Ayn Rand and Libertarian mythology
« on: 2010-06-21 15:12:08 »
I personally will never read her. After understanding 1) that she believes that morality derives from the human condition and 2) that she steadfastly denied human biological evolution, and 3) considered herself a serious philosopher - given one and three I think two makes her pretty close to completely irrelevant by Church of Virus standards. However, her sociopathic fairy tales have proven propagating potential in US media markets, so I figure we'll have to address her occasionally.
Blunderov brought us this great cartoon on another thread.
ps - it has been brought to my attention that Ayn Rand did not reject evolution but was rather ambivalent about it. I can only conclude that her ambivalence about it was due to an incompetant lack of curiosity which any serious philosopher claiming "human nature" as the central basis of their value would overcome without effort. Any one who cared about science and was curious about human nature, its evolution, and hence its origins, even in her time could not fail to accept evolution. If she hadn't claimed to be such a serious philosopher, it might be no big deal, but since she claimed all kinds of authority that way, its a big f'n deal.
Ayn Rand (born Alice Rosenbaum) is a fascinating person and an inspiring advocate of freedom but a very mixed blessing philosophically. Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are still best selling introductions to the ideas of personal freedom and of the free market. As literature they may have drawbacks, but they are compelling "reads," which is certainly what Rand would have wanted. Rand's passionate and moralistic tone, while off-putting to many, is nevertheless probably a real part of her appeal and is no less than an equal and opposite reaction to the self-righteousness that is still characteristic of leftist rhetoric. Few writers convey an irresistible ferocity of convictions as Rand does. To many, including the present writer, raised and indoctrinated with the standard disparagements of capitalism, a novel like Atlas Shrugged can produce something very much like a Conversion Experience. At the same time, the harsh certainty of an autodidact and self-made person, and the high handed authoritarian manner of Rand's personality, worked against her case, her cause, and her life.
Although David Kelley, Leonard Peikoff, and others now try to develop her thought into a complete philosophical system, nothing can hide the relative shallowness of her knowledge: She despised Immanuel Kant but then actually invokes "treating persons as ends rather than as means only" to explain the nature of morality. Perhaps she had picked that up without realizing it was from Kant [note]. At the same time, the Nietzschean inspiration that evidently is behind her "virtue of selfishness" approach to ethics seems to have embarrassed her later: She very properly realized that, since the free market is built upon voluntary exchanges, capitalism requires firm moral limits, ruling out violence, coercion, fraud, etc. That was certainly not a concern of Nietzsche, but it was very much a concern of Adam Smith, who realized that, in a context of mutually voluntary exchange, people will always go for the best deal, producing the "invisible hand" effect of mutual and public goods being produced by private preferences. This confuses people enough in regard to Smith; and that makes it all the easier to mistakenly see Rand as advocating a view of capitalists as righteous predators -- especially unfortunate when the popular vision of laissez-faire capitalism is already of merciless and oppressive robber barons. A careful reading of Rand dispels that idea, but her rhetoric works against a good understanding.
Rand also confuses her case with her emphasis on individuals being deliberately "rational." That sets her against the Austrian and Chicago principles of economics that the free market is the means of coordinating limited knowledge, not some place where rationalistic supermen (e.g. the John Galt of Atlas Shrugged) display superhuman intellectual and moral powers. That makes it sound like the free market works just because such supermen exist to control it. Rand herself was actually aware that was not true: At her best moments she asserts only that capitalism is superior because it automatically, through the "invisible hand," rewards the more rational behavior, not because some superrational persons must exist to hand out those rewards. That would have been F.A. Hayek's "intentionalistic fallacy." Nevertheless, one is left with the impression that Rand and her "Objectivist" successors do commit Hayek's "fatal conceit" by supposing that heroic characters will exercise a superrationalistic control over themselves and the economy, and that capitalism is not really a way of coping with ignorance, or with dispersed knowledge.
Rand certainly tried to exercise a superrationalistic control in her own life, with disastrous results: Her psychological understanding of people, and even of herself, was clearly and gravely limited. Thus she engineered the marriage between Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, even though (according to Barbara, in The Passion of Ayn Rand) they weren't all that attracted to each other -- their unease was "irrational" to Rand. Then she decided that she and Nathaniel should have some sort of "rational" love affair, like characters in her novels. That Nathaniel was not comfortable with that, especially since they were both already married, does not seem to have mattered. When he finally refused to continue their relationship, Rand furiously expelled him from her "movement" and then scuttled the "movement" itself. That was, curiously, all for the better, since under her control the Objectivist movement was taking on more and more of the authoritarian or totalitarian overtones of the very ideologies it was supposedly opposing.
