Searching for a Musical Voice of My Own

Searching for A Musical Voice of My Own

More Thoughts on What Matters in Music?

And on What is There to Sing About?

Eric Paul Nolte

A couple musical matters have been on my mind recently. 

One is the question that dogs me now: what is there to sing about? This moved me to write an essay recently, but I have more to say. 

Also I've been thinking again about M. Zachary Johnson's Dancing With the Muses, and how, from my experience of working at music for many years, I feel that Johnson illuminates and integrates many matters that, for me, were stuck in a rather murky state. What really matters in music? I especially appreciate Johnson's explication of Rameau's wooly-headed but portentous, dire and cognitively destructive attempt to begin a student's musical education with instruction in four-part harmony, long before there has been any discussion of the more fundamental matters bearing on melody. This is like trying to learn algebra without knowing arithmetic or how to handle common fractions. Rameau's book was published in 1722 and its message of beginning music theory with learning four part harmony has dominated music pedagogy ever since.

It has personally taken me years to sort out my grasp of harmony and counterpoint, and truly begin to figure out what I believe matters most in music.

While I was genetically doomed to be musical, given that my parents were accomplished symphony string players who set me to playing the violin and the piano at five, I did not work very hard at music as a child, and the music bug never bit me until I was in my mid-twenties. At that point I contracted a virulent case of it. 

In my late twenties, after the Army, I had been a pilot for two wobbly commuter airlines, and when the last one of these went bust, I went back to school, enrolling at New College of Florida, at Sarasota.

Arriving at New College, I knew I wanted to study music, but I had it in mind that I was a musical failure because I had flunked out of the North Carolina School of the Arts as a piano major, a few years before. 

(Footnote: all right, in fairness, I did very well during my first semester at NCSA. I studied with Marjorie Mitchell, learned a Beethoven piano sonata in E, Opus 14 Number 1, which I performed in master class with Claude Frank, and a Mozart piano concerto in A, K.414, which I also performed in master class. Neither of these were huge virtuoso knuckle busters, but they were hard enough. Then at the start of the second semester, my draft board wrote me to say, in essence, "Boy, you know that college deferment we gave you? No more. We'll kindly let you finish out the year in which you're enrolled, but this is to remind you that your ass belongs to us, and we expect you to present it to us at your local induction center in June!" Thereafter I was incapable of so much as cracking a book. I even flunked piano. Eight years later I was admitted to New College on academic probation.)

So, at New College I wanted to study the psychology of what makes it possible to learn how to make music at a high level. This was maybe a self-deluding strategy for trying to get around my own perceived failure at music.

What I found instead was Gray Perry, then an 83 year old concert pianist and pedagogue extraordinaire, who had a musical pedigree that on one side went back to Beethoven, and on another side went back to Chopin. Gray had studied in Paris in the 1920s, at the American Conservatory at Fontainbleau, where Nadia Boulanger taught.

I went to Gray because I'd made friends with one of his students who suggested that I approach him. When I told Gray that I thought I was a musical failure but that I still wanted to study piano, he listened to me play for a while, and then he gently growled at me, "Son, you're not a musical failure. You don't know enough to be a musical failure!"

I was taken aback until Gray continued and said, "Now... here is how you can go about mastering this thorny figure in this little etude by LeCouppey...." What he meant to say was a kind nudge in the right direction and to point out that I simply had not worked long and intelligently enough to know what kind of goods I might have!

Gray gave me a stunning insight that amounted to a profound shift in focus. Where I had felt paralyzed by doubt about if I could learn to play the piano at a high level, Gray blew away my cloud of doubt with a much better question: don't ask if you can do something, instead ask how do you do it? How can I figure it out? How to unravel a knot? How to take a problem apart and put it back together? And the answers were forthcoming. Gray gave me a tool kit full of powerful ideas on how to build one's powers at music, intellectually and physically. 

Gray was the only piano teacher I had ever known to speak with depth and sophistication about the problems of piano technique and how to develop it. He brought with him a sensibility of music steeped in the golden tone and long line of melody and structure, purveyed during the golden age of such piano virtuosi as Rachmaninoff, Josef and Rosina Lhevinne, Joseph Hoffman, Artur Rubinstein, etc. I studied with Gray for three years and progressed enough to learn, for example, a few of the Chopin Etudes. He was a dear soul to me and taught me so much that was wonderful! He very kindly always made me his last student on my lesson day, and while he only charged me for an hour, he always gave me twice that and often more! He was the closest thing to a mentor I ever had, and I was bereft at his loss so soon after I left New College.

Marc Silverman, also a student of Gray's and another graduate of New College, who went on to become chairman of the piano faculty at the Manhattan School of Music, told me that Gray was the only teacher he ever knew who spoke so effectively about piano technique. All the other teachers were "expression coaches."

My theory and composition teacher at New College was the late Ron Riddle, a curious and wonderful combination of things. He was a serious-minded composer, a jazz pianist who had studied with Oscar Peterson, and an ethnomusicologist who studied with Bruno Nettl at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Ron had become a specialist in Chinese opera, if you can fathom this vocal taste that screws the voice into the sound of something like mating cats in a dark alley in Beijing. But Ron was an excellent teacher, and at New College all my classes with him were tutorials or small group tutorials in which Ron himself played and commented on every note I wrote! This intense attention was illuminating. He taught harmony from Roger Sessions' Harmonic Practice, the Bach chorales, and species counterpoint from Knut Jeppesen's book. We studied modal counterpoint, then tonal counterpoint, leading up to fugue writing and analysis. In short, I came by something like Johann Joseph Fux's perspective on learning music, and this helped me to find my way to the beginnings of a voice of my own.

However, I always felt that I was missing something, so some years later I began running laps through other harmony and counterpoint textbooks, including those by Walter Piston and even Arnold Schoenberg's book on harmony, which I found surprisingly thorough. I seriously worked through every page and exercise in Hindemith's books on harmony and his Elementary Training for Musicians (which was vastly more comprehensive than its title might suggest.)

But I felt that I still needed something more. At the time, I felt that Hindemith's book on harmony was the best of the lot, but the man simply did not believe in this harmony of the common practice period, the harmony he taught in his book. He felt that this conventional formulation of harmony and tonality was obsolete. He had deep ideas of his own, which he explained at length in his books on The Craft of Musical Composition. But what I liked about Hindemith's book on harmony was that it was written by a deeply accomplished and original composer who brought a composer's sensibility and perspective on what he chose to include and call important.  

Still I felt that what I needed was the work of another accomplished composer who seriously believed in tonality, so I turned then to the books by Tchaikovsky, which I found surprisingly derivative and lacking, and finally to the one by Rimsky-Korsakov, which I liked very much.

One book that saved my sanity, early on, in an age in which the whole world seemed to have fallen off a cliff, was Henry Pleasants' Serious Music and All That Jazz. Pleasants asserts that serious art music of the 20th century had become something of an aesthetic train wreck, far removed from the ability of audiences to grasp or love it. The composers of serious art music had become effete, inbred, and haughtily wrote only for each other, not for the regular audiences of classical music. He believed that jazz had become the only voice of truly serious music in the 20th century, and while I did not agree with this assertion, his book nevertheless helped me to feel more confidence in my own voice and my own ability to make good judgments about music.  

When I moved to New York after New College of Florida, I spent two years studying at (what was then) the New School for Social Research, in the workshop of Aaron Frankel, author of Writing the Broadway Musical. I was paired off with a collaborator, John Benedict, the editor at Norton who created the various Norton anthologies of literature. John wrote the book and lyrics for a children's show about an adolescent niece he dreamed up for Sherlock Holmes. She yearns for exciting adventures of her own, like those of her illustrious uncle, but falls into deeper and deeper trouble before she eventually pulls herself out of the fire. Sadly, John died after we had written a couple dozen songs, and all my work there made its way into yet another one of my portfolios of musical orphans. 

