In Defense of Ayn Rand

[gurugeorge]

Several months ago I made a post in the Metaphysics and Epistemology thread called "Is this about Right?", where I copied a capsule summary of some points re. Objectivism as I understand it, that I'd given to a hostile interlocutor.  I thought some of you might enjoy the following, which is more of a defense of Ayn Rand in general against another hater.  I wasn't quite sure where to put it, this sub-forum seemed the most neutral - and anyway, as with the previous thread, I would (again) appreciate feedback as to whether I'm "getting it right" on the philosophical points, so my posting this is sort of questioney, in a sense. 

In what follows "MRM" = Mens' Rights Movement (a small but growing movement supportive of redressing legal gender rights imbalances that have gone too far in the female direction, particularly with regard to the things like child custody, that strongly rejects Third Wave Feminism and other associated Social Justice and Politically Correct twaddle).  "Karen" is a lady called Karen Straughan, a Youtuber who is one of the leading lights of the movement.  "Red Pill" (a Matrix reference of course) is a shorthand MRAs (Mens' Rights Activists/Advocates) use to encapsulate the experience of the scales falling from one's eyes when one realizes how all-pervasive and deleterious, indeed positively evil, the influence of radical Feminism has been on society.  "Virtue signalling" is a term used in the broad Alt-Right/anti-Feminist/anti-SocJus movement, to denote the way people perpetuate and internalize dogma by vigorously displaying assent to it (even if they don't believe it in their heart of hearts), for fear of social shaming (or simply to be able to carry on making a living).  Enjoy!

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Actually she was an extraordinarily intelligent, courageous, profound and sharp thinker.  Her writing is definitely uneven, and she had a tendency to belabour points, but she's far from lousy, she was capable of writing quite powerfully on occasion.  She's as wildly misunderstood and slandered as the MRM.  And her philosophy dovetails with the red pill stuff, in several ways.

Notice how much of what the MRM talks about relates to how men (and women, albeit in a different, subtler way) are conditioned/forced to be dutifully self-sacrificing - i.e. altruistic.  You have to understand that Rand was in no way opposed to being kind, helping people, to compassion, etc. She "altruistically" helped many people in her life - she supported her husband in his aspirations, as well as many of her "acolytes".  She sent money home to her family up to the point when it became impossible, and she tried many, many times to get her family over to the States with her - again, up to the point when it became impossible; and when it did eventually become possible (by which time her entire family had died, except her youngest sister) she got her sister to the States (sadly, after an initial joyous reunion, the poor woman was so conditioned by that time, she hated the vertiginous freedom of the US and went back to Russia).  

In fact she was manifestly compassionate, since her entire oeuvre was partly inspired by her experience of the appalling human suffering she experienced in Soviet Russia, and she constantly paints the picture of what happens to society as a whole,  including the poor and disadvantaged, when what she considered to be the root of evil (the altruism/collectivism "axis") holds sway; it's just that the main focus of her compassion was the "prime movers", the people (mainly men, as we know) who conceive, initiate and manage the production of, the stuff that enables us to survive and thrive (including intellectual and aesthetic "products"), but who are considered as undeserving of the fruits of their labour.  But she was not at all blind to the suffering of ordinary schlubs, the people who do the grunt work - it's just that she didn't virtue signal that they were the only ones worthy of compassion.  For example, there's a moving passage in Atlas Shrugged where she describes quite vividly the decay of an entire town and the factory that supports it, as a result of the  implementation of potty collectivist ideals, and the horrific effects on the people who lived in the town, including the ordinary folks.   In one of her earliest interviews, when she first became somewhat famous, she compared the life of an average, ordinary woman in Soviet Russia, to the life of an average, ordinary woman in the States.  

What she was opposed to was the idea that compassion and self-sacrifice should be a (collectively forced or internalized) MORAL DUTY, i.e. altruism (as defined by, e.g., Kant, Comte, and many others throughout history).  When you really, really get that, the revelation is in itself quite a red pill moment of sorts.  The reaction people have to her saying altruism is evil, is quite analogous to the "eeek, Satan!" reaction people have when they hear MRAs say they want to take mens' rights seriously, and read that as MRAs necessarily saying that they're against women, or hate women, etc.  i.e. when people hear "altruism is evil", how it filters through to their minds is "compassion, kindness, etc., are evil".  When people hear her saying that the opposite of altruism is selfishness, what filters through to their minds is that she's recommending people ride roughshod over others, and devil take the hindmost.  Whereas, what she's actually saying is that when it comes to MORAL DUTY, what you MUST do, what you HAVE to do, is sustain and fulfill your own life as a rational being first of all, since that's the precondition of doing ANYTHING (including things like helping others, if that's what YOU HAVE FREELY, RATIONALLY CHOSEN TO DO - as opposed to doing it because you think it's your MORAL DUTY).

