| | I would add Edith Efron to the list of honorable exiles. When I was building my library (sugh), I remember running across the following book filed away in dusty shelves amidst all of the diet fads: The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie: How Environmental Politics Controls What We Know about Cancer. Wonderful book, almost an Objectivist treatise on the politics and even epistemology of science than a narrow treatment of the cancer wars.
I highly recommend Efron's book, and I say this despite some disagreements with her episteme. I, myself, don't think the fault lines are so much between woosy [hmmm... I would like to check the etymology of that term] pseudoscience fostered by the welfare state and an opposed rational citadel of besieged scientists, so much as I think there are four sides in this war, (1) Humanist Enlightenment science grounded ultimately in an individual's questioning perception of nature, (2) Positivist institutional science, statistical and reductionist in methods, (3) Countercultural alternative or 'holistic' medicine, and (4) Christian assimilation of health to morality. I believe Objectivists do not significantly distinguish (2) from (1) while allying most of the faults of (2) to (3), while wholly neglecting the influence on (4) on the actual practice and premises of medicine as a life-or-death social authority. Personally, I think that a flourishing, dialectical version of (1) has much in common with a rationally scrutinized version of (3), and that, a la Thomas Szasz, (2) is often a functional excuse to carry on the social domination of (4). In the early nineteenth century, during the same period when the lines between throne-and-altar Conservatism and individualist liberalism were clear, it was also understood that self-taught folk medicine and the light of independent science were natural allies against theocratic establishments equally promoting dogmatism and the rule of experts. I think a lot has sadly gone wrong since on all sides.
As for Ron Merrill... Ideas of Ayn Rand said some interesting things about Nietzsche I thought were overdue, but others among his claims were absolutely barbaric, such as his hope that no one in the future would read Plato or all of those evil philosophers any more than we read the discarded failed theories of science in alchemy or astrology. Well, personally I think a great problem with the modern sciences is that they don't go back, check their premises, question their assumptions, and debate or learn from rival theories... the results are atrocities such as genetic determinism and sociobiology, which Merrill tends to predictably swallow. I think we could do well to read more alchemy and astrology (the former, in particular).
One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened, and there is no end of derision.
The same in philosophy? We already have modern analytic philosophy claiming (in Allan Bloom's phrase), that it knows what was wrong with the whole tradition and we don't need to study it. Yet I would fight to the death to preserve the works of Plato, or Aristotle, or Kant, or Hegel, or Nietzsche, over the entire corpus in its vast libraries of analytic philosophy. And I hate to say it, but the proposal to force a war between Ayn Rand (and a couple of other As, and maybe one N.) and the wisdom and insights of the entire remainder of the history of philosophy, is a battle that Rand will, must, and should, lose. And it is an unnecessary battle. This position is not exclusive with the highest respect for Rand as one of many geniuses.
Merrill also exhibits a general conservatism which he blithely assumes to follow from reason without making the effort of using reason to validate it. He claims at one point that libertarianism is a silly crusade because all libertarians are just interested in social issues (?) and that, further, the reign of Babylon has come to pass and that sex and drugs are de facto unpersecuted (??- in 1990?). Nowhere does Merrill precisely define what is irrational about these things, and nowhere does he back up his picture of society or libertarianism; he seems to simply assume that any friendly reader will see these things as obvious. What he is really doing is falling back on a conservative moral intuition, taking a certain near-zero visibility of certain 'anti-social' behaviours as 'natural' and treating any positive deviation from this 'natural' level as water coming over the dikes. This, even if in actual fact, these cultural phenomena are still rigorously persecuted but somewhat less than at a former time, whereas mainstream ones are not. Yet this is not reason, this is sloppy thinking; the same illogic that leads people to think that feminists must be taking over society if they upset a situation of exclusive male privilege. And given that Merrill was obviously well educated in many ways, I find it shockingly bad history... he should know that sensuality, like commerce, was characteristic of those cultures most affirmative of a rational, worldly ethic; Miletus, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Florence, Venice, and Paris are just a few of the names that should scream in an historian's memory. Perhaps Merrill read Gibbon too often and too blindly. Or Spengler.
Then there is Merrill's thesis that a free society will be one of rigid social intolerance. My first question, if not the most basic, is whose social intolerance? Merrill seems to presume that human reason easily leads to predictable and similar conclusions, and that we may safely treat those whose conclusions differ from the common sense of humanity as madmen to be shut out of any benefits of society. This is simply breathtaking, especially as an Ayn Rand would, in fact, be the first victim of such a policy. Great individuals may be very alike in their essential passions, but they are not at all alike in their conclusions, and the kind of social intolerance Merrill advocates, which social conservatives with no interest in reason are happy to hear about, will serve to shut out precisely those people who most think for themselves. I leave aside the fact that social intolerance itself produces a shrivelled, ugly state of soul; this observation does not have to be argued on Sense Of Life Objectivists.
Throughout Ideas, Merrill seems so absolutely certain that he knows the obvious truth that he does not need to actually argue it. This is Platonism, specifically the product of a view of science as primarily the construction of an eternal pyramid of iron we will all look up to in its completed answers, rather than essentially the study of nature as a mode of life based in the independence of intellectual pleasure. He models philosophy similarly, looking at philosophy as a means to trap answers in resin, and ends up choking off the passions for both experiments in living and experiments in thought in fideity to the truth he has seen.
But he doesn't have The Truth, and in his broadsides against the skeptic-subjectivist-relativist axis of philosophy manages to near-completely absorb the models and methods of the intrinsicist, classical 'objectivist' quadrant. True, he defends his convictions by reason rather than authority, but his top down, imperial method of looking at truth is solidly modelled on the establishment of catholic (the term means 'universal') canons. He looks forward to the day when all people, not necessarily well schooled in the alternatives or curious about them, have studied just enough philosophy to look up to the mountaintop where, in the 20th century, the Eternal Truth was finally discovered for all time and made manifest, and there, history will stop. The inventions may keep pouring out of the laboratories, the GNP may continue to increase, the quanta of knowledge may become more fine and detailed, but philosophy can close up shop, save for occasional decorations to the axiomatic pyramid.
"We have met the enemy, and it is us."
It is precisely because a Ron Merrill can indulge in such visions while treating Plato as superstition that we need a firm grounding in books which show us the essential human alternatives. Plato may in some sense remain as enemy, but without a sympathetic understanding of the best of our enemies, we will not recognize ourselves.
'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a
star?'- so asks the last man, and he blinks.
The Earth has become small, and on it hops the last
man, who makes everything small. His species is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.
'We have discovered happiness'- say the last men, and they blink.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
my regards,
Jeanine Ring 
stand forth!
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