Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

Though Rand recognized the crucial importance of the parent-child relationship, she argued that the Family was a cultural institution that frequently undercut the individual’s independence and autonomy, breaking “a man’s or a woman’s spirit by means of unchosen obligations and unearned guilt.”125 Devotion to the Family was a con game in Rand’s view, in which the weaker and irresponsible family members are dependent on those who are stronger. Frequently, the relations within the family mirror those of master and slave. Just as the stronger members are exploited, they are also obeyed. For Rand, these family figures become “mini-dictator[s]” (in Walker 1992T).

  Beginning with her rejection of conservatism, Rand became disillusioned with the two major alternatives in U.S. politics. Whereas the conservatives sought to perpetuate the tyranny of the Family, the liberals sought to make the nation one huge Family, dedicated to the exploitation of the producers for the benefit of the money-appropriators. As early as 1962, Rand suggested that U.S. electoral politics had offered the citizens two major political parties dedicated to the preservation of the status quo. Whereas the Democratic liberals sought to “leap” into the abyss of statism, the Republican conservatives preferred to crawl “into the same abyss.” Elections were contests in which voters casted their ballots not for a particular candidate or program, but merely against the politician or proposed policy changes that they feared most.126

  It was this early observation on the futility of U. S. politics that led Rand to a more thorough consideration of the conservative-liberal distinction. Prompted by Supreme Court decisions on censorship and pornography, Rand’s dialectical analysis of the dualism in contemporary thought was a microcosm of her genuinely radical alternative.

  Rand was a principled civil libertarian. Though she abhorred pornography, she opposed all legal and judicial attempts to censor it.127 And yet Rand believed that the censorship controversy revealed the essence of the conservative-liberal duality.128 In the nineteenth century, the classical liberal was an anti-authoritarian advocate of individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism, while the classical conservative had advocated state authority and tradition. Modern American politics achieved a near total inversion, offering “a choice between 20th century liberal statism and 19th century conservative statism.”129

  The polarity between modern conservatives and liberals was based on their dualistic metaphysical assumptions. Both schools of thought embraced different sides of the same mind-body dichotomy. The conservatives tended to advocate freedom of action in the material realm of production and business, but favored government control of the spiritual realm through state censorship and the imposition of religious values. The liberals tended to advocate freedom of action in the spiritual realm of ideas, the arts, and academia, but favored government control of the material realm in their adherence to economic regulation and welfare statism. Rand explains: “This is merely a paradox, not a contradiction: each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom, only to the activities it despises.”130

  The conservatives are “mystics of spirit,” metaphysical idealists, seeking to use the power of the state to control the spiritual products of the human mind. Epistemologically, the conservatives are intrinsicists and advocates of faith. The liberals are “mystics of muscle,” metaphysical materialists seeking to use the power of the state to control the material products of the human mind. Epistemologically, the liberals are subjectivists and advocates of emotionalism. Each ideological group is united with its apparent opposite in rejecting reason, and the freedom that the mind requires (228–29).

  As a child of Russian culture, Rand had seen this same political dualism before: in the opposition between the religious idealists and the Bolshevik materialists. The idealists, like modern-day conservatives, opposed Bolshevism with their own visions for a theocratic utopia. The Bolsheviks, like modern-day liberals, were thoroughgoing economic statists. Both sides had accepted different forms of the same collectivist tyranny.

  Rand’s resolution was directed toward the union of the “homeless refugees” in contemporary politics: the nontotalitarian liberals and the nontraditional conservatives.131 Her radical alternative aimed to transcend dualism in each of its personal, cultural, and structural manifestations.

  13

  HISTORY AND RESOLUTION

  Ayn Rand’s philosophical project comprises successive negative and positive moments of inquiry. It began as a historically constituted critique of the Russian duality of religion and statism. It embraced a positive synthesis, seeking to transcend false alternatives by integrating categories traditionally kept separate and distinct. Given her critical view of dualism and her vision of the ideal individual and the ideal society, Rand was faced with the typical problem of all radical thinkers: how to move from theoretical prescription to practical implementation. Like most radical thinkers, Rand looked to history for instruction.

