Rude Awakenings
Chapter 5 (Part 2 of 4) of the book
The Discovery of First Principles, Volume 3
Edward J. Dodson
Retreat from Radicalism
As the 1950s passed mid-point, the social democracies came under the
spell of what is appropriately characterized as an era of wait and see
with respect to socio-political change. The agenda of
liberalism -- of national security state interventionism --
and the acceptance of demand management as the core of government
fiscal and monetary policies, slid into place. Interventionists,
united around liberalism regardless of their nominal
affiliation with political parties, effectively excluded from
participation in the public policy dialogue those who were thought to
hold extreme views. Even William F. Buckley, Jr., who was coming to
serve as a sort of liaison between the individualist Remnant
and mainstream conservative interventionists, recognized the challenge
liberalism presented to anyone guided by principle:
As to the conservative movement, our troubles are
legion. Those who charge that there is no conservative position have
an easy time of it rhetorically. There is no commonly-acknowledged
conservative position today, and any claim to the contrary is easy
to make sport of. Yet there is to be found in contemporary
conservative literature both a total critique of Liberalism, and
compelling proposals for the reorientation of our thought.
Conservatism must, however, be wiped clean of the parasitic cant
that defaces it, and repels so many of those who approach it
inquiringly.[45]
The more he yielded to the interests of the national security
state, however, the more Buckley became ensconced as a gadfly in the
arena of liberalism. His brand of conservatism sounded
increasingly reminiscent of doctrinaire laissez-faire
interventionism in making use of government to protect privilege
while seeming to advance the cause of individualism. While concerned
that "[c]onservatives have failed to alert the community to
the interconnection between economic freedom and - freedom,"[46]
he made no attempt to reconcile the ancient conflict between liberty
and license set down by Locke as the cornerstone of justice.
The most positive comment that can be made about Buckley is that his
long association with Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov apparently
had enough of an influence on him so that he could not bring himself
wholeheartedly to trade principles for influence. He tempered his
definition of freedom in the economic realm to "choices ...
involving oneself, without damage to other people."[47]
This is a tip of the hat to principle. And yet, he went on to
challenge the notion of requiring the rich to pay heavy income or
estate taxes, without consideration of whether the wealth possessed
and income received is earned (by the process of using one's labor
and capital goods) or is gained as a recipient of rent
gained by privileges sanctioned by the State. For all intents and
purposes, Buckley was lost to the Remnant. His journalistic
success only added to the confused state of dialogue and inquiry in
which intellectuals engaged.
A high percentage of others describing themselves as conservatives
could scarcely get beyond their anti-communism and participate in
even the mildest challenge to the American System. As a
group, they were convinced of the right of the United States to
assume moral leadership over the social democracies and political
leadership of the noncommunist developing countries. For example,
when Douglas MacArthur finally got around to writing his memoirs in
1964, he echoed the thinking of conservative interventionists who
equated uncritical acceptance of the American System with
patriotism:
It is the result and fruition of the capitalistic system
-- a system embracing every segment of American society -- the
owners of industry, the workers in industry, the public served by
industry. This free enterprise based upon the right to work and the
right to possess the fruits of that work has created an economic
freedom which is the basis of all other freedoms.
But this very success created its own perils and harassments, both
from without and within. For from one end of the world to the other
there was a titanic struggle to seize control of industry and of the
economics. Whether this be in the masquerade of Communism or
Socialism or Fascism the purpose is the same -- to destroy a primary
element of Freedom and preempt it for the State.
The capitalistic system has hence become the great target, although
it has never failed to provide the resources for an ever increasing
standard for human life, has never failed to maximize the fruits of
human energy and creative enterprise, has never failed to provide
the sinews for victory in war. It has built this nation far beyond
the wildest dreams of its architects; it has through the scientific
advance of means of communication closed the international
geographic gap to permit rapid and effective trade and commerce
among the peoples of the world, has elevated the laborer, the farmer
and the tradesman to their rightful station of dignity and relative
prosperity, and has established the pattern for modern
industrialization and scientific development.[48]
One has to wonder how MacArthur could make such statements in light
of having lived through the 1930s depression and then headed the
reconstruction of Japanese law and institutions. Conservative
interventionists either could not see or were unwilling to concede
that the American System of the early 1900s contained
serious structural flaws, that agrarian and industrial landlordism
had been rescued by the rise of the national security state in an
atmosphere of permanent preparation for global war. Rather than
amazement in the material progress achieved, the architects of the
Democracy (and Paine and George, in particular) would be
dismayed at the failure of subsequent generations to rectify the
structural socio-political flaws he and others knew existed but had
insufficient political influence to remedy. In 1958, Harry Gunnison
Brown took an opportunity to step outside his role as an economics
professor to remind conservatives of the true spirit of the
Democracy:
Time was when the American Declaration of Independence
and the struggle of the American states for freedom from political
domination by Great Britain, stirred the imaginations of
liberty-loving people in many other countries. Today we seek allies
and sympathizers in our ideological struggle against the
socialistically regimented countries of the Communist bloc. Will it
help us in this ideological struggle -- will it stir enthusiasm for
capitalism -- if in the "capitalism" that we practice and
urge upon others, we include vast private income derived from
charging (a) for permission to use -- and history might have been
such as to make it so -- navigable lakes and streams, or (b)
permission -- and this is the way history really has made it -- to
work on and live on the earth?[49]
Even more to the point were observations made by a young University
of Colorado associate professor of political science, James L.
