Bringing Philosophy to Athens: Aspasia of Miletus

Aspasia of Miletus is easiest to find in the history of classical Athens as the woman with whom Pericles lived after divorcing his wife.  In fact, in those days, what we call “philosophy” was known in Athens as "the Milesian way” and it was Aspasia who brought it.  What we call the “Socratic method” should be the “Aspasian method” because young Socrates learned it at symposia held at her home. 

In the generation after the collapse of the Ionian Revolt refugees emigrated to Athens.  Athens’ role in the defeat of Persia brought honors, of course; but also, the dialects were similar.  They are commonly considered together: Attic-Ionian, different from Doric (at Sparta), Aeolic (at Thebes), and Arcadian-Cypriot.  

Among the twelve Ionian cities were Miletus, Samos, and Clazomenae.  Miletus was the home of Thales, who is credited with the first formal proof in geometry; and who is called the father of philosophy.  Samos was the home of Pythagoras, who had fled to Croton in southern Italy long before the revolt.  Anaxagoras who taught astronomy to Pericles came from Clazomenae. 

Anaxagoras found a meteorite that was seen falling; and he concluded that the sun is a hot rock.  For this, he was charged before the Athenian assembly with impiety for denying the divinity of the sun.  Aspasia was also tried for impiety.  This was also one of the charges against Socrates.  Athens was not friendly to philosophy.  Pericles spoke unsuccessfully in defense of Anaxagoras.  Pericles apparently did better on behalf of Aspasia.  Ancient sources and modern interpretations all vary on the trial, but agree on the influence that Aspasia carried in Athens.

In the 19^th century, when education in Greek and Latin was still required, the romance between Pericles and Aspasia was a popular topic for novelists.  More recently, she regained the attention of feminist scholars.  Indeed, it may be cogent to consider Pericles only the largest satellite orbiting her.  Socrates is easily the best known in common culture today, but Protagoras of Abdera was undoubtedly another visitor in her home, as was the young Alcibiades. 

Dr. William Smith’s A Smaller Classical Dictionary, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877) carried this entry:

“Apasia (1) the Elder of Miletus, daughter of Axiochus, the most celebrated of the Greek Hetaerae. She came to Athens where she gained the affection of Pericles, not more by her beauty than by her high mental accomplishments. Having parted with his wife, Pericles lived with Aspasia during the rest of his life. His enemies accused Aspasia of impiety and it required all of his personal influence to win her acquittal. The house of Aspasia was the center of the best literary and philosophical society of Athens, and was frequented even by Socrates. On the death of Pericles (c. 429 BC), Aspasia is said to have attached herself to one Lysicles, a dealer in cattle, and to have made him by her instruction, a first rate orator.” 

 It is important, also, to understand what Dr. Smith meant by "heterae."  The word means "companion."  It has sexual connotations, as well.  In her own time Aspasia was ridiculed as a brothel madame, a charge that is clearly theatrical hyperbole.  It nonetheless speaks to the status (or rather, the lack of it) held by women in classical Greece.

That paragraph was accompanied by a line drawing of a stele labeled ACΠACIA in late Hellenistic letters. A photograph of this funerary monument appears in Madeleine M. Henry's Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition.  Henry cites an article in Acta Classica by Peter Bicknell. Bicknell examines a stele given in Inscriptiones Graecae Vol. II Part 2, inscription number 7394 which he asserts shows the descendents of Apsasia.  According to Henry's accumulated evidence, Aspasia was born in Miletus about 470 BC. She was the younger sister of the woman married by Alcibiades the Elder (grandfather of the troublesome Alcibiades), whose ostracism from Athens expired in 450. The family arrived to find the laws changed unfavorably against metics (foreign Greeks) and their descendents. Aspasia caught the eye of Pericles and the rest is history. 

Now in the Vatican

Madeleine M. Henry's Prisoner of History is an excellent summary and evaluation of the material available on Aspasia of Miletos. This is a work which will stand the test of time and which will be read 100 years from now. I am most impressed by the variety and detail of evidence which Henry has acquired in constructing this book.

Ancient Athens was nothing without her metics. Among the foreign Greeks who came to the city, Anaxagoras and Aspasia were typical of the Ionians who made Athens “the school of Hellas.”  It is no accident that both were associated with Pericles and that both were tried for impiety by his enemies and that neither was a citizen of Athens.  The question then becomes: Why would intelligent people flock to Athens to be treated as second-class beings, barely better than barbarians? When we examine the status of metics, we must consider the collateral status of women.  If Aspasia stands out as a special woman, then even a century later Aristotle stands out as a special foreigner.  No easy wrapper explains all of the facts, though the facts remain.

