Happy Randsday

Ayn Rand was born on this day, February 2, in 1905. Harry Binswanger made the excellent suggestion that we celebrate this day as a new holiday: Randsday.[1] 

On Randsday, it is traditional--well, perhaps someday it will have become a tradition--to buy yourself a present.

Image from The Harry Binswanger List.

The simple, selfish action of buying yourself a present for your pleasure should not be construed as some sort of superficial gimmick or stunt; it constitutes a deep and radical philosophical shift away from the moral premises that dominate this culture. America (and civilization in general) is perishing under a corrupt moral code that holds unselfishness as a virtue and selfishness as a vice. Today, it is universally held that morality demands sacrifice, that wherever there is virtue there are necessarily victims. And moreover, this sacrifice must be accepted willingly, even enthusiastically; the truly moral being, we are told, struggles against his "selfish impulses" and submits his own neck to the yoke or the noose. 

This horrifying moral code is, in essence, the two-thousand-year-old Christian morality, revived by the anti-Enlightenment philosophers of the last two centuries in generally secular form, which infects every corner of the globe, from the so-called "progressive" welfare states to the communist slaughterhouses. This is the morality that urges you to live your life not for yourself but for others; that regards you as nothing compared to the collective ("Du bist Nichts, dein Volk ist Alles"); that systematically--with righteousness, piousness, and an authoritarian air of inexorability that is almost polite--suffocates, shackles, and murders you at the unquestioned and unquestionable altar called the "needs of society"; and that ensures this appalling injustice: any honest action of yours that benefits yourself must be accompanied by guilt.

Randsday reminds us that a 20th-century philosopher challenged this monstrous moral code. Ayn Rand demonstrated that selfishness is a virtue. By selfishness, I do not mean the corrupt conventional view that denotes hedonism (do whatever feels right at the moment) or predation (do whatever you can get away with, the hell with everybody else). The drug addict, the mountebank, the thief, the liar, the bully, and the dictator are not selfish but self-destructive. 

To be truly selfish, in the deepest sense, means to pursue one's own values with the longest-range view possible: one's whole life. It is to hold one's own being as sovereign and inviolate--and by extension, to regard everyone else from the same perspective, as individuals, each of whom has the right to live his own life for himself. The idea that a man is a thinking, rational, and efficacious individual has roots in 5th- and 4th-century BC Greece and is the essence of Enlightenment thought. The United State of America, that kingless crown of the Enlightenment, was founded upon the most profoundly selfish and moral idea ever set in parchment: that every man has a right to pursue his own happiness. 

What Ayn Rand achieved was to make explicit what the Founders grasped only implicitly--and to root morality firmly in reason, not superstition.

I've already bought myself a Randsday present--a small, pleasing luxury--that I had been wanting for some time. I hope you do the same . . . for profoundly selfish reasons.

NOTES

1. "Randsday: A New Holiday," The Harry Binswanger List, http://www.hblist.com/Randsday.htm.

Also, see a good article by Craig Biddle at The Objective Standard, http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/blog/index.php/2012/02/have-a-selfish-randsday/.

Happy Atlas Shrugged Day!

Cool! I extend a hat tip to The Objective Standard for reminding me that Ayn Rand started writing Atlas Shrugged on this day, September 2, sixty-five years ago.

Addendum to Movie Review: Atlas Shrugged Part 1

Having seen Atlas Shrugged Part 1 for a second time, I have a few more comments to add to my original review.


I still think Francisco’s character is totally wrong—too slouchy to convince me that there’s a vibrant, burning intelligence hiding behind the playboy façade—but I didn’t find him quite as objectionable as I did on the first viewing. (Maybe Jsu Garcia would have been better playing the part of Owen Kellogg instead of Francisco.) Dr. Akston’s character, on the other hand, seemed even worse than my original dismal estimation, exhibiting not only an inexplicable rudeness and hostility to Dagny but a manner that is fundamentally irrational and mystical. Even his clothing—a white, loose shirt and trousers—suggested this; I don’t remember if they showed his feet, but it would have been fitting for him to be as barefoot as a Buddhist ascetic. The character is more suited to shack up with Ivy Starnes than to roam the halls of Patrick Henry University.


The music, which I originally called only “sufficient,” actually rose substantially in my opinion, now that I paid a little more attention to it. I think it contributes to the drama more than I previously gave it credit for—especially now that I marked so many more failings in the script.


