Monthly Archives: November 2011

There have been many attempts to compare Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party. Until recently, the better view seemed to be that both movements recognize that there is something terribly wrong with the world today, but that each has different policy prescriptions for improving the situation. But then last week something changed. Both movements — Occupy as part of “Occupy Black Friday,” and a prominent Tea Party group, Grassfire Nation, as part of an attempt to cash in on “Small Business Saturday” — urged their followers to do the same thing: to shun the “Big Box” stores in favor of small businesses. Of course Grassfire Nation’s call to action came with neither the anti-business window-dressing, nor the calls to “occupy or boycott” successful retail outlets, that Occupy was urging. Nonetheless, I was surprised to see a Tea Party group buy into the “Small Business Saturday” idea because it is both anti-small business and anti-American.

How could “Small Business Saturday” be anti-small business? Well, consider what is actually in the interest of small business — or any business. For a business to be successful, it needs to be able to plan long-range. It needs to be able to anticipate demand and allocate its resources accordingly. If a business is being patronized sporadically by people who are buying from them out of guilt, altruism, or misplaced patriotic feeling, rather than rational self-interest, then the business cannot determine the true demand for its product or service, the demand that will remain when the feeling-based fad-of-the-moment passes.

Moreover, any rational business owner has as his goal the providing of value to his customers. He needs to be confident that he is actually earning the money his customers spend on his products or services — that they would not prefer to be spending their money elsewhere. Otherwise, how can he feel the confidence in himself, his company, and his product, that is necessary for him to keep his business operating, developing and growing?

It is true that small business today is akin to an endangered species, and that we are in danger of losing the values that only it can offer — including, in many cases, specialized knowledge and personalized service. But the answer is not to ask people to, e.g., spend more money on a product than they would have otherwise, simply because they were told they had a duty to patronize a small business. Such a policy is antithetical to the idea of human beings born with an inalienable right to pursue their own happiness — the uniquely American ideal. This is particularly true today when, thanks to our government moving further and further away from that ideal, it may be that the only big businesses can earn enough profit to hire new workers or reinvest. Only big businesses enjoy the economies of scale often necessary to thrive in spite of the huge regulatory and tax burdens they are forced to bear.

If you really want to help small business, buy exactly what you want or need, where you want to and can best afford to buy it. And then spend the rest of your money donating to those organizations or candidates who are most likely to help lift our government’s huge regulatory and tax burden — from all businesses. Only when our economy recovers can there exist a substantial, stable customer base that can afford, based on their tastes and preferences, regularly to patronize both small and big businesses. And abolishing as much of the tax and regulatory burden as possible, as soon as possible, is essential to the process of recovery.

(For more, see “‘Buy American’ is Un-American,” by Dr. Harry Binswanger of ARI.)

I am convinced, based on the evidence I’ve seen, that there is nothing that rises to the level of an ideology that is held by those self-labeled Muslims who do not wish to destroy us and our way of life.

This weekend I attended David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in Florida. One of the panel discussions was entitled “Islam vs. Islamism,” the purpose of which was to discuss the ongoing debate between Andrew McCarthy and Robert Spencer regarding the terminology we should use to refer to those who, today, pose a threat to us and our way of life, along with the ideology that motivates them.

Over the years we have seen the enemy’s ideology referred to using a variety of terms: “Islamism,” “Radical Islam,” “Militant Islam,” “Political Islam,” “Islamic Totalitarianism,” and “Islamic Supremacism,” among others. The primary motivation for using such terms, instead of just saying “Islam,” is to acknowledge the fact that only a minority of those who call themselves Muslims wish to kill us or destroy our way of life.

I’ve discussed the issue off and on, over the last few years, with Bosch Fawstin, who wrote this essay about it. After hearing the panel presentations by Robert Spencer, Andrew McCarthy, Bosch Fawstin, and Baroness Caroline Cox this weekend, followed by a couple hours of discussion with Bosch Fawstin and Robert Spencer, I’d like to explain the issue as I currently see it and invite your input.

