About a month and a half ago, in Atlas Shrugged movie finally filming?!, Jacob Huebert updated us on the Atlas Shrugged movie. Now, thanks to Reason Magazine and Reason.tv, we are privileged to see behind-the-scenes footage and interviews.

I’ll admit I was leery of the current iteration of the project, but I am somewhat reassured to hear that Atlas Shrugged will be made into three movies, not one, which is more doable. I’m also reassured that the director and the actor playing Henry Rearden seem to have a decent handle on Ayn Rand’s vision and characters, though I was a bit disquieted by the director mispronouncing Rand’s first name.

From Reason.com’s Hit & Run blog (video below):

Many actors and producers have talked about adapting Ayn Rand’s classic Atlas Shrugged for the big screen, but 53 years after its publication no one has dared tackle the ambitious project—until now.

Reason.tv heads to the set of Atlas Shrugged Part One to offer viewers a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of this most anticipated film.

Director Paul Johansson (One Tree Hill) and Grant Bowler (Lost, True Blood, Ugly Betty), who plays Henry Rearden, discuss the perils, pressures, and pleasure involved in telling the epic tale of a society where the “men of the mind” go on strike and refuse to contribute to a collectivist world.

Produced by Ted Balaker and Hawk Jensen. Camera by Austin Bragg and Hawk Jensen. Production support by Sam Corcos.

Music: “Eu Nao Sabia” by Anamar available from Magnatune Records.

Approximately 5.3 minutes.

Go to Reason.tv downloadable HD, iPod, and audio versions of this and all our videos and subscribe to Reason.tv’s YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

The “final” issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies is finally available online, although it looks like there will be one more final issue for all the other accepted but unpublished articles. This is the Atlas Shrugged Symposium issue, the last issue edited by Roderick Long, and I’m proud to say it includes an article by me. Head on over to the Mises blog and check out Jeff Tucker’s announcement. You can also download my article, “Atlas Shrugged and the Importance of Dramatizing Our Values,” directly.

At least one science fiction author has a pretty sound grasp of economic theory and history, and of the current financial crisis.

Ludwig von Mises over half a century ago proved, beyond a shadow of doubt, that a little intervention in one sector of the economy creates an incentive for a lot of intervention in ever larger sections of the economy; and the government must forswear either the goals it has set as policy or the means selected to pursue them to resist, if ever, that incentive, and suffer the humiliation and financial loss of reversing long-standing policy. (A nice summary of his argument can be read here: http://mises.org/midroad.asp. A complete study of the underlying logic and epistemology can be read here: http://mises.org/resources/3250.)

Read the rest. He even mentions Bastiat.

There are two things he says that jumped out at me that I must disagree with, however.

Sadly, one cannot run a free market republic in a land where the citizens are ignorant of the basic scientific laws governing the market relations.

I agree wholeheartedly with this, except for the part about running a republic. We don’t need anyone to be running any kind of republic. The state itself is an evil. We shouldn’t settle for a free market republic. And no free market republic could ever remain free market for long anyway.

The other point of disagreement is that he seems to blame the financial crisis on the wealth-transferring “Dems,” as in Democrats I assume, but the Republicans are guilty of wealth transfer from Main Street to Wall Street too. Precious few Republican politicians give more than lip service to the free market. McCain is no small government, free market man.

From Gary North’s obituary for John Robbins:

Robbins first came to the attention of libertarians because of his self-published book, Answer to Ayn Rand (1974). He did not object to her defense of the free market. He objected to her epistemology, which rested on atheism.

I can see why he would think that, since for Christians God is at the level of metaphysics and ontology, in a sense prior to epistemology. However, while I can’t speak for Rand herself, for me at least my epistemology does not rest on my atheism. Rather, it is more the other way around. My atheism rests in part on my epistemological views (which inform and are informed by my metaphysical views, to be sure), but I (and I think Rand too) do not first assume God doesn’t exist and then develop my epistemology on that basis.

I have uploaded a brief essay giving my interpretation of the relationship between values and virtues in Rand’s though. It was written to fulfill the writing assignment of the TAS/TOC 2007 Grad Student Summer Seminar I attended in August. Enjoy.

There is a quasi-interview/article here at The Advocates for Self-Government website. See, also, Wright’s page on SFF.net.

I have only read Wright’s Golden Age trilogy, not any of his other novels. I can say that I greatly enjoyed the trilogy. Not only is it good science fiction but it is explicitly libertarian science fiction. There is a distinct Randian influence evident in the main character’s words and actions as well as in the setting and plot.

As a libertarian, I do have a few problems with the libertarian society Wright dramatizes, however. One is that I am skeptical of any government remaining as limited as his over such a long period of time. Unfortunately, Wright, quoted in the article, makes clear that he is not a “true-blue libertarian.” Whatever that means. But better mostly libertarian than mostly not. However, his description of the type of government he thought he had to create for his fictional world in order to make his plot possible makes me wonder how well he understands the nature of the state. How did his government get to be so ultra-minimalist and how did it manage to stay that way? Wright doesn’t provide an adequate explanation. The only workings of the government we are made directly privy to are the (literally) one man army and the “Supreme Court.”

