Well you could stick agree with the first statement and believe we only have a 20% of finding something if they’ve built their grand structures of wood or other short lasting materials
We know quite a lot about the vikings. We have a few texts that date back to that period in their origin, and a lot of texts written by their descendants a century or two after the end of the viking period. Do we have anything from ancient Egypt comparable to the saga literature?
They built in wood, but enough of their structures survived to be excavated and studied by modern archaeologists. Along with their weapons, jewelry, clothing, ... .
> "Do we have anything from ancient Egypt comparable to the saga literature?"
Sort of. We have huge amounts of preserved Egyptian writing, including both letters and the longer sorts of funerary inscriptions. But as far as actual literature goes, in Middle Egyptian? We have a couple hundred pages of moderately good literature, but the drop-off after that is steep. This includes a couple of saga-like tales, some collections of interesting annecdotes, some very deft political satire, and a couple of spiritual works. Taken together, it fills roughly the same niche as the Elder Edda. There's nothing directly analogous to the collected Icelandic sagas.
The ancestral Puebloans, Cahokians, and Polynesians were all having their “golden ages” centuries after the fall of Rome - I don’t see how their existence implies that similar societies must have existed 10 millennia earlier.
That’s what’s being talked about here - Puebloans confining themselves to narrow strips of coastline in a world where everyone else was barely beyond “caveman”.
The Vikings may have had some technology the Egyptians lacked, but Egyptian civilization was clearly on a different scale from vikings. That's why sea peoples sought to raid the Egyptians, while the vikings themselves were raiders.
IIUC, the vikings were not a culture. They was a fringe group on the edge of a culture that was mainly in southern/central Sweden. They were largely younger sons of noblemen that lived in Norway and their followers. The older sons stayed home and kept the family estate. We know about them because Odin was patron of nobles and bards.
Now the Norse culture did have skills that the Egyptians lacked, but it's not clear how many. The ones we know about are from groups that had to leave before the Christians came in and killed everyone. (Well, not everyone. See the "ordeal of the horn" (sorry, I couldn't find a good reference. Maybe you'll do better.) The guy who wanted to convert to Christianity rather than just being killed had a drinking horn forced down his throat, and a serpent was put in the bell of the horn, which was then sealed and heated until the serpent tried to escape. (I suspect this only happened to nobles, but "records are scarce".) And everything suspected of pagan influence was destroyed.
Lol Vikings were the ones who were killing Christians. Anyways no foreign Christians ever conquered their lands. Norse leadership converted to Christianity followed by the subjects. It was the Christian descendants of these Vikings who wrote down the pagan stories of their ancestors that the ancestors themselves could never bother to.
"Viking" is a profession, not a nationality or even a culture — there were Irish and Welsh vikings. But in this context, "Viking" refers to the Norse culture that most of the vikings came from in the period when vikings were active, ending sometime in the 11th century.
The culture was not mainly in Sweden, it was in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, and various of the islands. A good deal of what we know about it is due to the fact that the Icelandic branch produced quite a lot of good literature in the couple of centuries after the end of the viking period. I don't think Odin's preferences had much to do with that, since by the time that literature was written Iceland was Christian.
It is not true that everything suspected of pagan influence was destroyed. The original settlement of the Pagan/Christian dispute in Iceland in the year 1000 included toleration for private (but not public) pagan worship. Skaldic poetry continued to make heavy use of pagan materials long after all of the Norse lands were officially Christian.
To the extent that the Norse culture was in Ireland (not minor) it was the culture of the invaders. The Fingols, or "light haired foreigners". They did rule Ireland for awhile, but they were always seen as foreigners.
I thought Denmark was Vanir country rather than Aesir country. (There was a lot of slop, of course. And the invaders were often the Norse.) Iceland is from a later period than I was thinking of, but various islands are in period. Also Scotland and parts of England. But those *were* viking settlements. The Danes were a different culture ("Dane" I take as from "wain", the wagons lived in by the people of the Vanir.) Some time around the period of the Romans (eddas are a bit vague as to timing) the Norse (i.e. the Aesir) fought the people of the Vanir (i.e. the Vanir) to a draw, and came to a truce.
Also, well past the expansion of central Anatolian farmers using the Levantine farmer tool kit. Which, genetically the people there are descended from.
Not sure it is such a mystery anyway. You would expect with earlier civs for there to be both a wider variety in potential cultural practices, and access to resource of an accessibility and richness that was not later possible.
The Varna finds are very cool, but I don’t really think there is anything odd about them or they challenge previous info.
Fascinating, but still within the accepted span of human civilisation and after agriculture got started. This is not "ancient Atlantis had flying saucers" levels that the usual "lost prehistoric civilisations" go for. Generally, because "okay humans were using stone tools a millenium before we thought they did" is not sexy for the kind of National Geographic Special, the proponents of such lost civilisations go for "they had tech equivalent to our modern level (where "modern" covers anything from the 1930s to today) or even more advanced", not "so they were chipping really good flint hand axes earlier than the consensus had it".
I think people are open to "pre-Ice Age civilisations on a Stone Age level", but while we all had the dream of the "lost in the depths of Darkest Africa, an ancient lost civilisation remains to be found" and so forth, that's not probable. We can extrapolate large, culturally complex, past societies but nothing like "ancient laser beam technology".
The other problem with these theories is - where did they go? The sea level rise was fast on a geological scale, but not a human one. Yes, some sites would get flooded but presumably not fast enough to drown their inhabitants and make them forget how to do all the civilization things that would be leaving large monuments behind. We’d expect to find sites inland, or we’d have to explain why the civilizations completely collapsed prior to the sea level rise.
There are civilizations that we know existed from the records of other civilizations, which we cannot seem to find. See things like "The Sea People" as an example.
Especially if war was involved, where the victor may have destroyed the loser and carried off the people. Early stone buildings, even very advanced ones, may not look like much if all of the stones are torn down.
ETA: and obviously buildings with less durable materials would almost certainly all be gone by now.
I think there is a significant distinction between a civilization declining, even quite sharply, and a civilization disappearing completely from the archaeological record. Even after something like the Late Bronze Age Collapse or the Dark Ages or the collapse of various indigenous civilizations in the Americas, it’s not as if the people after the collapse become invisible.
It’s not impossible of course but I agree with Scott that it puts a hard upper bound on how advanced such a civilization would be. Any civilization would need to have sprung up during the ice age, rose to whatever level of advancement you theorize, and then utterly collapse, all while never leaving the fairly narrow strip of coastal elevation that would later be reflooded. It raises the question of “what happened” and the answer almost certainly can’t be just welp their old cities flooded and they never bothered moving inland.
War or disease might do it I suppose but again that upper bound - something like Ancient Egypt would need an unprecedented plague to just totally disappear, and any enemy strong enough to absolutely wipe them out would probably themselves be advanced enough to leave a lot of evidence behind. (The mystery of the Sea Peoples is almost certainly limited to “from which civilization we already know about did the Sea People come”, they are probably not a phantom civilization that rose, raided, and then vanished except for a few vague notes in Egyptian inscriptions).
This all ignores my actual beef with the Ice Age civilization theories, which is their path dependence. In large part, belief in these civilizations doesn’t come from “hey look at all this archaeological evidence we have that only really works if there is was an advanced civilization that got flooded after the Ice Age ended”, but rather from people who believe deeply that Atlantis existed and are trying to shoehorn that myth into something vaguely plausible.
There are lots of other "hard bounds". Quarries don't move around much, and can often be dated. We can tell that they didn't use various easily available resources, because they were there to be used at a later date. Etc.
For just about any resource, you can track when the easily accessible parts got used. (Well, *I* can't track that, but for each resource there are those who can.) Just consider what the post-apocalypse civilization will need to do to get oil or anthracite. Or even good gravel.
The steelman the argument of the "shoehorn atlantis" people is that there seem to have been a lot of sites with later investigations that are regularly found (by mainstream folks) to be older than earlier studies (and the reverse is also at times true). None of that invalidates the overall evidence and trend, but we should make a slight Bayesian adjustment to thinking that there may be older pockets of civilization than we know about, but not the overfitting of "everything is older." A site found to be occupied a couple hundred years earlier than previously known is not the same thing as thousands of years earlier, and might not be same people or people of similar technical sophistication.
I think the best case for some of these things is that in many parts of the world, the areas that were flooded in post-Ice Age sea level rise isn't a "narrow strip" - rather, it's an even wider area than the areas that are currently between sea level and 100 meters.
If there were notable civilizations on Dogger Bank or the Mediterranean or the Bahamas, and if those civilizations didn't build significant sites more than a few dozen miles from the coast, then it's conceivable that they all got hidden by sea level rise.
That said, it would be surprising if there was any *big* civilization that didn't get too far from the coast along the rivers.
During an Ice Age, you'd want to be at as low an elevation as possible to stay warm, which would often be below current sea levels. On the other hand, you'd probably want to put your big buildings on top of hills and outcroppings for defense. So, yeah, the idea that there were a lot of impressive buildings built during the Ice Age and every single one of them happened to be below the current sea level is implausible.
I agree that this kind of analysis should limit how big such a civilization would be expected to get (I'm not quite to "hard limit" but close enough for our purposes).
I really don't think an 1700s major international civilization would be possible. I'm pretty skeptical of the Egyptian pyramid scenario as well, but think that could come down to definitions and timing. As Scott mentioned, the Sphinx may be much older than previously thought.
I do think that we would have a very hard time disproving a Stonehenge-level society. It would be incredibly easy to have lost the physical evidence of such a society. As I said above, this is especially true if they built with materials unlikely to survive that length of time or in the conditions (underwater) that we would be likely to find them in.
Most of these pictures are of Americans and other Westerners living in Afghanistan in the 70s. Like the last picture is of (American) boys and girls attending the (American) School in Kabul. Most Afghanis didn't even attend school much less coeducational ones during that period.
No doubt, but it *is* an example of some thing becoming unrecognizable in a fairly short time. You can also look at ISIS intentionally destroying thousands of years of archeological history in a few days.
My point is not that Afghanistan was completely different, but to find an example of fairly substantial change in a short time period. We're talking about thousands of years for these sites to disappear, which means a lot more can happen.
This doesn't follow- displaced people aren't just the same people doing the same things. If you have a sedentary agriculture wealthy enough to raise monuments it doesn't hold that if you lose that agriculrual base and have to restructure your entire society that you will rise to that level of wealth again. If the lands which were flooded were particularly fertile, or particularly well suited to the crops you domesticated then the flooding could well reset you to a much poorer agricultural lifestyle or even force your descendants into a H/G lifestyle and you are basically three generations away from losing all the knowledge that was useful for the first lifesytle but not the second.
