What is There to Sing About? A Credo

What is There to Sing About? A Credo

by

Eric Paul Nolte

After a performance that included two pieces from a song cycle I am writing, a new friend asked me if I would answer the question of how I work at creating music, of how I approach the creative process. In essence this essay is an expanded version of what I wrote my friend.

While I continue to write instrumental music, I find myself completely smitten by music for the human voice. My love of music can be captured by my new animating credo, which is now in the form of an answer to the question: what is there to sing about?  

This question, after a lifetime of not really knowing or caring much about vocal music, comes to me thanks to my treasured wife, who in recent years turned my attention to precisely the right angle so that I could become infused and illuminated by the power of song, and fall in love with this glory which is the human voice and the marriage of words and music.  

Song has the singular power to grab us by the soul in a way that seems utterly to bypass the critical and conceptual mind.  So I am devoting myself to answering this question of what there is to sing about!  

My answer is in the form of a credo: I believe in the power of the human spirit to be an exalted force and to do good things in the world, but being and doing so are neither instinctual nor easy! Art, all good art, provides us with something like fuel for our spirit, as we labor at our time-consuming dreams and projects. So I am devoting myself to creating words and music with the purpose of moving people deeply (which would have to start with me, myself, of course!) 

I want to write songs that can make one feel uplifted, deeply moved, or inspired to seek edification and insight. In the end, I want to write songs that allow one to feel swept up by the waves of love and human connection, to feel awe and wonder before the beauty of the earth and at the enduring mysteries of existence. If these songs should also engage us with The Big Questions of life, then so much the better.  

By the way, I believe we are each on this earth to create lives of joy, meaning, and purpose, and to do so by our own lights. Music should be one of those exalted areas that, as I said, give us fuel to keep moving in the direction of our greater unfolding, the long-term happiness that Aristotle identified as eudaimonia, and which Ayn Rand expanded and refined as the ethics of rational egoism.

How to move towards creating such music? This may have been much easier for others than for me. I am saddled by a college education in music and philosophy, and ironically enough, a background like this can leave one feeling tongue-tied and hobbled by crashing waves of contradictory pronouncements and judgments that issue from warring schools of aesthetics. Finding my way, finding any confidence in my own voice, was a struggle. This struggle was because I embodied all these warring schools and they left me scarcely able to recognize myself even in a mirror. In a sense, these contradictory edicts left me musically blind and deaf to myself.  

There were three warring schools of thought that sank me when I was in school: the twelve-tone counterpoint created by Arnold Schoenberg, the aleatory music of the sort begun by John Cage, and the musical minimalism of such composers as Philip Glass.

Incidentally, this aesthetic paralysis may go some way towards explaining why I abandoned the pursuit of music as a living, and turned instead to aviation. In airplanes, I found rational principles employed to fulfill this ancient human yearning to fly. Objective reason, by which I mean logic applied to the evidence of experience, allowed rational humans to bring this perennial, lofty human ambition down to earth. Airplanes made sense to me, and inspired awe and wonder. Music, new so-called serious art music, made little sense that I could grasp, and brought me aesthetic vertigo (even though, of course, I still loved the practice of great music of the past.)

In the decades since leaving college, I have slowly reconstituted myself and my understanding of the crazy aesthetics that had so immobilized me. I found that in the mainstream, philosophy has been in an abysmal pit for centuries, and today we see something like a dogfight between religious absolutism and postmodern, nihilistic skepticism. This skepticism militantly, absolutely, and therefore ironically denies the possibility of our being able to know anything about anything with confidence. Aesthetics in general has been a victim of this hapless philosophical turn, and music, in particular, has for most of the last century been in a dizzy, pixilated, and confused state. 

Yes, okay, let me acknowledge that this assessment overstates the matter. There is, after all, the long history of jazz, the American musical theater and its many dramatic innovations, starting with Showboat in the 1927, and the American songbook that derives largely from this same musical theater. Yes, there was the work of a legion of accomplished composers, toiling in eclectic vineyards, unaffiliated with any academic school of thought. Think of Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Leonard Bernstein who wrote compelling and beautiful music at a time when the very concept of beauty was problematic in academic circles. Think of those composers of 20th century lieder, or art song, like Ned Rorem, Lee Hoiby, Dominick Argento, and William Bolcom. Think of the serious turn taken by rock and roll, and its inspiration to all genres of popular music. Nevertheless, the point here is that the influential pundits of serious art music were academics who largely upheld the primacy of these three schools of thought: Schoenberg's serialism, John Cage's aleatory music, and the musical minimalism of such composers as John Adams and Philip Glass.

There were aesthetic skirmishes and feints against the materials of the common practice period in the 19th century. Think of French impressionism, of Debussy and Ravel. But the shattering and decisive turn away from the common practice came around 1910, when Arnold Schoenberg declared that composers had explored every nook and cranny of the musical universe and thereby exhausted all possibility of creating anything profoundly new. What was called for was a wholesale reimagining of the nature of music itself, and Schoenberg presented himself as its prophet.

So this is how we got Schoenberg's serial music, this rationalistic twelve-tone counterpoint that denies the significance of the physics of sound and the construction of diatonic scales and chords which are derived from the overtone series. Such scales (but not the chords, which only appeared in the world with the European music around 1600) are found in the music of all the peoples of the world, according to the ethnomusicologists, like Manfred Clynes, who have studied these matters. These scales and chords, in the European world, were the basis for the common practice period from Palestrina, around 1600, until the turn of the 20th century. But Schoenberg asserted a musical "egalitarianism" that dismissed the common practice chords and scales as nothing more than arbitrary cultural conventions. In an aesthetic world that was well prepared to embrace his ideas, he said that there is nothing to distinguish any of the 12 tones by which we divide the octave. No tone can be more important than any other. There can be no inherent tonal centers and wings, no tonic, no dominant, no subdominant, there can be no natural emotion attached intrinsically to any feature of music, he asserted. 

Schoenberg's system requires the building of "tone rows," like a little tune or a riff, in which all 12 tones of the octave must be used once before the composer can use any of those tones again. The tone row is then treated as the subject of the contrapuntal procedures of inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion, in much the same way as practiced by Baroque composers like J. S. Bach. In other words, the notes of the subject are played every which way, front-to-back, upside down and back-to-front. These procedures are all very rationalistic and intellectually rigorous, but by the nature of the 12 tone theory, such compositions tend to have an effect that is unearthly, chilling, and far removed from anything that has ever moved a human heart to dance or sing! 

