Nanny State. Nanny State.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Over at Salon is an anti-Ayn Rand piece -- and an "Editor's Pick" no less -- that is so bad it's good. If fact, had it not been hosted and promoted by Salon, I would have been been stumped by the question of whether it was intended as a serious piece or a parody. As with almost anything a leftist might have to say about Ayn Rand, the piece starts out with the usual litany of inane stereotypes and outright fabrications.
Make no mistake: All this Ayn Rand libertarian me-first-and-the-rest-of-you-go-to-hell stuff -- the there's-no-government-like-no-government theology that's now being piously intoned as Holy Received Truth by everybody, male and female, in the GOP -- is, very precisely, the kind of politics you'd come up with if you were a 16-year-old boy trying to explain away his dependence on Mom.Thank you, Sara Robinson, MS, APF, whoever you are, for setting me straight. I cannot believe that I allowed myself, via a careful reading of Ayn Rand's actual words, to imagine that my own best interests did not entail walking over a pile of corpses or working for the return of this country to government limited to its proper scope.
But then she really lets loose:
Also: I'm putting them on notice: I don't ever want to hear one more word about the "nanny state." Not one. Not ever again.Allow me to join the straw-man that is Ms. Robinson's imaginary nemesis in rolling my eyes, which is, frankly, about as serious a response as this drivel deserves. That, and maybe shouting "Nanny state!" over and over again.
First of all : It's ugly. It just reeks of that 16-year-old boy being told to clean up his mess. The big sigh. The dramatic eye-roll. The drawn-out, agonized, "yyezzzz, mommmm .. ." that lets you know you're about to spend the rest of the evening in a passive-aggressive battle during which your teenager will generate enough inertia to bring the rotation of this and several neighboring galaxies to a dead stop.
The "nanny state" is making you do the dishes, and then it wants you to clean out the garage. You poor persecuted darling. Go dial 1-976-WAAAAAH.
Second of all: It's sexist as hell. Anti-feminist at its very core. It says that the concerns that we most identify with mothers -- cleaning up your crap, minding your manners, not annoying other people, taking responsibility for your actions -- are intrusive and unwarranted infringements on your essential freedom instead of the basic adult responsibilities that are required of everybody if society is going to remain free and functional.
It says that the power and authority by which mothers -- "nannies," in this construction -- set the rules within the family is illegitimate. It belittles women who are bossy enough to insist on adult behavior from men.
I was tempted to explain here that Ms. Robinson's enthusiasm for defending the Leviathan state had perhaps caused her to jump to the wrong conclusion about why I and people of my ilk use (and will sometimes continue to use) the term "nanny state", that we're being infantilized, that women being traditional caregivers caused the term to be natural, no offense to caring mothers anywhere, etc., etc.
But that would do nothing to convince Ms. Robinson or her ilk of anything, as witness her seizure upon a single term yanked from context as the foundation of her massive castle of hot air. I don't give a damn what Ms. Robinson thinks, if what she does can really be called thinking. I do, however, hope that anyone with an active mind who does happen by will take my cue and see what Ayn Rand actually has to say on any of the things Ms. Robinson ranted about. If you do, you will see that this Editor's pick of the runt-filled Salon litter has almost everything completely backwards. And then you'll wonder why Ms. Robinson and Salon's editors think we all need gun-packing government mommies well into adulthood to figure out which end is up and somehow not fall down when walking and (if we're still allowed to) chewing gum at the same time.
-- CAV
Updates
Today: Corrected some typos.
17 comments:
Her hysteria is ironic.
If only she were right that the GOP is moving to Rand's ideas!
Well Gus, Objectivists are always complaining that the anti-Rand arguments they read are so irrational and that her views are misrepresented. Well, if you’re not allowed to misrepresent her ideas, then I think coming up with a really good anti Ayn Rand essay would be pretty hard. Could you do it being completely honest about her beliefs? I don’t think I could. The only valid criticism I could come up with to rant about (and I tried really hard) was that she (sort of) dissed coin collecting in her essay about stamp collecting. But a one sentence prevaricating diatribe doesn’t often get published, even by Salon.