See my previous reply - decline yes, vanish probably not. They might not rise to the same level ever again, but they wouldn’t completely forget the very concept of farming or that metalworking existed or that writing things down was a good idea or whatever. Even that assumes a pretty rapid change from “farming works” to “agriculture is unsustainable”. Post Ice Age sea level rise was tens of meters over hundreds of years - this would have been a gradual shift inland over generations not an “oh shit a volcano killed most of us and buried our fields and now we must abandon civilization”.
Consider something like the ancient Puebloan people of the southwest US - fairly rapid and severe climate change seems to have caused them to voluntarily abandon a lot of their larger dwellings that are now left behind, and they didn’t seem to build anything equivalent afterwards. But they just moved somewhere else more temperate and started farming there, they didn’t forget how to grow crops or how to make pots and baskets.
The “collapses” we’ve actually witnessed are much less severe than the cataclysm that would have had to befall these civilizations - knocking them (and anybody who interacted with them) back literally thousands of years on the “tech tree”.
This is just an assertion. We have lots of historical evidence of building types going out of style in very short order when situations deteriorated. After the collapse of the Roman empire building with stone drops way, way down and building with mud/wood goes way up, and that is a trivail inconvience (the fall of Rome) compared to every major city being underwater.
To the rest of the post- the hypothesis is generally that a large impact(s) either caused or coincided with the sea level rise, which very plausibly could cause crop failures and large population declines. By the time you get a population rebound large enough to rebuild even a shadow of the former society the sea level rise will have wiped out all the low lying cities which means all the trade routes which depended on those cities for goods or as resupply points are done with in addition to the lower population leading to less surplus activity which means its not likely that new routes will be sought out (and even if they were they would continually be interrupted as sea level rise continued to flood other population centers.
There absoultely is the chance that a people could face devestation to the extent that they would 'forget' all kids of things, anything that isn't in active use quickly becomes forgotten. Toss in that the hypothesis includes the fact that examples of their older work would be completely inacessessible to them and it is a reasonable outcome that specific skills would simply be lost.
Writing is one of the things that has repeatedly gotten lost. It's often restricted to a small elite group, and for everybody else it's what tells the tax collector how much you owe.
Lost doesn't mean totally lost. Merchants can find pieces of it valuable. But effectively lost. Linear B is one classic example, but it's not the only one. There's currently a claim that the Neanderthals or possibly Cro-magnon had a limited form of writing that they used to track when the prey would be giving birth, etc. If so writing in one form or another has been around a LONG time, and we don't know anything about most of the earlier forms. (How are you at Ogham?)
Well, there's a few places that did "just collapse", but the ones I thinking of are a lot later, and the explanation is "the river dried up or got diverted". (In at least one case I suspect enemy action, but the proof is missing.)
However, in those cases there's no clear evidence where the folks went. So I don't find this a compelling argument. (I have a friend who believes they treked from India to Israel, and that Exodus is a lot longer ago that the begats indicate and... well, that's an answer, but I don't find it compelling.)
Not quite - ice dam bursts on the north American continent have been known to release a lot of water from ocean size lakes - in a human relevant time period.
For example, per Wikipedia
"This final drainage of Lake Agassiz has been associated with an estimated 0.8 to 2.8 m (2.6 to 9.2 ft) rise in global sea levels.[13]"
Pre-glacial maximum agriculture would probably have lost the domesticated crops. CO2 levels were too low during the glacial max to allow high enough productivity to make agriculture worth pursuing.
So we'd need to be looking for signs of ag from roughly 100,000 years ago when CO2 levels were similar to the current era.
But presumably in that period, not many of the sites would be flooded, so if there's some significantly denser population somewhere, that should show up in excavations of sites from that period, right?
I imagine so. At least traces. On the other hand, we just recently discovered a major new civilization in the Amazon that was present just hundreds of years ago. No one had bothered to look before. Gobekli Tepe was thought to be a Roman-era construction, until someone actually dug it up. So, it's possible.
Personally I doubt there were 100,000-year-old civilizations.
Exactly - the world clearly has a richer past than we currently understand. There are enough places were we have some _some_ evidence of interesting cultures with almost no details that are certainly many more that we don't even know we are missing. But at the same time that doesn't mean that there are lost high-tech civilizations when current evidence is pointing to hunter-gathering being the norm. Yet there might very well be some interesting civil works we know nothing about today that will be discovered in coming decades. The increasingly low cost of things like drone surveys of remote sites using broad-spectrum and magnetic imaging as well as ground-penetrating technologies is going to turn up more and more interesting finds, it should be exciting.
Wouldn't they end up destroyed by later melt waters. I mean you don't need anything as extreme as the giant floods that created the bad lands to totally destroy evidence of human habitation. Our evidence for neolithic sites is often as little as different colored dirt from post holes and some animal teeth. Bury it in ice and then flood it with melt water and it's undetectable.
Behavioral modernity is generally dated to ~50k years ago, so any hypothetical 100k year old human civilization didn't engage in any advanced burial practices, leave behind art, or wear personal ornamentation (e.g. beads) as far as the record shows.
1. I think there's increasingly evidence that domestication (genetic changes resulting from patterns of human cultivation/resource management) runs deep. One of the coolest but underrated findings, I think, is evidence of incipient grain domestication at the Last Glacial Maximum at Ohalo II in Israel more than 10,000 years before the onset of the Holocene (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422&xid=17259,15700019,15700124,15700149,15700168,15700173,15700186,15700190,15700201). The title and abstract are all about weeds, but just as striking is the proportion of domestic-type rachises, which is much higher than in wild populations (although still quite low compared to "fully" domesticated situations). This site's discovery was a serendipitous fluke (it has a fascinating backstory); many instances of Pleistocene domestication have probably eluded us.
2. I wouldn't discount how sophisticated societies can become without domesticated plants. In my Aeon essay, I focus on the Calusa, who had what seems like a tributary state/kingdom (they are also covered in The Dawn of Everything). They inhabited modern-day Florida, collected tribute from an area the size of Belgium, and were capable of profound feats, constructing huge mounds and a 4-km-long canal. But their resource base was, for the most part, fish. To your point about how easy it is to record such societies, they were observed during the Spanish colonial era and were near modern-day centers of anthropological research. Yet they were largely unknown to archaeologists until the 1970s. So I think we should expect to have overlooked lots of sophisticated non-agricultural peoples, especially in the Pleistocene.
I think “domestication runs deep” actually works against the Ice Age civilization theory, because it makes it even harder to explain why it would have popped up thousands of years early but only very specifically in areas that would be flooded slowly over hundreds of years when the ice sheets melted.
Am I the only one who thinks Shermer is overrated as a Skeptic and a Rationalist?
While I was criticising the racialists, I read his critique in "Why People Believe Weird Things", and it was just terrible. He made logical errors one could drive a truck through (his essay in "The Borderlands of Science" is much better, though it focuses only on sports).
And don't even get me started on his chapter on Objectivism. He literally writes a chapter on a philosophy while never discussing what that philosophy is, while relying on third hand accounts of the founder's personal circle, third hand accounts that are from sources he knows are biased.
You're not the only one. I'm usually unimpressed with what I've read of him.
He also sometimes does a bait and switch, and maybe that's what you're objecting to in his Objectivism essay (which I haven't read). His book on Holocaust denial, for example, is a book proving the Holocaust happened. I have no objection to people making that argument and the more, the better. And as far as I could tell, his reasoning and facts were good in that case. But the book wasn't really about the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, and when I picked it up at the library, that's what I wanted to read about.
That's exactly it - he does bait-and-switch all the time. Which is extremely irritating, especially if you agree with the overall point he is making. There is something particularly vexing about seeing shoddy arguments defending a case you respect.
I have a standing challenge to anyone to clearly state what Objectivism is - what the core of Rand's philosophy is - and then present a rational case against it.
I have looked for 20 years, and found exactly nothing. You might be the first. But I doubt it.
Do you have any recommendations for works which (even if they don’t argue against it) clearly state what Objectivism is? If nobody can define it clearly, that might be more of a problem for Objectivism than for its critics
Ayn Rand has a long, almost 100 page section in "Atlas Shrugged" where she uses her main protagonist John Galt as a mouthpiece to lay out Objectivism in one long, boring speech.
There isn't really a "core" for Objectivism, Rand lays out her entire metaphysics (which she sums up as "A is A", which she says she learned from Aristotle), Epistemology (which I can't really recall, but it wasn't very sophisticated - for the most part her Epistemology from my recollection is "I believe this, therefore it is true", and she relies heavily on stating things are "self-evident", many such statements are in my view not self-evident. For example, she states that smoking is self evidently good, because it is a promethean symbol of man's creativity and industry.
She also lays out a system of Aesthetics in her Objectivist system, but its one small book, and doesn't come up much in her main works "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead", at least from my recollection.
The meat and potatoes of Rand's Objectivism is her Ethics, which is a modified version of ethical egoism. Egoism suffers from circular reasoning and many other problems. I found egoism to be seductive when I first learned of it, but the shine wears off, and my own life experience doesn't jive with it.
I don't pretend that I am providing a full and accurate characterization of objectivism or that I am providing great arguments against it, but maybe this will help anyone who hasn't gone through their "Ayn Rand" phase. Every philosophy teacher I spoke with was less than impressed with Rand and had good arguments for why her system was just generally lacking and fails to wrestle adequately with most difficult philosophical problems (argument from authority, this is just food for thought rather than an argument, consider it context).
The only things I know about Ayn Rand are from reading "Atlas Shrugged", "The Fountainhead", and a couple of her essay compilations, I forget which ones. All years ago now.
I'm sure my characterization of her Epistemology is incomplete.
Ayn Rand gets dunked on by a lot of people who haven't read her work, and from people who dislike her for political reasons (her influence on the current far-right and libertarians). I can imagine for fans of hers it must be frustrating to see people setting up strawmen version of Rand's views and destroying them easily with lots of self congratulating.
Again, personally I liked her work some time ago, but after long consideration I no longer resonate with her system of beliefs. I am all about disagreeing with people in good faith and for the right reasons - I'm not the best person to argue against Objectivism though, I don't have a sophisticated knowledge of it, or good arguments against it. I saw Ghost's comment below that I thought was quite good, I recommend engaging respectfully with them, as their arguments and characterization appears to be in good faith, and of a high quality.
I actually read her philosophy. Please...she claims that the gold standard follows from considerations of pure logic. Umm, ok that's funny since you can't even deduce the existence of gold from pure logic.
Sure you could imagine a more careful claim like the use of a currency standard satisfying such and such properties follows by logic from assumptions A-E but she doesn't do anything like that.
FWIW, after reading a couple of Ayn Rand books, and a few RAWilson books, I was more favorably impressed by Discordianism than by Objectivism. But I can't define either of them, Even though I've got a copy of Principia Discordia.
