And please bear in mind that this is a blog entry, not a full-on essay. While I have in fact written point-by-point notes in refutation of (or agreement with) Rand’s various assertions, in this forum I’m only going to deal in broad strokes.
Let’s start with this: there is, in fact, a massive point of agreement between Ms. Rand and myself. In a presentation she delivered to the University of Wisconsin’s “Ethics in Our Time” symposium in 1961, Ms. Rand said:
“That which is required for the survival of man qua man” is an abstract principle that applies to every individual man. The task of applying this principle to a concrete, specific purpose--the purpose of living a life proper to a rational being--belongs to every individual man, and the life he has to lead is his own.
This is, in Rand’s words, a nearly perfect analogue to a principle I have often expressed (it is in fact the principal idea underlying just about everything I’ve ever written), which, in my own words, is that our lives are stories we are telling to ourselves, and that only we can tell our own stories--but that we must also resist the efforts of others to tell our stories for us. (Parents, bosses, governments, etc., it goes on all the time.)
What she and I both say, to put it yet another way, is that the responsibility for living our lives is only our own, and that when we simply follow the herd, or do what the herd tells us to do, very often we end up losing many of the things that are, or should be, most important to us.
If I agree with her on this important point, then why do I still, in general, disagree so strenuously with the Objectivist ethos? It all turns on two ideas: sacrifice and selfishness. First up, sacrifice.
As I have noted before, I believe I understand why she responded to any notion of individual sacrifice to a collective as vehemently as she did: she was born in Russia in 1905, watched the 1917 revolution unfold beneath the windows of her home in St. Petersburg, and had to endure the confiscation of her father’s pharmacy by the new Soviet government. The family fled to the Crimea, were nearly killed by bandits along the way, and when her father opened a new pharmacy in the Crimea, that too was confiscated. She escaped to the U.S. after college and vowed never to return. So obviously, she went through a long series of horrific experiences, and I cannot begrudge her violent reaction against anything that smacks of her personal experiences with a collective form of government.
After all of this, it’s no surprise that she loved the U.S. so much--and that she loved capitalism, which she elevated to something akin to a religion. It also led, I believe, to a fiercely Manichean worldview in which any sacrifice to the general welfare was deemed evil, and selfishness was elevated to the noblest of virtues.
There is a philosophical idea that I think applies here: it’s called bivalence, or “the exclusion of the middle.” It has to do with the notion that often, when trying to formulate a postulate, philosophers tend to push their ideas into either/or configurations: “Either X is true, or Y is true, but it is impossible for them to both be true.” But in the process, they end up excluding everything that might lie between X and Y. And since I am a firm believer that almost nothing in life is strictly black or white, I tend to have rather strong reactions to anyone who asserts otherwise.
(I have been accused of being a relativist, which is true enough, but not entirely true. When discussing the Terry Schiavo case with a fundamentalist Christian she trotted out the relativist argument, and asked whether I believe in anything absolute. My answer: yes, I do. The golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. No surprise, Ms. Rand takes exception to this notion, which I’ll get to in a little bit.)
The either/or-ness of Rand’s viewpoint is expressed constantly:
...”society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And--since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men--this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.
(And before continuing on, let me just note that the entity she calls “society” most definitely exists separate from the individual men of whom it is comprised. I’m in the midst of reading Charles MacKay’s 1841 masterpiece Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which is all about the ways in which group-think differs from the ways individuals think. The famous quote from his Preface sums up his viewpoint: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”)
I would also argue that there’s nothing ethical about her assertion that some men feel entitled to “pursue any whims (or atrocities)” they wish. This obviously goes on all the time (witness almost anything in the news today, from Somalia to Wall Street), but the whole point is that this sort of behavior is not ethical. And once it’s exposed, “society” frequently gets rather upset at just how unethical it all is. Witness the current mass anger at the nation’s financial institutions. Repeatedly, masses of people have woken from their slumber and demanded that the oligarchs change their ways. (And then, just as often, the oligarchs wait for the masses to go back to sleep again and start to slowly change things back—but they can never take it all back, and in this manner, century by century, change does indeed happen.)
Rand also writes:
An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.
But what about fire? Fire, by her definition, would be both good and evil, simultaneously: it furthers life by warming us when the weather is cold, and by destroying organisms in food that might threaten us. But unleashed, fire obviously threatens life when it burns your house and perhaps you inside of it. But nowhere does Rand ever consider the vast range of things that might be both good and evil, depending upon the circumstances. Either/or is the only possibility she contemplates.
In Atlas Shrugged, Rand has John Galt say:
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice--and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal.
So if I am not strictly rational (using only her definition) at all times, then I’m suicidal? I don’t think so. I do irrational things all the time. Lots of people do. To cite just one potent example: there was nothing rational about the hundreds of people who flocked to Ground Zero after September 11th, to try and help. Everyone knew there were toxins in the air, everyone knew there was a risk. But people wanted to help, and some have paid the price, but they felt it worth the price just to try to help. Rand would surely call this irrational and suicidal. I call it something else.
She writes,
...let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life.
This is the crux of her argument against sacrifice, and for selfishness. Since living is the only possible ultimate value for any entity, then anything that threatens that living must ipso facto be evil. She continues:
The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end to itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.
(All italics, by the way, are Rand’s. Like all dogmatists, she is endlessly emphatic.)
To this I have to ask, why must this be exclusive? Why must one’s own happiness exclude any consideration of the happiness of others? Because, after all, sacrifice is not black and white. There are little sacrifices we make all the time that don’t in any way threaten our lives, and that therefore are not even considered in Rand’s ethos. A parent’s million sacrifice for his or her children is a prime example, one that most definitely leads to the continued existence of the human race as a whole and would therefore be, in Rand’s terms, most definitely good and not evil. Yet it involves sacrifice. How does she reconcile this? She doesn’t. It is never even addressed.
Rand’s hatred of sacrifice means that, if the world conducted itself according to her precepts, there could never be armies. But it also means that there could never be firefighters, or policemen. Doctors would never go near someone with a deadly communicable disease. A nuclear engineer would not make the crucial repair that might stop a meltdown. Their refusal to sacrifice would in fact result in the sacrifice of others, which is something that Rand says should never be done. This discrepancy is also never addressed. In fact, she writes...
Altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value--and it is logical that renunciation, resignation, self-denial, and every other form of suffering, including self-destruction, are the virtues it advocates. And, logically, these are the only things that the practitioners of altruism have achieved and are achieving now.
Nonsense. Absolute nonsense.
The flip side of her hatred of sacrifice is, of course, her promotion of selfishness. And since this is long enough already, I’ll save this side of the discussion for next time.
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