A partial solution to the it’s-in-a-box-somewhere problem

Having moved so often, I have become skilled of the art of moving. Perhaps I am not a professional but at least I am a gifted amateur. One thing I learned to do is label boxes of books “A,” “B,” and “C,” in the order in which they were to be unpacked. It takes a long time to unpack the boxes. After my most recent move I never did finish unpacking them, in part because I don’t have the room to shelve them all.

The point I am approaching is that I often know that I have a certain book in my library but am unable to easily get the book because it’s in a box somewhere instead of on a shelf. Recently I came across a recommendation of The Art of Cross-Examination by Francis Wellman. This volume, purchased many years ago, is in my library and may even be on a shelf, but I did not bother to look. Via Google I soon found two free pdf editions, one more cleanly typeset than the other, and downloaded the cleaner version to the Goodreader app on my iPad mini. These days, a reasonably readable free electronic edition of almost any classic text out of copyright can be gotten within a few minutes.

Part Two of The Art of Cross-Examination includes transcripts of famous cross-examinations. I began reading John K. Porter’s examination of Charles J. Guiteau, who assassinated President James Garfield on instructions from God, as Guiteau believed or pretended to believe. Wellman writes that the defendant was “cleverly led [by Porter's cross-examination] to picture himself to the civilized world as a moral monstrosity.” Porter grills the assassin about when God inspired him to do the deed, when he realized the notion had been instilled by God, whether he initially disagreed with God about the feasibility of killing the President, etc. Goiteau’s thought of killing Garfield seems exactly like the kind of thought that might occur to a person had no deity implanted it. His insistence that God authorized the deed seems like what a rationalization of his own decision to commit it would seem like.

If one believes in God, how does one distinguish between a thought that has not been injected into one’s head by God but which one has convinced oneself (or at least is trying to convince oneself) has been thus injected, and a thought that has in fact been thus injected? In light of the fact that there is no God, there is no way to do it, no distinction to be made. The former is always the case.

Did Roy A. Childs Jr. suffer from ‘Archist Illusions’?

Two distinguished libertarian and anarchist friends of the late, great Roy A. Childs Jr. (1949-1992) suppose that Roy likely had suspect motives for his change of mind about anarchism later in life, and perhaps also for his failure to explain his reasons for his change of mind in print during the years of his declining health before he died in 1992.

In a recent post at Cato’s libertarianism.org in which he endorses psycho-speculations of Roy’s motives offered by Ron Neff, George H. Smith reports that Roy toward the end of his life told him that he believed that anarchism is impractical. But a sarcastic remark by Smith, which he recalls now with regret, unfortunately ended the conversation before Roy could elaborate. Ron Neff, for his part, cites Roy’s earlier reference to the messy situation in Lebanon. “He referred to the condition into which Lebanon had fallen after the shelling of Beirut by Israel in September of [1982], and he said that that was what anarchism would produce.” For Neff, the import of this example is somehow unlikely to represent what he calls “the whole story” of Roy’s rejection of his famously influential anarchist views. Another old friend of Roy’s, Jeff Riggenbach, offers a fine profile of Roy for Riggenbach’s Libertarian Tradition podcast that stresses the influence of Roy’s early anarchism but also scrupulously neglects to mention his eventual repudiation of that anarchism.

That anarchism or anarcho-capitalism can’t coherently function to objectively protect individual rights doesn’t seem a bad reason for believing that anarchism is impractical from the perspective of someone who values life, justice, rights, liberty. In the anarcho-capitalist society, what indeed is to be done about competing gangs—oops, competing “defense agencies”? Would a government concerned about (actual) rights and (actual) freedom and (actual) justice be justified in outlawing fundamentally competing brands of physically-enforced justice? Would a genuinely just, libertarian “defense agency” be justified in “competing with”—i.e., using force to stop—a “defense agency” determined to impose reparations for slavery, to impose reparations for the taking of Indian land, to stop abortions by force, or to extract the “surplus labor value” that the rich capitalists “steal” from their employees?