(Footnote. Having called serialism unearthly and chilling, I should acknowledge that Alban Berg, one of Schoenberg's students, wrote 12-tone music that could move human hearts. Think of his violin concerto. But Berg wrote music that featured tone rows composed so as to create tonal centers and capture musical triads like those which were the basis of the materials of the common practice period! So, the degree to which Berg's music could sway a human heart was the same degree to which he deviated from Schoenberg's icy intention to treat every tone of the octave as equal and unrelated to every other tone.) 

Schoenberg's system utterly captured academic music composition for more than half a century! And to this day the French IRCAM, created by Pierre Boulez, continues to purvey the idea, as Boulez put it not long so ago, that no music today can be considered "serious" if it does not fully embrace the techniques of this 12-tone music, this dodecaphony, this serialism.  Yeesh.... 

How Schoenberg's system won over so much of the world of academic music is a story that would seem to stagger one's common sense, until one realizes that at the same time a similar trend was unfolding in the art world. Think of how, starting in the later 19th century, all the traditional materials and goals of art were being attacked and replaced by ideas that ripped apart all of the traditional goals of three-dimensional, representational art that depicted with passion and craft significant and exalted themes of vital human importance, and replaced them either with nothing or with the opposite of these elements. Why such disintegration should have become a major cultural current is a matter of a parallel disintegration in philosophy, beginning in a big way with the reactionary European counter-enlightenment in the 18th century. This is a story beyond the scope of this little blog entry, but the best short account I know of this development is by the philosopher and professor, Stephen Hicks, "Why Art Became Ugly."  You can find this essay here: 

http://www.atlassociety.org/why_art_became_ugly

Schoenberg's system enjoyed such professional support because the academic world was richly prepared for such ideas by more than a century of bizarre philosophical developments that attacked the very foundation of human confidence in the power of reason. Under attack was the capability of the senses to be in contact with the facts of reality, or to know anything about things in themselves, apart from the human mind. The senses were said to be incapable of knowing the truth about the facts of reality, therefore it was argued that we can know nothing with confidence, and, moreover, the power of reason itself was unalterably tainted. The mind did not grasp reality, argued a long line of philosophers from such disparate streams of philosophy as rationalism and empiricism, the mind invented reality. Philosophers as different as Rene Descartes, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, had all argued from their separate views, against the power of the mind to grasp reality. The resultant crisis of confidence was shattering, and the crisis in art followed inevitably. 

(Footnote. My statement immediately above is both too sweeping and yet not comprehensive enough, but there is deep truth here as well. For a closer reading of the matter, see Stephen Hicks' essay, for starters, then go to Leonard Peikoff's The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out.

(Well, here's another Footnote. With respect to Descartes as a counter-englightment figure, I would argue that his assertion that Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) was the result of his search for a valid starting point of reason, for an idea or an observation in which he could have absolute confidence in justifying the validity of reason. However, his argument was shortly demonstrated to be fallacious, and led philosophers to take it as more "evidence" that the mind does not grasp reality, but creates it instead. While it was the opposite of Descartes' intention, the result of his work was to undermine confidence in reason. In the pages leading up to his cogito conclusion, Descartes wrote a long series of attacks on sense perception and on every other aspect of human reason. In this area, if not in his mathematics, Descartes' rationalism was of no help at all to the project of the European Enlightenment!)  

Now, back to Schoenberg and those who came after him.

Decades after Schoenberg's initial work, there came an alternative to this 12-tone counterpoint: aleatory music, a term from a Latin root meaning luck or chance, which is supposed to be music created sort of by chance. John Cage, American mystic and charismatic eccentric, believed that music should reflect the essential nature of existence, which he believed to be found somewhere between determinism and randomness, or in chance itself. Our Will is not free, so how can one capture in music this essence of existence? If we are not endowed with the power to choose anything, how can one choose one tone over another? Cage rolled dice (and consulted the I Ching ) in order to choose the tones of his compositions.  

Cage is also famous for an iconic piece called 4'33", in which a pianist sits down before the Black Beast on the concert stage, places a stop watch on the music rack, and waits 4 minutes and 33 seconds, hands quietly folded, then stands up to receive an ovation from the audience. The point of this baffling exercise is to demonstrate that it is naked intention that truly makes music. In other words, your calling something "music" is the very thing that makes it so ... and therefore no technique, craft, or even notes, are required. Yeesh, again! Insanity, but hugely influential, like Schoenberg's work. And yet, parenthetically, for all its bizarre-minded silliness, I must say that I have found some quirky charm in Cage's small pieces for "prepared piano" (which is said to be "prepared" because it has had various bits and pieces of metal and wood inserted between some of the strings of the piano, thereby creating a completely different sonority.)

Another alternative to 12-tone and aleatory music came in the last half of the 20th century in the form of musical minimalism, the work of composers like John Adams and Philip Glass.  Fully embracing the aesthetic belief that the essence of musical virtue is always to do something novel, these minimalist composers abandoned the effort to write ever-changing musical phrases, and instead employed dogged, endless repetition of short phrases.  Minimalism is musical catatonia, in the name of originality. In my opinion, this obsession with the new for the sake of newness is as silly as saying that architects, in striving for the virtue of originality, should abandon any conventional idea of, say, a roof and walls because we've done all this before! They say these ideas are obsolete and too trivial to bother with anymore! They would argue that architecture has "exhausted itself" (as Schoenberg said of music at the turn of the 20th century) and since we've tried all these things before, we therefore need a new architectural language.

*   *   * 

Now, really, I do believe right down to the marrow of me, that we have a musical nature as an aspect of being human. In the same way that we are endowed by our nature with a physical basis for responding to the taste of food as sweet, sour, salty, or savory, I believe that we are also endowed by our nature to respond emotionally to music that is made of tones selected from the first few harmonics of the overtone series.  

Anybody who is not deaf or in a coma knows that I speak the truth here, that our nature as Homo saps makes us feel a wide range of emotions in response to diatonic music, no matter with or without words. 

I believe this is self-evidently true, despite the fact that the music to which one responds may vary as widely as the difference between a fugue by Bach and the angry, urban yowling of crude young men shouting rhythmic and rhyming obscenities without melody.

So, for myself, I embrace the palette of sound we receive from the physics of the overtone series. This is the first point of my creative process.

The second point is my belief that worthy music of the sort I want to write, must be rooted in solid craftsmanship. 

