Me, me, me ... and Ayn Rand!

I know, I know, I'm a fickle fellow but, alas, I must rescind my offer in a recent post for Ms. Ayn Rand to have my babies.  The fact that she has been dead for 27 years is neither here nor there, my reasons for premature withdrawal are philosophical rather than physiological!

In my previous post I admitted to being very taken with her philosophical views but even then I added my 'get out' clause, "even whilst reserving some doubts".  If anything these doubts have grown as, in my dull-witted way, I have slowly mulled over her various propositions.  Yesterday I came across two book reviews, here and here, on the subject of Ayn Rand in The American Thinker which confirmed my hesitation.

Perhaps the most shocking, and I really do mean 'shocking', part of her philosophy is her insistent hostility toward altruism. Now, I am not so steeped in her works for me to be precise as to whether she confined her detestation of it only as it appears in political philosophy or whether she includes personal behaviour.  Certainly she will have none of it when it appears in political form because she denounces it as a fraud foisted on the unwary as a means of enslaving them.  To understand why, one only has to glance at recent and current communistic regimes in which individual desires and wants are subjugated for the so-called 'greater good'; and you don't have to look much further than our own political parties, yes, all of them, to hear similar if softer sorts of the same clap-trap.  In essence the message is always the same; in the name of morality, that's 'Big Brother's' morality not necessarily yours, we will stop you doing 'x' and insist that you do 'y' even though that might harm you in order that the lot of others will thereby be improved.  Speaking of the Enlightenment philosophers, she writes:

The great treason of the philosophers was that they never stepped out of the Middle Ages.  [...]  They were willing to doubt the existence of physical objects [Kant, Hume, etc], they were willing to doubt the validity of their own senses, they were willing to defy the authority of absolute monarchies, they were willing (occasionally) to proclaim themselves to be skeptics or agnostics or atheists - but they were not willing to doubt the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal, that he has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.

Under all its countless guises, variations and adaptations, that doctrine - best described as the morality of altruism - has come from prehistoric swamps to New York City, unchallenged.  In savage societies, men practiced the ritual of human sacrifices, immolating individual men on sacrificial alters, for the sake of what they regarded as their collective [my emphasis] tribal good.  Today, they are still doing it, only the agony is slower and the slaughter greater - but the doctrine that demands and sanctions it, is the same doctrine of moral cannibalism."

That is difficult, if not impossible, to deny given the history of the 20th century.  Rand idolises the producer, the businessman, the man who uses his skill, his labour and his daring to meet a need that he perceives amongst his fellow men and women.  He does it, not out of altruism, but  because it satisfies him personally and rewards him handsomely - if he succeeds!  Such people, she maintains, should be feted as heroes, not, as they usually are, denigrated as villains.  She points to the 19th century which was a period closest to the ideals of free market capitalism and which saw unbelievable growth in wealth and well-being for the world's population. For Rand, everything she believes was encompassed by the Founding Fathers:

The New Intellectuals [as opposed to the 'old' ones with their collectivist ideas] must remind the world that the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was man's right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness - which means: man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders [her emphasis], by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.

Rand came to America after her family fled the communist revolution in Russia so you can understand her vehement hatred for all things socialist.  However, it seems to me that in her extreme views she simply mirrors the way in which collectivist philosophers think.  They construct a theoretical edifice whilst ignoring the characteristics of the building materials, that is, human beings.  Rand does much the same in the opposite direction.  For example, and to use a trite metaphor, in pursuing his happiness, 'Lord Gradgrind' might well eschew altruism and decide that small boys and girls should work in his factory for a penny a day, and given that they are impoverished and hungry they might well agree and thus comply with Rand's notion of dealing with each other as "traders" indulging in "voluntary exchange for mutual benefit".  But can anyone with even the faintest sense of charity accept such a state of affairs?  I think not, and indeed, I know not, because the 19th and 20th centuries also saw, in the democracies, a steady improvement in the condition of the workforce without the horrors of collectivisation.

Today we can see that these efforts have gone too far, not as a result of actions by the workers themselves, but mostly because of the malignant and growing power of the political class.  Hiding behind apparently 'good intentions' with which it is difficult to argue, they accrue more and more money by means of a vast array of new taxes, the distribution of which then gives them enormous power.  The plight of the working man in the democratic west is no longer a matter of urgency, so new means must be attached to new emergencies in order to raise new streams of revenue for the governmental coffers - step forward, amongst others, global warming!  All over the western world, government ministers and their 'hand-maidens' are smacking their lips at the prospect of huge amounts of money from taxes aimed at avoiding an entirely mythical end of the world!

I believe we need a Randian revolution to undertake a 'slash and burn' attack on governments in general, and the political class in particular.  However, we should not assume that Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy will cure all our ills, it will merely change them - but as my old mum used to say, a change is as good as a rest!

 

Comments

[dearieme]

Anyone who takes Mr Jefferson's propaganda literally is a political simpleton.

[David Duff]

I must read up more on the Founding Fathers, 'DM', my ignorance is a persoanl disgrace. It was, when you think about it, an amazing exercise for those men to sit down with a more or less clean slate and design the governance of a new nation. By and large I think they did a good job. It could be said, I suppose, (and Rand would and did say it) that it has been the activities ever since of people who did not take the Constitution literally which has gradually whittled it away.