In another incident, related by the columnist Samuel Francis, when Rand learned that the economist Murray Rothbard's wife, Joey, was a devout Christian, she all but ordered that if Joey did not see the light and become an atheist in six months, Rothbard, who was an agnostic, must divorce her. Rothbard never had any intention of doing anything of the sort, and this estranged him from Rand, who found such "irrational" behavior intolerable.
It is revealing that as Rand refined her idea of the heroic personality from the Howard Roark of The Fountainhead to John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, the type became steadily drained of, indeed, personality. Galt seems little better than a robotic mouthpiece of merciless ideology. Howard Roark was already peculiar enough, since he would just sit staring at the phone while waiting for work. He might at least have read magazines. Subsidiary characters, like Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart, possess something more like real personalities. This deadness of such central characters is an excellent warning that Rand had passed beyond a desire for mere human beings as her ideals. (Jung probably would have detected an animus projection.) This was an unhelpful bit of falseness, not to mention humorlessness, with which to burden her case for capitalism.
One drawback of Rand's literary method to present her ideas, although it follows in the great Russian tradition of philosophical novels, is the manner in which it sometimes obscures historical realities that would reinforce her argument. Thus the Taggart Railroad of Atlas Shrugged may strike someone with an average knowledge of American history as the kind of thing that never existed. Most people know that the transcontinental railroads were built with federal subsidies and federal land grants. They may also know that such railroads were tangled up in hopelessly corrupt, politicized financial schemes and in the end were so badly run and managed that they all (Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, & Northern Pacific) went bankrupt in the Panic of 1893. It takes somewhat better knowledge to know about James J. Hill (1838-1916), who built his own transcontinental railroad, the Great Northern, without public subsidies or land grants and often with the political opposition and obstructionism of the rival Northern Pacific and its political backers. Some of Rand's stories about the Taggart, for instance the challenge of building a Mississippi bridge, seem to have been inspired by real incidents in the building of the Great Northern. Unlike the other transcontinentals, Hill's railroad was financially sound; and after they went bankrupt, he was able to buy the Northern Pacific and also the Burlington. Hill, sadly, had to end his days furious and frustrated with the ignorant manipulations of the Interstate Commerce Commission. By merely fictionalizing Hill, Rand did not help combat the standard, biased history of American railroads (cf. Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant, The Growth, Rejection & Rebirth of a Vital American Force, Oxford University Press, 1992).
Rand's fiction also obscures another side of the story. The Taggart Railroad does not begin, like the Great Northern, in Minneapolis, but in New York City. The description of its terminal there does fit that of a real place: Pennsylvania Station, built by another great forgotten figure of American railroad history, Alexander J. Cassatt (1839-1906), President of the Pennsylvania Railroad (1899-1906). Cassatt successfully built, not only the first railroad tunnels under the Hudson River, but the first such tunnels under the East River also -- for the Long Island Rail Road, which was acquired by the Pennsylvania for just that purpose. Like any Randian hero, Cassatt had to battle the corrupt political machine of New York City to build something that would only be a benefit for everyone. Cassatt, who had retired, was offered the Presidency of the Railroad in a scene that could have been right out of Roman history, indeed, just like the act of Cincinnatus being offered the office of Roman Dictator:
And so on a lovely day, June 8, 1899, shortly after [President Frank] Thomson's death, a sober-suited delegation from the railroad's board journeyed out on their Main Line to Haverford [Pennsylvania]. Under a glorious bowl of blue sky they drove past the clipped emerald greensward of the Merion Cricket Club (of which Cassatt was president), and onto a meandering drive past a flock of Shropshire sheep cropping buttercups. Nestled among the trees stood Cheswold, Cassatt's charmingly gabled fieldstone mansion, now completely ivy-covered with gaily striped awnings at all the windows. Cassatt, the master of this country paradise, was out in the fields exercising one of his beloved horses. The men redirected their carriages down another road and spied him.