Busey. "Until the roles of national states can somehow be
markedly reduced, peace must remain a hope, a dream, an aspiration,
but a shibboleth. ...The United States -- or any other country, for
that matter -- can begin at its own frontiers. A reduction, for
example, of the economic barriers which prevail between ourselves
and Mexico and Canada would begin the long process of reducing the
danger of war and at the same time would even add to the security of
the participants."[50] Could conservatives bring themselves
to challenge the foundation upon which agrarian and industrial
landlordism had arisen, and which they embraced as capitalism?
Only those who accepted the principles of cooperative individualism
understood that no individual or group of people possessed a right
of absolute and sovereign control over a portion of the earth. Of
the conservatives, Clinton Rossiter suggested that, "[w]ith
the exception of a few professors and publicists, who are looked
upon with suspicion for their pains, the men on the Right are not
given to hard thinking about man, society, and government."[51]
Unfortunately, of those who did resort to hard thinking, only a much
smaller number managed to clear their own heads of conventional
wisdoms and search for truth. Too often, their futures were in the
hands of persons of much less integrity, vision and commitment to
equality of opportunity. To challenge conventional wisdoms long
nurtured by the financial support of agrarian and industrial
landlords was a rather dangerous proposition for those whose own
careers and financial survival was dependent upon the good will of
the privileged.
In his survey of conservatism, Rossiter identified Raymond Moley as
one of the few conservatives "not afraid to assert that
property is a distinct right ranking with life and liberty."[52]
What Moley understood, as someone who had read and absorbed the
arguments presented by Henry George, was that there were two forms
of property, one natural (arising out of the application of one's
labor and capital goods to nature, or by voluntary exchange of labor
for goods), the other unnatural (arising out of
government-sanctioned claims to nature and other forms of economic
license created by the State awarded privilege at the expense of
producers). Moley, at one time at the right side of presidential
power, could not have moved deeper into the wilderness than by his
efforts to advocate on behalf of Georgist principles. Neither the
New Dealers nor the new conservatives were interested in sharing the
political stage or the academic arena with individuals who espoused
a socio-political philosophy the power elite had devoted so much
energy to discredit.
Clinton Rossiter's assessment of the conservatives indicated that
most had reconciled themselves to the incrementalist social welfare
agenda of liberalism. They thought of themselves as
pragmatic and (generally) uninterested in socio-political
philosophies or theories. Whatever their moral sense ethic, whatever
their desire to advance the cause of human rights, they would come
under attack by anti-communist extremists, ethnic purists, racial
bigots, Christian fundamentalists and hate mongers who
fashioned pseudo-conservative orthodoxy to support their own
agendas. During the decade of the 1950s, no group challenged the
conservative mainstream more than Robert Welch's John Birch Society,
which counted more than 20,000 men and women as members by 1960.
Welch was of the Establishment, educated at the U.S. Naval
Academy and Harvard Law School. By the early 1950s, however, he
looked upon mainstream Republicans -- and Eisenhower, in particular
-- as having abandoned the conservative cause against communism.
With each passing year, he hammered away at the existence of the
communist conspiracy. For conservatives working to capture the moral
high ground -- that is, to celebrate principle -- Welch frightened
the thoughtful and the sincere by calling for a return to
isolationism and political orthodoxy. If there was to be a real
challenge to liberalism, therefore, the Remnant
would have to find new leadership from within a younger generation
willing to compete with the mainstream on its own terms. Remarkably,
one of the leading candidates turned out to be a woman and a writer
of fiction -- Ayn Rand.
"Who is John Galt?"
Ayn Rand was born Alice Rosenbaum in 1905, in St. Petersburg,
Russia. Although from a poor family, her father had gained entrance
to the university and later obtained a position as a chemist. In
1917, however, the Bolsheviks confiscated her father's business, and
her family's existence in Russia took a harsh turn. They embarked on
a hazardous journey to Odessa in the Crimea, suffering along with an
entire civilization caught up in the struggle for control of the
former Russian empire, its natural resources and its peoples. Alice
somehow managed to continue with her schooling, graduating high
school in 1921 and obtaining work teaching Red army soldiers to read
and write. When civil war ended, the family returned to St.
Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd, where they endured more poverty
and hardship. The future author and philosopher entered the
University of Petrograd in 1924 to study history. Here, her
instinctive individualism and anti-communism intensified under the
repressive atmosphere imposed by the Bolshevik regime. She
nevertheless received her degree and obtained a job as a guide in
the fortress of Peter and Paul. A letter from relatives who had two
decades earlier emigrated to the United States brought hope of
leaving Russia. And, in January of 1925, Alice escaped; she was
twenty-one years old and determined never to return to the hell of
Soviet Russia.
