Objectivism & Religion, Part 10

Religion and freedom. Peikoff, in his essay “Religion Versus America,” argues that religion is logically incompatible with freedom and individual rights.

The principle of individual rights does not derive from or depend on the idea of God as man's creator. It derives from the very nature of man, whatever his source or origin; it derives from the requirements of man's mind and his survival. In fact, as I have argued, the concept of rights is ultimately incompatible with the idea of the supernatural. This is true not only logically, but also historically.

Apologists of Christianity make the opposite claim: rights come from God, they argue, just as the Declaration of Independence asserts. Freedom rests on a religious base.

Who is right on this issue, Peikoff and Objectivism or the apologists of Christianity? The answer is: neither side is right. Both make the erroneous assumption that rights derive from a doctrinal or logical base. There is no convincing evidence that this is true.

Rights are far more the product of the give and take between various political factions than they are of any specific doctrine of rights. Most people have only vague notions of rights. Since the majority people are not logically consistent in their beliefs, issues about where specific claims about rights originate and whether they are based on sound logical foundations is utterly vain. The overly-intellectualized views of Rand and her orthodox apologists leads to vague and impossible dreams about the causal determinants of the social order, as if metaphysical, logical, rhetorical, and other philosophical concepts are supposed to manifest themselves on the strength of their own logic!

Perhaps it would be better to rephrase the issue and ask whether religion is compatible with freedom? which is the real question at stake. Here only history can be our guide; and what we find when we examine the historical record is that freedom doesn’t appear to flourish in societies that are either excessively religious or excessively secular; that freedom seems to work best when there exists a healthy balance between the secular and the profane.

In the last three centuries, the two countries in which freedom has most flourished are England and the United States. Yet in the Western world, these are the nations that came closest to maintaining a healthy balance between the religious and the secular (although since World War 2, England has lost its religiosity, along with its empire). On the European continent, secular opinion became rabidly anti-clerical, eventually leading to widespread secularism in the 20th century. On the surface, this may not seem so bad. For the most part, life is good in Western Europe. Most people enjoy an unprecedented combination of personal freedom and economic security. Secularism never had it so good. But this secularism contains several fatal flaws. In the first place, it could never have existed without the protection of the United States. And secondly, even with America’s protection, it is doomed to be overrun by the demographics of an Islamic tide.

The failure of secularism is that it depends on two things that, in the long-run, are at odds: military security and a high standard of living. Any nation that lives well for several generations becomes soft. Its citizens give way to hedonistic mores and excesses of welfare economics. Religion, as a conservative force in society, can serve as a partial brake against this sort of hedonistic disintegration. Religion tends to support traditional ethical norms that go against the grain of hedonistic mores. Religion also imposes forms of discipline on its adherents which reinforce those traditional, anti-hedonistic moral ideals. It is no coincidence that the United States, the most religious in the West, remains the primary defender of freedom in the world today; nor is it a coincidence that the those Americans that are most supportive of the military and the use of force to defend freedom also tend to be religious, whereas those Americans that tend to oppose the military and the use of force tend to be secular.

Of course, the opposite extreme also poses a danger, when nations become too religious. But that is so obvious that it doesn’t require further comment.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 9

Aquinas and Rand. Peikoff, in his essay “Religion Versus America,” credits Thomas Aquinas, the great philosopher of Catholicism, for leading Europe out of the Middle Ages.

What--or who--ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. What--or who--ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said in opposition to Augustine, does not rest on faith; it is a self-contained, natural faculty, which works on sense experience. Its essential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world.

Rand’s admiration for the greatest philosopher of Catholic Christianity may seem odd at first glance. The saintly Aquinas, known for being “frequently abstracted and in ecstasy," devoted his life to rationalizing faith. What could Rand have possibly seen in Aquinas?

There are a number of reasons why Rand had to regard this intensely religious thinker as one of the few philosophers to have a positive impact on history. The Objectivist philosophy of history needed to explain how the Middle Ages ended. What accounts for the progress of European Civilization beginning with the Renaissance? Since Objectivism believes that only philosophy can determine history, there had to be a philosophical cause. The problem is, all the philosophers of the Middle Ages were Christians. Luckily Rand never paid much attention to details: only broad abstractions interested her. So using the cover of vague abstractions, she was able to declare Aquinas a champion of Aristotle, because Aquinas is broadly linked to the Stagyrite. “The prelude to the Renaissance was the return of Aristotle via Thomas Aquinas,” she wrote. [FTNI, 21] Problem solved: henceforth no need for any true believing Objectivist to go into the matter in any more detail.

