India holds up a mirror for America to see itself

  "Evil requires the sanction of the victim." Ayn Rand"

 David Seaton's News Links

The other day in my perusings I stumbled upon this troubling jewel

Not only do Indians perform more Google searches for (Ayn) Rand than citizens of any country in the world except the United States, but Penguin Books India has sold an impressive number of copies -- as many as 50,000 of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead each since 2005, a number comparable to sales there by global best-seller John Grisham. And that's not counting the ubiquitous pirated copies of her works that are hawked at rickety street stalls, sidewalk piles, and bus stations -- an honor that Rand, a fierce defender of intellectual property rights, probably would not have appreciated. Foreign Policy

To put this information into some perspective I would ask you to read a paragraph from Wikipedia:

The World Bank estimates that 456 million Indians (42% of the total Indian population) now live under the global poverty line of $1.25 per day (PPP). This means that a third of the global poor now reside in India.(...) India has a higher rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three (46% in year 2007) than any other country in the world.

Now into that context, to see what Indians are so eagerly googling, let's mix in the following sayings of Ayn Rand, which though few, hopefully give the full flavor of her "Objectivist" philosophy:

"Evil requires the sanction of the victim."

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. 

Now you may ask yourself, what possible attraction could this sort of paen to sociopathic selfishness have for the countrymen of that paragon of selflessness, Mahatma Gandhi? How can you revere one and also revere the other?

You can't. Rand is in, Gandhi is out.

How is this put together?

Again from Wikipedia:

A disproportionally large share of poor are lower caste Hindus. According to S. M. Michael, Dalits constitute the bulk of poor and unemployed. Many see Hinduism and its subsidiary called caste system as a system of exploitation of poor low-ranking groups by more prosperous high-ranking groups. In many parts of India, land is largely held by high-ranking property owners of the dominant castes that economically exploit low-ranking landless labourers and poor artisans, all the while degrading them with ritual emphases on their so-called god-given inferior status.

"Dalit" is a politically correct term for "untouchable"; to put this into clearer focus, let's hear from Mahatma Gandhi on the subject:

Removal of untouchability means love for, and service of, the whole world and thus merges into Ahimsa. Removal of untouchability spells the breaking down of barriers between man and man and between the various orders of Being."

Now it is obvious that the Dalits (untouchables) and the rest of India's 456 million poor, living on less than $1.25 a day, are not the ones who are googling Ayn Rand, isn't it? It would be safe to assume, I imagine, that the googlers belong to what the paragraph above calls the "more prosperous high-ranking groups".

The mechanism at work here is also obvious. The  extreme poverty of India  has always been a great embarrassment to Indian yuppies when speaking to foreigners and the cruelty of its ancient caste systems is universally condemned throughout the world by all the other belief systems. Till now untouchability and  the extreme poverty of India have been intellectually indefensible. How to rephrase them for the globalized world, a place where India's elites are hot to trot?

At this point, along comes a prestigious  American, a major cult-figure,  Ayn Rand, the guru of Sri Alan Greenspan no less, someone who with her  indifference to suffering, with the clockwork logic of her exposition and the elaborate intellectual edifice constructed around what boils down to, "bugger you, I'm alright Jack", justifies their system in all its time-hardened egotistical racism.

Not only do they have the absolution of their ancient religious traditions, they now have the apostolic blessing of one of the guiding lights of ultra-modern, western, anarcho-capitalism.

Gotta be a hit.

Something that is fun and often productive is to run things backwards and see what turns up. Let's try that on Ayn Rand in India.

Here is the scenario: Ayn Rand is a big hit with high-cast Indians, who would like to ignore India's racism and justify their indifference to its poverty, but long before she made it in India, she was a big hit in the USA: could it be for the same reasons?

Could Ayn Rand's popularity in India hold the key to her popularity in the United States?

Could India be holding up a mirror for us to contemplate ourselves?

Are we looking to Ayn Rand for the same absolution she gives the Indians?

If you stop to think about, since South Africa abandoned apartheid, what other large, densely populated country besides India has such a history of race problems or where the poor are so abandoned to their fate as the USA?

It is curious to observe the relation Rand's "thinking" and her followers to our present predicaments.

