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<!-- you can have any number of categories here --> [[Category:Angus Sibley]] [[Category:Ayn Rand]] [[Category:Objectivism]] [[Category:Christian Criticisms Of Libertarianism]] <!-- 1 URL must be followed by >= 0 Other URL and Old URL and 1 End URL.--> {{URL | url = https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340898450_Ayn_Rand_a_pernicious_influence}} <!-- {{Other URL | url = }} --> <!-- {{Old URL | url = }} --> {{End URL}} {{DES | des = A scathing Catholic criticism of [[Ayn Rand]], her cult of [[Objectivism]] and her works. | show=}} <!-- insert wiki page text here --> <!-- DPL has problems with categories that have a single quote in them. Use these explicit workarounds. --> <!-- otherwise, we would use {{Links}} and {{Quotes}} --> {{List|title=Ayn Rand: a pernicious influence|links=true}} {{Quotations|title=Ayn Rand: a pernicious influence|quotes=true}} {{Text | A world of prickly egotists Ayn Rand’s fantasy world is a strange place indeed, where elites of detestable super-egotists struggle with hordes of forgettable nonentities. Rand’s leading characters scarcely possess normal human feelings. They are driven by obsessions with hubristic self-assertion, with mechanistic efficiency, with brutalistic sexuality. Their opponents parade their concern for humanity and social justice; behind that façade, they are hypocritical and incompetent power-seekers. I held it as my honor that I would never need anyone; now my only desire is one I loathe to admit even to myself:1 thus gripes Hank Rearden, autocrat of the steelmills in Atlas Shrugged, after a bout of explosive hochmagandy2 with equally truculent Dagny Taggart, queen of the Taggart Transcontinental railroad. On another occasion she attends a party where there wasn’t a man that I couldn’t squash ten of.3 Howard Roark, hyper-arrogant architect in The Fountainhead, asserts that nothing matters to him but my work my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That’s the only way I function. That’s all I am.4 Dominique 1 Rand, Atlas Shrugged, part I, chap. 9. 2 Hochmagandy, found in the poems of Robert Burns, is a Scots Gaelic term equivalent to fornication. 3 Atlas Shrugged, part I, chap. 5. Francon, fearsome heroine of the same novel, concludes the tale by making him her third husband. Here she is, talking to newspaper editor Alvah Scarret about a statue of a naked man, which she has acquired by bullying a European museum director into selling it to her:5 DF: I think I was in love with it, Alvah. I brought it home with me. AS: Where is it? I’d like to see something you like, for a change. DF: It’s broken. AS: Broken? A museum piece? How did that happen? DF: I broke it. AS: How? DF: I threw it down the air shaft. There’s a concrete floor below. AS: Are you totally crazy? Why? DF: So that no-one else would ever see it. Individualism is acceptable, indeed desirable, in moderation; Rand demonstrates brilliantly how nasty it can become when taken to extremes. But that was far from her intention. Why am I devoting an entire essay to this author of phantasmagorical business sagas and fiery sermons on the cult of the Almighty Dollar? Well, Ayn Rand certainly knew how to write a page-turning thriller; but that is hardly the point. Her books are important not because of their real, though limited and twisted, literary merits. They are important because millions of Americans not only read them, but accord them the reverence that would properly be due to the works of a truly great philosopher. And they continue to buy them in great numbers – around 450,000 in 2016.6 4 Rand, The Fountainhead, part IV, chap. 12. 5 Rand, The Fountainhead, part I, chap. 12. Rand was an accomplished story-teller who used her stories to ram home her economic, social and moral doctrines, which she also expounded in many non-fictional writings. But it is the stories that have sold the most copies and had the widest impact. So what are the doctrines that they proclaim so noisily? The absolute privacy of private property The little tale of the statue vividly illustrates Rand’s obsessive belief that property rights must be absolute. It’s mine; do you understand the word? demands Hank Rearden.7 Dominique Francon could not bear the thought of sharing her property with others in any way, even by merely allowing anyone else to enjoy the sight of her statue! This attitude stemmed from a disaster that struck Rand’s family when she was only twelve: in 1918, during the Bolshevik revolution, the Red Guards seized her father’s prosperous pharmacy business in St Petersburg (then Petrograd) in the name of the people, as they asserted. This stamped upon her mind the conviction that there must be zero tolerance for any intrusion whatsoever upon private property rights, even for the benefit of the general public – the common good – and even for the relief of dire poverty. Thus, according to Rand, taxation is in principle fundamentally wrong, even if imposed by a democratically-elected regime, because it means that ‘the government’ or ‘the people’ infringe individual citizens’ absolute rights to their own property. We can well understand Rand’s place in the affections of Tea Partygoers. A new kind of class war The traditional class war theory of the communists – the conflict between the working class or proletariat and the capitalist class or bourgeoisie – naturally did not interest Rand, for whom communism was the ultimate nonsense. But Rand believed in a different class war: between the individualist ‘creators’, 6 This figure, given by the Ayn Rand Institute, covers gross sales of all English editions of Rand's works. It includes almost 200,000 copies ordered by the Institute for distribution, free of charge, to schools in the USA and Canada. 