Theodore Dalrymple, discussing academic British anti-Semitism, thinks so. I’m not so sure. Dalrymple says, “Socialist and anti-Semite alike seek an all-encompassing explanation of the imperfection of the world, and for the persistence of poverty and injustice: and each thinks he has found an answer.” Well, all-encompassing explanations are pretty popular all over the spectrum; I myself spend half my waking hours looking for them. Evangelical Christians find theirs in godlessness, and my friends the Objectivists find theirs in altruism.

Dalrymple continues, “The liberal intellectual who laments the predominance of dead white males in the college syllabus or the lack of minority representation in the judiciary uses fundamentally the same argument as the anti-Semite who objects to the prominence of Jews in the arts, sciences, professions, and in commerce. They both assume that something must be amiss a conspiracy if any human group is over- or under-represented in any human activity, achievement, or institution.” The same objection to Jewish prominence also manifests as good old-fashioned envy, which drives resentment politics both left and right. Genteel academic anti-Semitism is the poison of choice in Britain, whereas in America there’s a long tradition of vulgar backwoods Jew-hating of the Ku Klux Klan/Father Coughlin variety. (Pat Buchanan is the latest lightning rod for this sort of thing.) In short, Dalrymple understates the cultural factors. But the piece is interesting.

Oh God. Do I sound like a liberal? Somebody please slap me.

As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.

A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.

The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone —
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.

And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.

–Emily Dickinson

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin Amis. Talk Miramax Books, 2002. 306 pp (small ones). $24.95.

Q: What do twenty million victims of Stalin’s Great Terror and Martin Amis’s sister have in common?

A: They’re dead.

And they both get a lot of ink in Martin Amis’s new book. And that’s about it. Wherein lies the problem. Amis keeps trying to explain the Great Terror, the largest mass slaughter of all time going away, in personal terms, when there’s really nothing personal about it. To begin with the obvious objection: Stalin’s policies were essentially a logical continuation of Lenin’s, yet the revolutionary atheist intellectual and the insecure ex-seminarian bureaucrat were not alike, personally, at all. Lenin veered off the strictly collectivist path with the New Economic Policy, but Stalin had his occasional zigs and zags as well, most notably in 1936-37, with a brief economic liberalization that he actually called “perestroika.” Stalinism is consolidated Leninism. Amis acknowledges this objection, once, in a footnote, without ever really answering it.

[Martin] Malia [author of The Soviet Tragedy]…dissents from [the view that nobody was keen on collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s, which Amis calls, mistakenly, “the consensus view”]; he sees Collectivization as structural to the Lenin-Stalin continuum, and he is eloquent. “For a Bolshevik party the real choice in 1929 was not between Stalin’s road and Bukharin’s; it was between doing approximately what Stalin did and giving up the whole Leninist enterprise.” The question remains: how approximately do we take the word “approximately”?

He loads the dice, but even here Malia wins on points.
Continue reading »

(Part 1 and Part 2.)

Someone who styles himself “Ragnar” (why, if it isn’t “Galt,” is it always “Ragnar”? why can’t I have a “Francisco” or a “Howard” or a “Hank” every once in a while?) took issue with my remarks about Objectivism and determinism as follows:

“I may be determined by my chemical makeup — and surely that is quite real — to believe certain things, but those beliefs can still be true or false…”

How do you know that? You were simply determined to believe that position just as the advocate of free-will was allegedly determined to believe in volition. Reality is obviously the way it is despite the beliefs of any particular subject. That has nothing to do with the Objectivist argument. That is a metaphysical point. The Objectivist position is that determinism is guilty of an epistemological contradiction — namely that determinism by its very nature makes it impossible to independently validate claims including the claim that determinism is true.

If determinism were true then all claims would be valid, i.e., determinism would be valid and so would free-will — claims that directly contradict each other. The fact that there are different, and mutually exhaustive claims, means that there was a mental process that has engaged in error. Error is only possible to a volitional being — its existence refutes the theory of determinism.

In sum, you have completely missed the point being made. Your argument is a total misunderstanding of the Objectivist position. Please read a little more carefully next time before you criticize. (Even if you disagree with the Objectivist position, please at least get right what you are disagreeing with.

His argument is wrong, but that isn’t what concerns me here. I want to discuss the style and tone of this post, not to pick on Ragnar, but because it exemplifies certain habits of thought and discourse. It is actually far more civil than what one usually encounters from Objectivists, but the tell-tale signs are there.

