"...whatever people wish to be true, is true, whatever people wish to exist, does exist - provided a consensus says so."

 

"[O]ur mixed economy is the literal, faithfully carried-out product of Pragmatism - and of the generation[s] brought up under its influence. Pragmatism is the philosophy which holds that there is no objective reality or permanent truth, that there are no absolute principles, no valid abstractions, no firm concepts, that anything may be tried by rule-of-thumb, that objectivity consists of collective subjectivism, that whatever people wish to be true, is true, whatever people wish to exist, does exist - provided a consensus says so.
    "If you want to avert the final disaster, it is this type of thinking - every one of those propositions and all of them - that you must face, grasp, and reject. Then you will have grasped the connection of philosophy to politics and to the daily events of your life. Then you will have learned that no society is better than its philosophical foundation."

~ Ayn Rand, from her article/talk 'The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus' [collected in her book of essays Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal]

"Neither evidence nor logic penetrates the fog in which they have been reared. It is difficult to bring one to any conclusion, when detached from the group. They will say, 'Well, I just don't think so,' as if there could be no facts or connected mental processes which should lead to one opinion rather than another, or distinguish a conviction from a taste." #QotD

"Western education has moved steadily towards the [group] basis; that is its 'progressive' tendency. Class acitivities, group interests, social influences have become predominant. And the prevailing philosophy with which pupils are indoctrinated is that of 'instrumentalism' [i.e., pragmatism], which  denies that there are any universal or permanent [facts], moral values, or standards.
    "The most striking result is precisely that ... neither evidence nor logic penetrates the fog in which they have been reared. It is difficult to bring one to any conclusion, when detached from the group. They will say, 'Well, I just don't think so,' as if there could be no facts or connected mental processes which should lead to one opinion rather than another, or distinguish a conviction from a taste.
    "They have an impression that 'everything is different now' from anything that may have been in the past; though they have no idea what or how. Do not two and two still make four? Does not a lever operate on exactly the same principle today as it did for Archimedes? They do not quite know. They may say, 'Oh, I don't agree with you,' but they can give no reason for dissent. They are 'not quite convinced,' but they can offer no argument in rebuttal.
    "That is to say, when called upon to think, they cannot, because they have been trained to accept the class, the group, the 'social trend,' as the sole authority. As far as it can be done, they have been reduced to 'ganglions,' neural processes in a collective 'body,' instead of persons."
        ~ Isabel Paterson, from her 1943 book The God of the Machine.

He is the very model of a modern major pragmatist

The American People: "I don't understand why Ayn Rand condemned pragmatism so strongly."  

Donald Trump: "Hold my beer ... "

[Hat tip Robert Nasir ] 

.

Bonus Quote of the Day: On the ever-accelerating downward pull of the welfare state

"Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull. Morally, the chance to satisfy demands by force spreads the demands wider and wider, with less and less pretense at justification. Economically, the forced demands of one group create hardships for all others, thus producing an inextricable mixture of actual victims and plain parasites. Since need, not achievement, is held as the criterion of rewards, the government necessarily keeps sacrificing the more productive groups to the less productive, gradually chaining the top level of the economy, then the next level, then the next. (How else are unachieved rewards to be provided?)
"There are two kinds of need involved in this process: the need of the group making demands, which is openly proclaimed and serves as cover for another need, which is never mentioned—the need of the power-seekers, who require a group of dependent favor-recipients in order to rise to power. Altruism feeds the first need, statism feeds the second, Pragmatism blinds everyone—including victims and profiteers—not merely to the deadly nature of the process, but even to the fact that a process is going on…

"[A] real turning point came when the welfare statists switched from economics to physiology: they began to seek a new power base in deliberately fostered racism, the racism of minority groups, then in the hatreds and inferiority complexes of women, of 'the young,’ etc. The significant aspect of this switch was the severing of economic rewards from productive work. Physiology replaced the conditions of employment as the basis of social claims. The demands were no longer for 'just compensation,' but just for compensation, with no work required.

"So long as the power-seekers clung to the basic premises of the welfare state, holding need as the criterion of rewards, logic forced them, step by step, to champion the interests of the less and less productive groups, until they reached the ultimate dead end of turning from the role of champions of 'honest toil' to the role of champions of open parasitism, parasitism on principle, parasitism as a ‘right' (with their famous slogan turning into: 'Who does not toil, shall eat those who do’).”

~ Ayn Rand, from “A Preview,” The Ayn Rand Letter, I, 23, 1

Greece, Keynes & intellectual decay: What made it possible?

Greece is in many ways the dead end of Keynesian economics; of the idea that aggregate demand alone, regardless of its source, is what fires prosperity. Like many modern top-heavy welfare states, Greece has abundant demand; but thanks to unaffordable government promises it has few willing to produce enough to pay for it, and –even now!—an infrastructure of credit creation ready, willing and able to underpin it.

The result, of course, has been prosperity’s opposite.

So how does something as intellectually lame as Keynesian apparatus get traction? Why were Keynes’s nonsensical nostrums accepted so readily in the mid-twentieth century by neoclassical economists when they’d been thoroughly exploded decades before by British classical economists?

The answer given by Austroclassical economist George Reisman is: “intellectual decay.” Not just in those (like Hayek and the ineffectual Pigou) who attempted to answer Keynes in the 1930s, or later on post-war when the Keynesian technocrats took control of the academies and their centres of economic “planning” -- because the decay had started several generations earlier.