I would say is that the term nanny state is not a particularly good term for us to use, since it assumes that the state intends its intrusions to be beneficial. At leas with the case of a 16 year old you might argue he’s not really mature. In the case of an adult, it’s hard to see why a politician has more wisdom or is any smarter than anyone else. In that case you are left with the implication that the politician really is after power only. Is that the case for the nanny?
Actually, you should thank Sara Robinson. She’s doing nothing but helping our cause by writing an essay so idiotic that it will cause even most extreme leftists to cringe. Then again, maybe she’s an Objectivist mole?
RT and Steve,
You're both right: I should have thanked her and, yes, too bad the GOP isn't really adopting her ideas!
Gus
Yo, Gus, that little screed does take, perhaps not the cake, but one of the bigger cupcakes in the batch. I first thought, "Oh, Jeez Louise, not Lakoff again." He's an interesting linguist working in a very interesting school of linguistics (though even there he's very much the third of the Big Three), but his political pronouncements are very much not. I'm thinking in particular of the statement she starts with, "If, as George Lakoff says, we view politics through the metaphor of family..."
But not everyone does. I certainly don't. I find such an attitude of any variety utterly foreign and certainly not benign, but I find it tells a lot about the worldview of someone who does. (And I got in the appropriate satirical jab elsewhere.) If you really have an attitude of the state as a parent, then you have tacitly admitted that you are eternally a child (for an adult's relationship with his or her parents is not what is meant by the metaphor, as you can see in that silly woman nattering on about cleaning up your room--in the political sphere she clearly has not put away childish things), and children are not suited to self-government.
Certainly someone with that attitude would be hard-pressed with the best of intentions to appreciate Rand's appeal, never mind sympathizing with her arguments. It's a thoroughly emotionalist rant—I doubt anyone would gainsay me that. And that brings up the question of her audience. She's clearly garnering the plaudits of her peers in the comments, despite the fact that like so many of her ilk she has only the fuzziest grasp of what Rand actually said, I guess since she adds a new overtone to the same tired old song they all sing.
And the dance in the routine is no better--regurgitate falsehoods, fundamentally flawed misrememberings of what Rand actually said (marked by false statements about the plot of Atlas Shrugged, for example), and out of context misinterpretations, and if anyone quotes what she actually said, he or she is a cultist, since only a cultist would actually strive for accuracy in such a baleful cause, and by that very fact forfeits any respect. It's all a tiresome excrescence around the fact that they're all by all evidence emotionalists who share a fundamentally collectivist worldview.
[End of Part I]
[And now Part II of 2]
You can see the worst aspects of the modern age throughout their discourse: Rand was a sociopath, as you can tell by her worship of William Hickman (ably rebutted here), and could only appeal to sociopaths. If contrary to their assertions you are a healthy, happy Objectivist much more fun to be around than humorless leftist drudges like themselves, that's only because you're not (yet) an "asshole." (Direct quote there.) And so on--and note that none of this is in any way philosophical but instead oozes the modern establishment's preference for psychiatric diagnosis and emphasis on psychological lack of fit, and the concomitant standard of fitting in happily in the group like particularly sticky grains of rice. (That image is from Japanese culture; it's how Japanese sum up the difference between collectivist sticky-rice Japanese culture and individualist dry-rice Western culture.) If you're not a sticky grain of rice, then you're a sociopath and a danger to your fellows, and there's no need to examine your ideas at all closely. And so no real debate is possible.
And this, of course, is the theory, practice, and end result of modern educational theory. And I suspect it's precisely there, in the schools, that you should search (if you aren't easily queasy) for the roots of the screeds against Rand: Many of them read Rand in high school, by their own testimony, and most public high schools do not teach careful analysis of novels but instead encourage regurgitating your feelings in the name of "appreciation." (But since American public education is at least highly decentralized, this is not universally true; if we had the French system wedded with American educational theory, that would indeed be a universal smothering of the mind.) Love Rand or hate her, it doesn't matter which, just so long as you put a fine edge on those feelings when let loose, and those feelings are more genuine than any facts about what she actually wrote or the testimony of her actual words.
