The Church of St. Ayn Deconsecrated

Ayn Rand pursued two vocations in her long career: first, that of a writer, novelist, screen writer and second, that of the founder and subsequent leader of a philosophic movement.  It seems to me, then, that any commentary on her life’s work must deal separately with each-or, as Hollywood would have it, with the two faces of Ayn. 

AYN RAND THE NOVELIST 

As judged by the longevity and popularity of her novels, Ayn Rand was a first rate novelist.  Published roughly fifty years before, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have sold over twelve million copies in the United States alone and continue to be popular.  And for understandable reasons.  Her plots are carefully structured and suspenseful, her characters interesting, and her dialogue strong.  In short, they are good reads.  Moreover, the ideas contained in the books are expressed forcefully as they should be in literature: bold, dramatic, opinionated unequivocal, even hyperbolic. It is, after all, the novelist’s prerogative, even duty, to call attention, in the strongest possible terms, to what the author sees as the wrongs of the world.  Sound the Klaxon, as it were.  Give voice to world’s conscience when other sources may be too indifferent or too intimidated to speak.

It was a mistake, however, for the novelist, and eventually some of her more susceptible readers, to be so immersed in fiction as to confuse it with the real world in which issues are never black and white; heros, alas, are never immaculate; villains frequently escape punishment; virtues and wickedness are seldom unalloyed; and many a socio-economic theory found to be unworkable.  

AYN RAND THE PHILOSOPHER

Between 1428 and 1431, teenage Joan of Arc led a French Army across Anglo-Burgundian territory.  Wearing men’s clothing and armor, holding her sword high, and proclaiming God’s word she inspired what had been a demoralized force to rally to her side.  Against the opposition of senior commanders, she assailed entrenched English garrisons and won a series of remarkable victories thus paving the way to an autonomous France.

Some five centuries later, a new feminine crusader took the stage and, with equal fervor and conviction, carved a swath through the liberal ranks and led her acolytes to a new ideology she called ‘objectivism.’  Whereas I would not want to stretch the analogy too far, there was, I believe, a compelling similarity in the way the two women were possessed with an ideological certitude and their acting upon it with fanatic zeal.

History has commemorated their singular achievements: Joan in history books, museums, and French lore; Ayn in public recognition that has taken the form of   two recent well-publicized biographies; numerous blogs; articles in the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Reason, Liberty, the Economist, and others; a pending television series; a resurgence in the sales of her most famous book, Atlas Shrugged; and two ongoing organizations of devotees, The Atlas Society and The Ayn Rand Institute.  Even a few of our elected representatives have seen fit to pay appropriate homage.

Sainthood comes with a price so it is not surprising that both women have had their detractors.  In the decades immediately following her death, Joan was regarded suspiciously as a heretic and deranged mystic.  And I suspect there are some among Ayn’s critics who dearly wish that the careers of the two had been reversed-i.e., that Joan had lived to 77 and Ayn burned at the stake at 19.

Personally, I would not go quite that far but my own view of Ayn’s philosophy is likewise a jaundiced one.  My basic disagreement with Rand is that her entire epistemology, her central thesis, rests on the assertion that she is, above all, rational-i.e., that by rising above the fog-shrouded clouds of sentimentality she has the clairvoyance to view mankind’s situation with scientific detachment and from her observations draw unassailable conclusions.  Her embrace of that conceit may very well have been sincere but it was, I would argue, delusional.  Indeed, her outlook is the very opposite of what she claimed it to be.  It was irrational.

Rand started, reasonably enough, with a number of self-evident (to anyone who has bothered to open a history book) Libertarian tenets.  Unfortunately she did not stop there.  She took these perfectly valid propositions and radicalized them into dogma.  Once cast in stone and carried down from the mountain, Rand’s absolutes became brittle, vulnerable to attack, and incapable of improvement.  As a result, her contribution to the Libertarian cause is roughly comparable to that of the jihadists’ contribution to the Koran.

The fact is no stricture in the social sciences can be taken as axiomatic.  Institutions are too variable, public sentiment too volatile, political factors too unpredictable and economic events too anomalous to be universal in their application

Allow me to touch on her treatment of a few of the tenets she appropriated:

Tenet 1:  Capitalist (free enterprise, laissez faire) economic systems have proven to be more productive and more conducive to the common good than socialist (leftist, communistic, communal) economic systems.

 As Rand would have it, capitalism is the “ideal political-economic system.”  I would argue that, whereas it is undeniably the best system around, it is far from ideal.  Like democracy, it merits commendation simply because there seems to be no better alternative on the horizon.  (A below-the-horizon alternative, and the answers to many another perplexing economic question, can be found on this very same website.  Simply click on the “Economics” tab and then “Money Redefined, Parts 1-4)

Among capitalism’s current failings are:

 a) Its proclivity to periods of overexpansion and deflation-i.e., its notorious boom-and-bust cycles.

 b) Its uneven distribution of wealth leading to the undesirable formation of social classes.  (Conservatives like to say that society should limit itself to providing youngsters with equal opportunity as opposed to guaranteeing equal outcomes ignoring the fact that capitalism furnishes neither.  One would have to be blind to contend that young people coming from wealthy families do not enjoy an overwhelming economic advantage over those from underprivileged circumstances.)

 c) Its pell-mell destruction of the environment.

 d) Its dependence on money which is essentially an artificial construct-that is to say, an irrational figment of our collective imagination.  No economic system based on our present monetary system can truly be considered rational-Rand’s professed allegiances notwithstanding.