The second major sticking point is a major plot device without which the novels would have been very different indeed. A major part of the ills that pervade Wright’s libertarian society stem from its universal and rigid acceptance of intellectual property rights. Like a good number of libertarians, albeit not a majority, I believe that intellectual property rights are illegitimate (see here and here). Remove them from Wright’s fictional world and many major problems stemming from them disappear. In a society of immortals the royalties accruing from intellectual property will be endless and bountiful. It is thus no surprise that Wright’s fictional society is dominated by a relative handful of mostly older immortals who are absurdly wealthy and control some of the most vital technology. In effect, their dominance is subsidized by the state. Given the obvious ills IP causes in the trilogy it wouldn’t have been difficult to have the main protagonists at least come to doubt its legitimacy, but alas.

But again, these quibbles aside, I enjoyed the books very much. They were well-written, imaginative, engrossing and very explicitly libertarian. At least one of the three books should have won the Prometheus Award. Perhaps this oversight will be rectified with a Hall of Fame or Special Award.

Given the strong Randian influence, it came as no surprise to me that Wright was an atheist while writing these books. In his own words, a “vehement, argumentative, proselytizing atheist.” I am disappointed to find out that he renounced his atheism, but glad that he survived the heart attack that precipitated his conversion to Christianity. Still, to speculate a bit, it is not so surprising to me that someone I would describe as a militant atheist would have a change of heart. It seems to me there is something similar psychologically about this kind of atheist and proselytizing, especially fundamentalist, Christians. There is something defensive about it* and that to me implies doubt. A mid-life crisis like a near-death experience can be powerful fertilizer for that seed. Ayn Rand was an atheist; not as a primary or starting point, however, but as a consequence of her philosophy. Hence, she described herself not as a militant atheist (or some similar combination of adjectives) but as an intransigent atheist.

*Granted religious conservatives and radical Islamists periodically give us reason to be defensive and even worried, but not enough in my mind to justify it dominating one’s life to the point one can be described as “vehement, argumentative, [and] proselytizing” (or militant).

Mike Wallace Interview (1959)

Donahue Interview

And there is some commentary over at the Mises Econ Blog.

Today I left a comment over at SOLOHQ on Heidi Morris’s article “Reason and Reality: The Logical Compatibility of Austrian Economics and Objectivism,” disagreeing with what I take to be mistaken views of Austrian economics by a couple of the other commentors. The article is interesting, and admirable in its attempt to bridge the divide between the two schools of thought on both philosophical and economic issues, but it is also a little superficial in its treatment. For instance, one of the major hurdles to such a reconciliation is the subject of apriorism. Rand explicitly rejected apriorism (or at least Kantian apriorism). It remains to be shown how (or even if) praxeology-as-an-a priori-discipline can be compatible with Objectivism. (I think it can be, although it may require a little reformulation.) I recently began work on an essay dealing with this very problem. I plan to submit it to JARS when it is finished. Keep an eye out for future posts linking to rough drafts.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been reading Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. While I agree with him much of the time and I’ve found his speculations about Nietzsche’s influence on Rand to be interesting and informative, I cannot (at least at the moment) completely agree with his interpretation of Nietzsche as championing Master morality over Slave morality, Dionysus over Apollo, and subjectivist egoism over intrinsicist altruism. It has been a long while since I have read Nietzsche so I don’t have citations readily at hand to back up my suggestions, but my recollected interpretation of Nietzsche is that he tried to transcend these dichotomies with his doctrine of the Overman. Although Nietzsche appears to champion Dionysus in his later work it was my impression that he continued to use the term Dionysus as a synthesis of his early conceptions of Dionysus and Apollo. Similarly, he did not argue that the Master morality should be adopted instead of the Slave morality, but rather (like Marx’s critique of capitalism) recognized the good and the bad in it. He remarks in his Genealogy of Morals that Slave morality is a disease in the sense that pregnancy is a disease. He credited Slave morality with the creation of the soul. He recognized the good aspects of Apollo. I realize my own thoughts are rather tentative and suggestive on this, so just take it as food for thought. One of these days I’ll have to go back and reread Nietzsche in order to confirm or deny this interpretation and maybe write up a scholarly essay on it. It may well be that in the final analysis Nietzsche remained a subjectivist egoist, but if I am right his thought is more subtle and dialectical than even Doctor Diabolical Dialectical himself realizes.