Musical craft for me involves an understanding of melody above all, because melody is the defining characteristic of music.

Sorry, all you rappers and hipsters out there, this is the brutal truth: ethnomusicologists have studied all the musics of all the larger groups of peoples all over the world, and have found that for all their vast differences of vocal ideals, timbre, and the actual number of tones by which they divide the octave, all peoples make music with tones selected from the first few harmonics of the overtone series, and, here it is, above all: the defining characteristic of music, shared by all these peoples, is melody. (See the work of Manfred Clynes...)

Melody, in the work I most want to do, is for the purpose of writing songs, and this brings us back to the key question of what on earth should we be singing about?  

What is there to sing about? 

In short, I want my music to uplift and inspire, to engage, and perhaps even to provoke. Music should make us want to dance and sing, at least in our hearts! So the words matter hugely now. 

Setting words to music is a craft in itself. The words must be set in a way that allows them to be heard and felt. I spent two years in Aaron Frankel's workshop at the New School, on writing for the musical theater, which dealt largely with this problem of setting words to music. I have subsequently read a shelf of books on the subject, including lyrics by such masters as Oscar Hammerstein and Stephan Sondheim. 

For me, after the words and melody, the next elements of musical craft are harmony and counterpoint. Melody is the horizontal movement of succeeding tones through time.  Simultaneous melodies, crafted slyly enough, create the vertical dimension, which is harmony. Again, I majored in music. I spent years studying harmony and counterpoint, and I have subsequently run many more laps around these topics.  

Books can be written on this matter of craft, the words, melodies, counterpoint, and harmony, but I believe this little meditation of mine frames the subject well enough to get a sense of the whole sweep of the matter, as I see it.

E  P  N

2014.1110
(revised 2015.28)

Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt?

Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt

(while not stated in the title, that would be Atlas Shrugged, Part 3)

thoughts on the film

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I am thrilled that all three in the series of the Atlas Shrugged film project actually made it to the screen, after all the overwhelming obstacles this project has had to surmount over the last half a century.  

The film should have moved forward with Al Ruddy's project starring maybe Faye Dunaway and Robert Redford, as originally planned, from 1972, but Ayn  Rand insisted on veto power over the script, perhaps rightly so, and therefore the producers scuttled the project. The film should also have moved forward many times in the subsequent years, not least due to the interest of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, several years ago. But it was not to be.

So here we are with Atlas Shrugged, Part 3, finally on the big screen, and the conclusion of the project.

Okay, so this last installment of the film was made on a measly $5 million budget, which is roughly half the budget of the previous installment, and that film was roughly half of the first film's budget. 

Big budget films spend $300 million or more. The average film runs something like $130 million. This film was made on less than 4 % of the average feature film's budget!

The film appeared in an almost vanishingly tiny percentage of American theaters. There are over 5,000 theaters in the US with over 39,000 screens. Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt appeared in its first week in 245 theaters, which is less than 5 percent of the available venues. One would think that no visible impact can possibly result from such a meager showing.

Moreover, what kind of film are we allowed to get for such a minuscule budget?

You know, we actually get some gorgeous scenes of natural beauty, depicted in the segments set in Galt's Gulch and elsewhere too. We get scenes of appropriate atmospheric quality in many places. 

Also, on the good side of the ledger, we get a ravishing film score ... again ... by Elia Cmiral, the composer of the first film's score, who was dropped in the second film, but returns in the third installment. Cmiral's score gives us reprises and more beautiful music, woven appropriately into the scenes (yes, much of it was recycled from the first film, but this is entirely appropriate, in the same sense as a Wagnerian recycling and redevelopment of leitmotifs.)

Alas, on the negative side of the ledger, we get a thoroughly ridiculous scene at the climax of the movie, in which the bad guys torture Galt as absurdly as if in a 1930's sci-fi drama, with stupid looking equipment, with with big levers and sparks flying absurdly off an apparatus that is as hokey as something that should embarrass the likes of the producers of the 1950's film, Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman. I truly hate to say this, but I feel it's true.  

I wanted to be able to stand up and cheer this film. I'm afraid that I can give it only rather more tepid praise.

There are other things about Part 3 with which I want to quibble.

The film is so epigrammatic that it is hard to follow a truly coherent narrative thread.

Here's another thing: as an airline pilot, I have to raise an eyebrow at the opening scene in which Dagny crashes her business jet in Galt's Gulch, and is evidently thrown free of the fuselage. She is also thrown free of her seat itself, with all its belts and harnesses as well, and yet suffers no physical harm beyond a bloody nose and a couple bruised ribs. Oh, come on, now! Worse than this is her acting after this scene, which I would hope is the result of misguided direction. I thought that Laura Regan's acting, apart from this scene and its immediate aftermath, was pretty strong. In general, I thought all the actors performed at a pretty high level.

My wife thought that Kristopher Polaha was entirely too sexy a piece of eye candy to be a believable John Galt. She thought Galt's appearance should be more ... hmm ... scholarly, intellectual, with sharper planes in his physical appearance, less sexy. Being a man of a certain age, I was, of course, disappointed by John Galt's depiction in the the currently fashionable look of an unshaven vagrant's three day growth of beard, and his shirt tail hanging over his trousers belt. Yeesh. Call me an old geezer, I don't care. Yech. It's ugly.

Given the ever more crabbed and disappearing budgets of the three films, I don't want to quibble much with the ever shrinking scale of the scenery. They nevertheless did more than a couple beautiful things even with this last installment.    

I want to say there were things I loved about the whole series, and Part 3, in particular.

I loved the depiction of a Galt's Gulch as a place which was populated with many strong, accomplished, brilliant, and beautiful women! And there were children there too! Yay!

I loved the detail at the end, that Galt's rescuers were going back to get hapless Eddie Willers, whom Rand left out in the desert, abandoned to god only knows what horrible fate!

I was amazed that Galt's speech could be boiled down from 60 pages in the novel to four minutes and 40 seconds, and still have something left of intellectual muscle that could be wrenching and compelling.

I confess to feeling a certain disappointment here. And yet, I do not feel that the essence of Ayn Rand's work has been tainted by these films. I do have the feeling that they may yet draw many people into reading the books.

And yet, I don't see how anyone can come away from these films without the strong impression that we have just watched a powerful explanation for why the world is now coming apart because of the poisons of government collectivism, crony capitalism, authoritarian, righteous-but-cynical control freak, bureaucratic central planning of everything. 

