Who's Side Were YOU On In The Battle For Sherwood Forest?

I wonder if, when he was still in knickers, young Paul Ryan was rooting for the Sheriff of Nottingham and hoping he'd catch Robin Hood. Or did his epiphany about which side he was on come after he'd read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and his absorption into the Ayn Rand cult? As for Rand, even as a child she hated Robin Hood. Doesn't that make sense? I wonder how true it is not just for conscious Rand fanatics like Ryan but across the Republican Party spectrum. I've asked Ken to explain the significance of Rand having deemed Rachmaninoff superior to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven but I suspect it would be something like Paul Gosar declaring that REO Speedwagon is superior to The Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Doors.

As you may have noticed in the last couple of weeks, I'm busily devouring Corey Robin's new book, The Reactionary Mind. I keep linking to the DWT bookstore, not because I'm eager to make the 5 cent commission if someone buys the book but because I want everyone to read it. It's actually elucidating and elegantly written, a truly enjoyable read that opens the mind and explains the world. What more could you want? Oh... free? Well... good news on that front too. It would be hard to write about the reactionary mind without explaining the Ayn Rand phenomena. And Robin tackles it extraordinarily well-- a whole chapter's worth. And that whole chapter was previously (May, 2010) published by The Nation, Garbage And Gravitas.

Look, I hope Rob Zerban actually takes out Paul Ryan next year-- and I think he can. (By the way, you can help him do that at the Blue America Stop Paul Ryan page.) But if he doesn't, Wall Street fully intends to sentence the country to a Paul Ryan presidency at some point up the road. They've been grooming him for it and the political class they finance has acquiesced. And there is no way to understand what makes Ryan tick-- beyond checks from Big Business-- without understanding "Garbage and Gravitas." He's long seen himself as a totally Randian creation, in a way you might expect from a college freshmen... or even a sophomore. But whether you're a Ryan watcher or not (yet), here's an opportunity to get a chapter of Corey Robin's book gratis. In fact, here are some excerpts for your late afternoon enjoyment, just a couple of lines about Aristotle, Hitler, Goebbels, zombies and Nietzsche, nothing I'd suggest bringing up at a Paul Ryan town hall event.

Rand also liked to cite Aristotle's law of identity or noncontradiction-- the notion that everything is identical to itself, captured by the shorthand "A is A"-- as the basis of her defense of selfishness, the free market and the limited state. That particular transport sent Rand's admirers into rapture and drove her critics, even the friendliest, to distraction. Several months before his death in 2002, Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, the most analytically sophisticated of twentieth-century libertarians, said that "the use that's made by people in the Randian tradition of this principle of logic...is completely unjustified so far as I can see; it's illegitimate." In 1961 Sidney Hook wrote in the New York Times,

Since his baptism in medieval times, Aristotle has served many strange purposes. None have been odder than this sacramental alliance, so to speak, of Aristotle with Adam Smith. The extraordinary virtues Miss Rand finds in the law that A is A suggests that she is unaware that logical principles by themselves can test only consistency. They cannot establish truth.... Swearing fidelity to Aristotle, Miss Rand claims to deduce not only matters of fact from logic but, with as little warrant, ethical rules and economic truths as well. As she understands them, the laws of logic license her in proclaiming that "existence exists," which is very much like saying that the law of gravitation is heavy and the formula of sugar sweet.

Whether or not Rand read Aristotle, it's clear that he made little impression upon her, particularly when it came to ethics. Aristotle had a distinctive approach to morality, quite out of keeping with modern sensibilities; and while Rand had some awareness of its distinctiveness, its substance seems to have been lost on her. Like a set of faux-leather classics on the living room shelf, Aristotle was there to impress the company-- and, in Rand's case, distract from the real business at hand.