Last semester I took an independent study/readings course on formal ontology and phenomenology. I read some of the work of Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, and Barry Smith. There is, I think, a lot to like about phenomenology, realist phenomenology at least. In attempting to clarify my own objections to Husserl’s transcendental turn, the notorious transcendental reduction, I ran across this fantastic gem by Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith entitled “Against Idealism: Johannes Daubert vs. Husserl’s Ideas I.” I had trouble understanding Husserl and, especially, formulating objections to him because of his penchant for using terms in ways completely different from how I and many others of his time were used to. In reading Schuhmann and Smith’s paper on Daubert, I was struck by apparent parallels between his thought and that of Ayn Rand. Unfortunately, I don’t know how deep the parallel’s run because none of Daubert’s work is published in English, much less any language. The translated quotations, mainly on the subjects of metaphysics (ontology) and epistemology, cited in a few articles by Schuhmann and Smith are about all there is. I did, however, attempt tentatively to trace some of the parallels between Rand and Daubert in these areas in my final paper for the course. Here is the result of my efforts: “Against Idealism: Rand and Daubert vs. Husserl’s Ideas I.” If Rand was familiar with Husserl or his Ideas, I am not aware of it. Daubert, however, was intimately familiar with Husserl’s work and had a chance to react to it in his own work. In my paper, I attempt to show how Ayn Rand might have objected to Husserl as well and how her work is similar to Daubert’s in this regard.

Well… It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been rather busy what with the three graduate-level classes that I am taking, another class that I am teaching, and the fact that my clunker of a car went belly up so I’m looking for a new, cheap replacement.

In any case, my three classes are going well…aside from the fact that I have to do an empirical quantitative analysis research paper in my international conflict class. Not sure what I’ll do the paper on yet.

My seminar on the metaphysics and morals of death (from an analytic philosophy perspective) is proving interesting. We are primarily looking at the fundamental questions of whether death (as opposed to the process of dying) is a harm, and whether the dead can be harmed. The answers to both questions, particularly the latter though, have important implications for ethical and political theories. If the dead cannot be harmed, then why should we respect their interests, wills, contracts, etc.? I plan to write a paper on these issues from a neo-Aristotelian virtue-ethics approach. I’m also going to apply for an IHS Summer Graduate Research Fellowship to develop it for publication.

And my seminar on Austrian philosophy, formal ontology, and realist phenomenology goes well. I’m finding I still agree with Barry Smith that the Austrian economists can benefit from studying the Austrian philosophers (the Brentano School, Husserl, Reinach, Wittgenstein). The last vestiges of Kantianism need to be shed from praxeology. Rothbard began this process, but did not complete it. Namely, it needs to be recognized that rather than the whole corpus of economic theory being implied in, and deduced directly from, the action axiom in some analytical and tautological sense, there exist a vast web of synthetic a priori propositions from which praxeological theory is woven around the central action axiom. (If my meaning here isn’t clear, I can elaborate in future posts.) However, I think both the Austrian philosophers and economists can benefit from studying Ayn Rand. And all three can benefit from returning to the great Aristotle himself. Accordingly, I am thinking of writing my paper for this class on “Ayn Rand, the Austrians, and Aristotelian Apriorism,” which I could then expand into a thesis for my second M.A. (in philosophy).

My class, introduction to political theory, is going well (I think). I’m almost done discussing Plato’s Republic. I can’t wait to move on to Aristotle’s Ethics (in its entirety) and Politics (selections).

The Ayn Rand Institute has backslided… ahem, I mean “clarified,” its position on foreign aid for the tsunami victims. I would have expected ARI to have more backbone than this, especially given the aggressive dogmatism that seems so prevalent over there. But then again, perhaps it is that very dogmatism that explains the backsliding: hammer home on the issues Ayn Rand wrote about, go soft on the issues she did not write about, don’t bother thinking for yourself.

Thanks to Skip Oliva at the Mises blog for the link. See his post for further discussion. As Skip and some commentators have pointed out, ARI’s “clarification” is decidedly lacking in percipient analysis.

The recent tsunami that hit Asia, costing over one hundred thousand human lives, is certainly a tragedy. Some people have accused the US of being stingy in its aid for the victims, as if the American government is (or should be) the only American donor of aid. In fact, the American people habitually give far more in aid than does our government. Moreover, the American government cannot be said to be generous nor can the aid it gives be considered charity, for we cannot consider it generosity or charity to steal money from some people in order to give it to others (for the government gets all of its revenue from taxation, borrowing, and inflation). Foreign aid, insofar as it is synonymous with government handouts, is immoral and unjust. True charity is that given out of generosity; i.e., given out of voluntary initiative by private individuals and groups.

For further discussion on this subject, see the posts by David J. Heinrich (“WSJ’s Taranto Slanders Ayn Rand Institute“) and Chris Matthew Sciabarra (“The Privatization of Foreign Aid“) over at the Mises blog. See also here, here, here, and here at the LRC blog.

Highly relevant quote: “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” – Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

I comment briefly over at the Mises Economics blog on the correlation between Rand’s theory of the agent-relative nature of values and the Austrian theory of subjective value, and on value-neutrality in economic science. Also, I wholeheartedly agree with Sheldon Richman’s comment immediately following mine.

Neil Parille has written an article on “Ayn Rand and Apriorism” over at SOLO HQ (that’s Sense of Life Objectivists Headquarters). And, as it is a subject that I myself am very much interested in and currently working on, I have commented with my own insights into the issue.

I’ve managed to get myself into a debate with a dogmatic Objectivist on the nature of US foreign policy and the merits of another dogmatic Objectivist’s characterization of it. See here.