Category Archives: Art and Ideas

Murray Rothbard On The Cult Of St. Ayn

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Rothbard’s penetrating analysis of the cult of St. Ayn:

“The adoption of the central axiom of Rand’s greatness was made possible by Rand’s undoubted personal charisma, a charisma buttressed by her air of unshakeable arrogance and self-assurance. It was a charisma and an arrogance that was partially emulated by her leading disciples. Since the rank-and-file disciple knew in his heart that he was not all-wise or totally self-assured, it became all too easy to subordinate his own will and intellect to that of Rand. Rand became the living embodiment of Reason and Reality and by some quality of personality Rand was able to bring about the mind-set in her disciples that their highest value was to earn her approval while the gravest sin was to incur her displeasure. The ardent belief in Rand’s supreme originality was of course reinforced by the disciples’ not having read (or been able to read) anyone whom they might have discovered had said the same things long before.

Ejection From Paradise

The Rand cult grew and flourished until the irrevocable split between the Greatest and the Second Greatest, until Satan was ejected from Paradise in the fall of 1968. The Rand-Branden split destroyed NBI, and with it the organized Randian movement. Rand has not displayed the ability or the desire to pick up the pieces and reconstitute an equivalent organization. The Objectivist fell back to The Ayn Rand Letter, and now that too has gone.

With the death of NBI, the Randian cultists were cast adrift, for the first time in a decade, to think for themselves. Generally, their personalities rebounded to their non-robotic, pre-Randian selves. But there were some unfortunate legacies of the cult. In the first place, there is the problem of what the Thomists call invincible ignorance. For many ex-cultists remain imbued with the Randian belief that every individual is armed with the means of spinning out all truths a priori from his own head – hence there is felt to be no need to learn the concrete facts about the real world, either about contemporary history or the laws of the social sciences. Armed with axiomatic first principles, many ex-Randians see no need of learning very much else. Furthermore, lingering Randian hubris imbues many ex-members with the idea that each one is able and qualified to spin out an entire philosophy of life and of the world a priori. Such aberrations as the “Students of Objectivism for Rational Bestiality” are not far from the bizarreries of many neo-Randian philosophies, preaching to a handful of zealous partisans. On the other hand, there is another understandable but unfortunate reaction. After many years of subjection to Randian dictates in the name of “reason,” there is a tendency among some ex-cultists to bend the stick the other way, to reject reason or thinking altogether in the name of hedonistic sensation and caprice.

We conclude our analysis of the Rand cult with the observation that here was an extreme example of contradiction between the exoteric and the esoteric creed. That in the name of individuality, reason, and liberty, the Rand cult in effect preached something totally different. The Rand cult was concerned not with every man’s individuality, but only with Rand’s individuality, not with everyone’s right reason but only with Rand’s reason. The only individuality that flowered to the extent of blotting out all others, was Ayn Rand’s herself; everyone else was to become a cipher subject to Rand’s mind and will.

Nikolai Bukharin’s famous denunciation of the Stalin cult, masked during the Russia of the 1930’s as a critique of the Jesuit order, does not seem very overdrawn as a portrayal of the Randian reality:

It has been correctly said that there isn’t a meanness in the world which would not find for itself and ideological justification. The king of the Jesuits, Loyola, developed a theory of subordination, of “cadaver discipline,” every member of the order was supposed to obey his superior “like a corpse which could be turned in all directions, like a stick which follows every movement, like a ball of wax which could be changed and extended in all directions”… This corpse is characterized by three degrees of perfection: subordination by action, subordination of the will, subordination of the intellect. When the last degree is reached, when the man substitutes naked subordination for intellect, renouncing all his convictions, then you have a hundred percent Jesuit.3

It has been remarked that a curious contradiction existed with the strategic perspective of the Randian movement. For, on the one hand, disciples were not allowed to read or talk to other persons who might be quite close to them as libertarians or Objectivists. Within the broad rationalist or libertarian movement, the Randians took a 100% pure, ultra-sectarian stance. And yet, in the larger political world, the Randian strategy shifted drastically, and Rand and her disciples were willing to endorse and work with politicians who might only be one millimeter more conservative than their opponents. In the larger world, concern with purity or principles seemed to be totally abandoned. Hence, Rand’s whole-hearted endorsement of Goldwater, Nixon, and Ford, and even of Senators Henry Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan.

