Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
The real humanists...

Victor Davis Hanson:

If someone wonders about the enormous task at hand in democratizing the Middle East, he could do no worse than ponder the last days of Yasser Arafat: the tawdry fight over his stolen millions; the charade of the First Lady of Palestine barking from a Paris salon; the unwillingness to disclose what really killed the "Tiger" of Ramallah; the gauche snub of obsequious Europeans hovering in the skies over Cairo, preening to pay homage to the late prince of peace; and, of course, the usual street theater of machine guns spraying the air and thousands of males crushing each other to touch the bier of the man who robbed them blind. Try bringing a constitution and open and fair elections to a mess like that.

But that is precisely what the United States was trying to do by removing the Taliban, putting Saddam Hussein on trial, and marginalizing Arafat. Such idealism has been caricatured with every type of slur -- from both the radical Left and the paleo-Right, ranging from alleged Likud conspiracies and neo-con pipe dreams to secret pipeline deals and plans for a new American imperium in the Middle East shepherded in by the Bush dynasts. In fact, the effort not just to strike back after September 11, but to alter the very landscape in which our enemies operated was the only choice we had if we wished to end the cruise-missile/bomb-'em-for-a-day cycle of the past 20 years, the ultimate logic of which had led to the crater at the World Trade Center.

Oddly, our enemies understand the long-term strategic efforts of the United States far better than do our own dissidents. They know that oil is not under U.S. control but priced at all-time highs, and that America is not propping up despotism anymore, but is now the general foe of both theocracies and dictatorships -- and the thorn in the side of "moderate" autocracies. An America that is a force for democratic change is a very dangerous foe indeed. Most despots long for the old days of Jimmy Carter's pious homilies, appeasement of awful dictatorships gussied up as "concern" for "human rights," and the lure of a Noble Prize to ensure nights in the Lincoln bedroom or hours waiting on a dictator's tarmac.

In the struggle in Fallujah hinges not just the fate of the Sunni Triangle, or even Iraq, but rather of the entire Middle East -- and it will be decided on the bravery and skill of mostly 20-something American soldiers. If they are successful in crushing and humiliating the fascists there and extending the victory to other spots then the radical Islamists and their fascistic sponsors will erode away. But if they fail or are called off, then we will see Days of Sorrow that make September 11 look like child's play.

We are living in historic times, as all the landmarks of the past half-century are in the midst of passing away. The old left-wing critique is in shambles -- as the United States is proving to be the most radical engine for world democratic change and liberalization of the age. A reactionary Old Europe, in concert with the ossified American leftist elite, unleashed everything within its ample cultural arsenal: novels, plays, and op-ed columns calling for the assassination of President Bush; propaganda documentaries reminiscent of the oeuvre of Pravda or Leni Riefenstahl; and transparent bias passed off as front-page news and lead-ins on the evening network news.

Germany and France threw away their historic special relationships with America, while billions in Eastern Europe, India, Russia, China, and Japan either approved of our efforts or at least kept silent. Who would have believed 60 years ago that the great critics of democracy in the Middle East would now be American novelists and European utopians, while Indians, Poles, and Japanese were supporting those who just wanted the chance to vote? Who would have thought that a young Marine from the suburbs of Topeka battling the Dark Ages in Fallujah -- the real humanist -- was doing more to aid the planet than all the billions of the U.N.?

Those on the left who are ignorant of history lectured the Bush administration that democracy has never come as a result of the threat of conflict or outright war -- apparently the creation of a democratic United States, Germany, Japan, Italy, Israel, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, and Afghanistan was proof of the power of mere talk. In contrast, the old realist Right warned that strongmen are our best bet to ensure stability -- as if Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been loyal allies with content and stable pro-American citizenries. In truth, George Bush's radical efforts to cleanse the world of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, bring democracy to the heart of the Arab world, and isolate Yasser Arafat were the most risky and humane developments in the Middle East in a century -- old-fashioned idealism backed with force in a postmodern age of abject cynicism and nihilism.

Quite literally, we are living in the strangest, most perilous, and unbelievable decade in modern memory.

posted by Greg Swann at 10:17 AM

 
The unprecedented restraint of Cincinnatus' America...

My friend Mike Arst, a finely-honed mind in desperate need of even a crudely-hewn weblog, sends along this wonderful book review:

Whether or not this will work, and whether or not charity ever works, it remains that the motives of President Bush and the United States are very different from those of historic empires. To equate them is false, and thus the conclusions to be drawn from equating them will prove to be incorrect.