But it is precisely in the details that the Objectivist view can be seen for what it is: namely, as bad all the way through—bad as philosophy, as biography, as history. If we were to take Peikoff’s account seriously, we would have to believe that human beings are too stupid to figure out how to make any progress in this world until some philosopher comes along and tells them that they can use “reason” to gain knowledge of this world. This view leads to some immense absurdities, including, most infamously, Rand’s preposterous panegyric of Aristotle:

If we consider the fact that to this day everything that makes us civilized beings, every rational value that we possess—including the birth of science, the creation of the United States, even the structure of our language—is the result of Aristotle’s influence, of the degree to which, explicitly or implicitly, men accept his epistemological principles, we would have to say: never have so many owed so much to one man. [FTNI, 20]

One has to be appalling ignorant of history (and linguistics and science) to give any credence to these this baseless patter. If Aristotle is responsible for “everything that makes us civilized,” does this mean that everyone who lived before Aristotle was uncivilized? If so, that would pretty much place Periclean Athens beyond the civilized pale. It is strange that Aristotle’s philosophy should have preceded “everything that makes us civilized beings.” Of this notion Rand gives us not a shred of evidence. Yet this is no coincidence, because no shreds of evidence exist. Rand is simply making things up in order to justify her belief that philosophy determines the course of history.

Implicit in Rand’s contention about Aristotle’s influence is the idea that thinking is something that has to be invented. Before Aristotle, no rational values were possible because people did not know how to think rationally. They needed Aristotle’s logic for that. Logic, then, is critical to human thought. People aren’t really civilized without it.

There are no compelling reasons to believe that Rand is right on this point. Logic may be critical in mathematics and in specialized scientific work; but in everyday life, its uses are limited. Human beings can get along without it, using, instead (as they always have) trial and error experimentation mixed with loose analogical reasoning and other informal (and often logically invalid) inferences. Aristotle’s contribution to human civilization, though significant, is not anywhere as momentous as Rand makes it out to be.

Aristotle’s formulation of logic, though important, is somewhat vitiated by a critical error he (or his followers) made in relation to it. Aristotle decided that logic was the model of how people should think. As late as the 19th century, J. S. Mill could declare that nearly all of our knowledge of science and human conduct “is amenable to the authority of logic.” Since Mill’s view, more or less accepted by Rand, is not true, any attempt to put it in practice will inevitably have unintended results. When people consciously try to follow the classical reason of Aristotle and his followers, instead of reaching truth, they merely wind up coming up with reasons for what they wanted to believe all along. In other words, Aristotelian reason, in practical terms, is little more than rationalization.

With this in mind, we can understand why Aquinas, the great rationalizer of medieval Christianity, was drawn to Aristotelian reason. Rationalization is what "reason" is all about. If you want to give a pseudo-scientific varnish to your pet ideas, you dip into the toolbox of reason and you can rationalize to your heart's content. If, on the other hand, you want to learn facts about the real world, you have to adopt a much more critical approach involving an exhaustive examination of the relevant evidence, experimentation, and criticism through peer review. The scientific method is not the equivalent of Aristotle’s “reason”; it is, in many respects, a rejection of such vapid scholasticism.

If we consult the facts, rather than merely our “reason,” what, then, do we discover about the ending of the Middle Ages? Well, it certainly wasn’t ended by Aquinas: that much is clear. Outside of the fairly closed world of scholars, no one knew anything about Aquinas. Keep in mind: Aquinas lived before the age of the printing press, when books were scarce and few could read. The ending of the Middle Ages, far from having obscure intellectual causes, came about initially through the diminishment of feudal anarchy. The ninth and tenth centuries had been eras of extreme social disorganization—mostly brought about, not by the influence of Augustine or the Catholic Church, but by the terribly excursions of fierce barbarians from the north and east.

