by Tom Pratt
Aristotle’s Politics is also crucial in understanding Rand. In Homer’s Iliad we find the classic portrayal of Greek governance. Before the Gates of Troy, the Greeks are deciding whether to continue their ten-year-long war with the Trojans, or to go home defeated.[52] Achilles has gone to his tent, angry with King Agamemnon, and the King (basileus in Greek) now calls on the men to follow him. Learning of Achilles’s reticence, the men (ekklesia, or “Assembly” in Greek) vote with their feet and rush to the ships. Odysseus quickly calls the Council (boulé, in Greek) together and urges the members to follow the king, at which time they call the men (ekklesia) back to the battle. This three-fold partition of governance between basileus (or, sometimes, archon, “ruler”), boulé, and ekklesia carries over into the governance of the later Greek city-states (singular, polis, plural, poleis), though the manner in which the three estates related to one another was diverse.
Aristotle discusses this in Books III and IV of his Politics.[53] He shows that the partition can be done badly or well. So, if an ekklesia attempts to rule without an active boulé or without an assertive archon, the result is “Pure Democracy,” which can devolve into the kind of “mob-ocracy” that demanded (and got) the death of Socrates. If there is a powerful boulé without a substantial Assembly of the men of the polis, you wind up with an Oligarchy of the rich and powerful, such as prevailed at Sparta, and as we know, everyone hates the Spartans (except the Spartans). Or, if you have an archon (or basileus) that bypasses the boulé, or worse, has them exterminated, you wind up with what Aristotle called a Tyranny (something that happened in various poleis throughout the Classic Age in Greece), the absolute rule of one over the subjugated masses with no intervening Council to limit his authority. On the other hand, if there is a healthy balance between the three estates, such as in a Monarchy (with a strong Council and involved Assembly), an Aristocracy (not merely based on land and money and that involves a strong First Citizen and on a voting Assembly), or a Polity (where the citizens have a voice, but where a Council is representative of them), there exists a much better possibility of a just political order. This is all in keeping with Aristotle’s notion of the Golden Mean, where everything political and ethical must be done in moderation.
All of this is completely contrary to Plato’s model of a Statist government with a ruling elite dominating the less fortunate and using a police force to keep them from rebellion. Aristotle believed that governments should flow naturally from the kind of topography and from the will of the people. He believed the greatest amount of justice in society would be found when governments balanced out the three estates, with none overly dominant and none absent.
Christian Thinkers and Mystics
For the first 280 or so years after its inception, Christianity labored under the tag of “illegal religion.” But in AD 312 Constantine changed all of that by passing the Edict of Milan, legitimizing the faith. In 384 Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the religion of the empire, later outlawing paganism. The time for Christian emperors had come, and though this was a short-lived experience in the Roman West (the empire collapsed in 476), East Rome in Constantinople would witness centuries of Christian rule.
Augustine (d. 430) was dubious about the possibility for righteous governing in this age, even if the rulers were Christians, and he wrote extensively about that in his great work, The City of God. Augustine did, however, believe that theology was a rational exercise, and he developed the first full-blown theology that was both biblical and rational. He wrote, “Heaven forbid that God should hate in us that by which he made us superior to the animals! Heaven forbid that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls.”[54]
Reason also had an important place in the knowledge of God, though it must be conjoined with faith. We must combine the two, faith “that works by love” and understanding, “that He may be known more clearly and so loved more fervently.”[55] For this West African church father, reason was a tool given by God to humans and was one aspect of the image of God in man, contrary to the premise of Galt and Rand. Augustine also believed in the Platonic Forms, but saw them as existing in the mind of the almighty and rational God who had created us. Augustine’s thought was also mystical or pietistic in that he saw all of life as lived coram deo, in the presence of God; his autobiographical Confessions was one long prayer. His pietism, however, did not negate his emphasis on the importance of reason, nor did it result in him simply playing ideas off on one another in a fruitless effort to arrive at answers to any substantial questions. He believed that language could be used to predicate truths about both God and the world, and that both of these kinds of predications were central to what it means to be human.
Contemporary with Augustine was a group of Greek Eastern theologians who would establish a theological tradition quite different from that in the Latin West. Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil of Caesarea, the so-called Cappadocian Fathers, established a theological tradition in which predicating positive attributes of God was nearly impossible. Basil put it like this: “It is by His energies that we can say we know our God; we do not assert that we can come near to the essence itself, for His energies descend to us, but His essence remains unapproachable.”[56] Gregory of Nyssa was even more emphatic, claiming, “The negative way of the knowledge of God is an ascendant undertaking of the mind that progressively eliminates all positive attributes of the object it wishes to attain, in order to culminate finally in a kind of apprehension by supreme ignorance of Him who cannot be an object of knowledge. We can say that it is an intellectual experience of the mind’s failure when confronted with something beyond the conceivable.”[57] Then there is this from Maximus the Confessor, writing about three hundred years after the Cappadocians, “Negative statements about divine matters are the only true ones.”[58] Reason had little role to play in formulating an understanding of God. This is essentially the understanding of John Galt as to the Christian conception of God, as we quoted him above.