Chunks of RAWs stuff are reactions to Rand ("Telemachus Sneezed!")...but it took me a while to realise that, because I read them in the wrong order , as it were. Rand is little known in Europe, and I didn't find out about Objectivism till going online in the nineties.
Sure. One can start with everything Ayn Rand wrote. Try reading Atlas Shrugged, and if that's too long, Galt's Speech, and if that's too long The Objectivist Ethics.
Wikipedia is also pretty good - by which I mean better than 99% of online detractors. I do find it irritating that they write "So and so said Objectivism is wrong here" without ever saying how, but one cannot have everything.
I still insist that Objectivism is not a thing at all. I did a Master's Degree in Political Science in Italy, without ever hearing of it.
The first time while leaving in the US when I heard of "Randians" I thought it was Rand Paul's political faction, and I was really puzzled about why someone should base their political thought around an obscure sci-fi writer.
Rand's books have sold something like 37 million copies, which makes her one of the least obscure sf writers of the 20th century. Terry Pratchett beats her, but I'm not sure how many other writers do.
Ayn Rand doesn't appear to make this list, but I don't think the list claims to be exhaustive. It does seem to contain close to a hundred names who each sold over 100 million copies (interestingly, Agatha Christie might beat out William Shakespeare for the number 1 spot!) I'm only familiar with about half the names on the top 10, but I am familiar with close to half the names for the whole list.
I didn’t recognize as many of the names as you did, but the only SF writer I noticed was Michael Crichton. But then I’m not sure I’d have called either Rand or Pratchett SF either. The exploration of the use of Reardenite in Atlas Shrugged is plausibly SF but it has little to do with the plot, and the static-electricity free energy is just silly.
It's interesting that Rand gets such a bad rap as an author given the standard theories most ppl advanced about the value of literature. I don't put any real stock in her ideas but it's hard to argue that she exposes the reader to a dramatically different way of looking at the world that some ppl genuinely have (no to mention what a Dexedrine habit feels like) so it seems like if ppl really meant that theory she should rate pretty highly as literature.
(to be clear I don't buy such theories...I think it's basically just fun and reject the idea there is some deeper benefit from art...but many ppl feel differently).
Objectivism is a philosophy, not a political system. Rand rejected anarchy but there is no reason why someone could not share her philosophy but reject the details of her political proposal — a government that funded itself by selling the service of rights enforcement, of which it had a monopoly — as unworkable or inconsistent with Objectivism. I think that was Roy Childs' position, at least at one point.
"But then how could it be that Oedipus could believe what (J) asserts without believing what (M) asserts, if they assert the same thing?"
Because knowledge is something held by an individual consciousness? There's no such thing as knowledge "out there", nor is there a collective brain. Every bit of knowledge that is known is known by someone.
To put it simply, Oedipus didn't know he'd married his mother. Ta-dah! Solved.
5.1 one is better, but still wrong. It asks, "Well, how can you prove that life is good?" And Rand does answer: "You can't. You have to make that choice completely alone. It is the one truly free choice you have. You can't say, 'I choose to live because of my children, my work, my family, whatever', because those all presuppose that you have chosen life. They are values that make life worth living, and make it easier and better to do so, but they are only possible once you have made that choice - to live. You have the choice to die, you have the choice to live self-destructively, which is slow death by self-imposed torture. You have those choices, but you have no choice about the nature of the choice."
I'll look at the rest later. As I say, I have looked for 20 years.
I have a better idea! Why don't you, I don't know, read the relevant text yourself? It's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology", if you are curious.
There is no contradiction here whatsoever. Huemer is misquoting Rand. A concept is an integration of concretes.
Concrete whats? Concrete perceptions. Perceptions which are held where? In an individual consciousness.
Objectivism, as described by Rand herself, is the idea that humans are uniquely vital agents in a soulless material world, and that each individual, as a sealed unit of motive, meaning, and rationality is a sort of god-unto-oneself. Meaning and right, therefore, are derived on an individual basis by the exertion of agency, through the tools of rationality, upon the external world towards goals that satisfy the appetites of this central agent. In other words, each person is the heroic centre of their own universe, equipped with the ability to reshape the world to promote their own happiness, and with a moral compass that can only point towards that happiness.
I can't resurrect Rand, but I'm reasonably confident she would be broadly okay with that high level characterisation. And, in the abstract, it's compelling. At it's heart, it's not that different from modern rationalism, especially when we allow that, of course, the happiness of any given agent can be (and is) contingent on the happiness of other (or all) agents.
The problem with this philosophy is twofold.
First, it's sort of fundamentally philosophically ungrounded. It posits an external world, and not just in the "we all posit an external world to survive" sense. Objectivism requires that an objective reality of referents and means exist independent of us, that we have direct access to that world through sense data, and that there be no meaning, morality, or sense in this world before we put it there. It also requires that meaning and morality be things that can exist within a single individual, without requiring outside reference and collaboration. None of the are particularly young or radical ideas in the fields of ethics, ontology, and epistemology. All of them are also open, and quite possibly unresolvable, questions despite millennia of attention from many of humanity's greatest minds.
The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind, is particularly troublesome. This is an idea which has proven to be a real sticking point for a lot of philosophical models, and recognizing it as a hurdle is one of the more significant forces that has advanced modern philosophy in the last few hundred years. In fact, depending on how you read, interpret, and value Wittgenstein, it can be argued that this question is one of the few big philosophical disputes that has actually been conclusively resolved, and not in the way that objectivism requires. Of course, not everyone agrees, this is philosophy. So we can proceed as though this remains an open question. It changes little
In the realm of philosophy, a schematic of ethics and meaning that posits answers to unresolved questions as axioms and then builds from there is basically a toy. A toy can be a useful rhetorical device for inestigating these questions, but it’s not a coherent and stable philosophy of its own. It doesn’t stand on the same ground as actual philosophical models. Note that, through this same lens, religious philosophies are also toys, and the difference in scope is why religious thought struggles so much in philosophical debate. I’m not exactly trying to make an inflammatory statement like “objectivism is a religion,” but, honestly, the two broadly occupy the same space.
Which brings us to the second problem of objectivism. Maybe it’s not coherent as a philosophical model, but how does it work as a personal philosophy. This is where the actual history and sociology of it becomes relevant. There are a lot of things that follow very easily from the core tenets that are... not great. They aren’t necessary conclusions from the premises, but they certainly seem to be common ones. These are ideas like selfishness being the best path to altruism. Ideas like the worth of individuals being measurable, in how effective they are at shaping the world. Ideas like an overclass/underclass structure of society being not only inevitable but morally desirable. In practise, these themes come up again and again in objectivist thought. From the intellectual tower of “pure objectivism” some of these might be considered missteps, and others might be considered stepping stones on the way to the greater good that only look ugly because of flawed assumptions from the observer. Judging these things is always going to be subjective. From my point of view though, objectivism certainly seems to enable and provide permission for a lot more bad behaviour than it does encourage good behaviour.
So, if objectivism as a personal philosophy works for you, and if it encourages you towards good behaviour, then great. But I really think it does very much the opposite for most people who subscribe to it. That’s plenty good reason to be uncomfortable with its signal being amplified.
To summarize:
1. Objectivism is philosophically void as an ontological and ethical framework.
2. Objectivism is net harmful as a sociological movement.
The big problem with objectivism appears (to me) to be that it assumes the individual has no obligations towards society. This is clearly a recipe for the collapse of society, and I'm not in favor of that.
Is that quite right? Could it instead assume that any person’s duty to society is determined solely by that person? It might be hard to tell the two apart in practice, but in theory they are quite different — with the latter there could be tons of duty guiding people’s actions, just none that is legitimately imposed by a central authority.
Edit: I should have read farther. ThePrussian’s answer says pretty much what I meant rather better than I did.
Thank you! Which answer in particular were you referring to?
Just to summarise: Rand argues - and, again, in 20 years I haven't heard a counterargument against this - that life, which is to say individual human life, living your life successfully means practicing as hard as you can, 7 virtues: Rationality, Independence, Integrity, Honesty, Justice, Productiveness, and Pride.
Now, imagine a society full of honest and productive and just people. I don't really see how such a society is doomed to collapse...
You are wrong about that. An individual has the obligation - this assumes he is being moral, i.e., that he has chosen to live rationally - to treat all other members of said society with justice and honesty, and to respect their rights. More, having a stake in said society's nature, reason obliges us to defend it an maintain it.
I go a little further than most Objectivists and argue that the whole basis for human society is mutual protection, so all members of a society have the obligation to defend the rights of all others. Not merely to passively _accept_ them, but to actively _defend_ them. Paine's line is brilliant: "A Bill of Rights is also a Prescription of Duties". Mind you, this is my own derivation, which I am certain follows logically from Objectivism, but it isn't shared that much.
>You are wrong about that. An individual has the obligation - this assumes he is being moral, i.e., that he has chosen to live rationally - to treat all other members of said society with justice and honesty, and to respect their rights
Even ifs its against there owninterests? You need to choose one,again.
I am hesitant to respond to the above, since it contains a lot of terms whose meanings are not quite clear to me. So instead I'll put the case positively.
Ethics - morality - if it is about anything is about what we should do, what the right behaviour is, what 'the Good' is. There are three basic questions:
1. What is the Good?
2. How do we know?
3. Why should we care?
And with neat symmetry, there are three traditional types of answer:
1. the Religious,
2. the Social
3. the Intrinsic.
The religious answer says the Good is whatever the man in the sky says it is, we know because he occaisionally sticks random ideas in the heads of Special People, and we have to follow what these special people say, or we'll be tortured forever.
The social answer says the Good is whatever the group (nation, race, society, class, whatever) says it is, we know this because certain Special People get random ideas that express the will of the group, and we should do this because, among other things, the group - at the direction of the Special People - has the right to mess you up good if you don't.
The intrinsic answer says that the Good is something you just somehow know, you know through random ideas that pop into your head, and you just somehow know from random ideas that you should do all this. This is the approach Scott takes in the Consequentialist F.A.Q., easily his weakest piece of writing (go look: just read "random idea" for "intuition" throughout).
In pracice, since different kinds of intrinsic types have different kinds of random ideas, the one who shouts the loudest tends to take over as a new Special Person and you go back to answers 1 and 2.
Okay.
And what about Rand? Well, she says what is the Good is what is required for you to live which is also what is required to live the best life possible, that you can know this by using your mind to carefully examine reality, including the reality of your own life, and you should do this because it is the path to a long, happy, fulfilled life, the best life for you and all other good people whom you will ever meet.
"And what about Rand? Well, she says what is the Good is what is required for you to live "
The good-for-me is whatever is whatever required for me to live. If I am starving and I steal food from another starving man, that is good-for-me, because I live another day. It's no so good for the victim of my theft.