  ATTILA VERSUS THE WITCH DOCTOR

  Though her view of history was far more complex than some of her essays suggest, Rand’s popularized exposition projects an almost apocalyptic battle between good and evil. Rand’s conception reflects her Russian roots. In Russia, the two main philosophic fashions of the Silver Age proposed conflicts in similar apocalyptic terms. The mystical Symbolists warned of the impending doom of the old order; the materialist Bolsheviks posited a life-and-death struggle between communism and capitalism.

  Rand’s apocalyptic imagery, however, is less a clash between good and evil than one between good and two interpenetrating versions of evil. Rand relied upon symbolic metaphors to dramatize the historical opposition and mutually beneficial support that mystics and materialists derived from each other. Rand understood the value of symbolic figures as an “adjunct to philosophy.” She appreciated Nietzsche’s aesthetic distinction between Apollo and Dionysus because it enabled people “to integrate and bear in mind the essential meaning of complex issues.”1 Following Nietzsche, Rand’s symbols were designed to achieve the same clarity and integration. They encapsulate her repudiation of mysticism and statism, each of which requires the other in order to survive. They formalize the organic relationship between the “man of faith” and the “man of force”:

  These two figures … are philosophical archetypes, psychological symbols and historical reality. As philosophical archetypes, they embody two variants of a certain view of man and of existence. As psychological symbols, they represent the basic motivation of a great many men who exist in any era, culture or society. As historical reality, they are the actual rulers of most of mankind’s societies, who rise to power whenever men abandon reason. (New Intellectual, 14)

  Drawing from a designation made initially by Nathaniel Branden, Rand identified these archetypes as Attila and the Witch Doctor.2 Attila rules by brute, physical force, whereas the Witch Doctor rules by mysticism. Like other dualities, these archetypes “appear to be opposites,” but they are united by a pronounced hostility to the conceptual level of consciousness.

  Attilas seek to achieve physical domination by ruling the bodies of their subjects and seizing their material products. They regard people “as others regard fruit trees or farm animals.” They exhibit a “perceptual mentality,” which is as close to “an animal ‘epistemology’ … as a human consciousness can come.” Attilas are the anti-conceptual mentality incarnate. They do not understand the cognitive roots of production. They see no need to comprehend “how men manage to produce the things [they covet]” (New Intellectual, 14–16). In modern social science, Atillas contribute to the fragmentation of knowledge and the compartmentalization of the disciplines. They view the problems of social life in a piecemeal, concrete-bound fashion, rejecting all forms of “system-building” as “irrational, mystical and unscientific” (43–44).

  In the face of such anti-conceptualism, it is little wonder that people are drawn psychologically to the Witch Doctor. Rand argues that human efficacy requires a comprehensive view of the world. The Witch Doctor att
empts to fulfill this need. But the Witch Doctor’s attempt at comprehensiveness is saturated with mysticism. By manipulating floating abstractions, the Witch Doctor “seeks to rule … men’s souls.” A Witch Doctor views his or her own consciousness as an “irreducible primary,” obliterating “the distinction between consciousness and reality, between the perceiver and the perceived.” The Witch Doctor damns the material world, the body, and the self as evil, asserts an ineffable grasp of a higher reality and proposes to lead people to paradise. The Witch Doctor achieves spiritual domination through the “lethal opposition of the moral and the practical,” reducing people to sacrificial animals by attacking their self-esteem (16–18).

  Thus, whereas Attilas prey on peoples’ bodies, Witch Doctors prey on their souls. Whereas Attilas focus on “concretes unintegrated by abstractions,” Witch Doctors accept “floating abstractions unrelated to concretes.” Both of these figures “are incomplete parts of a human being who seek completion in each other: the man of muscle and the man of feelings, seeking to exist without mind” (19). Their historical opposition—and alliance—is “based on mutual fear and mutual contempt” (20). It is a synthesis of apparent opposites brought about by the poverty of each.

