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Stephen Hicks discusses the type of literature used in postmodern education. This is from Part 14 of his Philosophy of Education course.
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Some wise words from Deirdre McCloskey, for those who fear that things were healthier in the good old days and that we are degrading our environment and living less authentic lives:
“‘Ah, but the environment was better.’ Briefly for now, no. Consider that you may be mistaken. Air quality during the past fifty years has improved in some respects in every rich city in the world. Let us then be rich. Remember smoky crofters’ cabins. Remember being tied in Japan by law and cost to one locale. Remember American outhouses and iced-over rain barrels and cold and wet and dirt. Remember in Denmark ten people living in one room, the cows and chickens in the other room. Remember in Nebraska sod houses and isolation. Remember a very reasonable terror in the face of nature, wolves roaming in packs during the seventeenth century even in the highly urbanized Low Countries. Remember horse manure in New York and soft coal in London. This is what we have escaped, thanks to that used-up liberal capitalism.”
That’s from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (University of Chicago Press, 2006), which I discussed briefly here: “Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800.”
McCloskey mentions another datum, excerpts from a diary kept by midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine from 1785 to 1812:
“I attended funeral of [name of child obscure], who deceased being 4 years and 1 day old … Captain Lamb’s wife, and Solon Cook’s, and Ebeneezer Davis, Jr.’s wives died in child bed; infants deceased also … A storm of snow; cold for March … I had two falls; one on my way there, the other on my return … I traveled some roads in the snow where it was almost as high as my waist … I was at home this day making soap and knitting … Was called at a little past 12 in morning by Mr. Edson, to go to his wife being in travail … The river [was] dangerous but [I] arrived safe through Divine protection … I could not sleep for fleas. I found 80 fleas on my clothes after I came home… Cleared some of the manure from under the out house … Iced-over rain barrel.”
McCloskey notes: “Martha Ballard lived a typical precapitalist life. Is any of this, dear reader, typical of your life in a modern bourgeois society?”
(Perhaps not, he answers to himself, sitting in his air-conditioned family room on a humid day, sipping imported coffee while browsing the web on his laptop and watching a soccer game broadcast live from the other side of the world, kids splashing noisily in the backyard pool).
The wind has that tone
Between whistle and moan.
Here Professor Hicks discusses the central metaphor from a passage in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as an example of method. This is from Part 3 of Professor Hicks’s Philosophy of Education course.
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Like Peter Keating, Gail Wynand pursues a use-and-be-used career strategy. Wynand uses strong-arm tactics when necessary in building up his newspaper’s market; he manipulates his employees with money to break their integrity; he fires those like Dominique who refuse to bend; and he lets the lowest-common-denominator of public taste dictate the content of the newspaper he works so hard to build up. Like Keating, he acquires plenty of money and a position at the top of his profession’s social hierarchy.
So why is Wynand not just another Keating-type character? Why isn’t he literarily redundant to the development of the theme of The Fountainhead? Because Rand develops Wynand as more consciously aware of the strategy he is pursuing and of the risks it poses to his soul; consequently, Rand also develops Wynand as pursuing deliberate strategies to insulate himself from those risks.
Keating semi-consciously manipulates and meanders through life and ends up a selfless wreck of a man. Wynand consciously sees that risk but believes that he can achieve his goals in a corrupt world—and keep his soul intact enough to enjoy them—if :
1. He gets the right kind of power over other people.
2. He keeps a rigid separation of his work life and his personal life.
On the right kind of social power. Keating’s social power is based on schmoozing and lying. Wynand’s social power is based on money. Wynand makes a judgment here: a life of lying and schmoozing one’s way to the top is to commit to fakery and to losing one’s personal sense of what’s real and what’s illusory. By contrast, money as Wynand uses it is more honest. Wynand doesn’t fake; he is upfront when tempting employees with money to break their integrity, for example, or when trading the Stoneridge commission for Dominique. Keating will kiss you on the cheek, so to speak, while stabbing you in the back. Wynand will look you in the eye and straight-up make you an outrageous bribe.
