Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  struggles to hide his meaning (if any) under coils of meaningless generalities and safely popular bromides. Regardless of whether his message is good or bad, true or false, he cannot state it openly, but must smuggle it into his audience’s subconscious by means of the same unfocused, deceptive, evasive verbiage. He must strive to be misunderstood in the greatest number of ways by the greatest number of people: this is the only way to keep up the pretense of unity.45

  The dominant trend in the culture of consensus is anti-ideology.46 Whereas a genuine political ideology projects a program of long-term action guided by fundamental principles, anti-ideology shrinks “men’s minds to the range of the immediate moment, without regard to past or future, without context or memory.” The anti-ideologists, the pseudo-intellectuals and lobbyists, claim to have no attachment to “inflexible” principles, but they nonetheless rely on spurious principles of their own. They disarm their opposition by switching the terms of the debate whenever it is expedient. In this manner, they distort public discourse to suit the strategic purposes of the pressure groups in whose interests they serve.47

  If people do not explicitly define the nature of the debate, or the nature of their goals, Rand asked, how can genuine social unity ever be achieved? Since efficacious action is not possible in the absence of principles, how can public debate encourage rational negotiation and compromise when “the intentions of the various men or groups involved are not revealed?” How can anyone ascertain the desirability of any political deal without reference to the explicit principles at work?

  Under such conditions of public discourse, “men begin to regard social relationships not as a matter of dealing with one another, but of putting something over on one another.” By assaulting “the precision—of public communication (and its precondition: the freedom of public information),” the system necessarily breeds an atmosphere of mistrust and bitterness. Fostering an illusory intellectual unity, the system engenders the growth “of divisiveness or existential polarization” through the mass proliferation of conflicting pressure groups. Each group unites not by loyalty to an idea, but on the basis of race, age, sex, religious creed, or common hatred of another group. The unity within each group is motivated “not by choice, but by terror.”48 And just as the Establishment uses anti-concepts to legitimate its own foreign and domestic initiatives, so each group uses anti-concepts in its quest for political power. For Rand, “any ideological product of the mixed economy … is a vague, indefinable, approximation and, therefore an instrument of pressure group warfare.”49 Rand asked: “What sort of unity can one establish between victims and executioners?”50

  In abandoning the necessity of clearly defined principles, people are unable to plan for the long term or engage in comprehensible social discourse. The absence of principles obscures any understanding of “the context, causes, consequences or solutions” of any given social problem. The “brute physical force” of the state becomes the “ultimate arbiter of disputes.”51

  Like Habermas, Rand envisioned a genuine, truthful, public discourse. She favored real intellectual “polarization” in which dialogical participants enter into constructive debate, bringing to the “cultural atmosphere an all-but-forgotten quality: honesty with its corollary, clarity.” The unintelligible would be transcended as rational people grasped “their own stand and that of their adversaries.” Out of this dialogue would emerge a genuine social unity, a unity that would be “a consequence, not a primary,” one based on the triumph of “fundamental principles, rationally validated, clearly understood and voluntarily accepted” (4).

  But unlike Habermas, Rand defended capitalism, “the unknown ideal,” as the only social system capable of establishing the necessary conditions for free human discourse.52 Unlike any other radical theorist of her generation, Rand linked a multilevel, dialectical analysis to a libertarian politics.

  THE ANTIRATIONAL CULTURE

  Rand recognized that radical social change could not emerge solely on the basis of an honest public dialogue. In Rand’s view, such honesty is anathema to statist society. The existing culture and the political system were, she thought, profoundly “antirational.”53 As she saw it, the system itself expressed and perpetuated a fundamental irrationality that punished virtue and rewarded vice. To this end, culture and politics were “two mutually reinforcing manifestations of the same philosophy.”54

  Before examining the dimensions of cultural irrationality that Rand condemned, it is important to grasp what she meant by “culture.” Rand interpreted the social sphere in a manner that reflected her own view of the individual sphere. Every society, like every individual, acts on the basis of a certain articulated or tacit philosophic view of the world. Our survival as human beings, the integrated direction of our lives, and the efficacy of our chosen courses of action ultimately depend on the principles we accept, either consciously or tacitly. Likewise, a society’s economic, political, and cultural trends are ultimately set by its implicit, dominant philosophical premises. (Whether Rand’s theory of history borders on a kind of philosophical determinism is a contention I explore later.)

  What must be emphasized at this juncture is Rand’s view of society as an organic totality. Rand refused to see the social whole as a hodgepodge of unrelated tendencies. These tendencies form a system, for better or for worse. The system shapes each of its constituent parts. And the parts both generate and reflect the system they jointly constitute.

  Rand proposed an equivalence between social and individual structures. She sees a basic correspondence on three tiers (Diagram 2).

  The vertical links between these three tiers are not what interests us here. For Rand, the factors within the vertical relationship of each sphere can both mutually support and undermine one another. Moreover, she sees a one-to-one horizontal correspondence between the respective social and individual spheres.