That anarchism is incompatible with the protection of individual rights is obvious from reading the news. Look at what the Mafia Defense Agency does. Look at what the PLO Defense Agency does. Look at what the Al Qaeda Defense Agency does. Such annoyingly obtrusive facts as the chronic conduct of these defense agencies are meaningless, though, we’re told. Anarchists tend to reply, “There you go again. That kind of bloody conflict among power-lusting gangs is not what we mean by defense agencies or an anarcho-capitalist society. What we mean is the smoothly functioning rights-respecting ‘defense agencies’ of our disconnected-from-facts-on-the-ground theoretical books and journal papers, a society in which everybody is always carrying around a copy of the Libertarian Law Code and has sworn to it eternal fealty, ever ready to submit to arbitration in case of a dispute the defense agencies can’t resolve amongst themselves as if the last three thousand years of human history had never happened. Human beings aren’t evil by nature, after all.”

In other words, anarchists merely assume that none of the proposed defense agencies would in fact actually be competing at the most fundamental level—i.e., at the level of what vision and package of justice, rights, and proper use of coercion they would be promoting in the brochure—a level at which they would not be inclined in good faith to accept binding adjudication of disputes if they happen to hold the exact opposite view of rights and justice as the party doing the adjudicating.

What happens, according to the anarcho-capitalists, in the anarcho-capitalist society with respect to fundamentally different uses of coercion? Is it that the defense agencies will be free to compete at the very most fundamental level, but that they simply won’t want to, all criminal, leftie and jihadic motivations for violating actual rights having evaporated as soon as the anarcho-capitalist program gets the go-ahead? Or would there, after all, be some kind of mutually accepted and enforced ban on the wrongful use of force? If the latter, would there or would there not be enforceable mechanisms in place for adjudicating disputes among the defense agencies, and for declining to renew the license of a defense agency that tries to blow up World Trade Centers in the name of the Allah Defense Code?

Problem, though: as soon as any such reasonable, enforceable constraints are imposed on the defense agencies independently of their preferences in a particular dispute, we are talking about an apparatus of limited government, not about anarchism or anarcho-capitalism. The defense agencies would be governed by this government. They wouldn’t be allowed to secede to institute a contrary program of justice, rights and coercion.

To be sure, unfettered government is also misbegotten with respect to the purpose of safeguarding genuine rights. So what, then, would be a practical means of protecting life, liberty and property in a society? We the people would have to institute a government restricted to the defense and enforcement of individual rights, an institution the attaining and maintaining of which depends a lot on education, ideas and culture. (Which means that anarchists are wrong to suggest, as some do, that governments virtually automatically devolve into tyrannies—ideas and culture being potent in their view except when they matter not at all.) Such a limited government could accept a lot more competition in means of protecting rights than we see today; but it could not permit citizens to protect their rights anywhichway whatever, especially when there is no immediate threat to life and limb.

According to Neff, it’s unlikely that Roy Childs could have honestly come to the view that his youthful and rationalistic arguments for anarchism were mistaken. (By rationalism, here, I mean theoretical web-spinning that may be very smart and persuasive on its own self-contained terms but which inadequately takes into account critical facts on which the theory should be based.) For Neff, Roy’s change of mind was more likely strategic than genuine, a product of short-term political calculation. “I do not think he meant by [his claim that anarchism is not practical] that anarchism was an ideal that could never be achieved, or that competing defense agencies could not behave justly. I think he meant that anarchism merely exacerbated the alienation from American culture its adherents already felt, especially adherents who came from an Objectivist background,” Neff contends, as if Roy hadn’t pointed to Lebanon. (Only Roy’s every explicit reference to the question of anarchism versus limited government in his later years would tend to suggest that he meant what he said.)

Says Smith: “Though speculative, Neff’s explanation of what was really going on with Roy’s refutation of anarchism is, in my judgment, exactly on point, so I refer readers to his account for additional details.” In the same article, Smith also suggests that Roy’s employment of Objectivistic arguments in certain essays defending anarchism was mediated primarily by his desire to appeal rhetorically to Objectivist readers rather than by his own sympathy with Objectivist ideas.

All this strained imputation of merely strategic profession of conviction strikes me as gratuitous at best, a smear at worst. If Smith and Neff are right, Roy, dead at 43, was one of the most disingenuous severely-ailing non-writers of an essay he never got around to that ever bestrode lower Manhattan. But is it really so implausible to suppose that their good friend changed his mind about anarchism because Roy was a good thinker and a man of integrity who concluded that anarcho-capitalism is incoherent as a means of instituting a free society in large part due to the hardly irrelevant fact that it is?