This point is easy to miss. Rhetoric is public speaking. In the Athenian democracy, any citizen could bring suit and any citizen could be selected to judge a trial. As democrats, the Athenian citizens were all public speakers.  Certainly the successful ones were.  As lampooned in The Clouds, Socrates taught how to use wrong logic to evade, deny, and disprove obvious truths. In our language, sophistry is spurious logic or shallow reasoning. However, what Aspasia taught was not merely projecting your voice, waving your hands, and acting for the back row. Aspasia taught logic. She brought from Miletos the way of thinking that gave us geometry. The conservative Athenians were unprepared and found themselves disadvantaged if not helpless.  They were used to pleading their case by direct statement. Aspasia taught the technique we call "Socratic inquiry." In short, she taught how to ask questions. 

ASPASIA OF MILETOS -- A bibliography

(You will find her in Xenophon's Memorabilia and in his Economics, as well as Plato's “Menexenus,” and  Plutarch's “Life of Perikles.”

• Pericles and Aspasia by Walter Landor Savage (1776 - 1864). Boston: Roberts Brothers 1894. (London: E. Moxon 1846). Historical fiction.
• The Heroines of History by Emily ("Mrs. Octavius Freirs Owen") Owen ( - ). London: Routledge, 1854. Biography.
• Aspasia: a Romance of Art and Love in Ancient Hellas by Robert Hamerling (1830 - 1889). New York: W. S. Gottsberger Peck 1893.Fiction. (Translated from original German.)
• Woman in ihe Golden Ages by Mrs. Amelia Ruth (Gere) Mason ( - ).New York: The Century Company, 1901. ("history and condition of women.")
• Old Saws and Modern Instances by William Leonard Courtney (1850 - 1928). New York: Dutton (1918). Historical insight.
• The Immortal Marriage by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton (1857 - 1948). New York: Boni and Liveright, (1927) Historical fiction.
• The Glory and the Lightning by Taylor Caldwell (1900-). Garden City, New York: Doubleday. 1974. Historical fiction. 
• Bicknell, Peter J. (1982). "Axiochus Alkibiadou, Aspasia and Aspasios". L'Antiquité Classique 51 (3): 240–250.
• “Aspasia of Miletus: how one woman disappeared from the history of rhetoric (discrimination against women in the field of rhetoric.)” by A. Cheree Carlson. Women's Studies in Communication, Spring 1994. 
• Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletos and Her Biographical Tradition by Madeleine Mary Henry (1949 - ). New York: Oxford University Press. 1995.
• “Aspasia of Miletos: The Woman who Ruled Athens,” by Michael Edward Marotta (mercury), The Well, http://www.well.com/ History, posted Friday, December  8, 1995.

A limited preview of Madeleine Henry’s Prisoner of History is available on Google Books here.   The collection, Inscriptiones Graecae (Wikipedia here), was started in 1825 and continued by the Prussian Academy.  It is now the work of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy for Science (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften; German only homepage here).

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
You Only Have to be Better to be Equal
She's Such a Geek!
Gregory Browne's Necessary Factual Truths
Slow Down and Think
The Simple Origins of Complexities

Austin Science and Engineering Festival

Over seventy businesses, colleges, and government agencies provided two full days of hands-on activities and stage demonstrations, to more than 17,000 visitors, November 5 and 6, at the Austin Convention Center.
Focused on young learners, the exposition enjoyed support from nineteen sponsors including Google, Dell, ExxonMobil, Shell, the U.S. Navy, the Austin Chronicle, and the Mexican-American Engineering Society. Two portable star show domes - one from Austin Planetarium, the other from Rice University - competed for attention with roving robots, catapult construction, police laboratories, and solar cars. 


Experiencing electrons

 

Three visitors

Saturday's crowd was boosted by busloads of elementary and middle school pupils from Dallas and Houston area districts, as well as locals. Many kids were primed for the serious side of fun with notebooks at the ready to record their experiences. Their hosts were prepared, as well.  IBM provided trays of oobleck. IBM also had an aerodynamics exercise where the kids built gliders with a straw and two loops of paper. The Society of Women Engineers also had a paper airplane exercise, the key to which was a wind tunnel made from a room fan and half-liter plastic bottles. The Texas Department of Public Safety provided a command car and a SWAT tank and made both freely available to the event visitors. The CIA brought a robot for the kids to operate.  The US Navy handed over the controls to a submersible model.

SEEK: Student Engineers Educating Kids

Of the fifteen stage presentations, "Science in the Movies" (both Saturday and Sunday) was easily the most popular with its explosions, flashes, and realizations of make-believe. They had a tough act to follow. Opening both days was Dr. Kold's liquid nitrogen show.

On Sunday, NASA mission specialist Dr. Richard M. Linnehan engaged the youngest in the audience with a Q&A that traveled light years from low Earth orbit to intergalactic space. The kids held their own and even surprised the astronaut with their knowledge. Rounding out the theater offerings were the Circus of Physics, the UT Solar Car, BEST Robotics, Google Science Fair Winner Shree Bose, and two different sets of talks by UT doctoral candidates in physical science, life science, and engineering.

