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 “[Thanksgiving’s] essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers’ holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.”–Ayn Rand, quoted. by Debi Ghate in Capitalism Magazine.

“Thanksgiving is as close as we get to a nationalist holiday in America (a country where nationalism as a concept doesn’t really fit). Thanksgiving’s roots are pre-founding, which means its not a political holiday in any conventional sense. We are giving thanks for the soil, the land, for the gifts of providence which were bequeathed to us long before we figured out our political system.”–Jonah Goldberg of National Review, quoted. in Wikisource.

“They [the Plymouth settlers] may have contemplated a system of complete religious and civil democracy, or they may not. They may have found their communist practices agreeable to their notion of a sound and just social order, or they may not. The point is that while apparently they might be free enough to found a church order as democratic as they chose, they were by no means free to found a civil democracy, or anything remotely resembling one, because they were in bondage to the will of an English trading-company.”–Albert Jay Nock. Our Enemy, the State. [Italics mine.]

The first thing to note about all these quotes is that they are from people who would all be classified today as “conservative”.

Because our two major political factions cannot be relied upon to agree even about the weather, it is perhaps unsurprising that they cannot reach a consensus about what went on nearly 400 years ago. This temporal distance does not stop them from assuming it vindicated their platform, however.

There is a running argument about the nature of the economy which existed at the time of the first Thanksgiving. The Conservatives hail it as a triumph of the free market, whereas Liberals tend to view it as a product of  “communal” sharing. From my cursory reading, it seems to have been a result of socializing the private gains, which is a form of “welfare capitalism”, or “market socialism”–whichever you prefer to call it.

One thing I don’t understand about this debate is that no one addresses the issue of currency. In fact, I don’t know if they had currency, it was probably a barter system, which introduces the question of whether people were sharing or just bartering at Thanksgiving. If anyone reading this knows, please enlighten me.

In any event, the argument about the economics of Thanksgiving is small potatoes compared with the social and philosophical debates. The Nationalists use Thanksgiving to celebrate the soil itself, as Goldberg says, and sing the praises of the European founders of the Nation. For instance, two years ago, A.W.R Hawkins wrote in Human Events:

“When Thanksgiving became an official, national holiday in 1941 it retained its focus on God, the freedoms we enjoy as Americans, and the rich fruits of Western Civilization…

[A]ny attempt to reduce [Thanksgiving] to a secular celebration is a bogus attempt to deny the God-centered focus of this particular holiday. It is also a ploy to downplay the bounty of freedoms and rights that flow to us by birth and are protected by the traditions and cultural norms of Western Civilization.” 

The Cosmopolitan intellectuals, on the other hand, will reflect and mourn upon the fate which was to befall the Natives at the hands of the settlers. The late Howard Zinn wrote a good deal about this, much to the fury of Republicans.

For my part, I’ve never been big on dictating what the “meaning” of the holiday ought to be. There are some holidays that do have a specific meaning, but to me, Thanksgiving is a day that doesn’t really have or need any political meaning. But if people choose to invest it with same, I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it.

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“[W]hat I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system . . . a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY.”–H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to C.L. Moore. (Italics and Capitals his.)

The political journey of H.P. Lovecraft is a fascinating one. He was, as most readers know, a racist, even by the standards of the 1920s and ’30s. His economic views during the Depression were what people call “left-wing”, but which are more accurately described as simply “socialist” or perhaps even better “anti-capitalist”. Joined with his racism, this made his political outlook–and know that I don’t make this comparison lightly–basically fascistic. (You can read about his views in more detail here.)

But the central point here is that Lovecraft believed in replacing the capitalistic, market-driven society with one more like an aristocracy in which–and I’m paraphrasing and condensing a lot here–tended to value aesthetic and intellectual qualities more.

So, as I understand it, his idea was to replace the security an aristocracy provided by means of inheritance with the security socialism provided by means of a social safety net, redistributionary measures and public control of the factors of production.

Compare this with the views of Ayn Rand mentioned in my previous post. She saw control of the material market as being abhorrent, and opposed just as she opposed control of people’s minds. (Judging by the stories of her “Objectivists” group, she waived the latter opposition where she was doing the control.) but Rand favored a competitive market economy in which, she believed, the best would rise to the top.

The flaw in Rand’s concept, as I said, is that in a market economy there is little time for intellectual and artistic endeavors, and what there is, if also subjected to the market, is designed to satisfy the minds and the tastes of the “lowest common denominator”, as they say.