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."   Ayn Rand

"You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost." Milton Friedman

"Left to their own devices, it is alleged, businessmen would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings. Thus, it is argued, the Pure Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the numerous building regulatory agencies are indispensable if the consumer is to be protected from the `greed' of the businessman. But it is precisely the `greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer." Alan Greenspan in a 1963 article, ``The Assault on Integrity'' for  "The Objectivist" magazine - quoted by Ayn Rand in her 1967 book, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal''

One of the upsides of our present predicament has been the defenistration of luminaries like Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan and fellow travelers. This from the Financial Times:

The Washington Consensus, the organizing idea behind the global advance of laisser faire economics, has been unceremoniously buried.(...) The crisis has restored the legitimacy of the state: bankers have been dethroned, Alan Greenspan defrocked and economists exposed. Regulation is no longer a term of abuse. Adam Smith has made way for John Maynard Keynes as fiscal policy has been rehabilitated as a tool of economic management. Phillip Stephens - Financial Times

Or this from BusinessWeek:

The cost included a Hobbesian view of business -- nasty, brutish and every man for himself -- and a rejection of the idea that ultimately we're all in this together. Which is precisely what we do not need at this time of increasing global interdependence. (...) In this worldview, "business ethics" is an oxymoron, not because of bad behavior but because ethics can't even exist apart from some notion of a "relationship" to something or someone else. Subordinating everything to shareholder value is, literally, anti-ethical. Charles H. Green - BusinessWeek

Here, Charles Green, an MBA from Harvard, has gone straight to the heart of the whole matter when he says, "ethics can't even exist apart from some notion of a "relationship" to something or someone else".

That is really what human life is all about. Nothing is more defenseless and miserable than an isolated human being.

Our terror of being the only human on earth is the romance of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe's joy at encountering Friday, saving his life and becoming his friend is one of the most powerful metaphors in literature.
 

The human being is a social anthropoid, whose phenomenal success as a species is due to its unique capacity for empathy, altruism and sacrifice for the common good. If selfishness were such a survival plus, then the common house cat would be the "master of the universe" and not human beings.

Since we wandered over the African savanna in small groups of hunter-gatherers, naked, without even fire, in fear of lions and hyenas, a sprained ankle or a broken bone, during those hundreds of thousands of years, the "common good" existed. If humans hadn't recognized it and sacrificed for it we wouldn't be here today.

Over most of our history that was our life, only of late have we taken a sinister detour. That wandering togetherness is what our brains, inhabiting spirits and digestive tract are built for and look where we are now.

Over a relatively few millennia we have woven ourselves into hell.

Selfishness is precisely the least human of our traits and that it has become a driving force in our world is perhaps the central problem we face... our paradox: humans that dehumanize themselves.

Certainly, unless we can recreate the essence of our cooperative origins on a mass scale within our present technological development, there seems to be no solution in sight to this hell we have created.

Ayn Rand is probably (with Milton Friedman) the most profoundly immoral and destructive thinker that America has ever produced.  Milton Friedman believed that greed was humanity's sole motivator and Rand believed that selfishness was. Both considered what western civilization has traditionally marked as deadly sins as virtues not defects. Their followers are legion and we live among the wreckage they and their "virtues" have created. DS

I just couldn't stomach writing about Petraeus today

Jyoti Amge, the world's smallest teenager

David Seaton's News Links
General Petraeus is in Washington and I know I'm going to have to write about Iraq again sometime this week, I'm even going to get paid for it... but I'm going to hold off as long as I can...

Depressing is not exactly the word... The war in Iraq is like... I dunno, writing about Iraq is like... like playing the part of Bill Murray in "Ground Hog Day"... on LSD, or like rowing a boat with a clothes line.

HDS Greenway has got it down pretty good in the Boston Globe:

"The American public hears no realistic plans from Democrats on how to disengage from this fruitless enterprise. McCain talks about a 100-year troop presence as if Iraq were a homogeneous, industrial democracy like Japan, (...) In the meantime, the through-the-looking-glass atmosphere surrounding whatever Bush says about Iraq becomes ever-more bizarre."

After surviving all the atomic perils of decades of cold war, who would have ever thought that the USA would attempt suicide in a place, that if God were to give the earth an enema, he would surely insert the hose?

