DAY TEN:
WHAT'S WRONG WITH POSTMODERNISM?http://www.carleton.ca/~claughli/tutpost.htm
Part 1
If you are a student of anthropology with any appreciation of the history of
our discipline, you will be aware that the discipline has been under serious
and sustained attack for just about a generation. The effect of this attack
has been to create a great deal of confusion about what the discipline is on
about, and to render scientific theory construction all but moribund. This
attack has gone under various labels, "post- structuralism," "humanism,"
"critical anthropology," "cultural studies," "postmodernism," and so on.
This attack has generally speaking been directed at two presumed failings of
anthropology: 

Failure to Culturally Relativize All Forms of Knowledge. The presumed
failure of anthropology to recognize the cultural relativity of all
knowledge, including scientific knowledge; i.e., scientific knowledge is not
objective and is just another of the endless ways humans have of portraying
their interpretation of events. Anthropology itself has been fundamentally
ethnocentric in its views of other cultures.
Failure to Take a Moral Stand Against Oppression. The presumed failure of
anthropology as a discipline, and anthropologists as individuals, to take a
firm moral stance against oppression of all sorts; oppression against
children, against visible minorities, against Third and Fourth World
peoples, gainst women, etc., etc.
There are so many labels for these various movements and pseudo-scientific
positions that I will arbitrarily pick "postmodernism" as the label I will
use here to simplify our terms of reference. This won't do too much
injustice to the various centers of attack, for they all seem to be driven
by the same motivations -- namely, anti-science and anti-oppression -- and
thus make the same fundamental errors. It is the errors I want to address,
and only part of the motivation, for I, too, would rather that people not be
"oppressed" and hurt in all the ways humans seem to be able to
misunderstand, injure and dominate other human beings. 

I am introducing this topic at this point in the tutorial because: 

You have now mastered some of the fundamentals of biogenetic structuralism,
and
You can therefore understand why biogenetic structuralism comes down on the
side of the effort for truth over the effort for meaning as a primary
identification of anthropology, and
You can now perhaps use biogenetic structuralism to discriminate the
difference between empirically derived scientific theory from morally
derived ideology.
Over the past generation or so, anthropology has been variously
characterized as: 

An instrument of the expansion of Euroamerican colonial expansion (Asad
1973).
An essentially non-objective and ethnocentric enterprise (Rosaldo 1989).
A disguised ideology supporting the domination of oppressed groups in
society (Foucault 1972).
According to many of those writers attacking anthropology-
as-colonial-instrument, research and theory in the discipline should be in
the direction of exposing and unmasking the various cultural factors
maintaining hegemony (i.e., dominance, dominion, heavy authority) of one
human group over another human group. Anthropological movements and
theoretical schools that take this position (see Scheper-Hughes 1995) hold
that anthropology is, or should be an applied moral enterprise. 

In most moral models there is some way to correct evil. In the current moral
model in anthropology this is done by unmasking the symbolic hegemony that
hides and legitimates oppression. The moral corrective act is denunciation.
One can also act morally by giving voice to those who resist oppression;
this at least identifies the oppression and the oppressors. Nowadays one can
have a moral career in anthropology; having a moral career in anthropology
is being known for what one has denounced. (d'Andrade 1995:400)
OBJECTIVITY VS. SUBJECTIVITY
Postmodernism, whether of the political/moral sort, or the more
amoralistic/relativistic sort, is fundamentally anti- realist and
non-empirical in its evaluation of "truth." The truth is attained when
either the essentially relativistic nature of knowledge is acknowledged, or
the underlying hegemonic function of knowledge is unveiled. There is no
reference in postmodernist accounts to any transcendental reality in
relation to which human knowing "trues itself" (see my earlier discussions
of truth and belief). 

The debate these days is frequently a polemic between those who embrace the
"objectivity" of science and those that deny any such thing as objectivity
exists, and who lodge their methods in subjectivity (or reflexivity).
Objectivists would have us return to the "good old days" of positivism, and
subjectivists would have us embrace the moral high ground of critical
theory. 