(Footnote: I rewrote some of these pieces, echoing Mendelssohn's title, Songs Without Words, as my own "Songs Shorn of Words," and I transcribed some of these pieces for brass quintet because I had a friend who played in one. Speaking of my portfolios of musical orphans, I also have the sad remains of an hour's worth of music for an orchestral score I wrote for the offbeat, feature length film created by Jonathan Sherer, who was then a young, recent graduate of the School of Visual Design. The project died when he ran out of money in post production.)

Where Henry Pleasants' work stimulated me to think about the weird direction that musical composition had taken in the 20th century, Ayn Rand's work introduced me to some foundational philosophical ideas that allowed me to begin to make sense of the crazy aesthetics of modern art in general. While Rand did not write very much about music per se, her thinking about philosophy in general, and aesthetics in particular, gave me some tools with which I could begin to have a deeper understanding of how and why we got the serialism of Schoenberg and the aleatory music of John Cage, et al. Pleasants and Rand's works helped me to develop more intellectual independence and confidence to judge the musical ideas I came across.

So I come back to Johnson's book again. Dancing with the Muses shines a strong and intelligent light on what is truly important in music. I have come to feel that I can see more clearly than ever before what deeply matters in music, why it matters, and how, in the last century, so much music by so many otherwise talented but misguided composers came to be so ugly and nihilistic! In this regard, once again, let me praise Stephen R. C. Hicks' illuminating and important essay on "Why Art Became Ugly."

Johnson's discussion of the importance of melody above that of harmony makes the very important point that melody, or line, has primacy in music because it comes first, developmentally, or psychologically, and harmony emerges from the interplay of simultaneous voices, or lines, or melodies. Melody is the horizontal line which, when played together with more than one line, creates the vertical dimension of harmony.

Notwithstanding this primacy of melody, I come back to the idea that since the publication in 1722 of Rameau's Treatise on Harmony, it is Rameau's view that dominates the teaching of music theory.

  
Now, knowing that Rameau admired Descarte's rationalism, we are not surprised to see that Rameau begins with some mathematical formulas and somewhat arbitrary axioms and proceeds deductively to spin out implications that are deaf to inductive experience and blind to observation.  

If you've read David Harriman's book, The Logical Leap, on the matter of inductive inference in physics and philosophy, you would know of Descartes' disastrous book on physics, which was an exercise in rationalistically spinning out the implications of crazy, arbitrary axioms he dreamed up, divorced from observation and experience, with results that are as similarly misguided as Rameau's theory that teaches the primacy of harmony in four parts before teaching melody. Indeed, as a matter of theoretical system, he teaches in Part One of his 1722  (which is the deep theoretical and mathematical section) he teaches that melody is derived from harmony. Tell that to all the peoples of the world, whose music everywhere begins with melody and nowhere develops anything like a system of animated harmony, except for the music of Europe, and there only beginning around 500 years ago! (Well, okay, to be completely accurate, there have been some cultures around the world who have employed the occasional drone of two steady tones like the interval of a fifth or a fourth.)

Manfred Clynes' work comes to mind here too. I've mentioned him before, but his conclusion about the nature of music, reached after decades of scientific inquiry, is worth saying again. Clynes is a neurosurgeon, an ethnomusicologist, and a concert pianist (if you can wrap your mind around all those accomplishments!) who has done research into the music of many of the far-flung peoples of the world. You will not be astonished to learn of Clynes' conclusion from these studies.  

Clynes found that, yes, there are vast differences between the music of all these peoples, differences in such elements as the choice of vocal timbre and in the particular division of the octave into their scales, but whether the scale is divided into five, or six, or more notes, these tones are invariably chosen from among the first several harmonics of the overtone series, and not by some artificial, rationalistic division. 

To the point here, Clynes' conclusions from studying all these peoples' music is twofold: 

The music of all the peoples of the world, prior to that of the 20th century's effete and pixilated academics (my pejorative adjectives, not Clynes...), is rooted in the physics of sound. 

The defining characteristic of music everywhere in the world is ... melody.  

Blessed melody! Surprise!  

Tell that to the gangsta rappers and the vulgar hip-hopsters!

*   *   *

Now, before I close up shop here, let me turn back to the question I posed in the subject line of my recent essay by the same title, namely:

What is there to sing about?

In some profound way, I owe this question to my wife, Terri, who, once upon a time made her way through the lesser diva circles as a soprano in New York City, singing many leading roles with lesser companies. Her name then was Teresa Hoover. She won a couple big, international opera competitions, one of which, that of the Center for Contemporary Opera rewarded her in 1990 with a full solo recital at the Weill recital hall at Carnegie Hall. On another occasion (as Josephine in a production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, HMS Pinafore at VLOG, the Village Light Opera Group, in 1989), she received a review from the New York Times's James Oestreich, who called her singing "excellent."

(Footnote: this production of HMS Pinafore at VLOG was infused and tweaked with a little original material written by Isaac Asimov--yes, that Asimov, the famous science fiction author--who was a big fan and supporter of the VLOG, and this production was actually billed as USS Pinafore.)

What is there to sing about?  It was Terri who opened me up to understanding the power of the human voice to drill down into the deepest core of our heart, soul, and mind. I'm a believer! Hallelujah! Hosannah! Well, of course, as a longtime student of Ayn Rand, to put it this way may sound perilously close to the unreasoning epistemology of faith, but I hasten to add that I try to believe nothing in the absence of evidence, and I try to hold all my beliefs in a context that is open to rational revision in the light of new evidence. 

(Footnote: yeah, yeah, ...  of course I know that not everything is available to revision, given the self-evidently axiomatic realm, where Rand points out how we find that the concepts of existence, identity, and consciousness are at the base of all knowledge, and, moreover, we find that these ideas are genuinely axiomatic because they show themselves to be impervious to rejection or revision, in that one must employ these concepts in any attempt to reject them.)

So, a few years ago my wife got me to audition for a 30 voice a cappella choir, Charis Chamber Voices, in Westchester County, then under the direction of Scott Turkington, with whom we sang for a couple years.  We performed a piece I wrote for them too. In recent years we've been singing with Collegium Westchester, Eric Kramer's lovely group, where my wife once sang the soprano solo with orchestra for Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. 

These experiences with vocal music and the daily presence of a glorious singer under my own roof at home have radically transformed my appreciation of what the human voice can do in song.

So, here it is, in short: I am devoting the rest of my life to writing vocal music.  My projects from now on will be shaped by this question of what there is to sing about.  

We live in a time that is largely pixilated by crazy aesthetics and driven into mental vertigo by incoherent philosophy. Ayn Rand's work gave me something even more important than the insight to dismiss the crazy aesthetics of Schoenberg's serialism and John Cage's aleatory music: her work gave me the power to begin to embrace my own vision, to hone and trust my own power of reason above that of any Authority (since who else is there to try to make sense of the claims of so many Authorities who are clamorously asserting contradictory and mutually exclusive propositions), and she led me to the wider philosophical, and specifically ethical conviction (and the arguments rooted in facts by which to defend the idea) that one's own happiness is of the most crucial importance to a human life. It is morally right, to pursue our own happiness. 

Happiness matters. And whether my music is good or bad is not the point. The point is that my study and practice of music bring me joy and contribute greatly to my sense of meaning and purpose in life. What greater possibility does an activity in life offer?

What the world needs now is reason, sweet reason! And song! But so much of what people find to sing about is neither exalted nor inspiring.

Not heavy metal music for me (although I would not sneer at you if this brings you joy) ... how about "heavy mental" music? (as Jana Stanfield, a motivational speaker/singer/songwriter, puts it... I don't know her music, but I love the term!)   

We have work to do, those of us who love the glorious power of the human voice rising in song with words and music, and I suspect that there are audiences hungry for work of a more exalted and uplifting nature than so much of what came to us in the dizzy 20th century!