The above, on the weblog, caught my eye and right away I thought of some passages in a book I've been reading, Charles Pellegrino's Ghosts of Vesuvius. Pellegrino is a multi-disciplinary sort who has studied in the ruins of Pompeii, at the depths of the ocean (including at the wreck of the Titanic), and in the dust at Ground Zero. I haven't figured out what his actual job title is. Lacking a better description, I've settled on "forensic paleo-archaeo-anthropologist." His specialty appears to be the effects -- immediate and long-term -- of huge blasts or other disasters. He is also quite the historian (or else has a crackerjack staff of researchers combing the libraries for him).

This book, occasionally (alas) soporific but mostly mesmerizing, concerns in large part what scientists studying Pompeii and Herculaneum have been learning about how people lived, exactly how they died, and what they wrote. Quite a bit is preserved underneath yards of ash and mud: charred -- but recognizeable -- food in rooms not vaporized by the capricious pyroclastic clouds; scrolls that can be read because, says Pellegrino, scientists can now distinguish carbonized paper from carbonized ink; DNA that allows researchers to find out if skeleton "A" is related to skeleton "B".

The book also contains fascinating information about technological developments in the ancient world. The Minoan civilization was wiped away a long time ago by the Thera volcanic explosion, which in vaporizing an estimated 40 cubic miles of rock -- Pellegrino's estimate* -- was 24,000 times more powerful than the "big" Mt. St. Helens eruption. The Minoans, whose name for themselves is lost, had developed some remarkable devices, including what is verifiably an analogue computer, found well preserved in a shipwreck. There's a lot under the ground at Pompeii and Herculaneum, too -- downright modern niceties whose existence, so long ago, nobody would have imagined until the excavations began in recent centuries. And the excavations are far from complete.

This Pellegrino would make one mighty fascinating dinner guest.

He is intrigued by -- among a thousand other things -- how hugely destructive events such as volcanic explosions have retarded the advance of civilization. Now to what caught my attention after seeing the weblog entry: Pellegrino devotes quite a bit of space to discussing how Rome -- which was developing plenty of interesting technologies of its own -- had its weird oscillations between barbarism and civility, depending on who was running the show. Vulcanism alone didn't retard the advance of civilization in the West; humans played a plenty big role in their own retardation.

In discussing Roman civility, he touches on how that society's ideas and architecture have come down to us (a walk through certain parts of NYC and Washington, D.C., he says, is in effect a walk through Rome). What of the most advanced Roman concepts of law and government? He devotes a bit of space to Cincinnatus. And this is the passage I thought about when I read the weblog entry:

"Two centuries [after George Washington's refusal to accept the role of king], America still struggles with its growing pains, but the Republic does not hide its pains by imprisoning or executing its Ciceros. Instead, its pains and its scandals, no matter how embarrassing, are displayed on the front page for all to see. And the concept of power with restraint still lives. Say what you want about the American experiment (you're free to do so); the single event that speaks loudest for what Cincinnatus started, and for what Washington revived, came at the dawn of humanity's nuclear adolescence.

"Once upon a time, only one nation on Earth possessed the atomic bomb -- the ultimate, unstoppable weapon. Four months after the nation of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln ended a terrible war at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America had assembled five new Hiroshima-class fission bombs, and Dr. Edward Teller (aka "Dr. Strangelove") was already pointing the way toward a Vesuvius-class explosive. That quickly, America was absolutely invincible and absolutely powerful.

"The most probable next step for any other nation on Earth, or at this same technological crossroad anywhere else in the cosmos, would be the immediate subjugation of every other nation.

"Instead, America chose the most improbable of all possible roads. Rather than seizing Tokyo, Berlin, and Rome, then moving onward to the takeover of Russia, China, Australia, and so on, until Earth was united by unbeatable power into a universal empire, the Americans behaved in a way contrary to the actions of every victorious nation that had gone before them. They rebuilt Japan, Germany, and Italy, and then turned them over to their own self-government. They thereafter refused to be led by the temptations of nuclear conquest and global empire building.

"'Absolute power corrupts absolutely,' or so the philosophers say. Usually this is true. But in post-World War II America, something unusual occurred. For nearly half a decade after Hiroshima, no one else on Earth held sway over the thermonuclear inverse to the Golden Rule--and the one nation that did hold sway over such energies could easily have seen to it that no neutron-articulate competitors arose and survived the challenge for very long. Something unusual occurred, something extraordinary.