To begin with the end. The last paragraph consists, in its entirety, of the reiterated accusation that I completely missed the point, totally misunderstood, read carelessly, got it wrong. This is of course very bad manners, but it gets at something central to the Objecto-universe. Ragnar’s not just saying that my argument is fallacious. He’s saying that I would never dream of making such a silly argument if I only understood Objectivism properly.

Objectivists cannot admit what is obvious to the rest of the world, that it is possible for two reasonable people to understand each other perfectly, and still disagree. To understand Objectivism is to accept Objectivism. This bland certainty finds an outlet in official doctrine in Rand’s famous assertion that there are “no conflicts of interest among rational men”; and in the fiction, most ludicrously, when Rearden gives up his mistress Dagny in Atlas Shrugged because Galt, whom he recognizes as a superior being, comes along, and they all live happily ever after together in the gulch.

Now as to the whole business about epistemological (emphasis Ragnar’s) contradictions. There are certain talismans, magic words and phrases that Objectivists use to ward off argument, the way vampire-hunters use garlic and wolfbane. Anyone who was ever argued with an Objectivist will know what I mean. “Epistemological,” which is just a fancy word for “having to do with how we know things,” is one of these. It is obvious that all contradictions are “epistemological”: since a contradiction is a mental construct what else could they possibly be? But Objectivists are sure that everyone but them disbelieves in an objective reality independent of the perceiver, when about the last philosopher to maintain such a position was Bishop Berkeley, about 300 years ago, and even he wasn’t very serious. Therefore they are apt to emphasize their belief in an objective reality with pointless qualifiers like “epistemological,” and to assail their interlocutors with remarks like “A is A” and “existence exists.” There are even monstrous coinages like “psycho-epistemology” — which means “how one thinks.”

I imagine the experience must resemble arguing with a true-blue Marxist, although I’ve never had the pleasure. You ask him a simple question, like “what is a class, anyway?” and he probably tells you all about “the principle of distribution according to need” and “determining socioeconomic bases” but never quite gets round to answering you. It’s the same thing with Objectivists. Drives me crazy.

(Update: Billy Beck comments. “Epistemological” is a fine word. But “epistemological contradiction” has eleven syllables, and “contradiction” only four.)

Let’s suppose it does. Then what is a race, exactly? One might say it’s a group of people with common ancestry. Well, so is a family. How common, and how ancient? A snobbish Frenchman once remarked that Americans can amuse themselves endlessly trying to discover who their grandfather is, to which Mark Twain replied that Frenchmen can amuse themselves endlessly trying to discover who their father is. But almost all of us can amuse ourselves endlessly trying to discover who our great-great-great-grandfather was. If ancestry is the race-criterion, then it must be inferred, because it can’t be discovered.

We are then left with the question of which characteristics show race. One might think that all of them do, but some are always favored over others. Skin pigmentation is very popular, but why is that more a racial characteristic than, say, height? The Nazi race-theorists used to like eye color. In the late 19th century, the heyday of race theories, skull shape was all the rage. Dolichocephalic, or long-skulled people, were supposed to be the guardians of civilization, while the degenerate broad-skulled (brachycephalic) types were all radical politics and dirty fingernails.

And how many races are there? Three seems to be the standard answer these days — Negro, Caucasian, Asian — but why only three? What about the Arabs? the Italians? the Irish? Don’t we also have to distinguish the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes? Are there only races or are there sub-races as well? Race-theorists have given numbers ranging from two to two hundred. No logic dictates the choice. One might object that we don’t know exactly how many species there are either, yet we believe in the division. True; but once we get up to the level of families, or phyla, there is universal agreement among scientists. With race there is no agreement even at that level of granularity.

I am reminded of this by Andrew Sullivan’s excellent article on miscegenation. (I realize I am logically bound to deny that there is such a thing as miscegenation. I define it as marriage between people who identify themselves as belonging to different races.) The more intermarriage there is, the fewer obvious physical distinctions to latch onto, the more race-thinking is submerged. Tiger Woods, Sullivan points out, is a terrific antidote to race-thinking, partly because he pretty clearly has no race at all, but mostly because he refuses to identify himself racially or to align himself with any race causes.

Nations, cultures, religions — these things are real. But races are like witches. Witch-thinking disappeared not because cultural exchange programs convinced people that witches were nice people too, even if they did fornicate with Satan once in a while. It disappeared because people finally convinced themselves that witches don’t exist.

(Note on Sources: Mostly stolen from Jacques Barzun’s book Race: A Study in Superstition. He wrote it in 1937 and it is as relevant now as then. I would dig up a copy if I were you.)