Human, All Too Human

What beast is Man!
Cruel and mean-spirited
Conformity is the master plan
Individuality has faded

To be different is to be outcast
Mindlessly follow the herd mentality
The disease spreads fast
Don’t deviate from the herd morality!

No one questions anymore
Do you know who you are…really?
Name, age, sex, job…categories galore
All aspects of an external identity

Look inside and what do you see?
A pale reflection, shaped and molded
From behavioral controls of society
A forged soul, twisted and distorted

Smother me not with your well-meaning lies
One True Way? It’s a sham
I, myself, will surmise
Who it is that I am

As the Left is wont to do in lieu of sound argument, US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke recently related what is meant to be a heartrending story:

Recently, I’ve had a chance to read letters from award winning writers and artists whose livelihoods have been destroyed by music piracy. One letter that stuck out for me was a guy who said the songwriting royalties he had depended on to ‘be a golden parachute to fund his retirement had turned out to be a lead balloon.’ This just isn’t right.

My first immediate thought was why isn’t it right? Shouldn’t a progressive egalitarian’s own values lead him to be against intellectual property?

“What,” the progressive egalitarian should say, “you do a little work maybe once in your life, work which would be impossible if not for the shared cultural traditions from which it is derived and re-mixed, and get lucky (unearned talent, fortuitously good timing, etc.)…and you think you shouldn’t have to work for society again!?! That’s hardly fair, now is it? To paraphrase Proudhon, intellectual ‘property’ is theft!”

Lest the reader get the wrong impression, I am not as insensitive to the artist’s plight as this hypothetical progressive egalitarian. And I do not share his collectivist values. We come to similar conclusions via different reasons. I do not think that merely having an idea entitles one, legally-speaking, to be monetarily compensated by others or to have the power to prevent others from using their own property as they wish. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen. It is implementing them effectively, and in such a way as to earn a profit, that is hard. Accomplishing this is praiseworthy, but one should not rest on one’s laurels. Life, to say nothing of a flourishing life, requires productive work in order to be maintained and improved. Intellectual property is an attempt to use the coercive power of the state via granted monopoly-privilege to defy this reality as well as economic law and moral principle. The artist Secretary Locke mentioned could have saved (more) for his retirement and/or kept producing art instead of relying upon royalties to see him through his old age.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

I’ll admit I was leery of the current iteration of the project, but I am somewhat reassured to hear that Atlas Shrugged will be made into three movies, not one, which is more doable. I’m also reassured that the director and the actor playing Henry Rearden seem to have a decent handle on Ayn Rand’s vision and characters, though I was a bit disquieted by the director mispronouncing Rand’s first name.

From Reason.com’s Hit & Run blog (video below):

Many actors and producers have talked about adapting Ayn Rand’s classic Atlas Shrugged for the big screen, but 53 years after its publication no one has dared tackle the ambitious project—until now.

Reason.tv heads to the set of Atlas Shrugged Part One to offer viewers a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of this most anticipated film.

Director Paul Johansson (One Tree Hill) and Grant Bowler (Lost, True Blood, Ugly Betty), who plays Henry Rearden, discuss the perils, pressures, and pleasure involved in telling the epic tale of a society where the “men of the mind” go on strike and refuse to contribute to a collectivist world.

Produced by Ted Balaker and Hawk Jensen. Camera by Austin Bragg and Hawk Jensen. Production support by Sam Corcos.

Music: “Eu Nao Sabia” by Anamar available from Magnatune Records.

Approximately 5.3 minutes.

Go to Reason.tv downloadable HD, iPod, and audio versions of this and all our videos and subscribe to Reason.tv’s YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

For all that, I found the movie entertaining. The action scenes are well-done and stylish. And I particularly liked the parkour–inspired sequences. The plot is interesting and tightly executed. The story even has a couple of elements of interest to libertarians. There are a number of ninja clans that kidnap orphan children and train them to be assassins, indoctrinating them with the belief that the lives of individuals are valueless compared to that of the clan, which is one big family to which they owe unquestioning and unwavering loyalty and obedience. The ninja clans apparently act as secret private contractors for governments around the world, assassinating targets for 100 lbs. of gold. Our ninja hero is one particularly promising pupil of the Ozunu clan. He buys into the propaganda at first, but falls for a pretty young girl, a fellow trainee, who does not. She attempts to escape, and is recaptured and executed in front of all the ninjas-in-training as an example. When he is later faced with killing another girl, whom he is told has similarly betrayed the clan, as the final requirement of becoming a full member of the clan, he refuses and is nearly killed. The bulk of the movie is about his quest for revenge against the Ozunu clan with the help of a female government agent.

Though it is a classic revenge tale, the negative portrayal of coercive and aggressive collectivism is a nice touch. The notion that the individual should be subservient to and acquires his value and ultimate end from The Collective, whatever it be named (the Family, the Clan, the Tribe, the Race, the Nation or State), is an insidious sickness. It that permeates the communitarian classical republicanism of Rome (as I explain in my working paper “Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization“ (pdf)), which, along with classical liberalism, with which it is in tension due to the conflict with the latter’s inherent individualism, was one of the major influences on the so-called Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It is also inherent in nationalism and, of course, the modern collectivist political movements of our age. At the risk of being redundant, a truly libertarian and civilized society exists for each and every individual’s own well-being — not the other way round.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

I’m finally getting around to reviewing a movie I saw for the first time on dvd a couple of weeks ago. I’ll keep this brief.