Typical of human beings, polarization of knowledge is often due to
predominance of an effort after meaning -- a giving-in, so to speak, to the
cognitive imperative to make experience meaningful to the ego. As an
objectivist, Roy d'Andrade (1995:399) would have us talk about the object
without describing oneself. In other words, he would have us distinguish
"subject" from "object" and build our science around the object. And of
course, the "object" is something apart from us -- it's "out there"
somewhere. 

But what has biogenetic structuralism to say about this claim about the
object? Well, it's out there and it isn't, depending upon whether you are
talking about the transcendental object (the noumenon or nexus) apart from
our knowing of it, or the cognized object that is the object we are aware of
in our experience -- the object constituted by our sensorium. And this is so
whether the "other" is a piece of pottery or a person. So, to an extent Roy
d'Andrade is right. Objectivity, if it means anything useful in a
naturalistic discipline like ethnography, is a strategy for keeping the
observing subject from mucking up the scope of inquiry as much as possible.
The fact that I have a headache should not have an effect upon whether I
record the right native term for mother's brother. 

But divorcing the object from the subjectivity of experience is not the way
anymore to conceptualize objectivity. That kind of naive positivism has been
completely debunked. Moreover, it is wrong-headed because it is as
phenomenologically naive as is the "reflexivity" (for heaven's sake, please
do not read "reflexivity" as equivalent to mature contemplation!) of the
postmodernist strategy. 

The naivete of positivism rests in the fallacy that we can know the world
"as it really is" apart from the process of our knowing of it. Twenty-five
hundred years ago the Buddha was occasionally asked to talk about the world
apart from consciousness of the world, and he would remain mute, steadfastly
refusing to answer such questions. Indeed, this was one of the ten famous
questions the Buddha remained silent about. If I may be so presumptuous as
to say why he refused to comment on the question, it was because the problem
was in the naivete of the question itself. To ask to know something without
the process of knowing conditioning what is known is just silly. Positivism
often led to reification of scientific models of the world upon the
operational environment in just this naive sort of way -- as though our
models of the world were the world. 

For all the reasons that Rik Pinxten (1981) suggests, the positivistic
rendition of ethnographic fieldwork as a value- free, totally objective
(totally non-subjective or interactional) enterprise won't wash. It won't
wash because it begs more fundamental epistemological questions, the very
questions (as you will appreciate having followed this tutorial) that are
the raison d'etre of biogenetic structural theory. Our answer is that both a
neuroepistemology and a neurophenomenology must ground our understanding of
how we come to know the world and how we communicate that knowledge to
others. An accurate and modern understanding of the power of science is not
possible without that foundation. 

This said, the rejection of naive positivism does not necessarily open us up
to the "specter of relativism" (as Lawrence Schmidt entitled his 1995 edited
book of articles on the philosophy of Gadamer). The tendency is (as always
it seems!) to polarize objectivity and subjectivity. And neither option is
the case in their pure sense. As we have seen, there is no such thing as a
knowing consciousness without intentionality. We are only able to record
knowledge, as in a book or in a text file on the Internet, from a certain
point of view. Actually, what we set down in books and files are symbols and
it is the reader that produces the knowledge within their consciousness
during the experience of reading. The symbols penetrate to their meaning in
the conscious brain. Thus we are able to communicate knowledge using symbol
systems and thus come to share information in a public way. As I have
repeatedly emphasized in my writings, there is no such thing as a totally
public experience, but a great deal of sharing of information and knowledge
can and does occur quite naturally among members of a social group. 

>From a biogenetic structural point of view, objectivity means (and can only
mean) that knowledge may be intersubjectively shared. There is always a
subjective aspect to experience, and to some extent all experiences are
ineffable. What makes considerable objectivity possible is the trueing
process that is neurognostically built into the very organization of the
knowing brain. 