STEM: Science Technology Engineering & Mathematics

The University of Texas programs in engineering, astronomy, and physics met the public from five different tables. However, Prairie View A&M sat at seven separate locations. ACC took two, one for electronics, the other for physics. Texas State Technical College, Texas Southern University, Texas State University, Southern Methodoist University, and the Geoforce Institute rounded out the higher learning alternatives. Present to help manage the choices was My College Options. Parents also found help with their science homework at table set up by the UT Women in Engineering.  SaplingLearning demonstrated their innovative virtual laboratory experiments and other online homework aids and study tools.

 

This was the second annual Texas Science and Engineering Festival. The concept and the plethora of administrative details were were the work of MAES, the Society of Mexican-American Engineers and Scientists.

On this blog, see also Nerd Nation here and Nerd Nation 2.0 here

Private Security in the 21st Century

In J. Neil Schulman’s libertarian utopia Alongside Night, our hero, the son of a free market Nobel laureate economist, is on the run when he falls in love with the daughter of the director of the FBI.  He discovers an underground, both literal and figurative, and as the stormtroopers attack, the Boy and the Girl are separated.  He needs to find her, but the private security guards are directing people to safety.  He wants to argue, but they will have none of that. Rather than ordering him to obey the klaxon call to evacuate – which is what he expects – the guard asks him to stand aside for a moment until they can help him find his girlfriend. So it is with private security: we are not cops… at least, not ideally. 

Today, supervisors in private security generally come from the world of public policing.  They follow the Guardian ethos.  However, as security services are increasingly for-profit enterprises, the future of market-driven security will evolve along a different line. 

In Systems of Survival, (see here on this blog) Jane Jacobs outlined two moral syndromes: the Guardian, and the Trader.  They are often different expressions of the same virtues, but, also, often contrary in motives or opposite in goals.  The future of private security lies with eliminating as many of the "power" modes as possible and replacing them with "market" modes.

It is true that Guardians should not trade favors.  That way lies corruption.  However, many of the elements of the warrior path can be replaced with the merchant's course – and to the benefit and profit of the security provider, as well as to their clients and to their clients' communities of customers, who in retail are known as the ultimate consumers.  

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security
Employee Theft
Locksporting
Redshirts

AVAILABLE ON SLIDESHARE:
Physical Security for Data Centers

Accounting for Civilization

The work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat demonstrates from empirical historical evidence that civilization began with accounting. The first writing began with records of promises and debts.

While not a circulating medium of indirect barter, the early artifacts of accounting nonetheless bear the essential elements of money, showing value and naming the guarantor. Moreover, in a long foreshadowing to the modern era, these earliest tokens functioned more like drafts and promissory notes. When the debt was paid, the recording instrument was discarded. Thus, archeologists found them in refuse pits and middens.

That was one reason that these intriguing evidences of commerce were overlooked. Archeologists brought with them an implicit mindset at once modern (of course), but also, more primitive than that of Jarmo c. 8000 BC: they thought that the media of commerce would be treated like gold treasure and silver coins.

These little clay objects were given scant attention by museums. When art history professor Denise Schmandt-Besserat queried and visited museums for their oldest ceramics, she was surprised to be shown these little bullets, pyramids, cones, and disks. Most were uncatalogued. After a few years of puzzling over them, the truth dawned on her: these were tokens. And they – not pictographs – were the true origin of writing.
Pictographs did, indeed, antedate cuneiform. However, the pictographs themselves show much epistemic development, representing abstractions such as “food” rather than only concretes such as “bread.” As many pictographs mimicked tokens, it was clear that the clay promises came first. The clay tokens show a long development of their own, from simple representations such as “sheep” and “wheat” to differentiations of kind and measure, as well as to manufactured goods such as beer and cloth.

She published her findings first in a large two-volume corpus, Before Writing (University of Texas Press, 1992). The core of that narrative and the essential illustrations were condensed into a popular paperback, How Writing Came About (University of Texas Press, 1996). Focusing even more narrowly on the power of these tokens to enable the creation of civilization, she produced a children’s book, The History of Counting (Morrow Jr., 1999).

Before these tokens, there were no large numbers such as 4, 5, 6, and 7. Today, we accept decimal tallying on our ten digits as “natural” but it surely was not. The first representations of “five” were "three passed one“ and "three one one.” Our modern languages still hint of that earlier time, as in French three is big (trois/tres) or in Hungarian big follows three (nagy/negy). Slavic languages still carry the old Indo-European singular-dual-plural grammar for 1-2-many. (Other languages have other divisions; none at root speaks distinctly of four, five, and six.)

Numeracy is not natural and was invented for commerce and from that came literacy.  What was counted was farm goods owed, i.e., debts – economic, financial, fiduciary, commercial, exchanges.

The barrier to understanding this is easy to show. The broad mainstream of intellectuals across all academic disciplines holds business in low regard. That is obvious by inspection. In the festschrift The Philosophy of Karl Popper (Open Court, 1974), Nobel laureate neurologist Sir John Carew Eccles outlined Popper’s theory of objective knowledge. We have sensora; and we have words for our perceptions. A third world also exists, the writings about our perceptions. This was before Schmandt-Besserat’s discoveries, of course, but resting on the earlier work of Sir Leonard Wooley, Eccles wrote:

“There is undoubtedly a feeling of bathos in the uses to which this marvellous discovery was put initially. Mostly it was used for business documents, contracts, inventories, deeds of sale! But also it was used for Royal inscriptions and at a later stage for recording religious texts.”