E   P   N

2014.1223
revised 2015.0428

Reining-in My Contempt for the Bad Guys?

Reining-in My Contempt for the Bad Guys?

Eric Paul Nolte

I was looking through my blog recently and noticed the title of a piece I wrote right after the presidential election of 2012, "Welcome to Looter-Moocher Land!" You may have noticed that the essay I just wrote, asking for whom one should vote in the mid-term elections, is clearly not the only place I hurl such ugly epithets at people.

I felt a little breeze of regret blowing past my face, that I would stoop to such name calling, but I came to my senses soon enough...

From my frequent denunciations of what I believe are bad ideas and actions purveyed by the bad guys I see in the world, one would never guess that I was reared in the Unitarian Church, where the first of their seven essential principles affirms their deep belief in "the inherent dignity and worth of every person."

(Footnote: Imagine a whole theology that can be published on a card the size of a book mark!)

There is a certain unwitting hypocrisy in this well intentioned Unitarian Universalist principle because they do single out for special castigation a whole class of people: social conservatives who campaign against abortion and gay marriage. While I too condemn social conservatives for those beliefs, this is not the point. The point is that the UUs uphold as their cardinal belief a principle that they do not practice, and I dare say should not be practiced.

I believe it is right to condemn those people who act on crazy ideas and do horrible things in the world. 

I do not believe it is right to attempt to be non-judgmental, and if one looks at their actions, neither do the UUs who say otherwise.

Maybe we should say it is right to be slow to judge. We certainly want to rein-in our confirmation bias! We surely want to rein-in this terrible tendency of all human beings to be deaf and blind to ideas which we do not already believe to be true and right. We should certainly work hard to be open to ideas that may not be familiar to us, which is the only way I know how to combat my own tendency to get stuck in my own intellectual echo chamber.   

As I think about it now, I believe it is hopeless to say that every person actually possesses an inherent worth and dignity. Why?

I believe that worth and dignity, like legitimate self-esteem, are the achievements of individuals who make of these concepts projects that require careful, intelligent, and thoughtful labor.

Think about this: where is the inherent worth and dignity of those parents who would dance in the streets with joy when their children strap on bomb vests so they can blow themselves up and murder random civilians on busses in Israel?

These are sick, blighted souls, murderers of twisted mind and heart, who are not worthy of respect, and are in fact stripped of any shred of dignity.

Still, many people believe that we should not be "judgmental." 

I say we should harshly judge those who do such bad things. Why? 

Absent such judgment, and efforts to restrain the bad guys, we will get more bad things. We should resist these destructive actions with enough force to protect ourselves. 

To be non-judgmental is rather like pacifism, which I believe is a thoroughly hopeless, misguided, and self-destructive ideal.

If you say I am forgetting about the successful campaigns of passive resistance by Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, I would draw your attention to an aspect of this pacifism:

Consider Gandhi's non-violent, passive resistance. It worked very well against the angst-ridden, hand-wringing guilt of the morally and economically exhausted British empire, as it was in its dotage. Now, giving a moment's thought to how Gandhi would have fared against a more determined opponent, such as the Communist Chinese, it must be obvious that they would have crushed him with the ease of (forgive me...) taking Gandhi from a baby.

(Footnote: Forgive me twice here: first for the terrible pun, secondly, for using this formulation in my writing more than once before!)

So, far from reining-in my contempt for the bad guys, I believe I should be working to deepen my understanding of these crucial matters in the world, and to find more effective and persuasive ways to draw attention to both the good and the bad.

E   P   N

2014.1110  

Incidentally, here are the Seven Principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association. You thought I was joking about a whole theology that can fit on a card the size of a bookmark! 

1st Principle: The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

2nd Principle: Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

3rd Principle: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

4th Principle: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

5th Principle: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

6th Principle: The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

7th Principle: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

For Whom Should I Vote in 2014?

For Whom Should I Vote in 2014?

NY State Congressional District 18

NY State Senate District 41

Eric Paul Nolte

Here we are again in Looter-Moocher Land for the mid-term elections! 

Is there anyone for whom can we vote, whose election might stand a better chance of improving the world than that of a snowball's chance in the Sahara?

I hear P. J. O'Rourke's words ringing in my ears again: Don't vote! It only encourages the bastards!

This encouragement manifests itself as the politicians' tendency to believe that our votes grant them a mandate to go full speed ahead with their plunder and their tyranny. It is maybe more likely that your vote is not a ringing endorsement, but rather the case that you pulled the polling lever with one hand while holding your nose with the other hand. We often vote not for one of these meatheads, but against the more despicable one.

Nevertheless, I am indeed going to vote today.

Now, this year the biggest difference in Looter-Moocher Land will be the result of the US Senate races, because the Republicans stand a good chance of winning the six more seats that will grant them control of the Senate. 

However, neither of the US Senate seats from New York State is up for re-election this year. Chuck Schumer comes up for re-election in 2016, and Kirsten Gillibrand in 2018, so in this important matter of the Senate races, my vote will make even less of a difference today than the vanishingly small difference one's personal vote ever makes. 

The biggest difference in my neck of the woods will be in the vote for the House of Representatives, where NY State Congressional District 18 is in a red hot race between Democrat Sean Maloney and Republican Nan Hayworth.

Now, yes, Hayworth held this office for the term that began in 2010, and was battered by the lefties into defeat two years ago. In the liberal Daily Kos, I read that Hayworth was denounced as being aligned with "Tea Party thugs." Of course, nowadays the left calls anyone a thuggish, selfish bastard if one so much as mentions the US Constitution, or believes that the purpose of government should be limited to the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property.

While Sean Maloney has started a business and says that he believes the "economy succeeds when the middle class succeeds," he says that the road to this success must include raising taxes on the wealthy so that they "will pay their fair share" and thereby give some relief to the middle class. In the same spirit, he also advocates raising taxes on corporations. This view displays a stunning ignorance of the elementary fact that corporate taxes are just another factor of production, baked into the price of those goods and services, and paid for ... by whom? Like every other factor of production, it is the customer who pays for every factor that goes into the prices they pay. So it is the customer who pays corporate taxes, over and above what these customers already pay in income taxes. Moreover it is the poorest customers who are hurt the most by these hidden taxes, these taxes which are "hidden" to the customers, anyway.

I will be voting for Nan Hayworth for Congress because she is at least the slightly better representative for freedom.


In the NY State Senate District 41 race, Republican Sue Serino is running against Democrat Terry Gipson.

Every day, my mailbox overflows with flyers from the Democratic party in which Sue Serino is depicted in reptilian shades of green with drool dripping off her fangs, and her eyes narrowed to little yellow slits. You must think I'm kidding, but my description is pretty close! 

I think that if I were depicted by an opponent in such a graphically loathsome manner, I might want to wear this as a badge of pride because it would indicate that my opponents have so little of substance to hurl against me!

Now I don't know much about Serino except that she is in real estate and appears to be championing policies that sound less harmful to freedom than those of her opponent, Terry Gipson.   

Gipson strikes me as your garden variety liberal, whose innocence of any deep knowledge of sound economics and history leads him to write that he is "proud" to be a big champion of the minimum wage, when history and economics are crystal clear on this point, namely that like every other price control, the minimum wage creates shortages of the thing controlled. A shortage here means unemployment. In other words, the minimum wage causes unemployment among the very people it is designed to help, and hurts them more than anybody else. 

I will vote for Sue Serino for the NY State Senate.

*   *   *

So here we go again... everybody knows that freedom works. Freedom works to unleash the creative energy and imagination of humanity. And yet freedom is denounced left and right. 

Freedom works better than bossy bureaucratic central planning of everything, and you can see this fact  beyond any possibility of refutation in such nearly laboratory conditions as in the contrast between the two Koreas, north and south, and the two Germanies, east and west, before the fall of the iron curtain. 