"Moving against human nature, guided by civilization and not by instinct (as if to prove that what is natural is not always good), the Americans approached nuclear adolescence with a single governing principle, articulated by Cincinnatus, resurrected by Washington, and adopted as the unbreakable habit of power with restraint. This is a habit so contrary to nature that, at a guess, it is likely to have occurred only once among all the civilizations that ever have, or ever will, exist on our little island of 600 billion stars.

"(Power with restraint . . .)

"Humanity's greatest evolutionary change was not the one that occurred in its genes, but in its way of thinking."

# # #

Another fascinating little tidbit in this book: the discovery of the Pompeii and Herculaneum sites triggered a widespread fascination with Rome and things Roman, including the decoration and artwork preserved in the ash. (Some of the statuary style ended up in the Titanic, among other places. Thomas Jefferson, says Pellegrino, designed silverware based on objects he'd seen that had been taken from the ruins. On and on it went.)

A certain Josiah Wedgewood made a fortune selling china containing some of that same decoration. And:

"...the Wedgewood fortune did, a century later, permit a young explorer who married Josiah's granddaughter to live by the orthodox Epicurean ideal of cloistered, nonstop study and contemplation. As way leads into way, and as history fashions (from infinitely interacting events) unpredicted and unpredictable points of pivot, the many great works of art plundered by Piso and Philodemus, then copied by Wedgewood, afforded Charles Darwin the rare nineteenth-century luxury of being able to devote a life to pure thought. Independently, he reinvented Lucretius' theory of evolution, then refined it more fully into biology's version of e=mc2."

# # #

Hmm.


Christians probably won't like the book. It isn't kind at all to the early Church, and it has the Bible -- and Christianity itself -- appearing not as the revealed word of God but as a patchwork quilt of Jewish, Christian, and pagan traditions and writings. That part of the book kinda puts me to sleep even if I should be wide awake while reading it. Not that the subjects aren't interesting, but he covers way too much of 'em. Likewise the sections on the Gnostics and their destruction by the early Church. Those are also interesting subjects, but they've been handled in a much more interesting way by Elaine Pagels.

This got me sitting bolt upright: a passage in Ghosts of Vesuvius about apocalyptic visions and terrorism that could have been written with Pellegrino collaborating directly with Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism. Or perhaps Berman had already read some of Pellegrino's work. Or perhaps it's simply that great minds think alike (likely). Pellegrino lost family in the 9/11 attacks, so the question of what drives terrorists to commit mass murder is not far from his mind. (On 9/11, he says, there was a human-generated cataclysm similar in its destructiveness to a small pyroclastic "surge cloud" -- and so for him there is a strong connection between the capricious destructiveness of down-blasting pyroclastic clouds originating way down under, and the destructiveness of the down-blasting cloud generated entirely from above on 9/11. The former have sometimes wiped out entire civilizations. The intent of the latter was to accomplish that very thing.)

I'm sure-as-shootin' recommending this book, with vigor.

Now that's a truly wonderful overview of a fascinating book, but Mike goes on to add this much more as footnote:

*I think I should add the phrase "Pellegrino's estimate" for now because I haven't yet seen notes saying how what he reports is documented. The book isn't heavily footnoted but there might be a large section of notes that I haven't yet seen -- I'm far from done with it. If you read the book, you'll see right away why documentation would come to mind. He covers the excavations; space/time physics and the origins and possible future death of the cosmos; Roman and other civilizations; the origins of the Bible; how passages in the Bible might have been written as a direct result of observations of ancient vulcanism; the Egyptians and their cultures; the conflicts between the Gnostics and the early church; lots of information about volcanoes and other disasters; information about possible Roman sailings to the New World, even (shipwrecks found near Brazil and Venezuela -- the former buried [literally], he says, by bigots who refused to allow Columbus to be one-upped by ancient Romans). On and on it goes!

The threads he uses to connect many events and ideas through history are astonishing. There's so much remarkable stuff in this book that I keep wondering: can it possibly all be true or be reported accurately? How do they learn all of these things? Does he fill in blanks a lot, or is what he's writing based on solid, hard science? Well clearly not all of it can be -- he makes a lot of inferences about people whose bodies and writings are preserved in the ash. But the inferences are oh, so compelling!

Not that I think it's all simply made-up: the forensics guys have made huge strides in recent years. A blood-spatter expert can tell you if someone was standing, lying down, kneeling, running (and so forth) when they died. How do they know? Beats me. Is expertise demonstrable, or is it simply a kind of low-grade royalty, a pedigree passed down from one (previously-pedigreed) "expert" to another? Is it a much-watered-down modern twist on the divine right of [philosopher-]kings? (How, for instance, are "diversity consultants" or "experts on multiculturalism" certified as "experts"? Of course that isn't like expertise in the hard sciences -- but is it, sometimes? I'm wandering off the track...)