Lovecraft’s idea is much more consistent with the socially engineered Utopianism so popular in his time, but the irony is that, if his feelings on race are any indication, Lovecraft didn’t just want the benefits of  classical aristocracy to be achieved through socialism, he wanted an honest-to-God classical aristocracy back. Since aristocracy is usually a hierarchy based on heredity, and since racism amounts to a system of dividing into hierarchies based on heredity, a racist and socialist society would be, practically, a hereditary aristocracy, only a little more crude and obvious about it.

My point in contrasting these two philosophies is to point out the flaws they suffered from: Rand’s philosophy could not be the basis for an intelligent society because it allows all non-moneymaking pursuits to be subverted to the behavior of capital flows. Lovecraft’s vision could not because it was effectively reinventing
what had already been done, and the flaws of which were already known.

So, why should anyone care? The political ideas of two deceased writers, one of whom wrote mediocre romance novels for millionaires and the other who wrote about flying space octopi don’t seem terribly important.

Well, I care because Rand and Lovecraft–unpleasant, deluded, cruel and arrogant though they may have been–were also very intelligent people, and this is demonstrated by the fact that they successfully articulated philosophies which may be seen in action even today. That these philosophies do not appear to be capable of creating a functional society might be what is most important, but also interesting is that intelligent people thought that they could.
 

Notes

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“The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.”–Ayn Rand. 

I mock Rand a lot on this blog, but the above claim is almost totally true. (For full credit, she should have said “Republicans” and “Democrats”.) True, she casts their efforts at control in the worst possible light, but still she describes their perception of the trade-off correctly.

Where she went wrong was in assuming that their assessment was wrong. She no doubt saw this as irrational behavior on the part of these parties, but in truth, it’s a necessary trade-off. It’s very hard for people to engage in meaningful artistic and intellectual pursuits if they can’t have a certain level of material well-being. And if they have to spend all their time working to achieve this, they won’t have time to use their minds. So, the “Liberal” concludes it is best to use intervention in the economy to allow people a certain degree of comfort.

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It hadn’t occurred to me before, but thinking more about Niall Ferguson’s article on “American Civilization”, I realized something. He writes:

“In my view, civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man.”

Here I think he might be making a reference to Oswald Spengler’s model of civilizations, which explicitly references the seasons. Ferguson’s computing analogy is, whether intentionally or not, is very much the opposite of Spengler’s organic, natural model. (Spengler was one of the prominent early predictors of the fall of Western civilization, or as Ferguson says, “declinist”.)

The other thing that occurred to me is that Ferguson seems, from the title onward, a little confused about whether he’s writing about “American” Civilization (the U.S.) or about “Western” Civilization in general. Indeed, I think this might be why the article seems so strange; he’s mixing up broad concepts with (relatively) narrow ones–i.e. the present recession.

I don’t mean to say his article is bad–it’s quite thought provoking, actually–but I think it’s a bit muddled.

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Via Noah Smith comes a puzzling article by historian Niall Ferguson about how to reverse the fall of Western Civilization. He makes extensive use of an analogy to computer technology: comparing the West to an Operating System, and listing some of the “killer apps” of the “Western OS”. They are as follows, quoting directly from his article:

COMPETITION: Western societies divided into competing factions, leading to progressive improvements.

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION: Breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology.

THE RULE OF LAW: Representative government based on private-property rights and democratic elections.

MODERN MEDICINE: 19th- and 20th-century advances in germ theory, antibiotics, and anesthesia.

THE CONSUMER SOCIETY: Leaps in productivity combined with widespread demand for more, better, and cheaper goods.

THE WORK ETHIC: Combination of intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

There is something very disturbing to me about this article, and I was struggling to put my finger on just what it was. Perhaps it was the same qualms articulated by Noah Smith in his response, for I think there is is much merit in what he says about Ferguson’s article.

Perhaps it was the uncanny way it reminded me of the scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia, wherein a British Colonel (played by Anthony Quayle) is lecturing the Arabs about why Britain is great. He argues that Britain is “small, but it’s great. And why?”, he asks rhetorically. But before he can answer this, an Arab (Omar Sharif) interrupts: “Because it has guns!” The Colonel, somewhat lamely, finishes: “Because it has Discipline,” but he’s clearly quite put-out by the Arab’s less-inspiring assessment.

But then I realized what it was that bothered me: there is no mention of Art in Ferguson’s article. His so-called “killer apps” are technical, legal, and scientific devices. Which are all fine things, and all of necessity to civilization, no doubt, but there is an oddly cold quality to it all.