7 Atlas Shrugged, part I, chap. 7. whom Rand revered almost as gods, and the rest of humanity: those who were not self-assertive mavericks, lonely geniuses, brilliant inventors or entrepreneurs, but simply people who wanted to enjoy life in the society of their own kind. For this latter class she had only contempt. In her mind, the outright individualists were the only human beings of any real value. Hank Rearden asserts that people like Jim Taggart (Dagny’s left-of-centre brother) just clutter up the world.8 Another Atlas Shrugged character, Ellis Wyatt, lord of the Wyatt oil wells in Colorado, remarks that he has guest rooms in his house for the kind of people who come to see me on business. I want as many miles as possible between myself and all the other kinds.9 Some of the other kinds (apparently public-sector bureaucrats) are even labeled sub-animal creatures who crawl on their bellies.10 If ‘social’ individuals are contemptible, ‘society’ itself is beneath contempt; if, indeed, it has any real existence. For in Man’s Rights, a chapter of her book The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), Rand gives us a notorious phrase: there is no such entity as ‘society’. In 1987, we heard from Margaret Thatcher that there is no such thing as society. Whether she got this idea directly from Rand is doubtful, since the British ‘iron lady’ is not known to have been a Rand fan. She may well have got it indirectly via Ronald Reagan, who was an admirer of Rand, though the feeling was not mutual; only utterly uncompromising free-marketeers won her approval. The total rejection of solidarity and altruism All I want is the freedom to make money . . . If I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own – I would refuse. I would reject it as the most contemptible evil . . . The public good be damned. I will have no part of it.11 Thus speaks Hank Rearden in court, on trial for breaking the rules laid down in a state plan regulating the steel industry. Rand repudiated totally the notion that anyone should choose to act in the public interest rather than 8 Atlas Shrugged, part I, chap. 4. 9 Ibid., part I, chap. 8. 10 Ibid., part III, chap. 1. 11 Ibid., part II, chap. 4. one’s own, or that government should presume to direct resources into areas where they are most needed, rather than wherever the market sends them. For Rand, the idea that anyone should undertake any action, primarily in response to someone else’s needs, was an irritant that never failed to spark off a prickly reaction. She held that one should act only in response to one’s own needs or desires. For otherwise, one’s freedom is limited by the demands of other people, and there is no ‘rational’ or 'objective' criterion for deciding which of those demands deserve or need to be satisfied. So John Galt denounces a morality that holds need as a claim.12 Dagny Taggart puts a test question to Quentin Daniels, who is researching in a technological laboratory:13 Haven’t you any desire to be of service to humanity? To which Quentin replies: I don’t talk that kind of language, Miss Taggart. I don’t think you do, either. Randian minds think alike. Businesses, of course, supply our needs; but, in Rand’s world, they must do so only to the extent that it is highly profitable for their owners, in whose minds there should be no question of considering the public interest, the good of society in general. The basis for this idea is Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, her own name for her particular form of rationalism. On this theory, nothing must be done unless it is justified by ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ criteria. Her prime objective criterion is, of course, the market. If any action pays its way in the market, it should be done; otherwise it should not be done. Thus, everything that is done or produced must have a market value and must be paid for. Rand’s ideal society was made up of traders, offering value for value, whose relationships spanned only the length of any given transaction.14 It is a society that practices full, pure, concentrated laisser-faire capitalism.15 The elite who retreat to the Valhalla of ‘Galt’s Gulch’ in Atlas Shrugged put this theory into practice. Here is the great John Galt himself with Dagny 12 Atlas Shrugged, part III, chap. 7. 13 Ibid., part II, chap. 2. 14 Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: University Press, 2009), 209. 15 Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness. Taggart; Galt has asked his friend Midas Mulligan to lend him his car for the day at the usual rate of twenty-five cents:16 DT: Did I understand you to say that Mr Mulligan – who’s worth about two hundred million dollars, I believe – is going to charge you twenty-five cents for the use of his car? JG: That’s right. DT: Good heavens, couldn’t he give it to you as a courtesy? JG: Miss Taggart . . . there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word give. Distributive Justice Rand’s writings display a pronounced ‘snobbery of success’, an outright adulation of people who are rational, capable, efficient, hard-working and acquisitive. Her leading characters excel in these qualities; they grow very rich, they are sure they deserve every penny they earn, and they see no obligation whatsoever to share any of their affluence with anyone, however needy. Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others17 as Rand neatly puts it. Thus, she rejects outright the principle of distributive justice, which regulates what the community owes its citizens in proportion to their contributions and needs.18 According to her axioms, ‘the community’ does not exist, and no-one owes anything to any fellow-citizen except in payment at market value for that citizen’s output. This assumes that someone wishes to buy the output. If there are no buyers, there is no market value. What, then, is to be done about those who, for one reason or another, do not become rich, or who are even too poor to enjoy any sort of decent existence? Rand’s attitude to this problem is underpinned by her fervent belief that a true free-market economy would surely provide ample opportunities for 16 Atlas Shrugged, part III, chap. 1. 17 Rand, The Objectivist, September 1969. 18 Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), par. 2411. everyone to succeed; therefore, in her fantasy world, anyone who fails has only oneself to blame. Every individual can and must stand on one’s own feet. In the real world of partially-regulated markets, she argues, poor people who try to enrich themselves, by finding jobs or by setting up their own enterprises, are hampered by minimum wage laws, trade union restrictions, environmental regulations, town planning rules and other bureaucratic nonsense. Let them join the Ayn Rand Institute and add their voices to the chorus screaming for abolition of all regulations and constraints! Rand, an atheist from her early youth, was clearly a rebel against the Jewish tradition into which she was born. For in that tradition, redistribution from rich to poor is obligatory; it is not primarily a matter of voluntary kindliness, though that, of course, is necessary too. The underlying principle is that all the riches of this world belong to God, and it is God’s will that every human being should have enough of those riches at least to live in basically decent conditions. The rich, therefore, owe a debt to the poor. The Torah, or Law of Moses, in the first five books of the Old Testament, prescribes various ways of settling this debt. There are tithes to be paid, like our taxes. There is the rule of pe’ah or ‘corners’: a farmer must not reap the corners of his fields, but must leave some of the crop standing to be gathered by poor people. There is the Sabbatical year, one year in seven, when fields must lie fallow, whatever grows there being available for the poor. These and other such practices are mandated by law. Supporting the poor is . . . an act of compliance with the covenant that has little to do with free will and everything to do with the fulfillment of one’s obligations to God.19 Rand wasn’t having any of that. For her, the poor have no right to mulct the rich by claiming entitlement to assistance from them. The small minority of adults who are unable, rather than unwilling, to work, have to rely on voluntary charity,20 she insists, and elsewhere she claims that charity is a marginal issue . . . not a moral duty or a primary virtue.21 Poverty, however, is by no means a marginal issue. Not to mention the underdeveloped countries, penury is the lot of many people even in the 19 Alan Avery-Peck in Encyclopedia of Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2000), article Charity in Judaism. 20 Rand, What is Capitalism? in Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967). 21 Rand, interview with Playboy, March 1964. richest nations, like America, where the pursuit of semi-Randian economic policies has seriously aggravated the problem. Anthropocentrism Rand’s atheistic thinking puts man, not God, at the center of the universe. Moreover, the human race has every right to unlimited domination and exploitation of the natural world. Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires.22 Concern for the environment is nonsense. Ecology as a social principle . . . condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men’s return to ‘nature’, to the state of grunting sub-animals digging the soil with their bare hands.23 Gutter-press magnate Gail Wynand, on the deck of his splendid yacht, engages in earnest conversation with Dominique Francon, who is now married to architect Peter Keating, but only until Gail requisitions her, handing Peter a quarter of a million dollars in exchange for a quick non- contentious divorce. Dominique asks him: You’ve never felt how small you were when looking at the ocean? He replies: Never . . . when I look at the ocean, I think of man’s magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes . . . I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline . . . The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?24 The Collective and the Nathaniel Branden Institute Rand was a charismatic personality who attracted a large coterie of admirers. With an inner circle of these, from the early 1950s onwards, she developed a regular salon, held on Saturday evenings in her apartment at 36, East 36th Street, New York, a small, dimly-lit space reeking with smoke and filled with hair 22 Atlas Shrugged, part III, chap. 7. 