Here we have the very same culture, the same people with the same sets of beliefs, talents, and the same everything except that one side of the country was run by a totalitarian dictatorship, and the other side enjoyed a significant measure of freedom. 

In the dictator's side of these countries, there was mass murder, oppression, unending poverty, fear, outright terror, suspicion, mistrust, and relentless misery. In Berlin, nearly half a century after the war ended, there were still bombed out sections of the city that had never been rebuilt. 

In the freer side of these countries, there was an ever-expanding prosperity, driven by the creative energy, ambition, and intelligence of a people who knew that their efforts could normally be expected to result in success. 

But, of course, freedom is selfish, according to all the dominant codes of morality and ethics, so freedom is reviled, and we are rendered blind to the fact that profit-seeking free market capitalism (not to be confused with fascist crony-capitalism resulting from the unholy marriage of big government and big business) is responsible for the most astonishing improvements in the condition of humanity ever seen in history.

So, while I detest the social conservative side of the Republican party that works against women's reproductive rights, or gays' rights to marry and decide what a family should look like, I nevertheless find the Republican party as a whole, to be a much smaller threat to our social and economic well-being than the dangers posed by liberal democrats. This is ironic and hard to believe, but it's true. 

I do not believe that dark ages biblical injunctions against gays, or socially conservative efforts to ban abortion can be widely imposed on the world today. 

I believe that the libertarian wing of the Republican party would steer the country in a less threatening direction than the policies purveyed by the Democratic party.

By the same measure, I detest the beliefs of liberals and progressives who work assiduously against free markets, and purvey the crazy idea that the source of all good things is the government's largesse and its bureaucratic central planning of everything. 

I do believe that the policies of progressives are tyrannical and are succeeding to an ever more appalling degree in America, and pose a clear and present danger to our freedom, which is the very basis of a good life.

I find these liberals and progressives to be well-intentioned, but unwitting (sometimes even witless) crusaders for all those policies that, when implemented undiluted, lead us down what Friedrich Hayek called the road the serfdom, which is the condition in which peaceful citizens are transformed by their governments into something like feudal serfs. Down this road lies the condition of North Korea and the former East Germany.

*   *   *

Now, back to the minutia of my little District 18 voting:

I would be voting for more libertarians, because they are clearly the more principled advocates of freedom, but they stand no chance of winning any offices.

Republicans do stand a chance of winning office, so voting for one who is not godawful stands a chance of making at least a little difference for the good. 

Those Republicans who are in the libertarian wing of the Republican party are without any doubt far less threatening to our general well being than the wholly destructive, control freak policies of big government, top-down, tax-and-spend, freedom-bashing progressives and liberals, whose ignorance of sound economics is exceeded only by their righteousness, their belief that they have claim to the moral high ground as they assert their ever growing power over the economy. 

Often, the Republicans are only a little better, but they do tend to be better and less threatening here.

So, here is my ballot:

*   *   *

*  United States House of Representatives, NY State District 18: Nan Hayworth

*  NY Governor: Rob Astorino (whose education policies in particular seem to be much better than the destructiveness of incumbent Governor Cuomo's.)

*  NY State Lieutenant Governor: Chris Moss

*  NY State Attorney General: John Cahill

*  NY State Comptroller:  Robert Antonacci

*  NY State Senate District 41:  Sue Serino

 - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

There are three Proposals on the ballot:

*  Proposal 1, on redistricting, 

Cuomo will vote Yes; Astorino, No. 

I'm not entirely sure about this one. We would like to avoid political gerrymandering that can be artfully arranged to favor whomever can grab those levers of power, but I can't be sure that Proposition 1 will either restrain or empower the would-be gerrymanders! Astorino will vote no on the proposal because he believes the proposal does not go far enough. I distrust Cuomo more than Astorino, and Cuomo is voting yes, so this tips me over into voting no.

*  Proposal 2, on creating a largely electronic and paperless system of distributing legislation to the lawmakers for them to study (which grants them the benevolent, if perhaps unwarranted, assumption that any of them ever read anything they vote on.)

This proposal should save money. Both major candidates will vote yes, and I shall too.

*  Proposal 3, on borrowing yet another $2 billion to improve school technology with such features as paying for wireless classroom technology, tablets, and smart boards. But this enormous amount of borrowing will pay only for the purchase and construction of these things, and provides not penny for the staff to run the equipment or to pay for its maintenance. Servicing the debt on these purchases will run another $130 million per year. The NY State debt is already up to something like $63 billion, and Albany's plans to reduce this debt are dubious. 

Moreover, we're talking about yet another government program, and we know from experience that damned near all government programs wind up costing vastly more than estimated, they often fail to accomplish what they were intended to do, and frequently achieve precisely the opposite of their well-intended goals (even when those goals are indeed well-intentioned.)

So I say vote no on Prop. 3.

*   *   *

All righty, folks, that's it for this year.

E   P   N

2014.1104b

Ted Cruz, a Disappointment

Ted Cruz, a Disappointment

And some wailing over my disappointment with both Left and Right

by

Eric Paul Nolte

If one definition of insanity is the expectation that one might get different results from performing the same action again and again, then I am in danger of thus driving into the ditch beside the road of sanity.

How can I continue to be astonished by the cognitive dissonance one can see in the sets of beliefs embraced by social conservatives and liberals?

How can liberals and conservatives so relentlessly maintain views that are internally contradictory, and yet are completely inverse to each other? Liberals have better views on the freedom of individuals to put lives together by their own lights, yet absurd views on economics. The right has better views on human action in the economics arena, and yet absurd views on morality as it relates to personal freedom.

How can left and right be so divided between good sense and ridiculous views?

Consider the matter of science. 

Many conservatives continue to support the insanity of the biblically inspired dogma of "scientific creationism." If this is science, then pigs can fly by flapping their little toes.

Leftists also continue to beat a drum for an insane view of science: they are agitating for governments to hijack industrial civilization in the name of preventing anthropogenic climate change. I believe that liberals thereby show themselves to be in the grips of a mass delusion, a so-called science that is perhaps even more ridiculous than that of the creationists. There are dishonest purveyors of this idea of man-made climate change, like the lying professors at the Univeristy of East Anglia, who blithely alter data to fit their lies. There are the lying writers of the summaries of the articles (if not the scientists who write the articles themselves) in the assessments of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There are powerful American figures from agencies like NASA and NOAA, such as James Hansen and Michael Mann, and there is Bill McKibbon, creator of 350.org, all of whom may be guilty of the most massive intellectual swindle ever put over on a credulous population. Even the most casual research will show the intellectually honest the truth that the atmospheric saturation of carbon dioxide was once 12 times higher than it is today, while at the same time the temperature of the earth was in the middle of an ice age. The computer simulations, the models on which the future climate disasters are predicted are 100 percent wrong, compared with the satellite data. Don't get me started...

Liberals tend to support cultural freedom, but, as P.J. O'Rourke famously put it, they would never trust consenting adults to perform capitalist acts together without the meddling of government overlords to control them.

By contrast, social conservatives tend, or once tended, to support economic freedom, but will never trust consenting adults to put together lives and families by their own lights without the meddling of government overlords to control them according to the revealed wisdom of holy books said to have been written by ghosts in heaven, whom no reliable witness in millennia have seen on earth. 

Which brings us back to the dismaying news I read now about Ted Cruz.

The news is that the Supreme Court of the United States has just made a decision that should make same sex marriage possible in five states.

Senator Ted Cruz and Mike Lee expressed their disappointment at this decision and upheld their belief that marriage must be between a man and a woman.

This is the social conservative position, always justified as being rooted in God's divinely revealed wisdom in the Bible.

What a disappointment!