Cassatt stood in the June sunshine, perhaps thinking of his very good life as a country gentleman, knowing as well as anyone present the almost insuperable problems bedeviling the railroad. His fellow board members got down from their carriages, and offered him their greatest honor, the presidency of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He paused and then responded quietly that yes, he would be very interested. [Jill Jonnes, Conquering Gotham, A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels, Viking, 2007, pp.36-37]
Rand's respect for philosophy is one virtue of her system, but her epistemology and metaphysics miss much of the point of modern philosophy. Indeed, her ideal, rather like Mortimer Adler, was Aristotle. This could be good, since Aristotle's view of substance steered Rand away from a reductionistic materialism. Her development of Aristotle, on the other hand, ends up with something rather like Leibniz's view of concepts: Concepts refer to every characteristic contained in every individual of their kind. This was not an improvement on Aristotle, who realized that if there are natural kinds, then there are both essential and accidental characteristics of those kinds. The meaning of concepts would be about the essential characteristics. For Leibniz's view of concepts to work, one would have to have, as Leibniz well understood himself, the infinite knowledge of God: It would be impossible for our finite understanding to encompass all the characteristics of all the individuals of their kind. One suspects that Rand was not one to let God claim some superior status to human (or her) comprehension and knowledge.
Rand's description of "concept formation" seems more sensible. Qualities are "abstracted" from experience and formulated into concepts. Rand shoots for a "conceptualist" theory of universals, which avoids an Aristotelian "realism" of substantial essences on the one hand and the subjectivism of "nominalism," where universals are just words, on the other hand. However, a conceptualist theory cannot be consistently maintained (and this is not just a problem for Rand). Even if concepts may be conventional and arbitrary in many ways, they can only be connected to reality if they are based on some abstract features that are really in the objects. Thus, as soon as Rand allows that the terms for features "abstracted" from experience refer to features that are really there, then she has let in some form of Aristotelian realism, whether she wants to or not. And if there are indeed natural kinds, then there must be natural, and real, essences. Otherwise her theory is nominalist and subjectivist. Evidently aware of that tension, we have the motivation for Rand's idea that concepts refer to everything in the objects. That preserves the objectivism of her theory, and so the appropriateness of "Objectivism" as the name of it, but, as we have seen, it leads down the paradoxical road of a Leibnizian theory of concepts.
Rand's theory of concepts, regarded by both Rand and her successors as the centerpiece of her thought, leads, as in Leibniz, to a view of all truth as essentially analytic. Such a theory, in turn, is pregnant with the potential for speculative dogmatism, ultimately relying, as it must, on a Rationalistic (and Aristotelian) sense of the self-evidence of first principles. Rand's "Objectivism" is, indeed, Rationalistic metaphysics. A good indication of this is that the principle of causality is itself viewed as a corollary of the principle of identity. Identity (either (x)x=x or P->P; stated by Rand as "A is A") itself is a tautology of no positive content, overinterpreted by Rand as the basis of various substantive propositions. Few philosophers since Hume, apart from speculative metaphysicians like Hegel, have regarded causality as logically related to any tautological or analytic truth. The watershed insights of Hume and Kant are thus overlooked and their theories denigrated. Peikoff ("The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Meridian, 1990) even confuses Kant's definition of synthetic propositions with the Logical Positivist interpretation that all synthetic propositions are contingent. Since Kant would not accept such a trivialization of his theory for a minute (he would even regard it as a misunderstanding of Hume), Peikoff cannot even begin to address the substance of the issues that Kant considers. "Objectivist" epistemology has not been awakened, as Kant was by Hume, from its "dogmatic slumber."
Rand's fundamental law of morality, that one is never justified in initiating the use of force against others (though I am now told that this originally came from Lysander Spooner), has been adopted as the basic Principle of the Libertarian Party. This is an illuminating version of the Moral Law in that it highlights an aspect of morality, politics, and law often overlooked: That they are about the justification of the use of force. People who casually toss around ideas about what should and should not be allowed in society, or about how much of people's income should be taxed, or what restrictions should be put on property rights, often don't seem to be aware that they are talking about sending men with guns, the police, against people who don't agree with such dispositions and who may not be willing to comply with them. Thus, since it has not seemed wise to many to "allow" people to harm themselves by freely using opiates, cocaine, or marijuana, people have shown themselves willing to harm the uncooperative with equal or greater severity by fining or seizing their wealth and property, putting them in jail for long periods among hardened, violent criminals, and denying them various rights and privileges of citizenship and commerce in addition to the natural penalties, such as they may be, of drug use -- in short, by ruining their lives in retribution for disobeying "society." Behind even those sanctions, furthermore, is the threat of death should the uncooperative choose to defend their Natural Rights to control of their own bodies by "resisting" the representatives of "authority," the men with guns, by force. Few Americans have sympathy for people who resist the police, whatever their reasons.