23 The Ayn Rand Letter, vol. III, no. 25. 24 The Fountainhead ̧ part III, chap. 4. from the O’Connors’ Persian cats.25 Rand had married the film actor Frank O’Connor in 1929. It is ironic that Rand, who made a fetish of competence and success, married a miserably unsuccessful actor, doubtless because she wanted a man whom she could dominate. The couple stayed together till Frank’s death in 1979, despite Rand’s twelve year long liaison with their close friend Nathaniel Branden. The apartment building on 36th Street (Murray Hill), constructed in 1950, still exists. Rand’s choice of this building, new at the time, reflects her liking for modern architecture, evident in The Fountainhead. These gatherings were devoted to philosophical discussions or to reading chapters of Atlas Shrugged as they were drafted. The group called itself The Collective; this name was clearly a joke, since Rand abhorred anything and everything collective. The Collective consisted mainly of people a generation younger than Rand, willing (unlike most of her own generation) to accept her unconventional ideas. Among them were family friends Nathaniel26 and Barbara Branden, Barbara’s cousin Leonard Peikoff, who inherited and still manages Rand’s estate, and Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve, who was attracted by Rand’s extreme free-market views. Though he became more moderate in later life, he was always disinclined to impose strict regulation on the US banking system, and has therefore been blamed for the exorbitant growth of credit leading to the 2008 crash. After the Lehman Brothers failure, Greenspan had the decency to admit, with evident embarrassment, that his trust in the ability of financial markets to regulate themselves – a key element in libertarian thought – had been a mistake. The Collective was an exclusive circle of intimate friends; in order to spread the word more widely, Nathaniel Branden set up a ‘junior collective’ which evolved into an unofficial ‘university’, the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI). Here, courses of lectures on Objectivism were given by Branden; at first, Rand herself attended a question and answer session after each lecture. Soon the system was expanded by sending tape recordings of the lectures to 25 Burns, Goddess of the Market, chap. 5. 26 Also known as Nathan Branden; original name Nathaniel Blumenthal. regional representatives, who organized regular sessions where students listened to the tapes. Though Rand was originally motivated by rebellion against the Russian communist tyranny, and though she claimed to be a proponent of ‘freedom’ (by which she meant absence of coercion by the state), Rand ran her ‘collectives’ in a tyrannical, even totalitarian fashion. She tolerated no dissent from her rigid, all-embracing philosophy of Objectivism. Earlier, in The Fountainhead (1943) she had sneered at ‘second-handers’, her scathing term for people who based their opinions on those of others, rather than blazing their own individual trails. But students at NBI complained that the institute demanded total conformity: there was more than just a right kind of politics and a right kind of moral code. There was also a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we could not buy, and right ones which we should.27 The role of government John Galt’s famous oration, near the end of Atlas Shrugged, contains the standard libertarian view on government: the only proper functions of a government are: the police . . . the army . . . and the courts.28 Earlier in the novel we see businesses all over America ‘delocalizing’ to the state of Colorado; and a Connecticut industrialist wonders why: Colorado, he complains, is a backward, primitive, unenlightened place . . . It’s the worst government in any state. The laziest. It does nothing – outside of keeping law courts and a police department. It doesn’t do anything for the people.29 Rand thus favors the ‘night-watchman state’, leaving citizens to their own devices and providing no public services of any kind apart from the maintenance of law and order. Thus all the usual public amenities, from roads, street-lighting and parks to unemployment benefits and healthcare – not to mention the upkeep of public schools, universities, museums and theatres – would have to be provided by private-sector businesses and paid 27 Ellen Plasil, Therapy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985), 45. 28 Atlas Shrugged, part III, chap. 7. 29 Ibid., part I, chap. 9. for by their immediate users. In reality, of course, such provision could in many cases be impracticable; but that kind of niggling detail never bothers the ideologues of the far right. The libertarians’ anti-government obsession is deeply perverse, because it discourages any effort to make government better. Rand’s view, shared by many libertarian economists, refuses (almost or entirely) to accept that government is necessary, and that we must therefore strive to make it work as well as possible. Instead, government is seen as intrinsically bad, at best a necessary evil, of which as little as possible must be tolerated. At heart, these people are anarchists, even though they may admit, as did Rand, the need for minimal government. But what is so wrong with the notion of public or communal goods and services, or the notion of public regulation? The public sector is simply an arrangement whereby we buy