Trueing is part of the exaptational structure of living systems. That is,
neural structures are "coopted" to model novelty in the operational
environment with considerable verity. This makes sense when you keep in mind
that the Prime Directive at the level of the knowing brain is to obtain food
without becoming food. There is a built-in accuracy to knowledge that
derives from the initial neurognostic structure of the cognitive system, and
that foundation of accuracy remains to some considerable extent during the
development of neurocognitive structures throughout life. 

As I say, the Prime Directive in all critters with big brains and extensive
cognized environments requires some mechanism to more or less standardize
individual cognized environments in service to the commonweal. Language is
the primary medium for this standardization in humans, although other
symbolic systems are operating as well. In any event, intersubjective
sharing of vicarious experience is fundamental to human sociality. But
contrary to some of the postmodernist views, the standardization of meaning
is trued (rendered veridical, accurate) relative to the operational
environment in experience. Neurognostic structures, already functioning to
mediate nascent truth, develop within the context of tension between
inherent developmental processes, socially received knowledge, and direct
experience. 

For most people most of the time, this tension is resolved by the completion
of systems of meaning within the brain that nonetheless remain somewhat open
to novelty, but mainly produce a redundant world of experience. But the
conditions of experience can be set up, as in a series of lab experiments,
or as in a set of field observations paired with focused questions, in which
attention is directed at possibly anomalous experiences. The system of
meaning may be again opened to the process of trueing -- views are tested in
the crucible of direct experience. And the results of the trueing may then
be intersubjectively shared and standardized in symbolic descriptions. 

The process of opening the effort for meaning to the transformative effects
of the effort for truth -- a very natural and phenomenologically available
process -- is very commonly only partially adumbrated and then
conceptualized and labelled and then passed around as though it is an
accurate depiction of the entire natural process of trueing. Thus the
intersubjective sharing of observation and knowledge becomes reified and
normatively elevated to the status of reality -- perhaps interpreted as
total objectivity. This error is precisely why both James and Husserl taught
that we must perpetually return to "things as they are," to a phenomenology
of objectivity. This requires that we are able to distinguish between
subject and object and yet discern the intentional processes that operate
between. 

TRANSPOSITION, TRUTH AND THE WRITING OF ETHNOGRAPHY
As I said earlier, a difficulty that the intersubjective sharing of
experience inevitably faces is the problem of transposition. Any symbolic
medium shares this narrowing of the channel of information -- like squeezing
information through a funnel. Experienced ethnographers know that they are
never able to record all they experience and come to know about life in
their host cultures. Moreover, by selecting one language over another to
communicate knowledge about the host culture, the limits and conditions of
the language effect the knowledge transmitted by that medium. 

But in the sense that I have defined the terms in this tutorial, trueing is
still operating in the ethnographic enterprise, even though communication of
ethnographic information is via symbolic media. Indeed, trueing our
understanding of the Other (to use today's common parlance) has motivated
ethnographers from the very beginning of the discipline. This is not to say
that other motivations have not intervened from time to time. But
anthropologists all along have wanted to portray their hosts' ways of life
in as accurate a way as possible -- this despite the vagary of the political
culture of their day. 

The failure in postmodern attacks on objectivity, and in objectivist
reactions to those attacks is that "truth" and "meaning" (or
"interpretation") are polarized. The fact of the matter is -- and a plain
fact if you take the biogenetic structural view -- that there is no such
thing as knowing the truth of something without interpretation playing a
role in the knowing. Knowing the truth about something is knowledge that is
trued to the transcendental event in the operational environment. "Truth" is
the product of a process, a process of trueing which involves the
transformation of models in the cognized environment in interaction with the
operational environment. (In our early work we often spoke of the empirical
modification cycle, or EMC, and it was the trueing process that we were
addressing, although we didn't bear down on the issue.) 

