CIAO DATE: 04/2012
Volume: 7, Issue: 1
Spring 2012
Craig Biddle
On January 3, 2012, John David Lewis, my good friend and contributing editor of this journal, died after a relentless battle with cancer. The premature death of any good man is tragic, but John was not just a good man; he was the kind of man good men look up to. John was an ideal man, and his early death comes as close as anything can to being a metaphysical flaw in the universe.
Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice
Craig Biddle
Surveys the metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics of these two creeds, showing, at each level, that only one of them corresponds to observable reality.
Objectivism vs. Kantianism in The Fountainhead
Andrew Bernstein
Examines these opposing philosophies in the story, characters, and theme of Ayn Rand’s great novel.
Interview with Boaz Arad on the Israeli Freedom Movement
Craig Biddle
Boaz Arad, a founder of and spokesman for the Israeli Freedom Movement, discusses the inception, activities, allies, and successes of the Israeli equivalent of the Tea Party movement.
Jason Stotts
Drs. Ellen Kenner and Ed Locke discuss their new book The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion and Reason, covering ground from how altruism destroys relationships, to why people settle for less-than-ideal partners, to how to ask your lover to experiment sexually.
Eames: The Architect and the Painter, directed by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey
Earl Parson
Eames: The Architect and the Painter, of the PBS American Masters series, presents a portrait of the husband and wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames. Charles, educated as an architect, and Ray, trained as a painter, met in 1940 at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Although Charles was already married at the time, he fell madly in love with Ray, ended his marriage, and proposed to her. After marrying, they left the Midwest and moved to Los Angeles with the goal of bringing to fruition Charles’s vision for the molded plywood chair, which had already won a major award but needed further development. There they founded the Eames Office, which was by all accounts informal, playful, and circus-like, yet simultaneously focused and intense. “[L]ife was fun was work was fun was life” as former Eames Office designer Deborah Sussman describes it in the film.
Burgess Laughlin
About the Muslim Middle East, Robert R. Reilly, author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind, says, “I am trying to understand the situation as it is and the reasons for it. I am simply offering the conclusions to which I have come after searching for years to make sense of what I have seen, experienced, and read” (p. 9).
The 7 Principles of Zionism: A Values-Based Approach to Israel Advocacy by Dan Illouz
Gideon Reich
Given that Israel’s legitimacy is regularly questioned in the media, a short book providing well-reasoned moral arguments defending Israel would be a useful addition to the library of any serious advocate of the state. Unfortunately, in The 7 Principles of Zionism: A Values-Based Approach to Israel Advocacy, Dan Illouz focuses primarily on the collectivist and nonessential historical arguments for Israel as the realization of “Jewish statehood” (p. 30) and spends few pages presenting genuine, objective moral arguments for its legitimacy.
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism by Ann Coulter
Joshua Lipana
In Treason, Ann Coulter chronicles the anti-American actions of the leftist “liberals” in the United States from the Cold War to the beginning of the “War on Terrorism.” However, the book concentrates primarily on the Cold War, and fortunately so, as this is where Coulter shines.
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 by Frank Dikötter
Daniel Wahl
The term “command economy” was coined by the Nazis, but it was later used to describe the economies of the Soviet Union and sundry other “people’s states.” On paper, it sounded like this:
Instead of allowing dispersed buyers and sellers to determine their own economic activities according to the laws of supply and demand, a higher authority would issue commands determining the overall direction of the economy following a master plan. The command principle entailed that all economic decisions were centralized for the greater good, as the state determined what should be produced, how much should be produced, who produced what and where, how resources should be allocated and what prices should be charged for materials, goods and services. (p. 127)
Richard Salsman
Despite its many errors, contemporary academic economics has improved considerably in recent decades, especially after the Keynesian detour of interventionism from the 1930s to the 1970s. There is a lagged influence between academic economics and public policy, but increasingly since the 1970s academic economists have recognized that free markets work, that “market failure” reflects poorly defined and ill-protected property rights, and that boom-bust cycles and sapped prosperity are consequences of bad public policies.
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney
Daniel Wahl
Roy F. Baumeister started his career in psychology skeptical that such a thing as willpower even exists. In this, he says, he did not differ from many other psychologists and philosophers.
But then he observed willpower in the laboratory: how it gives people the strength to persevere, how they lose self-control as their willpower is depleted, how this mental energy is fueled by the glucose in one’s bloodstream. He . . . discovered that willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can also be strengthened over the long term through exercise. (pp. 1–2)
Daniel Wahl
Anyone eager to increase his mental productivity will do well to read David Rock’s Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long.
Each chapter has many tips that you can put to use right away to get more and better work done. And the setup is not just clear and entertaining but also memorable.
Daniel Wahl
One day, in 1893, while taking a walk, nineteen-year-old Louise Barant met a slightly older man named Joseph Vacher (pronounced Vashay). After he asked about the weather, they went to a café, where, much to Louise’s surprise, Vacher proposed marriage. He added that if she ever betrayed him, he’d kill her.
Daniel Wahl
Professor Max Pettenkofer held up a flask containing deadly cholera bacteria. The rapt attention of the students gathered all around him was unsurprising, for the professor had raised the flask in a toast, about to drink it.
Pettenkofer did not believe that he would die. Contrary to the opinions of many scientists, he thought that the billion or so bacteria inside the flask would cause cholera only under certain conditions, conditions that were not present in his experiment. The experiment, he thought, would prove that he was right and that the theories held by others were wrong, settling the issue resolutely.
Obit: Inspiring Stories of Ordinary People Who Led Extraordinary Lives by Jim Sheeler
Joseph Kellard
It’s a pleasure to read Jim Sheeler writing about the dead.
Consider how Sheeler, an obituary writer for the Denver Post and Boulder Planet newspapers during the 1990s, wrote “After 624 Deaths, One More,” his obit for Carolyn Jaffe. He shines a light on the techniques Jaffe used in her work as a hospice nurse who helped hundreds of patients come to terms with their mortality, and turns up the brightness on the enrichment she derived from her career by using this quote from a book she coauthored:
I know I’ve made the time better. I’ve changed the dying from something that’s feared, something that’s the enemy, to a natural part of life—maybe even a friend. The families tell me this, and I know it without their saying a word. This is powerful; it is beautiful. (p. 208)
Craig Biddle
Welcome to the Spring 2012 issue of The Objective Standard, which begins our seventh year of publication. Let me begin by thanking you, our readers, for your continued business and support, for enabling us to produce this vital journal, and for helping spread the word about its existence and articles. With your help, we have expanded dramatically in our first six years—and our seventh is off to a remarkable start: Our website traffic is up 160 percent from February 2011 to February 2012, and up 40 percent from January 2012 to February 2012. This explosive growth is due in large part to our proliferation of posts on TOS Blog—which has become the source for daily commentary from an Objectivist perspective. (Special thanks go to Joshua Lipana, Ari Armstrong, and Daniel Wahl for helping to make it so.)