In the end, I must also say that I come away from the theater with something of the spirit of Ayn Rand ringing in my ears, perhaps not as sonorously as I would have liked, and not with the kind of big, cinematic presentation which the book's themes cry out for, but something wonderful anyway.  

There is still something important that is captured by these films, and I don't see how one can come away from these films without at least a strong whiff of that bracing fragrance which is Rand's sense of life. I came away from this last film in the Atlas Shrugged series imbued with more than a hint of the vibrant feeling of what is the essence of Rand's work, namely, that your own life is unique, precious, and your most sacred possession, the thing which your reasoning mind should do its best to develop for the purpose of living your life and being happy here on this beautiful earth! 

What's wrong with that? 

Not so bad, in the end, for a series of films brought to the big screen on a crabbed and tiny budget, reaching a vanishingly small percentage of the movie screens in the country, and produced in the face of enormous hostility. Yes, hostility. Read the reviews. It's enough to make you retch and cry at the outright blindness and malevolence of the reviewers.

Go see the film in a theater, while you still can.

                                                    E  P  N

2014.1027

The film, "Saving Mr. Banks"

The Film, "Saving Mr. Banks"

Some Thoughts

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Last night over the internet we watched the film, "Saving Mr. Banks," which depicts the making of the 1964 Disney film, Mary Poppins.

Wow! Wonderful movie! Vastly better than one might imagine from its negative reviews and the paltry attention it got. I thought the film was a knockout, with Tom Hanks as the ebullient Walt Disney, and Emma Thompson as the thorny, crotchety Mrs. P. L. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins, the magical English nanny.

The film interwove the life stories of Disney and Travers, told in flashbacks and in present time. The present time of the narration included delightful scenes in which the song-writing Sherman brothers, Robert and Richard, were depicted in full flight, working on the film.

Mr. Banks was the father of the family whose two little kids Mary Poppins was evidently dispatched to save. Banks was a stodgy London banker who had no time for his children. In the end, he takes his children, newly won over, to go fly a kite with them for the sheer joy of life. The film slyly shows a tie between Mrs. Travers' tragic father, whom she lost too early, and Mr. Banks. We are led to believe that the saving of Mr. Banks is also about saving Mrs. Travers' hapless father.

Walt Disney was always belittled by supposedly serious critics, but I don't give a damn about them. I remember loving him and his work when I was a child. 

Who Walt Disney really was came to me when I visited Epcot and Disney World as a grownup, with my then little children in tow. The whole place radiates a love of life and of our potential to make good in life. At Epcot, there is a gallery with life-affirming quotes to spur us on to embrace our own potential. There are even a couple quotes by Ayn Rand. 

By the way, over at the Harry Binswanger Letter, Ed Thompson reminds us that the otherwise catholic collection of everything anybody ever wrote on liberty, which is the Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty, has 1,652 entries written by 459 authors. The Fund's founder is a conservative, evidently of the William F. Buckley or Whitaker Chambers variety, and can you guess which significant champion of liberty is missing altogether from this list? Yup, Rand. Despicable. Anybody who thinks Ayn Rand was a conservative is seriously mistaken. Clearly, Disney was not a conservative of this ilk.

Disney was a champion of loving life and of the grandness of the human spirit and a champion of human possibility, human potential, the irresistible idea of progress, and the joy of life. 

Walt Disney was not a prickly, brilliant philosopher like Ayn Rand, with dazzling, epochal solutions to some of the most vexing problems that ever bedeviled so many of the most brilliant thinkers who ever lived ... but Walt Disney embodied so many of the things Rand loved about America and the very idea of America!

I loved seeing this vision of Walt Disney rather faithfully and movingly depicted on the screen!

Rand herself understood that we go a long way towards inspiring people to embrace their own unfolding, and the political and economic liberty which this growth requires, by means of creating inspiring works of literature, including, of course, films like "Saving Mr. Banks."

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Happy Birthday, Ludwig von Mises!

Happy 133rd Birthday, Ludwig von Mises!

The great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, was born on this day, in 1881, to parents of prominent Viennese families, while the father was on temporary duty in the city of Lemberg (now Lvov) in Galicia, which is now part of the Ukraine. His father was a Jew whose grandfather received the ennobling "von" prefix for his exceptional service to the Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria.

It is my belief that the Austrians, starting with Carl Menger, but with Mises in particular, have done more than any other economists to correct the confusions of the classical economists. 

Speaking of these confusions, I'm thinking particularly of Adam Smith's stumbling over the problem of value, such as the explanation for why diamonds cost more than water or bread. Smith's explanation of value was that the greater labor involved in bringing diamonds to market is why diamonds are more valuable than bread. This labor theory of value makes of everybody else in the economic system, like entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and factory owners, a pack of parasites living on the backs of labor, a theory which was so gratefully received by Karl Marx! Marx took the labor theory of value and baked it into a poisonous and stinking cake of no nutritional value, that nevertheless intoxicated generations of leftist control freak collectivists ever since, including the current communist occupier of the American White House.

Through his 1922 essay on the problem of "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," and the book, Socialism, that followed shortly, in 1922, Mises also did more than anybody else before him to prove that socialism as an economic system can lead only to chaos because of its singular lack of a viable price system. It is prices, discovered by the choices of consumers in a free economy, that allow rational economic calculation. It is the choices of consumers that direct the flow of scarce resources into those enterprises that stand the best chance of satisfying the most urgent wants and needs of the consumers. Lacking a price system, chaos follows, as central planning bureaucrats guess at what to produce, in which quantities and sizes, employing which and how many workers at which wages, and so forth, with the result that under the interventionist, government planned economy, there are inevitably shortages of everything that people really want, and surpluses of things that nobody wants.

Considering that Mises grew up in the German-speaking world of the late 19th century, which by that time was thoroughly infected by the Kantian skeptic notions, it is astonishing how close Mises came to avoiding the deadly Kantian spore, and naming the actual rational epistemological grounds on which to build a theory of economics.

Mises' approach to the epistemological groundwork of his field begins with unassailable truths we can know by observation and experience, and thence to deduce the logical implications by which we get the truths of human action in the economic realm. He has been lambasted for this approach by everybody from the positivists onwards, although I believe that all of these critics were completely mistaken in their approach to knowledge, and that Mises actually did a much better job of grounding the field than his critics.