The goal is to use only terms that will help us to think about the issues ourselves, and to communicate the truth to others. The focus should be on the facts of reality — what actually needs to be identified and conceptualized — and, as a secondary consideration, whatever is required for clarity in communication. In choosing terms, we must not sacrifice honesty or accuracy. The context here is that of war, where we need to properly identify the enemy so that we will take those actions necessary to eliminate the threat.

With respect to the terminology that is motivating our enemies, I agree with Bosch Fawstin and others who think it is best to just say “Islam.” The reason for this, as Fawstin has argued for years, is that whenever you use another term, like those listed above, you are implying something about Islam itself that is not true: you are implying that Islam is either not supremacist, or not militant, or not totalitarian, etc. From Fawstin’s essay:

Imagine, if during past wars, we used terms such as “Radical Nazism”, “Extremist Shinto” and “Militant Communism”. Those who use terms other than “Islam” create the impression that it’s some variant of Islam that’s behind the enemy that we’re facing.

The only plausible counter-arguments I’ve heard to using “Islam” as the term have to do either with (1) the necessity of communicating with others who don’t share your context of knowledge; or (2) as Andrew McCarthy and others have argued, that such terms would give would-be-moderate or non-Muslim Muslims some “rhetorical space,” and that this is something that we either should give them, or even that we somehow owe them.

As for (1), a term like “rational self-interest” is an example of a term used by Objectivists to communicate to those who do not share our understanding of “self-interest”. Same with “individual rights.” Objectivists do not believe in a self-interest that isn’t rational, or rights possessed by groups or parts of individuals, and yet we use these terms to communicate with others who are under the (we think mistaken) impression that these things do exist. Because I think the terms other than “Islam” have not served us well in the ten years since 9/11 (and perhaps before that), I am starting to question even the use of these Objectivist terms, so I’d love to hear any input on that issue in general as well.

The reasons I’ve heard for giving would-be-moderate or non-Muslim Muslims some “rhetorical space,” are either that we want to do this to encourage moderation, which might, e.g., encourage them to help us in fighting the enemy, or because of an altruistic motive: we want them to have a nice religious life, to not think their religion is bad, etc. When I hear these arguments, I tend to wonder how much help we will actually get from these individuals anyway, and I certainly don’t think that we owe them this as a duty. We may choose to do this, as a matter of charity, but, particularly as an atheist, I worry that there will almost always be self-sacrifice involved. I also agree with a point made by Robert Spencer at the panel this weekend: of what value is “rhetorical space” if it is based on a lie?

The second issue is what term(s) you use to refer to Muslims, in order to distinguish those Muslims that wish to kill you and destroy your way of life from those Muslims who have no such propensity or desire. While there is not, in reality, a distinction between Islam and the ideology that motivates our enemies (see Robert Spencer’s work), it is true that only a small minority of Muslims are actively trying to kill us or destroy our culture. The majority do not seem to be rejecting this minority, unfortunately, but I think we still need to have terms to distinguish these groups of individuals.

The problem, then, is this: What term can we use to distinguish these two groups from each other, without whitewashing the nature of the ideology, Islam?

As for the terms I’ve heard, I like “Islamist” the best, simply because it adds no content to Islam. “Islamist” would refer to those self-described Muslims who are actively working to achieve the dominance of Islam and thereby destroy us and our way of life. But Robert Spencer thinks the majority in our culture already understand this term to imply that there are two different Islams and only one wants to destroy us. Spencer has sometimes used the word, “Islamic Supremacist,” which can be interpreted to mean the same thing, and other possible candidates are “Organized Islam,” which Fawstin prefers, and also “Fundamentalist Muslims,” which I believe I’ve heard from the Sultan Knish.

One might argue that any old term will do, because really the only concern in choosing a term to distinguish the people from one another, as opposed to the ideology, is that we might be worried that the use of such a term would mean to imply there is a separate ideology corresponding to each of the groups of people. But I am not: I am convinced, based on the evidence I’ve seen, that there is nothing that rises to the level of an ideology that is held by those self-labeled Muslims who do not wish to destroy us and our way of life. For more on that, I refer you to the writings of Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch. The only problem, then, is that most people (not even most Muslims, per Spencer) have not read the Koran, much less the writings of Spencer and other experts. For the sake of communicating with those who do not have this context of knowledge, I would want to use a term that conveys that there is a distinction, but that does not imply that there really are two essentially different, identifiable types of “Islam.”

