualist. I sat down to look at Fall 2005, and ended up reading it from cover to cover. I especially liked the variety of articles, from politics to music, as well as the lively writing style. I also liked the graphics and pictures. Keep up the good work!
Marsha Familaro Enright
College of the United States
www.collegeunitedstates.org
Chicago, Illinois
My highest compliments to Robert Bidinotto and the staff of The New Individualist on the stylish format and provocative substance of your wonderful magazine. It looks great, it reads well, and most of all: it inspires thought. Terrific!
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Visiting Scholar, NYU Department of Politics,
New York, New York
Multiculturalism’s Discontents
Bruce Thornton’s “Multiculturalism and Its Discontents” (July 2005) is a case of false advertising. I expected to read an Objectivist analysis of the broadly ambitious agenda of multiculturalism. Instead, I was treated to a screed against immigration—a much narrower topic. Thornton’s arguments offer no hint that he is armed with the philosophy of Objectivism, and are impossible to distinguish from the standard conservative positions found in the likes of National Review.
Thornton’s approach is collectivist in its roots. He frets over immigrants, and whether or not his neighbor is “assimilating.” He trots out the popular nostalgia for the good old days when immigrants assimilated, complaining that they no longer do— without offering any concrete evidence that today’s Mexican immigrants are any different from yesterday’s Italians.
Thornton never gives a clear picture of the common American culture he champions, other than a brief mention of its political commitment to individual rights. When he speaks of immigrant cultures, he cites holidays, recipes, and costumes as definitive attributes. Thus, he offers no basis of comparison or conflict—nothing in the immigrant cultures to contradict the putative American commitment to individual liberty.
So what is he complaining about? This is left unclear to the reader, as Thornton wanders through the standard conservative reactions to newcomers. He seems frustrated at the multiculturalist movement as such, but this is an academic monster, completely divorced from the workaday life of the average immigrant. He offers only one concrete example of objectionable activity: “people who have risked life and limb to come to America, some illegally, publicly chastising this country and asserting the superiority of their native lands.”
This is curious, because I’ve never witnessed an immigrant, particularly one who risked life to come here, subsequently chastising this country. Even more curious is why we should care if they did. So what if someone moves to America and speaks out against her? Why should we care? Whose rights have been shattered? Thornton frets too much about other people’s lives and speech, in a manner that is strangely tribal and collectivist for an Objectivist.
Thornton closes by calling for the leveraging of government schools to teach a common American culture. Again, he never defined or even outlined that culture, and I’m confused as to why an Objectivist would want to use government schools to do anything, much less something as dangerous as cultural indoctrination.
The photos used in the article are even more confusing. In one case, the caption notes that a judge took a child from a mother because the mother allegedly refused to learn English. Since when does the Objectivist politics endorse the seizure of one’s children based on the language spoken in the home? What does English have to do with parenting?
America is not a monolith. Nor is America a big piece of public property where “we” should worry about “them.” The greatest aspect of American culture is that there is no “we.”
Philosophical multiculturalism is a toxic brew, and worthy of critique. Where immigration is concerned, the problem is the welfare state, and also the fact that immigration is presently illegal for most intents and purposes, leading to all the predictable effects of prohibitions since time immemorial. The problem is not the brown man mowing your lawn. He’s oblivious to all of this, and his purpose is simply to build a life.
Joe Duarte
Tempe, AZ
The Editor replies:
My editorial in the Fall 2005 issue—which, in fairness to Mr. Duarte, appeared after I received his letter—addressed some of the concerns he raises concerning contributions by non-Objectivists to the pages of this magazine. To be clear, Professor Thornton is not an Objectivist, and that fact obviously thwarted Duarte’s expectations. However, Thornton is an eminent classical scholar and cultural commentator with his feet and premises planted firmly in the Western Enlightenment tradition. That said, I still can’t find in Thornton’s essay the notions ascribed to him here—not even remotely.