Europe [in the tenth century] ceased to be overrun by ruthless hordes [testified historian Henri Pirenne]. She recovered confidence in the future, and, with that confidence, courage and ambition. The date of the renewal of a cooperative activity on the part of the people might well be ascribed to the tenth century. At that date, likewise, social authorities began once more to acquit themselves in the role which it was their place to play… The prime need of that era, hardly rising above anarchy, was the need of peace, the most fundamental and most essential of all needs of society.

The first Truce of God was proclaimed in 989. Private wars, the greatest of the plagues that harassed those troubled times, were energetically combated by the territorial counts in France and by the prelates of the imperial Church in Germany….

[The eleventh century] is characterized, in contrast with the preceding one, by a recrudescence of activity so marked that it could pass for the vigorous and joyful awakening of a society long oppressed by a nightmare of anguish. In every demesne was to be seen the same burst of energy and, for that matter, optimism. The Church, revivified by the Clunisian reform, undertook to purify herself of the abuses which had crept into her discipline and to shake off the bondage in which the emperors held her.

It was the development of capitalistic, market-based institutions that, ultimately, ended the Middle Ages. In the eleventh century, the birth rate went up appreciably, providing Western Europe with plenty of cheap labor. With the greater social stability brought about by the pacification (via conversion to Christianity) of the barbarian invaders, enterprising men could now begin the slow process of developing a mercantile system. By the beginning of the twelfth century, the growing prosperity of merchant colonies enabled them to build ramparts of stone, flanked by towers, adding greater protection against attack. Cities capable of defense were critical to Europe’s growing merchant class, since the rights of trade must everywhere be defended with force. Medieval cities provided the seed bed for the birth and growth of modern capitalism.

The early developments of medieval trade and the resurgence of Western Europe occurred well before the birth of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Indeed, Aquinas came along at the high tide of the Middle Age renaissance. Societal decadence, culminating in the black plague of the fourteenth century, when a third of Europe’s population perished within a few years time, coincided with the life of Aquinas. The Renaissance of the 15th century was merely the third in a series of upswings that Western Europe experienced after the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire (the others being the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth century and Renaissance of the Middle Ages). The first two post-Empire renaissances had nothing to do with Thomas Aquinas, since they occurred before he was born. Nor was Aquinas the “bridge” to the final renaissance. Indeed, this last renaissance, which ushers in the modern world, involved elements that sharply conflicted with Aquinas, such as a renewed interest in Plato and the emergence non-Aristotelian empirical and mechanistic epistemological paradigms in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The Christian church played a much larger role in the development of Western Civilization than Aquinas or his scholastic philosophy ever did. Critical to the revival of the West was the conversion of the fierce Scandinavian and Slavic barbarians to Christianity. No civilization was possible until this happened. Also critical was the church’s role as a unifying force. Governments in the Middle Ages were weak. Internecine warfare was tearing society apart. What was needed was a unifying force to keep infighting to a minimum. The church, by making use of crusades against Islam, managed to direct the energies of the warlike barons that ruled Europe against foreign targets, instead of against each other (and against the emerging merchant cities).

Whatever role ideas played in the course of European history, their affect is always greatly influenced by the development of institutions that are not the product of human design. Capitalism is not caused by the application of philosophical, political, or economic ideas. The Middle Ages were not economically or politically sophisticated enough to understand the workings of a complex free market, or to develop them a theory that would allow them to create a capitalist system. Such an understanding would only begin to develop in the 18th century. As a matter of fact, the nascent capitalism of the Middle Ages had to develop in the teeth of several ideas that went against its fundamental grain, such as notions concerning rank and birth, the honor codes of the feudal barons, and deep-rooted prejudices against usury (prejudices, I might add, shared by Aquinas and his philosophical idol, Aristotle).

Objectivism & Religion, Part 8

Did Christianity cause the Dark Ages? Peikoff, in his essay “Religion Versus America,” more or less claims that Christianity was responsible for the Dark Ages.

What were the practical results of the medieval approach [i.e., of Christianity]? The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as "the lust of the eyes." … [T]he medievals took religion seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was anti-materialistic and anti-intellectual.... The economic and social results of this kind of value code were inevitable; mass stagnation and abject poverty, ignorance and mass illiteracy, waves of insanity that swept whole towns, a life expectancy in the teens. "Woe unto ye who laugh now," the Sermon on the Mount had said. Well, they were pretty safe on this count. They had precious little to laugh about.