On separating the public and the personal. Keating never figures out how to define his own personal values and draw his lines and so ends up letting himself be manipulated in his core values. Wynand defines his own personal values and ruthlessly resists all incursions upon them. He cultivates his own tastes in art, builds up his own collection of masterpieces, and keeps his art gallery off limits to the grubby masses. He spends significant time on his yacht, wandering the world at will, and again cultivating an oasis of meaningful privacy against a sordid world.
Wynand is thus a compromise character: In dealing with the external social world, he plays brilliantly the mutually-corrupting power-struggle game; but in his internal private life, he is committed to independence and integrity.
He is like Keating when at The Banner but like Roark when in his art gallery or on his yacht.
He is Roarkian in his ability to visual the end: doing things his own way according to his own highest independent standards. But he is Keating-esque in his judgment of the means necessary to achieve his ends: corrupting others and selling oneself in a base world to get power.
The next question: Does Wynand’s strategy work?
[We are reading The Fountainhead this week in my Introduction to Philosophy course, so this is a re-post for new readers this semester.]
The ethics of altruism holds that others are standard of value. One is good to the extent one puts the interests of other first, acts to achieve their interests, and when necessary sacrifices one’s interests for their sake.
In The Fountainhead, Ellsworth Toohey is the major strategist of altruism, and in my reading he uses five distinct variants of altruism to achieve his ends:
(1) Altruism as a policy of collectivism for the purpose of mutual self support;
(2) Altruism as a tactic of the weak to protect themselves against the strong;
(3) Altruism as a tactic of the weak to get support from the strong;
(4) Altruism as a strategy of the weak to get power over the strong in order to rule them; and
(5) Altruism as a strategy by the weak to destroy the strong out of envy, hatred, or revenge.
History provides many examples of Type 1 altruism, in, for example, religious communities that isolate themselves and live communally. The key organizing concepts of such communities are collective assets, solidarity, and conformity.
In The Fountainhead, Type 1 is combined with Type 2 in the official philosophy Ellsworth Toohey uses when preaching to the masses — for example in his speech to the strikers of the building-trades union (I:9). The key concepts in Toohey’s speech are unity and brotherhood for its own sake, on the one hand; and on the other the aggression of the owners and the consequent role of unions as a self-protection agency to fight back.
Type 3 altruism appears less in The Fountainhead, e.g., in the tactics Keating’s mother uses to live vicariously, both psychologically and — later in the novel — materially, through him. (It is much more developed in Atlas Shrugged, e.g., in the strategy that Rearden’s mother and brother pursue to ensure that he will continue to support them.)
Type 4 altruism is the altruism of power-lust. One sub-plot of The Fountainhead is the battle between Gail Wynand and Toohey. Wynand pursues the common “master” power strategy of physical wealth and intimidation (e.g., of his business competitors), while Toohey’s strategy is to use psychological power. An example from late in the novel when Toohey explains his philosophy to Peter Keating, who is now an empty shell of a man:
“It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken” (4:14).
Toohey’s particular tactics to achieve the strategy are designed to make the strong doubt themselves. Toohey elaborates in detail:
“There are many ways. Here’s one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. . . . Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell man that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue — and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness” (4:14).
Guilty individuals are weakened and much easier to manipulate and rule.
Type 5 altruism is the most disturbing case of altruism. Type 4 altruism is about achieving power in order to rule, but ruling is still a positive goal. Type 5 is about getting power as a means purely to destroy. Rand clearly sees it operative, but many readers wonder whether she exaggerates her enemies’ positions.
Rand provides many examples of Type 5 altruism in Atlas, especially in the characters Lillian Rearden and James Taggart. But it was first made explicit by Toohey when he explained to Keating the real purpose behind his communal organizing, his writings critical of individuality, and his promotion of mediocrities. When Keating whinily asks him what he really wants, Toohey snaps: “Howard Roark’s neck” — and then elaborates: “I don’t want to kill him. I want him in jail. You understand? In jail. In a cell. Behind bars. Locked, stopped, strapped — and alive” (4:13). Toohey has no positive goal: he only wants to destroy an outstanding man.