Ted Cruz is arguably among the brightest bulbs ever to occupy the Senate. Look at his resume. Princeton grad, attorney who made his way up the legal intellectual circles and ultimately came to argue cases before the SCOTUS more times than anybody else in the whole US Congress. 

More than almost anybody else now in the Congress, Ted Cruz displays a deep understanding of the case for freedom, economically, politically, and historically. 

(Footnote: I would say that Ron Paul's understanding may be more sophisticated than Cruz's, but Paul is the only one I know to show more insight, and sadly he is now retired from the Congress.)

According to Newsmax, 10/7/14, "Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a likely 2016 Republican presidential contender, called the court's move "tragic and indefensible." He vowed to introduce a constitutional amendment allowing states to ban gay marriage.

"This is judicial activism at its worst," Cruz said in a statement. "The Constitution entrusts state legislatures, elected by the People, to define marriage consistent with the values and mores of their citizens. Unelected judges should not be imposing their policy preferences to subvert the considered judgments of democratically elected legislatures...

"... Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also weighed in to call the decision "disappointing." He suggested that justices should affirm that states have the right to restrict marriage to a union between a man and a woman, the Post reported."

How can I still feel so appalled, knowing that social conservatives are by definition committed to such views which are rooted in the faith of ancient and dark ages mystics? 

The right has always tended to display some good sense on economics. I want such good sense to prevail! But the right continues to show up as champions of dark ages morality!

The left has long tended to display good sense on the rights of people to put together lives by their own lights, on the rights of gays, and on women's reproductive freedom. But the left continues to show up as imbeciles on the matter of human action in the economic arena. 

Hmm. I would not go so far as to say that the right displays very much more sophistication than the left on economics, but they do tend to be a little better today. Those, like Ron Paul and Ted Cruz, who show any real wisdom on the matter are rare, but I know of none on the left whose views on human action in the economic arena exhibit so much as whiff of wisdom. 

I wait without bated breath for the day when the insight of Ludwig von Mises can be heard clearly by the whole world. And for the day when the moral insight of Ayn Rand will illuminate both the left and the right.

E  P  N

2014.1112

Ayn Rand: How is She Still a Thing?

Ayn Rand: How is She Still a Thing?

Snarky, Sophomoric, Straw Man Attacks on Ayn Rand

And a Better Perspective on the Significance of Her Work

by

Eric Paul Nolte

On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver's TV show of political satire and comedy, they often air a segment mocking some individual or institution, called "How is This Still a Thing?" 

Recently, they aired a clip called, "Ayn Rand: How is She Still a Thing?"

A better question would be, "Ayn Rand: Why is She Still So Reviled?"

Now, John Oliver is a very clever English political satirist and stand-up comedian who often harvests ripe blowhards and other big jerks by using his knack for ironic juxtaposition and a sarcastic eye bent on comic effect. 

For example, Oliver recently lampooned the blockhead leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman Al Zawahiri, after he was apparently provoked into a hissy fit upon realizing that his own murderous gang has been completely surpassed, in the number of beheadings and the creation of righteous mayhem, by the new dogs of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. 

Another segment of Oliver's mocked the US State Department's production of a fake TV recruiting ad for the Islamic State, in which recruits are encouraged to come to Iraq where they can enjoy the pleasures of blowing up Shiite mosques and beheading Islamic apostates, Jews, and Christians (as if any candidate for ISIS recruitment might have the capacity for appreciating irony!) Then Oliver created a fake Nazi recruitment ad using 1930s stock footage from Hitler's Germany, with similarly comic effect.

So how is it that Ayn Rand shows up in the gunsights of a clever English laddie like John Oliver?

It's simple: we live in a world where from the farthest reaches of antiquity until today, here and everywhere, all the major systems of ethics and morality condemn self-interest as the very starting point of evil, and uphold self-sacrifice for the lives of others as the very essence of goodness. Another factor is that those who believe in self-sacrifice as the Good, tend to be among the world's worst victims of confirmation bias, meaning that they are entirely deaf and blind to any ideas that do not agreeably chime with their own.

(Footnote: of course we are all victims of confirmation bias, but the way out of this sort of secular Original Sin, is to open oneself to the ideas of those with whom we might disagree, and, granting them the assumption that they are well-intentioned people of good soul and mind, try to read their work while sympathetically imagining how such a person might come to hold such views. Over the decades, steering myself by this policy, I have actually come to change my mind on a few things, including a couple foundational views.)

Now, Ayn Rand is surely most famous for advocating an ethics of egoism, which is, duh, not an idea in harmony with the ethics of altruistic self-sacrifice, so we should not be surprised that Oliver and crew might be deaf and blind to Rand's significance. 

But Rand's importance runs deeper than her formulation of a radical theory of ethics. Her theory of ethics is purveyed as just one aspect of her comprehensive philosophy, which she called Objectivism. The key point here is that Rand's philosophy got it right on the big issues she addressed, and did so with spectacular depth, clarity, and force. 

Rand's philosophy picked up the most important and baffling conundrums in what Mortimer Adler called "the great conversation," the dialogue between succeeding generations of philosophers and other great thinkers, and she addressed and corrected many of these crippling errors in philosophy. She thereby transformed the conversation and profoundly carried it forward. One cannot overestimate the power and significance of her ideas.

Ayn Rand's creation of a comprehensive and subtly reasoned philosophy came  at a time when such systematic thinking had been reeling under attack by centuries of post-enlightenment, modernist and postmodern philosophies. European philosophy went down this road in a mistaken effort to resolve the contradictions between the two major conflicting schools of thought, the rationalism of Descartes, and the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume. The thinker who supposedly resolved these conflicts was Immanuel Kant, who delivered us into the arms of a radical skepticism, this German Romantic Idealism, which ultimately led us down the path to a sort of stalemated intellectual trench warfare between what became this postmodern, nihilistic skepticism, and a reactionary religious absolutism that rose up to attack it. 

Rand transformed the mainstream debate in morality by picking up and greatly advancing Aristotle's ethics with a fully fleshed-out theory of ethics as rational egoism.

(Footnote: one could also say that Rand picked up many ideas in the Aristotelian stream of thought and carried these forward. Remember that this stream of thought comprises the intellectual roots of the European Enlightenment, which thereby gave us modern science and technology, the industrial revolution which dramatically transformed the quality of life, created the middle class, doubled human life expectancy over the course of the 19th century, and gave us the ideas which inspired the American founders to create the world's first country meant to be the political embodiment of natural human rights.)  

Rand's philosophy makes it possible for the first time to identify objective facts of reality that allow us to make valid normative judgments. This is such an astonishing accomplishment that I feel compelled to elaborate on it because the conventional wisdom today holds that moral judgment is entirely subjective and tied to one's tribe, race, class, or gender. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that Rand's moral argument shows the way out of the woods of subjectivity here. This is a stunning accomplishment, not yet widely appreciated today, but it will come to be understood eventually.

Employing Rand's moral framework, we can objectively explain why it is not merely a civilized difference of opinion when we disagree with those jihadists who want to kill us in accordance with the Quran's many injunctions to kill the infidels. 

We can now objectively and confidently explain why it is evil when jihadists joyfully send their children into restaurants and crowded busses in Tel Aviv to blow up random strangers. Granted, we may recoil emotionally at such an abomination, but finding and spelling out in words the actual intellectual grounds for a moral condemnation of this unspeakable cruelty is something the cultural relativists and multiculturalists are powerless to do today.

The Christian religious absolutists believe that they have objective grounds for condemning the jihadists. Never mind that this belief is cut off from any possibility of a valid idea of objectivity, the fact is that they believe they have objective grounds for their beliefs. The Christian absolutists hold that God said it, they believe it, and that's all there is to it. But so do the jihadists believe that God said it, they believe it, and nothing more remains to be said on the matter. These religious ideas contradict each other. Stalemate! But what these conflicts actually mean is that religious absolutes amount to a species of emotional subjectivism. Religious absolutes are known by faith, which denotes belief in the truth of a proposition without evidence, which offers no better grounds than any other subjective emotion, and is certainly no better than the angst-ridden wailing of pixilated, hand-wringing, secular, cultural relativists. 