  Vertically, in the social sphere, a nation’s politico-economic trends and policies (Tier 3) cannot be abstracted from its cultural forms and practices (Tier 2), or from the sense of life of its people as expressed in their predominating social practices and attitudes, loosely defined as their “lifestyle” (Tier l).55 Culture (Tier 2) is explicitly manifested in the works of intellectuals and artists in such areas as letters, manners, painting, sculpture, music, and science (Peikoff 1991b, 129). Taken collectively, such cultural forms express the dominant ideas, values, and attitudes of a given age.

  Rand recognized that intellectuals and artists constituted a small minority in any given national population. In the case of the United States, Rand saw a stark contrast between the purveyors of culture (Tier 2) and the people, specifically, between the intellectuals’ and artists’ sense of life and the predominating sense of life of the American people (Tier 1). This conflict can be better understood when placed in a horizontal relationship with the individual sphere.

  On Tier 3, a society’s political and economic policies correspond to an individual’s course of action. They are not implemented in a vacuum. Just as an individual’s course of action cannot be abstracted from his conscious convictions, so a society’s political and economic policies cannot be abstracted from its cultural trends. Thus, on Tier 2, the culture, as manifested in explicit intellectual and artistic products, is analogous to an individual’s conscious convictions. The culture embodies a society’s dominant philosophy.

  On Tier 1, Rand created an analogy between the nation’s sense of life as expressed in its “lifestyle,” and the individual’s sense of life. The nation’s “lifestyle” is represented in its predominating social practices and attitudes, which constitute a general emotional atmosphere, an integrated encapsulation of the values that most people hold.56 These practices and attitudes serve “as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.”57 It becomes possible to identify “national characteristics” because the great majority of people will tacitly absorb and express values, attitudes, and traditions that have been habitually reproduced by succ
essive generations. They tend to develop “the essentials of the same subconscious philosophy” from the earliest impressions of their childhood.58

  Branden has echoed this Randian view. He argues that if one does not overtly identify accepted cultural values and practices, one cannot call these into question, “precisely because they are absorbed by a process that largely by-passes the conscious mind.” Branden maintains that such a “cultural unconscious”59 encompasses implicit beliefs about nature, reality, human beings, masculinity and femininity, good and evil. These beliefs reflect the context of a given historical time and place. Though there will be ideational differences among people within a specific culture, Branden argues “that at least some of these beliefs tend to reside in every psyche in a given society, and without ever being the subject of explicit awareness” (287–88). Recognizing that “cultures do not encourage the questioning of their own premises,” Branden, like Rand, grasps the crucial necessity of critical thinking in the struggle for personal and social change (303).

  Rand emphasized that a society, like an individual, will tend to see its inarticulate beliefs, practices, and attitudes (Tier 1) as natural and self-evident. But these beliefs cannot be reified; they must be analyzed as by-products of complex evaluations made by many people over a long period of time and reflecting a fundamental view of human nature.60 Just as Rand aimed for the articulation of values and attitudes within each individual as a means toward his or her rational integration or alteration, so too, did she aim to grasp a society’s implicit values and attitudes as a means toward their explicit articulation or transcendence.

  Rand argued that within both the individual and social spheres, there can be a pronounced conflict between tacit and articulated dimensions, between Tier 1 and Tiers 2 and 3. The social world, like the individual’s inner world, is not constituted by a hegemonic unity; it is frequently a sphere in contradiction with itself. She wrote:

  Just as an individual’s sense of life can clash with his conscious convictions, hampering or defeating his actions, so a nation’s sense of life can clash with its culture, hampering or defeating its political course. Just as an individual’s sense of life can be better or worse than his conscious convictions, so can a nation’s. And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into conscious convictions is in terrible danger—no matter how good his subconscious values—so is a nation. (252)

  The political trend (Tier 3) in the United States is statist. Its cultural trend (Tier 2) is “directed at the obliteration of man’s rational faculty.”61 The prime psychological effect of Tiers 3 and 2 on most people is “the erosion of ambition.” In Rand’s view, the political goal presupposes these two dominant cultural and psychological tendencies. Statism requires docility, hopelessness, and stagnation. Since “thinking men cannot be ruled,” and since “ambitious men do not stagnate,” statism had to institutionalize the antirational.62 Whereas previously there had been an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment, contemporary U.S. culture had brought about an Age of Envy, which expressed “hatred of the good for being the good.”63 In nearly every aspect of culture, a fundamental malevolence sought to annihilate every desirable human good because it was good. In the Age of Envy, there was a social function to every cultural idea that opposed success or ambition.

