Saturday, December 1, 2012

Ayn Rand: An Intellect, But What Else (Essay)



Paul Ryan seems to have started something with a comment he made early in his recent campaign for Vice President.  He indicated that Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” had meant a lot to him when once he was formulating his personal politics and core values.  Some of my church friends have shown an interest in reading it through and have invited others to read with them.  I encountered the book early in my life – about fifty-two years ago, to be exact.  I had what you might call a love affair with it and with her ultra conservative ideas about humanity’s place in the universe and the values of self-hood and independence. 

Published in 1957, it is a futuristic epic about America and the plight Rand perceived the country was undergoing.  It portrays a not too far off time when just about everything pertaining to the nation’s institutions and structures is in decay and heading furiously toward collapse.  Only a handful of industrialists and a brave woman manager of a transcontinental railroad are able to save it from itself.  Rand poses an imaginary situation in which a nationwide strike takes place, only the people going on strike are not unionized laborers but “the men of the mind,” the prime movers, those impelled by “rational” as opposed to “altruistic” or “mystical” imperatives.  Their withdrawal from society catalyzes the nation into change.

The book is gargantuan in length.  The paperback I once read (twice through, as a matter of fact) was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 pages.  After a half century, a three-part movie treatment is finally in the process of coming forth.  I have seen Part I, which follows the novel rather well and for pure curiosity’s sake I will most likely view Parts II and III, when they arrive in DVD.  But I can wait!

I discovered the book at a time in my life, in my mid-twenties, when because of various disillusionments and because of a thirst for ultimate meaning that my theological education had not fully satisfied up to that point in time and because of a new streak of maverick independence and, yes, self-importance, I latched onto the book.  It sounded alluring, tasted good and it was the kind of challenge that I believed my searching mind was craving.   

What I am writing here is not a review of the book per se, except to point out that I long ago got off her bandwagon, as I gradually came to understand that the story is extremely far-fetched and weighted down by too many speeches at implausible points in the action, and further examination of her world view and further maturity on my part laid bare for me the fallacies in her philosophy.  It is this world view that I now want to look at.  If the comments I make whet anyone’s appetite, I recommend reading two of her non-fiction works, “The Virtue of Selfishness” and “Capitalism: The Hidden Ideal.”

Her basic tenet of belief is that a human’s consciousness is, unlike that of all other species of animal, volitional.  We have to discover how to survive and what the values for survival are.  Unlike the animals, we cannot rely on instinct.  And reason is the “faculty that integrates the material all about” us.  This capacity for reason must be exercised by choice, through focused consciousness.  Otherwise one “drifts in a self-conscious daze. . .Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival – not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.”  The three values that are the means of reaching the ultimate are Reason, Purpose, and Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues, Rationality, Productiveness, and Pride.  The capital letters are hers. 

Of course, it seems that in her vocabulary Self-Esteem and Selfishness are the same thing.  No one exists to serve anyone else.  In her ideal world people would just make contracts.  They would trade, nothing more!  “The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material.  It is the principle of justice.”   As a staunch atheist she believed that humanity is the measure of all things.  And a human’s very existence requires the pursuit of these values.  

As a corollary to that prescription, she says that the only purpose of a government is to protect the individual’s rights, protect us from physical violence, and safeguard one’s right to one’s own life and property.  “Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”  The welfare state and government programs related to economics are anathema to her.  “Only [the individual has]the right to decide when or whether [that individual wishes] to help others; society—as an organized political system—has no rights in the matter at all.”  Taxation is legalized looting. 

I must admit that Rand was a shrewd intellect.  Her abstract thinking is about as systematic as anything theological or philosophical ever gets.  She is not easy to read; her concepts and her terminologies are quite intricate, and she really covers a lot of human territory.  And she has a very special gift for a turn of phrase.  But for all her verbiage she has not really covered the waterfront as thoroughly as it at first appears.  Just for starters, she says that the sole purpose of government is to protect the individual.  But how can a government do this without revenue?  Who is going to pay the salaries of those police and firefighters and other protectors?  We would still need judges and trial lawyers as well – the justice system.

