Replies to post #313926 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Not really 'essential reading', if you're out of HS.

Don't have to read it is not the same as 'don't read it'.

The System that Wasn’t There: Ayn Rand’s Failed Philosophy (and why it matters) -Nicholas McGinnis

The late Gore Vidal was scathing even decades ago, writing in 1961 that Rand has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the “welfare” state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts […] Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic.

http://www.rotman.uwo.ca/the-system-that-wasnt-there-ayn-rands-failed-philosophy-and-why-it-matters/

“I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.”

That’s Paul Ryan, Republican vice-presidential candidate, in a 2005 speech delivered at The Atlas Society–one of many lavishly funded organizations devoted to spreading the thought and philosophy of Ayn Rand (he’s since distanced himself).

There are so many of these organizations it is hard to keep track. Apart from the Atlas Society, there is the Ayn Rand Institute, the Nathaniel Branden Institute, the Anthem Foundation and the Institute for Objectivist Studies.

Numerous libertarian think-tanks, like the Cato Institute, promote Rand. Campus groups–which receive funding from objectivist foundations–are everywhere, promoting Rand via slick newsletters (like The Undercurrent: “Obama wants to use Blakely’s earnings to cover the bill for thousands of less productive citizens’ flu shots and groceries,” a typical line reads–Blakely is the noble, visionary entrepreneur who created Spanx.)

http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/his1005spring2011/files/2011/03/Homeless-Children.gif



The fantastically rich find in Rand’s celebration of individual achievement a kindred spirit, and support her work with pecuniary enthusiasm: in 1999, McGill University turned down a million-dollar endowment from wealthy businessman Gilles Tremblay, who had given the money in the hopes of creating a chair dedicated to the the study of her work.

Then-president Bernard Shapiro commented that “we can’t just sell our souls just for the sake of being richer,” hopefully aware of the irony: what else is there but getting richer? Rand literally ends her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, with the dollar sign replacing the sign of the cross, traced in the air–indicating the dawn of a new, bold, daringly sophomoric era.

Rand’s books have sold in the millions, never quite losing steam in the half-century since publication. A now-infamous Library of Congress survey placed Atlas Shrugged as the second-most influential book in America, trailing only the Bible–a dubious pairing, perhaps, given Rand’s militant atheism, but one that indeed captures the uneasy tension of contemporary America: the celebrated Protestant ethic versus the spirit of capitalism.

Despite her popular appeal, perennially best-selling books, and the breathless testimonial of politicians, actors and businessmen–Ryan is scarcely alone in his praise–professional academics almost universally disdain Rand.

An online poll by widely-read philosophy professor and blogger Brian Leiter had Ayn Rand elected the one thinker who “brings the most disrepute on to our discipline by being associated with it,” by a landslide. She is almost never taught in classrooms.

Her name elicits jeers and funny, exasperated tales of fierce, bright undergraduates under her spell arguing her case for hours on end.

This near-unanimous rejection has led to some remarkably uncharitable, and bizarre, attempts to explain away the lack of academic interest: in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Rand, its authors write that “her advocacy of a minimal state with the sole function of protecting negative individual rights is contrary to the welfare statism of most academics,” claiming outright that the overwhelming majority of professional philosophers and political theorists have been simply unable to fairly evaluate her work because of the biasing factor of their prior political commitments.

Somehow the same ‘welfare statism’ of academics has not prevented the close study of Robert Nozick’s landmark Anarchy, State and Utopia, a sophisticated libertarian text that mounts an original, and far more effective, argument against redistributive policies. Apart from John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, there is perhaps no more commonly-assigned book in undergraduate political philosophy classes.

Surely there must be some other reason for Rand’s academic neglect. The authors of the SEP entry do go on to suggest an additional number of largely psychological hypotheses having to do with Rand’s dogmatic tone, cult-like following, and emphasis on popular fiction–never entertaining the possibility that professional philosophers think her work is, quite simply, of poor quality. Objectively, ahem, speaking.



What is Rand’s ‘philosophy’, then? Her own summary may be appropriated:

I am primarily the creator of a new code of morality which has so far been believed impossible, namely a morality not based on faith, not on arbitrary whim, not on emotion, not on arbitrary edict, mystical or social, but on reason; a morality that can be proved by means of logic which can be demonstrated to be true and necessary.

Now may I define what my morality is? Since man’s mind is his basic means of survival […] he has to hold reason as an absolute, by which I mean that he has to hold reason as his only guide to action, and that he must live by the independent judgment of his own mind; that his highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness […] that each man must live as an end in himself, and follow his own rational self-interest.