Duarte somehow finds Thornton’s calmly reasoned essay to be a “screed against immigration.” But nowhere does Thornton say, “Close the borders.” And nowhere do I see a hint of hostility to immigrants or ethnic minorities. To the contrary, in his closing paragraph Thornton affirms: "Immigration can work, and has worked in this country.” The entire thrust of his essay, in fact, is to defend “the old immigrant model that for decades worked so well. That model was based on assimilation…[T]he immigrant was required to become American, to learn the language, history, political principles, and civic customs that identified an American as an American. The immigrant, of course, was free not to assimilate, but in that case, he and his children would not be able to take full advantage of all the economic and political opportunities open to those who did become American.”
In other words, Thornton only asserts that immigrants should jettison ideas and practices inconsistent with those of our individualist, Enlightenment founding, and that if they don’t, they should choose to live elsewhere. This Objectivist can only add to that a secular “amen.”
As for finding “tribal and collectivist” sentiments in the essay, I am equally at a loss. Thornton’s third paragraph so clearly and explicitly established an individualist, anti-collectivist context that I find it baffling that anyone could interpret him as advocating anything to the contrary. “Our form of government is predicated on the principle of individual, inalienable rights that each of us possess no matter what group or sect we belong to,” he wrote. “Those rights trump the accidents of race or religion or any other group characteristic.” He even describes this principle as “the core assumption of our liberal democracy.”
Thornton ’s closing paragraph therefore should be interpreted within that individualist context. The “common culture” that Thornton would have "schools and government” promote can only refer to that legacy of individualism bequeathed to us by the Founders. I find nothing immoral or inconsistent in our government institutions asserting the fundamental rightness of the values and principles embodied in our founding documents; affirming that they serve as the common, principled basis for our society; or declaring that those who come here from other nations ought to sign on to them as the price of full citizenship. Even in today’s context of public schools—which I of course oppose—upholding our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and the values of the Declaration of Independence in the classroom strikes me as no more controversial than upholding the principles of mathematics and science.
As to the photos accompanying the essay, those were of my own selection, and were intended only to illustrate ethnic conflicts now tearing away at the fabric of cultural assimilation in America. I certainly did not mean them to advocate anything depicted—such as seizure of children from non-English-speaking parents! I apologize for any unintended confusion.
—RJB
The Indictment of the West
Bruce Thornton argues (TNI, Fall 2005) that “the indictment of the West” rests on ancient myths of a golden age and “the noble savage”; that its modern forms spring from the work of Western thinkers themselves; that it cannot be squared with the facts; and that critics of Western technology and wealth are usually (and inconsistently) unwilling to forgo these values in their personal lives. I agree with all of these points in Thornton’s indictment of the indictment. I also appreciate his pitch-perfect ear for the rhetoric of the anti-Western mindset—the myriad issues and slogans in which it is expressed. To get at the essence of that mindset, however, we need to take his analysis and critique a few steps further.
In philosophical terms, the many anti-Western themes he mentions in his analysis can be reduced to a few core attitudes: anti-materialism, anti-technology, anti-individualism, anti-capitalism. What’s missing from this list is the attitude that underlies all the others: anti-reason.
The rational faculty is the source of all the benefits of civilization: language, science, technology, law, production, social institutions, and culture. The fact that reason gives us the capacity to think, choose, and act for ourselves is the basis for individualism: the recognition of individuals as ends in themselves, the principles of individual rights, and the political institutions of freedom. And the rational capacity for self-awareness underlies our ability to pursue spiritual as well as material values.
Conversely, the hostility to technology, material progress, individualism, and capitalism rests ultimately on hostility to reason. One form of that hostility is the subordination of reason to religious faith and dogma, as in bin Laden’s theocratic ideology. Another is postmodern skepticism and the view of reason as a tool of hegemony over others. Despite their many differences, these outlooks share a common essence. As Ayn Rand says about the Witch Doctor and Attila, her symbols for faith and force, respectively:
- It is against this faculty, the faculty of reason, that Attila and the Witch Doctor rebel…. Both dread the necessity, the risk and the responsibility of rational cognition. Both dread the fact that “nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Both seek to exist, not by conquering nature, but by adjusting to the given, the immediate, the known. There is only one means of survival for those who do not choose to conquer nature: to conquer those who do.
Recognizing the centrality of reason provides insight on a number of other points in Thornton’s essay.
· The myths of a golden age and the noble savage do have an enduring appeal, as Thornton says. But why these myths in particular? I would argue that it’s because they express the wish for a mode of life, and by implication a mode of cognition, that is exempt from effort and risk.