In this view only its use by the king (note the capital letter) and priests could elevate writing from the common clay of commerce.

But writing supersedes even this. In truth, as Denise Schmandt-Besserat shows most recently in When Writing Met Art (University of Texas Press, 2007), pre-literate art was illiterate. The ordered narratives which we accept as normal in art – Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, or Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks – had their origins in the nicely ordered spatial vocabulary of cuneiform inventories and Sumerian contracts.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Money is Speech

Art as Ordered Narrative

Debt: The Seed of Civilization

THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION: KARL POPPER AND HIS ENEMIES

The “Black Swan” refers to the fact that as far as Europeans knew, for thousands of years, hundreds of generations, all swans were white.  Then, after discovering Australia, they found black swans.  In the stock market, the "black swan" is the event no could have foreseen.  This is the problem of induction.  We can collect all the instances we want, but at some level, our knowledge must be admittedly contingent.  Objectivism asserts a positive solution to the problem of induction.

In the lecture series, “The Basic Principles of Objectivism” Nathaniel Branden said that if you disagree with someone on the relevant morality of some current political news topic, if you stay engaged, pretty soon the discussion gets down to philosophical principles at an ever more basic level until you must finally get to metaphysics.  For Ayn Rand, most disagreements centered on epistemology.  

In The Logical Leap, David Harriman provides one solution to the problem of induction:  a single example is enough if your generalization is based on reality.  (See my review on this blog.)

In the Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper makes a plea for tolerance based on an admission of ignorance.  Ultimate knowledge eludes us: all claims are contingent.  Therefore, it is wrong to force your views on another person because you cannot be sure that your claims are not to be falsified at some later date.  This clearly rests on Popper’s statements in The Logic of Scientific Discovery that inductive reasoning is insecure and that falsifiability is the test of truth.  Moreover, says Popper, deductive reasoning is not much help.  The claim that all ravens are black leads to the equivalent claim that all non-ravens are non-black.  Thus, everything you see that is not black validates the claim that all ravens are black; and this is clearly ridiculous.

The solution via Ayn Rand and via David Harriman is that a proper induction is based on the essential characteristics.  In the cases of ravens and swans what was lacking was the knowledge of genetics, of the biochemistry of inheritance.  Indeed, when black swans were discovered, they were not called vorks or gabongs.  They were called swans because whiteness was not essential to swanness after all.  Objective knowledge is not an accumulation of instances.  Objective knowledge integrates reason and experience, theory and data.  It is true that lacking any understanding of physics, we could only say that the sun would come up tomorrow again in the east, but a little bit moved over, only because it always had.  The claim was inductive  only.  After Newton, this was no longer merely an inductive claim, but an objective one.  And, to the point, the problem with the precession of the perihelion of Mercury that was solved by Einstein, did not invalidate the entire body of knowledge.  Inductive claims are contingent.  Objective truths are not.

Admirable as Popper’s passion for an open society remains, the weakness of his argument is revealed by the absolutism of his opponents.  They are not so laissez faire.  They are absolutely sure of their claims.  They unequivocally assert the right to dictate for others. 


I posted this observation at the OrgTheory blog in the Comments for Occupy Everything:

Popper placed our problems in Plato’s lap. These Occupy people are acting out a desire for a coup d’etat by the Philosopher Kings. They know what is best. The idle class is not really the bourgeoisie that shows up to the office every day to trade equities. Those are only workers of a different trade. The true leisure class are the philosophers and writers who proscribe our fuels, our foods, our trades and deals, our monetary media and margins. Those hawks ... always win over the doves because those conflict managers have an agenda while the merchants of peace beg for reasoned debate. So, the Occupiers will push and shove for their goals, while the advocates of reason fail to mount a coordinated defense. In fact, one is not possible.
Perhaps the best thing is just to ignore them. No headlines. No sound bites. No tweets. A thousand years ago, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw penned an essay titled, “What if they gave a millennium and nobody came?” It was about securing your own personal freedom here and now.

In the news now, the Occupiers of Wall Street demand the power to decide what is best for everyone else.  Admitting that you are not certain will not carry the day.  Is your mind so open that a loose array of slogans from a flash mob can occupy it?  If not, then why not?  If your individual sovereignty is your inviolable right, what is the social extension of that? 

Despite the fact that we survive and thrive through trade and commerce based on productivity, by the nature of self-interest, the bourgeoisie is difficult to arouse.  The guardians march to their battle hymns and anthems, but we have no tuneful lyrics about open exchange or scientific discovery.  Perhaps this is as it must be.  In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs delineated the guardian and the trader as mutually exclusive modes.  Perhaps the bottom line only needs to be laissez nous faire. 