Religious absolutists are powerless either to endorse or to condemn such a horror without reference to the commandments of what they believe is the revealed wisdom from heavenly authorities whom nobody alive today has ever talked to. 

Rand's grounds for condemning the jihadists are completely clear and unassailable to anybody with ears to hear and a brain not infected and rendered deaf and blind by the cockamamie intellectual virus which is belief in self-sacrifice as the essence of virtue and goodness.

Incidentally, I believe this debate over morality is part of an earth shaking paradigm shift, and this is how it goes with every shift of paradigm, from the first ancient person who came to understand that the earth is not flat, to the rather more recent debates in science over the existence of atoms and the puzzlements posed by relativity and the subatomic realm. I believe that eventually, the world will come to its senses and remove the blindfold that prevents people from seeing the truth about Rand's rational egoism.

Rand's accomplishments run still deeper. Her theory of concepts gives us the means by which to dismantle David Hume's problem of induction, which has been such a destructive minefield on the plains of epistemology and science. She wrestled to the mat Hume's problem with abstraction, and in the process came to explain Hume's problem with causality itself. Hume's troubled explanation of causality convinced the whole of his post-Enlightenment world that there was no good reason to justify even the belief that the sun would rise tomorrow (and these are Hume's very own words, written in about the same decade in which Edmund Halley was able to employ Newton's calculus and predict the reappearance of a comet unseen for 75 years.) Rand defused these intellectual bombs and those of Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and the whole crazy stream of German Romantic Idealists who followed, along with sundry positivists, and all the other postmodern fools right up to the present day. 

In politics, Rand picked up and corrected the American founders' error in framing the origin of human rights. Where Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, "We hold these Truths to be self-evident," the fact is that these truths are not self-evident and require a vigorous, worldly, secular defense, which is precisely what Ayn Rand gave us. 

These are some of the most important accomplishments of a genius whose significance may well be described as epochal.

Now, enter John Oliver, displaying the rarefied wit and scholarly knowledge he brings to his subtly crafted and deeply thoughtful piece on Ayn Rand. 

In John Oliver's video, the narrator says, "Ayn Rand became famous for her philosophy of Objectivism, which is a nice way of saying, being a selfish asshole." 

Clips of the elderly Rand are shown, some of them from her last interview, weeks before her death, looking feeble and slow of mind and speech. Her comments are artfully lifted wholly out of context in a patchy, mendacious editing. She is sarcastically attacked for several things that are quoted here so out of context that the meaning is viciously twisted to make her appear to be saying things she never believed.

The narrator of Oliver's video says, "Rand illustrated her beliefs in novels like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, stories of raping heroes who complain that nobody appreciates their true genius." 

They show a clip of Gary Cooper playing Howard Roark in the film The Fountainhead, leaning over the table at the board meeting where Roark is turning down his first really big commission because the board is demanding that Roark abandon the integrity of his work, and Roark significantly and passionately says, "My work, done my way. Nothing else matters!" Oliver's little snippet of film was lifted out of context to give the appearance of some cranky old guy who is huffing petulantly over not getting his way. 

The narrator says, "And if that reminds you of someone, it's probably of somebody like this..."  at which point they trot out a little video parade of rich, whining, spoiled young brats, evidently intended to make the viewer believe that they are the embodiment of Rand's ethics.

"Ayn Rand has always been popular with teenagers, but it's something you're supposed to grow out of, like ska music, or hand jobs. But, curiously she remains popular among a certain type of adult."

There follow some accolades for Rand from famous people whom liberals believe to be villainous. 

Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys and the HD TV network, is asked how many times he has read The Fountainhead. "Three complete times... You know it's funny, I'll pick it up for motivation and then I'll read too far and get too much motivation and I get too jittery and have to put it down." This fan of Rand was probably selected for how inarticulate, vapid and shallow he appears.

"Yes, unbelievably," continues the narrator, "Mark Cuban's favorite book is about a misunderstood visionary who blows things up when he doesn't get his way. Cuban even named his 287 foot yacht, Fountainhead, because sometimes even having a 287 foot yacht just isn't enough to warn people you're a douche bag."

Then the narrator says, "Rand's influence extends even farther," and trots out a number of conservative Republican politicians, most of whom are associated with the Tea Party, which has apparently become the lowest and most vile pejorative that a liberal or progressive can hurl at an opponent. Paul Ryan says that "Rand did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism" (and I suspect that John Oliver believes that it is hilariously ironic to link the ideas of morality and capitalism in the same phrase.) Rand Paul says of Ayn Rand, "I am a big fan... I've read all of her novels...." Ted Cruz, on the floor of the Senate, says, "And let me encourage any of you who have not read Atlas Shrugged, to go, tomorrow, buy Atlas Shrugged and read it."

The narrator then points out that Ayn Rand is an unlikely hero for conservatives because she was in favor of women's right to abortion, she was an atheist, and she thought ill of that conservative icon, Ronald Reagan. 

"But," the narrator continues, "in case these ideas are making you start to fall for her, take a listen to her views on native Americans: 'I do not think that they have any right to live in any country merely because they were born here, and then acted like savages.'"

Oliver seems to think that this remark is as self-evidently incendiary as if she had given a glowing endorsement of the Nazi holocaust. 

But her remark is lifted out of context from a long answer she gave to a student's question after her lecture at the 1974 West Point graduation. There is much more to be said on the matter.

Now it seems to me that Oliver takes this remark to be so devastating to Rand that there can remain nothing more to say on her behalf. Bingo! Game over! Ding dong, the Witch is dead! 

So I am going to address the matter a little more fully because I do not believe the matter is as clear as Oliver makes it out to be.

Let's take Rand's incendiary sentence as Oliver quotes her, clause by clause, which deal the two matters of whether one has a right to live in a country as a matter of birth, and then the description of the Amerindians as "savages."

Let's grant that the Amerindians immigrated to the Americas across the Bering straights about 10,000 years before the Europeans came here. They were here first. Common sense would grant that of course they are entitled to be here.

There were waves of immigrants in these Amerindian migrations. Did the earlier waves enjoy a right to be here that trumped the rights of the later ones?  

It is impossible to sort out such questions without an understanding of the nature of rights more generally.

Does anyone have a right to live in a country merely because one was born there? It so happens that the US grants citizenship to babies born on American soil, but this has been true only since the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868. Moreover, among all the countries of the world, the US is virtually alone in granting citizenship as a matter of birth on a country's soil. If your pregnant American parents were visiting Germany (or had even been US soldiers serving many years on German soil) your birth on German soil would not have conferred German citizenship on you.

As for living like "savages," when Rand grew up the term "savage" was used even by scholarly cultural anthropologists, who used the word as an entirely neutral descriptive, without any hint of pejorative intent. 

Now, back to the wider point of the nature of rights here, Rand was describing primitive peoples who lived largely as nomadic hunter gatherers, had no concept of property rights, and practiced slavery and servitude among themselves, and mass murder between warring tribes. These are not dirt simple matters. These are troubling questions woven into the fabric of a long history. These are questions that turn on the concept of rights.
  

The fundamental issue here is the matter of rights. If one wants to know the full context of Rand's thought on this issue of native Americans, one will have to examine her thoughts on human rights. 

What were the rights of primitive peoples living in lands being settled for the first time by other people who have brought with them the concepts and achievements of a more sophisticated civilization? How are these groups going to get along with each other? Again, these are troubling matters that are not likely to be resolved without an understanding of rights.