Despite this edifying emphasis, however, Rand's moral principle is clearly incomplete. First, it makes no provision for "privileges of necessity", which means it would be morally acceptable to let a drowning person die or a starving person starve even if it would present no burden or difficulty to rescue them. No use of force would be involved, simply a wrong of omission. Since wrongs of omission present difficulties of definition and implementation in any case, this is not too serious a fault for Rand's principle, unless it is to be insisted upon that the principle is perfect, rigorous, and exhaustive. It would be foolish to do so, though many do. The second problem with the principle is that it leaves issues of property rights entirely undefined. Is stealing someone's unattended luggage at an airport a moral wrong? It involves no obvious use of "force" against the victim's person. Therefore, if "force" is to mean any unauthorized action against property, property rights must be independently defined; and historically, among libertarians, there have been considerable differences of opinion about the scope of property rights -- including "Georgist" ideas that more property should not be allowed than can be used. Decisions in that area, however, can be no logical consequence of Rand's moral principle. As with cases of necessity, such a difficulty with Rand's theory does not discredit it but does show its limitations and incompleteness. The only really serious error would be to deny such limitations and incompleteness.
Consequently, Ayn Rand as a philosopher has relatively little to contribute to the doctrine of the Friesian School. She may be taken, nevertheless, for what she will continue to be: An inspiring advocate for the free market and for the creativity of the autonomous individual. With her intimate, personal knowledge of the Russian Revolution, and all the loathing that it inspired in her, Rand will always be an invaluable witness to the practice and folly of totalitarianism. She is also a useful one person test to distinguish libertarians from conservatives: Her atheism alienates most conservatives, who may even speak of her bitterly and dismissively. A defining moment in that respect was the savage review by Whittaker Chambers of Atlas Shrugged, when it came out, in the National Review. Many admirers of Rand have never forgiven William F. Buckley or conservative Cold Warriors for that attack. At the same time, Rand presents a difficult case for the Left. Since the preferred political universe for leftists contains a one dimensional spectrum from "progressive" to "reactionary," where the reactionary end is a seamless fabric of capitalism, religion, racism, and sexism, Rand is disconcertingly off the track and invulnerable to typical modes of leftist ad hominem religion and race baiting argumentation. Also, as a tremendously successful self-made woman, long before the ascendancy of political feminism, she is invulnerable to the typical feminist mode of gender argumention against "dead white males." These inconveniences make it preferable for the Left to ignore Rand, which mostly they can and have, given the minority and ignorable status of libertarianism. Rand herself and her followers have made that easier by often resenting and taking a sort of heresiological attitude towards fellow libertarians who are suspicious, as Charles Murray has recently put it [in What It Means to be a Libertarian, a Personal Interpretation, 1997], of the "well fortified" ideology of "Objectivism." Rand herself even wanted to sue Reason magazine for running a cover story on her in the late 1970's. Such conflicts and absurdities are typical in ideological movements, but it is a weakness. Rand's own seriousness about philosophy, although to her credit, was also a weakness, in that it complicated and ideologized her case for capitalism and gave her followers this heresiological attitude and a standoffishness to other advocates for freedom. That seems less of a problem for the self-made Objectivist David Kelley than for the anointed successor of Rand, Leonard Peikoff. But, like most philosophers, Rand is better taken as a goldmine for ideas than as authoritative doctrine.
Another of Rand's sins against the Left and still of current interest was her willingness to testify as a "friendly witness" in the 1947 hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Acitivies (HUAC) on Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Rand's only complaint was that they didn't let her testify enough. She was the only person at the hearings who had actually lived under Communism, indeed been a witness to the entire Russian Revolution and Civil War, and she wanted to explain how anti-capitalist messages were included in many mainstream Hollywood movies. It may not be remembered much now that Rand got her real start in America working in Hollywood, living for many years in the San Fernando Valley. This is still of current interest because, after many years of hard feelings, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 1999 finally gave an Oscar to Elia Kazan, director of such classics as On the Waterfront (1954) -- which itself was about a man fighting with his conscience over whether to expose his gangster (i.e. Communist) friends. Kazan, after leaving the Communist Party, was willing to "name names" to HUAC in 1952.