My favorite, then, would be “Islamist,” because it draws a distinction without conveying additional content. Runners up for me would be “Organized Islam” (which refers to people) and “Fundamentalist Muslims.” Finally, while I owe much to Robert Spencer in terms of my knowledge of Islam, I myself would want to avoid using the term “Islamic Supremacist,” as use of the term might imply that there is something called “Islamic Supremacism” and that, therefore, Islam as such is non-supremacist. (To my knowledge, Spencer has not used the term “Islamic Supremacism.”)

Thoughts?

Last week I published a review of Steve Jobs, the biography by Walter Isaacson.

One connection I made while thinking about the biography was something that would be more of interest to those who have studied a bit of philosophy — dare I call such people “philosophy geeks”?

It is that Steve Jobs, who was known for conducting business meetings while taking walks, might well be called a “peripatetic” businessman. “Peripatetic” refers to Aristotle’s school of philosophy, due to Aristotle’s habit of lecturing “in the Peripatos, a covered walk or loggia” at his school, the Lyceum. (Randall, Aristotle, p. 19)

That Steve Jobs liked to conduct important business meetings while walking is, taken alone, only a superficial similarity to the Greek philosopher to whom we all owe so much, but consider:

Legend has it that Aristotle chose to lecture while walking in the covered walkways, or colonnades, of the Lyceum. This Wikipedia article reports that Aristotle may have picked up this habit or technique from an earlier thinker, Hermippus of Smyrna. From what I’ve learned about Aristotle, he did not seem to be the type of person who would just unthinkingly pick up a habit of conducting lectures while walking, so I imagine it was done for a reason.

Fast-forward about 2300 years, to the time when Jobs, as Pixar’s CEO, was giving the chance to design the company’s headquarters in Emeryville, CA. Isaacson reports that Jobs purposefully designed Pixar’s headquarters in order to encourage his employees to have random, face-to-face encounters in a large, central atrium:

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all to well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

So the entire facility was designed to make people gravitate towards the central atrium. Jobs even tried to have “only two huge bathrooms in the building, one for each gender, connected to the atrium.” Jobs eventually compromised and allowed more bathrooms to be built, in response to complaints from employees, including one pregnant woman who “said she shouldn’t be forced to walk ten minutes just to go to the bathroom.” Jobs allowed there to be four sets of bathrooms, one set on each side of the atrium, on each of the two floors.

The new headquarters performed as Jobs had intended. “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” recalled John Lasseter, cofounder and creative force at Pixar. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”

Another parallel I recognized was in the two peripatetics’ methodologies. I recall from my study of Aristotle that the published works we have today are essentially lecture notes. And the way he proceeds in them is typically, per Randall, by starting with the general, the object of the investigation. In ethics, for example, the object of investigation is the first principles “of human conduct, the end at which man aims, acting well….” Skipping to the fourth and fifth steps (because here is where I next see the analogy to Jobs’ method), Aristotle would “find the relevant facts” and then “explain the subject matter, to exhibit the intelligible structure of facts.” (Randall, Aristotle, pp. 54-55).

In the Jobs biography, Isaacson tells the story of negotiations between Paul Otellini, president and later CEO of Intel, and Jobs, during “long walks, sometimes on the trails up to the radio telescope known as the Dish above the Stanford campus.” The description of Jobs’ methodology during these walks reminded me of Aristotle’s: “Jobs would start the walk by telling a story and explaining how he saw the history of computers evolving. By the end he would be haggling over price.” True, Aristotle probably didn’t end lectures by haggling over price! But he would have if he were a businessman, because in business price is one of the crucial facts that must be dealt with, which must be made part of “the intelligible structure of facts.” (Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Ch. 34) The CEO of Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, said that Jobs was able to be both “a strategic thinker and a master of the tiniest details. ‘Steve can go readily from the overarching principals [sic] into the details,’ he said.” (Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Ch. 38)

