June 2009

The Objectivist Round Up can be found at Erosophia this week.  I’m going to make a bit of time tonight to read the posts that intrigue me.

Leonard Peikoff has written a new introduction to Ayn Rand’s We The Living.  The latest paperback edition of the book just hit the shelves – you can see the new cover here.  I picked up a copy just to read LP’s introduction, which, in his podcast, he describes as one of the best short pieces he’s written.  I think I know why he is so proud.

He said the purpose of the introduction was to bring out why the novel’s theme is universal and not just a condemnation of Soviet Russia in particular.  He does so, first by naming the two causes of totalitarianism – faith and self-sacrifice – and then by giving historical examples of the manifestations of those errors and of their counterparts – reason and love of values.  He first does so chronologically, skimming history from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century, then he examines how “different” totalitarian states are fundamentally the same.  He tells the amazing story of the Italian film version of the novel, which is an eloquent example of his thesis.  Finally, he brings us to what we care about the most – the present – citing numerous examples of calls to faith and sacrifice in our own culture, and concludes with:

This book is not about your long-gone grandparents, but about your still-growing children.

He accomplishes all of this in 2 pages.

I admire Leonard Peikoff tremendously.  Aside from the incalculable benefits I have gained directly from his books and lectures, his intellectual growth is inspirational to me.  Dr. Peikoff admits that he was a rationalist as a young man, and he worked for decades to change his method of thinking.  Now he seems to be a paragon of the inductive method.  I can’t wait to read his forthcoming book, The DIM Hypothesis.  I attended his lectures on the subject two years ago in Telluride, and it is clear that this is a man committed to facts.  He is steeped in facts.  His podcasts show a man who has a detailed, deep and integrated knowledge of history.  What a transformation!  I tend towards rationalism myself so Dr. Peikoff is an intellectual mentor to me, at least from afar. 

The issue of being fact-oriented is something I work on every day.  I know I’m getting better when I take the position that one should follow the news.  Thanks, Dr. Peikoff!

The Mossoffs are a young family (although the individuals composing it are not so young), and until now we’ve been a bit unsettled, but we’ve managed to start at least one family tradition that I think will stick.  I call it the Adventure Box.  Every year at Christmas time, we decorate a shoe box in gift wrap and put it on a shelf that is easy to access.  Throughout the year, we put mementos from trips, special occasions, along with all the greeting cards we receive, into the box.  Next Christmas, we go through the box and label each item so that we won’t forget what it meant.  Then we write the year on the box and put it away and start a new one.

It’s a simple idea, but we love doing it.  It gives us a place to put all of those things that you don’t want to throw away, but which have no “home.”   And we don’t stress out about getting a souvenir from every single place we go, but having the Adventure Box in mind gives us something to think about when we’re at a new place, and helps to tie all those experiences together.  Going through the box is a great way to wrap up the year, and every single time, we’re surprised at how many fun things we did.

This year, we didn’t get to the adventure box until May.  We’ve never been so tardy, but moving for the fourth time right before Christmas made it difficult.  Here are some of the things we found in the 2008 box:

• A matchbook from the restaurant in New Orleans where we had our wedding reception – Adam went there on business last year and picked it up for me as a little reminder
• Maps of Disneyworld
• A homemade Halloween greeting card from my parents to Samantha
• A ticket stub from the park where we celebrated Samantha’s second birthday with Adam’s parents
• My personal favorite: a lollipop wrapper from the candy dish on the desk of Clarence Thomas, whose office I got to see on a private tour (but no, I didn’t get to meet him)

Where else would you keep all of these precious things?  I used to stick them in a file, but it would get full and I’d throw them away after a while.  Even if you stick them in a box, the labeling is critical.  We found that we’d almost forgotten a few things by May.

I think family traditions are important.  A tradition is a concretization of your family’s culture.  It should reflect a value or attitude that is important in your family.  If it does, it will become a fixture in your psyche that shapes who you are.  Adam brought the spirit of the Adventure Box into our family with his personal edict of, “No Regrets.”  When he is faced with a decision that involves some risk or maybe a lot of effort for an unknown payoff, he thinks about which decision he might regret ten years down the line, and makes the opposite choice.  We try not to let opportunities to experience the new pass us by, and to live life based on love of values, not fear of failure.  The Adventure Box represents this attitude perfectly, and so it has deep meaning for us.