After reaching the United States, she came to live with relatives
in Chicago. Almost immediately she got down to the business of
writing and took the name Ayn Rand (the first name from a Finnish
writer, the surname from the manufacturer of her typewriter). Less
than two years later she made her way to California in pursuit of a
career as a screenwriter. Despite a remarkable stroke of good
fortune in a chance meeting with Cecil B. DeMille, who hired her for
some months as a junior writer, she experienced considerable
hardship. Her success as a writer came only much later. In the
interim she married and found work in the wardrobe department for
one of the motion picture studios, soon rising to head the
department. Then, with the societies of the world falling into the
grip of global depression, and the American System
challenged by intellectuals and labor leaders who looked to the
Soviet Union as a worthy experiment in societal reconstruction, Ayn
Rand found her cause and the subject of her first book, We the
Living:
"We the Living was to be a protest and an
introduction to my philosophy. ...Ideologically, I had said exactly
what I wanted, and I had no difficulty in expressing my ideas. I had
wanted to write a novel about Man against the State. I had wanted to
show, as the basic theme, the sanctity -- the supreme value -- of
human life, and the immorality of treating men as sacrificial
animals and ruling them by physical force. I did so.[53]
Progress on the book was tortuously slow, until once again fortune
smiled on her. She was paid fifteen hundred dollars for a story and
screenplay she had hurriedly written, which permitted her to begin
working full-time on her book until, again, the need for income
intervened. Yet, near the end of 1933, We the Living was
finished. The manuscript was passed from publisher to publisher,
while Ayn worked on and sold a play script, the production of which
in 1934 brought her to New York. Her play proved a financial if not
a critical success. Finally, in 1936 Macmillan Company published
We the Living. Nothing much happened. Her anti-statism and
anti-communism failed to shake the faith of U.S. intellectuals in
the nobility of the Soviet experiment. She now set out to work on
her next project, The Fountainhead (stopping in midstream to
write Anthem and work on the play version of We the
Living).
Ayn Rand then turned activist, largely in reaction to the
collectivist sentiment arising in her adopted land. Although she had
voted for Roosevelt in 1932, by 1940 she was convinced that another
four years of Roosevelt would yield immeasurable damage to the
individualist cause. She and her husband worked on the presidential
campaign of Wendell Willkie, Ayn eventually heading a research group
and (despite losing confidence in Willkie's resolve and convictions)
speaking to group after group on behalf of the Republican Party.
After the election, her contact with conservative intellectuals and
activists markedly increased. She and the playwright Channing
Pollock attempted to pull together the mostly cynical conservatives
of the era into a unified movement. Albert Jay Nock, who had no time
for organized movements of any kind, declined to join. Others were
more encouraged by the opportunity to share time and ideas with
activists of like mind. Ayn Rand benefited immensely. For example,
an immediate friendship developed between Rand and columnist Isabel
Paterson, who was instrumental in helping the Russian expatriate
gain a more complete understanding of U.S. history and institutions.
Rand, focused on developing her own ideas and perspectives, did
little reading and relied heavily on such discussions with others to
fill gaps in her specific knowledge.
The publishing house of Bobbs-Merrill accepted Rand's unfinished
manuscript for The Fountainhead and gave her until the end
of 1942 to finish the writing. With war raging in the Old World and
her family entombed in the tragedy that destroyed so much of
Leningrad, she completed the work that would catapult her into the
periphery and then the center of individualist intellectuals,
although never out of the wilderness and into the mainstream.
Slowly, sales of The Fountainhead climbed throughout the war
years -- 100,000 copies selling in 1945 and total sales reaching
400,000 by 1948.
After Rand was paid $50,000 for the movie rights to The
Fountainhead, she and her husband moved to southern California,
where they bought a home in the rural San Fernando Valley. She
became acquainted with Leonard Read (founder of the
Irvington-on-Hudson-based Foundation for Economic Education) and
economist Henry Hazlett, who introduced her to Ludwig von Mises and
Friedrich von Hayek (both of whose ideas she thereafter aggressively
promoted in her own articles and public addresses). Interestingly,
she instinctively recognized one of the glaring mistakes by
economists in creating a supposed scientific study of markets out of
their destruction of political economy:
I didn't like his [Mises] separation of morality and
economics, but I assumed that it simply meant that morality was not
his specialty and that he could not devise one of his own. At that
time, I thought -- about both Henry [Hazlett] and Von Mises -- that
since they were fully committed to laissez-faire capitalism, the
rest of their philosophy had contradictions only because they did
not yet know how to integrate a full philosophy to capitalism.[54]
Morality could only thrive under individualism, and the deep-felt
beliefs Ayn Rand held concerning individualism brought her into the
struggle against socialistic and communistic ideology. At the same
time, she warned conservatives against use of the State to purge
communists from society; rather, the principle of voluntary
association meant to her that no one should be forced by law to
provide sustenance to a known communist. Although she appeared
before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, she later
told others she was disgusted by the incompetence of those
supposedly determined to attack communism at its foundation. "I
kept yelling at the conservatives about the difference between the
right to freedom of speech -- which means the government cannot
interfere -- and the private right of people who don't want to deal
with Communists, to boycott; and the private right of employers not
to hire men whom they consider to be enemies of this country,"[55]
she later recalled. She was, without really understanding where her
ideas placed her, very much of the Remnant. As time went on,
she was rejected by and in turn rejected the national security state
interventionists who called themselves conservative. Unaware of
cooperative individualism as a socio-political philosophical
framework, she could only hope for a new morality to take hold based
on the persuasive power of her own writings. She believed she was
both right and original in her thinking. She possessed a sense of
self-importance that was to have serious repercussions in her
personal life and, as a consequence, destroy much of what she
earlier accomplished as a writer.
Ayn Rand's next project was Atlas Shrugged, the idea for
which had been developing in her mind since the early 1940s. She
later described the book as the most difficult writing challenge of
her life. Half way through the manuscript, she received a long
letter from a psychology student at the University of California at
Los Angeles (UCLA) named Nathan Blumenthal, who had become
enthralled by her philosophical writings. She eventually invited him
to visit, and a relationship developed that would have enormous
consequences on both their lives. Blumenthal was involved
romantically with a young philosophy student named Barbara Weidman,
who was equally eager to meet the famous individualist philosopher.
