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Tuesday, March 25, 2003 - 10:48pmSanction this postReply
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I am sorry that I have neglected this list in the last few weeks. I have been grading the work of nearly a hundred students in three courses for the last couple of weeks; now that my winter quarter grades are in, I am taking this opportunity to note my differences with the anti-war views of Chris Sciabarra and Russ Madden.

At the root of these differences is a disagreement about the relative importance of history in social and political judgement. By history, I mean the sum of the facts of reality in which political thought must be grounded if it is to be objective - that is, if it is to be coherent with the ontological and epistemological principles of Objectivism. However much I admire Chris' Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, I can't help noticing that only 3 articles in the first three years of the Journal had a significant historical component, and those dealt only with intellectual (2 articles) and economic (1 article) history. About social and political history the Journal, at least to date, has been silent. If you didn't actually read Chris' study of the Ayn Rand Transcript, you would never guess, from scanning the Journal, that Ayn Rand was a history major. Now I know that this is not Chris' fault - the American libertarian movement has a long history of ahistorical rationalism, that is, of treating politics as a floating abstraction ungrounded in history; and it is primarily libertarians who write about Ayn Rand today. But when it comes to politics, especially applicable politics, history matters.

And the strange, at least to philosophers, aspect of history is that social and political systems change in real time. The statements that Chris and Russ cite from Ayn Rand were grounded in the specific historical setting in which they were written. The context of statements quoted by Russ Madden, for example, was wars fought with conscripted armies, and the nationalist ideology - the sacrifice of the individual to the good of the Nation - in which conscription was grounded. The unfortunate fact is that nationalism had to putrify before collectivist intellectuals would recognize it as dead; the fortunate fact is that no one, not even the most constipated collectivist, takes the morality of nationalism seriously any more. The moral and historical evaluation of wars fought for a rational purpose with all-volunteer forces must be different, and one should not assume that this evaluation will have the same outcome.

Similarly, Rand's statements about "the New Fascism" responded to the presidency of J. F. Kennedy; one should not assume that history actually moved in that direction, because in fact, thanks mostly to Ludwig von Mises but also in part to Ayn Rand, it didn't. John F. Kennedy was the son and political protege' of Joseph P. Kennedy, the most influential admirer and advocate of Fascism in the FDR administration, Democratic machine boss of Massachussetts and FDR's ambassador to Great Britain. After the outbreak of WWII the elder Kennedy censored himself of his previous praise for Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, but the substance of the values he inculcated in his children, and promoted through them, did not change. It was still 100%-pure Fascism, and Kennedy's court intellectuals did their best to promote a taboo on its name even as they promulgated its substance. Ayn Rand, of course, would not abide by this taboo. And about the actual politics of 1965 she was absolutely, 100% right. But the world - the facts of reality - did not stand still for the last 38 years, and Rand herself would have been the last to try to embalm her take on the Kennedys as some kind of lasting principle of politics.

So what has changed?

First, Oscar Lange's conjecture about the possibility of rationally calculated central economic planning has been conclusively disconfirmed by the failure of every single experiment in central economic planning over the last century. As Robert Heilbroner, the world's most eminent Marxist economist until he gathered and publicized the evidence that disconfirmed Marxist economics, wrote in 1995, von Mises was right, and "rational central planning" is _in reality_ an oxymoron. This, of course, includes the Fascist as well as the Marxist models of state-directed economy. No one, except for openly anti-scientific troglodytes, advocates state direction of the economy any more. And of course fascist economies - of which Saddam Hussein's Iraq is one of the last extant specimens - are just as extinct as their communist counterparts.

Second, Fascism has been replaced by a new invention, so far nameless, due primarily to former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, of a political structure designed to maximize the dictator's payout without compromising his power: what I will call the klepto-conservative dictatorship. This new model of the proprietary state combines low taxes and a minimally constrained economy - maximizing the dictator's payout - with totalitarian enforcement of social, cultural and ideological conformity to the dictator's values. At this point, most of the world's states, including Russia, China, their former satellites, theocratic states of the Middle East and Latin America, and also English-speaking countries including the United States, have been moving in the direction of a Singapore-style klepto-conservative dictatorship. The latter resembles Fascism in some respects, but in others is quite different, and the differences between the two must be kept clearly in focus if one is to oppose klepto-conservatism effectively.

Third, the theocratic variant of klepto-conservative totalitarianism has developed suicide terrorism as an effective delivery system for weapons of mass destruction. This permits dictators to blackmail the rest of the world, both for financial gain and obtain conformity with the dictator's values. While Al Quaida has been the most effective of the new quasi-private terrorist organizations, it is not the only one. And even if it were, there is nothing to prevent a Saddam Hussein (or other dictators) from organizing their own terrorist delivery systems for such weapons if they ever completed their development. Such quasi-private organizations can deliver mass death with near-complete deniability, and massive retaliation becomes very problematic, absent the kind of public proof that such organizations are optimized to eliminate.

Fourth, the new dictators are generic and, unlike the former satellite systems of Stalin and Hitler, capable of giving each other personal protection, refuge, and a luxurious retirement if one of them is overthrown. Stalin was held at bay precisely because he knew that if he ever lost power everyone, including his former subordinates, would turn against him. Osama bin Laden is, as far as we know, living privately in one of Sultan of Brunei's opulent palaces, and receiving, as part of the Sultan's hospitality, the services of the Sultan's world-famous sex slaves. There is no reason to believe that other potentates, including Saddam Hussein, are the least deterred by the prospect of such consequences.

Under these conditions no responsible government, including even a hypothetical Objectivist government of the United States, could permit Saddam Hussein to continue the development of chemical and bacteriological weapons even more advanced than those he has used in the past. Of course success against Saddam Hussein will accelerate the movement of the United States in the direction of klepto-conservative totalitarianism, but the consequences of failure, and especially of appeasement, are likely to be more immediate and worse. To paraphrase ben Gurion, one has to fight Hussein as if there were no Bush, and fight Bush as if there were no Hussein. That's a difficult program, but we live in difficult times. And, in even more difficult times, ben Gurion's strategy worked.

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Sunday, March 30, 2003 - 12:47amSanction this postReply
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Adam,

This was a very interesting post. Anytime you feel like writing something this interesting, please send it in as a daily article. That way it can get the attention it deserves.

Post 2

Monday, March 31, 2003 - 8:39pmSanction this postReply
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Very interesting and stimulating. I do think Rand would have been in favor of this war. It is very regrettable indeed that even before we begin to argue about the war that we do not look at the reasons, in historical context, why the major players are 'playing' the way they are.

I think the behavior of France and Germany is very ominous for Western Civilization and I think this issue (the division of the West) is more important--because it is more dangerous--than this current war. Also, the ambivalence of the West towards terrorism is an underanalyzed crucial issue. The fact that the West supports terrorism both ideologically and financially yet at the same time says it is against it is a (perhaps THE) major cause of the current explosion.

I am hopeful that the current administration is moving us more strongly against terrorism, yet the stance towards Arafat (even though largely based on pragmatic politics) shows that we have a long way to go. How can we be against terrorism and even talk with Arafat? Let alone give him a "State."

Let us know what you are thinking! You think so well!

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