POLITICS AND TRUTH
When I was a young Ph.D. student, I benefitted by all the money that was
made available by the US government for African research. When many African
nations suddenly became independent from their colonial masters in the early
'60s, the US government found they had to deal with these countries directly
and needed to know more about the cultures they were going to be
confronting. So they made research moneys available and young anthropology
students flocked to become Africanists. But the motivation of the funding
agency or the US government had nothing whatever to do with what I was
interested in, and the research that I did in Uganda was determined by my
own interest in how cultures adapt to adversity. 

Now, if you were to read my ethnography of the So people of Northeastern
Uganda, and you were interested in whether or not the So used spiked wheel
traps for hunting, or what their descent system is like, you would find that
information faithfully recorded in that book. The motivation of government
for funding the research is irrelevant to whether or not the So used spiked
wheel traps in their hunting, or whether or not the So allow marriage
between members of the same clan. These are facts about the So that are part
of a record of my observations while living in Soland. Now, how you
interpret these facts depends on all sorts of factors, not the least being
your experience of traditional hunting technologies, descent systems, your
interest in and experience with African peoples, your theoretical
standpoint, etc. You may be a radical or Marxist feminist vitally interested
in questions of differential power among social classes. If so, then maybe
you aren't interested in whether So hunters use spiked wheel traps or not.
Never the less, the intersubjectively shared "objective" fact that the So do
not use spiked wheel traps is not effected by your bias -- only your use or
non-use of the fact is effected. 

And if you were interested in testing my account of So hunting technology,
you could travel to Soland and make inquiries of your own and test my
empirical claims about spiked wheel traps. You undoubtedly would find, as I
did, that although many societies in that part of East Africa do indeed use
spiked wheel traps, the So in fact do not. And it would really not matter
one bit what your theoretical or political orientation is. No amount of
theoretical or ideological re- interpretation of So culture will make So
hunters in fact spiked wheel trap users. 

PHENOMENOLOGY OF OBJECTIVITY
Now, watch your own consciousness right now -- do some phenomenology on
yourself. (Ha! you really can't very well do phenomenology on anybody else,
can you?) I have told you that the So do not in fact use spiked wheel traps.
That claim is true about the So during and before the period I was living
with them. (Of course, some may have learned to make and use them since my
time there. Who knows?) Now you know something true about the So of
Northeastern Uganda. But what is it that you know? What exactly do you know
now that you didn't know a few minutes ago? Do you know what a spiked wheel
trap really is? Do you know how it is used by the hunters of other cultures
that do in fact use them? Do you know for instance why they are illegal to
own or use in Uganda? Do you know how to make one? Can you see one in your
mind's eye? Can you use the fact of the absence of the spiked wheel trap
among the So to add information to your understanding of the historical
relations among cultures in East Africa? 

I could address all of these questions relative to spiked wheel traps, and
the more I tell you about them, the more your brain will configure an
increasingly complex model of spiked wheel traps and their cultural
significance to peoples in East Africa. And the further I get from reporting
direct experiences on my part, the more an interpretive aspect creeps into
the communication. Sooner or later I will have left descriptions of direct
experiences behind and be into the domain of theory, interpretation and
supposition which you may well end up disagreeing with, even though you have
never clapped eyes on a spiked wheel trap in your life. 

But if my theorizing is grounded in my observations (and other people's
symbolically shared observations), then I am in the arena of empirical
science in which the truth value of my theorizing is not evaluated relative
to moral values or ideology, but rather in the direct or intersubjectively
shared experiences of observers. 

It is not the case that all systems of knowledge are equivalent and
culturally relative. Some knowledge is truer than other knowledge. It is not
the case that some systems of knowledge come to the fore only because they
are politically privileged over alternative systems of knowledge, although
any study of religious fundamentalism will give clear evidence that this may
happen in the world. Come to think about it, the study of the various
"political correctness" movements in academia today will give you more
evidence that this can happen. Systems of knowledge may prove to be
pragmatically "real" to people in their everyday lives -- the system of
knowledge may be "real" because it is sufficiently veridical that it allows
people to get things done in the world. This is trueing in its most mundane,
pragmatic, everyday sense. 