So, you want to know what made Keynesianism possible, and with it disasters like Greece? Answer: intellectual decay.¹

¹

Doesn’t it make you want to know more about the wages-fund doctrine “and other such essential doctrines of classical ‘economics” like Say’s Law that Keynes was supposed to have assailed? And about that intellectual decay? Because it wasn’t just exhibited in economics – and it didn’t of course originate there. Because, to paraphrase Keynes himself,

So-called practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct philosopher. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

We can identify the scribbler most at fault as German philosopher Immanuel Kant³, that “catastrophic spider” as Nietzsche called him who had declared “a few years back” that it was senseless to seek causes or try to integrate knowledge of phenomena since all these mere appearances – the notion for example that saving was somehow causally related to wage levels and future production, for example – or that production of commodities itself creates a market for the commodities produced -- were only surface manifestations of the unknowable.

Trying to explain these slippery manifestations by means of causality and integrated argument would be, argues Kant, a long, slow path to bedlam. American pragmatist John Dewey essentially holds that the ultimate source of the decay recounted above was  German idealism, noting Kant as “the thinker who for the past seventy-five years supplied the bible of German thought” that would foment a “revolt” against British support and enthusiasm for laissez-faire liberalism in economics and politics.⁴ The Kantian “bible’s” core themes, says Dewey, were skeptical, idealist, and duty-based:

Kant to himself and to many in his own day was a revolutionary. There is no valid intellectual access, he taught, to the things of ultimate importance to man. …

Dewey notes

    the immense interest taken in professional German philosophy in the generation after 1870 — the generation of revolt against the empiricism that reigned in Great Britain from Locke onwards. …
    German philosophy was seized upon [by this generation] as a weapon with which to attack the former official philosophy of England. It is more than a coincidence that the reign of German idealism in Great Britain⁵ coincided with the revolt against laissez-faire liberalism in economics and politics, and with the growth of collectivism … .

… and of intellectual decay.

---

1. Reisman’s phrase echoes Mises’s on the rise in those earlier generations of “the anti-capitalist mentality”: [T]he supremacy of those modern doctrines is a proof of intellectual decay … . It demonstrates … the decay of the intellectuals and of the bourgeoisie.” (Mises, Omnipotent Government, pp. 118–19)
2. From George Reisman’s book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, p. 865. (You can download a free PDF copy at Reisman’s site, www.capitalism.net)
3. Of Kant, the “all-pulveriser,” H.L. Mencken once observed, “Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell." Mencken was being generous.
4. Quotes from Dewey’s 1929 collected essays, Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, which also suggests: “It is possible that the Great War [no less] was in some true sense a day of reckoning for Kantian thought” (68).
5. Hard to believe, but one of the prime popularisers of Kant’s “idealism” in England was a book written and intended as an entertainment. Little-known now, for a generation of British and American romantics Carlyle's Sartor Resartus was the populariser of Kant’s philosophy.
The book Sartor Resartus (literally, 'The Tailor Re-Tailored') purports to describe dialectically a 'Book of Clothes' produced by a 'professor of clothing' Doctor Diogenes Teufeldrockh (Dr Heaven-Sent Devil's-Dung), which book, we are told, argues that clothes are simply appearances or metaphors for the true 'inner state' of a thing -"the material world is symbolic of the spiritual world of ultimate reality. Man's creeds, beliefs, and institutions, which are all in tatters because of the enormous advances of modern thought and science, have to be tailored anew as his reason perceives the essential mystery behind the natural world."
Itself written metaphorically (of course), the book is in may ways an ancestor to the books of Umberto Eco.

Content is copyright PC.BlogSpot.Com © Please contact author for permission to republish: (organon at ihug.co.nz)

The #1 reason for #dirtypolitics: the barrenness of the "centre-right"

The #DirtyPolitics saga saw the commentariat almost immediately begin comparing John Key to their favourite modern-day bogeyman, Richard Nixon.

On the face of it, the link looks seriously overblown. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy led a shambolic dirty tricks team directly overseen by Nixon’s Attorney General that ran a series of lurid operations including luring political opponents with prostitutes, attempts to destroy political party conventions, and carrying out break-ins of journalists and political opponents.

Cameron Slater runs a blog.

If the commentariat can’t see the difference between a blog post and a break-in, we can only despair.

That said however,on a level deeper than the superficial non-similarities pointed to by the regular critics, with all their wild mud-slinging, there is a connection to which they are and will always remain blind.  The real connection is not so much dirty trick s or Judith Collins’s alleged enemies list; the real connection is ideology – or, to be precise, the lack of one.

Poor old Banksie

Poor old Banksie. There are complaints about the traps that Labour have stooped to “dirty tricks” in their attempt to smear ACT’s Epsom candidate John Banks.

Amusingly the so-called “dirty tricks” involve posting around the electorate flyers quoting the candidate, and posting online his fiscal record while in office–all very helpful you would think to a candidate whose billboards boast his “experience” as his best feature.

Yet his record has less than meets the eye; leastways, less than met the eye of Don Brash and the ACT selection team when they selected “Banksie” as their candidate in their must-win seat. Because they apparently didn’t know when they selected him what everybody else knew long ago: That Banksie is a bigot. That Banksie is a spendthrift. That if he wants to run on his “experience,” then he can expect his past experiences to come back and bite him.

 His statements quoted on the pamphlets would bad enough, especially for any candidate representing a purportedly “liberal” party.  But it his fiscal record as Auckland mayor that should frighten the socks off anyone voting for him in the hope that the ACT Party represent fiscal responsibility.