What else fascinates me on reading this book is to realize -- not that it shouldn't have been obvious, but there's little in an average Joe's daily life to remind him of it -- that the human brain is now much as it was in those times. We tend to think of the folks of the past as if they weren't far from living in caves, as if they were simply primitive and once in a while "somehow" brought water into the house through a pipe rather than bucketing it out of a river. But clearly they -- especially the Greeks and Romans -- expressed sophisticated and often very eloquent, poetic, and moving thoughts: the life of the mind, as you call it. And -- no less -- the life of the heart. There's something in the Pellegrino book about a certain rigidity in Latin -- including a smaller vocab than we have now -- but that's a mystery to me as I don't speak Latin. Rigid or otherwise, the Latin speakers were eloquent and their eloquence comes through (see the excerpts from Pliny the Younger's letters about what he observed -- up close but not fatally close -- about the Vesuvius eruption and about the fate of his uncle, The Elder, suffocated by the ash clouds or toxic gas). Perhaps some of Pellegrino's regrets include being sad that so much eloquence was lost, whether because of natural disasters or pure stupidity. It got very dark in Europe for a long time...if the current wave of fascists were to have their way, it would go dark again. I wonder if Pellegrino is leading up to that. Don't know yet.

What a strange thing that such "loftiness" existed in the midst of slavery and brutality. The life of the heart in a heartless world and (Pellegrino's take) in the midst of an utterly uncaring universe. (See the part about a 9/11 disaster-recovery worker bringing a child's doll back to Pompeii.) But t'was always thus. One odd paradox after another.

posted by Greg Swann at 3:37 PM

 
Atlas in the net.world...

Billy Beck recounts his own experiences of being bounced from disreputable debating joints. Billy and I both cut our teeth in Usenet (and stranger fora in the by-now-enmuseumated past), an internet young and idealistic and almost entirely unfiltered. Usenet is obsessively ownerless, but the comment areas of weblogs are not. There is no justice in wailing about "censorship!" when you get thrown out of what is, in its essence, someone's private property--no different, really, from a salon in a living room. But it were the better part of dignity, it seems to me, to limit this sort of thing to reasonable causes--vitriolic abuse, constructive libel, etc.

Oh, well. Each man to his own saints. But there are two points nearby that are worth a thought:

First, the internet is self-correcting. An honest error about a matter of consequence will be ephemeral--it will last less than a day. Just ask Dan Rather. Dishonest error can endure, but only by willfully ignoring the eager and voluntary correction of the netizens. Just ask Dan Rather.

And second, it's sad that Ayn Rand did not have something like the internet as a debating tool. Whatever the faults of her rhetorical method, there are irreplaceable virtues in the underlying content of her rhetoric and it's a shame that she didn't learn to do a better job of defending them--or jettisoning those that proved to be in honest error. It's possible that she surrounded herself with second-rate sycophants because she herself could not bear up to the challenges of true debate. Lacking evidence one way or the other, I choose not to believe that. The woman--That Woman, as Billy calls her--was a fire-breather, and who knows what even-more-wonderful work might have emerged had she actually met a challenge in the last third of her life.
posted by Greg Swann at 9:49 AM

 
To the showers...

Well, I managed to get myself banned from the comment thread from Diana Hsieh's weblog that I've been quoting from. O, the shame! I had expected to get bounced in due course, and I ended up lasting a day longer than I thought I would. Intellectual tolerance abounds!

What were my crimes? Well, for one thing, I stand accused of not being serious. I write with a certain style, but my major arguments are quoted below--here and here--so you can decide for yourself if they are serious enough to appear in a forum where the presidential candidates were referred to as "the Giant Douche and the Turd Sandwich."

What's worse, I evidently insulted someone, I have no idea who. I am actually pretty good at insults when I want to be, but usually I have a clue as to the what and the whom. In truth, I expect that the never explicated complaint is that I had insulted Ayn Rand by saying that some (really much) of her non-fiction is poorly argued. I cannot but presume that it would somehow not be an insult to Ayn Rand to praise work that I think is atrocious, but that would depend from the logic of an upside-down planet. I don't live there, and I would be horrified to think that Ayn Rand herself did.