· The values that Thornton attributes to the West are values specifically of modernity, the culture born in the Enlightenment era. The Enlightenment’s commitment to reason as a cultural value spawned science, individualism, and freedom. Though Western in origin, the values of that culture are open to any society; and many non-Western societies, especially in east Asia, have indeed embraced them.
· Conversely, the indictment of the West is specifically a rejection of modernity. Thornton cites a rogue’s gallery from the cultural left, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to contemporary anti-global activists, and he sees that premodern Islamists share much of the same outlook. But we also need to include premodernists in the West, from Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century to the religious right today. The fundamental culture war of our time is not the West versus the rest. It is the modernists versus the anti-modernists within each civilization.
· Thorton’s accusation that anti-modernists are inconsistent in not abandoning their own use of technology misses the mark in some cases. Are the Iranian mullahs hypocrites because they “did not discard their jet fighters and antibiotics when they tried to outlaw cassette players”? Not directly. The mullahs might well reply that the issue is not technology per se but its purpose. Technology is good when it supports their theocracy, bad when it is used for personal pleasure. The real contradiction is the belief that they can sustain even a partial and constrained technology while banning the freedom of scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs who create and operate it.
· For those who truly value reason, finally, the value of civilization is not merely that it allows us to escape pain and disease, but also, and more importantly, that it allows us to achieve the positive values of art, wealth, knowledge, peace, justice, fulfilling relationships with others, and other ingredients of happiness.
David Kelley
Founder and Senior Fellow,
The Objectivist Center
Washington, DC
Creationism and “Intelligent Design”
In “What are Creationists Afraid Of?” (The New Individualist, Fall 2005), the Objectivist Center’s executive director, Edward L. Hudgins, proffers three poor arguments against intelligent design(ID)—i.e., the idea that some features of the world are best explained by reference to an intelligent cause rather than an undirected cause like natural selection.
First, Hudgins claims that ID is based upon religion. False. Design may have religious implications, but it does not have religious premises. For instance, the DNA molecule is embedded with an immense amount of information. In our experience, information only comes from minds (read: intelligence). So why should we attribute the information in DNA to a mindless process like natural selection? ID scientists think we should not. ID is an inference from the evidence, not from religious scriptures or practices. ID is distinct from Creationism which is based on religious assumptions.
Second, Hudgins claims that ID explains nothing because it doesn’t explain where the designer came from. False. Thought experiment: You are the archaeologist who unearths the Rosetta Stone. You say to yourself, “This thing was either designed by intelligence, or it was the outcome of a long natural process of wind and erosion.” Should you conclude that the stone is not designed by intelligence simply because the designing intelligence must be even more complex than the stone itself? Of course not. Mindless natural forces simply cannot account for the information inscribed on the Rosetta Stone—and neither can mindless forces like natural selection account for the information embedded within DNA or the exquisite nanotechnology within the cell. Again, our uniform and repeated experience is that information arises only from intelligence.
Third, Hudgins claims that economists such as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek proved that order and complexity can emerge spontaneously. True. But what exactly has Hudgins shown? He has given an example of design, I’m afraid. Order does emerge in a free market. But why? Because intelligent agents are at work—engaged in buying, selling, trading, and producing products. This was George Gilder’s fundamental insight in Wealth & Poverty. The supply-side revolution was ushered in partly because Gilder and others recognized that man is more than matter. He is mind. And mind is the source of all innovation, and hence mind is the resource that creates wealth where there was none before. Order and complexity can emerge “spontaneously”—from intelligent, creative beings, anyway.
Logan Paul Gage
Discovery Institute, Washington, DC
Edward L Hudgins attempts to defend evolution by drawing a parallel between the “Invisible Hand” of capitalism and the order that emerges through natural selection. Such a comparison is problematic.
Capitalism is not a function of “spontaneous order” as he quotes Hayek. Capitalism involves calculated planning on the part of intelligent men. The fact that government does not plan a capitalist economy, does not mean that the economy is random. A great deal of centralized planning is needed to coordinate the delivery of parcels by FedEx, for example. Even simple trips to the supermarket involve sophisticated decision-making. Competition may be “Darwinian” in a certain sense. But literally speaking, this couldn’t be further from the truth. A Darwinian view of nature is one of order emerging through unplanned chaos. This is not the nature of capitalism or any other human construct. A free economy is “intelligently designed.” (While a command economy is unintelligently designed.)