The way the various Amerindian groups sorted out their own disagreements among themselves before the arrival of the Europeans did not include the idea of rights, and often entailed war between these tribes. 

So what are rights? The different formulations of rights are a boiling cauldron of contradictions, if you listen to the political debates today. The answer to this confused discussion is one of the most important contributions Rand gave us. 

Rights, as Rand pointed out, are conditions of survival for a human being in a social context. Rand wrote (in her essay, "Man's Rights") "A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action--which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life." The right to life means only the right to one's freedom of action, and not to any goods produced by others and taken by force for redistribution as welfare or political favors.

This topic is throughly convoluted and confused in today's warring political debates between left and right. There is no general agreement among the polity. There are instead two broad streams of thought. 

On the one hand are welfare rights, which are positive claims of entitlement to goods and services, typically defined by whatever some special interest group is able to wrest from other groups, who are unable to fend off these attacks. 

On the other hand are liberty rights, the entitlement to one's own life, liberty, and property. 

Notice that these positive rights are claims to goods and services produced by other people, who thereby have an unchosen obligation to cough up the goods. These claims are enforced by the police power. 

Welfare rights destroy liberty rights. Welfare rights and liberty rights are mutually exclusive and contradictory, they are claims which are doomed to be forever at war with each other.  

While I am persuaded that Rand's formulation of rights is clear and correct, I am also certain that she will never be heard clearly by people who are untroubled by the idea that they are entitled to a piece of their neighbors' hides, which is another way of characterizing the idea of welfare rights.

All right, now suppose that Rand was mistaken to believe that the primitive peoples of America were not entitled to be left alone, or that the land on which they lived could rightly have been settled by the Europeans. Suppose she was mistaken. Suppose that the European occupation of America was as bad as the practice of slavery. Now what? Should we have something like slave reparations to right these long ago wrongs? Make the descendants of white Union soldiers, who died in the war to end slavery, pay the black children of Jamaican immigrants who just came to America last year?

Slavery was evil. So how do we right the wrong that was slavery? 

Today, how do we right the wrongs that were visited on the native Americans? Think of the horrible trail of tears visited on Amerindians by the US government. This is surely as horrible a story as that of the Bataan death march in the Philippines, caused by the invading Imperial Japanese army.

R. J. Rummel, perhaps the preeminent scholar of these matters, coined a term, "democide," to denote the murder of a multitude of people by their government. The concept includes genocide, politicide, and mass murder. In his book, Death by Government, his studies lead him to write that, "judging by the bloody history of this period of colonization throughout the Americas, a democide of 2 million would seem a rough minimum and 15 million a maximum. Even if these figures are remotely true, this subjugation of the Americas is a still one of the bloodier of the centuries-long, democides in world history." 

While it is true that many times more Indians died as a result of alien diseases unwittingly brought to them by Europeans than were killed by the European immigrants, it is still true that the Europeans displayed cruelty towards the natives.

One wonders if Rand ever knew of such evils. She certainly condemned all the murderous actions of government. I believe that if Rand were rightly apprised of the facts of the matter that she might have given us a more subtle evaluation of the issue of Amerindians. As it is, she did not leave us a well thought out essay on the matter.

Let us acknowledge that evils were visited on the Amerindians by the Europeans.

We cannot go back in time. The evils were done. That time is water over the dam and we can do nothing more than to move forward from here. 

The way to move forward must include a proper understanding of the very thing that makes slavery evil, namely, the crucial nature of human rights, and I believe that Ayn Rand got this issue right. 

The Amerindians are human beings like any other, and the answer to what we should do today is to affirm that all of us should now respect the rights of every individual, red, black, yellow, white, and any rainbow combination in between, to life, liberty, and property, and that the purpose of government should be to protect those rights.

Now, back to John Oliver's lambasting Ayn Rand on her opinion of the Amerindian problem.   

Oliver's narrator shows Rand making her remarks on native Americans and concludes, "Why would conservatives hold up as their idol someone who says things like that, especially when there are so many advocates of selfishness they could choose?"

So, using ironic juxtaposition, Donald Trump is trotted out, interviewed in one of his corporate jets. Trump tells the interviewer, "Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich...."

Then a rapper named Drake is shown performing with his artfully crafted attention to the beauty of language, "Gonna worry 'bout me, give a f..k about you!"

A bevy of beauties on the Bravo channel is then shown, all shouting shallow but murderous threats and obscenities at each other.

"All of which is enough to make you wonder," concludes the narrator, "Ayn Rand: how is it that she is still a thing?"

                  *  *  *

Now, the John Oliver video often employs classic straw man arguments, in attributing to Rand beliefs she never said, and in trotting out villainous characters with whom Rand is falsely compared. These are logical fallacies of a mean-spirited nature.   

The attacks are snarky because the author so clearly despises Rand and thinks his idea of morality is superior to hers. The attacks are sophomoric because John Oliver knows nothing essential about Rand's work.

So what else is new? Ayn Rand is among the most widely and fervently reviled thinkers who ever lived.

          *  *  *

I want to conclude here with some thoughts on how shocked and bewildered I myself felt when I encountered Ayn Rand's ideas for the first time, and thereby make my way to offering a few more thoughts on the importance of Ayn Rand's accomplishments.

Intuition tells me that John Oliver may have felt similarly shocked and bewildered by his first encounter with Ayn Rand, except that as a grown man of settled beliefs, he may have felt confident in his condemnation of ideas which he likely found completely alien.

Now, as a teenager reading Rand for the first time, I had echoes ringing in my mind of the moral preachings of two widely disparate groups. On the one hand there were the ideas of my father, the communist. On the other hand was my maternal grandmother, the southern fundamentalist Baptist. As I read Rand, I found it amazing that anybody could have the outright chutzpah to say all these outrageous things out loud! She blasted conventional moral taboos with the precision of a laser-guided missile! I had never heard anybody challenge these sacred cows that prohibited one from claiming any deep and principled concern with one's own self-interest and happiness. This was selfish! Therefore bad! Wicked! 

Into this world that universally condemns self-interest and celebrates self-sacrifice, Ayn Rand showed up on the world's stage as the strongest, most passionate, and most articulate voice ever to assert the moral goodness of holding your own life as your most sacred possession. 

Rand astonished me by the power of the logic that demonstrates how, if morality condemns self-interest and upholds self-sacrifice as the essence of everything good, then these altruistic beliefs turn us into sacrificial animals on the alter of the lives of others.

Now, I hasten to add that there is a huge difference between self-sacrifice and benevolence, or charity freely offered by one's own lights. 

A sacrifice, by definition, means giving up something more valuable in exchange for something less valuable. Charitably giving money one can afford to a friend is not a sacrifice. Even losing one's life while fighting in a war against a foreign invader would not be a sacrifice, if one believes that living as the slave of a foreign invader would be intolerable. If the soldier dies in a failed effort to protect his highest values, he does not intend to die, he dies in combat because he values his own freedom higher than life as a slave. The same principle applies to fire-fighters, namely, that they would never intend to sacrifice themselves while fighting the blazes they put out!

(Footnote: Speaking of a soldier who dies fighting a foreign invader, I am reminded of a political slogan that was popular during the Cold War of my youth which said, "Better dead than red." This slogan affirms that everywhere on the earth, red has always been the color of the lefties, at least until recent liberal political pollsters hopelessly confused the matter when they began to call lefties Blue and conservatives Red...) 

Think about this: given that life is a property of individuals, the idea of individual sacrifice as the essence of the Good therefore means that individuals should sacrifice their lives, which means, in other words, that they should give up their lives. Give up their lives? 

What is the state of being that results from giving up one's life?  

Is it not true that giving up one's life is the same thing as death? 

No? You still say that self-sacrifice is good? 

Well, if you give up your life, by definition, this means you are dead. 

So, in this formulation, self-sacrifice, carried to its logical end, must lead to death, and therefore: death is the basis of morality. 

