Odd Business

There have been some odd goings on among so-called official objectivists for a long time, going back to some of the condemnations and repudiations of former friends and colleagues by Ayn Rand herself during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Leaving the business with the Brandens aside, there were a number of cases where she turned on people harshly and wrote them out of the objectivist movement for offending her in some way. One can of course note that she was scarcely the first creative person to behave in an imperious way toward members of her entourage or the first artist to display what used to be called an artistic temperament. Still it all seemed disproportionate, overly bitter, inconsistent with her philosophy, and surprisingly frequent - happening often enough to become something of an ongoing joke among people who paid attention to what was happening.

After Any Rand’s death, Leonard Peikoff as her heir became the custodian of her legacy. Even early on there was much in his behavior to call to mind Nietzsche’s comment that the first generation of adherents proves nothing against a philosophy. In particular one can recall his deciding to ride David Kelley- a man who, judged by his writings, is as reasonable and thoughtful a person as you could expect to find just about anywhere – out of town on a rail for violating his parole by consorting with known libertarians.

Peikoff has claimed that objectivism is a fully integrated, closed and consistent system defined by Rand’s writings and not open to corrections of or deviations from the conclusions of those writings. (I don’t know if this extends so far as to saying that if, for example, a person likes Antigone better than Cyrano de Bergerac, he’s off the reservation as far as objectivism goes, but it sounds like it. It also sounds more like a hierophant protecting holy writ than like actual philosophy.) Peikoff wrote that the realm of possible honest error in philosophy is small, and that people, the very young and slow witted excepted, who fail to agree with objectivism mainly do so through bad motives. Aside for the fact that this claim is obviously false , it has a couple of implications that probably would bother most objectivists. It is hard to claim simultaneously that Ayn Rand was a great creative philosophical genius and also that her conclusions are so obvious that only kids, dummies, and bad people would not reach them. Second the notion leads to the conclusion that Aristotle, John Locke, Plato, Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Albert Einstein, and all the other serious people who thought about some of the same questions without reaching the conclusions of objectivism were bad guys, a claim that might be a bit embarrassing to defend. Peikoff also is mainly responsible for the efforts to maintain the fiction that Rand did not undergo a process of development in which her ideas and viewpoints evolved and changed and the accompanying assertion that her thoughts, attitudes, and pronouncements were fully consistent over time. This has included publishing editions of her letters and journals so bowdlerized that some people who have seen the originals deem the published books to be misleading and almost useless for scholars.

All of this stuff came back into the news recently with the controversy over a book a man named David Harriman wrote about induction in physics. In the book the author proposes and works from a theory of induction that he credits to Peikoff. (Peikoff wrote the introduction to the book, and Harriman gives him credit for developing the philosophical ideas behind it and reviewing the manuscript line by line.) The book cites examples and illustrations from the history of science. A historian of science named John McCaskey questioned the accuracy of some of the illustrations – things such as whether Galileo had a firm notion of the idea of friction or whether Newton explicitly understood acceleration as a vector quantity. He also credited the author with good work and good intentions and praised the book as generally a step in the right direction. Well, this all rubbed Peikoff the wrong way, and he launched ballistic big time. McCaskey was on the board of the Ayn Rand Institute, the 501(c3) that Peikoff had created to represent and promulgate objectivism. Peikoff issued an ultimatum to the Institute that either McCaskey goes or he goes. McCaskey resigned from the board but did not retract his comments which he continued to claim were valid. Of course, for the purpose of considering this fiasco, it doesn’t matter a bit if he was right or wrong about what Galileo knew about friction. It matters that Peikoff would allow no criticism, no matter how mild or well intended, and that, instead of laughing him out of the room, the foundation caved in to his demands. The whole incident reeks just a little too much for comfort of theologians squashing heresy or Marxists rooting out deviationism. It provides a really sad insight into the thinking of Peikoff and those around him. It suggests that productive work from objectivist thinkers will more likely be coming from members of the open school of thought than from those bound by orthodoxy and its enforcers. It gives people good reason to remember that Nietzsche was right about that first generation of adherents. Lastly, it gives those on the outside of the controversies a spectacle worthy of a belly laugh, a rueful one maybe, but still a belly laugh.