And that brings up another point--where else do you think you'd find candidates for Objectivist sociopaths than outsiders in high school equally stunted intellectually but who have a strong emotional resonance with her individualism? (Okay, some Internet forums, but the same comments go for those characters.) Such types are no better able to come at her ideas fresh, without the collectivist, altruist presuppositions American public education is based on and inculcates in its charges--and of course many of them are likely to reject Objectivism later unless they have the intelligence and fortitude to see through and reject their years of training.
So, in short, I pity her and her ilk, for they are eternally children and proud of it, and they have been made so by the mothering smothering state that hectors them when they've been bad but at least protects them in a warm cocoon from the cold world outside.
Thank you, Snedcat, for filling in lots of detail on people like Robinson that I omitted, in part due to weariness.
Also, I look forward to reading your satire. Thanks for pointing it our or reminding me of it, as the case may be!
Gus; this is slightly off topic but I was interested in the following statement from Snedcat’s link.
‘To find the influence of Nietzsche on Rand one must turn to her unpublished short stories, or to her writings on possible stories.’
At one point or another, I’ve read almost all of Rand’s published works and while that was a long time ago, I don’t remember ever noticing even a hint of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In fact the character of Gail Wynand is if anything, a repudiation of Nietzsche, since the whole point was to show that this philosophy was impractical and immoral. None of her earlier characters seem to resemble Nietzsche’s ‘superman’ or ever hint at forcing other people. So if she purged all of his influence from her works, she did a very good job. I would not have guessed.
Other than a superficial emotional level response, there doesn’t seem to be any similarities between the two. So, it’s a little hard for me to believe that his influence on her was as powerful as the article seems to conclude but who knows. I’m not a historian and I’m open to being convinced. Nietzsche wasn’t all that great of a philosopher anyway; nowhere near the ability or originality of Kant or Spinoza. She surely would have noticed that.
However, if she was under his influence, so to speak, shouldn’t her early stories at least evoke that feeling? Shouldn’t I at least sense a contradiction between her explicit words and the hidden meaning between the lines? With the exception of ‘Night of January 16’ which was specifically written to evoke an emotional level response (sense of life) and not an explicit philosophy, there doesn’t appear to be the slightest hint of Nietzsche.
‘She moves from criminals, who express their individualism through rebellion against society, to men who express their individuality through acts of creation.’
I don’t think at the time she wrote ‘Night of January 16’ she actually believed in her mind that criminals were heroic and then edited that out later when her views evolved. Even if she did at one time believe that (or almost believe that) this was long gone by the time she wrote that story. The most you can say is that she was comfortable criminals to dramatize a particular sense of life, but so what?
‘Hicks concludes that “differences between Nietzsche and Rand greatly outweigh the similarities.”’
No doubt. I don’t think you could find two philosophers more different than Rand and Nietzsche. I’d think she has more similarities with Plato than she does Nietzsche.
They have completely opposite world views. That is their main difference.
‘Unfortunately, in her later life, Rand did tend to pretend that the views she held then were the views she had always held. That is not true. In fact, she changed substantially. But, for whatever reason—pride, ego, embarrassment’
Another possibility is simply poor memory and the fact that humans tend to retain things that make them feel good about themselves.
Steve,
Not presently having time to read what was linked, I'll go ahead and post your comment, perhaps for Snedcat to address your points.
Gus
"I'll go ahead and post your comment, perhaps for Snedcat to address your points."
I'll add my two cents, but I should preface them by saying that I don't agree with everything at that link either. Since I didn't feel like adding a disclaimer, I'll have to do so now.