If there is a surprise for me in Epsom [writes Labour's Epsom candidate David Parker, accurately], it is that so few people knew that John Banks tripled Auckland City Council’s debt during his last three years as Mayor. This recent history is very damaging for Key as well as Banks, given their repeated assertions that they are fiscally responsible and Labour is profligate.
The reality that Banks was “borrow and spend” will get through. I am telling everyone! Every letter box in Epsom will get this message…
    The reality is that Banks’ very public record is there to haunt Key and Banks. The man who claims Muldoon as his hero has the worst economic record of any Mayor, ever, in the entire history of New Zealand.
    While the last Labour government ran budget surpluses and reduced government debt, this is what John Banks did to Auckland:

        Auckland City Council debt more than trebled in his last 3 years as Mayor!
            2007          2008         2009                31/10/2010
            $135m      $322m      $499m             $738 million !!!!!!!!

This was all pre amalgamation [and therefore represents the debt racked up just for the much smaller original Auckland City Council], and resulted in three credit downgrades for the council from Standard and Poors (from AA+ to AA-).
    The Act spin that debt increased because the old Auckland City was borrowing for the new City is untrue. (That extra $416m of borrowing in the 2010 year took Auckland City Council debt to $1,155m at the time of amalgamation, but is excluded from the above figures.)
   So John Banks certainly does not stand for fiscal responsibility.

He sure doesn’t.

One can only wonder about ACT’s sickening pragmatism in selecting this bigoted moron as their candidate in the first place.

Pragmatism & Mr Nixon: The Car Crash that was Watergate

I PROMISED YESTERDAY TO to discuss the single most important, eloquent and disastrous, example of Pragmatism in the modern political era.*
So sit back, pull up your cushions, and make yourself comfortable.

I give to you as first prize-winner the great political car crash that was Watergate—the scandal that sunk a President, launched a thousand suffixes, and wrote itself so much into modern history that a film merely dramatising four interviews about the scandal could still gross nearly $30 million last year. 
As one reviewer said, that film, Frost/Nixon,brilliantly presents “twin profiles in pragmatism”: dramatising two “corrupt, self-loathing defeatists who seek power,” and whose rise and fall between them signalled the full-blooded introduction of pragmatism to their respective worlds—something we’re still with today.

While Nixon’s  pragmatic credo (“whatever works”) gave the world wage and price controls, the Vietnam War, and the politics of image over substance -- and delivered to him the scandal that made him one of only three U.S. Presidents to face impeachment-- the self-same credo was shared by David Frost  (“whatever works”), and his work here helped delivered to the world “agenda journalism masquerading as moralism… in retrospect preview[ing] the plunge of the press into the tawdry, trashy institution it is today.”  

Seminal stuff indeed, then, based on a scandal that people still talk about.

Yet the scandal itself that brought Nixon down was simply small beer compared to many other things going on at the time (Vietnam, Chappaquiddick, the bombings of sundry Weathermen) and was unravelled because of little more than a failed break-in to the hotel that gave the scandal its name—a break-in organised by a Pro-Nixon group who self-identified as “practical men” unconcerned with ideology who would simply do whatever was necessary (“whatever works”) to re-elect their man.

Praised for his “pragmatism and flexibility” by no less than the NY Times’s leader writers earlier in his time at the White House, the car crash that was Watergate revealed just how impractical he and his team of so-called practical pragmatists really were. For Watergate and their reaction to it was really a car crash waiting to happen. A car crash that pragmatism drove, and made inevitable.

NIXON HIMSELF WAS THE ultimate pragmatist, a man who it was said “could make a U-turn on a dime (or on a paper dollar), discarding overnight every approximate principle he was approximately believed to stand for.” This is hardly a contentious claim. Writing recently in the Washington Post, Elizabeth Drew says

Nixon, who ran a rather disorganized presidency, wasn't interested in domestic policy. He essentially handed it off to his aide John Ehrlichman. And there was no unifying philosophy. Nixon called himself a ‘pragmatist,’ and he should be taken at his word: His domestic policy was a blend of the enlightened, the pragmatic and the cynical. In 1969, a Republican senator described Nixon to me as ‘the man with the portable center…’

(Remember yesterday’s post: “The Pragmatists declared that philosophy must be practical and that practicality consists of dispensing with all absolute principles and standard…”)
In a 1973 NY Times column "Pragmatism and Zeal" by Tom Wicker, he declares the Watergate corruption to be “qualitatively different" from the scandals of the past.

Without memorable exception, most political corruption has concerned itself with money—payoffs, bribes and kickbacks for crooked or dubious services rendered, or simple theft of the taxpayers' dollars...No charge has yet been made that any part of the vast sums involved in the Watergate case were simply pocketed by larcenous men .... It does not appear that any of the principals had the usual grafter's motive of enriching himself...The motive underlying Watergate was to insure the re-election of the President and the retention of power of those around him .... In their cold pragmatism, some Nixon men apparently saw neither right nor wrong but concentrated on their goal, regardless of right or wrong."

And James Reston, in the same issue of the same newspaper:

The problem [of Watergate] is the assumption that chiseling pays, that dishonesty is the best policy, that loyalty to the President is the same as loyalty to the Republic, and that if the President's objectives or ends are good and honorable, his men can use any means to support him, including discrediting, bugging, burglarizing or vilifying his opponents. [Watergate may] make us wonder whether expediency and pragmatism, divorced from right and wrong, are worthy of the American republic, and even whether they work."

