This Sunday is Valentine’s Day, a holiday on which we celebrate romantic love. But, what exactly is romantic love? According to Ayn Rand, “Love is a response to values. . . . One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul — the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness.”
At OCON 2015, during a panel on racism, philosopher Gregory Salmieri identified the term “white privilege” as what Ayn Rand called a package deal. His comments shed valuable light on an issue that many find frustrating.
Today is Ayn Rand’s birthday. Although Rand is known for her best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and works of nonfiction like The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, the fact is that her views are still largely unknown (and often misunderstood).
The idea of separating religion from state was a major advance in political thought, yet massively undervalued. So much so that many in the West take it for granted. Two recent articles — one about Pakistan, another about France — underscore how that idea deserves greater appreciation and strengthening.
One year ago today, Islamic terrorists entered the offices of the French publication Charlie Hebdo and fired sixty shots inside of three minutes. When the smoke cleared, eleven employees of the magazine and one building maintenance worker had been killed and eleven other people in the building had been injured. The “crime” for which these individuals were being punished was blasphemy.
In his terrific book The Tyranny of Silence, Flemming Rose, who was at the center of the Danish cartoon crisis in 2006, quotes Saudi cleric and TV preacher Muhammad Al-Munajid’s reaction to the controversy: “The problem is that they want to open a debate on whether Islam is true or not . . . . they want to open up everything for a debate. That’s it. It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief.”
While we should always be clear on the meaning of the concepts we're using, this commitment to clarity is especially important with respect to concepts that the culture seeks to muddy. Today, argues Peter Schwartz, the primary muddiers are the advocates of altruism, and their targets are concepts of morality. This talk examines the obfuscations, including the “package-dealing,” generated by altruists, and analyzes the valid and invalid definitions of crucial moral concepts.
ARI Fellow Don Watkins reviews Thomas Piketty’s “new” book, The Economics of Inequality, in The Claremont Review of Books. In this book, Piketty tries to explain why he believes that economic inequality is a problem and what we should do about it.