You have to be very ignorant not merely of human nature and sociology, but of history to buy into this explanation of the Dark Ages. Peikoff is basically asserting that the medieval Europe was little more than the practical application of Christian doctrine. The Christians, he claims, “proceeded to create a society that was anti-materialistic and anti-intellectual.” The Dark Ages, then, were an intentional creation: they were the product of the application of a system of ideas (that is, of Christian ideas) to society.

This view of the Dark Ages is hopelessly naive. The political and economic systems prevailing after the collapse of the Western half of the Roman Empire were not the consequences of anyone’s intention, as implied in Peikoff’s statement. They were brought about by causes that had nothing to do with Christian doctrine.

Rome had initially been a conquering peasant state. But after Hannibal decimated the Roman peasantry during the Second Punic War, slave labour became central to the economy of Rome and its expanding territories. But it was a particularly pernicious form of slavery that prevailed in the ancient world. Roman slaves live in collectivist barracks. They had no property, nor did they have families. Consequently, they failed to reproduce themselves. As sociologist Max Weber explained: “The ancient plantation consumed slaves the way a modern blast furnace consumes coal.”

When the Roman Empire ceased to expand in the second century, the supply of fresh slaves, so necessary to replenish the collectivized slave system of the plantations, ceased. This led to an acute shortage of slave labor and the eventual decline of the slave system. Now Rome did not have a terribly flexible or strong market economy. The decline of the slave system led to a corresponding economic decline. Interlocal commerce gradually disappeared; trade “relapsed to the level of peddling left to foreigners.” As a consequence of this, Rome could no longer raise taxes to pay for its mercenary armies. Barbarians from the north over-ran the Empire and assumed political supremacy of a completely demoralized civilization. The Muslims seized control of the Mediterranean, shutting off Western Europe from rest of the civilized world. Thus began the Dark Ages. But Christian doctrine had nothing to do with any of these developments. Rome’s collectivized slave system was the primary cause of the Empire’s fall. When the Empire ceased expanding and no more slaves were captured in war, the Empire went into decline. This decline greatly demoralized society. Intellectual life became vapid and inefficacious. The schools of Athens were hopelessly corrupt by the third century. Their teaching was confined mostly to rhetoric and neo-Platonism. Competition among various Athenian schools for students often lead to brawls and even murder.

Facing the huge challenges of waning economy and a demoralized populace, the Emperor Constantine decided to make Christianity the official religion of the Empire. He did so entirely for political reasons, as a desperate means to consolidate his power and save the Empire. He probably made the right choice. The Christian church was better organized, its members more disciplined, than any of the rival religions. Thes Christian church would help preserve some of the forms of the Roman Empire well into the Dark Ages, so that the re-civilization of Western Europe could begin as early as the Carolingian renaissance.

The Dark Ages were dark because of the complete absence of commercialized trade in Western Europe. Without commerce there can be no cities and without cities there can be no civilization. To again quote Max Weber: “It was only when the mediaeval city developed out of free division of labour and commercial exchange, when the transition to a natural economy made possible the development of burgher freedoms, and when the bonds imposed by outer and inner feudal authorities were cast off, that … the cultural heritage of Antiquity revived in the light of modern bourgeois civilization.”

Objectivism & Religion, Part 7

Ideas and doctrine as scapegoat. To what extent are ideas, doctrines, beliefs responsible for conduct? To what extent is any doctrine responsible for crimes committed in its name, or with the help of its influence? To what extent is Christianity, for example, responsible for the medieval Inquisition?

Zealous partisans of the anti-Christian (or anti-Catholic) point of view would be quick to assert that Christianity is responsible for Inquisition; that the Inquisition is merely the logical application of Christian doctrine (or of “faith” in general) to society. As Leonard Peikoff puts it: “There can be no philosophic breach between thought and action. The consequence of the epistemology of religion is the politics of tyranny.”