Later on during Barbara's college years she brought one of her
philosophy professors, Hans Meyerhoff, to meet Rand. Barbara's
recollection of their discussion captures the unique intellect
possessed by Ayn Rand -- and the unfortunate extent to which moral
relativism dominated the thinking of all too many university-trained
intellectuals:
He was not an admirer of her work; his views
were diametrically opposed to hers; but he was a man widely
respected in his field who had expressed great interest in meeting
Ayn. It was a memorable evening. They talked and argued with
mutually enthusiastic pleasure; Ayn was at her most incisive and
spirited, marshaling powerful arguments for her positions. They
discussed metaphysics: he was a Platonist, Ayn an Aristotelian; they
discussed morality: he was a utilitarian, she an advocate of
self-interest; they discussed politics: he was a socialist, she an
advocate of capitalism. At dawn, as the professor and I left, he
said to me, clearly distressed: "She's found gaping holes in
every philosophical position I've maintained for the whole of my
life -- positions I teach my students, positions on what I'm a
recognized authority -- and I can't answer her arguments! I don't
know what to do!" He found a solution: he refused to see Ayn
again, and he went on maintaining his former views.[56]
Meyerhoff also resorted to attacking Barbara Weidman for her
acceptance of Ayn Rand's moral philosophy. Throughout the remainder
of her college years, however, Barbara and Nathan continued their
debates -- with socialists, liberals and conservatives, none of whom
they concluded could rationally support their beliefs. They were
convinced Randians, ready to dedicate their lives to the teaching of
the ideas to which they had been introduced by Ayn Rand.
In 1951, soon after graduation from UCLA, Nathan and Barbara left
California to pursue graduate degrees at New York University. Not
long thereafter, Ayn Rand and her husband moved back to New York as
well, where Rand felt she needed to be in order to complete Atlas
Shrugged. Her relations with mainstream conservatives did not
improve. At every turn she found moral and logical inconsistencies
in the interventionist agenda of liberalism:
The conservatives want freedom to act in the material
world; they tend to oppose government control of production, of
industry, of trade, of business, of physical goods, of material
wealth. But they advocate government control of man's spirit, i.e.,
man's consciousness; they advocate the State's right to impose
censorship, to determine moral values, to create and enforce a
governmental establishment of morality, to rule the intellect. The
liberals want freedom to act in the spiritual realm; they oppose
censorship, they oppose government control of ideas, of the arts, of
the press, of education. ...But they advocate government control of
material production, of business, of employment, of wages, of
profits, of all physical property -- they advocate it all the way
down to total expropriation. ... each camp wants to control the
realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom
only to the activities it despises.[57]
The influence of Ayn Rand was beginning to spread. Nathan (changing
his own name to Nathaniel Branden) and Barbara married in January of
1953. While still at NYU, they were instrumental in finding others
who were attracted to Rand's philosophy of individualism. The small
but growing group included Leonard Peikoff (a philosophy student at
NYU) and economist Alan Greenspan. Four years later Atlas
Shrugged was published by Random House. From the left, the book
was attacked by Granville Hicks and others as a pathetic defense of
Social-Darwinism. From the right, Whittaker Chambers reviewed the
book for William F. Buckley's National Review, attacking
Rand as a philosopher of godless technocracy. "It would be
difficult to find a reviewer whose intellectual history was more
representative of the villains of Atlas Shrugged -- the villains of
'faith and force' -- and more certain to be antagonized by its
philosophy,"[58] concluded Barbara Branden. Despite the
reviews (or, perhaps, in part because of them), Atlas Shrugged
sold well. Yet, Ayn Rand fell into a depression because, as she
said, "there was no one to object to the attacks, no one to
oppose them, no one with a public name, a public reputation, a
public voice, to speak for her in that world which was vilifying
her, to defend her, to fight for her, to name the nature and the
stature of her accomplishment."[59] Out of her struggle
came the idea from Nathaniel to establish an institute in which her
philosophy -- now associated with the term "objectivism,"
could be systematically taught:
Suppose I create a course of lectures -- say, twenty
lectures -- that would distill the essence of your philosophy --
epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, political economy, literary
aesthetics, and perhaps some of my work in psychology -- and suppose
I offer this to people ... within commuting distance of New York who
have written you fan letters, and we can see what happens.[60]
And so, in 1958 the Nathaniel Branden Institute offered its first
classes in New York City. Alan Greenspan and Leonard Peikoff joined
as instructors. Their lectures were tape-recorded and used as the
basis for discussion sessions in cities throughout North America and
internationally. John Chamberlain wrote in the Wall Street
Journal, about this thriving new intellectual enterprise:
Seated about in booths in college-town snack shops, the
young Randites talk about their intellectual leader as their fathers
and mothers a generation ago talked about Karl Marx, or John Maynard
Keynes, or Thorstein Veblen. ...And it is normally a matter of two
decades before the young take over the seats of power in the name of
what they have learned to believe 20 years ago.[61]
Each year the Institute's lectures attracted more and more
students. Branden expanded the number of courses offered and
launched the Objectivist movement.