But the world of Official Objectivism, of which Diana's place is now an outpost, is nothing but an upside-down planet. To live there, to be suffered to remain, you have to swallow every bit of the dogma, whole, without persistent, bothersome questions. New converts are granted a good-natured sufferance--for a while. And apostates are always welcomed back, if they are sufficiently contrite. But when even a minor piece of the doctrine is challenged--as is done in the matter quoted below--in such a way that to continue to affect to accept it is folly but to reject it is heresy--then do the long knives come out.

This is religion, of course, differing only in inessential details from all those various sects of Christianity, each one policing for doctrinal purity, shunning the heretics and bringing in the sheaves of new converts and sorrowful returnees.

Now that by itself is funny enough, in a sad sort of way, but the thread in which I was unserious and insulting, the thread in which I was insufficiently reverent to the Church of Ayn, began with a series of slams against other people's religions.

And that's all one, in the end. It is conceivable to me that Official Objectivism, ultimately a pantomime of philosophy, is diverting the energies of some young minds who might otherwise have amounted to something. More likely, it's just an alternative lodge for congenital Rotarians. Either way, they're volunteers; it's their business.

It would have been nice, inasmuch as I was being a very nice boy, if someone would have stood up to say, "Even though this guy really makes you pay to talk to him, still he said some things I'd never thought about before." Alas, it's really not about thinking, it's about memorizing and regurgitating. More than anything, it's about a coded language of group-cohesion, just as you'll find in every other church.

Like this:

Please do not assume that leaving some things implicit, particularly in a public forum, is indicative of skepticism (in the philosophical sense) or even of uncertainty. In particular, lack of deference to infants, in a culture in which the local deity is often depicted as an infant, could be fatal to one's career or even one's life. I for one, if I held a view that the general public condemns to great opprobrium, would not even think of posting that view in a public forum, unless I were already a tenured professor at a private, secular university. Of course there are people on the other side of this debate who exploit the reasonable man's reticence. Atheist-baiting is quite a sport in some parts of the web, and we have seen examples of it here too.

One of the things I talked to them about, like a missionary to the heathens, is careful and thoughtful reading. So let's take this sentence by sentence.

> Please do not assume that leaving some things implicit, particularly in a public forum, is indicative of skepticism (in the philosophical sense) or even of uncertainty.

I think that says, "It's okay to conceal your true position in a philosophical debate." Possibly "implicit" means "in code words."

> In particular, lack of deference to infants, in a culture in which the local deity is often depicted as an infant, could be fatal to one's career or even one's life.

Remember that the supposed topic of debate is whether or not one should harvest organs from unborn babies. In the matter quoted below I established to no dispute that the standard of being born is arbitrary, that if you can do it to non-conceptualizing abortuses, you can do it to non-conceptualizing infants--or to vegetables for that matter. Since the word "infant" is used twice, I'm reading this to means that born babies really are to be regarded as fair game for organ farmers. That could be an error, though; the whole passage is oblique. "[F]atal to one's career or even one's life" is hyperbole, of course.

> Of course there are people on the other side of this debate who exploit the reasonable man's reticence. Atheist-baiting is quite a sport in some parts of the web, and we have seen examples of it here too.

I think this means me. Even though I am an atheist, I am an atheist-baiter for expecting them to stand on one side or the other of an idiotic line they thought they could get away with calling "objective."

To summarize: It's okay to lie in public. It's okay to kill babies, provided you don't talk about it in public. And if all else fails, shoot the messenger.

Okay...

This is nothing. It's standard operating procedure, and it doesn't mean anything at all. But the issue itself is important. Official Objectivism draws its line where it does not because this is "objective"--reflecting an actual measurable distinction among the objects considered--but because infanticide is taboo. Ayn Rand wanted a way to morally license abortion for contraception, but she understood that this is a Djinn difficult to keep in the bottle--as this proposal to harvest organs from clones makes plain. So she drew an arbitrary line at birth, even though a baby has no more conceptual ability the day after birth than he had the day before birth.

We have a much better way of determining who is and is not human; it's discussed below. But this does nothing to tell us which genetic homo sapiens we should or should not kill. And taking account of defective children and adults, vegetables and condemned criminals, there are a whole lot of organs up for grabs...
posted by Greg Swann at 11:52 PM

 
Shedding the grace of liberty...

Richard Nikoley at Uncommon Sense:

I'm an anarchist, atheist, secularist holder of moral principles based not upon the nature of God, but upon the nature of the ideal man. Accordingly, nobody appreciates the danger of political power blended with religious ideology more than I.

