RoR: Forum

Craig Biddle, who is a fantastic teacher and writer, also posted this last week:

Here

I want to persuade people from their bad ideas, not insult them into giving them up.

Post 1

Sunday, November 17, 2013 - 7:00pm

I know that it is disheartening to see them waste their time and effort. It is theirs to waste.

At some level, Ideas just do not matter. What I mean is, no Manifesto launched the Renaissance. If you need documents, they would be the poems of Petrarch and Dante's trilogy - works of art, not politics. Pericles's "Funeral Oration" was delivered in 431 BCE, seventy years - two full generations - after the founding of the democracy it praised. Ideas do matter, but those are often unstated and accepted long before they are enunciated and argued.

The next American revolution will implicitly accept the Objectivist ethos of self-interest, reason, and reality... even as these ideologues squabble among themselves over what that revolution really means. And very few people will actually perceive and acknowledge that Objectivist substrate. Even so, the external events will be self-evident.

The failure of Obamacare is the pivotal moment, but it has nothing to do with us arguing about rights. Ayn Rand explained why evil is impotent, why the muscle-mystics must fail. They thought (if "thought" is the right word) that by possessing computers, they would have the power to create a healthcare insurance management system for the nation. Meanwhile, Edward Snowden used social engineering to trick 20 to 25 NSA workers in Hawaii into giving him their usernames and passwords, by telling them that he needed those for system maintenance.

The disappointing aspect of this argument over rights is that none of them has actually written a body of law based on their theory. They certainly have not adjudicated any contract disputes based on their ideas. They are like Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: "There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them." When the dust settles, they will argue over who should get credit for the new renaissance.

Post 2

Monday, November 18, 2013 - 5:11pm

Thanks for post this, Tres.

I don't want to address Craig Biddle's points, or even how he made them -- so I will stick to addressing Mike's points:

Mike,

At some level, Ideas just do not matter. What I mean is, no Manifesto launched the Renaissance. If you need documents, they would be the poems of Petrarch and Dante's trilogy - works of art, not politics.

Ideas don't move mountains, people (with ideas) do. Contrast this against animals, who never move mountains. But I still think I get what you are saying: The explicit communication or transference, if you will, of explicit ideas has rarely, if ever, altered the course of history. If that is what you are saying, then fine, but that applies to the past and not necessarily to today. Also, if you would not sign-on to my double-explicit re-interpretation of your words, then I would ask you: What -- on the level you are intending -- matters? If you say that it is emotions that matter, and that the emotions of people are what it is that launched the Renaissance, then I will ask you where those emotions came from. Now emotions can come from anywhere (such as the emotion of being startled by a loud sound), but the emotions preceding the Renaissance did not. Instead, they came from ... ideas.

Again, I'm pretty sure you would sign-on to my double-explicit re-interpretation, because you then said:

Ideas do matter, but those are often unstated and accepted long before they are enunciated and argued.

... and I cannot disagree with that, as long as, again, we are talking about the past. It's kind of unfair to bring up history, because none of our ancestors had the tools -- the tools for the initiation and propagation of ideas -- that we have today.

The next American revolution will implicitly accept the Objectivist ethos of self-interest, reason, and reality...

Again, I cannot disagree with that.

The disappointing aspect of this argument over rights is that none of them has actually written a body of law based on their theory.

That sounds like a formidable, but valuable, task!

Ed

Post 3

Monday, November 18, 2013 - 6:31pm

At some level, Ideas just do not matter. What I mean is, no Manifesto launched the Renaissance. If you need documents, they would be the poems of Petrarch and Dante's trilogy - works of art, not politics.

Its possible to make nearly any statement technically true by qualifying it with "at some level." But strip that qualifier away and it is clearly a false statement. Politics can't exist without ideas. And written art that isn't based upon ideas (e.g., values) isn't art - just gibberish. And, apart from the fact that ideas do matter, that sentence has a rather slippery grasp of it's subject. It segues from "ideas" to a "manifesto" to "documents."

We can look at ideas in many ways. They require a mind to create them, of course. And those more fundamental ideas - those ideas of importance - should be credited to their creator because if the idea hadn't been conceived in the first place, it wouldn't be there to be learned, to inspire, and to be implemented. The time lag between that first discovery and full implementation is partially a product of technology (printing presses made things faster - so, contrary to that statement, the Renaissance was, partly, a product of documents - they printed rather than hand-copied document). But mostly the time lag is a product of societies intellectual inertia and that's the reasons that the more fundamental ideas spread and take effect over generations, not mere years.

Documents (and a manifesto is a kind of document) are just ideas on paper (or files). And I doubt that any great social or political awakening ever occurred without documents, if for no other purpose than to spread the ideas they contain. And it is those ideas, setting fire to men's emotions and driving the change. Every change of real magnitude is traceable to some thinker, usually dead by the time his ideas find successful implementation. At all of the levels that matter, ideas do matter.

Post 4

Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - 11:07am

Right, Ed! You can debate all kinds of unreal ideas, and we have for many years. How to propitiate angels, spirits, demons, and gods was once the discussion. A hundred years ago, German university professors argued Kant versus Hegel. Ideas per se do not matter: the RIGHT ideas do.

In this case, Craig Biddle is correct. (See his essay on Ayn Rand's theory of rights that was linked in the article under discussion.) But he was also correct in his sarcastic comment that it does not matter which theory of rights underpins the libertarian agenda. What matters is that people identify the rights they do have, and the reasons why the government must not violate them. The rest is for philosophers today and jurists tomorrow, when someone sues to stop a satellite from passing overhead, or tunneling a mine under their homestead.

In truth, the coming failure of Obamacare is the thread that will unravel the omnipresent state.

The Renaissance began with two men: Petrarch and Dante. They scoured monasteries looking for lost manuscripts. The Divina Commedia was written in Italian, not Latin; and the Guide was Virgil, a pagan. The vibrant paintings that were placed in churches were considered obscene for their worldliness. But no manifesto defended those paintings. They spoke for themselves in a different language entirely. No one in 1300 said, "We will glorify man; and here are the reasons why." But that is what they did. The so-called ideology of the Renaissance was expressed hundreds of years later during the Enlightenment by the French encyclopedists.

So, too, does the proposed "rebirth of capitalism" actually promise something totally unexpected and unpredicted today. I think that DMG's transhumanist ideas are closer to the norms of the year 2050.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 11/20, 12:15pm)

Post 5

Thursday, November 21, 2013 - 5:40pm