(“Pragmatism wedded to ‘right and wrong’ (i.e., to morality) is a philosophical
contradiction in terms…; Pragmatism denies the validity of any principles, moral
or epistemological. Pragmatism holds expediency as the only criterion of human
values and actions. Truth or falsehood, it claims, cannot be known in advance of
action: truth is "that which works" in a particular situation. According to this
standard, the only way the Watergate burglars could know that they were
doing wrong in their particular situation, was by getting caught.”**)

BOTH THE PRESIDENT HIMSELF and all the President’s Men who fell with him were pragmatists to the core.   This was a President who called for polls to decide whether or not to bomb Haiphong harbour, and then waited for the results while his minions worked to skew those very polls. A President whose chief domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, the ideologue of the White House, confessed at the Watergate hearings that he was neither a constitutional lawyer nor an “ideas man.”  Whose adviser’s lieutenant, John Haldeman, “looked upon himself not as an 'issues' man but as a technician and organizer, and the young men he hired and promoted met the same qualifications."

For what use would ‘issues’ or ideas be to such people? For them, politics wasn’t  a battle of ideas, it was a battle of warring political tribes.

(“But the big dilemma for all the pragmatists of the Right, is: what are they to fight
and by what means, if principles are inoperative? Politics is a field in which one deals
with ideas and it requires the ability to argue, to discuss, to persuade. What does
one do in politics if one has discarded the whole realm of ideas? One fights men.”)

And Nixon’s young pragmatists who bungled the burglary were all too happy to sign up to such a battle.  Readers can get a sense of the stunted world-view of these entities by reading the autobiography of the man who “organised” the burglary, G. Gordon Lilly. (Called without irony Will,  reviewers at the time called the book “a comedy masterpiece.” It’s that and much more, even if all the comedy was unintentional.)  This is a man whose party trick was holding his hand over a candle until the flesh burned, indicating to everyone (including himself, he hoped) how tough he was; a man who had served his political apprenticeship as part of Richard Nixon’s failed “War on Drugs,” and on which operation he based  what John Dean later called “his dream to build a clandestine police force for the White House”; the man whose “organisation” was responsible for the Watergate operation, after which he offered to stand on whatever street corner he needed to so his bosses could terminate him if their Commander-in-Chief wished it ("...on a street corner, I'm prepared to have that done. You just let me know when and where, and I'll be there”).

Liddy and his fellow “soldiers” in the Committee to Re-Elect the President, a semi-autonomous organisation run out of their Commander-in-Chief’s White House and dubbed by its own troops CREEP, signed up not to an intellectual battle, but to help put down the bombings, riots and mayhem instituted by the various bands of hippies, Yippies and the Weathermen of whom Obama’s friend William Ayers played such a large part.

They did this not by seeking evidence that might convict the perpetrators of these crimes, or engaging in a battle to discredit the ideas the goons used to justify the mayhem, but instead by what they called “rat-fucking” their Democratic opponents in the Presidential election. They gave this campaign of Dirty Tricks the grandiose title of “Operation Gemstone,” and almost immediately began laundering money to pay for the operation; sending out inflammatory bogus letters purporting to be from Democratic candidates; paying for spies in opposing campaigns, and planting bugs in their offices; planting rumours about illegitimate children; burgling psychiatrists’ offices to find material blackening opponents; buying prostitutes to “get close” to their opponents; and organising (or trying to) to put sand in the air-conditioners at the Democrats’ Miami convention in the hope the resulting heat would throw it into chaos.

Such ‘technicians’ [observed Ayn Rand] would know that one is supposed to fight, at election time. What would be a pragmatist's idea of a fight? Ideas—he has been taught—are impractical, it is only immediate events that count; what is true today, may not be true tomorrow; rigid values are childish, cynical ‘flexibility is mature. People—he has concluded—don't think; people are not interested in ideas, only in scandal, they do not care about the good, only about some sensational exposé of somebody's evil.
    “Thus the younger, more impatient pragmatists would come to believe that bugging, spying, burglary, in pursuit of somebody's scandalous personal secrets, are more effective than years of speechmaking about ‘issues.’ Pragmatism is a philosophy of action, of the ‘now. The mentality of the activists of the Left, becomes, on the Right, the mentality of the Watergate conspirators.”

Despite their grand plans for maximum electoral chaos paid for with purloined funds, the burglary that brought them all down was  in fact one of only very few operations they carried out, and it was a triumph of pragmatic “organisation”: it had no aim that anyone involved was aware of; even if successful it would have achieved precisely nothing; and everyone involved thought everyone else had authorised it.  The rest of the Watergate scandal was simply the Nixon White House trying, both pragmatically and unsuccessfully, to put down the whole apparatus of the pragmatic political “operation” that it then exposed—an operation that in the final analysis consisted of little more than eavesdropping on electoral opponents (the Democrats) who their own polls said they were going to beat in a landslide anyway.

The biggest mystery of Watergate [concluded Ayn Rand] is not what Richard Nixon did, but what he thought. No enemy could have destroyed him as thoroughly as he destroyed himself: consistently, systematically, he undercut his own case with every successive public statement he made  and every step he took, until there was nothing left of him or to him. Yet he was known as a ‘smart’ politician, a clever manipulator, not a man of thought, but of action. Moral issues apart, what happened to his purely practical judgment?
There is a paragraph in the first part of Dr. Peikoff's article ‘Pragmatism versus America,’ which answers this question. Reading it, I had an eerie feeling, as if a psychologist were describing the nature of Mr. Nixon's thought-processes—yet that paragraph was written over two years ago, about a philosophy originated in the nineteenth century:
        “ ‘In the normal course of affairs, the pragmatists elaborate, men do not—and need
    not—think; they merely act—by habit, by routine, by unthinking impulse. But, in
    certain situations, the malleable material of reality suddenly asserts itself, and habit
    proves inadequate: men are unable to achieve their goals, their action is blocked
    by obstacles, and they begin to experience frustration, tension, trouble, doubt, ‘disease.’
        “ ‘This, according to pragmatism, is when men should resort to the ‘instrument’ of
    thought. And the goal of the thought is to ‘reconstruct’ the situation so as to escape
    the trouble, alleviate the tension, remove the obstacles, and resume the normal process
    of unimpeded (and unthinking) action.
  “Mr. Nixon's desperate, contradictory, incomprehensible actions were aimed at ‘reconstructing the situation (even though it is unlikely that he had ever heard of this particular metaphysical prescription). But the malleable material of reality stubbornly refused to let itself be reconstructed.
    “This, dear readers, is an example of philosophy's power—of what a particular philosophic theory, pragmatism, did to its most consistent practitioner.”