So today, instead of Iraq, I have decided to pay homage to this lovely little person, Jyoti Amge from India. Here is what the agencies have to say about her:

A teenager from India who stands at a tiny 1ft 11in (58cm) tall is the smallest girl in the world.

Jyoti Amge, 14, is shorter than the average two-year-old child and only weighs 11lb (5kg).

Despite this, she goes to a regular school in Nagpur, central India, where she has her own small desk and chair, and her classmates treat her like any other student.

She said: 'I am proud of being small. I love all the attention I get. I'm not scared of being small and I don't regret it.

She will even be releasing an album with her favourite Indian pop star, the bhangra/rap star Mika Singh.

Jyoti is ambitious and hopes to work as a Bollywood actress one day.

She said: 'I would love to work in a big city like Mumbai, act in films and travel to London and America."

I love the line, "'I am proud of being small. I love all the attention I get. I'm not scared of being small and I don't regret it." She is obviously intelligent and from the expression on her face sitting next to the baby, she also has a mischievous sense of humor and must be full of fun. Irresistible!

Personally, I think that if a drip like Paris Hilton can get all the attention she gets, this adorable tiny creature is going to be a (adjective that means "big" or "huge" without being a joke) star.

Jyoti Amge should be making a world tour, not Alan Greenspan. DS

The soft Republican underbelly: caught between Rand and the Rapture

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other."
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a Stranger and you Welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me.
Jesus Christ - Matthew 25

"No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks."
Jesus Christ - Luke 6:43 - 45

David Seaton's News Links

There is a gaping fault line within the Republican Party that few seem to have noticed and fewer to exploit. It is the abyss that runs between those who follow the teachings of Ayn Rand and the woollier followers of Jesus Christ. As the quotes above show, no two doctrines could be more incompatible. Just by reading these snippets it is evident that the gap between the two world views is greater than any other imaginable, certainly greater than any gap that ever existed between Christianity and socialism.

Those brutalized by Reaganism and the pious platitudes of Bush may think that evangelical protestantism is irremediably wedded to Neanderthalite capitalism, but they forget, if they ever knew, that the leftist traditions of our British cousins have their firmest roots in the Nonconformist chapels of England and Wales and in the Presbyterian kirks of Scotland. The history of the British Labour Party is filled with Bible beating Baptists and Methodists and the Lutheran influence on Scandinavian social democracy is clear. Certainly the answer to the question, "am I my brother's keeper" is affirmative in both social democracy and Christianity.

Examples of Randism? With Wikipedia at our fingertips, I wont take up space and bandwidth expounding on the doctrines of Ayn Rand, suffice to say that she was the greatest single influence on former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, the overflow of whose heart and the fruits of whose tree -- more like the flowering orchard he planted -- we are only now beginning to taste in the fullness of their season.

The closest the GOP have ever come to the synthesis of these extremes is in the misbegotten, smirking, strut, adorned with homely pieties, of the improbable George W. Bush. It is unlikely that any successor, no matter how blighted his spirit and darkened his understanding, could long maintain such superlative cognitive dissonance or bridge that aching gap again anytime soon.

Over the last few days I have been writing frequently about Mike Huckabee and the reason is that his campaign and the reaction to it by the Republican leadership is illuminating this gap. For me it is the most interesting development, coming at a moment of military defeat and economic crisis, that I can remember.

It is clear that a path to victory is opening for progressive politics to take, but it is anything but clear that progressives are inclined to take it. I would tell them in the words of the the best loved king of France, the Protestant King Henry III of Navarre who, when he was offered the crown of France quickly became the Catholic, Henry IV or "Henry the Great", said, Paris vaut bien une messe ("Paris is well worth a Mass"). DS

Greenspan redefines "cleaning up"

David Seaton's News Links
To understand where Alan Greenspan is coming from, it's important to know that as a young man he was one of Ayn Rand's most favored disciples and that her magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged" could be said to be his "bible". Outside of the parameters of human relations affirmed by all major faiths, it is a book whose philosophy Gore Vidal described as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”

To make a long story short, Greenspan's years at the Fed have not been about the economy, which is now beginning to unravel: these years have been about Greenspan, who is now about to make a lot of money writing and speaking. And if what he writes or what he says about current affairs destabilizes that economy... hard cheese (that's British for tough shit). DS