Beginning in 1960, Ayn Rand presented her ideas directly to the
nation's students, lecturing at virtually all of the major
universities to large and enthusiastic audiences. She also began
writing a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times. In For
the New Intellectual, published in 1961, she seemed to be
calling out to the Remnant, searching for others who had given
thoughtful reflection on the threat of moral relativism to human
civilization:
America's intellectual leadership has collapsed. Her
virtues, her values, her enormous power are scattered in a silent
underground and will remain private, subjective, historically
impotent if left without intellectual expression. America is a
country without voice or defense -- a country sold out and abandoned
by her intellectual bodyguards. ...
...In politics, we are told that America, the greatest, noblest,
freest country on earth, is politically and morally inferior to
Soviet Russia, the bloodiest dictatorship in history -- and that our
wealth should be given away to the savages of Asia and Africa, with
apologies for the fact that we have produced it while they haven't.
If we look at modern intellectuals, we are confronted with the
grotesque spectacle of such characteristics as militant uncertainty,
crusading cynicism, dogmatic agnosticism, boastful self-abasement
and self-righteous depravity -- in an atmosphere of guilt, of panic,
of despair, of boredom and of all-pervasive evasion. If this is not
the state of being at the end of one's resources, there is no
further place to go.
Everybody seems to agree that civilization is facing a crisis, but
nobody cares to define its nature, to discover its cause and to
assume the responsibility of formulating a solution. ...If we ask
our intellectual leaders what are the ideals we should fight for,
their answer is such a sticky puddle of stale syrup -- of benevolent
bromides and apologetic generalities about brother love, global
progress and universal prosperity at America's expense -- that a fly
would not die for it or in it. ...
[A] human being cannot live his life moment by moment; a human
consciousness preserves a certain continuity and demands a certain
degree of integration, whether a man seeks it or not. A human being
needs a frame of reference, a comprehensive view of existence, no
matter how rudimentary, and, since his consciousness is
volitional, a sense of being right, a moral justification of
his actions, which means: a philosophical code of values. ...
...Morality is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions;
when it is set to oppose his own life and mind, it makes him turn
against himself and blindly act as the tool of his own destruction.
...
...In any age or society, there are men who think and work, who
discover how to deal with existence, how to produce the intellectual
and the material values it requires. These are the men whose effort
is the only means of survival for the parasites of all varieties;
the Attilas, the Witch Doctors and the human ballast. The ballast
consists of those who go through life in a state of unfocused
stupor, merely repeating the words and the motions they learned from
others. But the men from whom they learn, the men who are first to
discover any scrap of new knowledge, are the men who deal with
reality, with the task of conquering nature, and who, to that
extent, assume the responsibility of cognition: of exercising their
rational faculty. ...
The producers, so far, have been the forgotten men of history. With
the exception of a few brief periods, the producers have not been
the leaders or the term-setters of men's societies, although the
degree of their influence and freedom was the degree of a society's
welfare and progress. ...[62]
And, finally, Ayn Rand expresses her confidence that within the
system of capitalism (defined as a highly purified version
of agrarian and industrial landlordism, the problem of rent-seeking
left unresolved) lies the potential and hope for human progress:
Capitalism wiped out slavery in matter and in spirit. It
replaced Attila and the Witch Doctor, the looter of wealth and the
purveyor of revelations, with two new types of man: the producer of
wealth and the purveyor of knowledge -- the businessman and the
intellectual.
Capitalism demands the best of every man -- his rationality -- and
rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work
he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products
of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his
abilities and ambition will carry him. His success depends on the
objective value of his work and on the rationality of those who
recognize that value. When men are free to trade, with reason and
reality as their only arbiter, when no man may use physical force to
extort the consent of another, it is the best product and the best
judgment that win in every field of human endeavor, and raise the
standard of living -- and of thought -- ever higher for all those
who take part in mankind's productive activity.[63]
As far as these words go, they hold important truths. I have
searched without success through Ayn Rand's writings for evidence
that she understood that what Attilas and Witch Doctors began,
businessmen and intellectuals have defended and continued; namely,
the entrenched control over access to nature as the means by which
they could continue to extort rent from the wages
and interest of producers. She seems to be in agreement with
Georgists and cooperative individualists, when she writes: "All
property and all forms of wealth are produced by man's mind and
labor."[64] But, she elaborates not on the land
question. In the end, one is left without an answer to questions
of whether Rand saw in the private appropriation of rent a threat to
the success of capitalism. She was born into a society where the
concentration of land ownership brought on upheaval, confiscation by
the State of both nature and production, and the use of mass murder
as a policy of eliminating opposition. She came to a society still
benefiting from the broad (but declining) access to nature and the
protection under law (also declining) of the principle that what one
produces with one's labor and capital goods belongs to the producer.
Had she never read Tolstoy's Resurrection? Had she failed to
understand that the need for access to nature had driven people
everywhere to desperate actions in their quest for survival? Had she
no recollection of the attempts by cooperative individualists in
Russia to make land common property?
Barbara Branden writes that Ayn Rand admired Alexander Kerensky --
the one person who might have provided enlightened leadership to the
Russian peoples -- as "a man who stood for freedom and the
individual."[65] When Rand writes in 1961 that "[t]he
guilt of the intellectuals, in the nineteenth century, was that they
never discovered capitalism,"[66] does she mean, perhaps,
that neither Thomas Paine nor Henry George were intellectuals; or,
did her education in socio-political philosophy and political
economy remain incomplete? When another expatriate individualist
from Soviet Russia, Jacob (Jack) Schwartzman, interviewed Kerensky
in 1967 (Kerensky was then eighty-four), the aged Russian politician
revealed that he understood state-socialism's inherent weaknesses.