Mises came far closer than his peers to naming and bridging the crazy chasm which was Hume's problem of induction, and made a noble effort at bushwhacking his way out of the impenetrable epistemological tangle which was the condition in which the Kantians and Hegelians left the German-speaking universities.  It would remain for Ayn Rand and her various associates and allies to dismantle those problems. I believe it remains yet for anybody to apply the available solutions to the problem of induction as it relates to economics and thereby help in grounding Mises' immensely powerful work in a more coherent epistemology. 

Hmm. George Reisman, who was a student of both Mises and Rand, has done outstanding work in economics. Now that I mention it, I should go back and have another look his major book, Capitalism, and see how Reisman addresses this groundwork before I say anything more conclusive. He certainly embodies the great strengths of both Mises and Rand.

Mises' life motto, taken up in high school from Virgil and embraced the whole of his life, was: Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito. "Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it."

Mises was a hero whose work was dismissed and attacked by the socialists all his life, and as the socialists began to win over the profession, Mises never gave into pressure, never changed his mind without a proper reason. In the last half of his life, he narrowly escaped Hitler, but lost most of his library and papers in the process of escaping with his life. Thereafter, Mises came to New York University, but never enjoyed a university paid position (while his socialist colleagues, also intellectual refugees from Europe, were feted and celebrated in American universities.) 

I believe that Mises was a man of enormous importance in the history of ideas, a thinker of stunning intellectual power, and a man of unbreakable integrity and honor.

If you don't know Mises' work, or much about economics, I recommend starting with Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, and then Mises' own collection of essays, Liberalism, then Socialism, and finally read his other works, especially his magnum opus, Human Action. Be sure to get the scholar's edition of Human Action, from the Ludwig von Mises Institute (mises.org) Also be sure to get Percy Greaves' Mises Made Easier, in which Greaves very kindly defines all the arcane terms and translates into English all the quotations in ancient Greek and Latin, which any educated peer of Mises' would have known out of hand, but which tend to have become lost on our later, dumbed-down generations.

A wonderful book on Mises and his times is Jorg Guido Hulsmann's Mises: the Last Knight of Liberalism.

Anyway, bravo, Herr Professor Doktor Mises! Yay, Lu! Blessings on your spirit, honor to your work!

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2014.0930

How Can Rational People Believe So Much Hooey?

How Can Rational People Believe So Much Hooey?

Some Facts of Reality

by Which to Gain Objective Knowledge, 

Especially of What is Right and Wrong

by

Eric Paul Nolte

As airline pilots, we have a captive audience in the cockpit. Not taking advantage of this situation is a matter of compassion or character. Still, we sometimes talk about an amazing range of subjects.

I could write many essays on some of the topics that arise on the flight deck, but I am starting with this one because I find the subject and its setting compelling, and because I just wrote an essay on some of the problems of faith. 

So here is the question: how can it be that so many of these pilots I work with, men and women who are really squared away and run every detail of their lives absolutely ship shape-- how can they run their lives so rigorously by the light of reason, and yet assert that their most important values in life are rooted in a set of religious beliefs that defy all rational belief? How can so many otherwise rational people believe so much hooey?

But first, I should address the possibility that you may be reeling at the notion that while they are in charge of your precious soul, your tender hide, your pilots might be blathering away about the most abstruse matters when they're supposed to be riding herd on this tender tube of aluminum and other materials, this technological marvel, there at six miles above the ocean, and hurtling through the most hostile environment on earth at a velocity of nine miles every minute. Relax. Here's the situation: 

When we reach cruise altitude, we tidy up the flight deck, finish all our fussy little preparations and get everything configured for crossing over the North Pole, or the Pond over to Europe, or wherever. At that point, there is usually very little work to do for many hours. One little channel of the brain suffices to mind the store and make sure we stay on course and don't blunder into storms or other hazards, and that George, the autopilot, has everything right side up and pointing in the right direction. Once every 45 minutes or so, we cross another waypoint and verify that a mandatory report was sent to our company and to ATC, and we then compare the actual versus the estimated fuel consumption and a few other important parameters. The flight attendants kindly see to it that we are fed and watered. And it's otherwise all very quiet.

A blowhard pilot could take advantage of the situation, pull out a soapbox and begin making campaign speeches for some treasured crusade. 

But mostly we just sit back, sip coffee, take in the stunning view from our office, read things like flight manuals to brush up on some arcane question that might have recently arisen about the airplane systems or flight operations, or study the charts for the destination airport and airways. It would not be unprecedented to see an occasional newspaper or magazine. The demands of flight, at that point, are very, very low. We are all vastly experienced and have an acute ability to sense anything out of the expected. Moreover, anything that even begins to stray out of line will provoke a little yellow warning light (or a red light, if serious enough) and a printed and aural message that will begin chirping or dinging or honking at us to rouse even the slowest wit. Not to put it in a morbid way, but the flight deck of a modern airliner is like a little graveyard, in which every piece of equipment, every switch, instrument, and light, is a like a little tombstone and a monument, a testament, to the human capacity to learn from our experience. All that equipment was installed as the result of some pilot who died, and the installation of which now makes it less likely that anyone will ever suffer another fatal accident on account of those mistakes.

I don't think of myself as a blowhard, but I do try to hold this evaluation, like all my beliefs, in a context that is open to revision in the light of new evidence. Although I certainly have some strong opinions on matters about which I've thought long and hard, I try not to bulldoze anybody with whom I disagree. In fact, I wear as a badge of pride, the fact that I seem to be able to talk with almost anybody about anything. Even when I disagree with someone, I try hard to keep the discussion civil.

As the captain, the other crew members are obliged to honor my position in the chain of command, up there in the nose cone, but I am happy to say that we no longer practice anything like the rigid, "Captain as God" system of crew management, as was the case when I was a wet young pup in the 1970s. Nowadays we encourage everybody on the flight deck always to speak up, especially if there are any doubts or questions about the operation of the airplane. By this means, every brain on deck is fully engaged, and not cowering in monkish servitude and obedience while the captain does something stupid, like grazing the top of a ridge line short of the runway. If you had asked the first officer or the engineer, "Why didn't you tell the boss he was about to hit the ridge?" the answer was always, "He was flying, it wasn't my place, and when he wants my opinion he asks me, and besides I thought he saw it. Moreover, in the end, it's not my place."  

Even though I am the captain, I try to be sensitive to the other pilots' feelings. I am genuinely interested in what makes other people tick, and to learn how others have come to believe what they hold important. Nothing to me is more interesting than talking about the Big Questions and the puzzlements and conundrums of life, love, and the cosmos.

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So let me pose the question again: how can so many smart people, who run their lives absolutely by the light of reason, nevertheless hold that their most important values in life are religious beliefs that defy any grounds for rational belief? How can so many otherwise rational people believe so much hooey?

You can't just plunge into these deepest of intellectual waters without a long preparation. But the news out of the middle east always raises religious questions, and talking about any of it will draw us into these waters. 

Question: How can loving parents strap bomb vests on their children and send them out to blow up random strangers on busses in Tel Aviv? 

Answer: Religion. Well, there is in fact the religion that must not be named which is the source of this particularly murderous insanity today, but let's leave it, for the moment, with this universal label, "religion." You may already know why this particular religion today is not alone in having a long and murderous   history. I promise to revisit the matter momentarily. 

How can anybody believe the kind of murderous hogwash that leads them to use their children as suicidal instruments of random, mass murder? It's their religion. They grew up with it, they've never known anybody who has ever questioned it. More than that, remember it's a capital crime to question their religion, and, you know, ultimately it's a matter of faith. But Christians and Jews have faith too. But Christians and Jews are not strapping bomb vests on their children. So what's the difference? They all believe in the God of Abraham...

Before you know it, a conversation like this eventually shores up at the question of god. 

Do you believe in God? Yes, they'll tell me. 

You can ask what they mean by god, but eventually it all comes down to asking, "Why do you believe in God?"

Now here is what I find astonishing: the answer is almost always explained with reference to natural phenomena which they view as overwhelming evidence for the existence of god. Not always the God of Abraham, but at least Nature's God, as Jefferson and Adams would have put it.

They almost always say they have perfectly rational grounds for believing in God. They do not initially profess their belief in God as a matter of faith, although, when pressed on the matter, they will eventually feel compelled to say, yeah, ultimately it's all a matter of faith. Yet even when they invoke faith, it becomes clear that they do not mean anything like a belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence, which is the key dictionary denotation of faith. They never say they believe things without proof. In their minds, faith simply means the intellectual contents of whatever a person believes. Faith is synonymous with belief itself. And nearly all these pilots I've talked with believe that the existence of God is proved by logic and evidence!

Okay, so they are are naifs. In their minds, God explains the inexplicable, and  they haven't studied logic or philosophy by which they might find better explanations (I hasten to add that if we're talking about the mainstream academic postmodern varieties of philosophy, it might be a good thing that these pilots are thus naive, but, as I shall argue below, I believe there is good philosophy and reliable logic by which to test our beliefs.)

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By the way, my sample here is drawn over the course of something like 40 years, and is mostly male, white, heterosexual, and Christian, but there have been many, many women, blacks, Jews, gays, and even two Muslims, both men. They've all been to college, many have advanced degrees, and there is a wide range of talent and accomplishment up there on the flight deck.

If you ask them about the Bible's talking snakes, talking bushes on the road to Damascus that not only talk but burn without being consumed by the fire, or you ask them about virgin births, or resurrection after death, or any of the other miracles, they're passed off with a shrug and a nod at metaphor and how the primitive peoples who wrote these books knew little about the world. It just doesn't matter to them, and it does not impinge on their perceived, perfectly rational grounds for believing in God.

Now you point out that their argument for the existence of god is the Argument from Design, which is essentially that the world displays astonishing order, that things don't just happen in an orderly way by accident, and therefore some divine intelligence must have brought about this orderly universe. What's wrong with this?

Well, if the apparent design of the universe requires a Designer, surely the Designer displays an even more astonishing order than the thing designed, so why doesn't the Designer require a Designer to explain itself? Be consistent, now! To say the designer does not require a designer would thus be a contradiction, and would lead to the logical fallacy of an infinite regress. So now you have not explained the question with an answer rooted in observable nature, you have offered a riddle in answer to a puzzle, a conundrum to explain a bafflement, a mystical, ghostly other-worldly explanation as the answer to an earthly question. You haven't answered the question at all, you've simply pushed it down the road.

Oy, geeezz!-- the pilot will say, hands held high, now you're going off into la la land. Who needs to go that far? It's like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!

For the average pilot, indeed, who needs to go deeper than the cozy, comforting, unchallenged argument from Design? It's enough, already! If we are going to understand the physics of why airplanes fly, we can learn enough to acquire a practical mastery of a pilot's skills without having to learn all the higher math we would need to understand the baffling world of quantum mechanics.

Except ... that this argument from design is not enough to answer the question of god. This argument for the existence of God is not a practical solution to the matter. Far from it! This argument for god still leaves open the very basis of the dogfight between all of these other warring religions, namely, that each of them is asserting its own absolutes above all the others, and the fact that these ideas all contradict those of the other religions! It's a Tower of Absolute Babel.

And more: truly, the argument from design for the existence of god is bushwa, it explains nothing!

Moreover, there is a long list of arguments for god that have challenged the best minds that ever lived, and, in the end, we find that not a one of these arguments is valid, not one of them will hold water, logically, much less walk on water.

So what? My colleagues are intelligent, decent people, and are mostly devoted to being good people and to doing good in the world. In fact, it is this seeking after goodness, it is the pleasures of being in a community of the like-minded who enjoy each other's company, and helping each other out-- it is all of these things that motivates most of them to be religious.

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To most religious people, religion means the very source of goodness. If you ask them, they almost invariably say, echoing Dostoevsky, that if there is no god issuing rewards, threats, and punishments beyond the grave, then everything is permitted, so without God, life on earth would become a brutish war of predatory aggression of all against all. Without God, there are no standards for right action, no answers to how to be a good person in the world.

I disagree with the idea that a god is required to set standards or good and bad.

For one thing, there is no god.

No! They'll splutter indignantly, how can you say there is no god? They may then move on to asserting an alternative definition of god. Alright, they say, alright! What if by god you simply mean the impersonal forces that obviously animate the universe? Something is going on here! 

Well, okay, there are certainly forces at work in the universe, and we have not yet broken the code on what all these forces are, so what's wrong with calling these forces "god?"

Or what about the idea that some people's definition of god is simply the concept to which they appeal when they square off to the many enduring mysteries of existence? We do not have all the answers! Why not call this feeling of awe, god? Why not call God this cosmic sense of awe and astonishment at the beauty of the earth and at the way we feel when standing before all these enduring mysteries of life and the universe? We don't have all the answers, so what's wrong with calling our feelings about all these things, god?

Well, I share the belief that there are forces we have yet to understand. I agree that there are enduring mysteries of existence. I agree that all these things can inspire deep feelings of cosmic awe before the beauty and mystery of life. 

But I do not agree that calling these feelings "god" will do any good. Why not? Because we already have this word, god, and it already has a definition. Adding more definitions to the long list of definitions of the word will do nothing more than add to the problem of equivocation and provide grounds for even further confusion!

Remember also that this idea of god already comes with a long and bloody history. Untold millions have been murdered in the name of god, and millions more will surely die unless we in the world improve our rational understanding of the nature of existence and our relationship to it.

When I say there is no god, I mean the obviously true fact that there is no place and no entity anywhere on earth where any two people can go together to ask God questions and expect to hear divinely confirmed answers delivered in a voice sounding maybe like Charlton Heston, portraying Moses in "The Ten Commandments," that everybody can hear simultaneously and agree on what words are being said, and also agree that it is God who is incontestably saying these words.

There is no public god, no god available in a public square. Who in their right mind can deny this? There is no address, no phone number, no state of the union addresses being issued over the networks or the internet for all to hear. There simply is no god.

Instead, we have billions of Homo saps on earth who embrace countless texts which they claim to be the sacred, inerrant word of god, and all of these holy texts conflict with each other's pronouncements on many radically important points. Moreover, these holy texts are all said to be validated by the testimony of credible witnesses to all kinds of miracles like virgin births, flying carpets, talking snakes, resurrections of dead people, and so forth.

But these religions are all making claims that conflict with each other! They can't all be right. They could all be wrong, but they can't all be right. So how can we know which, if any, is right? And what about the possibility I mentioned above, of a new and better definition of god that might bring everybody together?

Another definition of god will not diminish the level of confusion and disagreement here. 

We need a replacement for the concept of god that will point to the universal facts of reality by which we can say with confidence what is objectively true and false, and what is right and wrong.

Ha! This is precisely what most of the world believes to be impossible! 

The religious believe that absolute knowledge of right and wrong is possible, but only because God gave us the absolutes. 

The postmodern left believes it is altogether impossible to name such absolutes. As least as far back as David Hume, in the 18th century, we have these allegedly unbridgeable chasms. One is said to be an insuperable problem with the nature of induction that renders all our universals and generalizations untenable. A related problem is with the generalization of causality. Still another uncrossable sea is called the "is-ought" dichotomy, which is the pronouncement that there are no facts of reality (nothing which is) by which we can derive any normative values (which would be to name something which ought to be as a result of this fact of reality.) 

(See Quee Nelson's wonderful book, The Slightest Philosophy, for a devastating stake in the heart of this vampire stream of thought, which has delivered us into the arms of postmodernism and the idea that all judgments are social constructs, laden with warping theories that render objectivity impossible.)

So here we have religion which says there are moral absolutes, but only God makes them absolute, and a secular opposition which says there are no absolutes at all (except for the one that denies that there are any absolutes) and therefore all pronouncements on right and wrong are entirely subjective, socially constructed, and tribal. I am persuaded that these are profoundly false alternatives that do not exhaust the possibilities for us to consider on the moral and normative realm.

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It turns out that we do in fact have some earthly standards, some facts of reality, to which we can turn for our questions on what is true or false, and right or wrong. I am persuaded that there are some perfectly good answers by which we can dismantle these unexploded mines on the killing fields of religion and postmodern philosophy. (The suicide bomber might represent the religious problem, and for the postmodern problem, think of a killer in the Cambodian genocide, like Pol Pot, with an AK-47 in one hand, and copies of Rousseau and Foucault in the other.) The absolutism of religion and ironically absolutist postmodern nihilism are pointless, false conundrums that have inspired people to kill and enslave each other, and there are perfectly good answers to them. These answers flow out of the stream of philosophy that begins with Aristotle and now reaches Ayn Rand and many others whose work carries on in this tradition.

Aristotle lived 2,400 years ago, and Ayn Rand's major works have mostly been available for half a century. How come many more people don't see that we have some good answers that can serve to dismantle the insanity?

Well, for one thing, maybe the most basic fact about human nature is that, while we certainly have instincts, these do not comprise a comprehensive knowledge of life, and so we are not born knowing what survival and flourishing demand of us. We have to figure it out by reason and observation. We pass this knowledge on to our children and they pass it on to theirs, along with any new knowledge they may have accumulated along the way. Reality can prune away the craziest ideas we have because these craziest of ideas tend to kill off those who believe them. But, obviously, we are a long, long way from having all the insane ideas carved away by natural selection, and see them drop to history's cutting room floor.

For another thing, it turns out, as Richard Dawkins eloquently frames the matter, human beings are hard-wired mostly to believe what we hear as we're growing up. Why does nearly everybody grow up believing the religion they were born into? We have a deep tendency to believe our elders! We believe what our parents and teachers tell us! Even the crazy stuff! To the point here, especially the crazy stuff!

Another matter here is that we are not born with minds that strive for independent thinking. Intellectual independence is a high virtue that must be discovered, or taught to the young by those who already hold this idea as a virtue. We live in world where many cultures absolutely revile such independence of mind, and for some of these cultures, critical thinking and independence of mind are capital crimes. They will kill you for daring to offer a critical thought! 

It is simply unrealistic to expect that ordinary people will display extraordinary independence of mind when nobody in their whole circle of friends, family, and acquaintance has ever displayed the first whiff of a question about, say, the existence of god, or to have an inclination to question any of the tribe's beliefs, or to exhibit a powerful curiosity about anything. The status quo embodies a powerful inertia. 

For yet another thing, consider what I myself call the real original sin of humanity, which is confirmation bias.  You may already know that this the hapless tendency of everybody to filter out anything we do not already understand or believe. Granted, there is survival value to an animal that possesses this reticular activation system, which allows us to filter out of the tsunami of sensory data that forever floods our senses, things like our own name, uttered across a smokey crowded room, or the cry of our baby from a distant crib, heard above the street noise outside. But it is a deep problem too! Confirmation bias tends to make us deaf and blind to anything we do not already believe to be true and right. The only antidote I know is to practice a ruthless intellectual honesty and force ourselves to pay attention to ideas with which we know we will disagree, and try sympathetically to understand why anybody in their right mind would hold such beliefs.

Another reason for why the world remains pretty much blind to the facts of reality by which we can come to hold objective knowledge of what is right and wrong: the Iron Law of Oligarchy, by which small groups of highly motivated elites tend to get their way over large groups of people who do not care nearly as much about the issues that so arouse the passions of the elites. It remains a very large majority of people who believe in these opposing false alternatives of religious absolutism and secular skepticism. The inertia of those who hold these orthodox views is enormous, and is militantly arrayed against the success of any alternatives.

