Ayn Rand and Objectivism: The Loathed Philosophy

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American philosopher and novelist of the mid-20^th century, famous for her works The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957).  She founded the philosophy of Objectivism and is credited with giving rise to the political offshoot of that philosophy, libertarianism.

Love her or hate her—and there doesn't seem to be much middle ground—she was a ferocious intellect who developed a complete and integrated philosophy from basic principles.  She was an uncompromising figure, given to a rather harsh derision of anyone who disagreed with her.  Even libertarianism, a political movement she helped launch, she considered an unwanted bastard child of her philosophy.  Her novels were a financial, if not critical, success.  She became politically active in the 1940s, participating as a "friendly witness" in the infamous US House Un-American Activities Committee, which blacklisted many Hollywood figures including Charlie Chaplin, who left the US.  She gathered around her a group of acolytes including future luminaries such Alan Greenspan (Chair of the Federal Reserve).  Later in life she was struck with lung cancer, and signed up for government-assisted social security and Medicare (to the schadenfreude of many of her adversaries on the political left) and died in 1982.

She called the philosophy Objectivism because she believed that the real world was objective—it existed as real things independent of the observer.  The way to know the world was through reason, a noble capacity unique to humankind.  She rejected all forms of mysticism, including religion.  She believed that humans, as rational beings,  were born with natural rights.  Chief among them was the right to life.  She believed that property was fundamental to life and therefore the right to property was also fundamental.  No man, she said, had the right to initiate force against another.  Force was widely defined: it didn't just include physical force but any type of coercion backed by the threat of force.  For this reason, she believed that taxation by the government was wrong.  She believed in the will of the individual, the morality of rational self-interest, the good of free market capitalism.  She opposed all forms of collectivism and statism.  The role of government was to protect individual (as opposed to collective) rights, through police, army, courts and an executive branch.  Any other role of government was illegitimate.

She was pro-abortion, a feminist, supported Israel in the 1967 war, considered homosexuality disgusting (though, true to her beliefs, she opposed any government intervention in it).  She condemned altruism, rejected animal rights, rejected capital punishment,  and opposed any form of censorship.  I'm guessing she wasn't a big fan of unions.

Two good quotes that nicely sum her philosophy are:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept 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)

and

I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

I, like many curious teenagers, read Atlas Shrugged.  After Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book which had a profound effect on me, and which I highly recommend) it was my first "important" book.  It's a real behemoth, over 1000 pages.  It's basically about a dystopian future America which veers towards severe statism, where the government starts taking over everything, even posting armed agents in company boardrooms.  As a result, a number of captains of industry, including the hero John Galt, withdraw their services (that would be Atlas shrugging, for the metaphorically tone-deaf) from the US and set up a shadow state where laissez-faire capitalism rules.  The government, having enslaved the people, collapses and there's a nice happy ending. 

It was a dreadful book as far as I was concerned.  Sure, many find the philosophy itself, particularly the rejection of altruism, to be loathsome, but I just thought it was poorly written, with wooden characters and a didactic voice that never stopped bludgeoning me.  At one point there was a speech by the hero, John Galt, that lasted over 50 pages.  Just repeating the same message over and over again.  I think I finally threw in the towel at that point.

Does that man you're going to make a 50-page speech?

Atlas Shrugged has been rather cattily called the "gateway drug" for right-wing philosophy, as it is apparently widely read by young readers.  If anything, it inoculated me against far right politics through the sheer pedagogy and intolerance of other views.  Others were obviously quite impressed though.  Ron Paul, the iconoclastic perennial runner-up in US Republican nominations is has a large dedicated following, and the Tea Party movement has its philosophical home in libertarianism.

Although I hate the leftist nanny state mentality as much as the next guy (probably even more) I reject the idea (never stated, but always implied in libertarianism) that the government is inherently evil.  That given half an inch, they will seek to enslave.  The government, in a functioning democracy, is us.  And when we, as Rand does, cast the government as the villain, we cast ourselves.

Nor do agree, fundamentally, that the ultimate goal of a man should be his own happiness.  Happiness can be a rather shallow goal—give an addict his fix when he needs it and he's good to go.

I don't see the philosophy as workable.  Indeed, subjugation of the proletariat by capitalists led to the overthrow of imperial regimes and the institution of communism in countries such as Chin and Russia.  Our government's allowance for the collective bargaining rights of unions was not done out of sympathy for the serfs, but because they were afraid that, unless they granted workers rights, a communist revolution would take place here.  That was a very real fear in the early to mid-20^th century.  Workers rights—collective rights—as far as I'm concerned, created the middle class, which was an engine of prosperity.  And countries with little government do not rank very high on the various wealth indexes and usual have poor human rights records to boot.

And some goods are simply not amenable to assignation of property rights, so loved by the libertarians.  Take air, for example.  How would you assign property rights to air?  Think about it.

Finally, I find a major internal inconsistency in Rand's work.  She states that fundamental rights (life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness) are derived as a result of man's capacity for rationality.  (Aside: Does that mean that a person incapable of rational thought, say someone severely brain-damaged, should not have rights?)  So rights are inherent, natural.  But how, in Objectivism, can you be born with a right? After all, you can't see, hear or smell a right.  Where is it?  It is not an objective thing at all.  It exists only in the minds of men, and therefore, by definition, subjective.  The Founding Fathers of the United States get around this by simply invoking God:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain rights.

The rights are there because God put them there. End o' story.  But Objectivism rejects all forms of mysticism.  So it opts, instead, for this rather weak stand-in of Man's Noble Rationality.  This just in:  we aren't actually all that rational.  Collectively, many times, we behave in a way quite similar to a pack of outraged baboons. We constantly follow notions and impulses we barely understand.  Take those yahoos who rioted when the Canucks lost to Boston in the Stanley Cup final a couple of years ago.  Afterwards the one question everyone had of these kids—who often had no criminal behavior in their pasts—was:  Why?  They simply couldn't answer.  "I don't know."  Remarkable.  See also a related post I wrote on the subject of Free Will.

A true Objectivist, to my mind, would consider a person to have rights only to the extent that those rights were real and palpable (i.e. objective) and that there was some force in place to ensure that right.  Such a view would hold that the government—a government of the people as we live in a democracy—created those rights for us. 

Anyways I suppose I could have written off Any Rand and Ron Paul as just crazy as fruit bats, like a lot of people do.  But even though I personally find their philosophy detestable on many levels, they offer a certain intellectual integrity that I think needs to be respected.  Plus, I'm hoping that Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann and the North Iowa Tea Party (below) will be impressed with my philosophical refutation of Objectivism.