To say that an optic nerve can evolve from nothing in the same way that an economy can bring prosperity through “spontaneous order” is specious. One cannot compare the seemingly random activity of markets with an optic nerve. Let us compare the invention of the camera to the optic nerve. Did the camera evolve by chance? Would anyone invent such a thing after billions of years without exercising deliberate thought? Does the invention of the camera have nothing to do with market activity?
Even if a giraffe can “will” it’s evolutionary change as Mr. Hudgins supposes, a plant certainly cannot. There is absolutely no conclusive proof that such a thing is possible, nor has anyone observed such an event. These statements are simple conjecture, not scientific fact. Yet from a materialist point of view, there isn’t really any difference between a giraffe “willing” it’s evolution and the apparently “spontaneous” activitiesof Rockefeller, Ford, or Gates. After all, their business decisions were simply the result of highly evolved survival instinct.
Chris Segedy
Brooklyn, New York
Edward Hudgins replies:
Mr. Gage and Mr. Segedy’s criticisms of my discussion of the problems with creationism and intelligent design point to the poverty of the arguments for those views, and are an object lesson in how religious arguments are both based on and lead to fuzzy thinking.
1. Intelligent Design is religion-based
Mr. Gage first objects that intelligent design is not based on religious premises though it does have religious implications. But the argument he offers to back his assertion has little to do with his contention, and, in any case, on its merits is a muddle of confused definitions.
He says that DNA contains “information” and that “information” implies a design, and its designer (that would be a god, by the way). Here Mr. Gage mixes up different definitions of the concept “information.”
First, “information” can refer to thoughts that exist in a conscious, individual mind and which can be communicated to another conscious mind—for example, this letter being read by you, dear readers, or by Mr. Gage.
Second, we can speak of any fact that is perceived by a mind as becoming “information.” I observe that a rock is made of marble. I now carry that information in my mind. But the rock did not “communicate” to me the information in the way that I am currently communicating information to you. My mind perceived the rock and determined its composition.
Third, we commonly label the causal properties of any entity as “information.” For example, DNA under certain conditions will undergo a chemical change—that is, divide into a duplicate of itself; and in certain additional circumstances, it can grow into a particular type of entity—a potato, a crab, a human—based on its causal properties. But the “information” in the DNA is not the same kind of information that is communicated between two conscious minds. The DNA only metaphorically “tells” the chemicals to become a turnip or a kangaroo. In this case the “information” is a description of the development of the living entity in specific circumstances, and in accordance with the causal potential of the entity’s nature. Would we speak of the gravitational force of the sun communicating “information” to the earth concerning how far, how fast, and in what direction to orbit around it?
Mr. Gage confuses these definitions: in fact, the “information” in DNA conforms to the second and third definitions but certainly not the first. His argument does nothing to support his contention that intelligent design does not begin with religious premises.
2. Intelligent Design doesn’t explain the designer
Mr. Gage rejects my point that intelligent design explains nothing about where the designer came from. But again, he merely makes an assertion; he never actually explains from whence the designer comes. Like so many religious proponents for millennia, Mr. Gage shows himself unable to answer the “infinite regress” problem. If the universe or life needed a designer, then why doesn’t the designer need a designer? Asserting a designer of the universe only pushes the question of where the universe came from back a step. Because it adds the necessity of a designer for man and the universe, it creates just the logical problem of an infinite regress that Mr. Gage fails to address. A natural explanation for man and the universe does not run into this problem.
Positing a designer in the case of intelligent life certainly is a religious assertion. I need only repeat the question from my article: Who is the designer? We humans didn’t design ourselves. And while perhaps advanced aliens genetically engineered us, the ID advocates don’t make that argument, either. They’d no doubt raise the question of who designed the aliens, which would leave only a god as the designer.
Mr. Gage suggests that an archeologist finding the Rosetta Stone might ask himself whether it was designed by an intelligence or was the outcome of natural processes. He asks, “Should you conclude that the stone is not designed by intelligence simply because the designing intelligence must be even more complex than the stone itself?”