Tenet 2:  The driving force behind all economic advance in capitalistic systems is individual initiative.  It follows then that such initiative should be provided as much freedom as possible and the gains acquired thereby protected by the law.

According to Rand’s version of human initiative, “Man-every man-is an end in himself, not a means to the end of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.”

a) Nonsense.  All men, including entrepreneurs, are motivated by a complex variety of motivations of which her “rational self-interest” is but one.  Were every captain of industry to follow Rand’s credo, they would retire as soon as their nest eggs allowed and spend the rest of their days in health clubs.

b) Any attempt to pin happiness down as a purpose in life is likely to discover it to be an all too illusive a target.  For all I know, Rand experienced nothing but a deliriously happy inner life (perhaps fueled by an inexhaustible flow of self-esteem), but certainly nothing in her life’s external trajectory suggests that her dogged focus on attaining happiness worked any better than the random stumblings employed by the rest of us.c) Businessmen suffer enough abuse from the media without the additional contumely that Rand’s money-and-power-driven caricatures invite.  

c)  Businessmen suffer enough abuse from the media without the additional contumely that Rand’s money-and-power-driven carricatures invite.

Tenet 3:  Paradoxically, or so it would seem, in a peaceful, lawful society, the aggregated result of countless individual actions motivated by enlightened self-interest results in the furtherance of greater prosperity for all.

As long as Rand emphasized Adam Smith’s insights, she was on firm ground.  But she wandered off the reservation when her two-dimensional literary protagonists devoted themselves exclusively to selfishness during working hours and sexual prowess when not otherwise engaged.

a) More nonsense.  Rand’s categorical rejection of altruism flies in the face of her cherished reality.  Altruism, whether she liked it or not, is an intrinsic part of human nature.  Our prehistoric forbears, from whom we inherit our emotional makeup, did not spend their total existence prowling about the forest floor with a club in their hands in search of bashable enemy skulls.  According to anthropologists, they spent most of their time sheltered in the company of their clan members when such impulses as altruism, cooperation, sociability, tactfulness, and compassion provided the best chance for survival.

b) There are, no doubt, hard-nosed, obdurate, uncompromising, and thoroughly unpleasant peope in the business world some of whom, no doubt, have made money.  On the other hand, there are many more successful people who have achieved their success by utilizing the full range of innate characteristics evolution has seen fit to bestow upon them.

Tenet 4:  The workings of big government are likely to be inefficient, counter-productive, wasteful, corrupt, and disruptive to the operations of the private economy.

If Rand was ever on solid ground, it was in her aversion to overzealous governmental authority.  And at a time when government is subsuming one chunk of our lives after another, Rand’s wagging finger of disapproval seems timely.  But, as always, she went too far.  She believed government should be limited to defending us from physical harm and protecting our property from illegal confiscation.  And nothing more.  Government clearly needs to be restrained; it does not need to be castrated.

a) Humanity seems compelled to foul the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food supplies we depend on.  Some form of control is essential if these self-destructive processes are to be reversed, and one cannot imagine it being exerted by any institution other than by government.

b)  Modern society depends upon a variety of civic improvements to function.  Rand’s dictum to the contrary, interstate highways, bridges, airports, water treatment plants, sewer systems, flood control projects, and the like all require governmental planning, finance, and organization to get underway.  Even the corporate owned railroads that Rand so doted on would never have been built had not the rails been laid on publicly-cleared right-of-ways.  On the other hand, Rand was partially right.  The actual construction, maintenance, and operation of government-planned facilities would be better left up to the private sector.

c) Likewise, government is required to formulate the services we depend upon such as disease control, trash collection, air traffic control, the allocation of communication airways, and so on.  But, again, the performance of these services should be turned over to private companies.

d)  In this connection, it is worth noting that evolution has favored creatures with brains over those without.  Indeed, when it came to human beings, nature found it desirable to sacrifice physical attributes in favor of our mental capabilities.  At the same time, however much she valued brains, she did not see fit to empower them.  Brain cells were provided only with sensory and intellectual functions with external muscle tissue left to do the heavy lifting.  We would do well, I believe, to follow nature’s time-tested guidance.

e)  Probably no expansion of governmental interference so excited Rand’s approbation than her dreaded income redistribution.  But here again, matters are not as black and white as she imagined them.  The argument against income distribution implicitly rests on the supposition that the threatened income was properly distributed to begin with.  With due apologies to my Libertarian friends, I feel obliged to argue that it was not, and is not.  Karl Marx rightly noted that the rules by which the money game is played were established by the rich and, not surprisingly, ended up being heavily canted in their favor.  Certainly personal achievement is deserving of reward but the same cannot be said of those who simply inherit it.  For that matter, can there really be any justification for wealth begetting wealth with little or no effort on the part of the benefactor?  Unfortunately, as it turned out, Marx was better at defining problems than inventing their solution.  But proving Marx wrong, does not make Rand right.

In conclusion, were I Rand’s publisher, I would ensure that every copy of her work be stamped with the inscription “The ideas presented herein are to be read solely for entertainment purposes.  They are those of the author only and are not to be construed as having been endorsed by the publisher or any of its affiliates.”