Michael Shermer, Ayn Rand & other dreck

See also my original post with feedback on Freethought Forum.

Written 2 January 2007:

Magazines such as The Skeptic do not as a rule interest me, and I never heard of Michael Shermer until I tuned into one of the most horrid programs I ever watched on PBS:

The Question of God

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/

I was so furious after seeing this pretentious, vacuous waste of airtime I wrote a really nasty note, on 16 September 2004:

This has got to be the dumbest piece of sh*t PBS has ever broadcast, after Suze Orman, Wayne Dyer, and Gary Null. . . . With one or two exceptions, the talking heads were just appalling, absolutely beneath contempt. Anyway, I’m writing up a denunciation of this show to send to PBS. I’ve already posted a few remarks to the discussion board. The preponderance of comments seem to come from idiots, but there are several voices of protest against the abominable premiss and execrable logic underlying this program. This is just the sort of second-rate middlebrow dreck designed to appeal to the upper middle class dweebs who donate money to public television and think they’re sophisticated for watching this sh*t instead of Springer.

I continued the following day:

. . . this documentary on Freud & Lewis with the exception of the two secular humanists had the most idiotic panel of talking heads I have ever seen. It’s worse than watching Dennis Wholey. The total lack of logical thinking, the lack of recognized experts in important fields such as comparative mythology, etc., the total arbitrariness in the selection of people and the tenor of conversation—this is a new low. It’s like watching Bill Clinton or Tony Blair engage in discourse—indecent total bullsh*t without content or substance.

It seems I never got around to writing the detailed analysis I planned. While apparently I didn’t think Shermer was the worst of the lot, I didn’t think there was a whole lot to him, either.

The Science of Good and Evil

The next time I wrote about Shermer was on 13 February 2006:

Here’s an example of my dislike of sociobiological “explanations” of human belief systems, esp. those using this crackpot notion of “memes” [Dawkins]:

The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule by Michael Shermer
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805075208

While biological evolution undoubtedly explains the formation of human groups who can survive in nature, aside from basic propensities to survive in social groups, natural selection cum genetics and neuroscience in the present state of biological knowledge cannot explain the “survival” of belief systems—i.e. culturally transmitted ideas and practices—esp. via natural selection of individual genetic traits.

My problem with sociobiological explanations is that not only are the genetics of belief systems unknown to physical science, but that their proponents lack a grounding in history, anthropology, and sociology, and are rather naive in their speculations on the regulation of social behavior.

One may applaud secular humanists such as Dennett, Shermer, and Dawkins for certain aspects of their public interventions, but the replacement of religion with tough-guy (or make-nice) pseudo-science only compounds the problem. These people are all sociologically naive, and can’t even understand the anti-scientific reaction and the policies of the ruling elite since the 1960s that have driven millions to illiteracy and superstition.

The Ayn Rand Cult: Reason as Unreason

Most recently, on 23 December, I ran into this little ‘gem’:

THE UNLIKELIEST CULT IN HISTORY by MICHAEL SHERMER
http://www.skepticfiles.org/skmag/un-cult.htm

And this is what I had to say about it:

This article by a prominent figure in skeptic and secular humanist circles pinpoints certain aspects of the Rand cult’s irrationality while neglecting to specify on a deeper level what makes it ideological (i.e., operating in a fashion of which its practitioners are unconscious), and revealing himself to be the same shallow intellectual type that characterizes much of the secular humanist and atheist movement in the anglophone world.

Even worse, Shermer embraces a good deal of Rand’s philosophy, most obviously the celebration of free market capitalism.

I never thought Shermer was very bright after seeing him on PBS, but this shows him to be worse.

And this is the best the ‘skeptic’ is capable of producing. I never had much use for ‘skeptics’, as they never had much to say about so many things that really mattered, and this piece shows just useless they are. There is a terrible intellectual vacuum in this milieu and the suggestion that these people are the best representatives of reason that we have makes me want to vomit.

Here is one rather revealing book on Rand and her cult following:

The Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker (Open Court Publishing Company, 1998)
http://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rand-Cult-Jeff-Walker/dp/0812693906/sr=1-1/qid=1167227566/

On 22 July 2004 I wrote:

The author of this book makes a penetrating observation. He says Rand was at war with reality her whole life. I think this is quite perceptive. The price of maintaining this foolish consistency is to edit out a good portion of reality and history. The incoherence is not [in] the internal logical consistency of the system, but [in] the mismatch between the ideology and reality, and [in] the contradiction between the avowed rationality of its proponents and the manifest irrationality of their motivations.

Like religious proselytizers, our [local] Rand groupie felt the need to accost every attendee of [our local philosophy group] and grill him or her seeking out contradictions. I’ve seen this individual in social situations, and he is only capable of treating other human beings as objects or lab rats. This is not rational behavior; it is mental illness.