Get super-cheap now: Leonard Peikoff’s History of Philosophy and other Objectivist courses

I’d say that $22 for a course–Leonard Peikoff’s 24-lecture set on the history of philosophy–which used to cost hundreds to purchase–is a pretty good deal. At its new Ayn Rand Institute eStore, the Ayn Rand Institute is selling for a song that course and many other courses and individual lectures in the format of downloadable MP3 files. I also downloaded Peikoff’s 1976 course on Objectivism, which includes Ayn Rand answering some of the questions in later lectures.

I’m not sure why these files are being offered so inexpensively, since the demand would be there for somewhat higher prices still a lot lower than the old prices for cassettes or CD-ROMs. These MP3 prices are much better than even The Teaching Company’s frequent cut-rate sale prices for courses. Now would be the time to download from the ARI eStore any sets or individual lectures you are interested in, as for sure the prices are not going to go lower.

New York Times reporter writes as if a property owner altering house is hypocritical because he fought eminent domain

The issue is property rights.

Ms. Frost, who sold earlier this year, said she was especially perplexed by Mr. Goldstein’s construction project since he had spent so many years agitating on behalf of his neighbors and their property rights as the Atlantic Yards developer, Forest City Ratner, muscled in. (Forest City Ratner also was the development partner for the headquarters of The New York Times Company.)

¶Mr. Goldstein called the comparison “laughable and offensive.”

¶“Are you kidding me?” he said by e-mail when first asked to comment on his neighbors’ displeasure.

¶In his calmer moments…

Why is the article writer or any reader treating as even vaguely equivalent the following: 1) coercively throwing a person off of property he owns and 2) a person’s developing his own property? The property owner discussed here has been adding an extension to his home on his own property. He has not been using eminent domain to take over neighboring plots owned by somebody else. Goldstein is consistent if in the one case he fought a developer using eminent domain to steal properties and in the other fought neighbors attempting to forcibly stop him from developing his own property. In each case, he defended property rights against those seeking to violate property rights.

“I don’t like how X is exercising his rights” is no argument for violating the rights of property owner who develops his own property. Lots of people dislike lots of things that other people do. If we could exercise the power of law to prevent others from doing anything we happen to dislike, there would be little or nothing that any of us could freely do by right. Our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, including the right to the use and control of property we honestly acquire, should be protected precisely so that we can act to sustain and improve our lives as we see fit despite the desire some others may have to interfere.

Making versus giving

No. No matter how much “teeing up” to “set oneself up” for a massive philanthropic legacy one engages in, the production and trade that make the philanthropy (and civilization) possible are the greater gift.

Happy 25th anniversary, Dipert misrepresentation of Kelley!

Here’s a pdf of the Randall Dipert’s 1987 essay-review in Reason Papers of David Kelley’s Evidence of the Senses.

Among other complaints, some not odd, Dipert offers the odd complaint that Kelley’s theory of perception is not enough about individualist ethics. “Where is the individualist theory of human action? …I conjecture that no tome on realistic epistemology can animate vigorous, individualist anything.” As I thought when I first read the review, this lament is like criticizing a book on plumbing for inadequately advancing a theory of architecture.

Dipert also contends that Kelley’s “main aim is to demonstrate just how passive and non-creative perception and knowledge are.” But (conceptual) knowledge is not the same as (sensory) perception, though one grounds the other; knowledge, though based on perception, is very much active, in Kelley’s view. One can’t, for example, merely peer at Dipert’s sentences in order to comprehend what he is talking about. Such comprehension can be achieved only by an active mental process, if then.

“There is an emphasis, an obsession [?], with demonstrating the essential (epistemological) passivity of human life,” Dipert contends. “This is radically out of tune with the ‘spirit’ of individualism.” He claims that “Rand/Kelley” promote a view of the “passivity…of the human mind.”