My advice, therefore, to political proponents of the right whose leaders pledge to govern “in a pragmatic and balanced way,” is to run like hell the first chance you get.

* * * * 

* The “modern political era”? I’d define it fairly loosely as the period that today’s practitioners still remember well.  So in New Zealand we have people still telling war stories about Muldoon; in Britain we have unionists still bewailing Thatchers’ victory in 1979; and in the US we still have people around who’d like us to forget they were once a part of the Nixon Administration. So in short, it’s the era starting just before ABBA, or maybe, just after the Beatles.

** Unless otherwise attributed, quotes and 1973 NYT columns were taken from Ayn Rand’s masterful, full-length, 1976 summary of the Watergate car crash, “Brothers, You Asked For It.”

QUOTE[S] OF THE DAY: Pragmatism

Since “pragmatism” is John Key’s word of the week, a triumph of spinelessness over any principle whatever, it’s appropriate then that “pragmatism” also be the subject of the Quote of the Day.

So then, pragmatists--what the hell are they about?

[The Pragmatists] declared that philosophy must be practical and that practicality consists of dispensing with all absolute principles and standards—that there is no such thing as objective reality or permanent truth—that truth is that which works, and its validity can be judged only by its consequences…”
                             - Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual

Which means…

Pragmatism … is a rationalization for the concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment, anti-conceptual mentalities that long for liberation from principles and future.”
        - Ayn Rand, “Philosophic Detection”

Sounds destructive. So what are  the implications of that …
… for politics:

The two points central to the pragmatist ethics are: a formal rejection of all fixed standards—and an unquestioning absorption of the prevailing standards. The same two points constitute the pragmatist approach to politics, which, developed most influentially by Dewey, became the philosophy of the Progressive movement in this country (and of most of its liberal descendants down to the present day).”
                              - Leonard Peikoff, “Pragmatism Versus America”

… for education:

Rarely, if ever, has a free nation capitulated to [a destructive new philosophy] as rapidly, as extensively, as abjectly, as America did [to pragmatism] . When the country surrendered its educational institutions—in countless forms, direct and indirect, public and private, from nursery school on up—to the legion of Progressive educators spawned, above all, by Dewey, it formally delivered its youth into the hands of the philosophy of pragmatism, to be ‘reconstructed’ according to the pragmatist image of man. It was a development which, in a few decades, created a new intellectual establishment in America…
    The goal of the Progressive indoctrinators was not, however, to impose a specific system of ideas on the student, but to destroy his capacity to hold any firm ideas, on any subject…”
                            - Leonard Peikoff, “Pragmatism Versus America”

Psychologically, Pragmatism lobotomized the country's intellectuals: John Dewey's theory of ‘Progressive’ education (which has dominated the schools for close to half a century), established a method of crippling a child's conceptual faculty and replacing cognition with ‘social adjustment.’ It was and is a systematic attempt to manufacture tribal mentalities.”
        - Ayn Rand, “The Missing Link”

… for actual problem-solving?

What, then, is left to man? The sensation, the wish, the whim, the range and the concrete of the moment. Since no solution to any problem is possible, anyone's suggestion, guess or edict is as valid as anyone else's—provided it is narrow enough.
     To give you an example: if a building were threatened with collapse and you declared that the crumbling foundation has to be rebuilt, a pragmatist would answer that your solution is too abstract, extreme, unprovable, and that immediate priority must be given to the need of putting ornaments on the balcony railings, because it would make the tenants feel better.
     There was a time when a man would not utter arguments of this sort, for fear of being rightly considered a fool. Today, Pragmatism has not merely given him permission to do it and liberated him from the necessity of thought, but has elevated his mental default into an intellectual virtue, has given him the right to dismiss thinkers (or construction engineers) as naive, and has endowed him with that typically modern quality: the arrogance of the concrete-bound, who takes pride in not seeing the  forest fire, or the forest, or the trees, while he is studying one inch of bark on a rotted tree stump…”
        - Ayn Rand, “How To Read (And Not To Write)”

… and for morality:

By itself, as a distinctive theory, the pragmatist ethics is contentless. It urges men to pursue “practicality,” but refrains from specifying any “rigid” set of values that could serve to define the concept. As a result, pragmatists—despite their repudiation of all systems of morality—are compelled, if they are to implement their ethical approach at all, to rely on value codes formulated by other, non-pragmatist moralists. As a rule the pragmatist appropriates these codes without acknowledging them; he accepts them by a process of osmosis, eclectically absorbing the cultural deposits left by the moral theories of his predecessors—and protesting all the while the futility of these theories.
        - Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels

Pragmatism wedded to "right and wrong" (i.e., to morality) is a philosophical contradiction in terms, as bad a contradiction as, for instance, an attempt to preach an atheism wedded to God. Morality is a code of principles; Pragmatism denies the validity of any principles, moral or epistemological. Pragmatism holds expediency as the only criterion of human values and actions. Truth or falsehood, it claims, cannot be known in advance of action: truth is "that which works" in a particular situation. According to this standard, the only way [a politician would] know that they were doing wrong in their particular situation, was by getting caught.”
        - Leonard Peikoff, “Pragmatism Versus America”

(Come in Len Brown, Shane Jones, Chris Carter, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.)