If Rand is despised by the academic community, and I don’t know whether that’s so, it is probably because her arrogance exceeds what they are used to, and the inflated claims of her status contrasts with her actual grasp of the ideas with which she is in competition. As a philosopher, her cult pretty much edits out most of philosophy. I don’t necessarily believe that the bulk of philosophical tradition mandates respect, but critique demands an understanding of how concepts are put together, even an understanding of the contradictions in philosophical systems which may be a product of the state of society and knowledge at a given time and their evolution through history. But real society and real history do not exist for Ayn Rand. She deduces reality from first principles but can only do so by denying or distorting most of it. This I think is why her followers are such simpletons as well as diseased personalities.

I run into these libertarian types at atheist gatherings. I have no interest in arguing with them; I simply recuse myself from whatever conversation I’m a party to. The last time I inadvertently got sucked into a discussion on this topic, while sitting next to a Randroid woman known for hawking her book at WASH [Washington Area Secular Humanists] meetings, I wanted to know only one thing I didn’t already know about Ayn Rand: what was her position on oral sex? I got a laugh, but not an answer.

Scientism of the Gaps & the ‘Two Cultures’

See also my original post on the Freethought Forum with a series of responses.

Written 1 January 2007:

It is essential to note that both pseudoscience under the aegis of legit science and pseudo-science or anti-science under the aegis of supernaturalism both rely on scientism and illicit projections based on gaps. Scientism is a disputed term, but here I am using it to mean a quasi-ritualistic aping of the methods of science in misapplication to an object of inquiry. Because there are always gaps in knowledge, these gaps are exploited to provide pseudo-explanations or denials of the scientific explicability of phenomena. The mirror-image of “Intelligent Design” is the pseudoscience of Dawkins’s memes. All of modern society is trapped in irreconcilable dualisms. A culture capable of generating the one in a scientific age invariably must generate its complement. Over a century and a half of philosophy and broader intellectual currents can be mapped as a competition and vacillation between the currents variously nameable as positivism (scientism) vs. irrationalism (Romanticism).

The religious Right represents one wing of reversion to irrationalism, its power in the USA derived from the decline of liberalism in the 1970s. The liberal wing of irrationalism (misconstrued by its opponents and many of its proponents as radicalism) is vaguely characterizable under the umbrella term of postmodernism, whose intellectual roots are derived from the political Right but have undergone political mutations in the course of their development. The ascendany of this tendency is concommitant with and derives from the same social conditions as the New Right. The attack of the postmodernist wing on rationality and science should be considered as much an assault on secularism and atheism as the attack of the religious Right, and in spite of the mutual cultural and political hostility of these two camps, the postmodernist assault on science serves the cause of the new fascism.

Meera Nanda has documented the problem in relation to India:

Meera Nanda Online

For those who can brave the waters of philosophy and intellectual history, my study guide provides a number of sources for exploring this dichotomy:

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie)

A more easily digestible approach to the problem can be found in C.P. Snow’s 1959 initiation of a debate on the “two cultures”:

The Two Cultures: C.P. Snow, Literature and Science

The ‘two cultures’ problem plagues us today: specialization and fragmentation allow educated people to remain ignorant of huge swaths of information needed to make sense of our world. Dennett, who is a professional philosopher, ought to know better, but philosophy is as divided as everything else, and Anglo-American philosophy is particularly narrow and provincial. Dawkins is an ignoramus outside of evolutionary theory, and he has impermissibly extended his knowledge by instigating the pseudoscience of memes, an illegitimate metaphorical extension of notions from genetics and natural selection to the cultural/social/ideological sphere. This is a repetition of the nonsense to which the new evolutionism was put in the second half of the 19th century.

Just as there is a god of the gaps, there is a pseudoscience of the gaps, which can be tailored to naturalistic and well as supernaturalistic world views. A naive conception of how science can be applied as a universal method, especially to social and cultural phenomena, constitutes scientism, or the fetishistic application of scientific methods and notions to an object of investigation without comprehension of how the two match up.

Sam Harris presents us with a somewhat different version of the problem. First, he presents a new twist, making ridiculous claims for Eastern mysticism, reincarnation, and similar New Age nonsense. Secondly, freaked out by 9–11, he purports to explain social behavior merely as an effect of belief, rendering an understanding of the springs of behavior in both the Islamic world and in our society impossible. Thirdly, he is so politically and sociologically naive that pernicious consequences flow from his public interventions. Harris himself amalgamates aspects of the two cultures, with the New Age gloss, but as he has no basis for explaining social, cultural, and ideological phenomena, he ends up doing as much harm as good.

Missing in all of this is a huge range of possible contributions from social theory, cultural theory, sociology, anthropology, history, and the full range of philosophical traditions, along with the crucial concept of ideology. Where are the representatives of these domains of expertise in the secular humanist, atheist, freethought, and skeptical communities? How is that the two cultures are somehow segmented such that activist atheists and secular humanists seem to be conversant only with one of these two cultures, both on the production and consumption ends of the culture industry?