Yet if you can blame the bad stuff done in the name of Christianity on Christianity, can’t you also blame the bad stuff done in the name of Objectivism on Ayn Rand? If there can be no philosophical breach between thought and action, what are we to make of someone like psychologist Lonnie Leonard, who, in the name of Objectivism, manipulated his female patients into granting him sexual favors? If Christianity is responsible for the Inquisition, why isn’t Objectivism responsible for Lonnie Leonard?

If it is said that Objectivism cannot be responsible for Lonnie Leonard because Leonard’s conduct goes directly against Objectivist doctrine, well the same thing can be said of Christianity. Where in the New Testament does is say one should torture and murder people over trivial points of doctrine? If it is said that Leonard merely used Objectivism as pretext for carrying out his nefarious deeds, that his motives had nothing to do with Rand’s ideas, well the same thing can be said of the Inquisition. Christianity was merely a pretext which allowed powerful church authorities to murder their enemies and pilfer the property of so-called “heretics.” Just as Objectivism had nothing really to do with Lonnie Leonard’s misconduct, so Christianity had nothing to do with the Inquisition.

Even this, however, doesn’t seem quite right. Surely Christianity had something to do with the Inquisition. True enough. But the linkage is very complicated. These complexities are ignored by people with axes to grind, who obscure the real issues involved by not being sufficiently detailed and masking their bigotry with broad-level abstractions. The term Christianity is far too vague to be used as a cause of anything, since there are many different forms of Christianity and many doctrines within each form. We need to isolate which doctrine (or doctrines) may have contributed to the Inquisition, and which forms of Christianity adhere to those doctrines.

The great historian of the Inquisition Henry Charles Lea placed the blame for the disaster on false ideals mixed with human nature. The conditions for the Inquisition, he wrote,

was the outcome of the theocracy whose foundation had been laid by Hildebrand in the belief that it would realize the reign of Christ on earth. Power such as was claimed and exercised by the Church could only be wielded by superhuman wisdom. Human nature was too imperfect not to convert it into the gratification of worldly passions and ambition, and its inevitable result was to plunge society deeper and deeper into corruption. Thus the divine law on which the Church professed to be founded was superseded by human law administered by those who profited by its abuse.

In other words, authorities in the Catholic Church were pursuing an imaginary end. While the pursuit of imaginary ends does not always lead to disaster (see my post on myths), this does not mean that the pursuit of every imaginary end will lead to a good result. Some will, some won’t. What are the worst sort of imaginary ends? Generally speaking, imaginary ends that are based on false views of human nature are particularly dangerous when zealously pursued. The imaginary ends pursued by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages helped bring about the Inquisition by entrusting too much power to individual men on the grounds that the power would be used well because they were “men of God.” A very unwise thing to have done.

We can apply some of the same logic to the Lonnie Leonard fiasco. Objectivism also pursues an imaginary goal: namely, Rand’s ideal man, the man of “self-made soul” who “has no inner conflicts, his mind and his emotions are integrated, his consciousness is in perfect harmony.” Now this is all nonsense. Men don’t have self-made souls, nor are they without inner conflicts. This view is a “myth” (using the term as defined here.) Now the question is: does this myth, when “followed,” lead to good or bad results? Well, that depends on the individuals involved. Some individuals may use myth of the ideal man to help motivate themselves to use more self-initiative, and if this leads them in a positive direction, then the Randian myth, in this respect, has operated for the better. But there are other individuals who either lack self-initiative or cannot exercise such initiative without leading themselves into trouble. It is precisely these kinds of individuals who are prone to the manipulations of charlatans like Lonnie Leonard. Leonard presented himself as an ideal man who could help others become the embodiment of Rand’s ideas. Leonard’ attracted just those individuals in the Objectivist movement who weren’t getting positive results from following Rand’s ideas and therefore concluded that they needed psychological help. Since these individuals wanted to believe in Rand’s ideals about self-made souls and perfect emotional integration, they were susceptible to believing that Leonard was, in fact, a Randian ideal man. Hence when Ellen Plasil exposed Leonard as a fraud, the natural reaction was to blame, not Leonard, but Plasil. “I received innumerable phone calls, from men and women alike,” Plasil later recalled, “who condemned me for terminating my own therapy and for the reason they had learned was behind my doing so. In one call, I was accused of ‘destroying the closest thing Man has ever had to a god.’ In another, I was threatened with retaliation for causing the closing of Dr. Leonard’s practice.” (Therapist, 158)