Ah, the script. The script is considerably worse than I first noticed, and in particular, the dialogue is atrocious. During my first viewing, while soaking up the visual presentation, I think I was “filling in the blanks” quite a lot, subconsciously supplementing an impoverished script because I know the novel so well. This time, the problems were much more apparent to me.


In some good articles I read I had come upon some criticisms of the language that gave as an example Dagny uttering, “That’s depressing.” I hadn’t remembered the dialogue being that bad, but sure enough, Dagny does indeed say, "That's depressing," . . . twice! (To my relief, Dagny and Rearden never resorted to “texting” each other, so there were no invocations of “LOL” or “OMG” in their discourse.) I cannot fathom why the filmmakers thought replacing Ayn Rand’s precise dialogue with a folksy and even ungrammatical vernacular would constitute an improvement. If they thought “people just don’t talk like that these days,” then that merely adds to the long list of reasons for them to have set the movie in the 1940’s or 1950’s. And more to the point, if “people just don’t talk like that these days,” it is because people just don’t think these days, and there is no better solution to that than to present Ayn Rand’s ideas directly. 


However well-intentioned the filmmakers may have been, dumbing down the language as they did serves no positive purpose. It simultaneously underestimates the intelligence of the average person (thus exhibiting the elitism of leftists and neo-conservatives—an elitism, by the way, that Ayn Rand never showed, contrary to accusations of such), and destroys the very substance of the material: It dilutes the meaning of ideas, reduces (or reverses) the significance of events, and perhaps above all, compromises the stature of the heroes. If the intent was to “reach” people by making the message more palatable to a public accustomed only to shades of gray, the very most that can be attained is to succeed with the “reach” at the expense of the message. It is like an art collector who, in order to display a brilliant sculptor’s masterpiece to the public, crushes it into dust so that it will fit in the box to ship to the gallery.


One final comment. I discovered something about the scriptwriters’ point of view at the end of my second viewing that is so contrary to the novel and to Ayn Rand’s philosophy that it didn’t occur to me even as a possibility after my first viewing. I could be wrong about this, but I think the final moments of the movie provide evidence for it. (I wish I had a transcript; my memory of it is not very good.) Toward the end of the film there are two voice-over sections—when John Galt addresses Ellis Wyatt and when Dagny looks out at the fire and screams—that articulate something to the effect of Atlantis being a place with little or no government for the industrialists of the world to finally go live out their lives in peace and prosperity. 


The first time I heard this I took it for an inept attempt to condense and simplify material that really ought not to be addressed until Part 3; I caught the libertarian, “small government” overtones but I was mostly appalled by the almost criminal giveaway of the story's mystery. But in my second viewing, it dawned on me that this point was presented as if it were wrapping things up. And if that is so, it struck me that the filmmakers seem to think that the Atlantis of the novel is the end goal, as opposed to a temporary haven—a paradise for producers, as opposed to a refuge from a world perishing from altruism. (Did they read all the way to the end of the book, or did they quit before Galt’s speech?) This is a grievous and unforgivable error, especially considering the mindless canard, often parroted, that Ayn Rand advocated some sort of utopian society populated solely by Nietzschean übermenschen. Hopefully, the movie will spawn enough interest in Atlas Shrugged for people to go read what Ayn Rand actually wrote.

King Barack the Mild

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. penned an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal last week, in which he characterized President Obama as “King Barack the Mild.”

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, name-calling falls in the category of mere ad hominem, and is thus actually counterproductive to an argument.  However, occasionally a clever appellation can make a point more vividly and concisely than could an entire essay.  I am sympathetic to Mr. Jenkins’ comparison; he strikes an apt parallel between Mr. Obama’s administration and the heavy-handed, arbitrary, and often contradictory decrees that one would expect from an omnipotent monarch.  

So, if the royal shoe fits...

image credit to The Wall Street Journal, Ismael Roldan

The straightforward enumeration of “King Barack’s” policies related to Chrysler and General Motors serves to demonstrate the dictatorial nature of the administration.  In particular, Mr. Jenkins shows the illogic of juggling the various contradictory political considerations - as “[k]ingly prerogative... conflicts with kingly prerogative” - none of which takes any real account of market requirements or individual freedom.[Note 1.]