Also, before turning to the link, I'll link to a useful source for anyone interested in what Rand actually wrote in her journals but without access to the published version that the smear is tenuously based on: someone put up a convenient compilation of everything Rand wrote about Hickman in her journals here.
(And one comment about it. It's a stale bromide of the lefterati that bourgeois American society is hypocritical, crass, bloodthirsty, full of hate of the nonconformist, etc. It runs throughout the fiction they idolize. Yet when faced with Rand writing exactly the same thing, they suddenly turn themselves inside out into conservative defenders of the addled majority--or at least they did when I posted these sentences in one forum: The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the "virtuous" indignation and mass-hatred of the "majority." One always feels the stuffy, bloodthirsty emotion of a mob in any great public feeling of a large number of humans. Or perhaps they just realized this could be turned very readily into a fit observation of Occupy Wall Street a few decades in advance...)
[Break here for length]
If this essay were written by a conservative, the only difference would be that the author would have spoken from the parent's POV rather than the child's. That should tell you something about the commonalities between the two "sides".
XKCD's knocks on Ayn Rand/Objectivism are high-falutin' collegiality by comparison, and they were done as *jokes*. Wow.
The feminist angle on "nanny" is something I've only recently noticed; it's in keeping with the Left's now near-universal tactic of redirecting all discussion away from ideas and towards the deterministic reduction of racism, sexism etc.
Steve: "However, if she was under his influence, so to speak, shouldn’t her early stories at least evoke that feeling? Shouldn’t I at least sense a contradiction between her explicit words and the hidden meaning between the lines? With the exception of ‘Night of January 16’ which was specifically written to evoke an emotional level response (sense of life) and not an explicit philosophy, there doesn’t appear to be the slightest hint of Nietzsche."
Indeed. I wonder about that myself. It could be that he needs to be more careful with the timing. The letter to Mencken with the quoted pro-Nietzschean sentiments is from 1934, and the first edition of We the Living from 1936, while The Fountainhead is from 1943, so the end of any putative Nietzschean influence would be in that period.
She moves from criminals, who express their individualism through rebellion against society, to men who express their individuality through acts of creation. (bolding added)
"I don’t think at the time she wrote ‘Night of January 16’ she actually believed in her mind that criminals were heroic and then edited that out later when her views evolved." (bolding added)
You're quite right, but I think you're talking past the guy here. "Individualism" and "heroism" are two different matters. The author writes the following in his comments about Night of January 16th, after all: Rand wrote that what interested her wasn’t that she thought these criminals were good or admirable. That is, he's focusing on the development of her vision of individualism, from a putatively Nietzschean view with contempt for the common man to her mature view that is the opposite of that, and explicitly denies that she considered criminals "good or admirable," or presumably heroic.
And as an afterthought, I'll point to two other good posts at that site setting straight the facts about two other recent smears of Ayn Rand. One is about her taking Social Security and Medicare, which in any case isn't hypocrisy according to Objectivism; the other is a more general post about Rand, generosity, charity, and her supposed hatred of poor people. (This smear especially irritates me, since not only is it not at all true, it only gains any traction because it relies on unchecked premises about class warfare and antagonism. I guess our supposed intellectual elite only thinks outside the box when it's a bourgeois box--since their Marxist-rooted box is so natural to them it's invisible.)
The last paragraph of the second linked post is worth quoting in full: One of the traits of a bigot is that he strips his prey of their humanity. He presents cardboard characters that are supposed to fit some predetermined, evil mould. While such blatant bigotry is no longer tolerated when it comes to gays, blacks, Jews, women, etc., the Left seems to relish it when it comes to Ayn Rand—even if they have to lie to do it. Then lying is how bigots convince themselves their bigotry is actually a clever perception that the rest of us "simpletons" don't see. The author's not an Objectivist, but he's sympathetic to her and insists on honesty from her critics--and castigates them for not providing it. This is fresh air indeed, sad to have to say.
First off I have to point out the fact that Robinson is an editor for Alternet. That's speaks for itself. I never read anything from Alternet b/c it's complete trash.