  Rand argued that the dominance of Attila and the Witch Doctor was fundamentally challenged from the beginning of Western civilization by the genesis of philosophy. From the time of ancient Greece, as people were provided with a modicum of political freedom, the first rumblings of a rational view of reality were felt. Though Witch Doctor metaphysics were reproduced in the works of most of the early Greek philosophers, including Plato, it was Aristotle who became “the world’s first intellectual, in the purest and noblest sense of that word” (22). By providing human beings with an objective view of reality, and by articulating the laws of logic, Aristotle challenged the mystic creeds of his day. For Rand, the history of philosophy was largely a duel between the secular rationality of Aristotelianism and the mysticism of Plato. Despite the achievements of Greek culture, early Western civilization was dominated by the predatory rule of statist empires and feudal tribalists. The Attilas often aligned themselves with Witch Doctors, who provided their rule with mystical, ideological legitimation. But after centuries of brutality, the reign of Attila and the Witch Doctor was fundamentally undermined by the rebirth of secular philosophy. The reintroduction of the Aristotelian worldview into Western culture, via Thomas Aquinas, was the philosophic precursor that made possible the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism. Though it took nearly four hundred years to secularize the Western mind, the release of body and soul from the domination of Attila and the Witch Doctor led to a burst of scientific discovery and invention, material production and creativity (Peikoff 1976T, lecture 12).

  These historical developments brought forth thinking and acting men and women, demonstrating in a definitive manner the efficacy of the mind in the production of goods and services for human survival on earth. The newly emergent, though “mixed,” capitalist systems “wiped out slavery in matter and in spirit,” and introduced two new historical archetypes: “the producer of wealth and the purveyor of knowledge—the businessman and the intellectual” who flourished in their respective marketplaces of goods and ideas (New Intellectual, 25). The businessman is the conduit of science, translating technological discoveries into material products for human consumption. The intellectual is the conduit of philosophy, translating philosophic abstractions into ideational products for human consumption (26–27).

  Like Marx before her, Rand saw the professional businessman and the professional intellectual “as brothers born of the industrial revolution” (13).3 But even as the Attilas and the Witch Doctors were kept at bay, they were not completely eliminated as historical forces. The Attilas began to use ever more sophisticated methods of predation to feast on the enormous productive power unleashed by the reasoning mind. The Witch Doctors began to infiltrate secular philosophy and to undercut the efficacy of reason by couching their mysticism in technical and scientific verbiage. The great philosophical turning point was achieved by Kant, who formalized dualism, pitting mind against body, reason against reality, morality against practicality. Nearly every major modern school of philosophy derived from this Kantian irrationality (New Intellectual, 30–34).

  Capitalism as a social formation was made possible by the rebirth of reason. But just as reason made political freedom possible, it required political freedom for its sustenance. Capitalism “was the last and (theoretically) incomplete product of an Aristotelian influence.” Before it reached structural maturity, it was undercut by a resurgent tide of mysticism in a culture that had never totally abandoned the mind-body distinction and the tribal premise. In the absence of an articulated moral base, capitalism remained stillborn, forever an unknown ideal.4

  Under capitalism, the businessman and the intellectual were archetypically involved in a process of free trade and free expression. But as the state came to dominate social life, most businessmen became modern-day Attilas, just as most intellectuals became modern-day Witch Doctors. Businessmen turned to the state to achieve consolidation and expansion. They typically scorned the realm of ideas as idealistic, impractical, and inconsequential. The intellectuals by contrast scorned the realm of production as materialistic and greedy. They provided the ideological rationale for the very predatory practices they often condemned. Their explicit and implicit attacks on rationality and freedom ideologically bolstered the power of the state. Frequently, they too depended on the state for material support of their research.