…and so, to the partial explanation for today’s political culture:

As a rule, it is an accident whether the smart young intellectual wheeler-dealers emitted by the colleges turn to the Left or to the Right. More often than not, those who turn to the Right do so because the Left is overcrowded and they see less competition for opportunities to climb, on the intellectually arid rocks of the Right. It is not a matter of political principles. What principles? Pragmatism has taught them that there are no such things.
But the big dilemma for all the pragmatists of the Right, is: what are they to fight and by what means, if principles are inoperative? Politics is a field in which one deals with ideas and it requires the ability to argue, to discuss, to persuade. What does one do in politics if one has discarded the whole realm of ideas? One fights men.
        - Ayn Rand, “Brother, You Asked For It”

(Welcome to the politics of the blogosphere.  And of the parliament.)

…and finally, what’s the actual “cash value” of a philosophy that itself boasts of ifs practicality?  It’s that “truth” is what’s asserted by public polls.

If you doubt the power of philosophy to set the course and shape the destiny of human societies, observe that our mixed economy is the literal, faithfully carried-out product of Pragmatism—and of the generation brought up under its influence. Pragmatism is the philosophy which holds that there is no objective reality or permanent truth, that there are no absolute principles, no valid abstractions, no firm concepts, that anything may be tried by rule-of-thumb, that objectivity consists of collective subjectivism, that whatever people wish to be true, is true, whatever people wish to exist, does exist—provided a consensus says so.
        - Ayn Rand, “The New Fascism: Rule By Consensus”

---and so, in summary:

Above all, the pragmatists stress ‘practicality’—which, according to their teachings, consists in action divorced from thought and reality.
     The pragmatists stress the "cash value" of ideas. But the Americans did not know the "cash value" of the pragmatist ideas they were buying. They did not know that pragmatism could not deliver on its promise of this-worldly success because, at root, it is a philosophy which does not believe in this—or any—world.”
                            - Leonard Peikoff, “Pragmatism Versus America”

Which is what the most famous modern practitioner of pragmatism once demonstrated for all the world to see.

On that, more tomorrow.

Pragmatism & Mr Key

This morning I want to take you an a brief philosophical journey around John Key’s new favourite word.

That word, as you might have noticed after the weekend, is “Pragmatic.” Or, if you prefer the proper noun, “Pragmatism.”  In recent months, for example, if you’d been paying attention you would have heard:

• Tax breaks to encourage investors and fund managers down to New Zealand? “In theory it sounds like a good idea but in practice the time and cost involved - you would have to take a pragmatic view…”
• “…not selling Kiwibank shows the govt is now taking a far more practical and pragmatic approach to state asset sales…”
• “Key said today the compromise is a ‘pragmatic solution…’”
• “Key’s reign is marked by his pragmatism and optimism…”
• And over the weekend, “The word ‘pragmatic’ was also on high-rotate in the Prime Minister's vocabulary. In Key's dictionary, ‘pragmatic’ is not a dirty word.”

How, you might ask yourself, did an obscure word invented by a now largely unknown pair of nineteenth-century philosophers come to so thoroughly litter political discourse. Because it’s not only not a dirty word, it was used three times in John Key’s keynote speech at the National Party conference, hardly the place to present a philosophical treatise! Said Key:

• [This] package of amendments to New Zealand's labour laws … contains pragmatic solutions to real issues facing real businesses and employees;
• “…a package of changes that I believe is pragmatic, credible and effective”;
• “… we will [govern] in a pragmatic and balanced way… guided by the values and principles that have underpinned this great Party for so many decades…”

Clearly an important idea, then, since as recent experience would tell you it has clearly done something important to those very Values and Principles that, as Fran O’Sullivan pointed out on the weekend, used to encompass “the principles of personal freedom, individual responsibility, a competitive economy and support for families and communities,” but now encompass … well, based on recent experience, what they encompass is Backflips, Backdowns and Doing Just What Labour Did.

And if you understand what pragmatism really means, why would anyone be at all surprised at that outcome? 

Bear with me a moment as I explain why. But first,  let’s check a real dictionary—or, since pragmatism is a philosophical term, a philosophical dictionary—to see what kind of a word ‘pragmatism’ is, because what you’ll find out there about pragmatism is highly illuminating.

The philosophical doctrine of pragmatism was really invented in the nineteenth century by Americans C.S. Pierce and William James to do away with what they understood to be obscure metaphysical speculation, (they’d been reading a lot of heavy Germanic philosophy, you understand, in which obscure metaphysical speculation has never been more weighty).  In Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy, they described, in the language that nineteenth-century gentlemen used, how their new philosophy would (they hoped) clear away the metaphysical tickets. First, James:

Pragmatism: The doctrine that the whole ‘meaning’ of a conception expresses itself in practical consequences…”

And now Pierce:

Pragmatism: The opinion that [the abstruse speculations of] metaphysics are to be largely cleared up by the application of the following maxim for attaining clearness of apprehension: ‘Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.’”