ADDENDUM

For more on Black Swan Theory see

This blurb from NUMB3RS on YouTube
Wikipedia on the Black Swan Theory here
The orignal work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Google Documents
Taleb's website here.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Is Physics a Science?
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
LOVERS OFFLINE
Hypatia of Alexandria

Steve Jobs: One of a Kind

Steve Jobs asked, "If you knew that this was going to be the last day of your life, would you do what you are about to do?" 
(This is based on a post to OrgTheory.)

I just came from the monthly CapMac Macintosh user group meeting here in Austin. Perhaps not every Macintosh user is bound by religious ties to Apple and Jobs. In addition to the Stanford Commencement Address (here), we watched two tributes (one created by CapMac VP Michael Sidoric), and then half a dozen people came down to the altar to witness for the affect Steve Jobs had on their lives.

On the sociology and economics blog, OrgTheory, Prof. Kieran Healy of Duke University springboarded the passing of Jobs for a post on the nature of Charisma. I replied that charisma, like entrepreneurship, is going to be sought and argued by sociologists because, ultimately, it is the ineffable quality of an individual. Maybe you can learn charisma; but it cannot be taught at university. And neither can entrepreneurship.

Jobs was both charismatic and an entrepreneur. It may be that the two are causally linked. Which is the cause or effect may finally depend on finding some third factor that brings into existence the other two. We know that different leaders have different styles and yet are separately successful. Different as they were, Hiram Ulysses Grant and George Armstrong Custer both ranked at the bottom of their classes at West Point. Both excelled as leaders. On the other hand, Richard P. Feynman was obviously charismatic without being an entrepreneur. Neither has he generated a cult of disciples who mimic him. On the other hand Ludwig Wittgenstein did spawn students who copied his affectations, though, again, without consciously building an economic enterprise.

You can learn entrepreneurship or charisma or leadership; you cannot teach them. But we can teach organizational behavior and organization theory. Kieran Healy asked (rhetorically) if the CEOs of Exxon Mobil or Nestlé will be honored the same way: "Apple’s storefronts became impromptu shrines and memorials, something we can safely say will not happen at gas stations or supermarkets when the CEOs of Exxon Mobil or Nestlé pass on." Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and a few others of that generation stand out, as do a few from every generation.

An ice age ago, we were lucky to have one person like that every three or four generations. Now with 6 billion of us, we lesser mortals benefit more frequently from the actions of the blessed and the divine. Tell someone that the universe is not only stranger than we do imagine, but stranger than we can imagine, and they will nod in sage agreement with the deep realization that we are limited in our knowledge. Yet, somehow, we are expected to understand and replicate Steve Jobs. The Marxists thought that a workers' committee could replace Rockefeller and Ford. We think that university graduate schools can generate copies of Jobs or Gates or Soros or Buffett.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away". 

Shelley's "Ozymandias" is supposed to remind us that we are dim lights, solitary candles, easily extinguished. And yet, we do know Ramses the Great. It is an easy prediction that Steven Paul Jobs will be known to millions who never know of the pharaoh. Ultimately, all that can matter is that at the end of his life, he knew that he made a difference in his lifetime. It is all we can expect.

Whether Apple endures remains to be seen. Free market economists revel in the fact that the Fortune 500 churns. Yesterdays's giants are gone, perhaps not yet forgotten like Ozymandias. On the other hand, old continuing firms do exist. (Wikipedia here.) Many are hotels. Others are breweries. That Apple produced the iPod (iPhone, etc.) may prove to be more significant than IBM's role in computers as data processing machines. We must wait and see.

... that goddam Ayn Rand book ...

When Roseanne Barr spoke at the Occupy Wall Street rallies on September 19, she called for a new "people-ism" that combines capitalism with socialism, which, actually, is the definition of fascism.  Barr denounced capitalism based on "that goddam Ayn Rand book."  She did not say which one she meant. 

Atlas Shrugged is the easy answer.  The movie came out this year.  The book has been selling well ever since the Bush Bailouts.  The election of Barack Obama only fueled the engine, not so much because of Obama's own beliefs (though there is that), as his continuation of the domestic and foreign policies of the previous administration.  Objectivists are not conservatives.  To Ayn Rand, faith and force were mutually required aspects of mysticism and collectivism.  So, the strong news from Washington, regardless of the parties in power, could only echo passages in Atlas Shrugged.


But then I wondered, how about Introduction to the Objectivist Epistemology?  After all, Rand taught that any political system - and any change to one - must be based at least implicitly on a theory of knowledge. 

Moreover, in our post-modernist era, claims of objective knowledge are radically contrary to the intellectual mainstream.  Note that "objective" does not mean "absolute."  While absolutes do exist, human knowledge and human action are contextual.  Knowing right from wrong and acting rightly depends on what we commonly call "the scientific method."  Another label for that is rational-empiricism, which in classical academic philosophy is a synonym for objectivism (with a small o).  In short, theories are supported by facts; and facts are explained by theories.  In the famous words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You have a right to your own opinion.  You do not have a right to your own facts."  It is an easy prediction that most of the anti-Wall Street protestors would claim both epistemological relativism and moral absolutism. 