In keeping with this view of knowledge, Eastern Christianity has virtually eschewed any attempt to formulate a systematic theology.[59] “The great mysteries of the faith are for the East matters of adoration rather than analysis.”[60] There is simply nothing in Orthodox Catholicism like Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Calvin’s Institutes, or Barth’s Church Dogmatics. The net effect of this perspective is that Orthodox Catholicism devolves immediately to mysticism as the highest expression of the faith, with no concomitant concern to give rational expression to theology alongside of faith in the way that Augustine and later Western thinkers would do.
Enter Thomas Aquinas. In the 1220’s a group of Muslim, Latin, and Jewish scholars came together in the city of Toledo and in an amazing demonstration of scholarly camaraderie, translated many of the works of Aristotle into Latin that had previously been available only in Greek and Arabic.[61] This joint effort ought to be seen as “an acute source of embarrassment”[62] for many modernists, who believe that in this period of the “Dark Ages” that only prejudice, ignorance, and intolerance were the hallmarks of the day. These translations of Aristotle into Latin would become the foundation for a new scholastic movement in the newly formed Western universities, such as Paris, Oxford, Cambridge and Bologna, and would render Aristotle’s insights into logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and other areas of knowledge available once again to educated persons. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) would incorporate these insights into his new scholastic theology. Thomas offered insights into the doctrines of God, salvation, the church, and many other areas of traditional theological loci, but his rational theology also explored the realms of politics, economics, psychology, and other realms that went beyond traditional Western themes, and that certainly went far beyond the limited spheres of exploration in Eastern Orthodox thought.
The kingdom of Russia converted to Christianity in AD 989. Queen Olga witnessed a high mass in the basilica of Hagia Soph
ia in Constantinople, the largest church in the world at the time and one decorated all round with magnificent stained glass windows. Stunned, she exclaimed that only God could dwell in such a place, and the whole kingdom subsequently went over to the Orthodox faith. When the Byzantine Empire later fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, “the main centers of eastern Christian thought shifted to Russia, and especially the cities of Kiev and Moscow.”[63] Writers such as A. S. Khomyakov (d. 1860) and Vladimir Soloviev (d. 1900) “did much to develop the intellectual foundations of Russian Orthodox theology during the nineteenth century,”[64] and they did so in keeping with the mystical, anti-rational manner passed on to them by the Orthodox Catholicism in whose heritage they stood. So, the faith of the Church in which Rand was raised was just that—an anti-rational, mystical faith, and one that had no answers to offer when Marxist Communism swept the country after 1917.
A new chapter in the history of the West would be written after AD 1517. In that year a Catholic professor of Bible in Saxony initiated a debate over various doctrinal aberrations (in his opinion) that would mushroom in just a few years into a theological and ecclesiastical revolution that we now call the Reformation. One of the key second generation figures of that revolt, John Calvin, would go on to build on insights from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to formulate a new rational theology. That theology, like Augustine’s, would fuse rationalism and piety, and would go even farther (and would be a more biblical corrective) than Thomas in articulating a foundation for politics (even the basis for political rebellion), economics, and social life. This theology would also serve as a foundational ideology for a significant segment of settlers in the new world of America in the seventeenth century.[65]
Enlightenment and Modernity: Smart and Smarter?
In the sixteenth century in the West, new formulations of science and philosophy would bring about a revolution both in the intellectual world and in the world in general. Francis Bacon (d. 1626) was the father of empiricism and established the inductive method as the true way to conduct scientific enquiry. His work was quite controversial since it overturned previous “science” that had been based on Aristotelian speculations.[66] But it laid the foundations upon which Galileo, Newton, Brahe, Boyle and others would build. This new science was not merely technology. “Science is a method utilized in organized efforts to formulate explanations of nature, always subject to modifications and correction through systematic observation.”[67] That is, science consists of two components, theory and research.[68] It is important to note that science was created in one place, the West, only one time, though it had been on the way to formulation for centuries, but again, only in the West.[69] Western Christian thinkers such as William of Occam and Nicolas of Cusa had been formulating, bit by bit, observations of nature that eventually coalesced into Bacon’s great insights. “Real science arose only once: in Europe.”[70] China, Greece, and Islam all had alchemy, but only in Europe did that develop into chemistry. Why? Because only Christianity, and really only Western Christianity, had a rational God who could be known, and whose thoughts could be “thought after him,” to use the famous phrase of Tycho Brahe. As we have seen, not even Eastern Orthodoxy, the Christianity of Greece and Russia, had the intellectual apparatus to make that jump. But the religious tradition of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin did.[71]
The Enlightenment brought us modern natural science, but that is not all it brought. It brought the philosophical explorations of René Descartes. Descartes (d. 1650) lived most of his adult life in the shadow of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), a war fought between Catholics and Protestants over what was the correct interpretation of Christianity.[72] This created in Descartes an epistemological crisis. If equally committed Christians cannot decide what is really true (the Catholic or the Protestant version) and if that disagreement leads inevitably to a horrendous war (and this war was horrendous), how can we know anything for certain? Descartes’s project began with radical doubt. What can I doubt about my own experience? Well, I can doubt almost everything about my experience. After all, perhaps I am just a brain in a vat and an evil genie (we would say a “mad scientist”) is feeding sense data to me by tubes and wires.[73] But there is one thing I cannot doubt: that I am doubting. From this observation Descartes formulating the cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” But in so doing he posited a dualism between mind and body. Only the mind can formulate the certainty of the body’s existence. Along the way he also made the knowing subject, not the external physical world, the arbiter of truth. In this he became one of the chief architects for modernity (and to an extent, even post-modernity), the belief that all truth is subject to my formulation of it.