Now while Rand is obviously not responsible for Leonard’s gross immoralities, does her philosophy perhaps bear some responsibility for the behavior of Leonard’s apologists? After all, their behavior was inspired by her ideas? If it is argued that Rand cannot possibly be responsible for this behavior, because she would have deplored it, the same argument could be used to defend Christianity against the behavior of medieval inquisitors. It is very difficult to determine the degree to which a specific doctrine is to blame for the conduct of those inspired by it, particularly when the doctrines involved contain imaginary goals based on a false views of human nature.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 6

Religion as a source of comfort. The Australian philosopher David Stove, despite regarding religion as little more than a psychological “deprivation-effect,” nevertheless provides an interesting take on the subject of religion as comfort. Whatever negative feelings Stove experienced toward religion, his hostility to anti-religious secularism was even more intense, as we find in the following passages:

It does not come naturally to us now, [Stove writes] to think of religion as a source of misery: we are far too familiar with the immense amount of misery that has resulted from the absence of religion. We therefore think of religion rather as a source of happiness, or at least comfort. And so it is, to many of the countless victims of twentieth-century atheist-terrorist governments, and to a few people in the derelict post-religious societies of the West. But those governments, and those societies, are themselves among the products of the Enlightenment’s assault on religion. In 1770, when that assault was reaching its height, religion presented a very different face from the one it does now.

Religion could then be blamed for bloody wars; massacres, expulsions, and persecutions of heretics; the craze for murdering witches; innumerable exactions for priests; the suppression of thought and even of natural curiosity; the forced sexual abstinence of thousands of men and women; flagellations and countless other “mortifications of the flesh”; the terror of punishments prolonged eternally after death. Such things as these formed, of course, the commonplaces of Enlightened denunciation; but it cannot possibly be denied that all these aspects of religion were fertile sources of misery. It was all true, too true.

At the same time, it is equally undeniable that a list like the one I have just given makes a startlingly trivial comparison with the misery which anti-religious zeal has produced in [the twentieth century]. Indeed, it is hardly even a comparison: “not game but shame” (as they say). How many Spanish Inquisitions equal one KGB? How many St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres, plus expulsions of the Huguenots, would it take to equal the misery caused by Lenin plus Mao?…

The Enlightenment’s tale of the misery caused by religion is not only trivial in retrospect: it was always absurdly exaggerated even at the time. Take, for example, the belief in eternal torments after death. Of course it ought to have been a source of enormous suffering, and in some cases it undoubtedly was. But the fear of hell was never as vivid or constant or widespread as, according to the religious theory, it should have been: a fact which we know partly from the incessant complaints of the priests to that very effect. Stupidity, the occupations of common life, and the natural belief that hell is intended only for other people, were always enough to prevent most Christians from being made as unhappy by their belief in hell as they should have been…. The fact is the Enlightened took religious beliefs far too literally and logically: a piece of folly which religious people, for their part, were hardly ever guilty of.

Does Stove overstate his case? Perhaps. But even when we have made the necessary adjustments, his thesis remains eminently plausible. Yet Stove has one last observation that seals the deal. The Enlightenment, Stove avers, had nothing to say about the suffering caused by “the actual process of losing religious beliefs.”

Parting with religion is not always, indeed, an altogether painful process. But there is always pain in it, and in most cases the pain greatly predominates over every other feeling. It was a question often pressed upon the Enlightened, therefore, how they reconciled their professed concern for human happiness, with their willful assault on the principal comfort of human life… It is [a question] not easily answered… Accordingly, the Enlightened never did answer this question….

Hume, for example, ignored the following response by James Beattie to his [i.e., Hume’s] attacks on religion. People like Hume, Beattie wrote, should remember that “in the solitary scenes of life, there is many an honest and tender heart pining with incurable anguish, pierced with the sharpest sting of disappointment, bereft of friends, chilled with poverty, racked with disease, scourged by the oppressor; whom nothing but trust in Providence, and the hope of future retribution, could preserve from the agonies of despair. And do they [the Enlightened], with sacrilegious hands, attempt to violate this last refuge of the miserable, and to rob them of the only comfort that has survived the ravages of misfortune, malice, and tyranny!”

