February "Furies"
Why Bronowski matters
This year marks the 50th anniversary of what I think is the greatest documentary ever made, The Ascent of Man—Jacob Bronowski’s 13-hour miniseries on the history of science. But actually, the series is so much more than that. It’s the summation of Bronowski’s humanist philosophy that he called “human specificity,” or “scientific existentialism.” It was a philosophy rooted in reason and a morality centering around discovery and truth—and it a fascinating compliment to the post-World War II liberalism articulated by people like Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, and Friedrich Hayek. Discourse magazine asked me to write up a piece on Bronowski’s philosophy, and I was inevitably drawn to Bronowski’s single greatest work, episode 11 of Ascent, entitled “Knowledge or Certainty.” Excerpt:
His intellectual interests were indeed so varied that one reporter called Bronowski “not one man, but a multitude.” Yet he saw the sciences and humanities as parts of a single effort to chart a modern, humanistic philosophy based in reason and discovery, instead of the superstition, poverty and violence that had so badly marred the 20th century. He thought of these last three as consequences of the “ascetic virtues” inherited from the medieval era—alongside nationalism, traditionalism, conformity and self-sacrifice. Such ideas produced only “societies constantly on the brink of famine, in which the greatest virtue of man was to achieve the heroics of an insect in a colony, and sacrifice himself for the hive.”
Believing that mankind was “past those famine days, and should be past those famine virtues,” Bronowski offered instead a philosophy he called “human specificity” or “scientific existentialism,” which he first articulated in 1956, in a series of lectures at MIT entitled Science and Human Values. Casting aside the alleged dichotomy between “is” and “ought,” he argued that science provides the foundation for a universal, human ethics: “We ought to act in such a way that what is true can be verified to be so.” That commitment to discover the nature of reality led inexorably to values such as honesty, individualism, freedom of speech and respect for self and others. “The society of scientists must be a democracy,” too, because “it can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect; between independence from the views of others, and tolerance for them.”
And of course, don’t forget to check out my book on the man: The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski.
Three women who launched a revolution
I was honored this month by two really good reviews of my new book Freedom’s Furies, one in The Dispatch by my colleague Jon Hersey and another in Reason by Professor Marcus Witcher. The latter is especially gratifying because I grew up reading Reason, and the idea that I’d have one of my books reviewed there is really a delight.
My philosophy of book reviews is that it matters less how a book is reviewed than whether and where it’s reviewed at all. I’ve had critical reviews of my books published in a number of magazines—National Review, Claremont Review of Books, and even Nature. Some of these have been unfair, or contained what I think were unfair criticisms. But H.L. Mencken advised writers long ago never to respond to reviews in print, except perhaps if they contain objective factual errors—and then only to correct the error. (As the old saying has it, if you touch a smear, it spreads.) I think that’s wise advice. So while almost every review I’ve seen contains critiques to which I could respond—some of them fair, others unfair—I just want to accentuate the positive here.
And on that note, I think the most positive so far is Hersey’s review, because he emphasized a point that’s hard to get across: Freedom’s Furies is more about the political and cultural context of the times than about the personal lives of the writers I’m talking about. I wanted to show how they were affected by the work of contemporaries such as Sinclair Lewis, Franklin Roosevelt, and Sherwood Anderson, more than to defend or critique their political views. Hersey writes:
Sandefur shows [that the Furies were] swimming against two strong cultural currents, one literary and the other political. The first, dubbed the “revolt from the village,” mixed the understandable goal of throwing off the chains of small-town orthodoxy with a sneer at consumerism and “bourgeois values.” Sinclair Lewis, the towering literary figure of the day, became de facto head of the revolt, the spirit of which he conveyed in his blockbuster novel Main Street. It portrayed small-town Americans as “a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”
All three furies marveled at Lewis’ ability to skewer stifling conformity but, in different ways, each eventually came to revolt against the revolt. Paterson was “wary of the village rebels” because she saw that “the mundane lives of the people Lewis ridiculed were admirable in their own way” and that “bourgeois culture represented something rare and precious: the peaceful pursuit of individual happiness, free of the commands of political authorities,” writes Sandefur. Lane regarded Lewis as having sent American literature into a “ditch,” and some of her best work was done trying to rehabilitate the image and values of America’s hardscrabble pioneers, who conquered the plains in covered wagons and had no time for the sorts of busybodies who now scoffed at hard-won simple pleasures.
Rand’s grasp of Lewis’ critique went deeper, though, helping her pinpoint psychological causes of America’s loss of liberty. What Lewis had described as “a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable,” she termed “second-handedness,” referring to the propensity to take one’s views and values from others instead of arriving at them by one’s own judgment. And, in The Fountainhead, she showed how the kernel of truth at the heart of Lewis’ cultural critique—the vulgarity of cheap imitation—was a symptom of the same second-handedness that led, at the political level, to the collectivism then plaguing Russia and much of Europe.
Witcher, too, underscores what I most want potential readers to know about the book:
The New Deal and World War II had a tremendous influence on the three thinkers. Sandefur describes the historical context well, with particular attention to the authoritarian side of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Indeed, professors looking for a book to assign classes studying American history from 1920 to 1950 should seriously consider Freedom's Furies. It masterfully details the causes of the Great Depression, the federal government's overreach during the New Deal, and the wartime attacks on political, economic, and civil liberties. Not only was individual freedom under assault, Sandefur notes, but it was "almost impossible to find any published material that made a strong, intellectual case for free markets." The furies realized they would have to produce their own.
Incidentally, Cato’s latest Cato Policy Report features an article I wrote that’s condensed from the book, so if you want to get a brief taste of what Freedom’s Furies is about, check it out here.
Phoenix is failing everyone—homeless or not—in The Zone
Phoenix is now the site of one of the nation’s largest homeless camps, called “The Zone.” City officials are effectively operating an illegal homeless shelter on the streets of the city, because they refuse to enforce existing laws against camping, loitering, and polluting the streets. The victims are not just the homeless themselves, but the hardworking, taxpaying citizens whose property and businesses are being destroyed by the City’s refusal to do its job. I and my colleague Austin VanDerHeyden wrote about this for The Arizona Republic:
shelters typically forbid people from drinking or using drugs, or engaging in other conduct on the premises that many of The Zone’s population would prefer to persist in. By letting people remain on the streets instead of moving to such a “high barrier” shelter, the city is effectively operating its own “low-barrier” shelter – that is, one where people can stay and ignore the law.
ICWA podcast
I recently joined Oliver Dunford and Anastasia Boden to talk about the Indian Child Welfare Act on Dissed, the Pacific Legal Foundation’s podcast. You can listen here.
Upcoming speaking events
In February, I’ll be speaking at a number of in-person and online events about my new book: February 16 at the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, February 23 in San Francisco, February 27 in Phoenix (again), and others. Check out the list here—and please join us!