In a nutshell, what she's saying is that what morality and ethics are, is totally misunderstood, since it's the answer to the question "how MUST I live, how OUGHT I to act, day to day, moment to moment, under typical circumstances?".  In fact, when it comes to Trolley/Lifeboat (etc.) type problems, she concurs with most peoples' intuitions, but she calls that "the ethics of emergencies", and claims that such contrived toy problems, far from being "stress tests", are actually irrelevant to day-to-day, moment-to-moment life, and therefore offer little insight into the central moral question, "How ought I to live?"

Another way in which she links up with this stuff is her constant insistence on the primacy of reality (as opposed to our private experience of reality), and that reason, working on the only evidence of anything we have, the evidence of the senses (as opposed to faith, mystical intuitions, etc.) is the only viable tool for understanding reality, taking knowledge not just as a collaborative product, but as something each and every individual has to actively pursue in their own life, in order to build up their own, accurate model of the world, and steer their own path through the world using that model;  and this, not just for the great productive geniuses among us, but, as above, for everyone, including us schlubs.  Now, you might say "well doesn't everyone sensible and rational think that?"  Well, kind of, at least most people would pay lip-service to the idea (although she was very clear that some philosophical ideas have been very much against the ideas of reason and sensory evidence, on very flimsy, contrived philosophical grounds, and that that's had really bad effects throughout history).  But are we consistently logical about it? Do we apply it to our own lives as consistently and thoroughgoingly as we can?  And that's the kicker - because for her, acknowledging reality, and dealing with it, and with other people, using reason, evidence, argument, persuasion, etc., as opposed to faith and force, is itself part of the MORAL DUTY described in the previous paragraph - for geniuses, for schlubs, for everyone.  (Again, this echoes Karen's insistence on everyone equally owning their shit being the moral thing to do.)

I am not an Objectivist in the "joiner" sense, I've just absorbed and integrated a lot of her philosophy, and respect it, and her.  It's obviously true that the Objectivist "Collective" (as she jokingly called it) was quite cult-like, and perhaps it's true that she had character flaws that exacerbated that.  But surely we understand that any set of ideas can turn cult-like, when expressed by a persuasive person, and parroted by awestruck people.  It's also true that her acrimoniously-ended affair with Nathaniel Branden was a bit of a mess, and doesn't reflect well on her philosophy as a proposed guide for living life.  But on the other hand, consider this: when she was 9 or so she decided to become a great novelist, specifically in order to present to the world her ideas about the ideal way to live (which she concretized as "the ideal man"), in an inspiring and artistic way, and she struggled for many years and actually achieved that, in the teeth of tremendous opposition, hatred, vilification, etc..  That's no mean feat, as the fulfillment of a deliberate, long-term life-plan conceived by a 9 year old girl, raised first of all in deeply, cloyingly religious Czarist Russia, and then immediately afterwards, in the hellish kafkatrap that was Soviet Russia.  That does speak well for her philosophy as a guide for life - for a successful, fulfilling life.

Also consider this: very, VERY few intellectuals of any note went against the consensus that Communism was a fantastic thing in those days - even the "useful idiots" who were invited over to inspect the wonderful fruits of the collective workers' paradise were taken in.  Bertrand Russell was one of the few.  But just as she'd rejected religion when she was 8 or so, Ayn Rand consciously, articulately and vehemently rejected Communism when she was 12 years old.  I would say that's the sign of quite a high IQ.

[Eiuol]

Are you distinguishing Rand as incompatible with MRA? Generally it is emotionalism and misconstrues a lot of feminism as if men are oppressed nowadays. Red pill, being the most extreme of the MRM, really does see women as less than men and mentally dependent by nature.

There ARE things Rand says that are MRM-ish, but her books I'd say really show no regard for gender as far as social roles go. Dagny is practically a feminist hero!

[epistemologue]

22 hours ago, gurugeorge said:

In a nutshell, what she's saying is that what morality and ethics are, is totally misunderstood, since it's the answer to the question "how MUST I live, how OUGHT I to act, day to day, moment to moment, under typical circumstances?".  In fact, when it comes to Trolley/Lifeboat (etc.) type problems, she concurs with most peoples' intuitions, but she calls that "the ethics of emergencies", and claims that such contrived toy problems, far from being "stress tests", are actually irrelevant to day-to-day, moment-to-moment life, and therefore offer little insight into the central moral question, "How ought I to live?"