[dearieme]

A slate that resulted in their adopting an approximation to King, Lords and Commons, and incorporating great chunks of the English Bill of Rights into their Constitution, was hardly "clean", David. Anyway, the problem is that people who accept that all politicians have, at best, mixed motives, often behave badly, and deal out large chunks of falsehood, are indoctrinated with the belief that the Founding Fathers are the sole historical exception to this rule. A bit of critical scrutiny, and attention to the facts insofar as they can be established, would do a power of good, but it wouldn't sell in the States, and no other market would be much interested, I imagine. Personally, I have One Big Question: what on earth was the War of Independence about? For example, sometimes American schoolchildren are told that it was about taxation, but the North American colonies were the most lightly taxed civilisation in history. (And the Boston Tea Party was a protest by smugglers aginst the reduction of the import duty on tea.) Other answers - it was about intolerable despotism, for example - also don't work, because they prove too much. That is to say, if they were true, the population would have rebelled on a vast scale, and the British government would have had to settle immediately. But opinions were divided, the rebels were few, and what was partly a civil war broke out. Even Ben Franklin's son thought the rebels quite wrong. I suspect that my One Big Question doesn't have One Big Answer, but it's hard to get very far discussing it on the web, because so many Americans just bridle and resort to name-calling and uncritically repeating the stuff they were taught at elementary school. You have to remember that Americans seem to believe their equivalents of the tales we learnt at school about, say, Alfred burning the cakes, Canute sitting on the beach, or Bruce learning persistence from the spider in the cave. But they don't put childish things behind them when they grow up, and really cling to their yarns. All very odd. They don't even seem to distinguish much between the impressive fellows, such as Washington, and the twerps, such as Jefferson. Hey ho.

[David Duff]

Can you recommend an even-handed book on all of this, 'DM'?

[dearieme]

Wish I could - I have learnt largely from fragments. The most interesting thing I've read lately is "Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolutionary War" by Hugh Bicheno. The problem is that the war was a big deal, obviously, in US history, but no big deal in anyone else's (unless you count the fact that it cost the French enough to ruin their state finances and thus, eventually, bring on their revolution). So you get a lot of pious lies intended for an American readership that ... well, you get the point.

As for the Constitution (and the debates that led up to it) I am a great admirer, but can't help but notice that it's ignored if ever the issue is deemed important enough by the Powers That Be. That, I suppose, means it's a failure, albeit a noble failure. So I take the view that the USA has a constitution, in which parts of The Constitution figure. Ah well, if the US is set on its own destruction, I don't suppose it matters much.

[David Duff]

I'm actually blushing, 'DM', which in a retired second-hand car trader is a very, very rare sight!

My interested raised I went over to my history book shelves and there I found "The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution" by Robert Middlekauff - and it is signed by the author! Oh God! How could I have forgotten? And now I remember the occasion. The Rothermere family (of Daily Mail fame) sponsor an American historian for a year at Oxford. I used to supply the motor - 'know wot I mean, John?' - and these visitors used to give an annual lecture which I attended on one occasion with a second-hand paperback copy of the man's book. I failed to remember the occasion and failed to remember the book, so I suppose that confirms me as a failure!

However, I quite like his first lines in the preface:

The title that I have given this book may be understood in this day - when all is suspect - as irony. I do not intend that it should be. The Americans, the "common people", as well as soldiers and great leaders,who made the Revolution against Britain believed that their cause was glorious - and so do I. But their cause, however glorious, had its inglorious sides, and the Americans' manner of advancing it was sometimes false to the great principles they espoused.

That promises well, I'll let you know.

[Dom]

Hitchens has a little book on Jefferson, if you want the opposite of what DM has been saying. Also, The Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis is quite good, as are most of the books that Ellis wrote.

[David Duff]

Thanks, Dom, I'll look out for Ellis - when I have worked my way through Middlekauff's hefty volume!

[Umbongo]

Indulge an old man and let him give a couple of random thoughts on this one:

1. I've always been led to believe that the Founding Fathers were heavily influenced by Montesquieu's "On the Spirit of the Laws" (1748) which stated M's belief that the separation of powers was fundamental to the success of democracy. He cited England as the prime - if not perfect - example of this. Accordingly, after the success of the AWoI, M's misreadings of how the English Constitution actually worked were translated into the US Constitution. Of course, the strict application of the separation of powers as envisaged by the writers of the US Constitution has never worked eg the "supreme" power in the state is the Supreme Court. The Court was accorded a passive role by the Constitution: - an "activist" judiciary would have been viewed with horror.

2. Revolutions - particularly successful ones - are led by those from the (for want of a better word) middle, or fairly prosperous, classes who are excluded from power (Mao, Lenin, Castro, Robespierre etc). The American Revolution is no different. However, as luck would have it, the revolutionaries in America were steeped in the traditions of the Common Law and of the Rule of Law. Accordingly, although they felt excluded from real power (despite elected assemblies in all (?) the colonies), they had a genuine attachment to the forms and disciplines which they believed the "real" English Constitution would reflect. The US was lucky in that it had a template in the existing English Constitution on which to craft an improvement. France, Russia andd China had autocracy; the Cubans had thugocracy.

[David Duff]

Always a pleasure to indulge you, 'Bongers'.

Until I finish Mr. Middlekauff's book there's not much I can usefully add to your comments. The apparent fact that they misunderstood the English settlement when they designed their constitution never occurred to me before. The recent activism by the Supreme Court is ferociously attacked by implication in Rand's book as she lays into the post-enlightenment philosophers who have, of course, been such a huge influence on those she calls, dismissively, 'modern intellectuals' of whom the legal profession has more than its share.

As to your second point, yes, it always provides me with a sly smile when I read 'Leftie' blogs where they never stop banging on about 'the workers' whilst remaining, themselves, impeccably middle-class.