The Return of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand is best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for her uncompromising advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism. So when the global economic crisis brought the anti-capitalists out of their bunkers to disingenuously blame “extreme capitalism”, Rand-haters predicted the imminent demise of her influence. But as it turned out, the GEC and anti-capitalist onslaught had the opposite effect. The GEC reminded Rand readers of Atlas Shrugged, a novel published in 1952 about a future world facing economic collapse due to the most productive men going on strike against a system that today might be called “crony capitalism” (as oxymoronic as that term is). Other people were jolted by the attacks on capitalism to investigate its true nature, which led them to Rand’s non-fiction. Still others delved deeper into Rand’s challenging ideas, such as her contention that Immanuel Kant’s philosophy had smothered the Enlightenment, and her formulation of a philosophy for its revival. 

Rand never enjoyed a good press or institutional support, so she had to rely heavily on word of mouth for the dissemination of her ideas and the sale of her books. Consequently her sales graphs defied conventional publishing trajectories. Instead of spiking soon after publication then dropping away, the sales of most of Rand’s books rose steadily year by year, decade by decade. Last year American sales of Atlas Shrugged reached 200,000; this year they jumped to 300,000 in six months. The Fountainhead is currently a best-seller in India. In the USA, Ayn Rand’s name is heard more frequently now than ever before: in the media, at tea parties, town hall meetings, and on the internet. The director of the Ayn Rand Institute, Dr Yaron Brook, and other ARI intellectuals, are heard regularly on television and radio shows, debating current affairs and promoting Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism; and their op-eds appear regularly in newspapers around the world. Thousands of students enter Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead and Anthem essay contests each year, Anthem being Rand’s shortest novel.

Rand’s best-known political argument is for the separation of the economy from state control “in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of church and state”. She favoured the Austrian School of economics, Ludwig Von Mises, and Henry Hazlitt. She had no time for F.A. Hayek or Milton Friedman, and made short work of John Maynard Keynes. Her most famous confidant, Alan Greenspan, contributed three chapters to her 1976 book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, in which he advocates a return to the gold standard—an advocacy he gradually subverted over the years, much to the chagrin of his former Objectivist friends. Rand’s political heroes were the founding fathers of the United States of America, the country she adopted after fleeing the Soviet Union in 1926. But her politics was by no means the most distinctive aspect of her philosophy.

Rand’s most controversial ideas were her atheism and her ethics. In Atlas Shrugged the novel’s hero John Galt speaks for Rand in his climactic speech as follows:

You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door—but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors—between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

Due to the tenor of her times, Rand concentrated her firepower on sacrifice for society, which she indicted as a morality waiting to be harnessed by a Hitler or a Stalin. Had she lived to see the collapse of the USSR and the return of religious fundamentalism, let alone suicide bombers, she might have directed as much at the morality of sacrifice for God.

Rand presented the kernel of a non-sacrificial ethics in Galt’s speech, and explained it further in “The Object-ivist Ethics”, published in her 1964 book The Virtue of Selfishness. In the introduction she explains why she uses the word selfishness to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonises so many people to whom it does not mean the things she means:

It is not a mere semantic issue nor a matter of arbitrary choice. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a    murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.

Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.

Rand argued that altruism saddles us with two inhuman tenets: that concern with our own interests is evil, regardless of what those interests may be; and that the predatory trampling of others is in fact in our interest, albeit interest we are duty-bound to forsake. If an action, no matter how productive, is carried out selfishly, for the satisfaction or benefit of the actor, it is immoral, or at best amoral. If an action, no matter how destructive, is carried out selflessly, as an altruistic duty, it is moral, or at the very least well intentioned. But the trampling of others is not in the predator’s self-interest, not when his full human context is taken into account. And the intended beneficiary criterion eschews the primary purpose of ethics: the establishment of a code of values to guide the choices we have to make in order to live successfully on earth. 

Altruism was so embedded in twentieth-century Western culture that few people could even conceive of there being any alternative code of ethics. The only aspect of ethics open to question was who we should sacrifice our interests for: the Aryan or some other race, the proletariat or some other class, the welfare recipients, working families, or some other beneficiaries of government largesse? The twenty-first century has seen the return of non-human recipients of our sacrifice: Allah, God and Gaia.

Rand rejected every form of sacrifice and proposed an ethical theory of “rational self-interest”. Her egoism should not be confused with Nietzsche’s predatory theory or the subjective theories of the hedonists. The only previous theory it might be compared with is Aristotle’s eudaimonian ethics, but Rand’s is more firmly rooted in the nature of life and of man, most specifically in his rational nature. Having witnessed the indubitable demonstration of the efficacy of human ingenuity that was the industrial revolution, Rand could identify reason as our primary means of survival and freedom as a requirement of reason’s productive application. It follows that a moral political system must guarantee freedom by upholding individual rights, including property rights.

Rand’s theory of ethics is revolutionary, but in my estimation her epistemology is even more so, and more fundamental. As its name suggests, Objectivism rejects any conception of a universe split into two realms, be they God’s heaven and earth, Plato’s worlds of forms and shadows, or Kant’s noumenal world and world of appearances. Taking her cue from Aristotle, Rand saw this splitting of reality into two realms as a disastrous metaphysical/epistemological confusion. She insisted that there is one reality, and that our concepts are our human means of identifying it. Herein, however, lay some epistemological problems. Rand addressed one of these in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I quote from the foreword:

The issue of concepts (known as “the problem of universals”) is philosophy’s central issue. Since man’s knowledge is gained and held in conceptual form, the validity of man’s knowledge depends on the validity of concepts. But concepts are abstractions or universals, and everything that man perceives is particular, concrete. What is the relationship between abstractions and concretes? To what precisely do concepts refer in reality? Do they refer to something real, something that exists—or are they merely inventions of man’s mind, arbitrary constructs or loose approximations that cannot claim to represent knowledge?