Assuming that here he is referring to the writing on the stone, Mr. Gage wants to draw an analogy between the creation of writing by a human being and the creation of a human being by a god. But his analogy, again, is simply a confused assertion: Since writing has an intelligent author, an intelligent human must have an intelligent author. Again, this fails to address the question of who authored the ultimate author.
We already know enough about writing to know that if we find it, it was probably created by humans. If we found a stone bearing writing that we thought was created by an extraterrestrial race, we certainly would ask where they came from. Regarding the Rosetta Stone analogy, it is valid to ask: “How can humans create writing? How do our minds produce concepts that are symbolized in language? Why do lower animals—say, chimps—have an extremely limited capacity for language? Did we evolve? What is the relationship between the brain and this capacity?” But if we can ask such questions of the intelligent creators of language—humans—why shouldn’t we ask similar questions about the origins of the purported intelligent creator of humans—Mr. Gage's god?
Using his earlier confused definitions, Mr. Gage asserts that natural forces cannot account for “information embedded within DNA or the exquisite nanotechnology with the cell.” It’s revealing that he describes the cell in terms of nanotechnology, which is human-designed. Here he’s mixing terminology that refers to something definitely created by intelligence with something that he maintains was created by intelligence—in essence, begging the question.
3. Order can arise without design
Mr. Gage and Chris Segedy both take exception to my analogy between the order that emerges in the economy (as explained by F.A. Hayek, Adam Smith, and others), and the “natural order.” Gage and Segedy rightly point out that the actors in an economy are intelligent agents who plan factories, products, and the like. But economists refer to “order” in the economy in three ways. First, they distinguish between the elements of the economic system—the human actors—and the system itself, including the causal laws that govern it and that describe what happens when many individuals interact to achieve specific goals of their own. Second, by “order” they refer to “orderly” phenomena that are attributes of the system—for example, stable prices over certain periods of time. And third, they refer to attributes of the system that might change—evolve–over time. These would include the price or quantity of a particular commodity that is the product of human agency, but not anyone’s design. Millions of choices and decisions went into making the price of oil $62.50 per barrel at 3:14 p.m. EST in New York on February 14, 2006. But no one designer planned it.
Regarding “natural order” and natural selection, it is not millions of conscious decisions that produce the emergent phenomena—i.e., changes in an entity—or that might cause a species to go extinct. Many random genetic mutations are the mechanism driving evolution. Some mutations confer survival advantages while others create disadvantages. I offered the analogy to the marketplace only because many on the political right who favor free markets understand how these mechanisms work in an economy to produce unplanned outcomes. If they are confused by intelligent design arguments, Hayek’s identification of three types of order—natural, designed, and emergent (this last being a special case of the natural order)—could help cut through their errors.
Mr. Segedy recycles once again the much-repeated assertion that the optic nerve simply couldn’t have evolved any more than a camera could. But again, this is an assertion based on no serious consideration of biological research or medical evidence.
He goes on to say that “Even if a giraffe can ‘will’ it’s [sic] evolutionary change as Mr. Hudgins supposes, a plant certainly cannot.” Sadly, his reading skills are as poor as his logic skills. In my article I pointed out that “Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet pseudo-scientist who rejected the Darwinian insight that evolution occurs through genetic mutation. He believed…that living creatures can, in effect, simply will their evolutionary change.” Got it? Lysenko, the communist—not me, Ed Hudgins—rejected Darwin and believed animals could will changes to their nature, changes that could be passed on to later generations. I also observed, “Scientific evidence did not support this belief, but the Bolsheviks did.” Again, Ed Hudgins rejects Lysenko’s assertion—just as he does the assertions of creationists and intelligent design advocates!
Let me close by observing another tactic of those who reject the scientific approach. They use what Ayn Rand called the “stolen concept fallacy.” Whenever it suits them they invoke information—e.g., how DNA or the optic nerve functions—that was gained by the very scientific process that they reject. Sorry, but if you reject the scientific method you cannot invoke selectively the knowledge it discovers. You either must stick to that method and accept the fact that life and the universe evolved, or you must reject that method and turn instead to revelations, emotions, or anything but the marvelous human mind.