With respect, this is the "If human beings evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" argument for us Objectivists.
Right off the bat I can think of things much better for both you and this other starving chap. You could appeal to your fellow human beings for help, until you can get back on your feet. Better, you could trade your work for food, the way many day labourers did, so both you and he would now have a stable source of food and a chance to better your prospects.
Better question: how did you and this guy end up in this situation? Theft isn't usually the result of starvation - more often, theft is the _cause_ of starvation. In a civilised society, the chronic thief finds himself unemployable and starving. In other societies, starvation is usually the result of truly grand-scale theft by the state, by the people with guns.
But - say you - what if there's just you and this guy, and one's going to die... Yeah, I know the argument. Rand called it "life boat ethics". What if there are two men stranded at sea in a lifeboat that only holds one?
Okay. But are you in this situation right now? How often does this occur? Is this the expected course of your life? Modelling your ethics on the extreme exception of an extreme exception is... questionable.
Basically, a parallel would be the "If Dr Evil will nuke a city unless I rape this woman, does that make rape okay?" This isn't a situation that happens often, and at some point you start to wonder why the person is asking the question...
"The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind, is particularly troublesome. [...] it can be argued that this question is one of the few big philosophical disputes that has actually been conclusively resolved [...]"
(Further and further off-topic) Could you say more about this? I'm particularly interested in meaning (ethics to me is precisely a concept that only makes sense within the collective). I think you implied that Wittgenstein solved this problem, how?
You're right that we're way off topic, so I won't go into any real detail, but this is generally seen to be the crux of the private language argument. It's not so much that Wittgenstein solved this problem as that he very convincingly showed that there cannot exist a coherent solution in an single isolated mind.
The definitive exploration of this is "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language" by Saul Kripke. It's short and relatively accessible.
Yes. For practical purposes, concepts are taught socially. You have to tell kids that "dog" is relatively narrow concept, and "animal" is a relatively broad one.
>Objectivism, as described by Rand herself, is the idea that humans are uniquely vital agents in a soulless material world, and that each individual, as a sealed unit of motive, meaning, and rationality is a sort of god-unto-oneself. Meaning and right, therefore, are derived on an individual basis by the exertion of agency, through the tools of rationality, upon the external world towards goals that satisfy the appetites of this central agent. In other words, each person is the heroic centre of their own universe, equipped with the ability to reshape the world to promote their own happiness, and with a moral compass that can only point towards that happiness
That's very eloquent!
A simpler way of putting the point is that Rand ignores biology...you start off as a helpless baby, you end up as an unemployable oldster. Without help from other people you're going to have a bad time at either end of your productive years.
> The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind
I don't think this is quite correct. Objectivism is definitely a form of ethical egoism, but her form of it still entails certain universal prescriptions that are required by reason, and which she's goes into at length. For instance, that "productive achievement as his noblest activity".
When I was younger, I could more or less make a formal argument against Objectivism. I had some friends who had gotten into Objectivism, and I read Rand's major fiction, plus some of her philosophical essays (which made a more formal version of the argument she makes in Galt's interminable speech).
If I recall correctly, Rand attempted to derive her philosophy from a fundamental choice between life and death. If the reader chose life, she argued that they also chose values consistent with life. And this was the first big philosophical sleight of hand: deciding which values are "consistent" with choosing life. For example, she argued that it was worth risking your life to avoid being enslaved, because being a slave was not consistent with that initial choice to live. I think there's actually a germ of interesting argument here, but I wouldn't call the version I read philosophy any more than I'd call a lot of C.S. Lewis's best work philosophy.
The problem for Rand's argument is that the initial choice of "life" is smuggling in an entire value system, and that value system is not uniquely determined. For example, someone from a society built around extended families might just as convincingly argue that the choice to live meant placing the interests of the extended family before the individual's. So the whole argument breaks down in the first 20 pages or so, as most amateur philosophical arguments do.
Which leaves me to evaluate Objectism as social movement, not as a philosophy. As a social movement, I find it tedious and uninspiring. The early leadership made a spectacular mess of their personal lives, mostly by trying to invent poly and making many of the classic newbie mistakes. Objectist art does not particularly inspire me, with the possible exception of one or two songs by Rush. I do not, in practice, enjoy spending time socially around Objectivists.
And perhaps unfairly, I politically lump Objectivists in with libertarians. And as I've aged, I've noticed that time and time again, libertarians have an alarming tendancy to transform into authoritarians, and/or to start spewing the most remarkable sorts of bigotry. None of this ought be inherent in libertarism, but it keeps happening to people I've known.
But this latter part is _not_ a philosophical argument against Objectivism. It's merely the list of reasons why (having read and rejected the philosophical argument), I do not usually bother to spend my time arguing about it. One of the lessons I've learned in life is that if a social movement makes my skin crawl in a particular way, it's rarely worth my time to engage with its arguments, for reasons described by G.K. Chesterton in "Orthodoxy":
> Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.
To me, much Objectivist argument feels very tight and circular in this way.
I'm going to home in on the essential mistake here, and leave the rest of this to one side, since it isn't an argument:
" For example, someone from a society built around extended families might just as convincingly argue that the choice to live meant placing the interests of the extended family before the individual's."
Here's the flaw: Life is only available to individuals. There is no such thing as a collective life, or a collective mind.
Yes, an extended family, assuming it's healthy, may be a great value. A great value... to whom? To an individual member of it. Or to someone else, who likes seeing a good family.
You know to whom - or what - it isn't a value? To a stone, or a river, or a dead person.
As I wrote above, the choice to live or not is your only 100% free one, the only one that isn't mixed up in other values - because all values presuppose the choice to live.
Oh, and an extended family that demanded an individual member subordinate his only life to its demands would not be any sort of value.
> leave the rest of this to one side, since it isn't an argument:
This is fine! The rest of my post was intended to explain why, even though I think Objectivism is wrong, I almost never bother to argue against it. The question is uninteresting to me in the way that debates about how a silver standard is ethically inferior to a gold standard are uninteresting to me.
> Here's the flaw: Life is only available to individuals. There is no such thing as a collective life, or a collective mind.
OK, so we're definitely discussing the same part of the argument. This is a good thing! (Especially because I'm relying on decades-old memories of the essays in question.)
But I don't think I explained my argument clearly. Let me try another metaphor.
The "100% free choice" between life and death essentially provides 1 bit of information. The philosophy of Objectivism is much larger—let's go by John Galt's speech and say it's roughly 90 pages long. Cut that in half to account for rhetoric, and apply some assumptions about information density of English text, and we get about 10kB of philosophy.
Rand's argument is essentially that a 1-bit choice implies at least 10kB of consequences.
But the mathematical problem is that you can't get 10kB out of a single bit unless you smuggle a bunch of information in by a side channel. "Choose life" is compatible with a great many philosophies. For example:
- "Dying on my feet is better than dying in chains, because a life in chains isn't really a life." (Rand argued something like this, IIRC. But it implies complex ideas about what lives are worth living, and what life means.)
- Many people have believed that it is better to die defending your homeland than to run and save your own skin. This closely analogous to the "better to die on my feet than in chains" argument, but I don't know how Rand would have felt about it. Would it matter if you were defending a free country against Stalin, and if you ran to save your life, allowing other people fully committed to the fight to die?
- For a silly example, in the Order of the Stick #652, the lich Xylon argues, "Be a vampire, or a ghost, or an immortal with a paint-by-numbers portrait in the rec room. Hell, even a brain-in-a-jar, in a pinch. Anything to avoid the Big Fire below." His philosophy is life at absolutely any cost.
Rand's argument is "choose life, but only a life that's worth living." In a mathematical sense, the resulting philosophy is "underdetermined." You can't derive a 90-page speech from a 1-bit choice. You need to add something to flesh it out. And I do not think that the next steps in Rand's argument justify her ultimate philosophy, any more than I think Xylon's choice of (un)life at all costs justifies his larger philosophy.
Anyway, I hope this makes my argument clearer. I'm not expecting this argument to be especially convincing, which is fine—as mentioned above, I am perfectly happy to ignore the question.
Well put again..this is the problem with axioms: she has these quite short, supposedly indisputable axioms, and she claims to derive all sorts of complex things from them.
> But the mathematical problem is that you can't get 10kB out of a single bit unless you smuggle a bunch of information in by a side channel.
I think this is the wrong model for thinking about this because it's misleading. As a loose metaphor, think of ethics as a decision tree whose content and structure is defined by her metaphysics and epistemology.
When she talks about choosing to live as man qua man, her metaphysics and epistemology define what it means to be human and human potential, and that is what defines the structure of the decision tree. Ethics is then the process of navigating this decision tree.
The binary choice to live as man qua man or not (your 1 bit) is the difference of living up to human potential, or giving up your humanity.
So trying to separate ethics from epistemology and metaphysics is the mistake that left you confused as to where all of those other bits are coming from. No matter what your philosophy, those three subjects are the inseparable pillars of any complete philosophy.
I agree with this.
Certainly with the last paragraph and not the first? “Ice Age Cahokia was definitely a thing” is much stronger than your “20% chance of Gobekli Tepe”
Well you could stick agree with the first statement and believe we only have a 20% of finding something if they’ve built their grand structures of wood or other short lasting materials
How much more can we expect to learn about the Vikings over time? Is this all we can know (lacking time travel)?
We are learning more over time as more graves and stuff are found. A few new connections to other manuscripts and stuff.
We know quite a lot about the vikings. We have a few texts that date back to that period in their origin, and a lot of texts written by their descendants a century or two after the end of the viking period. Do we have anything from ancient Egypt comparable to the saga literature?
They built in wood, but enough of their structures survived to be excavated and studied by modern archaeologists. Along with their weapons, jewelry, clothing, ... .
> "Do we have anything from ancient Egypt comparable to the saga literature?"
Sort of. We have huge amounts of preserved Egyptian writing, including both letters and the longer sorts of funerary inscriptions. But as far as actual literature goes, in Middle Egyptian? We have a couple hundred pages of moderately good literature, but the drop-off after that is steep. This includes a couple of saga-like tales, some collections of interesting annecdotes, some very deft political satire, and a couple of spiritual works. Taken together, it fills roughly the same niche as the Elder Edda. There's nothing directly analogous to the collected Icelandic sagas.
The ancestral Puebloans, Cahokians, and Polynesians were all having their “golden ages” centuries after the fall of Rome - I don’t see how their existence implies that similar societies must have existed 10 millennia earlier.
That’s what’s being talked about here - Puebloans confining themselves to narrow strips of coastline in a world where everyone else was barely beyond “caveman”.
The Vikings may have had some technology the Egyptians lacked, but Egyptian civilization was clearly on a different scale from vikings. That's why sea peoples sought to raid the Egyptians, while the vikings themselves were raiders.