But as far as it may seem to be from the arcane realm of scientific
research, the crucible of truth is still in direct experience. I have had
the privilege of working with the police from time to time. And one thing I
learned about cops is that they tend to be pragmatists. If you can show cops
that an idea will work on the street, they are with you. If you can't show
them it works on the street, you can talk til you are blue in the face and
you will never persuade them. 

Good science depends upon this kind of natural realism. I say "natural"
because we all operate in our daily lives upon a built-in presumption that
the world we experience is in fact the world that exists. (You may want to
read or reread what I have said in an earlier Tangent on the experience of
apodicticity, or the sense of necessity, reality and truth that is
wired-into experience.) I submit that even the most avid philosophical
idealist or relativist doesn't actually doubt that the floor is there when
she next puts her foot down. The truth of our models of reality are
evaluated in experience -- experience in the lab, experience in the field,
and experience in our daily life. 

Because the world is transcendental, taking any theoretical stance
immediately produces the conditions for anomalous experiences. Let me expand
on this further. A theory in the usual sense of the term is already a public
text. That is, the theory is part of our understanding of something that is
intersubjectively shared. Moreover, a theory is generally in some symbolic
form or another (i.e., communicated in natural spoken language, in writing,
or in mathematical form). And as I have said, symbolic media are inevitably
transposed from the relatively information rich domain of experience into a
relatively information poor medium of symbolism. And as experience itself is
always intentional, experience itself is information poor relative to the
transcendental nature of the operational environment. And when life or
discipline forces us to evaluate our theoretical texts in the crucible of
experienced engagement with the transcendental, we are immediately thrown
into a dialogue between the richness of reality and the incompleteness of
knowledge. 

There are states of consciousness that are relatively open to truth and
those that are relatively closed to the truth. Consciousness that is open to
truth, that is operating from an effort for truth, is obvious when you meet
it. There is a flexibility of understanding and an enduring state of
curiosity and emotional openness and neutrality to the disconfirming
possibilities of the transcendental world. There is an excitement about the
quest, perhaps an awe of the vastness of the unknown. 

The opposite consciousness is even easier to spot. Knowledge is in the
service of non-empirical convictions. Knowledge is generated as
rationalization for emotion-charged beliefs that are inflexible and
inaccessible to disconfirmation by testing relative to the transcendental
possibilities. This is a consciousness locked into a closed system of ideas
-- a kind of "hardening of the categories." Potentially anomalous data are
over-assimilated into the fixed idea structure and rendered redundant. As
Jung often said, if there is a lot of emotion behind someone's ideas, then
there is heavy projection of those ideas onto the world. 

Many of my anthropology colleagues today fervently believe the world can be
made a better place for oppressed people. So fervent are their beliefs in
this regard that they feel this should be the entire focus of the
discipline. Whereas I agree with them to an extent that the world can be
sometimes improved, I disagree that we can ever get to that goal by way of
any ideology, be that ideology radical feminism, environmentalism,
capitalism, Marxism, postmodernism, or whatever-ism. Paraphrasing Carl Jung
again, "isms" are the cancer of our age. 

And the only alternative to ideology is good science. Real science. Science
that is committed to truth first, then action -- or trueing built-in to
action. Science that always looks to experience to disconfirm ideas about
the world. After all, compassion is not just loving activity from good
intentions. Compassion is love plus wisdom - - wisdom that develops in a
continuous effort for truth in dialogue with the transcendental nature of
reality. 

So, in the end I come down strongly in favor of a science of humanity that
is free to seek, model and speak truth to any circumstance. Good science is
never concerned with being politically correct -- never concerned with
"being on the side of the angels," politically or otherwise. One cannot
serve both truth and ideology. I am not talking about absolute truth in any
sense here. And I am certainly not arguing that we should embrace the views
of science as one relativistic view being privileged over many other
possible views, as the postmodernists would have us believe. For one thing,
this would lead us into the fallacy of scientific imperialism. And for
another thing, we would lose sight of the truth of the transcendental -- the
knowledge that our knowledge, any knowledge, is partial and incomplete. 