Yet, it seems wholly ridiculous to me that we fail to make a critical distinction between an imperfect empire based on American civilization and any other empire that has ever existed previously, in history. We rail against a president who has the audacity to pray (gasp!), yet we can't grasp the distinction between that sort of faith and the sort that worships death on earthÑto themselves in martyrdom and to all who don't share it.

Aren't we smart?

I dispute the claim in the article Richard is discussing that the War on Terror makes the United States an empire, but I agree with Richard's critical distinction. Unlike imperialism from greed or envy or vengeance or pacification (all motives that could be ascribed to Rome at various times), the Bush Doctrine of the War on Terror amounts to Christian Charity: The man seeks to shed the grace of liberty, or at least democracy, in the train of our troops. This is only partly motivated by the national security interests of the U.S. Bush argues that democracy among the Islamic states will reduce if not eliminate the threat of terrorism. But what may in fact be the larger part of his vision is a simple "faith" in democracy as an elemental good--as a gift that America ought to confer upon those to whom it has been so brutally denied.

Whether or not this will work, and whether or not charity ever works, it remains that the motives of President Bush and the United States are very different from those of historic empires. To equate them is false, and thus the conclusions to be drawn from equating them will prove to be incorrect.
posted by Greg Swann at 2:16 PM

 
It's okay to kill the baby, but not to injure it...

This is more from Diana Hsieh's weblog on human rights and abortion. The paragraphs beginning with a ">" are quotations from a message by Adam Reed.

Reed: > you need to refrain from invective and baiting

I have not done so. To the contrary, I have labored to show respect for what I consider to be a particularly ghoulish application of the abortion argument. If you have a specific citation of invective or baiting, I'll have a better idea of what you are objecting to, in any case.

> I think that until one has a way to apply a higher standard - such as a standard of volitional conceptualization - objectively,

I did this in my last post, a fail-safe bright-line objective distinction between genetic homo sapiens who have the capacity to reason and choose and those who don't.

> given that conceptual consciousness develops gradually

This is hand-waving. Volitional conceptualization is a quantum leap, much more like learning to drive than learning a musical instrument. One moment you are learning to drive, and the next you are simply driving, with no awareness of the change in state, but with that change being utter and complete. Introspectively, the birth of self-conscious memory is a snapshot, frozen forever in the mind. Everything before it is of the mists.

> the moment of birth provides an objective, boundary setting condition of the kind required for objective law

No, it doesn't, for all the reasons I've named: Born babies may not develop volitional conceptuality, even in normal babies the process can be interrupted by injury, babies can exit the womb by means other than birth, someday soon babies may never even enter the womb, formerly normal human beings can lose the faculty of volitional conceptuality, etc. IF the bright-line standard of "rights" is the power to reason and choose, then the only rational objective standard of who possesses these "rights" is someone who can demonstrate that he can reason and choose. To rely on any other determining factor undermines the supposed standard and its asserted rationale.

> Some scope for independent action - like finding a nipple to suck on it - is necessary

In what way does this distinguish a normal genetic homo sapiens from a defective one? Or from any other organism, for that matter? This again is a difference without a distinction. At some point all organisms become autonomous value seekers. Only genetically normal homo sapiens who have (head-injury-free) human upbringing will become human beings. If you wish to argue that becoming an autonomous value seeker is a necessary pre-condition of becoming a human being, I will agree. If your claim is that it is a sufficient pre-condition, I can provide you with trillions of counter-examples.

> Even if a child's acquisition of independent rights of her own were delayed to some point beyond birth, any harm to the developing fetus or baby that deprives its creator(s) of any part of the value for which they created it, would still be a major crime against them.

What does this mean? I have not argued for injuring anyone. I have not made any affirmative argument at all. To the extent that this says anything pertinent to the debate, it would apply equally well to a pet. My Bloodhound has no "rights" in Rand's formulation, but if you hurt him, I will have been injured. This doesn't speak to the birth of genetic homo sapiens as the moment of acquisition of Randian "rights".

Moreover, if mom has the "right" to terminate her child the day before his birth, why does she lack that "right" the day after? What essential difference is there in that child that would result in this radical change in her "rights"? If you hurt her child, that's a crime against her. If she hurts the child, who is the complaining party?

(Interestingly, the state of Nevada is just now crafting legislation to increase the penalties for mothers who injure their unborn offspring. It's okay to kill the baby, but not to injure it.)

> From the moment of birth, the newborn has the capacity to bond with adopted as an alternative to natural parents. This fact could well have moral and even legal implications - although I have not worked out any details.