The dual indictment of David Kelley and Ayn Rand is slovenly as well as perverse, since at the time of Dipert’s review, 1987, the only book-length work by Kelley was Evidence of the Senses; whereas the entire corpus published by Ayn Rand in her lifetime, including Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, was still in print. How can anyone read IOE–or, for that matter, the dramatic portrayals of “planning, deliberating, intending, acting” in Rand’s novels–and come away with the notion that Rand regarded the human mind as essentially passive in its acquisition of knowledge? One can argue that Rand, Kelley or anybody needs to do more work on a “theory of practical reasoning in the sense of Aristotle.” But this is a far cry from the inference that a thinker sets forth or even passively relies upon a “passive” view of how the mind acquires knowledge and acts on the acquired knowledge. Rand and other Objectivism-influenced authors critique views of knowledge that regard its attainment as automatic.

How does Dipert come to such a strange indictment of Kelley’s perspective, certainly belied further by the latter’s later work (which includes a book on logic, with examples and exercises and everything of the non-passive sort)? If I were to speculate I would have to actively use my mind. Dipert’s review is interesting but at times tendentious, and strangely preoccupied with the Randian or Objectivist-movement backdrop, with which he seems at times to conflate the arguments of the book. Kelley cannot even use such a concept as “primacy of existence” without Dipert’s pausing to slam unspecified “rants” (admittedly not by Kelley) that have deployed this phrase. Perhaps Dipert’s approach to Kelley’s book is a little too passive and prejudiced.

Should you be annoyed with me?

I think that sometimes persons are annoyed when I express my annoyance at something, or disagreement with something. They are annoyed by my annoyance, which can only annoy me. I’m not saying that they should not be annoyed at the things which are truly annoying; but when they’re annoyed at me merely for being annoyed at something which is in fact annoying, then they are are not only wrong but annoying. So, first I get annoyed, rationally, at something annoying; then sombeody else’s irrational annoyance at my rational annoyance tumbles onto the scene; then I have to slather on a second layer of rational annoyance to bolster and affirm the first layer; which only irrationally annoys them all the more; which is annoying. You can see how these people go to great lengths to work themselves up into a lather of substanceless annoyance when they never had a sound point to begin with. It would be better if they hid in a closet, albeit one commodious enough not to elicit their contrived complaints.

Ebooks are not overpriced if you are buying them at their price

Animating some of the commenters in this Amazon discussion is a certain medieval “just price” notion according to which certain books, and in particular ebooks as a category, are supposedly “overpriced.” (I assume that this complaint exempts the hundreds of thousands of books we can obtain for 99 cents each or for 0 cents each.)

If Amazon were to charge $1,000 for an ordinary paperback that would typically sell for $7.95, it is unlikely that Amazon could move a single copy. But this $1,000 paperback would not be overpriced with respect to some Platonic abstract principle of The One True Price to which a disgruntled reader might appeal as he flings accusations of “greed and price-fixing.” It is, rather, overpriced with respect to what can be sold and earn a profit in the marketplace.

If I own a rare first-edition copy of a paperback in pristine condition, and I know I can sell it on eBay for $1,000, should I sell it for $7.95 (or perhaps $2.95) for the sake of protecting myself from JoCr’s accusations of “greed and price fixing”? If I seek a profit by participating in the marketplace, my profit-seeking is per se “greedy,” i.e., self-interested. But as philosopher and commentator Tibor Machan has often noted, the buyer is “greedy” too; he wants the most bang for his buck, just as I want the most buck for my bang. The buyer makes the trade because he values what I’m selling more than what he gives me in exchange for that good. If he knows that he can get a better deal in terms of price and convenience, though, he’s apt to take that better deal.

As a seller, I can “set” any price I wish for my wares (at least if Uncle Sam doesn’t intrude with orders to desist from alleged “price fixing”). But I must take into account how market conditions, including the valuations of buyers, determine the range of prices I can charge if I am to both sell my product and earn a profit. To overprice my product means to sell it at a price that too few customers will pay or that none at all will pay. That’s an error, of course; but it’s not in itself reprehensible. Similarly, I would not call a customer maleficently greedy for missing out on a good deal because he erroneously thought a better deal was just down the road.

Get ready for still more tightening of the leash, O holy socialists

Some devout Catholics who have supported Obamafascistcare but who oppose contraception and who especially oppose the use of abortifacients, i.e., the kind of contraception that kills incipient fetuses, are upset by the Obama administration’s recent decision to compel church-run institutions to provide contraceptives free of charge to their charges and employees.