Children of Men is an interesting dystopian film set in a near-future fascist Britain. The country has traded freedom for “security,” has closed its borders to immigrants and systematically rounds them up into concentration camps and deports or exterminates them. It is a world beset by terrorism, of the Islamic fundamentalist variety and others.

The premise of the movie, however, is such a stretch that it makes it hard for one to maintain adequate suspension of disbelief. Suddenly and inexplicably over a very short span of time (a few years maybe?) the entire female sex of the human race becomes infertile. Then, just as suddenly and inexplicably, a group of resistance fighters discovers a pregnant woman. Much of the movie is their attempt to smuggle her out of the country.

Though the premise is rather far-fetched, the movie makes interesting use of it for social analysis. With no possibility of children, the extinction of the human race is not far off. Hope for the future seems lost. What effect will this loss of hope have on individuals and on society as a whole? The movie does a good job of dramatizing this on both levels.

There is nothing especially libertarian about the movie, although its depiction of fascism serves as a note of warning. Even the resistance group, or at least certain members of it, can be rather brutal and extreme. The movie has a distinctly British/European sensibility, or so I thought. And though very dark, it does end with a weak and vague ray of hope. The hope, however, is a rather collectivist hope for humanity as a species. There is not much for individuals currently living during the time of the movie to look forward to, but at least the human race just might survive a little longer, provided we can get our acts together.

I did enjoy the movie, and the main actors turned out good performances. Clive Owen. Julianne Moore. I was happy to see Chiwetel Ejiofor, who did such a wonderful job as the chilling government assassin in Serenity, as one of the resistance fighters; and he turned out a fine performance here as well.

Given the caveats above, however, I was not especially moved by the movie, nor did I fall in love with it. Watching one of the documentaries included on the dvd kind of soured the movie for me actually. It is here that we get to see more clearly than in the movie the collectivist and environmentalist agenda that underlies and drives it. One “expert” featured in the documentary caught my attention in particular: former libertarian-turned-green-conservative, John Gray. No, I don’t think John Gray’s come back from the Dark Side yet.

I’ve written on Hegel’s notions of the State and war for one of my classes; here are some excerpts:

Hegel conceived of the state as a sovereign individual. States, being sovereign, will quite naturally come into conflict with each other and go to war. Hegel doesn’t merely see war as a necessary evil, however. Indeed, like Randolph Bourne, he sees war as the health of the State. Only, unlike Bourne, he is not concerned with the State growing in such power and centralization that it breaks the bounds of constitutional limits. Hegel sees war as a good thing. States are an ethical unity and go to war to protect that unity, not merely from other States but from internal forces. The State recognizes that the enforced unity brought about by war is needed to preserve itself from its own internal contradictions (or in Hegel’s mind, the stresses of civil society). “[W]ar is a “‘moment’ in the ethical life of the state.”[1. Steven B. Smith, “Hegel’s Views on War, the State, and International Relations,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 77 (1983), p. 627.] In war, individual citizens are educated in the ethical Idea when they submerge and lose their individuality in the universal, in the common will pursuing the State’s goal of self-preservation.

States seemingly paradoxically have equally legitimate sets of conflicting rights and therefore have no rights against each other. Why States have no rights against each other when individuals do is not entirely clear. (Are rights are a purely political construction for Hegel?) Hegel imports the Hobbesian notion of states being in a state of nature vis-à-vis each other. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, States (which are good) are paradoxically founded by evil actions and the tyrants who found them are considered “great” men due to their place in the rational process of history. Good is created through evil. Likewise, the question of right in wars between States is decided by world history; the outcome itself is history’s judgment. “[W]ar makes them unequal so that they can be unified, and this happens when one gives way to the other.”[2. Hegel, quoted in ibid., p. 630.]

For Hegel history is a rational process with the end of actualizing absolute freedom for humanity. The State is the embodiment of the ethical Idea, of absolute freedom, for its citizens. It stands to reason, following Hegel’s obsession with the Idea, the synthesis of concrete and universal, that the State that most embodies the ethical Idea vis-à-vis other States is superior. World history is the final arbiter in this matter, but world history is progressive and rational. This implies a growing rationality as history marches forward. Hegel thought that modern warfare with modern weapons would be more humane than previously. Though history has proven him wrong by the sheer inhumanity of modern total war, for Hegel history must lead to the “complete and total rationalization of human kind” and thus “to the homogenization or unification of humanity characterized by an increased agreement over all the fundamental aims of life. The triumph of reason will mean the elimination of the grounds of all war and conflict because there will be nothing left to fight about. It will represent the final triumph of bourgeois civil society with its pacific and commercial interests over the political state which seeks preeminence in struggle and combat. In the final analysis Hegel’s idea of an end of history undercuts his insistence on the necessity of war.”[3. Ibid., p. 631.]

The State, then, would seem to be a “moment” in the rational historical process leading to the triumph of reason in absolute freedom for man. Is this where Hegel intends to go? I am not sure. Such a future may entail the emergence of a World-State, as Hegel’s philosophy of history would seem to necessitate. Alternatively, in light of Hegel’s claim that a State is no more an actual State without other States than an individual is an actual “person without rapport with other persons[,]” perhaps such a future will resemble a kind of Kantian international order of liberal republican States.[4. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 212.]

Some neocons have some strikingly Hegelian notions about the family, civil society, the State, and war; Kristol’s notion that we need a good war once in a while, in particular.

What ever happened to Jefferson’s “Every generation needs a new revolution”?

(Thanks to Chris Matthew Sciabarra for the link to Tibor Machan’s article.)