Over on Rebirth of Reason, artist and musician Joe Maurone offered The Virtue of Selfishness as perhaps the cogent reply.  The study of politics rests directly on the study of morality and ethics.  For Ayn Rand, selfishness had a specific meaning and  it is about the same as "enlightened self-interest."  Not every whim that pops into your head is in your best interest.  Morality does not begin with "I want" but with "It is."  In other words, morality rests on metaphysics.  But it is an easy bet that you would hard pressed to find adherants to an objective metaphysics  at these rallies.  For them, reality for you is not reality for me.

It is not likely that Roseanne Barr was denouncing The Romantic Manifesto, but she could have been.  Romantic fiction portrays heroic action by confident people.  It deals with conflicts of values, values that are stated explicitly.  Born in 1905, Alissa Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand) found her heroes in the works of Victor Hugo.  The college students drawn to her novels in the 1960s pointed to Casablanca, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and High Noon.  Today, posters on Objectivist message boards and blogs tout History Boys, The King's Speech and X-Men.  ... and debate the merits of John Aglialaro's Atlas Shrugged.

Certainly Roseanne Barr did not mean Philosophy: Who Need It?  She missed her shot.  The title essay was delivered to a graduating class at West Point.  In other essays in this book, Rand denounced duty and tied egalitarianism to inflation.  She also demonstrated that federal regulaton of communications (via the FCC) is nothing less than censorship. All of that might be too complicated and difficult for people who cheered Roseanne Barr.

Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal is probably the other title that best would compete against Atlas Shrugged as a target for the ire of the Anti-Wall Street gang.  The defense of robber barons and child labor is clear enough, but the capstone would have to be Alan Greenspan's essay, "The Assault on Integrity" in which he explitictly asserts stock brokers as paragons of virtue. 

"Securities worth hundreds of millions of dollars are traded every day over the telephone. The slightest doubt as to the trustworthiness of a broker's word or commitment would put him out of business overnight. Reputation, in an unregulated economy, is thus a major competitive tool." (CUI, page 113) 

  "Government regulations do not eliminate potentially dishonest individuals, but merely make their activities harder to detect or easier to hush up. Furthermore, the possibility of individual dishonesty applies to government employees fully as much as to any other group of men. " (CUI, page 115)

After defining capitalism as the only moral political system, Rand then identifies collectivism (not the profit motive) as the cause of war.  The third essay "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business" hallmarks the book.

If a small group of men were always regarded as guilty, in any clash with any other group, regardless of the issues or circumstances involved, would you call it persecution? If this group were always made to pay for the sins, errors, or failures of any other group, would you call that persecution? If this group had to live under a silent reign of terror, under special laws, from which all other people were immune, laws which the accused could not grasp or define in advance and which the accuser could interpret in any way he pleased—would you call that persecution? If this group were penalized, not for its faults, but for its virtues, not for its incompetence, but for its ability, not for its failures, but for its achievements, and the greater the achievement, the greater the penalty—would you call that persecution? ...   That group is the American businessmen . . . (CUI, page 38)

BTW:  Joe Maurone has a couple of efforts going.  Objectivish is one blog, and Space Player Music  is another presentation.  The picture he posted on RoR of The Virtue of Selfishness was from videos he shot of Occupy Philadelphia, to be found on Objectivish.

Objectivism and the Gold Standard

Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan both assumed that the government would be the only source of money.  Even in Atlas Shrugged when John Galt hands Dagny Taggart his own five dollar gold coin it bears the semata of the United States of America.  “On whose authority?” she asks.  “It says right there,” Galt replies.  The absence of private money in Ayn Rand’s capitalist utopia is curious. 

US 1/10 Gold Eagle,
modern US $5,
older US $5

Nothing requires that money be issued by a government, though there is utility in that for that institution.  While gold proved most useful in the industrial age, and may well continue through the information age, historically, gold only served a special function relative to silver.  Historically, silver was the universal metallic money.  Gold, like copper, was a convenience. 

Moreover, a truly agoric coinage would announce only its weight and fineness and not be denominated in money of account.  If by law the “dollar” is 412 ½ grains of silver, then the definition of the dollar can change by law.  Historically, this is well-known.  Debasements are the rule as government expenditures outrun their incomes.  The coinage suffers as their denominations increase. 

On the other hand, it is important to note certain seeming contradictions to Gresham’s Law in the 19^th century United States.  Silver half dimes circulated alongside nickel 5-cent coins.  Silver and nickel 3-cent coins also passed equivalently.  When the government changed the weight and fineness of the coins in 1834, it declared that all issues of whatever standard were alike legal tender and it made little difference.

In fact, the first gold coins of the United States did not state their money of account value in dollars until 1807 ($5 half eagle), 1808 ($2½ quarter eagle) and then 1838 ($10 eagle).  They were gold coins, nothing more or less.  Likewise, the British sovereign did not and still does not have a mark of value. 

Size of a half dollar and
potentially more useful.