Rand answered those questions with a new theory of how concepts are identified and validated objectively. To any philosophy student whirling down the vortex of nominalism, sensualism and scepticism, this offers a lifeline that is neither ivory-tower rationalism nor concrete-bound empiricism. As Leonard Peikoff notes in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand:

Ayn Rand is the first philosopher to identify the differences separating an intrinsicist, a subjectivist, and an objectivist approach to epistemology. She is the first to base a definition of “objectivity” on a proper theory of concepts: As a result, she is the first to define this essential cognitive norm fully and to specify the means by which men can adhere to it.

From the philosophic platform Rand built she could view the political scene from a singular perspective. Most defenders of capitalism had concentrated on economic arguments, highlighting its unparalleled productivity. But economics rests on politics, and politics on ethics, so regardless of how stupendous capitalism’s economic success proved to be, it was habitually condemned from the unquestioned ethical perspective of altruism. Since it is driven by individual aspiration, capitalism is immoral by definition according to altruism, so at best it could be tolerated as a necessary evil to be “harnessed” for a social end. Thus Marx could capitalise on altruism and argue that society had put up with the greedy bourgeoisie long enough for them to serve their purpose and provide the industries and it was time for history to sweep them away so that individual aspiration could be expunged once and for all. And today social democrats argue that CEOs, or anyone else deemed greedy, are to be tolerated only if they can be “harnessed” to manage “redesigned” markets that advance “social justice” (which is another oxymoron, since justice applies to individuals).

Of those who tried to defend capitalism on moral grounds, most argued that it produces the greatest good for the greatest number—an argument that did not impress Rand. I quote from Capitalism the Unknown Ideal:

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve “the common good”. It is true that capitalism does—if that catch-phrase has any meaning—but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.

Every social system is based, explicitly or implicitly, on some theory of ethics. The tribal notion of “the common good” has served as the moral justification of most social systems—and of all tyrannies—in history. The degree of a society’s enslavement or freedom corresponded to the degree to which that tribal slogan was invoked or ignored.

“The common good” doesn’t protect an individual’s rights against the wishes of a collective, and it doesn’t tell us what is good. Nineteenth-century utilitarian philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill decided that since everybody wants as much pleasure and as little pain as possible, pleasure is the ultimate good and pain the ultimate evil. This psychological hedonism had a venerable pedigree, but whereas classical hedonists such as Epicurus had been egoists, centuries of Christianity, followed by philosophers such as Kant, Hegel and Auguste Comte had consigned such selfishness to the sin bin. The standard of the good, said Bentham and Mill, is the greatest good (pleasure) for the greatest number (of people on the planet). Thus if you or your child needs a pain-relieving or life-enhancing operation and you have the money to pay for it, morality demands that before you go ahead with the operation you carry out a hedonic calculus to determine whether more people could be relieved of pain or granted pleasure by any alternative use of your money.

Bentham and Mill advocated capitalism, but their utilitarian arguments, based on a combination of altruism and hedonism, only went to make advocates of capitalism appear disingenuous and hypocritical. In his later years Mill became a socialist, and an inspiration to the Fabians. Today utilitarianism has been co-opted by the likes of Peter Singer, who casts the net wider so that the pleasure and pain of all sentient beings must be considered before you can morally justify your operation—so much for utilitarianism. Who then is left to defend capitalism on moral grounds?

In the wake of the disintegration of philosophy into dead ends such as pragmatism and postmodernism, the world is turning back to the pre-modern source of moral guidance: religious fundamentalism. Some Christians try to defend capitalism, but given Bible stories about camels and needles and lilies of the field the logic of their attempts has always escaped me. One such attempt I came across recently goes something like this: the socialists seek utopia, which is a laudable goal, but humans are neither smart nor good enough to achieve this heaven on earth and will always end up creating some hell such as communism instead, so we had best leave people free in the hope that they will be guided by God. This argument implies that socialism has benevolence, rationality and morality on its side, but that since human nature eschews benevolence, rationality and morality, we should rely instead on faith and divine providence—as we did before the Enlightenment. With friends like this, capitalism doesn’t need enemies like Marx.

So capitalism—the proven provider of liberty, justice, productivity and an ascending spiral of prosperity—is condemned as immoral, because it appeals to self-interest. Whereas socialism, which binds everyone to dependence on the state, parasitises productivity, and produces a downward cycle of impoverishment, is deemed moral, because it appeals to altruistic self-sacrifice. And now, with the dust from the forced famines barely settled and the blood and tears from the purges and gulags barely dried, socialism is once again being dusted off, sanitised, buffed up and placed as a shiny beacon on the hill—cloaked in the all-forgiving mantle of altruism.  

Ayn Rand said no, we are not sacrificial animals; we each have the right to live for our own sake, neither sacrificing ourselves to others nor others to ourselves, but dealing with each other as traders, both in matter and in spirit. To facilitate this non-sacrificial way of life a political system must guarantee freedom by upholding individual rights. The name of the system that does that is: capitalism.