  The egalitarian-intellectuals, for instance, attacked human uniqueness and turned “equality … into an anti-concept.” They switched its meaning from a political to a metaphysical context, and proposed to invalidate the physical and spiritual distinctions among individuals through the coercive power of the state. In actuality, they wished to achieve “an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top—the aristocracy of non-value” (165). Such policies penalized the truly intelligent. But they also destroyed every individual, “each in proportion to his intelligence.” Under such conditions, the average person did not possess the genius’s resilience and self-confidence, and was much more apt to abdicate his mind, “in hopeless bewilderment, under the first touch of pressure.”64

  The modern egalitarians seek to replace self-responsibility and earned achievement with a psychology of entitlement and victimization based on claims of illusory rights and metaphysical equality (N. Branden 1994, 297–305). Their ultimate weapon is the altruist morality. Rand argued: “It makes no difference whether they embraced altruism as a means to their ulterior motives or the motives grew out of their altruistic creed.” These “two elements are mutually reinforcing.”65 Even if the egalitarians’ motivations were sincere, their doctrine of self-sacrifice, self-immolation, and self-abnegation inculcated a sense of guilt and worthlessness in other people. Historically, philosophically, and psychologically, altruism was used as a rationalization “for the most evil motives, the most inhuman actions, the most loathsome emotions.”66

  However, Rand believed that the nation’s “sense of life,” upheld by the majority of Americans (Tier 1), was in stark contradiction to this primordial cultural-intellectual trend. Though most Americans had “mixed” premises, they had internalized a fundamentally Aristotelian sense of life that was reality-oriented, progressive, technological, and defiant. But the United States could not long survive on the basis of a tacit benevolence. Without the full articulation and objective definition of rational values, American society was doomed.67 Its sense of life (Tier 1) was gradually being corrupted in an atmosphere of explicit cultural (Tier 2), and political (Tier 3) irrationality as manifested in most social institutions and practices.

  Rand’s critique duplicates the comprehensive, integrated character of the Marxian analysis of culture. Certainly there is an important distinction in emphasis: Rand saw social phenomena in terms of their philosophical roots, whereas Marx focused on their material roots. Yet both thinkers examine the extent to which a dominant philosophical or material mode is reproduced in nearly every aspect of social life.68 Rand presented a view of systemic irrationality that encompasses everything from art and religion to politics and pedagogy.

  In many ways, Rand’s approach bears an even closer resemblance to the vision of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist. Gramsci (1971) argued that philosophy (or culture), politics, and economics “are the necessary constituent elements of the same conception of the world, [hence] there must necessarily be, in their theoretical principles, a convertibility from one to the others and a reciprocal translation into the specific language of each constituent element. Any one is implicit in the others, and the three together form a homogeneous circle” (403).

  Gramsci developed an expansive definition of power relations that was reflected in each of the constituents he identified. He maintained that the phenomenon of power pervaded all social structures and institutions. As a Marxist, Gramsci developed the concept of “hegemony” to describe how capitalist relations achieved predominance in both the political and social spheres of action. He emphasized that power structures were not exclusively state formations. Most of them, in fact, reside in “civil society.” The “ideological state apparatuses” include institutions of religion, education, family, law, communication, and culture, as well as political parties and trade unions, all of which are expressive of “bourgeois” power relations. His vision of proletarian revolution required the formation of parallel institutions, a “counter-hegemony,” or “bloc of historical forces,” which would develop “within the womb of the old society,” negating every manifestation of capitalist relations. This was not primarily a “top-down” political revolution, but a “bottom-up” cultural transformation.69

  Like Gramsci, Rand grasped the expansive nature of power relations. She recognized the presence of oppressive forces in culture, politics, and economics and believed too that any genuine revolution in the political sphere would be preceded necessarily by a cultural renaissance. Unlike Gramsci, however, Rand argued that it was not capitalist hegemony that needed to be transcended. Capitalism was an unknown ideal, a social system not fully realized, undermined by antirational, ancient cult
ural practices. The aesthetic images in the contemporary “mixed” economy were a “concretized reality” of the tribalist and mystic philosophical premises at work in modern culture.70 For Rand, “Just as modern philosophy is dominated by the attempt to destroy the conceptual level of man’s consciousness and even the perceptual level, reducing man’s awareness to mere sensations—so modern art and literature are dominated by the attempt to disintegrate man’s consciousness and reduce it to mere sensations, to the ‘enjoyment’ of meaningless colors, noises and moods” (97).

  The culture mirrored such philosophical bankruptcy. In literature and motion pictures, writers had dispensed with structured plot progression. They were unconcerned with projecting an ideal man or woman, and frequently presented a clash between two variations of evil. The antihero became the central focus. In modern music, atonalism replaced melody and harmony. Mindless sounds and noises were introduced into composition as a deliberate attack on musical integration and structure.71 In painting and sculpture, artists presented formless blotches of a nonobjective and nonrepresentational nature.72 They distorted perspective, space, shape, color, and the human figure.

  In the face of such cultural nihilism, Rand believed that the individual was deprived “of conceptual stimulation and communication.” There was an absence of “value experiences” in modern culture that had the effect of lowering human expectations under the pressure of an omnipresent irrationality.73 In such a cultural context, many people turned to religion as a panacea. Rand recognized that “mystic fantasies” helped to explain those things which people failed to understand.74 But even in contemporary religion, Rand saw the progressive abandonment of rational, Thomistic theology in favor of fundamentalism, cults, astrology, and reincarnation.75 Most people respond to mysticism out of loneliness, hurt, and pain, eager to find inspiration in a moral ideal projected in the God-concept. Tragically, such people view existence as hopeless. They doubt their own efficacy and become victims of what Branden called a mystic “protection racket,” which fuels people’s fear of death—and of life on earth.76 But faith was no antidote. It was, in Branden’s view, “a tool of distortion”; religion by its nature fostered a bias against the mind.77