And then of course there’s the breadth of the two men’s reach in terms of lifetime productivity. Says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy about Aristotle:

His extant writings span a wide range of disciplines, from logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, through ethics, political theory, aesthetics and rhetoric, and into such primarily non-philosophical fields as empirical biology, where he excelled at detailed plant and animal observation and taxonomy. In all these areas, Aristotle’s theories have provided illumination, met with resistance, sparked debate, and generally stimulated the sustained interest of an abiding readership.

And that’s only thirty-one surviving treatises out of an estimated total of perhaps two hundred that Aristotle produced.

In a similar life-span, Jobs is said to have “revolutionized [at least] six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.” Isaacson argues that retail stores might be added to that list, and anyone who has visited an Apple store might agree with him.

Jobs, according to Isaacson, had a “passion for perfection and ferocious drive.” Randall writes of Aristotle, “his may well be the most passionate mind in history: it shines through every page, almost every line.”

And then, unfortunately, we might also draw a parallel with respect to Jobs’ and Aristotle’s “Platonic” elements. For Jobs, it was his “Reality Distortion Field.” I discuss both the better, reality-oriented, Aristotelian aspects of this, as well as those aspects resembling a more Platonic, “primacy-of-consciousness”  approach, in my review. The analogue in Aristotle to Jobs’ “reality distortion field” might be Aristotle’s “active intellect.” Just as “reality distortion field” was a label used by others, not anything that was explicitly embraced by Jobs, “active intellect” does not occur in Aristotle’s own writings. Rather, it was inferred to be part of Aristotle’s thought, because of his reference to “passive intellect.” Writes Randall:

Pomponazzi and Zabarella, Italian Aristotelians of the beginning and end of the sixteenth century, of all professed Aristotelians probably the closest to the elusive “Aristotelian spirit,” held that intellect or nous….in its functioning…can rise above the body’s limitations.” (Randall, Aristotle, p. 101)

Unfortunately, as I discussed in my review, this may have been the sort of thinking that Jobs engaged in during the first several months after receiving his cancer diagnosis. Too bad Aristotle couldn’t take Jobs on a long walk and change his mind.

Sorry if the acronym is a bit corny, but after hearing a bunch of  big-government prescriptions from “Republican” candidate Mitt Romney in tonight’s debate, I couldn’t resist.

Here are some choice tidbits:

1. He said, when asked why he supported a progressive income tax: “I want to take our precious dollars, as a nation….” Whose dollars?!

2. He said that we should get health care “to work more like a market.” How about having it work as a free market — i.e., get government out of health care?

3. He said, “Government is playing too heavy a role in health care.” Translation: Government — i.e., force — has a role to play in health care. My answer: it has no such role. Government is force. A gun is not a doctor. It cannot diagnose, treat or cure anything.

4. Romney proudly announces that he plans to cap spending … at 20% Of course he didn’t bother to say what I assume he means, which is 20% of GDP. Romney thinks he’s saying something bold when he says he wants the government to spend 1/5 of our gross domestic product on government.

5. Romney says “I love free trade, but…” and then says he plans to “crack down on cheaters like China” in the form of higher tariffs. This will make goods from China more expensive, at a time when he and others on stage were saying they did not want to increase taxes. Huh?

And that’s just the five things I happened to catch in one debate. Romney can use the phrase “free enterprise” in his plan all he wants; that’s not what he stands for.

I have been a loyal and enthusiastic Apple customer since 2002, when I bought my first iMac, the “Sunflower,” and wrote this review. I did not, however, get involved in the “cult” of Steve Jobs. I knew little about him until the media coverage of his deteriorating health made him almost impossible to ignore. I recall watching only one of his famous keynote addresses live, the announcement of the iPad in January of 2010. Around the time of his retirement in August, I, like so many others, watched his wonderful Stanford Commencement Address for the first time.

Read more at PJ Media.