Objectivist Round Up

This week's edition of the Objectivist Round Up is being hosted by Rational Jenn. Lots of good posts listed. Be sure to check it out.

A special nod to Paul McKeever who nicely refutes a rather bone-headed comparison of Ayn Rand and Thrasymachus.

Answering a Critic of Ayn Rand

The buzz about Atlas Shrugged is attracting attention on the left as well. Below is a response I typed to one of Ayn Rand's many new critics out there in the blogosphere.

We have a very different perspective on Rand's philosophy. What I see at it's core is a passionate love of man at his best. Far from being soulless, it reunifies man's body and soul and delivers them from the mind/body dichotomy that we inherited from Plato.

As for emotions, they are neither denied nor ignored by Objectivism. Rand was not advocating some sort of Vulcan approach to life. She would have considered it anti-human. Emotions, according to Rand, are automated value judgments. They are the summation of our previous thinking, and a reflection of previous evaluations. As such, they are not a primary source of knowledge. They only tell us what we already think, so they are only as good as the thinking that went into creating them. If our emotions seem to conflict with reason, that's not a sign that we should chose between reason and emotion, it's a sign that we should do more thinking to find the source of the conflict. It could be that our previous evaluation needs to be revised, or it could be that we've made an error in our current reasoning.

I don't know about you, but I find that a very reasonable and sane approach to the issue of emotions and reason. It disparages neither and fits both into their proper place. It is human in the best sense, because it appreciates the value of emotions in human experience while maintaining reason as our only source of knowledge. We should be neither emotional basket-cases following wherever whim takes us, nor repressed robots ignoring our feelings.

I agree with you that those who think they can mix Christianity and Objectivism are misguided. I view that as I view the attempt to merge Enlightenment values with Christianity. It certainly improved Christianity, but in the long-term I think it undermined the Enlightenment. Watering down poison will improve one's chances of surviving, but it would be better to give up the poison altogether.

Atlas Shrugged was not meant to be a realistic blueprint for how to accelerate the collapse of society. Its theme is the role of reason in human society. In order to dramatize the effect when a society abandons reason, the events and cast of characters are necessarily compressed. It took Roman civilization 500 yrs to collapse after the abandonment of the Republic. Rand chose to show that process in accelerated fasion, and as the result of a conscious withdrawal of reason from society, rather than the slow brain drain that occurs in a society in decline. The effect is far more dramatic and exciting.

Those who understand the strike as simply a tax revolt have missed the point of the story. Those who think of it as class warfare in which the rich win, have missed the point of the story. Rand's key identification was the immorality of the initiation of force by one man against another, or by a government against its citizens. As a corollary, she rejected all the spurious justifications for such force that have been advanced over the ages: right of conquest, divine right, the superiority of an elite, racial supremacy, vox populi vox dei, the needs of the many, etc, etc. Men do not own other men, neither in part nor in whole.

That is the moral point. There is also the practical point that societies based on enslavement inevitably crumble. Force drives out reason. You force a man to work, but you can't force him to think. All you can make him do is perform a set of manual tasks that you give him. In a society run on force innovation dies. The society deteriorates to a subsitence level, which is all that slavery is capable of maintaining over any period of time. The process of deterioration might be slower or faster given other factors, but it happens. The society becomes stagnant until it is swallowed up by a more dynamic culture.

You maintain that there will always be another titan to take the place of the ones who quit, but that is emphatically not true. In a culture that makes a point of cutting its titans off at the knees, people will stop trying to rise. No one will take up the burden of such a thankless job. They won't think, "Ah! Here's an opportunity for me!" They will think, "If they did that to him, what will they do to me?" They may not know enough to walk away from their job, but they know enough to keep their heads down. They know not to offer innovation where innovation is punished, not to work harder when hard work is for suckers. Not only that, but as the burden of society shifts ever downward, from the titans to the giants to the stalwart to the weary, more and more people find themselves cast in the role of sacrificial victim for the group. Eventually, you end up with a small, elite group at the top--call them aristocrats or call them commissars--living off the labor of the overburdened masses. That is not some airy theory, it is what happened when Rome fell, and it is what happened under communism.

You are correct, though, when you say that people who talk about reducing their productivity as a way of "going Galt" are not really emulating Galt. They are not walking away completely. They are shrugging, however. They are not completely rejecting our society yet, but they are showing definite signs of apathy towards its survival. They are not the $250k/yr wage earners either. It may not be entirely accurate to call them Galts, but they feel the same thing that Galt felt when he walked away from the 20th Century Motor Company. They are tired of their lives being regarded as the property of other men. Those are the people for whom Ayn Rand wrote, not just the titans, but all of us. She gave us the words to express the idea, and the moral courage to say, "Enough!"