Again, I don't see what this has to do with anything. I will say that the Roman idea of exposure, minus the slavery component, is preferable to me to abortion.

I think this boils down to sentiment. Infanticide is repellent, possibly because it is publicly known and unavoidably obvious to the killer. Abortion--or the advocacy of clone-mining that got me into this discussion--is less repellent to some, for reasons that are unclear to me--perhaps because, under the cover of pseudo-scientific language, we can make verbal distinctions among genetically equal entities that are not borne out in objectively measurable differences. In any case, opposing the one and upholding the other has nothing whatever to do with the capacity to reason and choose, which is absent both from infants and from prospective abortuses. Since the obvious bright-line standard to use, in choosing which genetic homo sapiens to kill, is zero--to kill a genetic homo sapiens, whether or not he has achieved or sustains the power to reason and choose, only in self-defense from mortal injury--I'm inclined to think the real topic of debate is abortion, not Rand's atrociously-argued argument for "rights".

posted by Greg Swann at 9:04 AM

 
"That's not fair!"

At Diana Hsieh's weblog, a commenter raised the idea that President's Bush's opposition to cloning is evidence of "theocracy." This seems hyperbolic to me, but I really don't care. The important part of the argument was the claim that, absent this oppostion, clones could be grown to produce organs to be transplanted into other embryonic homo sapiens. Lately at Setting the World to Rights a poster claimed that the argument against abortion is wholly religious. In both cases, the implication is that there is no secular argument against killing certain genetic homo sapiens. This is something I'd like to explore at some point, first because I think the affirmative position is undefended, and second because I think the negative case is essentially unexplored.

In the mean time, here are three of the posts I made at Diana's place, undermining a common dodge about when the attested right to kill genetic homo sapiens allegedly ends. ("Vos", referred to repatedly, is Ayn Rand's book "The Virtue of Selfishness.")

First this:

Reed: "So the moral question is now a question of objective fact: when does one become a rational agent capable of cooperation and trade? It is certainly not possible before birth. And as a parent, I know that I began to exchange important emotional values with my daughter when she was born. Therefore it is a fact of reality that a human becomes a rights-bearer at birth."

This is specious. All of VoS is atrociously argued, but that's not an excuse. If the bright line standard of political rights is "a rights-bearing moral agent", then any particular rights-bearing homo sapiens must have achieved the state of conceptual fluency--age four or so. Before then, or in the absence of that state, genetic homo sapiens are not free moral agents, acting by choice upon rationally informed discretion. The free-flow of values you describe applies much better to puppies than to infants, but dogs to not bear political rights in Rand's formulation, nor would defectives or vegetables if "moral agent" is the standard to be used.

So, either the number of genetic homo sapiens you can "rightfully" kill is much larger than your claim, or you need to rethink your standard of "justifiable" homocide. As it works out, the age at which both children and puppies can act upon the emotional if not the intellectual content of Galt's creed--"...I will never live for the sake of another man..."--is amazingly young--long before birth.

Inlookers: Please note that I have not made any affirmative argument.

Then more fully this:

Your use of birth as the point at which you will stop plotting to kill genetic homo sapiens is arbitrary. When you interact with an infant, you do not know for sure that you are promoting the development of the conceptual faculty. At best you are hoping to do so. In real life, you are simply playing with the baby. Playing assiduously with the baby is a necessary but not sufficient cause of humanity. Necessary because human beings are artifacts of human upbringing. But not sufficient, because no amount of human upbringing will induce humanity in a genetic homo sapiens too defective to develop volitional conceptuality. An extremely defective homo sapiens is essentially the same thing at age six months, at birth, and age minus six months: Not human. A genetically normal homo sapiens is essentially the same thing at age six months, at birth, and age minus six months: Not human. You have made a vast point of abstracting a difference without a distinction. The fact of being extra-uterine says nothing about the potential for volitional conceptuality in any particular genetic homo sapiens.

Someone cites intra-uterine perception, and this is reasonable. For example, newborns like their fathers because deeper voices mimic the acoustic environment of the womb. To insist that the development of volitional conceptuality in a genetically normal homo sapiens is exclusively extra-uterine is false to fact. Someone else has established to my complete satisfaction that a mother can have to power to evict from the womb, but not to kill. You have not in any way established that anyone other than the mother even has the power to evict, much less to kill in order to expropriate organs.

