Ayn Rand — VOICES for REASON

Ayn Rand was born on February 2, 1905. To commemorate the 107th anniversary of her birth, ARC analyst Don Watkins has an op-ed on FoxNews.com today, in which he discusses the controversy over Rand’s influence on today’s politics.

“Rand has clearly inspired millions,” he writes, ”But a debate has emerged over the question of Rand’s political influence, with many commentators claiming her ideas have played a key role in shaping the political landscape. . . . But to gauge Rand’s influence, we need to know more about her views than the sound bites we’re typically offered.”

Why are Tea Partiers, political commentators, and politicians talking about a philosopher almost thirty years after her death? Read the article to find out.

Earlier this week Penguin, the publisher of Atlas Shrugged, released an application for Apple’s iPad that offers readers an amplified edition of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. Instead of buying the text-only e-book of the novel, you can purchase this application, which offers many additional features that allow you to learn more about the novel, Ayn Rand, and her ideas.

The app contains four main sections: “The Book,” “The Author,” “The Philosophy” and “Hall of Atlas.”

• “The Book” section offers the full text of Atlas Shrugged. In addition, app users can share their favorite passages from the text on social media sites and see manuscript pages of various sections of the novel.
• “The Author” section features a biography of Ayn Rand, a graphic timeline of her life, a gallery of photos of Rand and key documents related to her work, and recollections of Rand by Leonard Peikoff, her longtime associate and intellectual heir.
• In “The Philosophy” section, users can read about the essentials of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and listen to an audio lecture by Rand describing her philosophy. Users can also listen to Rand’s 1964 talk “Is Atlas Shrugging?”
• The “Hall of Atlas” section offers users many video and audio interviews of Rand discussing the main themes in Atlas Shrugged and other intellectual topics. Users can also take an interactive quiz that tests whether they can correctly attribute quotes from the novel to their respective characters, access discussion questions, and view further reading resources.

To find out more about the Atlas Shrugged iPad app, and to see a gallery of screen shots, please visit the iTunes App Store. The app sells for $14.99.

My colleague Don Watkins just posted an online comment to a recent column by Al Lewis concerning Ayn Rand. Ordinarily Don wouldn’t have bothered, except that Lewis’s diatribe went out under the auspices of the Wall Street Journal, the nation’s largest circulation daily newspaper. I’ve reproduced Don’s comment in its entirety below:

Al Lewis suggests that today’s prominent admirers of Ayn Rand (such as Rep. Paul Ryan, Rush Limbaugh, and Justice Clarence Thomas) “would be crushed to learn that she might never love them back.” Lewis wants us to know how baffled he is at Rand’s refusal, during her lifetime, to forge alliances with everyone who claimed to have something in common with her politics.

Lewis’s column, for all its childish, hit-and-run bluster, invites attention to an important fact about Ayn Rand. As a crusader for laissez-faire capitalism, Rand traced the historical decline of freedom to a series of crucial intellectual errors. Her task, as she saw it, was to advance rigorous arguments demonstrating the system’s virtues, in order to persuade reasonable people to change their minds.

It was this serious mission that kept Rand on constant watch for advocates who might claim to be her allies, but whose arguments actually undermined the cause of freedom. Consider the examples Lewis mentions. When libertarians argued that capitalism leads to anarchism—or when Reaganite conservatives argued that a woman’s individual right to the pursuit of happiness must be sacrificed to a month-old embryo—or when right-leaning Christians argued that the profit motive, though immoral, is tolerable because it benefits society—Ayn Rand distanced herself and her philosophy from those movements. Why? Because she thought their arguments would hurt, rather than help, the cause of freedom.

In today’s world, to be selective about one’s allies is to invite accusations of dogmatism. But it was precisely Rand’s lack of dogmatism—her conviction that only rational, persuasive arguments can change the world—that made her so careful about avoiding confusion in making the case for capitalism.

From the wild array of accusations, distortions, and half-truths contained in Lewis’s column, I have selected this one issue for a too-brief discussion—the rest don’t merit rebuttal. Rand’s arguments and alliances deserve to be taken seriously, not treated in the cavalier fashion that Lewis adopts.