While Communism failed and fell in the real world, in the make-believe world of Hollywood Communist propaganda succeeded quite nicely, and many people still believe that the HUAC investigations were "witch hunts" for non-existent enemies or well-meaning idealists. Well meaning idealists there were, but they were not the targets of the Committee. Instead, they became the "useful idiot" liberals, in Lenin's words, who whitewashed all the real Communists and their activities. The useful idiots are still at it, though since the 60's many of them, as anti-anti-Communists, have been all but indistinguishable from their Communist friends in Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua. As it turned out, the easiest way to find the Communists in Hollywood was just to subpoena all the suspects. Almost everyone who then refused to testify or took the Fifth Amendment, it happened, actually were Party members (acting on Party orders) or fellow travelers, as we know now from many sources, including the Soviet archives that also reveal the Soviet funding and direction of the Communist Party USA and its activities in Hollywood. These were not idealists but willing agents of tyranny, murder, and crimes against humanity. Rand would have no more patience now with leftists whining about "McCarthyism" than she did in 1947 with the lying and dissimulating agents of the living mass murderer Josef Stalin.
Re:Ayn Rand and Libertarian mythology
« Reply #4 on: 2010-06-21 17:49:02 »
Thanks for all the info Fritz. I actually wrote my ps after all of those last postings of yours. Lucifer in IRC tentatively theorizes that I somehow "hate" Ayn Rand. I have no reason to hate Ayn Rand especially since I'm not ever going to read anything by her. I'm just stating my filtering standards, they are relevant to the content category she aspires to, she doesn't meet them, so I don't have time for her - end of story.
However I did think I would stick around and for discussion of "Libertarian mythology" as she qualifies as a member of that larger group. That's where I get to talk to a lot of people who have read her and hopefully understand why I never will since I've placed the filtering criteria in the open up front. Nothing about hate, but all about not cluttering reason with trash. If you don't accept biological evolution on more than sufficient evidence, then I generally don't have time for these kinds of discussions with you and this includes Ayn Rand. Especially Ayn Rand as she claimed so much authority on the topic of "human nature" as the central foundation of everything - in such a specific case a lack of curiosity will not be acceptable - indeed evidence of liability, malpractice, and other kinds of general incompetence.
All discussion is welcome of course as a general rule and I'm sure Ayn Rand doesn't exhaust the category of Libertarian mythology, but I just didn't want any Rand evangelists feeling all unjustly surprise-ignored after the fact. You've been warned now.
Re:Ayn Rand and Libertarian mythology
« Reply #5 on: 2010-06-21 18:27:14 »
I would like to make a general note here about "rugged individualism". That seems to be a central keyword toward activating Libertarian mythology memes. Rugged individualism= sociopathic fairy tales. There is hardly anything individual about the human condition. We live and exist as humans largely due to our hypersociality not due to individuality. Compared to other social animals our communities include hundreds, thousands, and even millions of more individuals. Indeed humans exist in the first place as a social construct, and not a "rugged individual". If you think you are a rugged individualist, its probably much more likely you're just a foolish narcissist. I'm certainly willing to talk about the unrugged individual and how important she is, but we've got to get past these other fairy tales first.
I would like to make a general note here about "rugged individualism". That seems to be a central keyword toward activating Libertarian mythology memes.
If you think your purpose in life is to serve other people's interests then you have a disagreement with Rand. If not, then you are an individualist in the sense that she meant it.
Thanks for all the info Fritz. I actually wrote my ps after all of those last postings of yours. Lucifer in IRC tentatively theorizes that I somehow "hate" Ayn Rand. I have no reason to hate Ayn Rand especially since I'm not ever going to read anything by her. I'm just stating my filtering standards, they are relevant to the content category she aspires to, she doesn't meet them, so I don't have time for her - end of story.
I said you she had some good ideas. You asserted you would never read her ideas based on ad hominen arguments. Make of that what you will.
Thanks for all the info Fritz. I actually wrote my ps after all of those last postings of yours. Lucifer in IRC tentatively theorizes that I somehow "hate" Ayn Rand. I have no reason to hate Ayn Rand especially since I'm not ever going to read anything by her. I'm just stating my filtering standards, they are relevant to the content category she aspires to, she doesn't meet them, so I don't have time for her - end of story.
I said you she had some good ideas. You asserted you would never read her ideas based on ad hominen arguments. Make of that what you will.
I don't think its an ad hominem at all. If someone claimed expertise in medicine but didn't actually study any medicine at all then I would discount whatever expertise in medicine that person claimed. Its a completely relevant filtering criteria. If she otherwise happened to have some good ideas, I'm sure we can find a more credible spokesperson than her who has dealt with those ideas, and probably better than she has.
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