Her most outrageous claim is that a conspiracy exists, dating way back to the beginning of recorded history, between what she calls the “mystics,” the “altruists,” the “hedonists” and political “thugs” and that this conspiracy has dragged western civilization down to the mud pits.  Under “mystics” would fall all religious observers, of any faith, anyone who believes in any sense in a higher power and, by implication for her, in a pie-in-the-sky recompense for human suffering and poverty.  Under “altruists” would be the welfare state and all who proclaim the doctrine of the brotherhood of man.  We are not our brother’s or sister’s keepers.  No individual exists to serve another.  To put others first is a form of living death.  Self-denial, as she understood it, is self-immolation.  The self, above all else, must not be denied or sacrificed.  The Sermon on the Mount is poison. 

Actually her definition of “altruism” is to a great extent accurate.  It does have to do with caring for others, at least as much if not more than the feathering of your own nest.  But for her it also includes the notion that “the happiness of one [person] necessitates the injury of another.  Today, most people hold this premise as an absolute not to be questioned.”  Most people!  How many of us consider ourselves one of the most?

Of course under ”thugs” would be any totalitarian power, most notably Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  And hedonists – well, we know who they are.   

A kind of “moral cannibalism” is at work in the world order, and as a result of all these evils (and this is an exact quote) “most people today [there’s that most again] are engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts.”  She said this in 1964.  I have no reason to think she would not say the same thing in 2012.  (She died in1983.)  There are very few “men of the mind.”  In fact, she thought that the most persecuted minority in the world are (get this!) the capitalists.  If the capitalists were only left free to pursue their business without regulation or taxation or restriction, all would work for the betterment of all.   The notion of checks and balances she shuns.  What would she say about the recent failure of the banks and the business segment of our society that brought on this current recession due to deregulation and too little transparency?  Capitalists left alone and unregulated can be a menace.  They are not saints.  They have led us down the garden path many a time. 

She ascribes evil strictly to the absence of rationality, and here is where I believe the basic fallacy in her philosophy lies.  She talks as if reason were a switch one can either flip on or turn off.  But evil is more than wrongheadedness; evil is a creeping cancer that we have barely begun to understand, let alone cure.  She seems to have no grasp of psychosomatic phenomena, of flesh and spirit struggling with each other.  I daresay she would reject the science of genetics.  She speaks as if everyone is born into the world with equal attributes and equal capacities.  Someone has called attention to the fact that no one ever gets sick in her novels.  Nobody wrestles with a chronic, life threatening illness.  No one ever endures anything more than a gunshot wound or a torture rack administered by the irrational bad guys.  In her fictional world there are no birth defects, no prenatal accidents, no retarded children, no cripples.  

Yes, Rand is a powerful, even formidable intellect.  But as far as I am concerned, that is all she is – an intellect.  Her novels ( I’ve read three others besides “Atlas Shrugged”), though intricate in construction and coherent in narrative, are devoid of humor or bona fide expressions of warmth or tenderness or grace or mystery or a sense of wonder.  They are cold as icebergs.  Nothing and no one in them are in the least complex.  Black is black and white is white.  Her so-called characters are not really characters; they are talking heads, mouthing her ideas or the exact opposite of her ideas.  But the last time I looked at the human scene, there was a lot more than talking heads out there.     

Altruistic people are not enemies to reason and equality and productivity.  They are motivated by the fact that in other people they see themselves.  We exist in the same bundle of life.  But that aside, speaking purely in economic and survival terms, humanity cannot survive if the poor and the diseased (through no fault of their own) are ignored.  They become a burden and a drain on us.  Altruism at the very least is self-interest at work.  It is not a school of abstract or conspiratorial thought; it is a practical, sensible form of investment. 

The big paradox lies in the contrast between Rand’s form and her substance.  As I have already pointed out, she has constructed a vast and intricate belief system, backed up by endless floodtides of rhetorical dissertation.  Quantum physics could not be more elaborate or dense.  She appears at first glance to be unfathomable.  But sift it all down and what she offers is really quite simplistic and even sophomoric.   She had a messianic complex.  Never until the coming of Ayn Rand did anyone know what morality was.  “The world is collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell,” and she has The Answer.  You look in vain for even a hint of the dialectical in her writings.  All the world has to do is follow her formula, throw out the Bible and adopt “Atlas Shrugged” as our new sacred writ. 

So read the book if you must.  It is very crisp, suspenseful and exciting for the most part, but do so keeping in mind her philosophical premises upon which the story is predicated, much of them made explicit in the articulations of her so-called characters.  As far as I can tell, her few followers today are themselves largely intellectual.  I do not believe that even today’s conservative politicians would pay her all that much heed, whatever to the contrary Ryan’s remark may have suggested.


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

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