The practical, political conclusions to be drawn from this ‘morality’ are surprisingly specific: a minimal government, for instance, which enforces no minimum wage law, operates no schools, collects no taxes, and merely enforces contracts in an economy that is otherwise entirely laissez-faire. Rational individuals do not come together to create a universal health insurance system in the process of seeking ‘happiness’. They do not pass laws restricting what age a child can work.


Unsurprisingly, the politicians and businessmen who admire Rand focus on such policy recommendations and are rather less familiar with, for instance, her grounds for rejecting the analytic-synthetic distinction.

There’s a radical disconnect between the impact her political thought and the influence her metaphysics has had. Everybody who likes Rand can defend at great length a number of socio-economic theses; what very few do is discuss the metaphysical underpinnings that purportedly justify her political and social views.

This is unfortunate, because her philosophy attempts to form a coherent system, and these higher-order political views are the direct result of foundational assumptions in metaphysics and logic (and a series of complex derivations from these). This is one case where an opinion on the possibility of a priori knowledge could mean the difference between a school breakfast program and a hungry child.

Now there are two ways to approach Objectivism: first, and most commonly, we may tackle her edifying fiction, which portrays Manichean conflicts between heroic, intelligent ‘producers’ and parasitic ‘looters.’

The latter, mainly by force of numbers and all the vile raiments of democracy, get in the way of the former: they do not understand that they depend, utterly, on these rarefied ubermenschen, who, of course, ultimately triumph.

Given the stark morality of the novels, everyone who reads them in a positive light cast themselves quite naturally as noble producers, and certainly not parasites, which, given Rand’s popularity, means we are a society absolutely replete with noble, heroic, rugged geniuses.

Well-meaning readers are taken in by her grandiose, if somewhat turgid, presentation of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute (Atlas Shrugged).

The values propounded in her work many find stirring and true. To contest Rand, to the true believer, is to besmirch rationality itself, to prize the unremarkable ‘collective’ over the individual, to shrug at excellence, and–from jealousy, or some other base instinct–to hate and undermine one’s betters and undeservedly demand what is theirs.

The other way in is via her ‘system’ of philosophy: resolutely materialistic, godless, and rationalistic. It proceeds largely from a set of basic axioms:

(‘existence’, ‘identity’, ‘consciousness’) and derives a more-or-less comprehensive set of metaphysical, epistemological and ethical views. Here we have a complicated internal jargon (which resists assimilation into the analytic vernacular) and a set of post-Randian writers–Peikoff, Kelley, and others–who have fleshed out and expanded her thought into something like a philosophical system in the traditional sense, the kind of thing that has been largely abandoned in contemporary academic philosophy.

One can get a sense of the ‘system’ from a glance at the wikipedia page: there are any number of dubious inferences made, most remarkably from ‘existence’ to ‘identity’ to something like conceptual necessity (and thence to causality itself, defined as the “principle of identity applied to action”–possibly the most cringe-worthy explanation of causality to ever be presented seriously: in effect, we are told that things do as they do because they are as they are.)

From axiomatic bases the edifice is built: existence exists and is characterized by identity, which is populated by conscious beings, who must use reason to survive as individuals, and the dictates of reason force us to admit that rational self-interest is the only metaphysically coherent way forward, logically implying capitalism and free markets.


“I think she’s [Rand] one of the greatest people of all time. Ultimately, in philosophy, she’s going to be one of the giants. I mean, she’ll be up there with Plato and Aristotle.”

That’s Dr. Yaron Brook, who holds a PhD in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin. This provocative quote is culled from a recent interview in which he asserted that we are headed for a new dark ages unless we heed Rand’s wisdom. If we do not, “the next renaissance will begin when her books are rediscovered after 1,000 years of darkness.”

Brook is the director of the Ayn Rand Institute, the largest Objectivist organization, with a budget in the millions and political links to the Tea Party movement.

The enlightened Dr. Yaron Brooks: “I would like to see the United States turn Fallujah into dust, and tell the Iraqis: If you’re going to continue to support the insurgents you will not have homes, you will not have schools, you will not have mosques.”

The incredible conceit that Ayn Rand will figure in the history of philosophy as one of the greats–better than Kant (“corrupt”), Hegel (“nonsensical”) or Wittgenstein (“garbage”)–is not restricted to her contemporary followers: Rand, in the same 1957 interview with Mike Wallace linked above, described herself as the most creative thinker alive.

