Why I am not (quite) an Objectivist.
I am very similar to an Objectivist, and I respect their approach with deep respect. Ayn Rand is remorselessly logical, which is more than I can say for any philosopher since Descartes.
My disagreement with Ayn Rand, and the thing that makes me a conservative and not a libertarian, is a disagreement over the role and priority of those imponderables, such as public virtue, the habits of work and the ordinary practice of honesty, which people nowadays call “cultural capital”. In other words, something other than merely being a rational being is needed to make a man a productive and free citizen. That something, for want of a better word, is a spirit, a sense of honor.
In Ayn Rand’s famous book ATLAS SHRUGGED, her main characters have such a strong sense of honor that they will not borrow a cigarette without paying for it. The main character is so firmly honorable that he would rather die than betray his true love. And yet there is no justification of honor in her philosophy: Ayn Rand takes it for granted. Honor cannot be divided from self-sacrifice for the same reason courage cannot be: honor and courage are what impels a man to act for the greater good when he puts his own good to one side.
She tend extols the virtues of selfishness, by which she means self-interest rightly understood. But honor requires, in times of public emergency or great moral trial, self-sacrifice, which is the mere opposite of self-interest. Ayn Rand dismisses self-sacrifice with words of contempt.
If Man were a perfectly rational creature, like a Vulcan or a Houyhnhnm, we would be incapable of self-sacrifice, and we would bear and raise children like indentured servants, granting them majority only when they had paid back their debt for the costs of their rearing and education: and we would consider the child-rearing wasted if we did not get a return on investment. We would consider the towns and nations in which we live to be hotels, merely places convenient for our use, and patriotism or love of our mother-land would not touch our minds.
Such creatures indeed would dismiss self-sacrifice with contempt; they would regard the Death of Socrates as a malfunction of the Socratic brain, not as the noblest act of an utterly loyal citizen to a city-state unworthy of his love.
But Socrates was motivated by the same sense of honor as motivates John Galt in the climax of ATLAS SHRUGGED to brave torment and death for his true love. Galt pauses to argue that it is not self-sacrifice because he values his lover more than he values life itself: an argument I find laugh-out-loud absurd. (By that reasoning, Christ on the cross, the very image and example of self-sacrifice, is being selfish, because He loves mankind more than his own safety.) Ayn Rand wrote nobler characters than her philosophy allowed.
What Rand’s inability to address the question of honor and self-sacrifice leads her to, is a dead end. Her heroine, and she herself, are childless adulteresses. Her system is correct when applied to the free market, and when applied to the question of how to deal with peaceful strangers. It says nothing about how to deal with family and friends: putting friendship on a quid-pro-quo basis is unfriendly. Putting family on such a basis is impossible: children cannot make contracts, and you cannot choose your parents. Ayn Rand’s moral system only deals with those duties that are contractual, mutually beneficial, and voluntary. She scoffs at the idea of an involuntary duty.
I find that remarkably naïve in a woman of such intellect. If I am a Samaritan and I pass a robbed Jew lying half-dead in the gutter, is it not a violation of an involuntary duty for me to walk on by? If I am Howard Rourke, and I have wild, passionate sex with Dominique, is it not a violation of an involuntary duty for me not to marry her when she tells me she is pregnant with my child? If I am Hank Reardon, is it not a violation of an involuntary duty to honor my father and my mother to throw my mother out in the street when she offends me, or nags, or becomes wearisome to me?
But here is the crux of my disagreement with Ayn Rand: the kind of man who cheats on his wife, dishonors his mother, has mad sexual flings out of wedlock, or walks past robbery-victims lying in gutters is lacking that same spirit, that sense of honor, which makes a man willing and able to trust his neighbors, customers, and employers, to pay his rent on time and serve in the armed forces when called upon.
In a chilling scene, the owners of the three houses break ranks, fling down their weapons, and announce they will defend their isolated three houses without the help of the other villagers: an act of mere madness, considering that there is a band of 40 brigands on the way. The samurai leader, Kambei Shimada, draws his sword and prepares to kill the owners of the three houses if they refuse to cooperate with the village in the coordinated defense: the owners are cowed and return to their ranks.
