 The Individual and the General in Our Lives
by Tibor R. Machan
Often people who speak out on various issues will do so as if they knew what is true about all of us. This is the source of all the "we" talk in public discourse. "We have such and such rights," "We need this or that vitamin or exercise or educational program." Medical science certainly weighs in with such pronouncements all the time, claiming that coffee is or is not healthful, that cholesterol must be lowered or a certain ratio of age to height to weight is right for everyone. (Read more...)
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Very Soft on Islamic Terrorism
by Tibor R. Machan
The New York Times magazine has a feature called "QUESTIONS FOR," and the other day it was "the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens," now named Yusuf Islam (as of his conversion to Islam), who was being questioned by Deborah Solomon. (Read more...)
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Assumptions of New Year's Resolutions
by Tibor R. Machan
So, often people think they are free of philosophical assumptions. Many think they are just practical people and look with some disparagement at the heavy thinkers, as if they were useless eggheads. Yet, all of us go around with various assumptions about the world which could use some exploration, analysis, and verification. (Read more...)
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Another Crazy FDR "Right"
by Tibor R. Machan
Over the last couple of years I have explored FDR’s Second Bill of Rights because recently some heavy hitters in politics and legal theory (e.g., Cass Sunstein) have made a point of championing these ultimately phony rights. With the Democrats back in power in Washington, it is not unreasonable to suppose that securing and expanding FDR’s list of rights—as distinct from those laid out by the American founders in the Declaration of Independence—will once again dominate the federal government’s agenda. Not that Republicans put up much of a fight against the Democrats but the Republicans' version of statism focuses less on wealth redistribution and more on soul craft. (Read more...)
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Anti-Individualism, Conservative Style
by Tibor R. Machan
Just to keep matters in balance, let me point out that although it is mostly the Left that hates individualism—remember, socialism means that we, humanity, are all just one organism—the Right’s hostility toward it is no less virulent. Just recall that both Hitler and Stalin hated individualism, in any of its varieties. American individualism, one that stresses the independent judgment of human beings—not their alleged and, not surprisingly, ridiculous, fictional independent or self-sufficient existence—does not suit either the Left or the Right, including some fairly powerful voices among American conservatives. Just consider the blurb peddling one currently rising conservative’s recent book, Peter Augustine Lawler’s Stuck With Virtue, The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future. “These insightful, provocative essays critique what the author sees as America’s ever-increasing individualistic habits and attitudes, centered on a view of the individual as self-sufficient and unencumbered.” As if that is what American individualism were about. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
December 20, 2006 |
Bad Arguments For And Against Liberty
by Tibor R. Machan
In his December 18th guest column for The New York Times, Orlando Patterson of Harvard University lays in on George W. Bush and his neo-conservative pals for misguidedly pushing Western style liberalism on Iraqis. The gist of his point is that Bush believes that liberty is "written in our hearts," something supposedly learned from John Locke, and that simply is false. (Read more...)
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General Pinochet-Some Lessons
by Tibor R. Machan
It is interesting just how real politics works. When the chips are down, we can often detect from little gestures and moves where people really stand on basic issues. When General Pinochet died the other day, there was not a great deal of discussion about him and those that did appear tended to make a lot out of his having been supported by the American CIA when he overthrew the regime of Salvador Allende. Now for my money if it took the CIA to do this, it could well be to its credit, even though technically Chile was a so called sovereign country and Allende a sovereign leader (or ruler!). (Read more...)
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Reductionism, Science and Reason
by Tibor R. Machan
Some natural scientists who like to philosophize prefer the doctrine of reductionism as their philosophical position. This view is that everything in reality is but one kind of thing—there are no real differences, only apparent ones. So, for example, even though it seems like music is different from airline travel, or mice are different from giraffes, or again that a Rembrandt painting is different from the contents of one's trash can, by the reductionist account all these things are the same—atoms, or strings or, to quote a famous passage from All the King's Men, dirt: (Read more...)
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Wednesday
November 29, 2006 |
 Rand and Ethical Objectivity
by Tibor R. Machan
This is a short discussion of an issue that arises in Objectivist meta-ethics, that is to say, the foundation of ethics according to Ayn Rand. It is an attempt to quite briefly but accurately show why Rand believed that ethical knowledge is objective, that human beings can know what is morally right and wrong. (Read more...)
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The Temptation to Lie
by Tibor R. Machan
Have you noticed that when you ask someone on the street where the next post office or drug store or some other locally known place is, they usually tell you it's just a couple of blocks when in fact it is a lot farther than that? Or when someone tells you she will be there in a few minutes and then you wait for half an hour and she is still missing? Or when you are told on the phone 'May I put you on hold for a moment?' and you are still waiting ten minutes later? (Read more...)