IIUC, the vikings were not a culture. They was a fringe group on the edge of a culture that was mainly in southern/central Sweden. They were largely younger sons of noblemen that lived in Norway and their followers. The older sons stayed home and kept the family estate. We know about them because Odin was patron of nobles and bards.
Now the Norse culture did have skills that the Egyptians lacked, but it's not clear how many. The ones we know about are from groups that had to leave before the Christians came in and killed everyone. (Well, not everyone. See the "ordeal of the horn" (sorry, I couldn't find a good reference. Maybe you'll do better.) The guy who wanted to convert to Christianity rather than just being killed had a drinking horn forced down his throat, and a serpent was put in the bell of the horn, which was then sealed and heated until the serpent tried to escape. (I suspect this only happened to nobles, but "records are scarce".) And everything suspected of pagan influence was destroyed.
Lol Vikings were the ones who were killing Christians. Anyways no foreign Christians ever conquered their lands. Norse leadership converted to Christianity followed by the subjects. It was the Christian descendants of these Vikings who wrote down the pagan stories of their ancestors that the ancestors themselves could never bother to.
"Viking" is a profession, not a nationality or even a culture — there were Irish and Welsh vikings. But in this context, "Viking" refers to the Norse culture that most of the vikings came from in the period when vikings were active, ending sometime in the 11th century.
The culture was not mainly in Sweden, it was in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, and various of the islands. A good deal of what we know about it is due to the fact that the Icelandic branch produced quite a lot of good literature in the couple of centuries after the end of the viking period. I don't think Odin's preferences had much to do with that, since by the time that literature was written Iceland was Christian.
It is not true that everything suspected of pagan influence was destroyed. The original settlement of the Pagan/Christian dispute in Iceland in the year 1000 included toleration for private (but not public) pagan worship. Skaldic poetry continued to make heavy use of pagan materials long after all of the Norse lands were officially Christian.
To the extent that the Norse culture was in Ireland (not minor) it was the culture of the invaders. The Fingols, or "light haired foreigners". They did rule Ireland for awhile, but they were always seen as foreigners.
I thought Denmark was Vanir country rather than Aesir country. (There was a lot of slop, of course. And the invaders were often the Norse.) Iceland is from a later period than I was thinking of, but various islands are in period. Also Scotland and parts of England. But those *were* viking settlements. The Danes were a different culture ("Dane" I take as from "wain", the wagons lived in by the people of the Vanir.) Some time around the period of the Romans (eddas are a bit vague as to timing) the Norse (i.e. the Aesir) fought the people of the Vanir (i.e. the Vanir) to a draw, and came to a truce.
5th millennium BC is well past the Ice Age, so that finding is unrelated to this essay.
Also, well past the expansion of central Anatolian farmers using the Levantine farmer tool kit. Which, genetically the people there are descended from.
> 5th millennium BC is well past the Ice Age
What do we mean by this? According to the standard definition, the most recent Ice Age is still going on right now.
"Ice age" is colloquially used to refer to the last glacial maximum. Not technically correct, but its common usage.
Last glaciation, not last glacial maximum. Glacial periods (just like interglacial ones) have their ups and down. The LGM was merely the maximum.
Not sure it is such a mystery anyway. You would expect with earlier civs for there to be both a wider variety in potential cultural practices, and access to resource of an accessibility and richness that was not later possible.
The Varna finds are very cool, but I don’t really think there is anything odd about them or they challenge previous info.
Fascinating, but still within the accepted span of human civilisation and after agriculture got started. This is not "ancient Atlantis had flying saucers" levels that the usual "lost prehistoric civilisations" go for. Generally, because "okay humans were using stone tools a millenium before we thought they did" is not sexy for the kind of National Geographic Special, the proponents of such lost civilisations go for "they had tech equivalent to our modern level (where "modern" covers anything from the 1930s to today) or even more advanced", not "so they were chipping really good flint hand axes earlier than the consensus had it".
I think people are open to "pre-Ice Age civilisations on a Stone Age level", but while we all had the dream of the "lost in the depths of Darkest Africa, an ancient lost civilisation remains to be found" and so forth, that's not probable. We can extrapolate large, culturally complex, past societies but nothing like "ancient laser beam technology".
Going to read all of this later, but an archeology channel on youtube is doing a series on Graham Hancock's Netflix series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A
The other problem with these theories is - where did they go? The sea level rise was fast on a geological scale, but not a human one. Yes, some sites would get flooded but presumably not fast enough to drown their inhabitants and make them forget how to do all the civilization things that would be leaving large monuments behind. We’d expect to find sites inland, or we’d have to explain why the civilizations completely collapsed prior to the sea level rise.
I don't know, civilizations can disappear. Consider Afghanistan in the 1970s, which had significant advancements and appeared quite westernized compared to today (https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/see-how-afghanistan-looked-like-before-the-taliban-ever-came-to-power-1842766-2021-08-19).
There are civilizations that we know existed from the records of other civilizations, which we cannot seem to find. See things like "The Sea People" as an example.
Especially if war was involved, where the victor may have destroyed the loser and carried off the people. Early stone buildings, even very advanced ones, may not look like much if all of the stones are torn down.
ETA: and obviously buildings with less durable materials would almost certainly all be gone by now.
I think there is a significant distinction between a civilization declining, even quite sharply, and a civilization disappearing completely from the archaeological record. Even after something like the Late Bronze Age Collapse or the Dark Ages or the collapse of various indigenous civilizations in the Americas, it’s not as if the people after the collapse become invisible.
It’s not impossible of course but I agree with Scott that it puts a hard upper bound on how advanced such a civilization would be. Any civilization would need to have sprung up during the ice age, rose to whatever level of advancement you theorize, and then utterly collapse, all while never leaving the fairly narrow strip of coastal elevation that would later be reflooded. It raises the question of “what happened” and the answer almost certainly can’t be just welp their old cities flooded and they never bothered moving inland.
War or disease might do it I suppose but again that upper bound - something like Ancient Egypt would need an unprecedented plague to just totally disappear, and any enemy strong enough to absolutely wipe them out would probably themselves be advanced enough to leave a lot of evidence behind. (The mystery of the Sea Peoples is almost certainly limited to “from which civilization we already know about did the Sea People come”, they are probably not a phantom civilization that rose, raided, and then vanished except for a few vague notes in Egyptian inscriptions).
This all ignores my actual beef with the Ice Age civilization theories, which is their path dependence. In large part, belief in these civilizations doesn’t come from “hey look at all this archaeological evidence we have that only really works if there is was an advanced civilization that got flooded after the Ice Age ended”, but rather from people who believe deeply that Atlantis existed and are trying to shoehorn that myth into something vaguely plausible.
There are lots of other "hard bounds". Quarries don't move around much, and can often be dated. We can tell that they didn't use various easily available resources, because they were there to be used at a later date. Etc.
For just about any resource, you can track when the easily accessible parts got used. (Well, *I* can't track that, but for each resource there are those who can.) Just consider what the post-apocalypse civilization will need to do to get oil or anthracite. Or even good gravel.
The steelman the argument of the "shoehorn atlantis" people is that there seem to have been a lot of sites with later investigations that are regularly found (by mainstream folks) to be older than earlier studies (and the reverse is also at times true). None of that invalidates the overall evidence and trend, but we should make a slight Bayesian adjustment to thinking that there may be older pockets of civilization than we know about, but not the overfitting of "everything is older." A site found to be occupied a couple hundred years earlier than previously known is not the same thing as thousands of years earlier, and might not be same people or people of similar technical sophistication.
I think the best case for some of these things is that in many parts of the world, the areas that were flooded in post-Ice Age sea level rise isn't a "narrow strip" - rather, it's an even wider area than the areas that are currently between sea level and 100 meters.
If there were notable civilizations on Dogger Bank or the Mediterranean or the Bahamas, and if those civilizations didn't build significant sites more than a few dozen miles from the coast, then it's conceivable that they all got hidden by sea level rise.
That said, it would be surprising if there was any *big* civilization that didn't get too far from the coast along the rivers.
During an Ice Age, you'd want to be at as low an elevation as possible to stay warm, which would often be below current sea levels. On the other hand, you'd probably want to put your big buildings on top of hills and outcroppings for defense. So, yeah, the idea that there were a lot of impressive buildings built during the Ice Age and every single one of them happened to be below the current sea level is implausible.
I agree that this kind of analysis should limit how big such a civilization would be expected to get (I'm not quite to "hard limit" but close enough for our purposes).
I really don't think an 1700s major international civilization would be possible. I'm pretty skeptical of the Egyptian pyramid scenario as well, but think that could come down to definitions and timing. As Scott mentioned, the Sphinx may be much older than previously thought.
I do think that we would have a very hard time disproving a Stonehenge-level society. It would be incredibly easy to have lost the physical evidence of such a society. As I said above, this is especially true if they built with materials unlikely to survive that length of time or in the conditions (underwater) that we would be likely to find them in.
Afghanistan didn't disappear. In fact, there are more people there now than in the 1970s.
Way too many
Most of these pictures are of Americans and other Westerners living in Afghanistan in the 70s. Like the last picture is of (American) boys and girls attending the (American) School in Kabul. Most Afghanis didn't even attend school much less coeducational ones during that period.
No doubt, but it *is* an example of some thing becoming unrecognizable in a fairly short time. You can also look at ISIS intentionally destroying thousands of years of archeological history in a few days.
My point is not that Afghanistan was completely different, but to find an example of fairly substantial change in a short time period. We're talking about thousands of years for these sites to disappear, which means a lot more can happen.
This doesn't follow- displaced people aren't just the same people doing the same things. If you have a sedentary agriculture wealthy enough to raise monuments it doesn't hold that if you lose that agriculrual base and have to restructure your entire society that you will rise to that level of wealth again. If the lands which were flooded were particularly fertile, or particularly well suited to the crops you domesticated then the flooding could well reset you to a much poorer agricultural lifestyle or even force your descendants into a H/G lifestyle and you are basically three generations away from losing all the knowledge that was useful for the first lifesytle but not the second.
See my previous reply - decline yes, vanish probably not. They might not rise to the same level ever again, but they wouldn’t completely forget the very concept of farming or that metalworking existed or that writing things down was a good idea or whatever. Even that assumes a pretty rapid change from “farming works” to “agriculture is unsustainable”. Post Ice Age sea level rise was tens of meters over hundreds of years - this would have been a gradual shift inland over generations not an “oh shit a volcano killed most of us and buried our fields and now we must abandon civilization”.
Consider something like the ancient Puebloan people of the southwest US - fairly rapid and severe climate change seems to have caused them to voluntarily abandon a lot of their larger dwellings that are now left behind, and they didn’t seem to build anything equivalent afterwards. But they just moved somewhere else more temperate and started farming there, they didn’t forget how to grow crops or how to make pots and baskets.