What they’re saying is that their new philosophy is not a search for truth, but for something they call “practicality.”  But observe that since truth has been dispensed with (“truth” is just another name for what you think you can get away with), this is a very unusual view of “practicality,” because their “conception” of reality is not about the stuff of reality itself, but only of the “conception” of the “effects” that some stuff may or may not make on other stuff (“perception is reality”).

In other words,* it is a “practicality” that consists of dispensing with all absolute principles and standards, and treating reality as so much malleable stuff that may (or may not) allow itself it be tricked into helping one’s goals.  

But if you dispense with absolute principles and standards, then what’s left?  Not truth; not honesty; and sure as hell not “the values and principles that have underpinned a great Party for so many decades.” All you’re left with instead is something called “practicality”—but a very fluid kind of practicality, in a strange and complicated world, in the service of some unnamed and undefined goals.

Because, if you think about it carefully, ethics is simply the science of goal-setting, and this is a philosophy entirely without an ethics. No wonder it proved so attractive to politicians  (Q: “How do you know a politician is lying?” A: “Their lips are moving.”)

These are the sorts of reasons more honest philosophers talk about “The Menace of Pragmatism,” because:

Pragmatism is not a substantive set of doctrines so much as a way of thinking, a unifying approach that helps to sustain an array of doctrines that are, in their content, irrational. Because it is a method, however, and informs the way that a practitioner tackles any issue, it proves much more difficult to unroot than an erroneous conclusion. Moreover, thanks to its positive image, pragmatism tends to give harmful ideas a good name, bestowing them with the misplaced aura of reason. It thereby makes people who wish to be rational all the more susceptible to those ideas.

The menace is a live one.

Now, I don’t suggest that every politician goes to bed with the dusty tomes of Messrs Pierce and James. But the teachings of these two have certainly got into the culture, (not least because their apprentice Pragmatist, a young John Dewey, was the founder of the Progressive school system in which the west’s education system is still enmired).  No, in Key’s dictionary—and the dictionary of very working politician, I suspect—being “pragmatic” simply means ignoring principle and doing what you can get away with. But if by this reasoning principles are taken off the decision-making table, and they have been, then what’s left?  If principles are off the table, then how on earth do you decide what to do?

The answer is that you’re left being blown around by whatever ideological wind more principled people can whip up. As they do.

No wonder this pragmatic Prime Minister always seems to find himself simply Doing Just What Labour Did.

Tomorrow:

I’ll discuss the single most important, eloquent and disastrous, expression of Pragmatism in modern political history.

Can you guess what it was?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: The Key to the Politician’s Blank Cheque

Any political candidate who proclaims proudly that he or she is a pragmatist must, therefore, be watched very carefully because the pragmatist ploy is, ultimately, a ticket to unchecked power, a world in which trickery, muscle, and such are the arbiters of acceptable policies, never mind whether the rights of citizens are being crushed in the process.”
                                            -  Tibor Machan, “The Fatal Allure of Pragmatism”

Fitzsimons’ Values Party: They won the nuclear war!

“Credit cards and a Maserati,
Don't go to films
‘Less he knows they're arty
Likes Womens’ Lib
And the Values Party,
He’s a Rasta, he’s New Wave,
Don’t do nothing
Less he’s told exactly how to behave . . . ”
- ‘Rebel,’ by Toy Love / Chris Knox(1978)

LAST NIGHT JEANETTE FITZSIMONS brought down the hemp curtain on her thirteen-year Parliamentary career. When an MP gives their valedictory speech, all their colleagues and the whole commentariat comes out in force to review their career.

But I’m not going to do that now.  No more than I did last week.  Instead, what I want to review (just briefly) is the ‘career’ of the Party with whom she was first associated.

Back in the early seventies there was a political party called the Values Party. (“She likes Women’s Lib and the Values Party. . . ”)  Non-threatening, non-violent and never any hope of winning a Parliamentary seat, they ran a programme based around saving the whales and the Tangata Whenua; around multiculturalism and mediocrity; promoting state support of everything except the production that would pay for it; attacking the “obsessions” with competition, money and personal gratification and promoting instead the spiritualism of sacrifice and “sustainability”—long, long  before any of these ideas were politically fashionable.  They were the original politically correct “rebels.” And they made them fashionable.

Tripping over their sandals, banging their head on their wind chimes, reeking of patchouli and clad in the inevitable tie-died macrame, at the the time they only appeared to be a threat to themselves, but a careful review of the Values Party programme would show that the Values Party have been one of the most successful parties of the last four decades. They never got an MP within a hippie’s roar of Parliament, but just take a look at the core Values programme (conveniently laid out for us by Claire Browning). and review for a moment how the ideas they brought to the fringes of the political table four decades ago are now front and centre in so much of what passes for political debate today:

Politics -- MMP, and open government, including freedom of information, now given effect by the Official Information Act.
International relations -- an independent foreign affairs stance (eg, ANZUS withdrawal), an anti-nuclear, nuclear-free stance, anti-apartheid in sport.
Law -- New Zealand’s highest court should be a New Zealand court not the Privy Council, Fair Trading and Consumer Guarantees policies.
Race relations and status of Maori -- strengthening Maori cultural identity and tino rangatiratanga, a Maori Minister of Maori Affairs.
Status of women -- a suite of policies to remove discrimination and gender bias against women in employment, healthcare, public participation (eg, jury service), and in the home (eg, deploring gender stereotypes, and proposing matrimonial property reform).
Individual responsibility for moral behaviour -- eg, homosexual law reform.
Immigration -- a cautious multi-racial population-replacement immigration policy (as opposed to Eurocentric).