Neither Liberty Nor Reason

There seems to be only one way to resolve the contradiction in the Randian strategic outlook of extreme sectarianism within the libertarian movement, coupled with extreme opportunism, and willingness to coalesce with slightly more conservative heads of State, in the outside world. That resolution, confirmed by the remainder of our analysis of the cult, holds that the guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty – as it seemed to many young members – but rather personal power for Ayn Rand and her leading disciples. For power within the movement could be secured by totalitarian isolation and control of the minds and lives of every member; but such tactics could scarcely work outside the movement, where power could only hopefully be achieved by cozying up the President and his inner circles of dominion.

Thus, power not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement. despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.” The major lesson of the history of the movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians,

Of the several works on Randianism, only one has concentrated on the cult itself: Leslie Hanscom, “Born Eccentric,” Newsweek (March 27, 1961), pp. 104–05. Hanscom brilliantly and wittily captured the spirit of the Rand cult from attending and reporting on one of the Branden lectures. Thus, Hanscom wrote: After three hours of heroically rapt attention to Branden’s droning delivery, the fans were rewarded by the personal apparition of Miss Rand herself – a lady with drilling black eyes and Russian accent who often wears a brooch in the shape of a dollar sign as her private icon….


“Her books,” said one member of the congregation, “are so good that most people should not be allowed to read them. I used to want to lock up nine-tenths of the world in a cage, and after reading her books, I want to lock them all up.” Later on, this same chap – a self-employed “investment counselor” of 22 – got a lash of his idol’s logic full in the face. Submitting a question from the floor – a privilege open to paying students only – the budding Baruch revealed himself as a mere visitor. Miss Rand – a lady whose glare would wilt a cactus – bawled him out from the platform as a “cheap fraud.” Other seekers of wisdom came off better. One worried disciple was told that it was permissible to celebrate Christmas and Easter so long as one rejected the religious significance (the topic of the night’s lecture was the folly of faith). A housewife was assured that she needn’t feel guilty about being a housewife so long as she chose the job for non-emotional

Although mysticism is one of the nastiest words in her political arsenal, there hasn’t been a she-messiah since Aimee McPherson who can so hypnotize a live audience.”

At least as revelatory as Hanscom’s article were the predictable howls of overkill outrage by the cult members. Thus, two weeks later, under the caption “Thugs and Hoodlums?”, Newsweek printed excerpts from Randian letters sent in reaction to the article. One letter stated: “Your vicious, vile, and obscene tirade against Ayn Rand is a new low, even for you. To have sanctioned such a stream of abusive invective…is an act of unprecedented moral depravity. A magazine staffed with irresponsible hoodlums has no place in my home.” Another man wrote that “one who has read the works of Miss Rand and proceeds to write an article of this caliber can only be motivated by villainy. It is the work of a literary thug.” Another warned, “Since you propose to behave like cockroaches, be prepared to be treated as such.” And finally, one Bonnie Benov revealed the inner axiom: “Ayn Rand is…the greatest individual that has ever lived.” Having fun with the cult, Newsweek printed a particularly unprepossessing picture of Rand underneath the Benov letter, and captioned it: “Greatest Ever?”5

My Comment:

I was repelled when I first read “The Fountainhead” when I was about twenty. To tell the truth, I didn’t really read it. I read about 20 pages and then got someone else to tell me about it.

That was natural, I think. I was reading a lot of Catholic philosophy and was surrounded by socialists. In India, that book and the kind of people who read it were people who lived in a different world from mine.

My friends and I tended to laugh at  them, as well as at the crowd we called “JNU Marxists” (upper class and upper middle-class Indian students who affected Marxism and usually attended the Marxist dominated university, Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi). These Randian contemporaries of mine, like the JNU Marxists, were usually affluent and enamored of the West, which they saw through the eyes of Western counter-culture.

It was only 15 years later, when I reread Ayn Rand, that I came to appreciate what had first seemed repellent to me.

I thought about this when I was reading Shikha Dalmia’s recent commentary about Rand at Forbes. She writes that a love of Rand is a sign of adolescence and is something you leave behind when you become an adult with adult responsibilities.  Dalmia’s criticism is a common one, but for me it’s unconvincing, because in my case, I came to admire Ayn Rand relatively late in life.

