Snappy

Not much time, so a quick one, as promised to RK aka Kirk (why anglicise?) and Amit (why bubba? why??) -

Crediting the Manifesto and the communist revolution with bringing the sad plight of workers to light is like crediting the AIDS epidemic for highlighting the need for safe sex. The causal link is at best tenuous, because there's nothing to say the changes wouldn't have happened anyway; and even if the causal link can be established, that doesn't make the cause a benevolent force - it remains just as abhorrent and vile as it is when it is taken at face value, without considering the consequences. (And meanwhile, if you're considering the consequences, you've got to see the ill effects too! You can't say, on one hand, that implementation is problematic and that real life consequences ought to be ignored to see the principle properly, and then claim a long-term consequence of the principle as justification that it is good.)

That's precisely the problem with Marx: the ends don't justify the means. Granted, it would be unfair to hold him to our standards without considering his social era, but he was a revolutionary, after all, who was independent enough to think beyond his social context. That is the precise reason why it's hard to forgive philosophers for such transgressions of morality: seizure of property and concentration of absolute power into the hands of a few are ok? If this dude actually believed this power would not be abused, he was naive to the extreme; if he didn't even consider how the power would be used, he was lazy. In either case, he had no business being a philosopher.

Ayn Rand was a philosopher. She can be credited with more than just bringing individualism into the mainstream. (Which, in fact, is itself a dubious claim, considering the treatment she gets from serious philosophers... but that's another issue.) She claimed - and as far as I know, no one and none of my reading has contradicted her claim - to be the first person to defend capitalism on moral and ethical grounds rather than on the idea of 'social good' and 'overall benefit to society'. Adam Smith et al want capitalism because it holds the promise of great prosperity for the greatest number; Rand suggested that even if capitalism did steal bread from the mouths of the impoverished worker class, it would still be the only right system to follow. Nobody else has been so unapologetic about the whole thing.

She also wrote down a very articulate and well defined philosophy. Amit says she wrote good novels and then a lot of drivel - but I beg to differ. Her non fiction works are far superior, if only because they classify, define and develop philosophy like it was mathematics. There's classical beauty in it. Of course she went nuts after a while and wrote a load of drivel (against homosexuality, on what makes 'right' art etc) but it's important to note that she was unable to defend any of this drivel with her basic philosophy. (She tried, but the holes are too, too obvious; she herself was reduced to banking on iffy things like 'soul' and 'human nature', terms she had previously been very outspoken against.) Which goes to show that her basis is truly sound.

Just for the record, I love the way she develops her whole philosophical structure around just one axiom: existance exists. Once the iffy things like her theories on art and sex are removed, it's untouchable, and impossible to deny.

(I know I promised a short post... sorry! But this is a pretty decent length for me, no?)