He consoled himself with the thought that the Soviet state would
eventually fall and be replaced by a society with greater citizen
participation:
The generations of the future will return to a free
life. Democracy -- which had so brief a trial in 1917 -- will be
restored. Freedom -- a classic concept of our writers and dreamers
-- will triumph in Russia. Dictatorship will die.[67]
Today, in light of recent events, we can only wonder whether
Kerensky also foresaw that in the absence of the Soviet state or the
Russian imperial empire, the impulse of ethnic nationalism and of
tribalism would arise anew to challenge the concept of a
democratically-governed federation. Ayn Rand believed the drive by
ethnic nationalists for sovereignty was "the product of
irrationalism and collectivism."[68] She recognized and
detailed in her writings the long-term consequences of tribalism;
however, what she ignores is the full historical context. Tribal
warfare has been a part of the human experience since long before
people developed the art of recording history. Many of these wars
were conducted as wars of annihilation, as preventive measures
against the possibility of future retaliation. The quest for
sovereignty by groups that survive under long domination by external
tribes or empires is a cause passed on from generation to
generation. Such societies do not nurture transnational thinking.
For these people, who look to the past for heroes and the future for
opportunity, sovereignty obtained is linked to self-esteem; and, to
the extent self-esteem is accompanied by general economic
well-being, individualism within the group will be tolerated and,
perhaps, eventually nurtured. In societies where immigration and
integration are encouraged by positive law tied to equality of
opportunity, the lure of tribalism is diminished (although, as in
the case of the United States, Canada, Australia and the few other
destination countries of large-scale migration, numerous ethnic
communities have continued to exist for generations). Inexplicably,
Ayn Rand did not see that even in the United States ethnicity
remained as an isolating and insulating dynamic. She looked to the
socio-political institutions of the Democracy with deep
respect and urged the thoughtful in the United States to be on guard
against the coercive arm of the State, encroaching as it was on the
rights of the individual while professing to stand for equality of
opportunity achieved through liberalism and Keynesian
policies transformed into the mixed economy. The
Democracy was an experiment in individual freedom unique in
history, to be treasured and nurtured. "The most profoundly
revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was,"
Rand declared, "the subordination of society to moral law."[69]
And, under moral law -- at least where property was concerned -- the
individual possessed the right to engage in production and to retain
ownership of what was produced:
Without property rights, no other rights are possible.
Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has
no right to the product of his effort has not means to sustain his
life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a
slave.[70]
This was a statement cooperative individualists could certainly
accept and identify with. Allowing the private appropriation of rent,
they would add, represented a violation of moral law as well as an
exercise of economic license the result of which is an unjust claim
on the wealth produced by others.
Within the Remnant, the core group of individualists found
even more reason to applaud the success of Ayn Rand in once again
raising the antistatist banner. Individualists from all over the
world were in contact with Nathaniel Branden and the institute he
established in New York. Ayn Rand clubs flourished on college and
university campuses throughout the United States. At a time when
liberalism was emerging as the program of choice for social
welfare advocates and national security state interventionists
alike, the writings of one woman raised uncomfortable questions
mainstream intellectuals thought expedient to ignore.
What Ayn Rand's writing had initiated, what her public persona had
nurtured, her private character would eventually destroy. Her
relationship with Nathaniel Branden had gone from one of nurturing a
devoted protégé to involvement in an extramarital
affair (of which both of their spouses were painfully aware) and
finally one of domination and guilt. Rand found that she could not
live up to the standards of rational behavior Objectivism
demanded. She became, according to the Brandens, extraordinarily
self-centered and intolerant of any challenges to her
pronouncements. This is, in large part, why those instinctively
repulsed by libertarian ideals tended to agree with
characterizations such as that by Charles Lam Markmann, who
described Objectivism as "Ayn Rand's brutal
philosophy of selfish enrichment and ruthlessness to the less
competent."[71] Clinton Rossiter comes much closer to
identifying the source of distaste for Ayn Rand among those who
embraced the national security state when he writes: "Miss
Rand presents as big a problem to the philosophers of
ultra-conservatism as McCarthy did to the practitioners."[72]
Objectivism, rising from the pages of her novels, was
nonetheless capturing the minds of the very college-age youth
cultivated with much less success by William F. Buckley in his National
Review and Frank Chodorov with the Intercollegiate Society of
Individualists. As already mentioned, Rand dismissed Whittaker
Chambers, to whom Buckley had assigned the task of reviewing Atlas
Shrugged, as a person whose moral fiber was obviously lacking.
After meeting with Buckley personally, she described him to
Nathaniel and Barbara Branden as: "Clever, but an
intellectual light-weight. An opportunist. Very 'social'; not
genuinely interested in ideas. And potentially dangerous, if he
acquires an influence -- because he tells people that the foundation
of capitalism is religious faith, which implies that reason and
science are on the side of the collectivists."[73]
There would be no rapprochement between the interventionist
conservatism of Buckley and the objectivist individualism espoused
by Rand. By her moral standards, the national security state
interventionists advocated the violation of individual liberty in
their willingness to make use of coercion to advance the
American System and fight communist inroads against totalitarian
dictatorships. Her own moral principles depended not on a higher law
(i.e., god's law), nor even on the moral sense of right and wrong,
but on the reasoning capabilities of the individual. Anti-communism,
to Ayn Rand, had nothing to do with defending god against heathens.