That didn't take long...

NR continues its crusade against Ayn Rand.

I'm too angry to say anything else at the moment.

Update: A little calmer now.

I knew that NR would eventually respond to the Go Galt phenomenon by trying to smear Ayn Rand. In fact, I predicted it. On March 8, at this blog, I wrote:

I’m expecting any day now for someone at NRO to remind their conservative
brethren that Ayn Rand was a heretic, and was excommunicated from the right by
W.F. Buckley himself, lo these many years.

So I'm not surprised that it was done. I'm just a little surprised at the thoroughness and the vindicativeness of it. A lot of the nastiness is of the same sort that I've been reading on leftist blogs. The leftists like to reassure each other that Ayn Rand is for adolescents only. Mature people know that one must set aside childish things like reason, individuality and freedom. That is what Rand called the Argument from Intimidation. I was a bit astonished at being called an adolescent by people who get their moral philosophy from the Bible.

Which brings up the one plaint, not usually made by the left, that the hatchet-wielders at NRO were almost unanimous on.

Alas, Rand’s “truth” leaves no room for God--or for disagreement. --Jonathan
Bean

...devoid of faith, hope and love... --Bradley J. Birzer

Ayn Rand makes for an entertaining novelist but a poor deity. --Daniel J. Flynn

On Christianity, Rand is a non-believer. And her fictional heroes are also
non-believers. Therefore, her central protagonists in Atlas Shrugged
and The Fountainhead were very entrepreneurial but avoided charity. In
real life, most entrepreneurs wanted to make a lasting mark with their
philanthropy. John D. Rockefeller, for example, was the wealthiest entrepreneur
of the late 1800s and was the largest donator to Christian and other social
causes in American history. --Burton Folsom Jr.

A friend who lost everything in the financial crisis took it as an opportunity
to come to both Christ and Ayn Rand. Knowing me as a fan of both, he asked how I
reconciled them, considering that Rand was an atheist. --Andrew Leigh

In other words, Rand must be wrong because she's an atheist. A news flash for them: Rand's atheism is a feature of her philosophy, not a bug.

If, at the base of a complex chain of reasoning, all one can offer is: because God said so, that's no argument at all. Conservatives have been beaten from pillar to post, because that was all they had to offer in the public debate. Ayn Rand offered a rational defense of capitalism grounded in verifiable moral principles. Conservatives have rejected it, because it would mean giving up the notion that there is a guy upstairs looking out for them, promising them that they don't have to worry about death, because they're going to live forever. In other words, it would mean giving up childish things.

One of these things doesn't belong with the other

Another example of how clueless some on the right are with respect to Ayn Rand.

Mark Thompson, 50, was arrested Thursday night by UI police for resisting
arrest after he disrupted a speech by UI-Chicago professor Bill Ayers at Allen
Hall in Urbana.

[...]

UI spokeswoman Robin Kaler said Thursday evening that Thompson tried to
give Ayers a Bible and a copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

It's almost funny, but not really. Someone needs to explain to Mr. Thompson that he can't have his life and sacrifice it too.

The Moral Case for Capitalism

In the comments at PW, Ric Locke does a good job of making the practical case for capitalism, but I again find myself wishing that conservatives would focus on the moral case for capitalism. I wonder how far abolitionists would have gotten by arguing against slavery on the grounds that it is inefficient? Probably as far as conservatives have gotten in reestablishing a capitalist system.

Every year we move further and further away from capitalism and freedom. Why? It's not because the case for socialism is so compelling, it's because the argument from efficiency is so weak. People care about morality first, and practicality second. It doesn't matter if we all starve under a socialist system, we will all starve together in a magnificent act of self-sacrifice. So long as people believe that self-sacrifice is the moral ideal, they will continue voting for the system that enshrines it in law; and if it leads to our collective self-destruction, so be it. It wouldn't be self-sacrifice if it didn't.

Ric accuses socialists of demonizing the rich, but the reason they can do that successfully is because accumulating wealth is a selfish act. There is no way to accept the premise that self-sacrice is the standard of morality without accepting the conclusion that rich people are evil. By that moral standard, anyone who refuses to hand over his surplus earnings to those less fortunate is immoral, and the greater the surplus, the greater the immorality. That standard of virtue must be completely rejected in order to make the moral case for capitalism.

How can conservatives do that, though, if they remain committed to Christianity? How can they do it when even a conservative who claims to be non-religious remains committed to the ethical framework of Christianity? I don't see it happening.

And so we'll continue to drift towards totalitarian socialism with the conservatives occasionally complaining about inefficiencies yet consistently voting for ever-increasing levels of sacrifice for the good of all.