As a large economic entity – even when limited by a constitution – the federal government of the United States easily should benefit from issuing its own currency, as would General Motors, Microsoft, or you.  There is nothing wrong with government money, but it is not necessarily the only money.  While a gold-backed federal currency would be inherently strong the government has the opportunity to consider and issue a variety of moneys – and historically, it has done so.  Gold and silver, of course, both came from the Mint as did minor and token coins in base metal.  However, through the 19^th century and up to the Great Depression, paper promises were backed in gold, and in silver, and in only the credit of the United States.  Some of those unbacked promises paid interest; others did not.  No objective test can show that one kind is “moral” but another not, as long as people have a right to choose. 

But the government does not need to issue its own money.  In 1800 and 1802 republicans in the Senate attempted to shut down the Mint as a drain on the Treasury.  Trade and commerce were carried by foreign coins, largely Spanish dollars and their factions.  Meanwhile, even into the 1830s, merchants along the East Coast kept their books in pounds-shillings-pence, not dollars and cents.  Gold and silver coins from Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal were legal tender until 1857. 

Problems in money and banking generate much discussion among libertarians and objectivists.  Working the Libertarian Party tent at the Ann Arbor Street Fair in 2009, I heard one of my comrades denounce the Federal Reserve and declare that only the government has the right to create money.  Rather than engage in all of that, I offer these links. 

• Should Objectivists Support the Gold Standard?
• Gold Standard (Ayn Rand Lexicon)
• Money (Ayn Rand Lexicon)

Also here on Necessary Facts:

• Money as a Crusoe Concept
• Mere Gold is Not Enough: Hayek's "Denationalisation"
• Money as Speech and Peacemaking
• Numismatics Informs Economics
• Numismatics: the standard of proof in economics
• Murray Rothbard: Fraud or Faker?
• Debt: the Seed of Civilization

Aging in America: Alternatives to Government Policies

The first Boston Marathon measured 24.5 miles. “On April 19, 1897, John J. McDermott of New York, emerged from a 15-member starting field and captured the first B.A.A. Marathon in 2:55:10.” In 2006, that mark would place him 5th among the women age 40-49 (Gina M. McGee, 2:55:03). However, the modern race is longer. Therefore, today, McDermott would beat all of the women 50-59, but none of the women 40-49. His time calculated for the longer course would be the same as John Smallwood, in the Men’s Age 60-69 who clocked 3:10:44. 
(This post is based on a term paper for an undergraduate class in Social Problems, Winter 2008.)

May 1970

Standard textbooks for classes in sociology present aging in generally the same ways that they present racism, war, and poverty. However, by studying discrimination, inequality, stratification, poverty, war, and other problems, we are supposed to be prepared to deal with them, perhaps to solve them forever.  

And so the old joke goes Q:  How many sociologists does it take to change a light bulb? A:  The light bulb does not need changing.  It is society that needs to be changed.   
Sociologists portray people above some arbitrary age as a disabled minority, needful of government programs.  Solutions for individuals are not in the toolset of sociologists. After, all it is society that needs to be changed.  The objective truth is that aging is not inevitable. 

“The Need for Reforms” is a section subhead in the chapter on “Aging in a Youth Oriented Society” in Hardert et al. Confronting Social Problems (West Publishing, 1984). The book says: “Government officials have been aware of the special needs of our older population for some time.  … Federal programs have proliferated…” and it lists some of the many, citing a total of 48 major federal programs (pp 118-119):

• The Administration on Aging, Department of Health and Human Services
• Comprehensive Older Americans Act of 1965
• Comprehensive Older American Act Amendments of 1978
• Social Security Administration
• Medicaid and Medicare
• Supplemental Security Income
• Healthcare Financing Administration

The authors recommend volunteering for work as one solution to social isolation. “Activity theory encourages volunteerism among the elderly replacing lost work roles [paid] with unpaid involvement.” (page 120)  Certainly, under normal conditions volunteering is the noblesse oblige of the wealthy. But unpaid labor is the very definition of slavery.

Rochelle Jones (The Other Generation: The New Power of Older People) equates the government with the economy:  “… the economic ‘pie’ is limited.  To say yes to expand or improve programs for older Americans is to say no to the needs of other sectors of the economy.”  (page 121)  It is true that government funding is limited, but the fact ist that under socialism, they divide the pie fairly, but under capitalism we bake more pies. (Actually, we bake a lot of alternatives and you are free to choose.) 

 John Macionis is perhaps the leading author of college textbooks for sociology in the USA.  (Globally, it is Sir Anthony Giddens.)  Discussing “Aging and Inequality” in Social Problems  (Pearson Prentice-Hall. 2002) Macionis says (page 120) that we have gone from the gerontocracy of preindustrial societies to “the elderly as a social problem” in industrial societies.  According to Macionis, capitalism devalues those who cannot contribute labor so the old are a cost burden.  A socialist society would care for the elderly as it cares for all of its citizens.  (pp138-139).  This ignores both Lenin and Saint Paul who alike decreed that he who does not work shall not eat.  In The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski tells of the Bakhtiari of southwest Iran who abandon their old when they move their herds.  In the utopian (or dystopian) novels Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and This Perfect Day by Ira Levin, people end their lives at age sixty by order. 