The “collapses” we’ve actually witnessed are much less severe than the cataclysm that would have had to befall these civilizations - knocking them (and anybody who interacted with them) back literally thousands of years on the “tech tree”.
This is just an assertion. We have lots of historical evidence of building types going out of style in very short order when situations deteriorated. After the collapse of the Roman empire building with stone drops way, way down and building with mud/wood goes way up, and that is a trivail inconvience (the fall of Rome) compared to every major city being underwater.
To the rest of the post- the hypothesis is generally that a large impact(s) either caused or coincided with the sea level rise, which very plausibly could cause crop failures and large population declines. By the time you get a population rebound large enough to rebuild even a shadow of the former society the sea level rise will have wiped out all the low lying cities which means all the trade routes which depended on those cities for goods or as resupply points are done with in addition to the lower population leading to less surplus activity which means its not likely that new routes will be sought out (and even if they were they would continually be interrupted as sea level rise continued to flood other population centers.
There absoultely is the chance that a people could face devestation to the extent that they would 'forget' all kids of things, anything that isn't in active use quickly becomes forgotten. Toss in that the hypothesis includes the fact that examples of their older work would be completely inacessessible to them and it is a reasonable outcome that specific skills would simply be lost.
Writing is one of the things that has repeatedly gotten lost. It's often restricted to a small elite group, and for everybody else it's what tells the tax collector how much you owe.
Lost doesn't mean totally lost. Merchants can find pieces of it valuable. But effectively lost. Linear B is one classic example, but it's not the only one. There's currently a claim that the Neanderthals or possibly Cro-magnon had a limited form of writing that they used to track when the prey would be giving birth, etc. If so writing in one form or another has been around a LONG time, and we don't know anything about most of the earlier forms. (How are you at Ogham?)
Well, there's a few places that did "just collapse", but the ones I thinking of are a lot later, and the explanation is "the river dried up or got diverted". (In at least one case I suspect enemy action, but the proof is missing.)
However, in those cases there's no clear evidence where the folks went. So I don't find this a compelling argument. (I have a friend who believes they treked from India to Israel, and that Exodus is a lot longer ago that the begats indicate and... well, that's an answer, but I don't find it compelling.)
Not quite - ice dam bursts on the north American continent have been known to release a lot of water from ocean size lakes - in a human relevant time period.
For example, per Wikipedia
"This final drainage of Lake Agassiz has been associated with an estimated 0.8 to 2.8 m (2.6 to 9.2 ft) rise in global sea levels.[13]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz
A quickish five foot rise is sea level could really devastate a costal civilization, especially if the rise is non globally uniform.
Pre-glacial maximum agriculture would probably have lost the domesticated crops. CO2 levels were too low during the glacial max to allow high enough productivity to make agriculture worth pursuing.
So we'd need to be looking for signs of ag from roughly 100,000 years ago when CO2 levels were similar to the current era.
But presumably in that period, not many of the sites would be flooded, so if there's some significantly denser population somewhere, that should show up in excavations of sites from that period, right?
I imagine so. At least traces. On the other hand, we just recently discovered a major new civilization in the Amazon that was present just hundreds of years ago. No one had bothered to look before. Gobekli Tepe was thought to be a Roman-era construction, until someone actually dug it up. So, it's possible.
Personally I doubt there were 100,000-year-old civilizations.
This. There is a lot more places we haven't looked than places we have.
Exactly - the world clearly has a richer past than we currently understand. There are enough places were we have some _some_ evidence of interesting cultures with almost no details that are certainly many more that we don't even know we are missing. But at the same time that doesn't mean that there are lost high-tech civilizations when current evidence is pointing to hunter-gathering being the norm. Yet there might very well be some interesting civil works we know nothing about today that will be discovered in coming decades. The increasingly low cost of things like drone surveys of remote sites using broad-spectrum and magnetic imaging as well as ground-penetrating technologies is going to turn up more and more interesting finds, it should be exciting.
Wouldn't they end up destroyed by later melt waters. I mean you don't need anything as extreme as the giant floods that created the bad lands to totally destroy evidence of human habitation. Our evidence for neolithic sites is often as little as different colored dirt from post holes and some animal teeth. Bury it in ice and then flood it with melt water and it's undetectable.
Behavioral modernity is generally dated to ~50k years ago, so any hypothetical 100k year old human civilization didn't engage in any advanced burial practices, leave behind art, or wear personal ornamentation (e.g. beads) as far as the record shows.
Interesting post! I've written on this topic, both for popular audiences (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513822000447) and for academic ones (https://aeon.co/essays/not-all-early-human-societies-were-small-scale-egalitarian-bands). I don't want to argue here for Pleistocene Great Pyramids or Buckingham Palaces, but here are two points that I think should increase priors about Gobekli Tepe- or Stonehenge-levels:
1. I think there's increasingly evidence that domestication (genetic changes resulting from patterns of human cultivation/resource management) runs deep. One of the coolest but underrated findings, I think, is evidence of incipient grain domestication at the Last Glacial Maximum at Ohalo II in Israel more than 10,000 years before the onset of the Holocene (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422&xid=17259,15700019,15700124,15700149,15700168,15700173,15700186,15700190,15700201). The title and abstract are all about weeds, but just as striking is the proportion of domestic-type rachises, which is much higher than in wild populations (although still quite low compared to "fully" domesticated situations). This site's discovery was a serendipitous fluke (it has a fascinating backstory); many instances of Pleistocene domestication have probably eluded us.
2. I wouldn't discount how sophisticated societies can become without domesticated plants. In my Aeon essay, I focus on the Calusa, who had what seems like a tributary state/kingdom (they are also covered in The Dawn of Everything). They inhabited modern-day Florida, collected tribute from an area the size of Belgium, and were capable of profound feats, constructing huge mounds and a 4-km-long canal. But their resource base was, for the most part, fish. To your point about how easy it is to record such societies, they were observed during the Spanish colonial era and were near modern-day centers of anthropological research. Yet they were largely unknown to archaeologists until the 1970s. So I think we should expect to have overlooked lots of sophisticated non-agricultural peoples, especially in the Pleistocene.
Great reply! I'll check out your articles!
I think “domestication runs deep” actually works against the Ice Age civilization theory, because it makes it even harder to explain why it would have popped up thousands of years early but only very specifically in areas that would be flooded slowly over hundreds of years when the ice sheets melted.
Minor Correction: It is "Mohenjo-daro" not "Mojeno-Daro"
Thanks, fixed.
Am I the only one who thinks Shermer is overrated as a Skeptic and a Rationalist?
While I was criticising the racialists, I read his critique in "Why People Believe Weird Things", and it was just terrible. He made logical errors one could drive a truck through (his essay in "The Borderlands of Science" is much better, though it focuses only on sports).
And don't even get me started on his chapter on Objectivism. He literally writes a chapter on a philosophy while never discussing what that philosophy is, while relying on third hand accounts of the founder's personal circle, third hand accounts that are from sources he knows are biased.
You're not the only one. I'm usually unimpressed with what I've read of him.
He also sometimes does a bait and switch, and maybe that's what you're objecting to in his Objectivism essay (which I haven't read). His book on Holocaust denial, for example, is a book proving the Holocaust happened. I have no objection to people making that argument and the more, the better. And as far as I could tell, his reasoning and facts were good in that case. But the book wasn't really about the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, and when I picked it up at the library, that's what I wanted to read about.
That's exactly it - he does bait-and-switch all the time. Which is extremely irritating, especially if you agree with the overall point he is making. There is something particularly vexing about seeing shoddy arguments defending a case you respect.
Well, I managed to be unimpressed with objectivism without reading Shermer.
And here we go...
I have a standing challenge to anyone to clearly state what Objectivism is - what the core of Rand's philosophy is - and then present a rational case against it.
I have looked for 20 years, and found exactly nothing. You might be the first. But I doubt it.
Do you have any recommendations for works which (even if they don’t argue against it) clearly state what Objectivism is? If nobody can define it clearly, that might be more of a problem for Objectivism than for its critics
Ayn Rand has a long, almost 100 page section in "Atlas Shrugged" where she uses her main protagonist John Galt as a mouthpiece to lay out Objectivism in one long, boring speech.
There isn't really a "core" for Objectivism, Rand lays out her entire metaphysics (which she sums up as "A is A", which she says she learned from Aristotle), Epistemology (which I can't really recall, but it wasn't very sophisticated - for the most part her Epistemology from my recollection is "I believe this, therefore it is true", and she relies heavily on stating things are "self-evident", many such statements are in my view not self-evident. For example, she states that smoking is self evidently good, because it is a promethean symbol of man's creativity and industry.
She also lays out a system of Aesthetics in her Objectivist system, but its one small book, and doesn't come up much in her main works "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead", at least from my recollection.
The meat and potatoes of Rand's Objectivism is her Ethics, which is a modified version of ethical egoism. Egoism suffers from circular reasoning and many other problems. I found egoism to be seductive when I first learned of it, but the shine wears off, and my own life experience doesn't jive with it.
I don't pretend that I am providing a full and accurate characterization of objectivism or that I am providing great arguments against it, but maybe this will help anyone who hasn't gone through their "Ayn Rand" phase. Every philosophy teacher I spoke with was less than impressed with Rand and had good arguments for why her system was just generally lacking and fails to wrestle adequately with most difficult philosophical problems (argument from authority, this is just food for thought rather than an argument, consider it context).
You're wrong about her Epistemology. You read S.A.'s review of "Surfing Uncertainty"? Rand anticipated all of that by 26 years.
That said, you are much fairer than most people I meet online when it comes to discussing Rand.
The only things I know about Ayn Rand are from reading "Atlas Shrugged", "The Fountainhead", and a couple of her essay compilations, I forget which ones. All years ago now.
I'm sure my characterization of her Epistemology is incomplete.
Ayn Rand gets dunked on by a lot of people who haven't read her work, and from people who dislike her for political reasons (her influence on the current far-right and libertarians). I can imagine for fans of hers it must be frustrating to see people setting up strawmen version of Rand's views and destroying them easily with lots of self congratulating.
Again, personally I liked her work some time ago, but after long consideration I no longer resonate with her system of beliefs. I am all about disagreeing with people in good faith and for the right reasons - I'm not the best person to argue against Objectivism though, I don't have a sophisticated knowledge of it, or good arguments against it. I saw Ghost's comment below that I thought was quite good, I recommend engaging respectfully with them, as their arguments and characterization appears to be in good faith, and of a high quality.
I actually read her philosophy. Please...she claims that the gold standard follows from considerations of pure logic. Umm, ok that's funny since you can't even deduce the existence of gold from pure logic.
