Here I have to digress a bit.
I'm obsessed w/ author R.F. Laird, in much the same way Ayn Rand's admirers are obsessed w/ her, being too dazzled by her innovations to be sufficiently critical of her**. But like Rand, the weight and scope of Robert's insights into the ticking guts of life is worth going crazy over at first. Not to fawn, but it's close to how it must have been to have cared about thinking during that long lull between Aristotle and anyone else, where his contribution to cognition is such an impressive leap forward his contemporaries can be forgiven for not seeing the flaws in his system for a long while.
Case in point, from the book of Swarthmorons (get it?) in The Boomer Bible, chapter 35:
You will find that this first rule of the academic path makes all your scholarship marvelously easy and simple,Among other things, TBB is a study in contrast. Once upon a time not long ago, the regular bible was, front to back, what we believed about we came to be, how we were supposed to regard right & wrong, how an ideal man could behave, and so on. Laird got to wondering what a bible of our current beliefs would look like, and by and by, a starkly different sort of holy book took shape.
2 Because there will be no dilemmas to deal with,
3 No difficult decisions to make,
4 And no analysis needed
5 For any question you may wish to inquire into,
6 Just look for the Others in the vicinity of your question,
7 And develop your positions and arguments accordingly,
8 Without thinking about it at all.
9 and if one set of Others comes into conflict with another set of others,
10 Rest assured that right is always on the side of the Others who are less white,
11 Less male,
12 Less western,
13 And less advanced technologically. [EA]
Aren't the above verses a perfect description of how we choose sides in matters of global conflict? And not just when two "Others" are fighting. David Horowitz mentions the contribution of a leading intellectual during the Vietnam war:
Meanwhile, Sartre, a consummate sophist, attempted to solve the problem in advance by declaring that the Communists were by definition incapable of committing war crimes: "I refuse to place in the same category the actions of an organization of poor peasants... and those of an immense army backed by a highly industrialized country." [EA]
We can get away w/ this haughty morality for only so much longer. There's a sizable chunk of Islam doing their damndest (and gaining momentum) to replace our (admittedly flawed) civilization w/ a barbarous (literally, not pejoratively), shittier system of law and government. Unlike our throwback religious idiots, their fundamentalist D-Bags are willing and eager to kill. What are we going to do about them? Nuking their culture off the face of the earth isn't an option. Neither is letting them be, as 9/11 and the Cartoon Wars**** demonstrated. What are we going to do w/ this large group of fanatical (again, literally, not as in "crazed"), hair-trigger murderers? What solution could there be?
Did I ever tell you my old idea for the Flush Islam blog? Each day I'd read a few pieces of the Koran, use them as toilet paper, and write a running commentary on what I'd read and what I'd thought of it. I'd play the commentary straight, leaving the bitter snark to the photos of soiled Koran pages that would accompany each entry.
The point of such a cruel insult? Twofold. To vent my frustration at our unwillingness to acknowledge and literally depict what I saw as the incontrovertible shitiness of Islam, and to demonstrate that shitiness by showing that Muslims can't behave properly when insulted and therefore should be regarded as something near dangerous children and treated appropriately; hence "Flush"***** (see 3).
It's a good thing I never started that blog. Only very recently have I figured out that making the cruel point isn't a bit as worthwhile as comprehending a problem well enough to know what to do about it and how, and if I had figured that out somewhere near "Houd"... wiping your ass w/ the Koran is a tough gesture to take back.
*Wikipedia and Google say it was 60 Minutes II that broke the scandal, which isn't how I remember it. I could be wrong.
**Whether you agree w/ whatever you've heard about her, Ayn Rand was hella smart, and right hella more often than she was wrong.
Commonly, she'd be (broadly) right in her premises and (basically) wrong in the extrapolations of those premises she'd use as examples or elaborations. From Wikipedia, here's a good summary of her philosophy of art:
The Objectivist theory of art flows fairly directly from its epistemology, by way of "psycho-epistemology" (Objectivism's term for the study of human cognition as it involves interactions between the conscious and the subconscious mind). Art, according to Objectivism, serves a human cognitive need: it allows human beings to grasp concepts as though they were percepts.
Objectivism defines "art" as a "selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments" — that is, according to what the artist believes to be ultimately true and important about the nature of reality and humanity. In this respect Objectivism regards art as a way of presenting abstractions concretely, in perceptual form.
I'd add a couple minor qualifiers, such as broadening the pyramid of acceptable topics going up to the "romantic realism" capstone, but at it's core that's the best definition of art I've come across; certainly the most useful, even if it doesn't pinpoint exactly what we sort of mean in the back of our heads when we typically talk about "art". In Objectivism, art is relaying ideas and telling stories about life. Sold.But look how overly narrow she is w/ this specification:
Photography, for example, is invalid to her (qua art form) because a camera merely records the world exactly as it is and has very limited, if any, capacity to carry a moral message beyond the photographer's choice of subject matter.
Whoa, chief. You could argue successfully that a photographer is afforded, in that work, less opportunity for creative artistry, and his work is less art-as-such to whatever degree it's documentarian (which it can't help but be at least somewhat), but to say that limitation invalidates it as art...? 'Fraid that's pure error, Ayn. Like you gave it a little extra enthusiastic push of emphasis that ruined it, like a soup w/ just too much salt. And because of her initial concept of art, and a thousand other genius reconceptions, her more adoring fans can't bring themselves to look at where her philosophy frays.
***Horowitz continues: "Of course, the NLF-the 'organization of poor peasants' to which Sartre referred was created by the Hanoi regime, whose own army, supplied with high-tech weapons by the Russians and the Chinese, was America's main opponent in the south." [EA]
****Here's an existential brainmine for you: Of all the possible histories, we live in a timeline where one can write the phrase "Cartoon Wars" w/ a straight face.
*****Thinking about it, I would have thought to work in "flush" in the sense of "square up", as in "how can we square Islam up w/ the rest of the world in peace?", as the blog progressed.