No, if scientific knowledge is to be privileged, it is so primarily because
scientific accounts are frequently directed at questions that never occur to
traditional people to ask, and frequently are truer, more extensive and
complex, more open to empirical disconfirmation, more productive of further
knowledge, and more pragmatically useful than other competing views. This is
because good science is an effort for truth, and is never satisfied with a
mere effort for meaning. But the irony of good science is that the process
itself is inherently disruptive of systems of meaning. The effort for truth
is ultimately open ended, while the effort for meaning closes in upon
itself, like the proverbial snake eating its own tail. 

Postmodernism, while certainly understandable at the level of well-intended
action in the world, is not a replacement for good science. The greatest
danger to humanity and perhaps to the planet is not in fact the oppression
of people by other people, is not nuclear weapons, or environmental
pollution, or even the growth of the power of transnationals. These are just
the byproducts of a far greater danger. That danger is our ignorance, our
failure to understand ourselves and the limitations of our cognitive
capabilities. The best hope for understanding humanity and its nature is
good, dynamic, empirical science, the most advanced manifestation of the
effort for truth that has yet to evolve on the planet. 

We have reached the end of this section of the tutorial. You may have
noticed that I titled this session "Part One." This is because I have more
to say about the failings of postmodernism, but this will have to wait for a
more advanced discourse. I must not lose track of the purpose of this
tutorial. 

Some relevant references are to be found below. You may wish to carry on to
Day Eleven (sorry, not yet finished), or return to the tutorial index. 

REFERENCES:
Asad, Talal (1973) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca
Press. 

D'Andrade, Roy (1995) "Moral Models in Anthropology." Current Anthropology
36(3):399-408. 

Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Harper. 

Pinxten, Rik (1981) "Observation in Anthropology: Positivism and
Subjectivism Combined." Communication & Cognition 14(1):57-83. 

Rosaldo, Renato (1989) Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis.
Boston: Beacon. 

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (1995) "The Primacy of the Ethical." Current
Anthropology 36(3):409-420. 

Schmidt, Lawrence K., ed. (1995) The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue,
and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics. Evanston,IL: Northwestern
University Press.=========================================================================
Date:         Wed, 31 May 2000 16:14:11 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-To:     [log in to unmask]
Sender:       enviroethics
From:         Steve <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:      Re: More on Rand:  Altruism
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Actually, I think that the parallels between Communists, Nazis and
Socialism are stronger than you think.  The Nazis were National
Socialists.  They played a very active role in managing the economy and
planning production.

Check out this link

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_rockwell/19990813_xclro_socialist_.shtml

Here is my favorite paragraph...

"Furthermore, as Robert Proctor showed in "Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under
the Nazis" (1988), the Nazis were health fanatics who banned cigarette
smoking, promoted vegetarianism and organic gardening, engaged in abortion
and euthanasia, frowned on all capitalist excess, and even promoted
animal rights. They were environmentalists who locked up land from
development to promote paganism."

Not exactly something I'd expect from free market types who value
individual rights.