Toohey is a fictional character, so his words alone don’t have much evidentiary status. But plenty of real-life individuals give us the evidence we need to see Rand’s point:
St. Augustine included the spectacle of Hell as one of the viewing pleasures for those in Heaven: “the good go out to see the punishment of the wicked . . . so as to witness the torments of the wicked in their bodily presence” (“The Saints’ Knowledge of the Punishment of the Wicked,” 426 CE).
Church father Tertullian exulted over his imagined destruction of the world and the torments of kings, philosophers, poets, and athletes in Hell:
“that last day of judgment, with its everlasting issues; that day unlooked for by the nations, the theme of their derision, when the world hoary with age, and all its many products, shall be consumed in one great flame! How vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? What my derision? Which sight gives me joy? Which rouses me to exultation?—as I see so many illustrious monarchs, whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced, groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove himself, and those, too, who bore witness of their exultation; governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian name, in fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they raged against the followers of Christ. What world’s wise men besides, the very philosophers, in fact, who taught their followers that God had no concern in aught that is sublunary, and were wont to assure them that either they had no souls, or that they would never return to the bodies which at death they had left, now covered with shame before the poor deluded ones, as one fire consumes them! Poets also, trembling not before the judgment-seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ! I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians, louder voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much more ‘dissolute’ in the dissolving flame; of looking upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding the wrestlers, not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows …” (De Spectaculis, written 197–200 CE).
St. Thomas Aquinas echoed Augustine: “In order that the bliss of the saints may be more delightful for them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, it is given to them to see perfectly the punishment of the damned” (Summa Theologica, Supplement, Q. 94, Articles 1 and 3; written 1265–1274 CE).
And American “Great Awakening” leader, Jonathan Edwards gave a 1739 sermon entitled “The Eternity of Hell Torments” with the following disturbing affirmation:
“The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever.” And: “Can the believing husband in Heaven be happy with his unbelieving wife in Hell? Can the believing father in Heaven be happy with his unbelieving children in Hell? Can the loving wife be happy in Heaven with her unbelieving husband in Hell? I tell you, yea! Such will be their sense of justice that it will increase rather than decrease their bliss.”
So Toohey is in “good” company, so to speak.
In a forthcoming journal article, “Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand,” I discuss these five strategies from The Fountainhead in fuller detail, Rand’s use of them in Atlas Shrugged, and I make connections and contrasts to Friedrich Nietzsche’s earlier harsh critique of altruism. The article is to be published in the next issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (Volume 10, Number 2).
I’ve been reading Richard Seaford’s 2004 Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy.
Seaford’s theme: “the monetisation of the Greek polis in the sixth and fifth centuries BC contributed to a radical transformation in thought that is, in a sense, still with us. Academics—perhaps because they are more interested in texts than in money—have emphasized rather the role of alphabetic literacy in the radical intellectual changes of this period.” (p. xi)
He then notes a striking coincidence: “The earliest surviving texts in the Greek alphabet were written shortly before and concurrently with the monetization of the city-states.” (p. 10)
Both alphabetic literacy and money involve a leap of abstraction.
Written texts are abstract representations of knowledge that are portable, easily transmittable among many people, and good for long-term storage.
Money is an abstract representation of wealth that is portable, easily transmittable among many people, and good for long-term storage.
Money is to the economic realm what texts are to the intellectual realm: empowering tools. Cultures that develop literacy become smarter and more knowledgeable. Cultures that develop money become more productive and wealthier.
So I wonder if there is a deep, common connection in the ancient Greek culture that led to both great innovations’ developing at almost the same time.
[Images: The text is a very early Greek alphabet. Source: The Schoyen Collection. The coin is an Athenian "owl" from around 450 BCE. Source: Money Museum.]
Get thy reeky hide hither, sirrah, and desist with the pewling — beslubbering puttock thou oft art.
(Via John Enright: no mammering lewdster he.)
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