  Capitalism did not make this dualism possible; it had inherited it. Capitalism had challenged dualism radically, but its revolution remained unconsummated. Whereas the Renaissance and the Enlightenment had made capitalism possible, modern philosophy made the death of capitalism inevitable. It could not survive in a culture so thoroughly committed to the obliteration of the mind. Rand believed that it was a “tragic irony” that businessmen and intellectuals, “the sons of capitalism,” were perishing in a struggle of mutual contempt. She argued: “If they perish, they will perish together.” But for Rand, “the major share of the guilt will belong to the intellectual” (New Intellectual, 13).

  THE PRIMACY OF PHILOSOPHY

  Rand’s contention that the major share of the guilt would belong to the intellectual requires detailed explanation. Recall the “tier” in Diagram 2 of Chapter 11. I have recast that figure here with interconnecting arrows to emphasize the point that there is no one-way causality between any two tiers (Diagram 3).

  As Diagram 3 shows, Tier 1 does not lead to Tier 2, and Tier 2 does not lead to Tier 3. Rather, each tier is a precondition and context for the other two. The political and economic systems of a given society cannot be abstracted from the culture, nor can these be abstracted from the “lifestyle” of the majority of people. Hence, it is illegitimate to discuss “capitalist” political and economic institutions as external to the culture within which they reside. Unlike Marx, Rand did not see culture as a “superstructure” of capitalist relations. Closer to the Weberian paradigm, she saw culture as a “base” that provides the broad context for political and economic relations. For example, Rand would have rejected the postcommunist Russian attempt to graft capitalist institutions onto an indigenous noncapitalist base. Russian culture lacked sufficient commitment to individualism and reason. Even if Russia rejected communism, its culture was constituted historically by a profound mysticism and tribalism that would necessarily undercut the effective achievement of even a Western-style mixed economy,5 much less a purely capitalist one.

  Because most people have tacitly absorbed the values of their age, Rand recognized that, in the United States, the last remnants of an Aristotelian sense of life were being eradicated under the weight of systemic irrationality. The essence of the “mixed” economy was not merely its structural mixture of the principles of capitalism and statism but its corresponding mixture in each person’s soul, what Rand called “the
‘mixed economies’ of the spirit.”6 There were conflicting philosophic cross-currents in U.S. culture and social psychology. After two hundred years of retrenchment, secular Aristotelianism, in Rand’s view, had been relegated to the cultural unconscious, as expressed in the predominating lifestyle of the American people (Tier 1). Explicit culture (Tier 2) was dominated by antirational practices, values, and ideas.

  How were such antirational practices, values, and ideas transmitted culturally? Let us examine the constituent human components of Tier 2 (Diagram 4).

  In Rand’s view, the “philosophic system-builders” set the ultimate trends of an age or a nation’s culture.7 The ideas of the system-builder filter through the culture as the adherents to the philosophy begin to derive implications from the innovator’s teachings. Rand used military terminology to describe the crucial role of the intellectuals in this regard; the intellectual is “the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher” (New Intellectual, 26–27). The intellectual proceeds to apply the system-builder’s principles to a variety of subdisciplines. The central tenets are transmitted through the educational establishment to those who will become scientists, businessmen, workers, politicians, journalists, and so on. These practitioners further transmit ideas through the communications media, art, literature, and music,8 As Kelley (1990, 28) suggests, in time, such ideas become “an element in the dominant psychology of an age, predisposing people to accept the kinds of art, behavior, and institutions that are consistent with the idea.”

  Rand did not believe that every single individual must accept a specific philosophic idea in order for it to qualify as a dominant trend. In any given historical period, there will be many philosophic cross-currents. But intellectual life, expressed in the normative, aesthetic, political, and economic sciences, will ultimately constitute a dominant philosophic paradigm. The key to comprehending the logic of history is to render explicit the dominant paradigm implicit in a variety of cultural forms. History, in Rand’s view, is “not an unintelligible chaos ruled by chance” but something that can be comprehended, predicted, and shaped.9