certain goods or services collectively rather than individually. It reflects the fact that we are communities, not just amorphous masses of totally separate, independent individuals. Public regulation simply reflects the fact that private interests may conflict with each other, or with the best interests of the community, or they may cause serious problems if they are allowed to get out of hand; so there is a basic need for regulation by public authority, which represents the community. Rand claimed that she owed nothing to any past philosopher except Aristotle; this was not in fact true, since her notion of the heroic entrepreneur derives from Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch (superman); Rand was, at least in her earlier years, a great admirer of Nietzsche. But among Aristotle’s basic principles is the idea that man is naturally a political animal,30 a member of a pόlis: a city, society, or community. The individual is not, and cannot be, totally independent – and why would anyone wish to be so? Total independence would mean no friendship, no companionship, no mutual help, no intimacy with anyone else. No relationships of any kind with anyone else, other than the contractual relations of business and trade. Who wants to live like that? The distinguished financial journalist Martin Wolf, economics editor of the Financial Times, recently observed that no democracy can thrive if its citizens 30 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a. view their own government as their greatest enemy.31 The essence of democracy is that government is not imposed upon us, it is of our own making. It is up to us to make it as well as we can. Not to sneer at it, as a curse that we have to bear, and to eliminate wherever possible. Conclusion: a pernicious influence David Nolan, founder of the Libertarian Party, has claimed that without Rand, the libertarian movement would not exist.32 That is probably an exaggeration, since libertarianism has been promoted independently of Rand by other high-profile intellectuals such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Murray Rothbard. Nevertheless, the wide and durable popularity of Rand’s books in America suggests that she has been a major influence in the period (early 1970s to late 2000s) of deregulation and turbo-capitalism.33 And even now, when recent disasters have brought the distorted values of that period into question, Rand’s influence persists with the Tea Party and in other reactionary circles. One may feel a certain sympathy for Rand inasmuch as she and her family suffered acutely during the Bolshevik revolution. However, her virulent reaction to that painful experience led her to adopt an extreme, perverse and in my view seriously evil ideology. As St Thomas Aquinas observed, evil arises when something that is good is drawn away from its true disposition.34 Thus Rand’s hatred of tyranny and love of freedom were diverted, by a certain malevolence on her part, into a gravely defective and pernicious philosophy, that grossly exaggerates the autonomy of the individual, and totally rejects the basic human need for community and solidarity. Jennifer Burns, whose Goddess of the Market is an excellent biography with a stance more sympathetic than mine towards Rand, explains that Rand confronted in communism and socialism the failure of good intentions. The proponents of those systems aimed to build progressive and just societies, 31 Martin Wolf, Era of a diminished superpower in Financial Times (London), May 15 2012. 32 Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (Garden City (NY): Doubleday, 1986), 414. 33 See Edward Luttwak, Turbo-capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy (London: Orion, 1999). 34 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, part I, quest. 49, art. 1. but their efforts led to tyranny and misery. Rand’s solution was, in Burns’ words, to eliminate all virtues that could possibly be used in the service of totalitarianism,35 such as the virtues of altruism and service to others. But it should be obvious that, in this fallen world, any virtue is capable of being perverted, misdirected or corrupted. One cannot eliminate all virtues that may possibly be abused, except by eliminating all virtues. Rand’s heroes and heroines did indeed contrive to denude themselves of most of them; that is why they are so repulsive. To quote St Thomas again, malum importat remotionem boni,36 ‘evil means the absence (or removal) of good’. If we eliminate a virtue, we shall probably find in its place evil consequences, not just an empty space. Accordingly, I would argue that Rand’s crusade for individual freedom is another example of the failure of good intentions. She may indeed have meant well, but the philosophy she propagated turned out to be evil. We cannot blame Rand for all the harm that has been done by the errors of libertarianism. We must also blame the numerous readers of Rand who have uncritically swallowed her ideas, thus offending against one of Rand’s own precepts: the worst of crimes is the acceptance of the opinions of others.37 As we have seen, while Rand trumpeted this precept, she expected her followers to ignore it, to passively absorb and accept whatever she told them. But, since Rand’s opinions were so misguided, they would do far better to refrain from committing her ‘worst of crimes’. }}
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