Ayn Rand, Part Two

I sometimes wonder whether Ayn Rand was being deliberately inflammatory when she chose “selfishness” as the lynchpin of her prescription for human behavior. It’s something we’re all taught not to be as children (when we are, of course, massively selfish), so to be told by an adult that in fact that’s just what we should be, it spins our heads around a little. Which was probably exactly what Rand wanted. Oliver Stone was, of course, trying to do exactly the same thing when he wrote Gordon Gekko’s infamous “Greed is good” speech in Wall Street, although in Stone’s case, he was laying out a position his main character would eventually abandon.

In defense of the orthodoxy, then, here I come to take on Ayn Rand. And let me begin, again, by agreeing with her on something:

To take “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whims--by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know--is to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by one’s stale evasions), a robot knocking its stagnant brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see.

Clearly, then, when she advocates selfishness she is not advocating any kind of emotional selfishness where you childishly do whatever you feel like at any given moment. What she’s after is rational selfishness, where you reason out what’s best for you and then do that, boldly and without hesitation.

The trouble is, this viewpoint is every bit as naïve as socialism, in that both ignore certain inescapable facts about human nature. (And remember that Rand’s philosophy is at heart a violent reaction against socialism, born from her personal experiences with the Soviet revolution.) With socialism, people will always want to at least believe that one way or another, they’re a little bit better than their neighbor. True parity is impossible because no one would ever stand for it. Similarly, some of the people most likely to be attracted to Rand’s selfishness are, alas, also likely to ignore her distinction between emotional and rational selfishness, and decide that they’ve now got license to go ahead and do whatever they feel like at any given moment. Their actions become, to be sure, a distortion of what Rand was going for--but, perhaps because she chose a deliberately inflammatory word, Rand opens the door wide and lets absolutely everyone in, including all those who’ve been looking for an excuse to be emotionally selfish. Children, dressed as adults.

But it doesn’t stop there, because Rand doesn’t stop there.

To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that “the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure” is to declare that “the proper value is whatever you happen to value”—which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.

And in this manner, she attempts to abnegate the golden rule. Because if you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, then there are no ethical standards at play, only individual whims, which is exactly what Rand means when she refers to “ethical hedonists.” But, speaking only for myself because I’m the only person I can speak for, my definition of how I’d like to be treated by others, and how I in turn strive to treat them, is not generally dictated by my sense of what’s pleasurable--it is in fact guided by my sense of values.

Have I just locked myself into a circular definition? In the first part of this critique I defined myself as a relative relativist, with only one absolute: the golden rule. Now I say that the test against which I measure the golden rule is my own set of values, even though, as a relativist, I would seem to have none. It’s exactly this sort of thing that drove Rand crazy...

When a “desire,” regardless of its nature or cause, is taken as an ethical primary, and the gratification of any and all desires is taken as an ethical goal (such as “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”)--men have no choice but to hate, fear and fight one another, because their desires and their interests will necessarily clash.

(Here, by the way, she is directly taking on the school of philosophers known as the Utilitarians. Bentham, Mill, etc. Utilitarianism, as it happens, is a branch of what’s called Consequentialism—and I can’t help wondering whether her Objectivism is really just a different branch of Consequentialism, thus explaining her particular ire for the Utilitarians. Academic in-fighting, basically. But that’s a topic for another day.)

“The greatest happiness for the greatest number” comes pretty close to describing what lies at the heart of my own ethos, so I guess you could call me a Utilitarian. But in her dismissal of this point of view, I think she misses the mark badly--men’s desires and interests will only clash when their desires and interests are exclusive, i.e., when my desires are not the same as yours, yours are not the same as mine, and we then resort to fisticuffs to try and force the question of whose desires will win the day. But by definition, my desires also take into account yours--you can’t have “the greatest good for the greatest number” without constant attention to what others desire, and how your own desires can be slotted into those of others.