The ethics of self-sacrifice is therefore a morality of death as the highest ideal. That would be your death, and that of everybody else, as the heart of goodness.

Altruists do not usually make a point of drawing this conclusion, but the logic of this conclusion is undeniable.

To the reflexive objection, "Oh, we don't have to go that far," I would point out that the moralists themselves do indeed go that far, if we will but look into their writings.

Consider the Catholic volume, The Lives of Saints, which lists a long catalog of heroes whose heroism is defined by the degree to which they deny, renounce, and reject the pleasures of the earth by such actions as drinking laundry water and sheep's gall, and by such actions as those of Saint Francis, who was known to throw himself into a snowbank when he felt lustful.  

Consider the biblical injunction that condemns the selfishness of being rich when it says that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter to gates of heaven 

(Footnote: and while I'm on the topic, think about how ridiculous it is to condemn wealth as such, with no consideration of how one achieves one's wealth! By this measure there is no difference between Bernie Madoff and the Wright brothers or Steve Jobs. Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi-scheming hedge fund manager who ripped off his clientele for the whole of his career never did anything that was genuinely in his self-interest. Madoff was a miserable jerk whose whole life was wasted in anxious anticipation of the day he would get caught in the act of abusing and stealing from his best friends and customers, and whose predatory behavior landed him in jail, destroyed his family, and in part inspired his son to commit suicide. How was any of this for Madoff's own benefit?) 

Consider Kant's duty-based morality, in which any personal benefit from acting rightly is said to negate the goodness of one's actions. 

Consider how Mother Teresa is held to be the essence of goodness, she whose work was made possible entirely by the charity she received from others who produced the wealth to support her. Yet the wealth producers themselves are condemned, except to the degree they "redeem" themselves by giving their money away.

Think of all the pious references to self-sacrifice as a moral ideal in all the speeches and movies and books we've read. This ideal is ubiquitous. 

To my own reflexive objection, when I read Rand as a young man, that it was selfish and therefore bad to be so concerned with oneself, Rand offered the observation that the world's moral systems offer us a false alternative between the ideal of self-sacrifice and the evil of predatory self-interest (no other idea of selfishness was available.) How so? Here's how: 

The religious absolutists uphold the Good as self-sacrifice for God and His revealed commandments, and furthermore say that your life belongs to your religious tribe. 

And on the other hand, the secular progressives, liberals, and socialists uphold the Good as self-sacrifice for the benefit of society, "society" being essentially everybody but the faintest ghost of you, yourself. Moreover, they believe that your life really belongs to society, not to you.

So, these far extremes are both upholding some kind of self-sacrifice as the moral ideal. 

These are false alternative because, as Rand pointed out, "nobody came to tell you that your life belongs to you, and that the Good is to live your life and enjoy it!" 

The true alternative to these traditional moralities begins with understanding that it is not true that a concern with your own self-interest means a predatory, grasping exploitation and abuse of others against their will in order to get your way.

Until Ayn Rand, we never had a fully developed theory of ethics and morality as anything but some flavor of self-sacrifice, sacrifice for one's religion, or tribe, or country, or even for the earth itself.

But there is an ethics of rational egoism, which Rand formulated and defended at length, in which it is demonstrated that one's true self-interest lies in the lifelong focus on peacefully cooperating with others through trade, namely, the exchange with others of valuable goods and services to mutual advantage. Rational selfishness is not predatory, it consists of entering win-win situations with others, it lies in the creation of relationships of mutual benefit where everyone comes away feeling better off for having engaged each other. 

While Rand's idea of the virtue of selfishness was shocking to me, when I first read it as a young man, it was equally shocking to read Rand's statement that this trading to mutual advantage is the very basis of human action in the free market. Such trading is the underlying dynamic of true capitalism, and is also the essence of laissez-faire, which is nothing more or less than the actions of grownups making their own arrangements with each other for mutual benefit. All of these are simply another way of pointing to the nature of the free market, of people dealing with each other voluntarily, peacefully, and unhampered by the meddling of government intervention. 

(Footnote: I didn't realize it when I first read Rand, but she got her powerful insight into this aspect of human action in the arena of markets and government intervention from the economics of this subject's best thinkers on the planet, who are the Austrians in the stream of Carl Menger, including especially my hero, Ludwig von Mises and his students, such as George Reisman, who, by the way, was also a student of Ayn Rand.)

Before Ayn Rand, there was Aristotle, whose ethics of eudaimonia upheld the idea of lifelong personal development for the purpose of achieving happiness on earth. But the justification of Aristotle's ethics was never advanced as a matter of defensible theory, but only as an opinion based on Aristotle's subjective observation and approval of outstanding individuals whom he judged to be men of "great soul."

Ayn Rand was the first thinker to make a comprehensive case for the ethics of rational self-interest, a case that was rooted in facts of reality that are observable by any normally healthy person here on earth.  Nobody argued more effectively than she for the idea that you should devote yourself to unfolding your gifts in the world for the purpose of achieving your own happiness. Nobody who ever lived before her showed up as such a skilled and principled defender of the idea that the purpose of morality, as she put it, is to teach you, not how to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. While John Locke made a case for the natural rights of every individual to life, liberty, and property, the moral case for rights was not advanced as a justified theory in the time of the American founders. This ideal of natural rights was not spelled out in logic, it was said merely to be "self-evident," as Jefferson framed the matter in the American Declaration of Independence. As I mentioned above, Rand fleshed out what I believe may be the first truly worldly validation of these rights. 

Ayn Rand advanced the case for individual rights in the context of a morality of rational self-interest.

I set out to prove Ayn Rand's case for the freedom of individuals. 

Here is the crux of the matter: Rand grounded this idea of the goodness of rational self-interest in these objective facts of reality: 

1. The concept of value means a thing that inspires one to work at acquiring it. "Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep," wrote Rand.

2. The very possibility of assigning value to anything begins with an individual's possession of life, and the necessity of making choices about what actions to take in order to preserve one's life.

3. These starting points, and their subsequent implications, are available to all persons who would open their eyes and give these matters some thought. 

4. If you want to live, you have to learn what survival requires of you, and this knowledge can only be acquired by employing the uniquely human tool of reason, which means using logic applied to the evidence of experience. 

The rest of her argument for rational self-interest follows by implication, is spelled out at length in her work, and can be grasped by anyone who gives these matters some real thought.

Giving these matters some real thought is clearly what snarky, sophomoric,  socialist John Oliver has never done.

Given the fact that everywhere socialism has actually come to take the levers of power, it has resulted in death camps and wars with mass murder on a scale unprecedented in the history of the world, how is it that socialism is still a thing?

Ayn Rand had an answer to this question: socialism appeals to the ethics of self-sacrifice for the lives of others, and appeals more deeply in this way than any other ideology. 

Now, unless we count the ancient traditions of the Christian crusades and the jihadist carriage of Islam into the world by the sword, if we measure the matter by the sheer depth of the oceans of blood spilled in the name of these causes, the religions pale by comparison with the body count of the various flavors of socialism, as practiced in the last century ... unless we are counting dead bodies as a percentage of the population, in which case Christianity surely takes the cake: consider, for just one example, that in the Thirty Years War of the 17th century, something like a third of the population, including every man, woman, and child, was murdered by Protestants fighting Catholics, all in the name of self-sacrifice for the greater glory of God. 

Where individuals are upheld as sacrificial animals on the alter of the lives of others, there will be blood collected by self-appointed authorities eager to collect sacrificial offerings. 

If happiness on earth is our ideal, then it is past time to abandon this crazy idea that the moral ideal is self-sacrifice for the lives of others, and embrace the crucial virtue of rational egoism.

Acquiring the ability to understand and validate this moral ideal of rational egoism and the happiness on earth it can bring, is why Ayn Rand "is still a thing."

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