Even when every deduction has been made for the over-eloquence of this passage, I do not see, much as I admire and love Hume, what satisfactory reply he could have made to it…. Hume, though he was infuriated by the great popularity of Beattie’s book, never did reply. [Against the Idols of the Age, 84-88]

Does religion, then, on balance, cause more happiness than misery? That is, indeed, what the evidence suggests. Consider the following facts:

• A large-scale 1972 study found that persons who did not attend church were four times as likely to commit suicide


• Numerous studies have found an inverse correlation between religious commitment as abuse of drugs. One study of nearly 14,000 youths concluded that religion was the single best predictor of substance abuse patterns.


• Several studies have found that high levels of religious commitment correlate with lower levels of depression, lower levels of stress, and greater ability to cope with stress.


• Strong religious believers consistently report greater overall happiness and satisfaction with life. In one Gallup survey, respondents who agreed that their religious faith was “the most important influence” in their lives, were twice as likely as those with minimal spiritual commitment to describe themselves as “very happy.” [Patrick Glynne, God: The Evidence, 62-65]

Of course, the thesis that religion serves as a comfort to people is only a generalization: it does not apply to everyone. There are people whose misery is increased by religious commitment, and who should therefore avoid religion like the plague. But there are many more people who are comforted by religion, and who would be less happy (or more miserable) were they to lose their faith.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 5

Force and Faith. As is well known among her admirers, Rand saw s linkage between force and faith. “These,” she insisted, “are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.” This view is a bit exaggerated: in the real world, the relationship between faith and force is not so simple. We can, however, give her credit for noticing the relationship between faith and force. These two elements often (though not always) go together. Their conjunction raises a number of difficult problems that Rand and her orthodox followers sedulously ignore.

All governments, whether good or bad, whether just or tyrannical, maintain their status through a mixture of consensus and force. No government can maintain itself by resorting to only one of these elements. A government of a free country needs to protect its citizens against foreign and domestic enemies, which can only be done through force. A tyrannical government, on the other hand, must at least establish a consensus among those responsible for enforcing its despotism.

The necessity of resorting to force is not a problem to a tyrannical government, since it thrives on force. But it is a problem for a free country, because force and freedom are somewhat antithetical. They are antithetical not merely for the obvious Objectivist reasons; but also, and more tragically, for reasons stemming from various short-comings in human nature.

Machiavelli famously wrote that a leader “should imitate the fox and the lion, because a lion cannot defend himself from snares and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. Therefore, it is important to be a fox in order to understand the snares and a lion in order to terrify the wolves.” The lion is envisaged as the man of force and courage; the fox as the man of intelligence and chicanery. When one examines these two archetypes and their role in politics and history, one comes upon several disturbing discoveries. Consider Pareto’s take on the subject:


Suppose a certain country has a governing class, A, that assimilates the best elements, as regards intelligence, in the whole population. In that case the subject class, B, is largely stripped of such elements and can have little or no hope of ever overcoming the class A so long as it is a battle of wits. If intelligence were to be combined with force, the dominion of the A’s would be perpetual…”

In other words, if the A’s combined both intelligence and force, they would conform to Machiavelli’s ideal of imitating both the lion and the fox. But there is a problem with this strategy, as illuminated by Pareto:

But such a happy combination occurs only for a few individuals. In the majority of cases people who rely on their wits are or become less fitted to use violence, and vice versa. So concentration in class A of the individuals most adept at chicanery leads to a concentration in class B of the individuals most adept at violence; and if that process is long continued, the equilibrium [of society] tends to be come unstable, because the A’s are long in cunning but short in the courage to use force and in the force itself; whereas the B’s have the force and the courage to use it, but are short in the skill required for exploiting those advantages. But if they chance to find leaders who have the skill—and history shows that such leadership is usually supplied by dissatisfied A’s—they have all they need for driving the A’s from power. Of just that development history affords countless examples from remotest times all the way down to the present.

Pareto, in setting up his example, makes no moral judgments as to the worth or utility of ruling class A and subject class B. But what if the A’s are the supporters of freedom and the rule of law while the B’s are men of force and faith? In that case, we are in heap of trouble.