That is not what Ayn Rand said about morality and ethics.

Morality is not just meant for answering the question about how one ought to act in the range of the moment or under "typical circumstances", completely disregarding moral principles, virtues, and individual rights whenever some "emergency" arises. She spends so much effort in Virtue of Selfishness arguing against this conception of a murderous "selfish" brute and their so-called "morality".

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Man cannot survive, like an animal, by acting on the range of the moment... Man’s life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him. He can alter his choices, he is free to change the direction of his course, he is even free, in many cases, to atone for the consequences of his past—but he is not free to escape them, nor to live his life with impunity on the range of the moment, like an animal, a playboy or a thug.

...

Such is the meaning of the definition: that which is required for man’s survival qua man. It does not mean a momentary or a merely physical survival. It does not mean the momentary physical survival of a mindless brute, waiting for another brute to crush his skull. It does not mean the momentary physical survival of a crawling aggregate of muscles who is willing to accept any terms, obey any thug and surrender any values, for the sake of what is known as “survival at any price,” which may or may not last a week or a year. “Man’s survival qua man” means the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan—in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice.

And she does not have an "ethics of emergencies" separate from ethics or morality in "normal" life. As I explained here, in her essay on The Ethics of Emergencies, she does not say that trolley or lifeboat problems are irrelevant to morality or life, or that they offer no insight:

 

The essay begins with her asking us to consider the implications of someone who begins their approach to the subject of ethics with lifeboat scenarios - which she regards as a disintegrated, malevolent, and basically altruistic approach to the subject, that cannot ultimately yield a rational system of ethics.

She did not say that lifeboat scenarios are "irrelevant", that they are the 0.01 of cases that morality is "not intended for", she says exactly the opposite:

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It is important to differentiate between the rules of conduct in an emergency situation and the rules of conduct in the normal conditions of human existence. This does not mean a double standard of morality: the standard and the basic principles remain the same, but their application to either case requires precise definitions.

And she absolutely did not say that moral principles are "intended for the 99.9% of existence":

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“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue... The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.

This applies to all choices, including one’s actions toward other men.

She does not say to act in accordance with your hierarchy of values 99.9% of the time, she says always. Sacrificing a greater value to a lesser one is not okay 0.01% of the time, it's never okay. She did not say that moral principles apply to 99.9% of one's choices - she says they apply to all choices.

She then goes to take those principles of ethics that apply in the 99.9% of existence in which one is not in an emergency, and proceeds to apply those very same principles to emergency situations:

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To illustrate this on the altruists’ favorite example: the issue of saving a drowning person. If the person to be saved is a stranger, it is morally proper to save him only when the danger to one’s own life is minimal; when the danger is great, it would be immoral to attempt it: only a lack of self-esteem could permit one to value one’s life no higher than that of any random stranger. (And, conversely, if one is drowning, one cannot expect a stranger to risk his life for one’s sake, remembering that one’s life cannot be as valuable to him as his own.)

If the person to be saved is not a stranger, then the risk one should be willing to take is greater in proportion to the greatness of that person’s value to oneself. If it is the man or woman one loves, then one can be willing to give one’s own life to save him or her—for the selfish reason that life without the loved person could be unbearable.

Conversely, if a man is able to swim and to save his drowning wife, but becomes panicky, gives in to an unjustified, irrational fear and lets her drown, then spends his life in loneliness and misery—one would not call him “selfish”; one would condemn him morally for his treason to himself and to his own values, that is: his failure to fight for the preservation of a value crucial to his own happiness. Remember that values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and that one’s own happiness has to be achieved by one’s own effort. Since one’s own happiness is the moral purpose of one’s life, the man who fails to achieve it because of his own default, because of his failure to fight for it, is morally guilty.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not “selflessness” or “sacrifice,” but integrity. Integrity is loyalty to one’s convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one’s values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality. If a man professes to love a woman, yet his actions are indifferent, inimical or damaging to her, it is his lack of integrity that makes him immoral.

As we can see in this example, the virtue of integrity, which applies in the 99.9% of existence in which one is not in an emergency, also prescribes what one ought to do in the 0.01% of life in which one is in an emergency, too.

 

Edited November 6, 2016 by epistemologue