Bolsheviks and their kind were simply another gang of bloodthirsty
monsters determined to gain and wield power regardless of the cost
in human lives. What, then, does the moral individual, living in a
society governed by reason, do in the face of such an external
threat? In an address to the graduating class of the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point, Ayn Rand offered her perspective:
In my morality, the defense of one's country means that
a man is personally unwilling to live as the conquered slave of any
enemy, foreign or domestic. This is an enormous virtue. ...
The army of a free country has a great responsibility: the right to
use force, but not as an instrument of compulsion and brute conquest
-- as the armies of other countries have done in their histories --
only as an instrument of a free nation's self-defense, which means:
the defense of a man's individual rights. The principle of using
force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use, is the
principle of subordinating might to right. The highest integrity and
sense of honor are required for such a task. ...[74]
By the time Rand delivered this speech, the United States had
already had troops in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. Those
within the foreign policy establishment and those who served
Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon have asked us to
remember the context of the times before passing judgment on their
decisions to commit U.S. military power against the North
Vietnamese. Only by a great stretch of the truth can one claim U.S.
leaders were motivated by a commitment to assist the people of
Vietnam in establishing a democracy. Intervention was ostensibly
justified in order to protect the right of the Vietnamese people to
vote; and, as Ayn Rand observed, "American soldiers were
asked to die ... to secure that privilege for the South Vietnamese,
who had no other rights and no knowledge of rights or freedom."[75]
Interestingly, by the time of her speech in 1974 Rand was willing
to include Taiwan with Israel as the only two countries that -- on
the basis of U.S. self-interest -- warranted U.S. assistance.
Formosan students in the U.S. and Canada had been actively
organizing from the early 1960s on to free Formosa of mainland
Chinese domination. On Formosa, anyone who criticized the Kuomintang
regime stood a good chance of disappearing never to be heard from
again. Despite the obvious despotism of the government in Formosa,
anti-communist rhetoric yielded the results Ayn Rand suggested were
appropriate. Economist Shirley W.Y. Kuo of the National Taiwan
University wrote in 1983 that between 1951 and 1965 "U.S.
aid comprised more than 30% of domestic investment each year,
sometimes reaching more than 50%, and was the main financial source
of domestic investment before 1961."[76] Only after the
death in 1988 of Chiang Kai-shek's son and successor, Chiang
Ching-kuo, has the heavy hand of single-party government softened.
When George Kerr's book was reprinted in 1992, expatriate Formosan
Tsung-yi Lin added a new preface, expressing his hope that finally "a
democratic Formosa will play a greater role in East Asia as an
example for the region and for the world."[77] Many were
sacrificed for that opportunity, during a period when (as Ayn Rand
suggests) reason dictated an acceptance of realpolitik
in lieu of principle as the operative basis for U.S. foreign policy
decisions. What, I wonder, does one say to those whose parents, or
brothers or sisters perished at the hands of despots to whom the
United States provided the financial reserves to consolidate their
power and build a totalitarian police state - simply because they
declared themselves to be staunch anti-communists?
Down the Long Dark Road
Within months after the French defeat in Indochina, Dwight
Eisenhower had John Foster Dulles on the road charged with the task
of creating an anti-communist Pacific alliance. Britain, France,
Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan and Thailand
agreed to join with the United States in the Southeast Asia Treaty
Organization (SEATO). Eisenhower then ignored agreements reached
between the French and the Viet Minh in Geneva concerning Vietnam,
providing U.S. financial assistance to Ngo Dinh Diem in order to
forestall the wholesale communist takeover of North and South
Vietnam. Despite warnings contained in CIA reports that Diem's
regime was authoritarian and had made almost no attempts to
introduce democratic processes or economic reforms, Diem was warmly
welcomed by Establishment leaders in the United States as a bulwark
of anti-communist stability in Asia.
By virtue of its knee-jerk anti-communist approach to dealing with
the diverse people of the developing world, the United States was
fast losing the moral high ground and its claim as postwar architect
of participatory government. While pressuring the British and French
to abandon their lingering imperial and colonial aspirations, the
Eisenhower-Dulles era became one of U.S. expansionism closely linked
to the interests of resource-extracting corporations. To the extent
business and foreign policy interests seemed to run parallel, the
process was nurtured and financed by the U.S. government. In the
prevailing atmosphere, transnationals were powerless to prevent
these actions. Soviet expansionism, on the other hand, rarely gave
consideration to economic benefit returned. Khrushchev looked for
every possible opening left by the departure of Old World powers to
support socialist revolutionary factions. Both superpowers felt
compelled to vie for the allegiance of leaders governing nations at
the periphery. And, where existing leaders proved unreliable,
neither superpower was beyond covert intervention.