Unlike Kant, the emblematic modern who claimed that the rightness of our deeds is determined solely by reason, unsullied by need, desire or interest, Aristotle rooted his ethics in human nature, in the habits and practices, the dispositions and tendencies, that make us happy and enable our flourishing. And where Kant believed that morality consists of austere rules, imposing unconditional duties upon us and requiring our most strenuous sacrifice, Aristotle located the ethical life in the virtues. These are qualities or states, somewhere between reason and emotion but combining elements of both, that carry and convey us, by the gentlest and subtlest of means, to the outer hills of good conduct. Once there, we are inspired and equipped to scale these lower heights, whence we move onto the higher reaches. A person who acts virtuously develops a nature that wants and is able to act virtuously and that finds happiness in virtue. That coincidence of thought and feeling, reason and desire, is achieved over a lifetime of virtuous deeds. Virtue, in other words, is less a codex of rules, which must be observed in the face of the self's most violent opposition, than it is the food and fiber, the grease and gasoline, of a properly functioning soul.

If Kant is an athlete of the moral life, Aristotle is its virtuoso. Rand, by contrast, is a melodramatist of the moral life. Apprenticed in Hollywood rather than Athens, she has little patience for the quiet habituation in the virtues that Aristotelian ethics entails. She returns instead to her favored image of a heroic individual confronting a difficult path. Difficulty is never the result of confusion or ambiguity; Rand loathed "the cult of moral grayness," insisting that morality is first and always "a code of black and white." What makes the path treacherous-- not for the hero, who seems to have been born fully outfitted for it, but for the rest of us-- are the obstacles along the way. Doing the right thing brings hardship, penury and exile, while doing the wrong thing brings wealth, status and acclaim. Because he refuses to submit to architectural conventions, Roark winds up splitting rocks in a quarry. Peter Keating, Roark's doppelgänger, betrays everyone, including himself, and is the toast of the town. Ultimately, of course, the distribution of rewards and punishments will reverse: Roark is happy, Keating miserable. But ultimately is always and inevitably a long ways off.

In her essays, Rand seeks to apply to this imagery a superficial Aristotelian gloss. She, too, roots her ethics in human nature and refuses to draw a distinction between self-interest and the good, between ethical conduct and desire or need. But Rand's metric of good and evil, virtue and vice, is not happiness or flourishing. It is the stern and stark exigencies of life and death. As she writes in "The Objectivist Ethics":

I quote from Galt's speech: "There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence-- and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil."

Rand's defenders like to claim that what Rand has in mind by "life" is not simply biological preservation but the good life of Aristotle's great-souled man, what Rand characterizes as "the survival of man qua man." And it's true that Rand isn't much taken with mere life or life for life's sake. That would be too pedestrian. But Rand's naturalism is far removed from Aristotle's. For him life is a given; for her it is a question, and that very question is what makes life, on its own, such an object and source of reflection.

What gives life value is the ever present possibility that it might (and one day will) end. Rand never speaks of life as a given or ground. It is a conditional, a choice we must make, not once but again and again. Death casts a pall, lending our days an urgency and weight they otherwise would lack. It demands wakefulness, an alertness to the fatefulness of each and every moment. "One must never act like a zombie," Rand enjoins. Death, in short, makes life dramatic. It makes our choices-- not just the big ones but the little ones we make every day, every second-- matter. In the Randian universe, it's high noon all the time. Far from being exhausting or enervating, such an existence, at least to Rand and her characters, is enlivening and exciting.

If this idea has any moral resonance, it will be heard not in the writings of Aristotle but in the drill march of fascism. The notion of life as a struggle against and unto death, of every moment laden with destruction, every choice pregnant with destiny, every action weighed upon by annihilation, its lethal pressure generating moral meaning-- these are the watchwords of the European night. In his famous Berlin Sportpalast speech of February 1943, Goebbels declared, "Whatever serves it and its struggle for existence is good and must be sustained and nurtured. Whatever is injurious to it and its struggle for existence is evil and must be removed and eliminated." The "it" in question is the German nation, not the Randian individual. But if we strip the pronoun of its antecedent-- and listen for the background hum of triumph and will, being and nonbeing, preservation and elimination-- the similarities between the moral syntax of Randianism and of fascism become clear. Goodness is measured by life, life is a struggle against death and only our daily vigilance ensures that one does not prevail over the other.