UPDATE: I missed this earlier article in the Wall Street Journal Online edition. I love the way the author attempts a six-degrees-of-separation style jump from Ayn Rand to Bill Clinton via Walt Whitman. You see, Rand wrote about selfishness, and Walt Whitman wrote a poem called "Song of Myself," and Bill Clinton used to hand out Leaves of Grass to impressionable young females. ("Hey, little girl... want a book of poetry?") So obviously Rand would have admired Clinton.

Is this what passes for reasoning at the WSJ? Was she too chicken to attempt a connection with Hitler or Stalin? Or does she consider Clinton worse?

The entire article is just one long smear, including all the obligatory references to cultish followers, Gordon Gekko's greed speech in Wall Street, and moral absolutism. (I love the way that Rand gets pinned with the amoralism of Gekko, while also being accused of moral absolutism. Which is it?) I knew what I was in for at the beginning, though, when she referred to Rand's writings as "individualist screeds." Hurrah for objectivity in the media.

Taranto Responds...

James Taranto responded today to my email criticizing his comment about Ayn Rand in yesterday's Best of the Web Today. He quotes my email in full, and after quoting another critical response from this blog, he responds to both of us as follows:

We must admit, we're surprised. Aren't Ayn Rand admirers usually known for their
jolly sense of humor?

That's his total response, which is very typical of Taranto. Any time he encounters a question for which he has no ready answer, he resorts to snark and sophistry. Still, I would have expected more sophistry and less snark if he were going to bother to respond at all. Does he really expect his readers to be as dismissive of Rand as he is?

Why the lack of substance in his reply? Is it because he hasn't read Rand, and he's embarrassed to admit it? Perhaps he only knows her as someone who defended the morality selfishness, and he has no idea what she meant by it, or what she said about it. It could be that his use of her name in his column was merely intended as a humorous reference to the uninformed stereotype in his head, and he does not know how to respond to criticism other than to try to laugh it off. We could then ask what do James Taranto and Barack Obama have in common?

Another possibility is that he knows full well what Ayn Rand believed, and he knows his misrepresentation would be obvious to anyone who has read her. Conservatives have a history of misrepresenting Rand's views that goes all the way back to the book review of Atlas Shrugged that appeared in National Review. It's something they have in common with leftist academics. It serves two purposes: 1) it gives their followers an excuse not to read the books in the first place; and 2) it gives their followers cover to dismiss Rand's views out of hand if they do happen to read her. They don't have to engage with her arguments, because they have a ready-to-wear defense against her. They can read through her writings in a fog, and repeat the mantras they were taught:

"She was a fascist."

"She was an atheist."

"She preached selfishness."

"Her admirers are humorless cultists."

Well, a sneer isn't an argument, and in this case it is just a confession of intellectual impotence.

In spite of those sneers, Rand's writings continue to sell. Her ideas continue to spread. New books are being published expounding on her ethical theory (see here, here, and here). Atlas Shrugged is being read in college classrooms around the country. University philosophy departments are opening up to her ideas. The political outlook may not be all that bright right now, but I'm looking forward to the day when we can all have a jolly old laugh at Mr. Taranto's expense.

A Letter to James Taranto

I sent the following as an email to James Taranto in response to this.

Mr Taranto,

In your Best of the Web column of April 13, you made the following statement:

Underlying this criticism is a curious normative premise: that the nonaffluent
ought to prioritize their material interests over moral and cultural concerns.
"Workers of the world, unite!" meets "The Virtue of Selfishness."

Either you have never read Ayn Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness," or you are a liar*. Her philosophy is grounded in the principle that a man's survival qua man is the moral purpose of his life. In her view, the virtues of rationality, productiveness, honesty, integrity, etc, are the means by which we achieve happiness and success over the course of our lives. She never advocated sacrificing those virtues for any chimerical short term gain. It is very true that she disagreed with conservatives on issues such as abortion, but she did so on moral grounds.

As for her view of free markets, unlike conservatives who base their support for capitalism on pragmatic grounds and on the view that man is too evil to live in a socialist utopia, Ayn Rand advocated capitalism because it is the only moral system. It is the only system that requires men to deal with each other by reason instead of force. It is the only system that acknowledges a man's right to pursue his well being and achieve his own happiness. If you honestly don't know that, then you need to read what she wrote. If you do know it, then you have acted immorally, betraying your own self-interest by misrepresenting her in an attempt to subject her ideas to ridicule.

--------------------
*Note: At the last minute I decided to replace "lying sack of shit" with "liar." It wasn't as viscerally satisfying, but it was probably the better choice.