As for Rothbard, as always, he presents many useful insights, but he was perhaps temperamentally unsuited to understand a woman of  Rand’s nature. There’s a whiff of male chauvinism here. Despite all her pretentiousness (and the pretentiousness of her acolytes), despite the flaws in her thinking and in her character, to reduce her to a power-hungry, narcissistic “wicked witch of Capitalism” is just mistaken.

Whatever warping of her personality took place, we have to remember when and where she grew up. She had to struggle mightily simply to maintain her vision of individualism intact, floating in a sea of collectivism and political ideology in the middle of the twentieth century. That, more than pathology, probably accounts for those ideological and personal alignments she made that seem opportunistic to us today….

“I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

Call this what you will but it’s not narcissism…and it is very very far from selfishness.

As for what is is that sends people screaming to the exits when they hear her name:

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”

Jesus, The Trend Follower

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King James Bible, Chapter 12, Verse 54

“And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is. And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?”

My Comment

The notion that you could look at nature and “read” it is part of the so-called “hermetic” tradition of the West and very much a part of eastern religion (Buddhism, Hinduism) as well, from where they might have been derived partially. In the hermetic tradition, the world was conceived of as a complex fractal system in which each part reflected the whole in a succession of patterns that extended from the stars in the sky down to star fish in the ocean. This way of looking at nature holistically in symbolic terms is not necessarily diametrically opposed to the scientific method, a truth that is evident from the fact that leading scientists from the Renaissance to the twentieth century have managed to pursue impeccably empirical research, while holding beliefs that the intellectual class today would call obscurantist.

Arthur Rubinstein And The Burial Of Lech Kaczynski

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Arthur Rubinstein plays the music of his compatriot –  Frederic Chopin’s Polonaise in A Flat ( Opus 53, “Heroic”, 1842).

The Polish genius took the slow, flowing folk-dance and turned it into the swaggering form that perfectly expressed his own fervent nationalism, the heroism of his people, and the mystic nationalism of Chopin’s literary counterpart, the activist and poet,  Adam Mickiewicz. Moved by the dismemberment of Poland, the devoutly Catholic Mickiewicz adopted the doctrine of Messianism. The mystic Andrzej Towiaski led him to embrace the belief that Poland was a Christ among nations, like Israel, and that the Kingdom of God would come about in the middle of the nineteenth century, through the Jews, the Poles, and the French.

It’s fitting music for the burial of former Polish president Lech Kaczynski at Wawal Cathedral in Krakow.

KRAKOW, Poland (AP) —http://www.9and10news.com/Category/Story/?id=221012&cID=3

A massive bell inside a thousand-year-old cathedral was tolling as the bodies of Poland’s president and first lady arrived for burial. Some 150,000 Poles in Krakow paid their last respects to Polish President Lech Kaczynski (lekh kah-CHIN’-skee) and his wife, Maria. The funeral was long on tradition but short on world leaders. Many of their travel plans were wrecked by the enormous plume of volcanic ash that blanketed Europe.

Nassim Taleb: Krugman And Friedman Are Dangers To Society

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….and Tyler Cowen is a “bull-shitter” ….and other insights, as Joe Weisenthal chats with Nassim Taleb.

With a command of several disciplines, from finance and mathematics to poetry and philosophy, Taleb knows how to state an interesting concept in clear and engaging terms.

I’m not a fan of Nouriel Roubini. But after reading this, I figured if Taleb thinks the guy is “robust,” there must be more to him…or maybe they just hang out together at Davos.

(I have recently warmed up to NR for admitting that gold could fall below $1000).

“Eliot Spitzer was not robust because a single sex scandal derailed his career.

Nouriel Roubini is robust because he has vulva castings on the wall of his apartment, and it doesn’t derail him at all.

[Actually, Taleb has it wrong here. Spitzer fell because he went after Hank Greenberg and Henry Paulson, when Paulson had the power of the Treasury behind him and Greenberg is central to the whole AIG-Goldman business, even though the MSM will tell you otherwise. Roubini, on the other hand, never said anything that got in the way of anyone powerful…..in fact, his pronouncements have served them well].

Understand this dichotomy, and you’ll begin to understand Nassim Taleb’s conception of a robust society where we wouldn’t have financial crises like the one we just came through.

Still don’t get the significance of the Spitzer and Roubini examples?

Ok, let’s use a financial example.

When Jerome Kerveil lost billions for SocGen, it wasn’t because his trades specifically cost the firm billions. It was because, in the process of liquidating $50 billion or so of assets, the bank depressed the market to such an extent that they lost billions.