In my latest Forbes.com column (co-authored by Yaron Brook), “What’s Missing from the Budget Debate,” I argue that to cut the entitlement state, you have to reject the morality of need and defend the individual’s right to live and work solely for his own sake. Ira Stoll at Future of Capitalism raises an interesting objection:

I don’t think it’s necessary to reject responsibility for your brother or your neighbor in order to support some entitlement reform or reductions. It’s possible to accept responsibility (or choose to accept responsibility) for your brother or neighbor, without accepting it for all Americans, or for the whole world. One can have different levels of obligation to people in different circles. At issue in the entitlement debate Messrs. Brook and Watkins are writing about is what obligation, if any, Americans have to each other as Americans, since not even the far left, so far as I can tell, is talking about including the entire world’s population into Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Here’s my response, posted in his comments:

Thanks for taking note of our column, Ira, and for your thoughtful comments. I think, however, that framing the issue in terms of “circles of obligation” clouds the issue because it blurs a crucial distinction: obligations an individual voluntarily accepts in pursuit of his own interests, and unchosen obligations an individual supposedly has that demand him to sacrifice his interests.

I would argue that a person pursuing his self-interest has all sorts of voluntarily-accepted obligations. For instance, I have obligations to treat my wife a certain way, not as some painful duty, but in order to foster a relationship that means a tremendous amount to me. Similarly, I’m contractually obligated to write the best columns I can for my employer.

That is radically different from the idea that there are people I have a self-sacrificial duty to help regardless of their value to me. Once you accept that idea, it doesn’t matter whether you happen to think it applies only to certain others. You’ve conceded the essential issue: the individual is not sovereign, and the needs of his neighbor trump his pursuit of happiness. It’s hard to see how you can then defend against the person who says that your “neighbor” ought to include your entire town, or city, or county, or planet. Indeed, isn’t that what moralists like Peter Singer (to say nothing of Christian theorists) have argued?

In my view, you can’t fight the welfare state by defending the welfare town. You have to fight for the individual’s moral and political right to pursue his own self-interest.

Ayn Rand addresses some of these issues at aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/charity.html and aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sacrifice.html. I encourage anyone interested to take a look.

The Objectivist Academic Center (OAC) is currently accepting applications for its Fall 2011 incoming class. Designed to provide expert guidance in the study of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, this program is for those who are serious about advocating pro-reason, pro-individual rights, pro-capitalism views in the intellectual arena.

Aimed at young and ambitious students with the energy and drive to make a difference in the world, the OAC program begins with a one-year course focusing on philosophical understanding and communication skills. Students who complete the one-year course are eligible to apply to an Advanced Education Program. There is no charge for the Core Course or for the Advanced Education Program.

The application deadline for Fall admission is July 29, 2011.

Forbes.com has just published the latest column by Yaron Brook and me, “What’s Missing from the Budget Debate.”

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget has come under severe attack for daring to curtail some elements of the entitlement state. Although we are certainly not defenders of the plan’s details–it doesn’t even cut spending–what’s striking is how easily its supporters have been put on the moral defensive, and to how devastating an effect.

You can read the whole column here.

Over at the American Thinker, Dr. Harry Binswanger, a member of the Ayn Rand Institute’s Board of Directors, writes:

The American Values Network, a left-wing group, with considerable funding by George Soros, has launched a media blitz under the banner “Ayn Rand vs. Jesus Christ.”  As an Institute founded by Ayn Rand’s heir and devoted to advancing her philosophy, Objectivism, we would like to respond.  Since this is an issue Rand faced repeatedly in her lifetime, our response is basically to let her speak for herself.

Read the whole thing here.

ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has an editorial on FoxNews.com today. “Ayn Rand is everywhere,” he writes, and “her political opponents are growing nervous.” With some Tea Partiers and politicians praising Ayn Rand’s views, what “worries advocates of the welfare state is that they have never before faced any moral opposition.”

Whatever the rhetoric of Republicans and Democrats in the past, they agreed on the basic goal: more and more government controls are necessary to rein in businessmen, “manage” the economy, and minister to those in need.

No matter which party was in power, therefore, we got things like Sarbanes-Oxley, bailouts of GM and Citibank, a huge prescription drug “benefit” and ObamaCare. Politics was a squabble about the efficacy of any proposed controls, not a dispute about the morality or immorality of imposing controls in the first place. As Krugman observes, in years past everyone “accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state.”

But now its advocates sense that this is no longer true, that some Americans are beginning to question the moral legitimacy of the welfare state. To strangle this questioning in the crib, supporters of government controls are trying to persuade their opponents to abandon Rand.

The current tactic is to tell Tea Partiers and “conservatives” that if you take religion seriously, you can’t be a fan of the atheist Ayn Rand. . . .

Dr. Ghate notes that “this much is true. Rand’s moral teachings are fundamentally different from Jesus’ teachings.”  But he goes on to ask the question, “Did Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers not reject the Sermon’s advice in creating America?”

Read the rest of the op-ed here.