Rand, no doubt, would object to the comparison. There is, after all, a difference between the individual and the collective. Rand thought the former an existential fundament, the latter-- whether it took the form of a class, race or nation-- a moral monstrosity. And where Goebbels talked of violence and war, Rand spoke of commerce and trade, production and economy. But fascism is hardly hostile to the heroic individual. That individual, moreover, often finds his deepest calling in economic activity. Far from demonstrating a divergence from fascism, Rand's economic writings register its impression indelibly.

Here is Hitler speaking to a group of industrialists in Düsseldorf in 1932:

You maintain, gentlemen, that the German economy must be constructed on the basis of private property. Now such a conception of private property can only be maintained in practice if it in some way appears to have a logical foundation. This conception must derive its ethical justification from the insight that this is what nature dictates.

Rand, too, believes that capitalism is vulnerable to attack because it lacks "a philosophical base." If it is to survive, it must be rationally justified. We must "begin at the beginning," with nature itself. "In order to sustain its life, every living species has to follow a certain course of action required by its nature." Because reason is man's "means of survival," nature dictates that "men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality." (Notice the slippage between success and failure and life and death.) Capitalism is the one system that acknowledges and incorporates this dictate of nature. "It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man's nature-- the connection between his survival and his use of reason-- that capitalism recognizes and protects." Like Hitler, Rand finds in nature, in man's struggle for survival, a "logical foundation" for capitalism.

Far from privileging the collective over the individual or subsuming the latter under the former, Hitler believed that it was the "strength and power of individual personality" that determined the economic (and cultural) fate of the race and nation. Here he is in 1933 addressing another group of industrialists:

Everything positive, good and valuable that has been achieved in the world in the field of economics or culture is solely attributable to the importance of personality.... All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the select few.

And here is Rand in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967):

The exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants....It is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements, while rising further and ever further.
If the first half of Hitler's economic views celebrates the romantic genius of the individual industrialist, the second spells out the inegalitarian implications of the first. Once we recognize "the outstanding achievements of individuals," Hitler says in Düsseldorf, we must conclude that "people are not of equal value or of equal importance." Private property "can be morally and ethically justified only if [we] admit that men's achievements are different." An understanding of nature fosters a respect for the heroic individual, which fosters an appreciation of inequality in its most vicious guise. "The creative and decomposing forces in a people always fight against one another."

Rand's appreciation of inequality is equally pungent. I quote from Galt's speech:

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains. Such is the nature of the "competition" between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of "exploitation" for which you have damned the strong.

Rand's path from nature to individualism to inequality also ends in a world divided between "the creative and decomposing forces." In every society, says Roark, there is a "creator" and a parasitic "second-hander," each with its own nature and code. The first "allows man to survive." The second is "incapable of survival." One produces life, the other induces death. In Atlas Shrugged the battle is between the producer and the "looters" and "moochers." It too must end in life or death.

It should come as no surprise to find Rand in such company, for she and the Nazis share a patrimony in the vulgar Nietzscheanism that has stalked the radical right, whether in its libertarian or fascist variants, since the early part of the twentieth century. As Heller and especially Burns show, Nietzsche exerted an early grip on Rand that never really loosened. Her cousin teased Rand that Nietzsche "beat you to all your ideas." When Rand arrived in the United States, Thus Spake Zarathustra was the first book in English she bought. With Nietzsche on her mind, she was inspired to write in her journals that "the secret of life" is, "you must be nothing but will. Know what you want and do it. Know what you are doing and why you are doing it, every minute of the day. All will and all control. Send everything else to hell!" Her entries frequently include phrases like "Nietzsche and I think" and "as Nietzsche said."

Rand was much taken with the idea of the violent criminal as moral hero, a Nietzschean transvaluator of all values; according to Burns, she "found criminality an irresistible metaphor for individualism." A literary Leopold and Loeb, she plotted out a novella based on the actual case of a murderer who strangled a 12-year-old girl. The murderer, said Rand, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness-- resulting from the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning or importance of other people." That is not a bad description of Nietzsche's master class in The Genealogy of Morals.