This blog comments on business, education, philosophy, psychology, and economics, among other topics, based on my understanding of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Ludwig von Mises’ economics, and Edith Packer's psychology. Epistemology and psychology are my special interests. Note that I assume ethical egoism and laissez-faire capitalism are morally and economically unassailable. My interest is in applying, not defending, them.
Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal has referred to our current political correctness madness as “a kind of Americanized Maoism.” This is an interesting characterization.*
China did not have a proletariat of factory workers, so Mao chose peasants as the oppressed class we should worship and model our lives on and, of course, protect from the evil capitalists.
Today’s American leftists certainly would not seem to mind having us all wear Mao tunics, nor would they mind reducing our standard of living to the level of Mao’s peasants.
Note a few of the consumer products that have been banned by those who know what is best for us: phosphates in laundry and dish detergents, high-flow water valves, incandescent light bulbs, plastic shopping bags, and the vent hole in the lowly gasoline can.
Jeffrey Tucker (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) has examined a number of these civilization killers. On the light bulb ban, he writes, “It’s the plot of [Ayn Rand’s] Anthem lived in real time.”
The gasoline can? Apparently, wealthy leftists have never had to mow their own lawns and don’t care to remember their elementary physics. That second hole makes it easy and spillage-free to pour gas into the mower’s tank. Tucker’s conclusion: the bureaucrats in power want us to reduce our lives to the misery of pre-capitalist eras.
The Americanized part of “Americanized Maoism,” however, is just another import from Europe. It is the post-modern rejection of Enlightenment values and establishment of what I referred to in a previous post as a virulent absolutism in an age of epistemological and moral relativism. (Some terms were borrowed from Stephen Hicks. See 1, 2.)
This is what has given us the word “narrative.” When challenging the left, the dismissive response will often be, “That’s only your narrative.” Which is another way of saying what’s true for you is not necessarily true for me. And it’s also Marx’s polylogism dressed up in new garb.
So why should we listen to the left? The unspoken and sometimes not so unspoken reply is, “We have the power. You don’t. Our narrative is in charge.”
One current “narrative” taken as a given is that opposition to minimum wage is racist. Fortunately, a recent column by Professor Williams has taught us an important history lesson about who really is the racist.
The 1931 origin and design of minimum wage legislation was to prevent African Americans from getting work. Nearly every economist in the United States knows minimum wage laws prevent the least skilled—mostly African Americans at that time, and still today—from being hired. Similar motivation operated in South Africa’s 1925 Apartheid legislation to prevent the hiring of “Natives.”
The true racists are the advocates of minimum wage, and since capitalism is the cure for racism, anyone who opposes free markets should be labelled haters of the minority disadvantaged and oppressed.
Trigger warning for the poor babies on college campuses:
The left has it wrong. Capitalism—free markets and free speech—are what you should be studying and supporting. It’s time to get your feelings hurt. You might learn something in the process.
*Henninger also argues that the popularity of certain “outsiders” in the 2016 Republican presidential circus is a revolt of the politically incorrect, meaning that Americans, probably through their “you can’t push me around” sense of life, are sick of being badgered by the left and told what to think, feel, and do.
A Note on Correctness. The term usually means free from error, accurate, or precise, but in the pejorative sense in which the word is used today, it means conformity to an orthodoxy with deviation calling for punishment.
Penalties for failure to conform range from expressions of disapproval, shock, contempt, and condemnation to the more serious excommunication, expulsion, or termination to the ultimate of imprisonment, and death.
Today’s radical Marxist left—in the form of political correctness—is not unique in insisting on such conformity.
Just ask Socrates about Athenian correctness in the fifth century BC or Galileo about the Inquisition’s Catholic correctness in 1633.
Throughout history, religious, ideological, and intellectual movements have produced their share of correctness zealots. Christian and Islamic correctness, as in “radical Christianity” and “radical Islam,” are not inappropriate designations.
Nor is Freudian correctness. See Jeffrey Masson on his expulsion from the Freud Archives and other psychoanalytic societies over his view of Freud’s seduction theory.
The motivation for correctness zealotry is intolerance of difference, especially as manifested in language and behavior that deviates from the orthodoxy. The goal is control, initially censorship of language but in the end total control of thought and behavior.
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 probable 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.
