[Read Part I and Part II]
Now that we've gotten the book out of the way, we can get to the pertinent political question: What are we to make of the current attempt to justify conservative economic policy with the writings and beliefs of Ayn Rand?
Notice that I said economic policy. You don't hear the Tea Party ranting and raving about Objectivist-style liberty when it comes to social issues like abortion or gay marriage. You certainly won't find them acknowledging Rand's hard-line atheism. These aspects of their heroine's philosophy simply don't comport with what they're trying to accomplish. So they ignore the implications and the imperatives that would come with being true believers...while claiming to be true believers.
Rand did not write fiction in the style of Camus and Sartre, whose great works were esoteric works of contemplative existentialism with provocatively ambiguous messages and implications. In a brief epigraph at the front of Atlas Shrugged, Rand says, "I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written - and published - is my proof that they do." Based on this statement, we must first reconsider the existence of Hobbits, the Tin Man, and the virgin birth. Then we must take her at her word and read Atlas Shrugged not as allegory, but as a true depiction of the world as she saw it. In doing so, we are not permitted to dismiss as literary hyperbole the otherworldly perfection of her protagonists or the ghastly degeneracy of her villains. We must hold them up against the corresponding characters of our time and determine whether her prognostications are applicable to the current debate.
This is where Rand's contemporary enthusiasts fail miserably, through some combination of ignorance, misinterpretation, and/or disingenuous misapplication. Whereas I am happy to admit my admiration for the actions and motivations of characters like Hank and Dagny (while admittedly doubting the existence of more than a handful of real-world counterparts), Randians are clearly unable to concede that the antagonists and the motives attributed to them are pure partisan fictions. Indeed, they hold that all opponents [read: liberals] are exactly as Rand describes them. They accept Rand's epigraph at face value as justification for vilifying their ideological opponents. Liberals, they say, will destroy the world as we know it. Ayn Rand said so. "That this book has been written - and published," is all the proof that they need.
Setting aside Rand's vehement and delusional misconceptions about liberals, let's take a moment to consider her virtues. She reserves her most ardent praise for the individual who, by sheer force of his nature, will, intelligence, and determination, devotes his entire existence to the conception and creation of great things. Her heroes are unflinchingly principled when it comes to issues of compensation, refusing to take what they haven't earned as forcefully as they refuse to pay more than the value of what someone else has provided them. They are, truly, great men and women.
I struggle to see how these people bear any resemblance to the bankers, hedge-fund managers, failed-but-richly-compensated CEOs, and corporate con-artists who seem to be the largest beneficiaries of the modern conservative movement. I fail to see, for example, how the health insurance industry - which creates nothing - fits into Rand's worldview. (It seems clear that Rand would prescribe a system in which patients pay doctors directly for the services provided.) I cannot imagine Rand approving of the schemes that debilitated the housing market or the derivatives that decimated the financial sector. All of these seem to be perfect embodiments of Rand's "looters" and "moochers." Yet these are the people that today's conservatives are protecting through their single-minded focus on destroying their opponents. Much like Rand, they are so hysterically fixated on the perceived evils of liberalism that they are unable to think rationally or constructively about the real issues of the day. They have no positive vision to speak of, only a fervent hatred of what they perceive to be the antithesis of their non-philosophy.
Whether they realize it or not, today's conservatives are radical, Kantian Deontologists. That is to say, they judge the morality of an action solely on the motives of the person doing it, irrespective of the consequences. Unfortunately, this particular brand of conservatism bastardizes this legitimate, if problematic, philosophical perspective by also presuming to know the motives of anyone who might be called a liberal. It should come as no surprise that they regard those motives as universally bad ones. Whatever liberals are doing at the moment - even if it's something conservatives have done in the past - can only lead to apocalyptic consequences because when liberals do it, they are acting on bad maxims, whereas when conservatives do it, they are acting on good maxims.
To that extent, modern conservatives are clearly Rand's disciples - and this is why we can't just get along. Liberals have positive ideas about what the world should look like. Conservatives merely detest liberals. Sure, liberals often think that conservatives have a tendency to be motivated by greed, xenophobia, racism, chauvinism, and other forms of ignorance, but conservatives believe that liberals are evil - not misguided, not cut from a different cloth - but motivated by powerful, metaphysical forces of darkness that seek to sew destruction and misery.
I am quite sure that most conservatives have not actually read Atlas Shrugged. It is also obvious that many others misunderstand and misapply what it says. No matter. Understanding the novel would not make their case any more substantive. They have latched onto Rand because somehow, somewhere, it was inserted into the conventional wisdom that Ayn Rand was a serious thinker - a philosopher queen - and that there must be some intellectual credibility behind a movement that claims her as its inspiration. That is why I chose to read Atlas Shrugged. I honestly hoped and sincerely expected that it would provide me with some deeper understanding of the logical basis of current conservative doctrine.
But Ayn Rand was not a serious thinker. Ayn Rand was a marvelous, if verbose, writer of fiction. Her logic is shoddy and her postulations go utterly unchallenged for want of plausibly-written adversaries. Setting up kerosene-soaked straw men, lighting them on fire, stomping on their ashes, and bottling the remains to be mixed into martinis is great fun, I'm sure, but it is not an impressive intellectual feat, to say the least. Adopting her writing as the theoretical basis of a political movement is a recipe for vacuous, counter-productive, and unresolvable conflict.
No comments:
Post a Comment