The foundation planks of the Values’ manifesto gave birth to the nostrums of ecological collapse due to climate change; to the soft fascism of political correctness and the collectivism of failure; to the mush of multiculturalism and the mainstreaming of “minorities”; to the “politics of enough” and a  “redistributive philosophy” in which the state would recover and share around the wealth of “the excessively greedy or fortunate”; to anti-capitalist assaults on consumerism and industry; to the greening of socialism and the throttling of capitalism--and they brought these all to the mainstream.  They didn’t just gave birth to the Greens, they gave birth (almost unobserved by the mainstream) to the political agenda of the last forty years.

What was wildly “way out, man” then is just mainstream and taken for granted today.  That’s the extent of their victory.

THE VALUES PARTY PROGRAMME was so wildly successful because their members, and many former members, all  understood they were involved in a battle of ideas—at a time when most of their opponents would barely be said to have an original idea between them.  And they had patience. They knew that to capture the mainstream they had to capture the young—and that to capture the young they had to capture the education system, so they could tell those youngsters how to behave.

And so they did.  And then those youngsters grew up, and took with them those ideas they’d imbibed when their brains were still tender.  It was always a battle of ideas—a battle in which they still give no quarter.

As Ayn Rand put it, “a political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; whereas a philosophical battle is a nuclear war." I very much doubt whether Ms Fitzsimons would ever put it quite like that, but she would be one of the few in the present Parliament who would understand.

Because, you see, you could always smell the ideological uranium on Fitzsimons’ breath. You could always smell it on her colleagues.  Which is why the Values Party won the nuclear war. 

They won it because, for the most part, while their opponents  were fussing about with the tactical weapons of pragmatism and politics—by refusing to confront the fact that bad ideas can only be fought by better ideas—the strategic nuclear weapons launched by the Values alumni were already having their victories.   While their opponents were figuring out the tactics of political musketry, the Values’ troops were (in the words of Chris Knox’s song) preparing everyone to be “told exactly how to behave.” Not for them fussing about with poll numbers, seats and cabinet rankings. They always knew that in the end it didn’t really matter how many MPs you sent to parliament, but how many ideas.

And that’s why the Values Party won.

The lesson, for most of us, should be obvious.

Yaron calls for a REAL Tea Party! [Update 9]

Yaron Brook analyses the Tea Parties on Pajamas TV, calling for an intellectual revolution to back up the Tea Party activism out on the streets. (NB: You have to sit through a short ad bagging the MSM before the interview starts.)

On this point, the first Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution itself is germane. As they point out at Bureaucrash, the real revolution happened not in 1773 in the Boston harbor or in 1776 with the “shot heard round the world” at the Battle of Lexington and Concord but in the decades leading up to that date with the revolution inside people's heads. Take to heart the words of Samuel Adams, who during his retirement years was fond of saying that the War for Independence was a consequence of the real American Revolution. The real revolution, he declared, had taken place in the minds and hearts of the colonists in the fifteen years prior to 1776. According to Adams, the American Revolution was first and foremost an intellectual revolution.

That's what's needed now.

• NB: Feel free to send me more Tea Party links either by email or in the comments , and I'll post them below. After all, we're not going to read about them in the MSM, are we.

UPDATE 1: There's been Tea Parties all over, in around 500 different locations, people mad as hell and not going to take it any more. Roundup here at the Tax Day Tea Party, and more pics here. Daily Pundit reports on the SF Tea Party, held outside Fancy Nancy Pelosi's office. Favourite signs:


More signs here from the Tea Party in Al Bore's locale:

And from Springfield, Illinois:

Austin, Texas:

Hartford, Connecticut:

New Haven, Connecticut:

Flemington, New Jersey:

Gilbert, Arizona:


UPDATE 2: Don Boudreaux is tea-ed off with Paul Krugman and the New York Times:

Paul Krugman criticizes the anti-tax tea parties to be held around the country on Wednesday ("Tea Parties Forever," April 13). But Mr. Krugman's message never rises above tabloid journalism. Rather than address the issues, he merely rehashes absurdities spewed (mostly years ago) by right-wingers such as Tom DeLay and Karl Rove. The implication is that, because the likes of Messrs. DeLay and Rove oppose higher taxes, persons who attend these tea parties must be similarly crazy partisans. But is it really so absurd for ordinary Americans to be furious that Uncle Sam now promises to run up $9.3 trillion in debt during the next decade - an unfathomable sum that will inevitably lead to much higher taxes or higher inflation or both? Is it small-minded to oppose corporate welfare for automakers, banks, and insurance companies? Is it lunatic to fear further socialization of medical-care provision? Do these concerns really signal that those of us who hold them are, as Mr. Krugman alleges, "refusing to grow up"? One need not agree with the tea-partiers to concede that these worries are ones that reasonable people can, and do, have.

UPDATE 3: Obama responds to Tea Baggers: "I simply want to rule you," paraphrases the Rational Capitalist.

This is prime Obama pragmatism on display[says the Rational Capitalist]. Notice that he claims to start from a 'simple premise': Marxism. . .

UPDATE 4: John Hindraker of Powerline smacks down the MSM's insistence that Tea Party protestors are just "right wing extremists."

UPDATE 5: More cool signs, courtesy of Bosch Fawstin and Amy Peikoff:

UPDATE 6: Rational Jenn records a one-minute speech for Atlanta's big screens, and takes her kids along. (Go, Jenn.)

UPDATE 7: Mish has a couple more cute kids:



UPDATE 8: Some great pics from Sweet Obamatown Chicago, and a cool video of the action.





UPDATE 9: Rochester, NY: