Challenging the New McCarthyism

Assaults on free speech in academia are not new. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out seventy years ago, academic freedom in European universities meant freedom to teach and agree with the government’s viewpoint (Bureaucracy, pp. 81-83).

It has always been a little risky for students to disagree with their professors’ ideas, unless the disagreement is done within the narrow confines, defined by the professors, of what is considered “reasoned debate.” This is what happens when the government is in charge of education; the government’s agents dictate what is acceptable speech, leaving its customers little choice or opportunity to take their business elsewhere.

A recent survey, however, starkly demonstrates the silencing of dissent on college campuses today: thirty percent of college seniors and less than twenty percent of faculty agree that it is safe to hold unpopular positions.

The cause is McCarthyism from the left, speech and harassment codes that are blatantly non-objective and violate First Amendment protections. As in the original McCarthyism these codes and their enforcement use “unfair allegations” and “unfair investigative techniques,” such as Star Chamber (secret) proceedings, “to restrict dissent or political criticism” (dictionary.com).

The history of political correctness has been chronicled in a number of books (1, 2, 3). The latest is Greg Lukianoff’s Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of Academic Debate. Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), details hundreds of cases his organization has defended on college campuses in the last fourteen years. FIRE initially writes to administrators citing First Amendment law and urges them to dismiss the cases they have against students and professors. When discussion fails, FIRE takes the cases public and helps victims litigate. FIRE to date has won all such cases. Very few universities, however, have apologized for almost wrecking a student’s or professor’s future.

Orwellian-style thought control is used to re-educate students in the political correctness ideology. Code violators face threats of expulsion, disciplinary blemishes on their records, and even criminal arrest. They often are “graciously” offered to have their records cleansed if they recant their sins (Galileo style?), apologize to the offended and write papers on the “correct” ideology, and attend mandatory counseling (Soviet style?) with a psychologist or other person well versed in the PC dogma.

The way speech and harassment codes work is that they equate words and actions; they declare fully protected offensive and hurtful speech to be nearly as harmful as assault and battery. Thus, racial or sexual epithets may be in violation of the codes because they are considered “hostile acts.” Sexual harassment is determined by the perceptions of recipients and may be as innocuous as a mild flirtatious comment saying “you’re beautiful.” If the recipients feel harassed, harassment has occurred. The codes are overbroad and vague, and the intent of speakers, in opposition to the First Amendment legal record, is irrelevant.

Indoctrination begins in first-year orientation in which students may be made to line up in order of skin color or by sexual leaning, for the purpose of demonstrating how racist, sexist, and homophobic certain privileged races, genders, and social classes are. On-on-one “therapy” sessions—or rather, invasions of privacy—may be required with a resident assistant to probe a student’s (incorrect) sexual attitudes and orientation. Ideological loyalty oaths are not uncommon, especially in fields such as social work where students must sign statements of agreement with their professors’ ideas about sex.

Other examples range from the comical to the reprehensibly serious. The comical includes dampening of the allegedly offensive decades-old tradition of Harvard and Yale students trading barbs over their annual football game and umbrage taken by Harvard’s Information Technology Department over a satirical cartoon lampooning the department’s computer glitches (Lukianoff, pp. 81 and 87-88).

The serious includes threats of arrest—for disorderly conduct of a professor who put a poster on his door of a sci-fi television hero saying, “If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And You’ll be armed.”  The message means “I play fair.” The university guardians of peace and harmony assumed he was threatening violence (Lukianoff, pp. 138-39).

The upshot of the codes is that anyone who feels hurt, feels criticized, or feels threatened—regardless of objective legal criteria spelled out in multiple court decisions—may file a complaint and be backed up by the weight of modern bureaucratic PC-ness to crush (or scare the living daylights out of) the student, professor, club, newspaper writer, or Facebook poster who “inspired” such feelings.

The uniqueness of Lukianoff’s organization is that FIRE is bi-partisan. Lukianoff describes himself as a lifelong Democrat and environmentalist. FIRE’s founders are Alan Charles Kors, a “conservative-leaning libertarian professor,” and Harvey Silverglate, a “liberal-leaning civil rights attorney.” Other members of the staff include “liberals, conservatives, libertarians, atheists, Christians, Jews, Muslims” (Lukianoff, p. 13). What they all have in common is a commitment to the First Amendment and freedom of speech.

Where has this PC lunacy come from? Marxism, of course. The new McCarthyism is a coercive application of political correctness to the regulation of behavior—everyone’s behavior, student as well as professor. It is not about being nice and respectful to historically disadvantaged and discriminated against races, genders, and sexual orientations. It is about old Marxism dressed up in modern cloth, using the historically disadvantaged groups as pawns in the continued political agenda to disparage capitalism.

The bourgeoisie are no longer the oppressors of the proletariat, especially since the working classes have moved up in the world under capitalism and in some cases now make more money than college professors! Today, the oppressors are white, Anglo-Saxon males and other allegedly privileged groups who are subjugating the historically disadvantaged. In true Marxist, revolutionary fashion, so goes the canon, some liberties must be sacrificed to make amends. Free speech and equality before the law must be sacrificed to the goal of social equality, that is, the goal of equalizing those historically disadvantaged races, genders, and sexual orientations even if it means harming the privileged classes and restricting their speech.

The source of this new McCarthyism is that Marxist darling of the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse and the virulent absolutism of his post-modern followers. Marcuse advocated in unmistakably plain language “the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions and movements” and endorsed revolutionary violence (quoted in Kors and Silverglate, p. 71).

As serious as the present state of censorship on campus currently is, organizations like FIRE and tireless writers and speakers like Lukianoff promise a freer future in what the Supreme Court has acknowledged is—and should be—a truly diverse marketplace of ideas.



Postscript: Read Lukianoff’s Wall Street Journal response to the latest federal government attempt, through the harassment codes, to restrict and punish speech on (and off) college campuses. Prior restraint is also involved in the feds' attempt.

Life Lessons from Sports: What about the Sixty Years after College?

In ancient Roman schools, boys who failed to learn their lessons were beaten on their bare backs with a ferula, a long piece of flat wood. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and we rarely hear about corporal punishment in the classroom, even of the kind I recall from childhood, like the paddle, knuckles rapped with a ruler, or kneeling on raw peas. Treatment of this type by a teacher today would be called assault and battery.

Yet in collegiate sports a coach who shoves his player “to motivate” him merely gets a mild rebuke from the university administration. Another coach, who threw basketballs at his players’ heads and knees, kicked them, and called them insulting names, has recently been fired . . . but only after the smoking gun of video went viral on the Internet.

Life lessons from sports? To be sure, quite a few life lessons are being learned by the victims of these coaches. What it’s like to be abused by a caretaker would be one. And, paraphrasing Menander, the lesson that you haven’t been trained unless you’ve been flogged. Sadly, many of the players, typical of abuse victims, defend their abusers by saying “it was for my own good.”

Remove the physical abuse from consideration and a dictatorial drill sergeant mentality, which would not likely be tolerated in a classroom teacher, still dominates coaching in sports. The mentality is often defended under the blather of providing valuable “life lessons.” Dependent robots and obedience to authority are what these coaches want and get.*

Independent thinking is the life lesson kids most desperately need to be learning—at home, in the classroom, and in sports. They need to be thinking about what they will do with their lives after the sports end, and the sports will end in college, if not sooner, for nearly all of them. What happens then? Get a job stocking shelves at Walmart?

Half of all college athletes after they graduate make less money than their non-athletic counterparts. Why? Because they don’t have the work experience and internships to put on their resumes that the non-athletes have. Athletes are expected by their drill sergeants to spend up to 45 hours per week on their sport. Throw in two hours of homework for every hour in class and not much time is left in the week. The “solution,” of course, for college athletes is to take fewer units and perhaps not ever graduate, or take puffcake courses like billiards, bowling, and water color painting.

Walmart is a fine place to work, but working there after college is not why one gets that degree.

If  the words “fraud” and “exploitation” come to mind in relation to amateur sports, there is good reason. The National Collegiate Athletic Association deserves the epithets the most. Fraud because, as scathingly chronicled with analogies to slavery by civil rights historian Taylor Branch (1, 2), there is nothing amateur—in expertise and, especially, money—about today’s sports. And exploitation, because the kids never see a penny of the billions they earn for their universities.

Scholarships are payment, no? No. The so-called full ride, contingent on not getting injured, still leaves an average of $3200 a year to cough up out of pocket, leaving some of the kids from poor families without grocery money or bus fare home for spring break. Another life lesson learned!

The obsession that parents and coaches in youth leagues have over landing a scholarship to college is, to put it mildly, absurd. Aside from the minuscule chance of being granted one, scholarship is still not necessary in most states to get a college education.**

In my thirty-plus years as a college professor, I have had my share of athletes in the classroom. One Division 1 football player told me his practices were from 2:00 – 6:00PM. My class started at 6:00, so he was always late. After four or five weeks, I never saw or heard from him again.

Another football player (at a different school) attended my class just after completing his first season in the National Football League. He made two pointed comments to me about why he was in that seat. One, that unlike his teammates he was determined to finish his degree. The second was his observation that when playing in the NFL you are just a  highly paid blue-collar worker. Meaning there was no way he was going to remain a blue-collar worker (or become a stock clerk at Walmart) when his playing days were over. This student went on to a successful career in the NFL and now has an equally successful career in business.

Projecting and setting goals beyond sports. That’s a good life lesson.



*”Legal, even celebrated child abuse” in Olympic gymnastics and figure skating was exposed by Joan Ryan in her 1995 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. “Absolute subservience” is how she described the demands of certain famous coaches.

**This assumes that education is what these parents and coaches really care about, as opposed to bragging rights about the child getting a scholarship to a Division 1 school. Forty percent of students in the California State University system receive no financial aid at all. They earn their education the old-fashioned way, going to community college for two years, then working 20-40 hours a week to earn the rest at a Cal State. And California is no longer among the least expensive states in which to attend college.

The Comparative Society

High school English teacher and poet, John Wooden (1, 2), also known as the highly successful, 27-year coach of UCLA basketball from 1948 to 1975, learned from his father that the key to success was never to compare oneself to others.

Compete only with yourself, Wooden the son would tell his players, by striving to do better than you did yesterday, last month, or last hour. During halftime Wooden would often not even talk about the other team, only about how each of his own players could improve in the second half.

Focus on bettering oneself, says Wooden, is what builds confidence, poise, and integrity, not to mention winning ball teams.

A “competitive society” is what most think our pseudo-capitalistic economy today is and beating the other guy—the ultimate comparison—is what competition supposedly is all about. But economic competition, as I have written before, is precisely the comparison-free bettering of oneself that Wooden describes.

Capitalism is a system of social cooperation where everyone wins by trading value for value. Entrepreneurs do not spend their days and nights thinking about how to beat the competition, but about how to improve their products and make them more affordable. Winning large market share is consequence of the focus on improvement, not the goal. Wooden would certainly concur with this description of economic competition.

In today’s obsessively comparative society, beating others shows up everywhere, especially and unfortunately in areas that relate to children. We have tiger moms forcing their children to take the “right” courses, attend the “right” schools, and play the “right” musical instruments. Why? To keep up with the Joneses, or rather, more specifically, to do better than the Joneses.

Our entire educational system, through grades, exams, and degrees, is institutionalized comparison. The no-child-left-behind act has merely ossified the system by making teaching to the test virtually mandatory and pushing advanced topics to lower and lower levels, such as algebra in sixth grade and reading and writing in kindergarten. And, of course, requiring lots of officiously mind-numbing busywork, usually called homework.* Why? American test scores are lower than those of the Japanese. We must be better!

“Pushing to lower levels,” meaning to younger ages, is not the prerogative of our education system. Organized youth sports continues its trend of putting younger and younger children through increasing hours of practice and game playing, week after week after week. Why? We have to be better than the other guy, we have to get our kids scholarships to get into college, and we have to prepare them properly, starting at the youngest age, or they won’t be able to compete at the high school or college level.

Indeed, education and youth sports share a similarity: both are dominated and controlled by adults. Traditional education systems, as Ken Robinson has amusingly pointed out, are created by college professors, which means their ultimate goal is not to meet the needs of students, but to turn out more college professors just like them.

Organized youth sports are organized and operated by adults for the sake of their own, adult needs. If the sports were organized for the children, fun and development would still be the primary goals. For many youth sports today, winning has become the only thing.

In education much can be accomplished by turning learning activities over to the kids. Hole-in-the-wall experiments conducted by 2013 TED Prize winner, Sugata Mitra, have spectacularly demonstrated how children can eagerly and without adult supervision teach themselves.

In a New Delhi slum, Mitra literally put a computer in a building wall, then walked away. The slum children, who had never seen a computer before, not only learned how to use it, but also learned English and, in other experiments, learned all about DNA! Most of the teaching came from each other. Minimal facilitation by grannies, not Oxford- or Cambridge-trained instructors, are all that has been needed to increase the learning.

If “truth is what works,” to borrow a much-reviled phrase from William James, then removal of the comparisons of grades, exams, and degrees in education seems to work. It works in Montessori schools. It works in hole-in-the-wall experiments.

Now if we can only implement the Wooden philosophy of removing comparison in sports. Regrettably, short of a return to the sandlot where kids are in charge, this does not seem likely.

When enormous amounts of money drive sports at the college and professional levels—twelve times as much money, for example, spent on athletes in one athletic conference as on academic students—can anyone seriously expect parents to turn their backs and say, “Let’s just do it because it’s fun”?

Perhaps what we need is to encourage more English teachers and poets to become coaches!



*This is not to say that advanced math and reading and writing cannot be learned at early ages. Montessori schools, by adapting the topics carefully to stage of development, inspire early learning every day, and without homework. But our traditional public and private schools do not teach via the Montessori method. They use the carrot and stick—grades, exams, and degrees—as motivators. Independence is not their goal. Obedience to authority is.

On Killing Creativity

To create something means to come up with something new, to rearrange existing objects or ideas and put them into a form that has not been done before. Everyone is creative because learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge, values, and skills by rearranging what we already have in our minds and integrating that content with what we are acquiring. When we learn, we craft new concepts, principles, values, and skills.

How creative each of us is varies and the process can be, and often is, stunted and destroyed. Some cultures are known to be more creative than others. For example, the Japanese education system produces students who score higher on standardized tests than Americans, yet American students and American culture are said to be more creative. How has this come about?

Ken Robinson, in a 2006 TED talk and, later, in his book The Element argues admirably that creativity should be just as important an objective of education as literacy and that our current one-size-fits-all system destroys it. This is the progressive idea of focusing on and stimulating the individual’s interests and therefore the individual’s imagination and inventiveness. It is this progressive influence in education and, no doubt, the overall non-authoritarian atmosphere of American culture that has allowed Americans to be more creative.

Robinson, however, like the progressives, erroneously clings to the government as supplier of education and blames the rise of  “one-size-fits-all” on the so-called factory model. Yet, it is precisely the government and all forms of authoritarian control that arrest and prevent imaginative thinking.

Government bureaucracy, using government guns as its means of control, only knows one-size-fits-all. In education, that calls for a core curriculum and both types of grading: evaluation and age-sequencing. Catering to needs and wants is something governments cannot do, or do very well.

As discussed in last month’s post, any type of physical force, trauma, neglect, or emotional abuse, severely hampers the development of self-esteem and independence. Without high degrees of these traits, children and adults become fearful of risk-taking experimentation—that is, they fear making mistakes that might be disapproved of and vilified by those who have been forcing, traumatizing, neglecting, or emotionally abusing them.

It was progressive educator Maria Montessori who realized that choice was crucial in the development of self-esteem and independence Her method of education, as a result, allows a maximum of choice in a structured environment. Montessori children who move on to more traditional schooling are known for their confidence and creativity.

Freedom to choose, which means freedom to make mistakes without fear of criticism or denigration, is the key to encouraging original thinking. Dictating to children—whether by parents, teachers, coaches, tiger moms, or stage moms—what the children must think and do is nearly as stunting and destructive as hitting or beating them.

In organized youth sports, the fear of making mistakes and lack of creativity and imagination has been pointed out by former National Hockey League star Wayne Gretzky. Lamenting today’s excessive control and domination by adults, Gretzky finds the origin of hockey creativity on the adult-less pond of yesteryear. In the current environment, he says, if kids are sent to the ice to play a scrimmage, the first thing a child will ask is, “What position do you want me to play?” The pond, Gretzky’s point being, as was the sandlot in the earlier days of baseball, was what taught kids how to make their own decisions. Today, they must bow to the dictates of the adults in charge, lest they be criticized for going against a coach’s system. The quality of play becomes cautious and mediocre, and often not fun.

The killing of creativity can be subtle and performed by apparently well-meaning adults. The premise of demanding obedience to authority can be expressed quietly and without obviously abusive techniques. It stems from the denial of choice. A parent, teacher, or coach who criticizes a child’s mistake and singles the child out as an example to others is demanding obedience to authority. The message to children under such a leader’s watch is that cautiousness, not imagination and creativity, is the path to the adult’s approval.

The well-meaning adult thinks that such criticism is what teaching is all about. But allowing mistakes and, as Montessori demonstrated, saving the correction for another time when a new teaching moment arises, are what build the foundation of creativity: namely confidence, self-esteem, and independence.

All forms of demands for obedience to authority, whether physical or mental, blatant or subtle, must be rejected.

The Root of Dictatorship

In Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (p. 117), I gingerly suggested that the root of dictatorship is the parent/child relationship. The simple reasoning was that if one thinks it is right to coerce children, then it must also be right to coerce adults. (Restraining children who are about to harm others or themselves is not counted here as coercion.)

It seems, however, that my comment was too tame and needlessly cautious. At least that is my conclusion after reading works by Alice Miller, Lloyd deMause, and Bruce Perry.

Miller, a Swiss psychologist (and former psychoanalyst), provides the strongest link in her book For Your Own Good,* in which she quotes the untranslated German text Schwarze Pädagogik, a collection of extensive excerpts from child-rearing and educational guidebooks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. “Black pedagogy” is the literal translation of this work, but Miller refers to it as “poisonous pedagogy.”

The upshot of advice from this period is to break the child’s will, to beat the wickedness—which usually means the budding assertiveness and independence—out of the child, and to command strict, unquestioned obedience to authority (of the parent, teacher, and other adults).^† In the course of enduring this brutality, shame, and humiliation, children are expected to thank their tormentors for the “discipline” and in some cases to kiss the hand that has just viciously beaten them. It is, after all, for their own good. (Even without these demands, Miller points out, abused children defend and cling to their abusive caregivers, because the small amount of caregiving they have received is all they know.)

Hitler and all the leaders of the Third Reich, says Miller, suffered this “pedagogy” and proudly passed it on to their children and subjects. Hitler often bragged of not flinching when his father repeatedly beat him. In For Your Own Good and elsewhere^‡ Miller cites D. G. M. Schreber, whose nineteenth-century book on child-rearing went through some 40 editions and preached self-renunciation and self-denial. When his nanny fed his child before herself, Schreber fired the nanny, thus sending a message to all of Germany that the goal of child-rearing is to harden children and rid them of alleged weakness. They must learn to sacrifice from the first day of infancy on, said Schreber. With this kind of upbringing, asks Miller, is it any wonder that the German people became attached to Hitler as a father-substitute and were only too glad to obey his commands?

Lloyd deMause, psychoanalyst and founder of the Journal of Psychohistory, traces the bleak history of childhood, concluding that it “is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken” (1, p. 1; see also 2). While his psychoanalytical jargon can become a bit much, his historical facts are shockingly accurate and well documented, for example, the extensive infanticide, usually of baby girls, practiced in ancient Greece and Rome and the legal right of Roman fathers to kill their children.^§ Brutalization, terrorization, and sexual abuse were common throughout history, gradually improving over the centuries such that the descriptions in the above paragraphs are actually an advance over the past!

Although traumatic childhoods per se do not trump free will and deterministically turn children into dictators or sacrificial lambs, those experiences certainly make recovery difficult, and it would require an unusual child to break free of the circumstances. Bruce Perry, neurobiologist and psychiatrist, specializes in childhood trauma and neglect. He acknowledges (without endorsing free will or volition outright) that children do make hundreds, perhaps thousands, of decisions while growing up (The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, pp. 119-20). It is those decisions, not genes or environment, that ultimately determine whether one neglected child (such as an infant left home alone every day for hours in a dark room) becomes a psychopathic killer and another an emotionless, socially awkward adolescent.

To be sure, Perry insists, early discovery and non-drug, empathetic psychotherapy are the remedies to such disturbances. Trauma of any kind—and this includes spanking by hand—overloads the brain’s stress response systems, causing a loss of felt control and competence by the victim. That is, the trauma prevents or erodes the development of self-esteem and independence. It does not have to be physical force. Trauma can be emotional abuse brought about by raging insults, name-calling, and belittling, or the lack of nurturing warmth, hugs, and empathetic understanding. Neglect, Perry points out, is not the prerogative of the poor and uneducated. There are also many uncared for infants, children, and adolescents among the educated well-to-do.

For as far back as we can go in history, children—at least those that have been allowed to live—have been beaten by their caregivers, abused, manipulated, and commanded to obey authority. Obedience and independence are opposites. A parent/child relationship that commands obedience from the child is one that prepares the way for dictatorship. A free society thrives on independence; it requires a healthy disrespect of authority, which is acquired through nurturing, warm, and affectionate caregiving. Coercion of any kind, physical or emotional, in the parent/child relationship must be eliminated.




*Alice Miller is well known for her first book The Drama of the Gifted Child, also published under the more correct title Prisoners of Childhood. Its thesis is that childhood experiences, many of which are traumatic, influence our adult behavior, trapping us in the futile pursuit of infantile needs that were not satisfied by our parents.

^†“The only vice deserving of blows is obstinacy. . . . Your son is trying to usurp your authority, and you are justified in answering force with force in order to insure his respect, without which you will be unable to train him. The blows you administer should not be merely playful ones but should convince him that you are his master. . . . this will rob him of his courage to rebel . . .” J. G. Krüger, 1752, quoted in Miller, pp. 14-15.

^‡“The Political Consequences of Child Abuse,” Journal of Psychohistory, 26:2, Fall 1998.

^§Carl A. Mounteer, “Roman Childhood, 200 B.C. to A.D. 600,” Journal of Psychohistory, 14:3, Winter 1987.

“Men of Hard Science” and the Denial of Animal Emotions

In a previous post about psychiatry I put the phrase “men of hard science” in scare quotes to contrast these alleged experts with the more sensible and scientific kindness movement of nineteenth century mental health. In all fields, the “hard science” culture, which today of course includes some women, gospelizes philosophical materialism and the “if it’s not quantitative, it’s not scientific” approach to intellectual rigor.

It also preaches that ascribing human traits, such as consciousness, thoughts, or emotions, to the likes of dogs and cats is unscientific anthropomorphism, because materialism precludes the use of such terms when describing animal (or human) behavior. And “anthropomorphism” is used as a club to disparage anyone who uses such language.

Jeffrey Masson, Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst* turned bestselling author of books on the emotional life of animals, challenges the “hard science” approach to biology. Indeed, he points out in When Elephants Weep (p. 33) that women for many years were considered by their male colleagues to be too emotional, and therefore more likely to be anthropomorphic, to work directly with animals.

Yet none other than Charles Darwin and, more recently, Donald Griffin and Jane Goodall have championed the scientific study of animal consciousness and Goodall (Elephants, p. 3) has defended anecdotal evidence, that scorned lay technique “hard scientists” would never touch.**

The anthropomorphism charge stems from our alleged inability to know “with certainty” what goes on inside an animal mind. We don’t even know, the hard scientists say, if animals feel pain when they are being shocked or locked in isolation from all other animals and humans.

But it is an unjustified leap to conclude that we can know nothing about the contents of an animal’s consciousness and therefore require all descriptions of behavior to be mere responses to external stimuli. For example, if a lay person were to say that a dog is feeling left out and wants attention, the “proper” scientific jargon of hard science would be: the dog “is performing the submissive display of a low-ranking canid” (Elephants, p. 31).

Behavioristic reasoning such as this can be pushed to a solipsistic extreme by saying that all we can really know with certainty is the contents of our own mind, not that of other human beings or animals.  And torture of humans, which fortunately no hard scientist today would agree to, can be justified on grounds that no one can know with certainty whether the victim is really feeling pain when whipped and stretched on the rack (Elephants, p. 39).

The term “with certainty” above is in scare quotes because it is both a redundancy and an equivocation; probable knowledge, which we can obtain by observing and interacting with animals, is a percentage of certainty, so any knowledge we have is certain knowledge, just not one hundred percent certain. To know anything, even as a probability, is to know it with certainty.

And one of those interesting ironies of probably knowledge, Masson points out, is that animals may sometimes be zoomorphic in relation to their human companions, such as the cat that deposits a tasty morsel of gopher innard under the lady of the house’s desk (Elephants, p. 44).

The bottom line of the anthropomorphism argument is not that some people improperly ascribe human qualities to animals. It is the contradiction and hypocrisy of the “hard scientists” who use animals to test hypotheses about human pain and depression (Dogs Never Lie about Love, p. 20). And more significantly, but not surprising to those who work in the academic world, it is the cowardice of those scientists who secretly believe that animals have emotions, but will never say so in their published work and may even criticize those who do (Never Lie, p. 17). Courage and “hard science” do not necessarily go together.

The further contradiction of the hard scientists—and tragedy and disgrace—is their failure to examine and acknowledge the similarities the human animal shares with its lower brethren. It is this failure that allowed mad doctors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the insane as wild beasts and, as a result, chain and beat them because animals were assumed not to feel pain.

Little progress, unfortunately, has been made today among the “men of hard science.”



* Masson became director of the Freud Archives in 1980. While in that position he discovered unpublished letters that shed light on Freud’s repudiation of his 1890’s seduction theory. Masson subsequently wrote The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, arguing  that Freud lacked moral courage to stand up to professional indifference and cultural hostility to his claims of sexual abuse as the cause of patient hysteria. Children at the time were viewed as considerable distorters of the truth and respectable males, especially fathers, were beyond reproach. Masson’s payment for his courage and independence to publish these letters and his book was to be fired from his job and dismissed from all psychoanalytic societies.

** The validity of anecdotal evidence in science rests on the assumption that universals exist. A good scientist using sound epistemology needs only two or three observations, not a probabilistic sample of 500, to make a generalization. See In Defense of Advertising, pp. 153-58.

Politics Is a Bore

The term “political junkie” is familiar to all of us today, but when I first heard it years ago used by a news reporter to describe herself, I was puzzled. Why, I thought, would anyone be so obsessed with politics to spend every waking minute following every conceivable tidbit of information coming out of the political arena?

Perhaps the reporter’s interest in politics was strictly professional, to cover what was going on, but I suspect that many in her position, as well others who follow political news closely, admire the entire system and consider it important to support. Many political junkies, I fear, are those who admire the coercive apparatus of the state and relish the thought of being in a position of political power to make political decisions.
   