What did religious socialists expect? That only their own judgment and conscience in matters directly and indirectly medical was not to be downtrodden by the rulers and regulators imposing the million and one rules authorized by Obamafascistcare?

If one awards a government dictatorial new powers, as Congress did when it passed Obamafascistcare over the objections of the merely sane and informed, those dictatorial powers will be used to–guess what–dictate. Persons will be given orders about how they must spend their time and money. And if, today, in response to widespread uproar, the Obamafascistcarers deign to compromise or to pretend to compromise on the exact terms of the latest dictat, one must not be surprised if, tomorrow, the Obamafascistcarers coyly roll back the rollback, i.e., JustMoveOn now that everybody has had a chance to become accustomed to their new roles as meekly subservient thralls to Obamafascistcaring.

The most fundamental objection to government’s compelling anybody to provide anybody In Need with anything other than redress of a demonstrated violation of the recipient’s actual rights is that such compulsion is itself a violation of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the person being thus unjustifiably compelled. Yes, if you are religious and are opposed to the use of contraception, you will object to being compelled to provide your employees or students with free contraceptives on the grounds that being forced to aid and abet the use of contraception is against your religious precepts and conscience. But there are a great many things that individuals will be forced to do under Obamafascistcare which they would not have done were they not being compelled and to which they might object; and these objections will be informed by many different personal concerns.

The objection to Obamafascistcare that everybody should share is that being compelled by government to live one’s life in a way other than that which is in accordance with one’s own judgment and values is an immoral violation of the rights of the individual. To flourish as human beings in society, we must all seek to disseminate our values by persuasion and voluntary cooperation, not by force. We need to leave other people alone and we need other people to leave us alone; we should not, directly or by proxy, be ordering each other around at the point of a gun.

Are we determined to believe that we’re undetermined because of chronic subatomic conspiracies?

Over at Amazon.com, commenting on a review of E. O. Wilson’s Consilience, an R. Schauer writes, in part: “Through reductionism and accurate brain scans, we have discovered what areas of the brain fire when reading a poem and we know the chemical processes that occur. That’s how reductionism helps us to understand a poem. How did you miss that?” Does not the reviewer understand that if different neurons had fired, a different metaphor altogether would have been chosen in a poem? How can the reviewer be so wrong here? What on earth was going on with his neurons, anyway? Were the synaptic clefts sleeping on the job when he wrote his review?

Okay, R. Schauer. Proceed. Explain, preferably with unassailable exactitude, how a particular sonnet by Shakespeare must have the content it has because of which neurons were firing in the Bard’s brain at the time he crafted it. Explain, too, how it must be impossible for the neurons and the self-regulatory capacity we call volition to interact in other than one-way fashion.

Explain, too, how the introspective awareness we have of freely regulating the focus of our consciousness must be an illusion because of how neurons in our brains conspiratorially crackle and pop to deceive us each and every time we experience ourselves as choosing to concentrate on this rather than that, and as choosing to concentrate at such-and-such level of intensity rather than such-other level of intensity; and as having been able to choose other than we did.

The problem with the thesis of reductionism, the notion that all phenomena at every level can be explained exhaustively in terms only of what is happening at the smallest-constituent-part level—presumably, the banging and jostling of subatomic particles—is that it is an article of faith. If we nonetheless directly observe that certain emergent and causally relevant properties exist only at higher levels of organization in an organism, reductionism must willfully refuse to admit this. A reductionist must close his eyes when any aspects of these emergent features–such as a human’s ability to self-regulate his own consciousness, what we call volition–clearly cannot be reduced to the physical laws of ultimate particles obtaining at subatomic levels. Far from magnifying our understanding of events, an attempt to explain, e.g., the rise or fall of the Roman Empire in terms wholly of subatomic jostling would kill all explanation of the history.

Like other articles of faith, reductionism a) can’t be proven and b) rejects the clear import of evidence that contradicts its fantastical assumptions. Of course, some aspects of wholes can indeed be explained in terms of the properties of the most fundamental constituents. Just not all of them. Science is about investigating the way the world is, not the way it is “supposed to be” in light of a philosophical assumption itself unsubstantiated.