The Randian argument of rights is atrocious--rights are what I need to achieve this attestedly useful end consequence, all asserted in mid-air--but nothing you have said about the properties of (at least so-far) non-conceptualizing genetic homo sapiens has anything to do with the atrocious Randian argument of rights in any case. You haven't offered any reason why you should be able to harvest organs from pre-natal genetic homo sapiens but not from non-conceptualizing post-natal genetic homo sapiens.

To the contrary, there is nothing in your basic position that would forbid you from harvesting organs from any genetic homo sapiens incapable of discovering what you are doing, inside or outside the womb. Under the circumstances, the standard of volitional conceptuality--the capacity to discover and comprehend your harvesting--itself seems arbitrary. At a minimum, you are asking another genetic homo sapiens, if not necessarily another man, to live--to die--for your sake. In what moral code would that be justified?

Then most fully this:

It would seem that Adam Reed is not going to respond to my most recent remarks in this thread. That's understandable--vita brevis, after all--but unfortunate. As discussed, the standard of being outside the womb, by which we establish whether or not we can kill a particular baby, seems to me to be arbitrary. Qua identity, the entity considered is not measurably different inside or outside the womb. Its residence has changed, as has its plumbing arrangements, but its cognitive capabilities with respect to volition and conceptualization are unchanged.

Moreover, in the service of Reed's objective of harvesting organs from clones of an extant specimen, in order to effect pre-natal repairs of that original specimen, it would seem more convenient to work on those clones outside the womb. The clones would thus acquire "rights" by the extra-uterine standard while the original specimen would still lack them. Killing the former in behalf of the latter would invert the arbitrary hierarchy of justice, if justice it be.

Moreover still, while there is a normal gestation period for genetic homo sapiens, there is a high degree of variation in this span of time. The age at which a normal genetic homo sapiens can survive outside the womb grows younger with every advance in medical technology. If a genetic homo sapiens could survive outside the womb, but is still inside it, is it fair game? If a genetic homo sapiens insists on trying to be born just as we're getting to the organ-harvesting, is it okay to prevent birth in order to kill it? (This sequence of events is attested to be the case with some so-called partial-birth abortions.)

Even more moreover, it seems likely that, sometime soon, in vitro fertilization will not require a "natural" womb; perfectly normal genetic homo sapiens will undergo "artificial" gestation. At what point will a genetic homo sapiens that will never be enwombed acquire its arbitrarily assigned extra-uterine "rights"?

But wait. There's more. The standard of rights argued in the atrociously argued Virtue of Selfishness would seem to require that a rights-owner would necessarily have to be a rights-respecter, at least in principle. It is not possible for infants (post- or pre-natal), for defectives, for vegetables--nor for animals, come to that--to be rights-owners in the Randian sense, since all of these creatures lack the existential capacity to be rights-respecters. In order to be capable of respecting Rand's idea of rights, one must first be capable of abstracting ideas in se. One must have the power of volitional conceptualization. Lacking this, a genetic homo sapiens is in essence an animal, since the essential characteristic of a human being is volitional conceptualization. Inasmuch as not all extra-uterine genetic homo sapiens are capable of volitional conceptualization, it follows that Reed's standard, even if he would insist that it is not arbitrary, is nevertheless not a valid objective standard for determining either who is possessed of rights in a Randian formulation, or, more importantly, which genetic homo sapiens ought to killed in pursuit of the utilitarian ends of other genetic homo sapiens.

I may have something to say on the latter question on my own weblog. For the former, I can provide a simple and fault-free bright-line standard for determining who does and who does not possess rights in the way that Rand argues (atrociously) for them:

A genetic homo sapiens demonstrates a clear understanding of the concept of justice, and therefore demonstrates that he has acquired the power of volitional conceptualization, when he says in no uncertain terms, "That's not fair!" Genetic homo sapiens who are not capable of issuing that protest are not human, and are not, properly speaking, rights-owners in Rand's atrociously-argued formulation. Whether or not this makes them the rightful prey of organ-snatchers or other would-be killers, it is clear that the objective standard of rights-ownership, per Rand--the standard that is based not in arbitrary words or warming sentiments but in the real, demonstrable, measurable and undeniable properties of the real entity considered--is volitional conceptualization.

For what it's worth, I don't think this has anything at all to do with the underlying issue, which is moral and not political, but I do think Objectivism would be a good deal more convincing if it based its arguments in objects and not unconnected, undefended sentiments. I understand that the bad example was set from the top, but today is a good day to start correcting the error.

When I have time, I should like to explore what I think are good reasons for not killing genetic homo sapiens, even those who are not capable of shouting, "That's not fair!"
posted by Greg Swann at 6:32 PM

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