In Ayn Rand’s moral universe, the samurai Kambei is wrong, and the owners of the three houses, no matter how imprudent, are within their rights. They did not choose to have houses in a position that made a defensive parameter unlikely: such things are determined by accidents of the battlefield, by the lay of the land and the disposition of the enemy. They did not ask to be attacked by brigands; it is merely a situation in which they find themselves. Because she does not allow for involuntary duties, she does not allow that a man has a duty to fight and die for his village. She does not allow that a house must be burned so that a village can be saved.
Ayn Rand dismisses all considerations of what to do in emergencies with a quip that life is not a lifeboat.
My reading of history is far different: war is constant and eternal. War is the human condition. Peace is a holiday. We in the United States live in an unnatural island of peace, without threatening neighbors, separated by wide oceans from the strife of the Old World. We are indeed in a lifeboat, surrounded by bloodthirsty sharks, and the other powers of the world wrestle with us continually to throw us overboard, while factions at home lust for the wealth they have not earned, and seek eternally to erode the law, to disarm us, to rob us, despoil us, and enslave us. In such a world, only justice, law and order, offers hope of peace and progress, and justice, law and order rest on the honor in the hearts of brave men.
Any culture that does not teach its young men to love honor more than life, to admire bravery and despise cowardice, to seek self-command and eschew self-indulgence, simply does not have the backbone to defend itself.
We are seeing around us now the end result of a prosperous, self-satisfied, self-indulgent, hedonistic culture. America is a cringing Hercules, an unreliable ally, a timid crusader, and even the most ordinary precepts of life and liberty are eroding rapidly. America has lost her spirit, her sense of honor. Objectivism will not give that spirit back to us.
In other words, the reason why I am not an Objectivist, is that I think their analysis of life and morality is correct as far as it goes, I do not see that it goes far enough.
In times of peace, yes indeed, the free market is the rational and moral arrangement to deal with friendly strangers. Objectivism pays homage to Hermes, the god of trade, but ignores gods much more ancient and potent: Aphrodite, Hymen, Hestia, Ares. The pursuit of self-interest rightly understood corrupts love and turns it into harlotry; dismisses marriage as a contract, or dismisses marriage altogether; ignores the demands of childrearing, hearth and home; ignores the demands of war. Objectivism dismisses religion altogether.
In other words, my objection to Objectivism is that it does not deal with the main things of real life: love and war, which are the main drivers of human existence, and the main reason why a community that consists of nothing but self-interested alliances cannot survive an encounter with a community bound together by strongest bonds of love and self-sacrifice.
The free market can only be free if surrounded by policemen, and policemen can only police if surrounded by a living wall of soldiers, and soldiers are only soldiers if their virtues include self-sacrifice, duty, honor and glory. The places in America too crime ridden to allow for this continue to be free only because the other areas of the country, where this is not the case, support them.
The free market can only be free if a man can drop his wallet in the street, and know that his neighbors are honest enough to return it intact: the places in America too crime ridden to allow for this continue to be free only because the other areas of the country, where this is not the case, support them. That willingness to be moral even when no one is looking is a mystical thing, and cannot convincingly be tied into a self-interest rightly understood. A Houyhnhnm would just pocket the lost wallet and say “finders keepers”, for such an act is in keeping with his self-interest.
Creatures of pure reason without passion, such as Houyhnhnms, were such fabulous creatures ever to exist, could not survive competition with Men, because we are creatures of honor, and we will do irrational things to defend our homes, our rights, our property. Leonidas of Sparta is one of us. Socrates of Athens is one of us. Objectivism cannot explain or justify the behavior of man like Socrates or Leonidas.
( Oddly enough, Objectivism cannot explain the behavior of a character like Ragnar Danneskjold, even though an old-fashioned writer and romantic like GK Chesterton could explain such behavior very well. Ironically, Ragnar Danneskjoldis a the very person he claims as his arch-foe. He is Robin Hood, the dashing thief who robs from the strong and gives to the weak, the justice that lives in the greenwood when no justice is found in the towns and castles of the powerful. Do not be fooled: the heroes in ATLAS SHRUGGED are despoiled just as wrongfully as any Saxon peasant. Merely because they have money does not make them “rich”: the money in their world is political power, not gold. Without the right philosophy to protect them, they are disarmed and helpless, and only Robin Hood, bold Loxley, can set the injustice right until the True King returns from exile — in Ayn Rand’s case, the missing Richard Lionheart role is filled by American Dream, by the Constitution, revised to include separation of economy and state. The story is an old one, and that is why it is a good one.)
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