Sure you could imagine a more careful claim like the use of a currency standard satisfying such and such properties follows by logic from assumptions A-E but she doesn't do anything like that.
FWIW, after reading a couple of Ayn Rand books, and a few RAWilson books, I was more favorably impressed by Discordianism than by Objectivism. But I can't define either of them, Even though I've got a copy of Principia Discordia.
Chunks of RAWs stuff are reactions to Rand ("Telemachus Sneezed!")...but it took me a while to realise that, because I read them in the wrong order , as it were. Rand is little known in Europe, and I didn't find out about Objectivism till going online in the nineties.
Sure. One can start with everything Ayn Rand wrote. Try reading Atlas Shrugged, and if that's too long, Galt's Speech, and if that's too long The Objectivist Ethics.
Wikipedia is also pretty good - by which I mean better than 99% of online detractors. I do find it irritating that they write "So and so said Objectivism is wrong here" without ever saying how, but one cannot have everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism
There is definitely a lot of argument between Rand's followers. You can't say "it" is 100% true when there is no agreement about what "it" is.
Yeah, no. The arguments are about less than 1%. 99% is agreed on.
I still insist that Objectivism is not a thing at all. I did a Master's Degree in Political Science in Italy, without ever hearing of it.
The first time while leaving in the US when I heard of "Randians" I thought it was Rand Paul's political faction, and I was really puzzled about why someone should base their political thought around an obscure sci-fi writer.
Deep, profound arguments. Earth-shattering. Why, you floor me, Sir, with the sheer brilliance of your insight.
Now. Do you have an actual point?
Rand's books have sold something like 37 million copies, which makes her one of the least obscure sf writers of the 20th century. Terry Pratchett beats her, but I'm not sure how many other writers do.
This comment provoked me to check out the Wikipedia list of authors with the most book sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_authors
Ayn Rand doesn't appear to make this list, but I don't think the list claims to be exhaustive. It does seem to contain close to a hundred names who each sold over 100 million copies (interestingly, Agatha Christie might beat out William Shakespeare for the number 1 spot!) I'm only familiar with about half the names on the top 10, but I am familiar with close to half the names for the whole list.
I didn’t recognize as many of the names as you did, but the only SF writer I noticed was Michael Crichton. But then I’m not sure I’d have called either Rand or Pratchett SF either. The exploration of the use of Reardenite in Atlas Shrugged is plausibly SF but it has little to do with the plot, and the static-electricity free energy is just silly.
It's interesting that Rand gets such a bad rap as an author given the standard theories most ppl advanced about the value of literature. I don't put any real stock in her ideas but it's hard to argue that she exposes the reader to a dramatically different way of looking at the world that some ppl genuinely have (no to mention what a Dexedrine habit feels like) so it seems like if ppl really meant that theory she should rate pretty highly as literature.
(to be clear I don't buy such theories...I think it's basically just fun and reject the idea there is some deeper benefit from art...but many ppl feel differently).
Enjoying something as fiction, and taking it seriously as philosophy are different things...but there are many points inbetween.
STP outsold Rand, but isn't taken seriously on the mainstream either.
Rand was not, however, an obscure sf writer, which was the claim I was responding to.
That's not a good argument.
OTOH, I feel that "Objectivism" would work much less well than pure anarchy. Which is NOT praise of anarchy.
Objectivism is a philosophy, not a political system. Rand rejected anarchy but there is no reason why someone could not share her philosophy but reject the details of her political proposal — a government that funded itself by selling the service of rights enforcement, of which it had a monopoly — as unworkable or inconsistent with Objectivism. I think that was Roy Childs' position, at least at one point.
Objectivism definitely isn't mainstream...opinions vary as to whether that's a bug or a feature.
https://owl232.net/papers/rand.htm
Right out of the gate, this is terrible:
"But then how could it be that Oedipus could believe what (J) asserts without believing what (M) asserts, if they assert the same thing?"
Because knowledge is something held by an individual consciousness? There's no such thing as knowledge "out there", nor is there a collective brain. Every bit of knowledge that is known is known by someone.
To put it simply, Oedipus didn't know he'd married his mother. Ta-dah! Solved.
5.1 one is better, but still wrong. It asks, "Well, how can you prove that life is good?" And Rand does answer: "You can't. You have to make that choice completely alone. It is the one truly free choice you have. You can't say, 'I choose to live because of my children, my work, my family, whatever', because those all presuppose that you have chosen life. They are values that make life worth living, and make it easier and better to do so, but they are only possible once you have made that choice - to live. You have the choice to die, you have the choice to live self-destructively, which is slow death by self-imposed torture. You have those choices, but you have no choice about the nature of the choice."
I'll look at the rest later. As I say, I have looked for 20 years.
,"Objectivists say that "the meaning of a concept is all of the concretes" Huemer, quoting Rand)
"Because knowledge is something held by an individual consciousness"
Choose one. How can knowledge be internal when meaning is external? (Prussian)
I have a better idea! Why don't you, I don't know, read the relevant text yourself? It's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology", if you are curious.
There is no contradiction here whatsoever. Huemer is misquoting Rand. A concept is an integration of concretes.
Concrete whats? Concrete perceptions. Perceptions which are held where? In an individual consciousness.
Objectivism, as described by Rand herself, is the idea that humans are uniquely vital agents in a soulless material world, and that each individual, as a sealed unit of motive, meaning, and rationality is a sort of god-unto-oneself. Meaning and right, therefore, are derived on an individual basis by the exertion of agency, through the tools of rationality, upon the external world towards goals that satisfy the appetites of this central agent. In other words, each person is the heroic centre of their own universe, equipped with the ability to reshape the world to promote their own happiness, and with a moral compass that can only point towards that happiness.
I can't resurrect Rand, but I'm reasonably confident she would be broadly okay with that high level characterisation. And, in the abstract, it's compelling. At it's heart, it's not that different from modern rationalism, especially when we allow that, of course, the happiness of any given agent can be (and is) contingent on the happiness of other (or all) agents.
The problem with this philosophy is twofold.
First, it's sort of fundamentally philosophically ungrounded. It posits an external world, and not just in the "we all posit an external world to survive" sense. Objectivism requires that an objective reality of referents and means exist independent of us, that we have direct access to that world through sense data, and that there be no meaning, morality, or sense in this world before we put it there. It also requires that meaning and morality be things that can exist within a single individual, without requiring outside reference and collaboration. None of the are particularly young or radical ideas in the fields of ethics, ontology, and epistemology. All of them are also open, and quite possibly unresolvable, questions despite millennia of attention from many of humanity's greatest minds.
The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind, is particularly troublesome. This is an idea which has proven to be a real sticking point for a lot of philosophical models, and recognizing it as a hurdle is one of the more significant forces that has advanced modern philosophy in the last few hundred years. In fact, depending on how you read, interpret, and value Wittgenstein, it can be argued that this question is one of the few big philosophical disputes that has actually been conclusively resolved, and not in the way that objectivism requires. Of course, not everyone agrees, this is philosophy. So we can proceed as though this remains an open question. It changes little
In the realm of philosophy, a schematic of ethics and meaning that posits answers to unresolved questions as axioms and then builds from there is basically a toy. A toy can be a useful rhetorical device for inestigating these questions, but it’s not a coherent and stable philosophy of its own. It doesn’t stand on the same ground as actual philosophical models. Note that, through this same lens, religious philosophies are also toys, and the difference in scope is why religious thought struggles so much in philosophical debate. I’m not exactly trying to make an inflammatory statement like “objectivism is a religion,” but, honestly, the two broadly occupy the same space.
Which brings us to the second problem of objectivism. Maybe it’s not coherent as a philosophical model, but how does it work as a personal philosophy. This is where the actual history and sociology of it becomes relevant. There are a lot of things that follow very easily from the core tenets that are... not great. They aren’t necessary conclusions from the premises, but they certainly seem to be common ones. These are ideas like selfishness being the best path to altruism. Ideas like the worth of individuals being measurable, in how effective they are at shaping the world. Ideas like an overclass/underclass structure of society being not only inevitable but morally desirable. In practise, these themes come up again and again in objectivist thought. From the intellectual tower of “pure objectivism” some of these might be considered missteps, and others might be considered stepping stones on the way to the greater good that only look ugly because of flawed assumptions from the observer. Judging these things is always going to be subjective. From my point of view though, objectivism certainly seems to enable and provide permission for a lot more bad behaviour than it does encourage good behaviour.
So, if objectivism as a personal philosophy works for you, and if it encourages you towards good behaviour, then great. But I really think it does very much the opposite for most people who subscribe to it. That’s plenty good reason to be uncomfortable with its signal being amplified.
To summarize:
1. Objectivism is philosophically void as an ontological and ethical framework.
2. Objectivism is net harmful as a sociological movement.
The big problem with objectivism appears (to me) to be that it assumes the individual has no obligations towards society. This is clearly a recipe for the collapse of society, and I'm not in favor of that.
Is that quite right? Could it instead assume that any person’s duty to society is determined solely by that person? It might be hard to tell the two apart in practice, but in theory they are quite different — with the latter there could be tons of duty guiding people’s actions, just none that is legitimately imposed by a central authority.
Edit: I should have read farther. ThePrussian’s answer says pretty much what I meant rather better than I did.
Thank you! Which answer in particular were you referring to?
Just to summarise: Rand argues - and, again, in 20 years I haven't heard a counterargument against this - that life, which is to say individual human life, living your life successfully means practicing as hard as you can, 7 virtues: Rationality, Independence, Integrity, Honesty, Justice, Productiveness, and Pride.
Now, imagine a society full of honest and productive and just people. I don't really see how such a society is doomed to collapse...
You are wrong about that. An individual has the obligation - this assumes he is being moral, i.e., that he has chosen to live rationally - to treat all other members of said society with justice and honesty, and to respect their rights. More, having a stake in said society's nature, reason obliges us to defend it an maintain it.
I go a little further than most Objectivists and argue that the whole basis for human society is mutual protection, so all members of a society have the obligation to defend the rights of all others. Not merely to passively _accept_ them, but to actively _defend_ them. Paine's line is brilliant: "A Bill of Rights is also a Prescription of Duties". Mind you, this is my own derivation, which I am certain follows logically from Objectivism, but it isn't shared that much.
Yes. The notion that inner-directedness necessarily implies a war of all against all is one of the most pernicious mistakes of modern times.
>You are wrong about that. An individual has the obligation - this assumes he is being moral, i.e., that he has chosen to live rationally - to treat all other members of said society with justice and honesty, and to respect their rights
Even ifs its against there owninterests? You need to choose one,again.
I am hesitant to respond to the above, since it contains a lot of terms whose meanings are not quite clear to me. So instead I'll put the case positively.