My approach, then, is inclusive; Rand’s is exclusive. I can’t help thinking that if one truly followed her approach, s/he would end up at exactly at the place Rand decries above: in conflict with others whose definition of their own self-interest, their own selfishness, does not agree with yours. Since consideration of others’ self-interest is considered harmful, then your own self-interest is all that’s left, and without that consideration of those around you, surely conflict becomes more likely rather than less. The only way around this problem would be enforced conformity: everyone on earth agreeing to the same definition of individual self-interest. And that doesn’t sound at all like the sort of freedom Rand is reaching for; in fact, it sounds like exactly the opposite.

But here’s where, for a moment, I agree with Rand again:

... no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man--or group or society or government--has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.

This seems self-evidently right, and for all my differences with Rand elsewhere, here we are matched up perfectly. But then she just has to take it further:

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence--to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

For one thing, she sneaks in a very sweeping declaration about property rights without further discussion of what she means (except to suggest that people go and read Atlas Shrugged). And since property rights more or less sit at the heart of every economic theory ever devised, then this particular question is of crucial importance. Not the sort of thing to be glossed over so casually.

Now on its face, the above statement about the purpose of government seems unassailable. But in short order, its ramifications are made clear:

When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism--with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never yet existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start.

Well, I might submit that during the Eighties and Nineties, we came relatively close to uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, and the result was disastrous. Rand, however, would probably respond that it was government’s interference in open markets that produced the abuses we have all seen. Her vision of capitalism is, after all, every bit as black-and-white as her vision of everything else is: pure unfettered capitalism, utterly unregulated, or nothing. If no other rights are possible without property rights, then it must follow that property rights must be defended fiercely above all else.

I tend to feel about capitalism the same way Churchill felt about democracy: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Rand, however, has clearly settled on capitalism as the be-all and end-all. But the trouble with any system that overtly appeals to man’s greed is that greed is a bottomless pit. You can never have enough of whatever you covet, as Charles MacKay demonstrates amply in the first chapter of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. (In which he discusses financial bubbles--remember please that he wrote it over 160 years ago, and we haven’t learned a thing since.)

Given the evidence before us with the current recession, I am more firmly convinced than ever that Rand is just plain wrong about the need for unfettered laissez-faire capitalism. What’s needed instead is managed capitalism, because otherwise you simply cannot check the greed of those who will, every time without fail, take advantage of unregulated markets to satisfy their bottomless greed. Rand might reply that the people who exploit markets and people for their own gain are simply criminals who deserve punishment, that even if they claim to be devoted Ayn Rand followers they are really just thugs taking advantage of what would otherwise be a perfectly good system.

Again, I say that this view is naïve. You simply cannot create a system that appeals to man’s greed and then tell him not to get too greedy. It won’t work. Without some mechanism that understands this, and sets limits, you will experience systemic crashes just like the one we’re suffering through now. Every time. Every. Damn. Time.

Are they criminals? Of course they’re criminals, and they deserve to be treated as such. But if markets are unregulated, how do you prosecute these people? The perpetrators of credit default swaps and all the other nonsense we’re suffering through now were behaving in a perfectly legal manner, in an unregulated sphere of the marketplace, and they came horrifyingly close to ruining the nation. (And may still --it ain’t over yet.) That is the result of Ayn Rand’s views about capitalism, which are the perfect end result of her entire Objectivist philosophy.

People have been buying Rand’s books by the thousands since the recession began. Yaron Brook, who runs the Ayn Rand Institute, recently said of this phenomenon,

As America faces a devastating economic crisis fundamentally caused by government policies, it is a hopeful sign for the future that increasing numbers of concerned Americans are turning to Atlas Shrugged and discovering Ayn Rand’s original morality of rational egoism and her uncompromising defense of laissez faire capitalism.

He’s got it completely backward. But if all these sales of her books somehow result in a groundswell movement where people actually try to implement Rand’s thinking on a national scale, well, to resort to a divinity she ridiculed, God help us.