Consider the pressures imposed by the Obama administration upon creditors.  As “King Barack the Mild... tries to dictate terms of what amounts to an out-of-court bankruptcy for Chrysler and GM,” Jenkins writes:

He wants Chrysler’s secured lenders to give up their right to nearly full recovery in a bankruptcy in return for 15 cents on the dollar.  They’d be crazy to do so, of course, except that these banks also happen to be beholden to the administration for TARP money.[Note 2.]

This is exactly the kind of government force that I’ve warned about in previous posts.  The government seizes the earnings of private citizens, distributes it to corporations, then uses that “gift” as a lever to exact obedience, compelling the companies to make concessions or decisions that they would not have otherwise made.  

As for GM’s creditors, the Treasury Department’s advisor Steven Rattner “has delivered word that the king’s pleasure is that these unsecured creditors give up 100% of their claims in return for GM stock.”  The article points out the absurdity of this charade.  Why would GM’s creditors accept as payment, instead of the dollars that they are owed, the stock of a company that “the king’s own policies mean they’d be loony to buy?”  Why indeed, except that implicit or explicit compulsion is behind it.

Naturally, political agendas trump the logic of running a company.  Jenkins notes that it is “the king’s pleasure” that GM discontinue its GMC-brand SUV’s and pickups despite the fact that they earn the company’s highest profit margins - a suicidal position that can be comprehended only in the shadow of the president's environmentalist policy.  And with that same illogic, Mr. Obama has refrained from advising GM to discard the “profitless black hole” that is the Chevy Volt because such programs are the darlings of the environmentalists.

Concludes Jenkins:

There’s a reason royal discretion has long been outmoded as a way to run an economy: Things just work better if a realm’s subjects are left to resolve their own disputes and interests through the impersonal mechanism of the markets and the law.

This point is well taken, though of course there is an even deeper reason than markets simply “working better” under capitalism.  At the heart of the matter is the moral foundation of capitalism.  In her essay “What Is Capitalism?” Ayn Rand wrote: 

The “practical” justification of capitalism does not lie in the collectivist claim that it effects  “the best allocation of national resources...”

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve “the common good.”  It is true that capitalism does - if that catch-phrase has any meaning - but this is merely a secondary consequence.  The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.[Note 3.]

NOTES

1.  To write “market requirements or individual freedom” is a redundancy.  What the market requires is the liberty of individuals.

2.  Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., “GM Is Becoming a Royal Debacle,” The Wall Street Journal, 22 Apr 2009, p.A13.  All other quotes of Mr. Jenkins are from this article as well.

3.  Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Penguin Books, New York, NY, p. 20.  Article reprinted from The Objectivist Newsletter, November and December, 1965. 

It’s Not About Her

In reading LB’s essay Why I am an Objectivist, with which I wholly agree, some of my own reflections came to the fore, especially concerning the introduction of reason, selfishness, and individual rights to people who are not familiar with Ayn Rand’s works.  

In an important sense, Objectivism - the body of ideas - has nothing to do with Ayn Rand.  Don’t misunderstand me: the philosophical achievements are entirely hers, and Miss Rand deserves literally all the credit for Objectivism.  She single-handedly integrated and formulated every major and minor tenet of the philosophy; the sheer scope of her achievement is almost too staggering to believe could be accomplished by one person. 

Nevertheless, in terms of Objectivism’s content and its application to the real world, I think it is important to focus on the philosophy, not the the philosopher.  I care not a whit about the genesis of the philosophy.  Its truth would not change had it been articulated and refined by dozens of great men over the course of the last two thousand or so years, or (as it turned out to be) formulated by a single twentieth-century novelist.  The important thing is that the tenets of the philosophy hold true to reality, comprehensively and systematically - which is exactly what Objectivism does.

From the perspective of evaluating and applying Ayn Rand’s ideas, I invoke this popular expression: “it’s not about her.”  

Incidentally, I do not know but would guess that this must be the reason Miss Rand chose to call her philosophy “Objectivism” as opposed to say, “Randism.”  She had every reason to be immensely proud of her achievements, but she did not label her philosophy as Hank Rearden labeled Rearden Metal.  To call it Objectivism not only emphasizes its distinction from subjectivism and intrisicism, but reinforces its generality as a complete, reality-based philosophical system.  Ayn Rand was not an inventor; she was a discoverer.  As a novelist she created, but as a philosopher she identified.