Ethics - morality - if it is about anything is about what we should do, what the right behaviour is, what 'the Good' is. There are three basic questions:
1. What is the Good?
2. How do we know?
3. Why should we care?
And with neat symmetry, there are three traditional types of answer:
1. the Religious,
2. the Social
3. the Intrinsic.
The religious answer says the Good is whatever the man in the sky says it is, we know because he occaisionally sticks random ideas in the heads of Special People, and we have to follow what these special people say, or we'll be tortured forever.
The social answer says the Good is whatever the group (nation, race, society, class, whatever) says it is, we know this because certain Special People get random ideas that express the will of the group, and we should do this because, among other things, the group - at the direction of the Special People - has the right to mess you up good if you don't.
The intrinsic answer says that the Good is something you just somehow know, you know through random ideas that pop into your head, and you just somehow know from random ideas that you should do all this. This is the approach Scott takes in the Consequentialist F.A.Q., easily his weakest piece of writing (go look: just read "random idea" for "intuition" throughout).
In pracice, since different kinds of intrinsic types have different kinds of random ideas, the one who shouts the loudest tends to take over as a new Special Person and you go back to answers 1 and 2.
Okay.
And what about Rand? Well, she says what is the Good is what is required for you to live which is also what is required to live the best life possible, that you can know this by using your mind to carefully examine reality, including the reality of your own life, and you should do this because it is the path to a long, happy, fulfilled life, the best life for you and all other good people whom you will ever meet.
Obviously Rand is the bonkers evil one.
"And what about Rand? Well, she says what is the Good is what is required for you to live "
The good-for-me is whatever is whatever required for me to live. If I am starving and I steal food from another starving man, that is good-for-me, because I live another day. It's no so good for the victim of my theft.
With respect, this is the "If human beings evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" argument for us Objectivists.
Right off the bat I can think of things much better for both you and this other starving chap. You could appeal to your fellow human beings for help, until you can get back on your feet. Better, you could trade your work for food, the way many day labourers did, so both you and he would now have a stable source of food and a chance to better your prospects.
Better question: how did you and this guy end up in this situation? Theft isn't usually the result of starvation - more often, theft is the _cause_ of starvation. In a civilised society, the chronic thief finds himself unemployable and starving. In other societies, starvation is usually the result of truly grand-scale theft by the state, by the people with guns.
But - say you - what if there's just you and this guy, and one's going to die... Yeah, I know the argument. Rand called it "life boat ethics". What if there are two men stranded at sea in a lifeboat that only holds one?
Okay. But are you in this situation right now? How often does this occur? Is this the expected course of your life? Modelling your ethics on the extreme exception of an extreme exception is... questionable.
Basically, a parallel would be the "If Dr Evil will nuke a city unless I rape this woman, does that make rape okay?" This isn't a situation that happens often, and at some point you start to wonder why the person is asking the question...
"The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind, is particularly troublesome. [...] it can be argued that this question is one of the few big philosophical disputes that has actually been conclusively resolved [...]"
(Further and further off-topic) Could you say more about this? I'm particularly interested in meaning (ethics to me is precisely a concept that only makes sense within the collective). I think you implied that Wittgenstein solved this problem, how?
You're right that we're way off topic, so I won't go into any real detail, but this is generally seen to be the crux of the private language argument. It's not so much that Wittgenstein solved this problem as that he very convincingly showed that there cannot exist a coherent solution in an single isolated mind.
The definitive exploration of this is "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language" by Saul Kripke. It's short and relatively accessible.
Thank you.
Is that answer coherent?
Yes. For practical purposes, concepts are taught socially. You have to tell kids that "dog" is relatively narrow concept, and "animal" is a relatively broad one.
>Objectivism, as described by Rand herself, is the idea that humans are uniquely vital agents in a soulless material world, and that each individual, as a sealed unit of motive, meaning, and rationality is a sort of god-unto-oneself. Meaning and right, therefore, are derived on an individual basis by the exertion of agency, through the tools of rationality, upon the external world towards goals that satisfy the appetites of this central agent. In other words, each person is the heroic centre of their own universe, equipped with the ability to reshape the world to promote their own happiness, and with a moral compass that can only point towards that happiness
That's very eloquent!
A simpler way of putting the point is that Rand ignores biology...you start off as a helpless baby, you end up as an unemployable oldster. Without help from other people you're going to have a bad time at either end of your productive years.
> The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind
I don't think this is quite correct. Objectivism is definitely a form of ethical egoism, but her form of it still entails certain universal prescriptions that are required by reason, and which she's goes into at length. For instance, that "productive achievement as his noblest activity".
Well yes, but that's all based on smuggling in extra information by narrowing the definition of a term, from the original, broad and vague one.
When I was younger, I could more or less make a formal argument against Objectivism. I had some friends who had gotten into Objectivism, and I read Rand's major fiction, plus some of her philosophical essays (which made a more formal version of the argument she makes in Galt's interminable speech).
If I recall correctly, Rand attempted to derive her philosophy from a fundamental choice between life and death. If the reader chose life, she argued that they also chose values consistent with life. And this was the first big philosophical sleight of hand: deciding which values are "consistent" with choosing life. For example, she argued that it was worth risking your life to avoid being enslaved, because being a slave was not consistent with that initial choice to live. I think there's actually a germ of interesting argument here, but I wouldn't call the version I read philosophy any more than I'd call a lot of C.S. Lewis's best work philosophy.
The problem for Rand's argument is that the initial choice of "life" is smuggling in an entire value system, and that value system is not uniquely determined. For example, someone from a society built around extended families might just as convincingly argue that the choice to live meant placing the interests of the extended family before the individual's. So the whole argument breaks down in the first 20 pages or so, as most amateur philosophical arguments do.
Which leaves me to evaluate Objectism as social movement, not as a philosophy. As a social movement, I find it tedious and uninspiring. The early leadership made a spectacular mess of their personal lives, mostly by trying to invent poly and making many of the classic newbie mistakes. Objectist art does not particularly inspire me, with the possible exception of one or two songs by Rush. I do not, in practice, enjoy spending time socially around Objectivists.
And perhaps unfairly, I politically lump Objectivists in with libertarians. And as I've aged, I've noticed that time and time again, libertarians have an alarming tendancy to transform into authoritarians, and/or to start spewing the most remarkable sorts of bigotry. None of this ought be inherent in libertarism, but it keeps happening to people I've known.
But this latter part is _not_ a philosophical argument against Objectivism. It's merely the list of reasons why (having read and rejected the philosophical argument), I do not usually bother to spend my time arguing about it. One of the lessons I've learned in life is that if a social movement makes my skin crawl in a particular way, it's rarely worth my time to engage with its arguments, for reasons described by G.K. Chesterton in "Orthodoxy":
> Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.
To me, much Objectivist argument feels very tight and circular in this way.
I'm going to home in on the essential mistake here, and leave the rest of this to one side, since it isn't an argument:
" For example, someone from a society built around extended families might just as convincingly argue that the choice to live meant placing the interests of the extended family before the individual's."
Here's the flaw: Life is only available to individuals. There is no such thing as a collective life, or a collective mind.
Yes, an extended family, assuming it's healthy, may be a great value. A great value... to whom? To an individual member of it. Or to someone else, who likes seeing a good family.
You know to whom - or what - it isn't a value? To a stone, or a river, or a dead person.
As I wrote above, the choice to live or not is your only 100% free one, the only one that isn't mixed up in other values - because all values presuppose the choice to live.
Oh, and an extended family that demanded an individual member subordinate his only life to its demands would not be any sort of value.
> leave the rest of this to one side, since it isn't an argument:
This is fine! The rest of my post was intended to explain why, even though I think Objectivism is wrong, I almost never bother to argue against it. The question is uninteresting to me in the way that debates about how a silver standard is ethically inferior to a gold standard are uninteresting to me.
> Here's the flaw: Life is only available to individuals. There is no such thing as a collective life, or a collective mind.
OK, so we're definitely discussing the same part of the argument. This is a good thing! (Especially because I'm relying on decades-old memories of the essays in question.)
But I don't think I explained my argument clearly. Let me try another metaphor.
The "100% free choice" between life and death essentially provides 1 bit of information. The philosophy of Objectivism is much larger—let's go by John Galt's speech and say it's roughly 90 pages long. Cut that in half to account for rhetoric, and apply some assumptions about information density of English text, and we get about 10kB of philosophy.
Rand's argument is essentially that a 1-bit choice implies at least 10kB of consequences.
But the mathematical problem is that you can't get 10kB out of a single bit unless you smuggle a bunch of information in by a side channel. "Choose life" is compatible with a great many philosophies. For example:
- "Dying on my feet is better than dying in chains, because a life in chains isn't really a life." (Rand argued something like this, IIRC. But it implies complex ideas about what lives are worth living, and what life means.)
- Many people have believed that it is better to die defending your homeland than to run and save your own skin. This closely analogous to the "better to die on my feet than in chains" argument, but I don't know how Rand would have felt about it. Would it matter if you were defending a free country against Stalin, and if you ran to save your life, allowing other people fully committed to the fight to die?
- For a silly example, in the Order of the Stick #652, the lich Xylon argues, "Be a vampire, or a ghost, or an immortal with a paint-by-numbers portrait in the rec room. Hell, even a brain-in-a-jar, in a pinch. Anything to avoid the Big Fire below." His philosophy is life at absolutely any cost.
Rand's argument is "choose life, but only a life that's worth living." In a mathematical sense, the resulting philosophy is "underdetermined." You can't derive a 90-page speech from a 1-bit choice. You need to add something to flesh it out. And I do not think that the next steps in Rand's argument justify her ultimate philosophy, any more than I think Xylon's choice of (un)life at all costs justifies his larger philosophy.
Anyway, I hope this makes my argument clearer. I'm not expecting this argument to be especially convincing, which is fine—as mentioned above, I am perfectly happy to ignore the question.
Well put again..this is the problem with axioms: she has these quite short, supposedly indisputable axioms, and she claims to derive all sorts of complex things from them.
> But the mathematical problem is that you can't get 10kB out of a single bit unless you smuggle a bunch of information in by a side channel.
I think this is the wrong model for thinking about this because it's misleading. As a loose metaphor, think of ethics as a decision tree whose content and structure is defined by her metaphysics and epistemology.
When she talks about choosing to live as man qua man, her metaphysics and epistemology define what it means to be human and human potential, and that is what defines the structure of the decision tree. Ethics is then the process of navigating this decision tree.
The binary choice to live as man qua man or not (your 1 bit) is the difference of living up to human potential, or giving up your humanity.
So trying to separate ethics from epistemology and metaphysics is the mistake that left you confused as to where all of those other bits are coming from. No matter what your philosophy, those three subjects are the inseparable pillars of any complete philosophy.
> Life is only available to individuals.
Individuals can support or destroy each others' lives.