Steve





--- Volker Bahn <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm glad you posted this, Jim, because I meant to reply to an older post
> of yours in which you also made a connection between elevating the
> common good over individual rights to fascism (sorry I don't have the
> post handy but if you insist, I'll dig it out).
> 
> Oh here it is:
>   Jim:
>   It's a fine line--I'm not saying this distinction is always easily
> made or
>   clear cut by any means.  But the authoritarian tendencies in
>   environmentalism are very real.  Environmentalism is perhaps the most
>   conservative of political ideologies, make no mistake about that.  Any
> time
>   there is talk of elevating the needs of the community over the rights
> of
>   individual inhabitants, human or nonhuman, then there is a subsequent
> risk
>   of "fascism," broadly construed.  It is simply in the nature of the
>   environmental beast.
> 
> 
> 
>   Okay, to be more accurate, the term I should have chosen is
> "collectivism" or possibly even "socialism." Remember, I'm still just
> trying to understand Rand's views--not defend them. 
> 
> I will criticise the following statements, but because they are not your
> opinions I guess the criticism goes to Rand. However, you were defending
> her against attacks from left, right and center and I'm curious to see
> whether you also conclude my criticism to be unsubstantiated or a
> misinterpretation.
> 
> 
> 
>   To her, socialism is what led (historically) to Nazism and to Soviet
> communism. Socialist intellectuals, then, are the thinkers who let the
> world down, so to speak. Rand:
> 
> This is wrong. Nazism and fascism were anti-communist and
> anti-socialist. 
> 
>   the connection to Naziism and communism :
>   --"It was not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or
> the labor unions or the remnants of the feudal aristocracy that began
> the revolt against freedom and the demand for the return of the absolute
> state: it was the intellectuals. It was the alleged guardians of reason
> who brought mankind back to the rule of brute force.
> 
> Wrong again. Fascism in Italy and later in many European countries was
> initiated and supported by the middle-classes (craftsmen, merchants,
> farmers, employees, officials), who felt threatened in their status and
> wealth by progressing industrialisation and worker's organisation.
> 
>   --"Growing throughout the nineteenth century, originated in and
> directed from intellectual salons, sidewalk cafés, basement beer joints
> and university classrooms, the industrial counter-revolution united the
> Witch Doctors and the Attila-ists. They demanded the right to enforce
> ideas at the point of a gun, that is: through the power of government,
> and compel the submission of others to the views and wishes of those who
> would gain control of the government's machinery. 
> 
> That's partly right. However, the fascists never planned to violently
> elevate society's rights over individual rights. They wanted to elevate
> their own egoistical (and therefore Randian) rights over individual and
> societal rights.
> 
>   They extolled the State as the 'Form of the Good,' with man as its
> abject servant, and they proposed as many variants of the socialist
> state as there had been of the altruist morality. But, in both cases,
> the variations merely played with the surface, while the cannibal
> essence remained the same: socialism is the doctrine that man has no
> right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not
> belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his
> existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him
> in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own
> tribal, collective good.
> 
>   --"It is only the Attila-ist, pragmatist, positivist, anti-conceptual
> mentality--which grants no validity to abstractions, no meaning to
> principles and no power to ideas--that can still wonder why a
> theoretical doctrine of that kind had to lead in practice to the torrent
> of blood and brute, non-human horror of such socialist societies as Nazi
> Germany and Soviet Russia. 
> 
>   Nazi Germany was NOT anywhere close to a socialist society. This is
> historical ignorance.
> 
>   Only the Attila-ist mentality can still claim that nobody can prove
> that these had to be the necessary results--or still try to blame it on
> the 'imperfection' of human nature or on the evil of some specific gang
> who 'betrayed and ideal,' and still promise that its own gang would do
> it better and make it work--or still mumble in a quavering voice that
> the motive was love of humanity.
>   --"The pretenses have worn thin, the evasions do not work any longer;
> the intellectuals are aware of their guilt, but are still struggling to
> evade its cause and to pass it on to the universe at large, to man's
> metaphysically predestined impotence" (The N.I., 48-9).
> 
> She seems to have fallen for the propaganda of the Nazis. Fascism and
> Soviet communism were built on propaganda, which of course did not
> represent reality. If her analysis doesn't go any deeper than taking the
> propaganda of totalitarian systems for their real intentions and thus
> tries to discredit social intentions I have to say that I'm starting to
> GAG.
> 
> In the same line of logic one could claim that democracy equals
> terrorism because the financing and military support of the Contras in
> Nicaragua was big scale terrorism in the name of democracy.
> 
> Sorry, I'm drifting away from EE, but I didn't start it.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Volker 
> 


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