Eisenhower's prestige as leader of a liberating society fell rather
substantially when the United States lamely accepted Soviet military
intervention in Hungary during 1956. Khrushchev confidently
installed a government the Soviets knew they could control. From
Hungarian expatriate Charles K. Ravasz, who contributed an analysis
of the uprising to the Georgist publication Land & Liberty,
readers learned that many of those involved in the rebellion and who
controlled Hungary's surviving literary and scientific periodicals
were "known to be well acquainted with the teachings of
Henry George."[78] Bold writers, such as George
Peter-Pikler had attacked the premises of the centrally-planned
economy and Marxist economic theory in general. In the brief period
of reawakened Hungarian nationalism, under the premiership of Imre
Nagy, writers Ravasz knew as Georgists were once again in the
vanguard of the freedom movement. Ravasz, by then an Australian
citizen, made no suggestion that the West had by its near-silence
abandoned a just cause to despotism. Rather, Ravasz pointed to the
message of Milovan Djilas, whose article in The New Leader
he paraphrased:
[T]he most reactionary element in the Soviet Union
realised that they had to crush the Hungarian revolution because its
success would have demonstrated that it was possible to establish a
society in which there was no exploitation of man by man in which
the individual enjoyed freedom. This would have rendered completely
invalid the argument that it was necessary to maintain a terror
regime to prevent exploitation and would have shown that this
argument was nothing but a pretext under which the Soviet
bureaucracy itself was exploiting the masses.[79]
Twenty years later, two other Hungarians would condemn the system
of Eastern European state-socialism as "a new system of
oppression and exploitation of the working class."[80]
Arrested as subversives even before their manuscript was completed,
George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi were (remarkably, even for the
mid-1970s) offered the opportunity to leave Hungary. Szelenyi, like
Ravasz, made his new home in Australia.
What the experience of the Hungarians in 1956 revealed to others
living behind the iron curtain was that liberation from
Soviet domination, or from state socialism, would come about only as
a result of a decline in Soviet power. Moreover, the actions of the
United States demonstrated acceptance of containment as the only
realistic foreign policy alternative in the face of Soviet offensive
military capabilities. The Soviet leaders contributed to their own
eventual demise by foolishly committing the Soviet Union to a
militaristic spending war with the social democracies, determined to
demonstrate the superiority of state socialism as a system of wealth
production. John Strachey, in his widely-read book on the decline of
imperialism, thought the Soviet empire already in serious disarray
by 1959. Khrushchev unleashed the pent-up frustrations of the Soviet
peoples, millions of whom had been released from the work camps, and
their anger gradually coalesced into spontaneous dissent. Cracks in
the Soviet system of control began to appear after the publication
in the West of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, a book
deemed counter-revolutionary by the Soviet regime. Khrushchev was
gone from power when, in 1967, the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg
tried to put into perspective the consequences of Stalin on the
communist quest for socialism:
The old argument about whether ends justify means seems
to me abstract. The end is not a signpost pointing along the road
but something quite real in itself; it is present reality, not the
dreams of tomorrow but the actions of today: the end must dictate
not only political strategy but morality too. One cannot establish
justice by consciously committing unjust acts; one cannot work for
equality by turning people into 'cogs' and 'screws' and oneself into
a mythical deity. The means always affects the end, it dignifies or
distorts it.[81]
I want the young Soviet readers of these memoirs to understand that
it is impossible to delete a quarter of a century of our history.
Under Stalin our people transformed backward Russia into a powerful
modern State, built [cities], dug canals, made roads and smashed
Hitler's armies which had conquered the whole of Europe; this people
had studied, read, matured spiritually and performed such feats that
it may rightfully be considered the hero of the twentieth century.
All this is well known to every Soviet citizen who worked and lived
at that time. But no matter what job we felt in our successes, no
matter how much we admired the unbreakable, unshakeable spirit and
talent of our people, no matter how highly we valued Stalin's
intellect, we could not live at peace with our consciences and we
tried in vain not to think about certain things. We knew that side
by side with the great achievements of which the press informed us,
unjust and foul deeds were being done of which people spoke in
whispers, and then only among their closest friends.[82]
Ehrenburg wrote of how, in that first post-Stalinist thaw, the
moral sense of his fellow citizens began to once again emerge. He
still believed in socialism and in the dialectics of Marx. However,
one could legitimately begin to ask whether the Soviet people would
pull their society toward democratic socialism and a commitment to a
respect for human rights existing independent of the State. In fact,
a human rights movement emerged when mathematician Alexander
Esenin-Volpin, released from prison in Siberia after Stalin's death,
agitated for government adherence to the law. Khrushchev's
government responded by introducing reforms that limited the
application of the death penalty and reduced sentences for other
crimes. The power of the KGB to independently investigate and arrest
Soviet citizens was also curtailed. The thaw allowed the first
volume of Ehrenburg's memoirs to be published; and, in 1962,
Solzhenitsn's career as a novelist began with publication of One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. As might have been expected,
however, the avalanche of reformist writings elicited a conservative
reaction from Khrushchev and the Central Committee. For the first
time under the Soviet regime, public opinion was challenging the
government's actions. In the face of worsening economic conditions,
Soviet citizens began to organize and emboldened workers called
strikes. Intellectuals were not yet prepared or inclined to
repudiate socialism as a socio-political system, but a significant
minority were becoming increasingly restless under the constraints
imposed on their intellectual freedom by the machinery of state
socialism.
Sadly for the cause of human rights, the power of enlightened
transnationals to influence the foreign and domestic policies of
their respective societies remained very low. Standing in the way of
the peaceful and incremental discarding of monopoly privilege and
state-sanctioned criminal and economic forms of license were those
who benefited by existing arrangements. They used their influence to
thwart any objective examination of the status quo. The same
mentality operated, it must be said, in Britain, France, the United
States and virtually every other society. Along with the struggle
over control of socio-political institutions, the world's people
needed to understand the true nature of their oppression, so that
one form of tyranny was not simply removed to be supplanted by
another.
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