If Descartes was the philosophical architect for modernity, Immanuel Kant was its destroyer. Kant read Descartes through the lens of Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume had argued that we can never have any knowledge of metaphysical realities. We cannot, for instance, establish causation. I may observe that when a billiard ball strikes another, that the one that is struck then moves in a certain way. But Hume argued that we cannot make a logical case for causation in this event, only constant conjunction, since cause is a metaphysical, not a physical, conclusion.[74] Kant’s project led him to propose that reality is divided into two realms, the noumenal and the phenomenal. The phenomenal world is the world of our experience, of rocks, babies, and Volkswagens (not in Kant’s day, of course). We have been created (Kant believed in God, unlike Hume) to experience this world by means of “a priori categories of cognition,” such as number, distance, time, color, etc. These categories of cognition enable us to parse our world and to communicate with other sentient creatures about it. The noumenal world (the metaphysical world), which includes knowledge of causation, along with angels and God, is unavailable to our cognition. We can believe in that world, but we cannot know it.[75]
Kant, like Descartes, had bifurcated reality into two realms. Descartes had divided between mind and body and Kant had bifurcated between the world of experience and the world of true meaning and knowledge, with the clear implication that the most important of these realms is unavailable to us.[76] Note also the similarities between these thinkers and the earlier Plato, for whom the Forms constituted the real reality while this world is only shadows and shades. Think also of the similarity in all of these forms of “dualism” with Greek and Russian Orthodox theology, for whom God and even ultimate reality are merely things we can contemplate, but not know.
Super State and Super Man
It remains only to discuss Marx and Nietzsche to complete our preparation for understanding and critiquing Rand. Karl Marx was born to a Jewish family in Prussia in 1818, a family that had converted to Lutheranism in part to advance his father’s career as a lawyer. He studied philosophy in Berlin, eventually receiving a doctor’s degree (from Jena) and then proceeded to become a writer, editing a left-wing political periodical in Prussia, but censorship issues there drove him first to Paris and several other cities, eventually landing him in London, where he would live out his life.
Marx is in many ways the opposite of Adam Smith, the philosopher from Scotland who had articulated the basic intellectual structure of free market economics in the previous century. The Scotsman had argued that when every man pursues his own self-interests, “this would result in an outcome beneficial to all, whereas Marx argued that the pursuit of self-interest would lead to anarchy, crisis, and the dissolution of the property-based system itself.”[77] Smith had a generally positive outlook on the human condition if only governments would honor man’s “natural liberty”; Marx believed all governments were corrupt and oppressive. Smith believed that the “invisible hand” would boost everyone along and raise all ships, while Marx believed that the “iron fist of competition” would pulverize workers, even while it enriched those who owned the means of production.
In 1848 he met Friedrich Engels in Paris and the two men wrote the pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. Later, in London, he would pursue
the work that he dreamed of writing, Das Kapital, or, in English, just Capital. Marx believed that in economics, being human involves an effort at changing the world around us by labor, and so, labor is crucial to what it means to be human. But older economic systems had robbed people of their ability to do that, especially the manorial system, which utilized other person’s labor to bring wealth to the barons, the bishops, and a few others. Capitalism (this was Marx’s term, which is why we use it here) was better in that it gave people some access to some goods and services needed for happiness, but Capitalism is only quantitatively better that Manorialism, not qualitatively. In the older system people had to turn over the produce of their farms to others, while in Capitalism people have to sell their labor for wages. Those who own the means of production, the bourgeoisie, employ workers to produce goods which are then sold for excess profit, profit that the owners keep for themselves. Profits were inherently unjust, in Marx’s view, since the owners of the means of production did not generate them themselves.
Marx’s economic theory was materialistic and deterministic. Marx had made a close study of the writings of Georg Hegel, a Berlin scholar who believed that history moved along a predictable and inevitable trajectory, always moving toward a higher consciousness (what Hegel called the Geist) and a more just and advanced social and political culture. Marx borrowed from Hegel, arguing that the Roman slavery system had collided with Feudalism, thus producing Capitalism, but that now Capitalism was headed for a conflict with the new Socialism, the outcome of which would be a new and more just system of political economy, Communism. Communism was the goal toward which history was aimed, but it had to pass first through Capitalism, then Socialism (what Marx saw as the developing conflict in his day) before utopia could be realized.[78]