Had SocGen and Kerveil been a tenth of its size, that same liquidation wouldn’t have cost the bank much at all.

Thus SocGen was not robust, but a similar firm 1/10th as big would have been.

[Lila: Is this back-handed support for “too big to fail”?]

All of the above are examples given to us by The Black Swan author during a recent night out in Manhattan.

That came about due to some interactions we had over Twitter, which Taleb is using to publish a hundreds of aphorisms that many find to be brilliant, obnoxious, arrogant, and addicting.

More than anything else, Taleb is obsessed with robustness, a topic he returned to several times during our night out.

It’s something he first started hitting on in The Black Swan, and as the Spitzer, Roubini, and SocGen examples demonstrate, it’s a very broad concept.

Norman Mailer, says Taleb, was robust, because “he had six mistresses” and nobody cared. The chairman of a large bank worth $100 million is not robust, because a blackmailer who has knowledge of some infidelities could extort him for $75 million.

[Norman Mailer’s milieu was different from the banker’s….So could we say that “robustness” is adaptability to one’s environment?]

Our conversation, over 3 plates of oysters, two servings of shrimp, and a few drinks* ranged from fitness (we both share an interest in evolutionary fitness and the teachings of fitness guru/economist Art De Vany), finance, global warming, and who is a danger to society.

One of the biggest dangers to society.

There were two names he insisted I include: Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman.

“Paul Krugman is a danger to society!“

“He uses the wrong mathematics, that’s how I knew he was a fluke.“

Why? It’s because Krugman is pushing to create a society that is less robust. Taleb, who characterizes himself as a libertarian, even goes one step further:

“The definition of a robust society: where Paul Krugman could exist without harming others.“

Even worse though is Krugman’s fellow NYT pundit, Thomas Friedman, who with his book about globalization, “is the biggest danger.”

I challenged Taleb on his anti-expert mentality, and told him my contention that much of the appeal of someone slamming these luminaries is that it makes normal people feel good about themselves.

He kind of sidestepped the question, saying that there are plenty of experts who he doesn’t slam, like, say, dentists, because their knowledge, and their arrogance isn’t dangerous. What’s dangerous is the arrogance of someone with the power to influence policy.

After dinner, we talked fitness, and he asked me how I became familiar with Art de Vany. I told him it was through the blogger and econ prof Tyler Cowen, which immediately set Taleb off.

“That guy’s a bullshitter,” noting that Cowen admits to writing about books he only reads parts of.

“How can you write a review of a book you haven’t read?” presumably referring to this Slate review.

His advice to Cowen: “Read much fewer books, read them slowly, turn off your internet connection, and then come back.”

[Lila: Ah, but Cowen has flourished academically and he might even end up in a government position, all without reading the books he writes about…how much more robust can you get than that?]

Correction: Apologies to Prof. Cowen for aspersing him unintentionally. I meant, Taleb says he doesn’t read the books he writes about, which is quite a different thing…. Taleb was apparently referring to a Salon review by Cowen of “Black Swan” that ticked off Taleb….

As the night ended, Taleb gave me a brief ride in his White Lexus Hybrid towards a better place to pick up a cab. As we left the parking garage, a couple walked in the direction of the car, and he made a comment about not wanting to run them over.

Unless the guy was an economist, in which case,  that would be a “benefit to society.”

Libertarians Rising: Helio Beltrao, Mises Brasil, and the Swedish Mises Institute

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From Lew Rockwell exciting news from Brazil…and also from Sweden:

“The young Brazilian financial and ideological entrepreneur, Helio Beltrão, has done something great for the Austro-libertarian movement and the cause of liberty, for his country and the whole world: establish the Instituto Ludwig von Mises Brasil, and make it flourish. The website is already significant, and this month, MisesBrasil sponsored the first Austrian Economics conference in the country’s history. Continue reading →

Aldous Huxley On How “Scientific Dictatorships” Induce Compliance

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Aldous Huxley, novelist and social critic, gave a talk at the University of Berkeley  on the dictatorship he saw in the future of the United States, a “scientific” dictatorship, he termed it. In it, control would be maintained by narcotizing the population with conveniences, entertainment, consumerism, and drugs. Ultimately, compliance would become pleasurable..

‘Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows.”

(Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution, University of Berkeley, March 20, 1962)

T.S. Eliot On The Unsoundness Of The Flesh

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“The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind us of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”

T. S. Eliot, East Coker, IV, Four Quartets

C. S. Lewis On Pseudo-Intellectuals And Indoctrination

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Update:

I posted this excerpt from Lewis yesterday, not because I entirely endorse it, but because it sets off so many interesting trains of thought..

Some libertarians would be unsettled by the description of “true” pedagogy as a kind of reproduction of the teacher. The description even set me thinking whether, contra Lewis, there may actually be a devious line running from the good kind of pedagogy to the bad kind….

But the confrontation between “fact” and “value” that Lewis describes does seem accurate to me and actually reminds me, strangely, of Robert Pirsig’s analysis of “quality” in the philosophical novel, Lila.

Original Post

Novelist and Christian scholar, C. S. Lewis, in “The Abolition of Man”:

“Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

Over against this stands the world of The Green Book. In it the very possibility of a sentiment being reasonable—or even unreasonable—has been excluded from the outset. It can be reasonable or unreasonable only if it conforms or fails to conform to something else. To say that the cataract is sublime means saying that our emotion of humility is appropriate or ordinate to the reality, and thus to speak of something else besides the emotion; just as to say that a shoe fits is to speak not only of shoes but of feet. But this reference to something beyond the emotion is what Gaius and Titius exclude from every sentence containing a predicate of value. Such statements, for them, refer solely to the emotion. Now the emotion, thus considered by itself, cannot be either in agreement or disagreement with Reason. It is irrational not as a paralogism is irrational, but as a physical event is irrational: it does not rise even to the dignity of error. On this view, the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of feelings, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible.

Hence the educational problem is wholly different according as you stand within or without the Tao. For those within, the task is to train in the pupil those responses which are in themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists. Those without, if they are logical, must regard all sentiments as equally non-rational, as mere mists between us and the real objects. As a result, they must either decide to remove all sentiments, as far as possible, from the pupil’s mind; or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic ‘justness’ or ‘ordinacy’. The latter course involves them in the questionable process of creating in others by ‘suggestion’ or incantation a mirage which their own reason has successfully dissipated.

Perhaps this will become clearer if we take a concrete instance. When a Roman father told his son that it was a sweet and seemly thing to die for his country, he believed what he said. He was communicating to the son an emotion which he himself shared and which he believed to be in accord with the value which his judgement discerned in noble death. He was giving the boy the best he had, giving of his spirit to humanize him as he had given of his body to beget him. But Gaius and Titius cannot believe that in calling such a death sweet and seemly they would be saying ‘something important about something’. Their own method of debunking would cry out against them if they attempted to do so. For death is not something to eat and therefore cannot be dulce in the literal sense, and it is unlikely that the real sensations preceding it will be dulce even by analogy. And as for decorum—that is only a word describing how some other people will feel about your death when they happen to think of it, which won’t be often, and will certainly do you no good. There are only two courses open to Gaius and Titius. Either they must go the whole way and debunk this sentiment like any other, or must set themselves to work to produce, from outside, a sentiment which they believe to be of no value to the pupil and which may cost him his life, because it is useful to us (the survivors) that our young men should feel it. If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds— making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

It is to their credit that Gaius and Titius embrace the first alternative. Propaganda is their abomination: not because their own philosophy gives a ground for condemning it (or anything else) but because they are better than their principles. They probably have some vague notion (I will examine it in my next lecture) that valour and good faith and justice could be sufficiently commended to the pupil on what they would call ‘rational’ or ‘biological’ or ‘modern’ grounds, if it should ever become necessary. In the meantime, they leave the matter alone and get on with the business of debunking. But this course, though less inhuman, is not less disastrous than the opposite alternative of cynical propaganda. Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’.20 The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity,21 of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

From Chapter One, “Men Without Chests,” in C. S. Lewis,  The Abolition of Man.

Hayek and Bork On Intellectuals

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In an earlier blog, I expressed my disagreement with a common criticism in libertarian circles that socialism was motivated mostly by envy and spite. I made the point that most socialists I’ve known have had honorable motives, but, in my view, are superficial in their analysis of events. I cited Michael Oakeshott to that effect.

In this debate between noted legal scholar (and former corporate attorney) Robert Bork, Hayek makes the same point, only in relation to intellectuals: They confuse the intelligible with the rational.