I bring this point up because a few too many times I have seen the word “cult” associated with Ayn Rand, as if she were some sort of religious figure with a following of obedient disciples.  This is an absurd smear, and it is not without a certain irony - for if there is one characteristic that is sure to be found in every individual who truly grasps Miss Rand’s ideas, it would be a selfish independence of mind that makes such “cultish” following impossible.  

With this in mind, I would not wish to grant my intellectual foes a favor by contributing, however inadvertently, to the idea that Objectivists are followers of a “gospel according to Rand.”  When I argue points with friends and colleagues, I do not frame my statements in the form, “Well, Ayn Rand said...” or, “As an Objectivist, I believe that...”   Why should this convince anybody?  Listeners (or readers) who disagree with Ayn Rand to begin with will not be convinced by merely repeating her position on matters, and those who are unfamiliar with her work should not take her - or anyone else’s - word for it.  Anyone who is worth arguing with should care only about facts and their connections to principles.  Mentioning Ayn Rand every few sentences would do more harm than good.

An even more fundamental reason that I don’t speak or write that way is that I don’t think that way.  I simply don’t go around wondering, “What would Ayn Rand do?”  It’s perfectly true that when I read The Fountainhead twenty-five years ago, it changed my life.  I’ve read and re-read her fiction and non-fiction many times, and without question Miss Rand is my supreme intellectual hero.  But when I’m puzzling over something, I do not mine her works for the answer.  I look to reality for the answer.

As did she.

Ayn Rand, Strunk and White, and the Oxford Comma

In addition to my American Heritage Dictionary, one of my most trusty and useful books, one that is always within reach when I am sitting at my desk, is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.  Its tiny size belies its value.  It is the only reference book I can think of in which the fastest way to find something is simply to flip through the pages rather than to use guidewords, the index, or the table of contents.

Anyway, if you examine the end of the previous sentence, you will see an example of the so-called serial comma, which is described in rule #2 in the Elementary Rules of Usage, found on page 2 of The Elements of Style.  The rule states:

In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.  

The title of this post is a good example of this usage.  Without the serial comma, the title would have been “Ayn Rand, Strunk and White and the Oxford Comma.”  One can see the ambiguity that results from the missing comma.  Are “Strunk and White” a pair?  Or is Strunk one of the elements in the list and “White and the Oxford Comma” another?  The serial comma makes the meaning clear and I have long been in the habit of using it (though the British tend not to use it).

Anyway, it is not my intent in this post to elaborate on the merits of the serial comma, though I think there are some.  What I really wanted to relate was a surprising thing that I found when I did an Internet search for “Oxford comma.”  I had seen a reference to an Oxford comma somewhere and wondered if it was the same thing as the serial comma in Strunk and White’s rule #2.  It turns out that it is.

The surprising thing I found, however, was that for some reason, Ayn Rand figures in what is evidently the classic example of usage used to illustrate the Oxford comma.  To pick just one instance, quoting from World Wide Words:

[Q]  … Can you tell me what the Oxford comma is?... I wonder if it may refer to the practice of putting a comma after the penultimate item in a list, before the and – for example “eggs, bacon, and sausage” rather than “eggs, bacon and sausage”, which is how I would write it.

[A]  You have it exactly right.  That form of punctuation is uncommon in British English,… but it’s a characteristic part of the house style of the Oxford University Press, hence the name…

Perhaps the best argument for the serial comma is that apocryphal book dedication: “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” [emphasis mine]

I don’t know why Ayn Rand was chosen for the example, but the use seems to be widespread.  (Come to think of it, though, if I ever write a book myself, I could hardly leave Miss Rand off the dedication list!)  Of course, the whole point of the illustration is to show that without the serial comma, “parents” and “Ayn Rand and God” satisfy the form of apposition, suggesting that Ayn Rand and God are the parents of the author!

I find it fascinating that this example would propagate – and it apparently has.  A Google search of “Ayn Rand” and “Oxford comma” yields thousands of references to the phrase.

That illustration of the missing comma is amusing, but there’s an even funnier one in the Wikipedia entry for Oxford_comma.  Apparently, The Times (UK) once included in a description of a Peter Ustinov documentary the sentence, “highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.”

WSJ LTE

To my surprise, the WSJ printed my letter to the editor, which was based on my post from earlier this week. It showed up in the Saturday/Sunday edition, May 17-18, both in print and online.

They did a little bit of editing, but they left my points more or less intact. Above all, they preserved the reference to Ayn Rand in the concluding paragraph.