Image: Wikimedia commons

In his blistering review of the new Atlas Shrugged movie, political humorist P.J. O’Rourke vows not to criticize Rand’s novel itself. “I don’t have the guts,” he assures us. “If you associate with Randians—and I do—saying anything critical about Ayn Rand is almost as scary as saying anything critical to Ayn Rand.”

I will try not to scare Mr. O’Rourke. But his treatment of Rand includes a number of errors (and, notwithstanding his declaration of cowardice, a number of insults). Most of them aren’t worth addressing, but one goes to the essence of Rand’s thought: her view of selfishness.  Here is how O’Rourke describes Rand’s view:

In “Atlas Shrugged” Rand set out to prove that self-interest is vital to mankind. This, of course, is the whole point of free-market classical liberalism and has been since Adam Smith invented free-market classical liberalism by proving the same point.

The idea is that Rand had nothing new to say about self-interest or free markets, but was merely fictionalizing Smith’s “invisible hand” argument. Rand, however, didn’t see it that way. During a radio appearance, she described the difference between her defense of capitalism and Smith’s:

I am not an advocate of Adam Smith’s philosophy. I do not believe in invisible hands leading men to altruism through the pursuit of their private interests. I reject altruism, public service, and the public good as the moral justification of free enterprise. Altruism is what’s destroying capitalism. Adam Smith was a brilliant economist; I agree with many of his economic theories. But I disagree with his attempt to justify capitalism on altruistic grounds. My defense of capitalism is based on individual rights, as was the American Founding Fathers’, who were not altruists. They did not say man should exist for others; they said he should pursue his own happiness.

Rand was not picking nits. In Atlas Shrugged and in her nonfiction works, she shows that there is an inescapable contradiction between the morality of altruism, which says that the good consists of self-sacrifice, and capitalism, which enshrines the selfish pursuit of profit. This contradiction, she argues, is what explains the disintegration of economic freedom in America: although the Founding Fathers created a system based on the individual’s political right to pursue his own happiness, that system could not stand without a defense of the individual’s moral right to pursue his own happiness.

That is what Atlas Shrugged provides—a new code of morality that defines the good in terms of what is required for each individual to make the most of his own life, and so lays the foundation for a social system in which the individual can make the most of his own life.  (This is the theme of my colleague Onkar Ghate’s riveting talk, Atlas Shrugged and the Morality of Freedom.)

Rand’s point and Smith’s are anything but the same. Smith proposed that free markets lead self-interested actors “as if by an invisible hand” to act for the “public good.” But morally speaking, he said, self-interest was not noble. That is precisely what Rand—author of The Virtue of Selfishness—challenged.

Rand did not champion self-interest for its social consequences, because it was “vital to mankind.” Rather, she championed self-interest  (what she called rational self-interest) because it is vital to each individual. The essence of virtue, she argued, is the individual’s pursuit and achievement of his own interests. And markets? They are moral because they free the individual to pursue and achieve his own self-interest.

Whatever one’s evaluation of Rand’s argument, there is no question that she is saying something profoundly new and challenging.

In 2006, O’Rourke wrote a commentary on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations because he noticed that, while everyone talks about Smith’s ideas, few have a clue what he actually said. It’s a lesson that O’Rourke might have seen fit to apply to another of capitalism’s great champions.

ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has a new op-ed published today in the Christian Science Monitor.  In the article, Dr. Ghate asks, given the parallels between the events in Atlas Shrugged and the financial/economic crises in recent years, “Should you, like Rand’s heroes, ‘go Galt,’ stop working, retreat to a secluded valley, and try to rebuild only when the country has collapsed?”

Dr. Ghate writes:

Rand was asked these very questions in her own lifetime. Her answers might surprise you. In the 1970s, America was in a deep financial crisis (a new word, stagflation, had to be coined), urban violence was rampant, and power-seeking politicians like President Nixon instituted wage and price controls that led to, among other things, gas stations with no gas. How, people wondered, could Rand have foreseen all this? Was she a prophet? No, she answered. She had simply identified the basic cause of why the country was veering from crisis to new crisis.

Was the solution to “go Galt” and quit society? No, Rand again answered. The solution was simultaneously much easier and much harder. “So long as we have not yet reached the state of censorship of ideas,” she once said, “one does not have to leave a society in the way the characters did in Atlas Shrugged…. But you know what one does have to do? One has to break relationships with the culture…. [D]iscard all the ideas – the entire cultural philosophy which is dominant today.”

Read the rest of Dr. Ghate’s op-ed here.  And to learn more about the ideas in Atlas Shrugged, go here.