Greenspan: His Fault - Portfolio.com
Abstract: Greenspan’s book will make headlines over the next few weeks, in part because of his surprisingly downbeat assessment of the economy and financial markets. But even though he left the Fed more than a year and a half ago, his recollections aren’t of merely historical interest. The current turmoil on Wall Street is largely a result of policy decisions he made during his final years. By keeping interest rates too low for too long, he encouraged a borrowing-fueled speculative binge, which has now given way to a credit squeeze. By failing to crack down on the mortgage industry, he allowed subprime hucksters to peddle dubious loans, which the financial industry’s math whizzes packaged for investors. Coming on top of his role in creating the internet-stock mania a decade ago, the mistakes Greenspan made—now playing out in home foreclosures and hedge fund collapses—will surely color historians’ views of his long tenure, if not his own account of it.(...) Since leaving the Fed, he has continued to make news, if not always in ways he would like. Within weeks, he started making off-the-record appearances before select audiences: hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and the like. Inevitably, some of his remarks slipped out, causing disruptions in the markets. In February, he said a recession was possible before the end of 2007—a comment that contributed to a 416-point fall in the Dow. In May, he put the chances of a recession at one in three. Two weeks later, he rattled international bourses by saying that a bubble had developed in the Chinese stock market and a “dramatic contraction” was inevitable. When Greenspan was chairman of the Fed, his public statements were famously delphic. While he is entitled to make a living—he reportedly charges $150,000 a speech and received an $8.5 million advance for the book—there is something jarring about his late-life discovery of clear, declaratory English. His predecessor, Paul Volcker, was barely heard from for years after he retired, and Greenspan’s failure to follow that example has perplexed some of his former colleagues.(...) Citing fears (which proved to be misplaced) of Japanese-style deflation spreading to the United States, he kept the federal funds rate at 1 percent until June 2004, by which point the economy had been growing steadily for more than two years. By failing to tighten monetary policy, Greenspan created an apparently limitless supply of cheap credit. After adjusting for inflation, the cost of cash was close to zero. Investment banks, hedge funds, and other financial operators were able to obtain money at minimal cost and use it to finance risky investments. To a lesser extent, so could ordinary Americans. In a feat of levitation almost without precedent, the prices of nearly all speculative assets moved in the same direction: U.S. stocks went up; foreign stocks went up; residential real estate went up; commercial real estate went up; oil went up; gold went up; sugar went up; coffee went up; Treasury bonds went up; junk bonds went up. To make money, all you had to do was suit up, buy something, and sit back and watch it grow.(...) Greenspan has come up with a new argument. “These adverse periods are very painful, but they’re inevitable if we choose to maintain a system in which people are free to take risks,” he said in August. Because of his Randian view of the world, there is no reason to doubt that Greenspan believes what he said, but it raises the question of whether he was ever a suitable choice for Fed chairman, given his understanding of the job. The reason the Fed was set up, in 1913, was to preserve financial stability—to break the historical pattern of ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. Central banks maintain stability by limiting the types of risks people can take, either by raising the cost of borrowed money or by enforcing regulations. If all else fails and panic breaks out, they inject liquidity into the system by acting as a bank of last resort, which is what the Fed and other central banks were forced to do over the summer. Given Greenspan’s inaction during his final years in office, our current crunch was pretty much inevitable. In addition to reducing interest rates to 1 percent, he rejected calls for more vigorous oversight of the mortgage industry. Instead of outlawing such dubious practices as the provision of “2-28” loans—which lure borrowers by offering them cheap rates for two years and then sock them with enormous increases in their monthly payments—the Fed issued vague “guidance” letters that most lenders ignored.(...) Greenspan did get one thing right, though: his retirement date. Were he still at the Fed, he would be responsible for cleaning up the mess he helped create. While his successor, Ben Bernanke, watches anxiously to see who the next casualty of the credit squeeze will be—a Wall Street investment bank? a big hedge fund? a private equity firm?—Greenspan will be busy signing autographs at Borders and Barnes & Noble. If you want to question him about all of this, get there early. The lines will be long.
READ IT ALL