11-30-13 Hodgepodge

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Spying "Sanction of the Victim" in a Word

I enjoy stopping by Word Spy from time to time to see what new and interesting words are out there in the popular media, but I got a small jolt from an entry I saw this morning:

copyduty -- n. A legal or voluntary obligation assumed by the owner of a work in exchange for having the work protected by copyright.
Given the increased cultural currency of my favorite novelist-philosopher, Ayn Rand, I must say that this is an interesting term. The term perfectly exemplifies something she once discussed in a famous speech to the graduating class at West Point: the often-unappreciated cultural influence of philosophers, such as the duty-foisting Immanuel Kant.

She also had a more general umbrella term for such practices as "compensating" for ownership, as if it isn't a right, or it isn't earned by the creative act itself: "sanction of the victim". Rand's longtime collaborator, Leonard Peikoff, defines sanction of the victim as, "the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the 'sin' of creating values."

Weekend Reading

"[W]hen Walmart opens a new store, it's not uncommon for as many as 10,000 people to apply for just 300 jobs." -- Doug Altner, in "Why Do 1.4 Million Americans Work at Walmart, With Many More Trying To?" at Forbes

"The FDA is waging war against the mind of the individual. The mind is a terrible thing to lay to waste." -- Harry Binswanger, in "FDA Says, 'No Gene Test for You: You Can't Handle the Truth'" at Forbes

"People with strong moral standards often get frustrated because they can't distinguish between explanations and excuses." -- Michael Hurd, in "Control and Serenity Don't Mix" at The Delaware Wave

"When I say I'm thankful to man, I'm expressing reverence for reason; the one quality that animates human beings to thrive and produce. " -- Michael Hurd, in "Thanksgiving, Rationally Speaking" at The Delaware Coast Press

My Two Cents

Right around the time I heard about the Binswanger piece, I also heard about one man's reaction to having been told, erroneously, in his DNA test results, that he was doomed to suffer from a rare, debilitating illness. His reaction -- to understand and question the results -- is an excellent example of someone behaving against the FDA's stereotype. (This is not to say that the FDA's meddling would be justified, even if most people did behave the way the FDA assumes we would.)

More Professionalism

The manager of Arsenal F.C. has brought back the club suit:
In a bid to maximise team spirit in his squad, Arsène Wenger recently decided to re-establish the tradition of wearing team suits - proper suits, not tracksuits - to games on match days.
Follow the second link for a team shot. It is nice to see, in this era of nihilistic -- and yet snobbish -- pressure to conform to slovenliness, that the players are on board.

--CAV

3 comments:

Snedcat said...

Yo, Gus, you write, "Rand's longtime collaborator, Leonard Peikoff, defines sanction of the victim as, 'the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the "sin" of creating values.'"

Sad to say, it's probably a good idea to include what the term means. I have actually read bashings of Rand in which supposedly knowledgeable opponents of hers have said that the sanction of the victim means the idea that anyone who has been victimized has, by that very fact, given their sanction to doing so, and therefore Rand was claiming that might makes right, etc. (When I posted a reply correcting this at one site, the comment was refused!) Even in the online world of lefty lies, that falsehood's egregious.

Snedcat said...

Yo, Gus, you also write, "It is nice to see, in this era of nihilistic -- and yet snobbish -- pressure to conform to slovenliness, that the players are on board."

Indeed. For my part, now that I work professionally, I would feel very uncomfortable without my charcoal suit, crisply ironed shirt, and tie every day, but even when I was in grad school, I was never slovenly. Mind you, it's understandable that the outfits of people who do "real work" as opposed to "the suits" would have a real and valid appeal--both terms are mixed bags, of course, so the appeal is mixed as well--but you'll notice that people who do "real work" in the positive sense typically have outfits suited to the task at hand and attractive into the bargain (and usually kept clean). This gets glommed together with snobbish slobbishness, which for me is summed up by the comment that a necktie is just a noose. It's a cute comment the first couple of times you hear it, but for me it wears thin very quickly. (And often suggests the speaker simply needs to get better-fitting dress shirts!)

And while there's a lot of comments come to my mind about the slide into slovenliness of the last few decades, I'll forgo the pleasure...since I don't have anything deep and incisive to say about it, so saying it would really only be my pleasure, not the reader's. I'll just point out that the fact that fashion has a large conventional element to it (and is seasonally changeable as a result, especially for women) is often equated with arbitrariness, which is fallacious...but going into that thicket could eat up a lifetime of discussion. And so I'll just leave off with this amusing and excellent bit of editorializing by Joe Queenan. A choice bit of many:

Mellon is to be commended for his regal bearing at a time when so many of his fellow billionaires have opted for the silly look. In that same issue of Forbes Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen is seen leaning against a pier piling, clutching a Fender electric guitar in a manner that does not suggest he is entirely prepared to set the house a-rockin’ on this or any other night.

Gus Van Horn said...

Snedcat,

Not frequenting internet discussions, i was unaware of that particular misrepresentation if Rand. Thanks for pointing it out.

Also, thanks for the amusing Queenan quote. Many people who would do better by adhering to established fashion conventions {which, as a form of communication, cannot be called arbitrary at every level), do look pretentious when attempting to ape the rule set of those who reject those conventions in the name of non-conformity.