Secondly, did anyone every point out that nanny state does not specify any sex male or female. She automatically assumes that nanny is female. I think someone should give her a mirror so she can see the real sexist.
Thank you, Snedcat, for the further elaboration, Jim for drawing that very good parallel, and Michael, for that telling observation. (How could I, as a mostly stay-at-home dad, have missed THAT?)
Snedcat:
Thanks for the links. I definitely want to look into them.
‘That is, he's focusing on the development of her vision of individualism, from a putatively Nietzschean view with contempt for the common man to her mature view that is the opposite of that, and explicitly denies that she considered criminals "good or admirable," or presumably heroic.’
Yes, I noticed that after I posted that I was actually agreeing with him on that issue. I guess the point that I was trying to make was that I don’t see even a hint of any contempt for the common man in anything I’ve read. My guess is that even at the early stage when Rand might have held a higher opinion of Nietzsche, she would have been uncomfortable with that part of the philosophy.
‘I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods.’
Well, I guess I would need multiple edits with a similar bent to this one to be convinced. She may just have been thinking of the literary merit of turning around the statements (or just because it sounded cool) and then later realized the inherent contradiction. I like to write as well, and often I end up with an individual making a statement completely out of character because I was focused on the theme or the plot or something other than the personality or ideals of the character – only to have to strike it (sheepishly) later.
‘Except that I don’t know, however, whether I’d include blood in my methods.’
Hmm… another contradictory statement and the style is awkward. I might take this statement as evidence that at the time, she WAS uncomfortable with the Nietzschean view, as much as I can get meaning from a single sentence, since in my previous paragraph, I stated that more than one statement or edit would necessary to convince me of anything.
‘’The letter to Mencken with the quoted pro-Nietzschean sentiments is from 1934, and the first edition of We the Living from 1936’
So, all of this happened in only two years, since in the final published We the Living, I don’t see Nietzsche’s influence at all? I’m betting she already had a lot of doubts by 1934.
Steve: "Thanks for the links. I definitely want to look into them." They're quite good. The one on the issue of Rand's social security benefits is especially good ammunition to keep on hand. When I have spare time this weekend or the next I plan to spend an hour or so browsing the blog to see whether I want to follow it.
"I guess the point that I was trying to make was that I don’t see even a hint of any contempt for the common man in anything I’ve read. My guess is that even at the early stage when Rand might have held a higher opinion of Nietzsche, she would have been uncomfortable with that part of the philosophy."
That wouldn't surprise me. However, I haven't read much of her early writings--they started coming out when I was in grad school and had very little free reading time--so I've withheld judgment on claims about them when I've encountered them.
"She may just have been thinking of the literary merit of turning around the statements (or just because it sounded cool) and then later realized the inherent contradiction."
Indeed. Another good example of the same would be W.H. Auden, who disowned some of his most famous poems from the 1930s a couple of decades later on the grounds that they sounded good but were dishonest:
Some poems I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out [of the Collected Poems] because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring.
A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained. For exampe, I once expressed a desire for "New styles of architecture"; but I have never liked modern architecture. I prefer old styles, and one must be honest even about one's prejudices. Again, and much more shamefully, I once wrote:
History to the defeated
May say alas but cannot help or pardon.
To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable. (1965 forword)
‘The one on the issue of Rand's social security benefits is especially good ammunition to keep on hand.’
The possibility that she might have been hypocritical for the opposite reason came to me as I read through it, though. Not that Rand pushed hard to collect social security but that she didn’t and should have. My understanding was that she believed you had a moral responsibility to try to collect back some of what is stolen from you.
Though that seems highly case specific to me – for example, I put my son in private school thereby giving up the possibility of getting any value from the public school taxes but forcing him into the public school just because I paid for it, seems wrong.
I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable
I guess I would say yes, if that feeling occurred to him at the time (i.e. he realized what he was doing) or that he didn’t edit it out later after he had time to think about it.
The statement in the poem did make me cringe though; so it was definitely effective.
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