To me, politics is a bore—precisely because it is all about coercion, the government-initiated type; it’s seldom about reducing government involvement in our lives. And following politics closely, as many do, means their interest really comes down to: who is going to be coerced today? Let’s see who’s going to be told by the anointed authorities what they can and cannot do. Protecting individual rights has long since disappeared from our political landscape such that decisions in today’s government-by-lobby mixed economy invariably constitute violations of innocent victims’ rights for the sake of someone else’s rent-seeking benefit.

Just look at the disgraceful shakedown of Gibson Guitar, carried out in the name of the environmental lobby. Flimsily suspected, but never charged, of illegally importing wood from Madagascar and India, the company was twice raided with Gestapo-like tactics by armed, bullet-proof clad SWAT teams. At a 2011 press conference, Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz courageously called the Justice Department on its flagrantly unjust laws and tyrannical procedures. Because of the outcry that followed, the Department compromised by allowing Gibson off the hook with a settlement: $350 thousand in fines and censorship (a gag order) not ever to do again what Juszkiewicz did at his press conference, namely to contradict the alleged facts claimed by the government (1, 2, 3). If this is not coercion in politics—the initiation of the use of physical force against innocent victims—what is?

Now I suppose one could say that some politicians are trying to do good things in Washington and the state capital. And I will grant that maybe one or two may be trying to roll back government intrusions into our bedrooms and board rooms. Ron Paul’s two presidential runs have certainly given a hearing to new ideas and Paul Ryan has put Ayn Rand’s name in the news.*

But, seriously, what have Democrats and Republicans done in the last hundred years to increase the protections of individual rights? Democrats make no pretense at rolling back government interventions; they are only too eager to pass more laws increasing the state’s size and power. Republicans, on the other hand, are notorious for paying lip service to the free market and capitalism, but when in office they end up increasing the government’s coercive powers more than the Democrats would have done. Look at the two previous Bush administrations.

“Passing a law” for over a century has almost always meant increasing coercion against an innocent party for the gain of a pressure group. The “squeakiest wheel,” of course, gets the grease in a mixed economy; that’s the fundamental theory of the system because there is no just way to determine who gets the favors, or should I say, rents. But the laws are democratically passed by vote, one might object? Democracy, as the Greeks taught, can be a form of dictatorship and Hong Kong survived quite well for decades under the British common law without general elections.**

That’s not to say that I don’t believe in voting, though not voting is just as valid a participation in the system as pulling a lever. In the current political season, I will vote against the many California tax propositions and probably vote for the lesser of two evils for president. I was going to write in Ron Paul’s name, as I did four years ago, but I think a statement does need to be made in this election. I realize that my vote in this very blue state is virtually worthless and after the election politics will resume its usual games of playing “who are we going to coerce today”?

Yawn! Wake me up when something really good and important happens.

Altering a bit what I have said before, “I do not expect life to improve much, if at all, in the next four years of the [next] presidential administration. I do not expect the [next] (or [current]) administration to be the indicator of the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.” Life goes on. Cultural and political systems change slowly. Political junkies can continue to obsess over every coercive decision that is made in positions of power. I will read and write about other topics.



*A recent informal search of The NY Times produced these mentions of Ayn Rand’s name: 97 for all of 2011, 10 for the first quarter of 2012, 68 for the second quarter, and 147 for the third. Paul Ryan seems to be doing some good, though most comments about Ayn Rand in the Old Gray Lady remain smarmy, snarky, ignorant, and hostile. Perhaps after I am dead, these Times writers will also be dead and younger ones will take their place, ones who have actually read Rand’s works and are capable of separating her personality and followers from her ideas.

**I’m not convinced that the vote is fundamental to a genuine liberalism. The classical liberals saw it that way, but Hong Kong has shown us that a constitution and legal system that are adhered to do not require voting to keep the system going. When African Americans and women attained the right to vote, that did not guarantee them the protection of other, more important rights to liberty and property.