(Corey Robin notes that “Arendt, Quine, Sartre, Camus, Lukács, Adorno, Murdoch, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Rawls, Anscombe and Popper were all at work” in 1957, and invites the reader to draw their own conclusions).

Rand’s extreme self-regard was mirrored in her friends and followers. Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan–a member of Ayn Rand’s tightly-knit inner circle–only recently, and reluctantly, acknowledged that there may be ‘flaws’ in Rand’s ideology of self-interest. But in the 1960s, he was writing for objectivist newsletters, and praised Rand for decades afterwards: “talking to Rand was like starting a game of chess thinking I was good, and suddenly finding myself in checkmate,” he said. In a 1957 letter to the editor prompted by a dismissive review of Atlas Shrugged, he wrote

Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.

One wonders at the type of celebration of ‘life’ that centers around satisfied joy at the perishing of so-called ‘parasites.’ A boldly totalitarian discourse of justified elimination, produced a scant dozen years after the end of the second world war.

It is a tradition upheld by contemporary Randians: Brooks has called for unrestricted, murderous warfare in Iraq (see above); Leonard Peikoff, who originally founded the Ayn Rand Institute, calls for the “immediate end” of “terrorist states” such as Iran, not ruling out nuclear weapons, and this “regardless of the countless innocents caught in the line of fire.”

Admiration for Rand can be found in strange places. Actors from Brad Pitt to Farrah Fawcett have effused praise as well. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas allegedly makes his clerks watch the 1949 film version of The Fountainhead.

But the definitive statements belongs to her lover and confidante Nathaniel Branden (indeed, Rand’s heir apparent until a fractious and unsavoury dispute over his termination of their affair). He recalls writing, in all seriousness, that

Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived. Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world. Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter of any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral or appropriate to man’s life on earth.

These were the initial premises presented in Branden’s lecture courses on objectivism, approved and overseen by Rand herself. From this point of view, it is indeed very fortunate for humanity that Rand did not choose to ‘go Galt’ and, like her most famous protagonist, withdraw her genius from us.

Meanwhile, a thriving cottage industry of journalists, essayists, cultural observers and philosophers seem engaged in a one-upmanship contest over who can deride her with the most vicious economy of words possible. George Monbiot says of Rand that her thought “has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced.”

Corey Robin, with a historical flourish, writes that “St. Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.”

The late Gore Vidal was scathing even decades ago, writing in 1961 that Rand has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the “welfare” state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts […] Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic.

Criticism has not only come from the left. While Rand’s allure to conservatives is far more pronounced now–despite some lingering misgivings from religious groups–intellectuals on the right despaired of Rand’s growing influence when her books were first published. In the National Review, Whittaker Chambers wrote, in 1957:

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.

In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible.

This was at a time when many conservative intellectuals saw in the complexity of the world a reason to be trepidant about radical change and wary about the potential for deleterious destabilization it brings, an altogether different form of ‘conservatism’ from that of the present-day marriage of libertarian economics with theological presumption.

Chambers rightly saw in Rand a dangerous radical, one who glosses over complexity in her desire to derive political prescription from first principles, an anti-conservative writer par excellence advocating a radically different society:

[Atlas Shrugged] is essentially a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us.

The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts.

In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

William F. Buckley, who helped define modern American conservatism by launching and serving as editor-in-chief of The National Review, specifically published Chambers’ critique (and others like it) to purge Rand from conservatism–writing that “her desiccated philosophy’s conclusive incompatibility with the conservative’s emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral” meant it was unworthy of the noble tradition of conservative politics, and to be cast out with the Birchers, anti-semites, and white supremacists.

The difference of opinion over the value of Rand’s work could not be more stark. One is hard-pressed to find a ‘moderate’ who finds in Rand some modest value or would characterize her as a decent, or simply good, thinker.

She is either genius or a fraud; either a first-rate, world-historical intellectual or a hack writer who appeals to the worst in people by pointing to their wounded self-worth and telling them they are great (“To say “I love you” one must first be able to say the “I” ”, she wrote in The Fountainhead, sounding more like Dr. Phil and less like the heir to Aristotle).

This polarizing effect is remarkable. It is partially a function of the reach of her work: far worse things have been expressed than those ideas contained in Rand’s novels, but almost none have had the impact (ten million grenades handed out on street-corners do more damage than an atom bomb left sitting on a shelf).

But the virulence is also a reaction to the breathless fanaticism of her converts, hyperbole matched to hyperbole, in the full knowledge that derision is often more effective than argument in inoculating the undecided.