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Wednesday
November 15, 2006 |
Two kinds of Stereotyping
by Tibor R. Machan
Now and then people will characterize groups in various ways. Some of this is clearly prejudice—as when one ascribes to blacks, whites, women, those from Poland, or Latin Americans certain moral attributes which some of those from these groups may exhibit but which are certainly not innate to all members of the group. Thinking that all Mexicans are lazy or that Germans are by nature methodical or, again, that Americans are phlegmatic would be such prejudice. These are traits of individuals and while some in these groups may have them, many clearly do not. One needs to see if the ascription is justified instead of making it just because someone is a member of the group. One is, to put it somewhat differently, not morally good or bad because one is born black or Australian or Chinese. One is good or bad as a result of one's own judgments and actions. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
November 8, 2006 |
Can One Respect the Police?
by Tibor R. Machan
It began with the Orange County ordinance authorizing police to stop teens from smoking in public places. One of my children asked me, who are these people to tell them whether they may smoke? Isn’t that the job of parents? Don’t the cops have kidnappers, rapists, murderers, and robbers to deal with? Is it really their role in our lives to order us to stop smoking?
(Read more...)
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Government School Follies
by Tibor R. Machan
France, England, Germany, and who knows which other countries are in deep doo-doo because of the impossibility of supporting both multiculturalism and state school policies. (Read more...)
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Respect our Enemies - Why?
by Tibor R. Machan
Freeman Dyson, who is a famous physicist and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University, wrote the following lines in The New York Review of Books that are, in my view, worth reflecting upon: (Read more...)
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One Size Fits All Revisited
by Tibor R. Machan
Outside of politics, the place where the one size fits all approach is most tempting would be the family. Parents are often eager to urge their own tastes and preferences on their children, confusing these with the basic values, virtues and principles they do need to teach them. (Read more...)
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Two Cheers for the Welches
by Tibor R. Machan
In their BusinessWeek column of October 9, 2006, Suzy and Jack Welch make a valiant effort to debunk the stakeholder theory of corporate ethics. This is the view that managers do not owe service first and foremost to shareholders or owners of a company but, rather, to anyone who has an "interest" in the company's activities. The idea has also been dubbed the CSR thesis, whereby the first duty of business managers is their so-called "corporate social responsibility." (Read more...)
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Thursday
September 28, 2006 |
Religion and the Public Square
by Tibor R. Machan
A wonderful aspect of a free, capitalist society is that nearly everything is privately owned. That applies to churches -- they are owned by the order, such as Roman Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Moonies, Muslims, Hindus, and all the some 4200 different religious groups (that's the number of how many different religious groups exist in the USA now [http://www.adherents.com/]) -- or by their congregations. Because a free society has no state religion, various religious groups are not involved in politically squaring off against one another. Sure, there are some political aspects of some religious orders, but in the main their affairs are left to the social and private realms of our lives. (Read more...)
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Arabs’ Handling of Dissent
by Tibor R. Machan
It is interesting to notice, by the way, that here is where the Marxist-Leninist Left is very close to the radical Muslims. They, too, make everything political, everything subject to a physical conflict, to coercion. (Read more...)
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"Progressives" Aren't Progressive
by Tibor R. Machan
At my university I was sitting at one interminably long meeting where sadly much time is wasted and little gets done. But during one of the discussions the person who was the leader made the point that there are faculty members of different political persuasion (a piece of vital information we all needed to be provided) and divided them into two groups, conservative and progressive. By this was meant something simply descriptive and showing not kind of bias at all. (Read more...)
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Thursday
September 7, 2006 |
Demeaning Work?
by Tibor R. Machan
So my CBS TV morning news program reports that whereas on average Americans take 10 days vacation per year, the Germans, French, Italians and other Europeans are up there with 25 days or near it. OK, so what? The report suggests one interpretation of these data: Americans cannot relax, while Europeans can. Americans are workaholics, while Europeans have a more sensible approach to work. (Read more...)
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The Mid East Crisis
by Tibor R. Machan
When the Hizbullah initially kidnapped the Israeli soldiers, the event that seems to have sparked the current crisis, I was traveling in Europe with only the International Herald Tribune, CNN, BBC and some German newscasts available to keep me up to snuff. I also had a chance to talk with several people from the region itself. (Read more...)
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Wishful Thinking From Mr. Lind
by Tibor R. Machan
In the August 16th issue of the Financial Times Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The American Way of Strategy (OUP, October 2006), penned a piece titled "The Unmourned End of Libertarian Politics." Immediately you could tell something fishy is going to be presented to you here because it is one of the most obvious facts of recent American politics that the libertarians have had hardly any role in it. (Read more...)
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It Begins with the Poor and Sick
by Tibor R. Machan
The story about the plastic saxophone illustrates very nicely, though, just how readily those in government abandon a commitment to confining their activism to helping those in dire straits. (Read more...)
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Hazards of Ethnicity
by Tibor R. Machan
One favorite way of attempting to understand people is by reference to their ethnicity—"Oh, well, now I understand—she comes from Italy (or India, Kentucky, New York or Rumania, you name the place)." Many books address this issue and one Nobel Laureate in literature, the Indian novelist V. S. Naipaul, is famous for dealing with it in nearly all of his works—see, for example, his recent novel Magic Seeds. Another Nobel Laureate, this time in economics, namely Amartya Sen—also of Indian origins—has also addressed the issue in several works, including his short book, Reason Before Identity. (Read more...)
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Another Blunder at "Public" Schools
by Tibor R. Machan
This is another wonderful—or, actually, horrible—case where the true culprit is not being identified in the major media or even by the interested parties. (Read more...)
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