His computer analogy is an interesting one, perhaps more than he realizes, because it reveals the true nature of Ferguson’s objective: he’s not actually interested in “civilization”, he’s interested in building a machine. For that’s what the key to his ideal of Western society is: a well-run machine. There is no mention of the sublime in it. I think that’s what unsettled me about it.

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I’ve come to notice that there are differing attitudes about the concept of regarding people as “heroes”. It seems there is one school of thought which wishes to have heroes to romanticize and deify, and another school which is more skeptical of those presented as “heroes”, criticizing and analyzing them.

To the former school belong such philosophers as Ayn Rand and Thomas Carlyle, among many others. To the latter school belong… well I’m not precisely sure who, though I suspect if you read the people the former school despised, you will find some examples.

I myself tend to be skeptical of those people who are presented as heroes. I think that even people who did great things often had flaws, or even more seriously, their actions had unintended side-effects. But these qualms of mine philosophers of the Romantic sort would brush aside as the complaints of a whining second-rate person. A “thinker”, not a “doer”, as they say.

To be clear, there are many people throughout history whom I admire very much, and who I think did great things. But there is something that does compel me to look for flaws even in these people, whereas others would say we should simply admire their greatness.

I think a lot of this is related to the debate over criticism in general I blogged about a few months ago. I’m not sure what the significance of any of this is exactly, but after reading about Carlyle the other day it set me thinking about it.

P.S. I can’t help but feel this post is a bit incoherent, but I’m posting it anyway.

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(Note: This post builds a bit more upon this post by P M Prescott. [Which links back to me, as it happens.]) 

Last week something of debate appeared in the pages of USA Today. A religion professor named Stephen Prothero argued that the “Objectivist” philosophy of Ayn Rand is incompatible with belief in the Christian religion. He is, in my view, correct; because Rand herself repeatedly stressed that this was the case, and moreover that one had to either accept her philosophy entirely or not at all. One could not believe some of John Galt’s teachings and some of Jesus Christ’s teachings, in other words.

But some people disagreed with this view, and wrote in to USA today to say so. You can read their dissensions here. Their general point is that you can in fact believe in both these things.

Quite apart from Rand’s own statements regarding this, I really do not see it. As a friend of mine pointed out to me: consider the Parable of the Prodigal Son, or the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. Both of these appear to be endorsing the idea of equal rewards for unequal work–sharing rewards based upon needs. Add to this the well-known statements made by Christ on the subject of the poor and Christianity and Objectivism look quite irreconcilable, in my opinion.

Prothero goes on to make the following remarkable statement: “In fact, [Objectivism] is farther from Christianity than the Marxism that Rand so abhorred.” Indeed. Rand herself called Christianity “the best kindergarten of communism possible.” (This reminds me of the conservative philosopher Oswald Spengler’s claim that “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”)

Now, I am not one to make such bold assertions as those above. But I really, really do not understand how one can glean support for free market capitalism out of Christian teachings.

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The Conservative William F. Gavin writes:

“What we have in the United States today is not an ideological battle, or even a cultural war, but something larger and deeper: a true clash of irreconcilable philosophic views, not just about abortion, but about truth. One of those views encompasses all that is best in the Western tradition from antiquity until now, including the findings of science, and the other holds that everything that is essential to human betterment in the modern world began during the Enlightenment, and everything preceding that was obscurantist, credulous, and bloody… the strategy is always the same: create a climate of doubt about the possibility of objective truth, discoverable by reason; corrupt the inherited intuitive wisdom by which the people have always lived; construct and then promulgate through mass-media entertainment a philosophy that puts an end to all philosophy, destroying civility in its broadest and deepest sense.”[Emphasis mine.]

I really wish I were better equipped to tackle this article, (I do raise some related, opposing points here) but it concerns philosophy, and philosophy is a subject at which I have never been terribly competent. As Paul Graham once wrote: “Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by ‘free.’ Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by ‘exist.'”

I can grasp a few basic philosophical concepts, but when I try to understand the details, it all turns out as in Graham’s example. This is not to suggest for one moment that philosophy is a waste of time–I would not be so arrogant as to presume all the obviously intelligent philosophers of history were simply wasting time–but only that, for the life of me, I cannot seem to get the real “point” of it. Ockham’s razor suggests that I am too dense for the subject.

At any rate, it is an interesting article. Read it, and form your own conclusions.