May 2008



In Stanley D. Eitzen and Maxine Baca Zinn Social Problems (4th ed, Allyn and Bacon, 1989), the authors offer this (page 297): “The thesis of this chapter is that old eople constitute a minority group in our youth-worshipping society, with a high visible trait – an aged body – that makes them different from the majority.  They are relatively powerless.  Their behavior and traits are stereotyped and regularly depreciated and devalued by the dominant group.  And, most important, because of their age, the elderly are singled out for differential and unfair treatment.” That was over 20 years ago, and was defined by the attitudes of the ascendant Baby Boomers who 20 years before that did not trust anyone over 30.  This is an example of conflict between groups - a sociological fact.  It does not prove that even then, old people were the underclass.  Today, we surely are not.  Old people vote and young people do not, thus who is the dominant group is arguable.  Moreover where oldest and youngest workers compete directly (retail and fastfood), the seniors have the advantage, being desired for reliability and judgment.

Kathryn A. Dietrich's 2007 work, Instructor’s Resource Manual with Test Bank for Mooney, Knox and Schacht’s Understanding Social Problems (Fifth Edition) continues the claim that seniors are an underclass..  “In 2003, median income for individuals age 65 and above was $14,000 with 29.3% reported incomes of $10,000 or less.”  (page 527) When individuals live together, it is their combined incomes that counts.  In America, about 70% of all people own their own homes, with ownership highest among the older groups.   Moreover, older homeowners typically pay no mortgage.  They can borrow against the equity of their homes with negative mortgages.  Their incomes from investments, annuities and funds may or may not be reportable and other incomes may not be reported.  Non-working children are the single biggest drain on family income; and most seniors have not accepted that commitment. 

            The plight of those who are trapped in harsh circumstances must not be overlooked, but neither should it be generalized beyond its bounds.  Aging necessitates increased medical care.  Even if there is nothing wrong – or more likely, nothing symptomatic – regular medical checkups are critical to health maintenance.  Office visits cost money.  So do prescriptions and other regimens.  That said, the fact is that the present generation of elders is far better off than any previous generation.  Those following the Baby Boomers have every reason to expect even better outcomes. 

            Medical care is more than fixing things that are wrong.  “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” says the old adage.  “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” reminds us about the importance of diet in general and vitamin C in particular.  Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) was the key to Linus Pauling’s recommendations for longevity.   Pauling himself took three grams of it every day.  He live to be 93.  When he was born in 1901, his life expectancy was 49.6 years.
  

The statistical probability of living longer is increasing.  The Social Security Administration actuarial tables give you zero probability of another year after 80, but continue the tables to 110 years of age to account for the increasing number of people who outlive their expectancy.  

Pauling’s recommendation for ascorbic acid remains controversial and not generally recognized by the medical community.  However, the theory is sound.  Like other vitamins, ascorbic is an anti-oxidant.  As such it protects against and repairs damage caused by free radicals.  The free radical theory of aging developed by Denham Harman.   Free radicals are partial compounds within the chemistry of the body.  Some are necessary.  Others float about as a kind of garbage, attaching themselves where they are neither needed nor wanted.  Free radicals damage fats, proteins, and nucleic acids.  Peroxidized fats cause arterial plaque.  Free radicals attack DNA and RNA causing cancer.  When lysosomal membranes are broken down by free radicals, the released enzymes (acid hydrolases) cause rheumatoid arthritis.   Just about all vitamins have anti-oxidant qualities, though C, A and the family of E seem to be the strongest actors.  In addition, chemicals BHT and BHA  commonly found in foods in America also protect against free radicals.  Some theorize that the addition of these preservatives to our processed foods has been responsible for the lower rates of stomach cancers among Americans and compared to other industrialized populations.



            Free radical theory is just one of several approaches to life extension.  Aging is not one thing, but a combination of processes and experiences. 

• Aubrey de Grey developed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence and explained his theories in several books.  The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging earned him a special doctorate from Cambridge. 
• John Sperling (founder of the University of Phoenix) has a project called “Genetic Savings and Clone” which failed to reproduce a dog, but which did create one CopyCat. 
• Ray Kurzweil inventor of optical character scanning, digitized audio and other technologies wrote Fantastic Voyage: Life Long Enough to Live Forever  and four other books on the same theme.  Kurzweil believes that future technology derived from the frontiers of today’s computers will enable us to store the essential aspects of personality in a useful, interactive format.  
• Cryonics is not “freezing”  but lowering body temperature may allow long-term storage and recovery of a human body.  The goal might be to hold you until a cure can be found for some serious problem.  Some people might prefer a slow trip into the far future. 

            Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw collected much of this information about free radicals and other theories for their books Life Extension a Practical Scientific Approach and The Life Extension Companion. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Aging

Social Stratification in the Academy

The Roots of Poverty

The Market is Always Right -- About the Market