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Now, we live at a time that remains at an abysmally low level of philosophical development, in my humble opinion. Academic philosophy continues to take tea at the table of postmodernism with the Mad Hatter in Alice's Wonderland.

Philosophy is the discipline that should give us the power of a solvent to scrub the worst absurdities out of our minds. Don't tell me that by this formulation I am advocating brain washing! I am asserting that there are profoundly destructive ideas in the world, and it is the discipline of good philosophy by which one can learn the intellectual technology to separate truth from nonsense, and of right from wrong.

But most people do not understand that this is what philosophy is or can be. Far from it. Even worse, most people agree (and yes, there are excellent survey data to support this claim) that there are no grounds apart from religion and arbitrary social constructs by which to support any ideas on morality, or on anything in the normative realm. There is in science a limited belief in the means by which we can distinguish truth from falsehood, but these truths are generally said to be delimited and contingent, never certain, and never available to any claims of a normative or ethical nature.

Even worse, we have a whole tribe of mostly university academics whose minds have been poisoned to some extent by the ravings of nihilistic postmodern skepticism that deny even the possibility of knowing anything with confidence. These are people like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Frank Lentricchia, Andrea Dworkin, Richard Rorty, and so forth. These thinkers have all claimed to be the true inheritors of philosophy, properly understood (not that they believe that anything can be "properly understood.") By their view our every utterance is irredeemably incoherent. There is no "reality," whatever the hell that might be, no world or self to have an intrinsic nature, there is no correspondence between the world and any truth we might try to assert about it. We have deconstructed reason, truth, and the very idea of any such correspondence! Quoted by Stephen Hicks in Explaining Postmodernism, Foucault writes, "Reason is the ultimate language of madness." By this view, we are trapped helplessly inside our own minds. 

It would be lovely to leave the postmodernist skeptics to their own nonsense, but, ironically, they continue to wield enormous intellectual influence in the world, and so they must be addressed.

So, what are these facts of reality that can give rise to objective knowledge of right and wrong?

Ayn Rand got it right here:

In the shortest thumbnail sketch I can make, let me first to draw your attention to the fact that there is one basic alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence. All life forms face a fundamental alternative: life or death.

Nature provides every life form, plant and animal alike, with a basic means of survival. For each life form, the good consists of the set of things which allow it to survive, the bad, or evil, are those things which threaten its life.

For a human being, survival and flourishing depend on rationality, observation and logic applied to the evidence of experience; in a word: reason.

To survive, we must take certain actions to assure food and shelter (or else someone else must act on our behalf.) Which actions? We must discover what is efficacious. We need knowledge of what supports us. This knowledge must be discovered by reason. 

The good, therefore, for a human being is life, its own life. Life is a property of each individual. The good is the set of things which support an individual's life. Life is the standard of the good. 

Nothing is possible without its life. No action, no thought, no value judgment, nothing is possible without its life. 

Think about this: one's life is the very grounds for making any value judgments, including even the decision to take one's own life, as might be the case with some poor soul who is stricken by a fatal and hopelessly painful illness, and who therefore decides that the pain of daily existence trumps any pleasures remaining in life.  

So life is the foundational good, the very standard of the good. Everything that threatens its life is the evil.

Let me flesh this out in just a little bigger way: if we want to live, then we must hold some values by which to guide the actions we take in order to support our lives. 

A value is something that inspires us to take action in order to get it. A value is the goal of the actions we take in order to acquire it. Reason is the cardinal value that supports our ability to live because reason allows us to acquire the knowledge of what we must do if we are to succeed in reaching our goals. 

Our nature endows us with free will, the power to choose to pay attention to one thing rather than another. We must choose a purpose, which will be the happiness that we want our life to be about, and it is this end towards which we must then use our reason to achieve. 

Self-esteem is the basic energy that moves our feet out of bed in the morning; it is the sum of two things: first, the knowledge we achieve that provides us with the certainty that we are competent to survive; and, second, the unshakable conviction that we are worthy of happiness.

Virtue is not some musty old idea that is said to be its own reward, not some ancient battle axe that threatens our happiness, but is instead a means by which to achieve a value. Most to the point here: the starting point of goodness and virtue is not self-sacrifice for the lives of others. The purpose of our lives is not to give up our lives for the benefit of everybody else, but to enjoy our own lives. 

Virtues are the means by which we achieve our values. The purpose of our lives is to live our life and achieve our own flourishing.  

The cardinal values are achieved by employing the primary virtues. Among these virtues are rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride, and benevolence. There are many other virtues as well, of course, such as courage, confidence, curiosity, and an unlimited number of others, all arrayed so as to support the values pursued. 

If flourishing and happiness are the purpose of our lives, then a predatory, grasping abuse of other people can never be a viable or enduring means for achieving these values. We achieve our values by dealing with other people voluntarily, respecting the fact that their purpose in life, like ours, should rightly be the pursuit of their own happiness, and that we can greatly enhance everyone's ability to achieve this happiness by dealing with each other as traders, exchanging value for value, to mutual advantage.  

A proper development of these ideas requires a hefty book (many of which have already been written in this Aristotelian/Randian stream I have mentioned above), but this the essence of the factual basis for judging what is right and wrong, in its most distilled form.

All of this is to draw attention to why the postmodern skeptics are mistaken about the impossibility of an ethics rooted in the facts of reality, and also for why all the warring religious absolutists are mistaken about the mystical basis for their absolutes, when there are perfectly good, earthly facts of reality by which to acquire objective knowledge and values.

I want to flesh out more of this, another time, when I will turn to the question I keep running into with the college students in my circle, namely: the cultural relativists' utterly helpless inability to find unassailable moral grounds on which to condemn those who believe that the highest good is to strap bomb vests on their children and send them out to blow up random strangers. 

The postmodern skeptics claim that there are no objective grounds by which to make such a condemnation. The religious absolutists, many of them anyway, are actually among those who believe that there is no greater glory or good than killing infidels, and meanwhile the world is wriggling with all kinds of religious people who affirm other absolute truths which conflict with each other's ideas hopelessly and irreconcilably. 

There is a way out. Stay calm, carry on, and apply logic to the evidence of experience. Eventually, better ideas will come to mind. 


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2014.1114