Unfortunately, this situation is not uncommon in modern history. Free institutions favor people with intelligence. Force, as Rand herself admits, is a “corollary” of faith; that is, men that are well fitted to violence tend to be drawn to faith. Hence, we find ourselves confronted with a dilemma. Governments that support the institutions of law favorable to free markets and “individual rights” tend to be governments dominated people who rely on their wits but are less adept at using force. Yet these very governments require force to protect the markets and the rights that they espouse. Where is this force to come from?

The only way out of this dilemma is for those who favor an open society with free markets to make a political alliance with those men of force and faith who come closest to sharing their values. Rand is wrong in assuming that all men of faith support dictatorship and tyranny. As is well known, early capitalism was dominated by devout Protestants, often of a strong Calvinist bent. One of the earliest defenders of free speech, John Milton, was a puritan. Cromwell’s puritanical protectorship, although hardly constituting an ideal of freedom and individual rights, nevertheless represented an improvement over what had preceded it, and helped pave the way for the Glorious Revolution in 1688. John Locke, the intellectual defender of this revolution, was a devout Christian. Christians played an essential role in the development of English Liberty and early capitalism.

The defenders of freedom therefore must form an alliance with those men of faith who are sympathetic to free markets and the open society. This is precisely what modern conservatism, in England and America, has attempted in the last half century. The modern conservative movement is an alliance between economic conservatives, nationalist “foreign policy” conservatives, and religious conservatives. As with any alliance, it is hardly perfect; but then perfection is the cynic’s standard. In the real world, as opposed to the fantasy world of ideologues, no battle can be won, no institution can be salvaged, no nation can remain free unless we are willing to ally ourselves with people we don’t entirely agree with. Through compromise one reaches a position that is better than would have prevailed otherwise.

As I have noted on a number of occasions on this blog, life involves tradeoffs. It is easy for us to imagine a world where no one believes in religion and most people are “rational” That is not the world we live in. We must take people as they are and try to make the best of it. Any other course is to lapse into utopianism and wishful thinking.

Light Posting Months

I won't be posting much for a while as I'm busy launching a new business, among other things. Greg will be posting as the spirit moves him.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 4

The Role of Myth. In my last post, I briefly analyzed some of the issues dealing with trying to determine how religious beliefs affect individual conduct. There is a common assumption, shared by both pro and anti-religious individuals, that conduct is merely a logical application of doctrine, so that if people hold irrational convictions or pursue imaginary goals, their behavior will be unsuccessful. Since there exist plenty of examples of people holding irrational convictions or pursuing imaginary goals who have not come to grief, theories need to be developed to explain the anomaly.

One possible explanation is that people pursuing irrational and/or imaginary goals are hypocrites. They say one thing and wind up doing something else. This may in fact be true in some instance, or even many instances, but it’s not true in all instances, as a candid examination of history will show. Enlightenment historians, for example, believed that Oliver Cromwell must have been hypocrite. How else could a religious zealot like Cromwell possibly have been so successful as a leader? Yet later historians, after examining the documentary evidence in detail, have found no reason to believe the Cromwell ever was a hypocrite.

Another possible explanation for this anomaly of imaginary goals leading to satisfactory results makes a distinction between motivational rationality and functional rationality. By aiming at an imaginary goal an individual might achieve real utility. Some religions, for example, believe that water can purify the individual from sin. So if, in pursuit of “purificaiton,” the religious enthusiast zealously washes himself, he gains something of real utility: cleanliness. After all, you can’t expect primitive peoples to understand germs. How, then, is the primitive or non-rational, unsophisticated individual to be persuaded to wash? Nothing works better than convince him that washing purifies him from sin or makes him holy in the sight of God. Through an imaginary goal this individual is persuaded to act in his own best interest.

The idea that imaginary goals can be used to motivate individuals to attain individual and social utility was developed into a sophisticated sociological theory by French syndicalist Georges Sorel and Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto as the theory of myths. As Pareto explained:

[It] is commonly recognized ... that enthusiastic derivations are better calculated than cold reasoning to influence human conduct…. The capacity for influencing human conduct [by] derivations that overstep experience and reality throws light upon a phenomenon that has been well observed and analyzed by Georges Sorel, the fact, namely that if a social doctrine (it would be more exact to say the sentiments manifested by a social doctrine) is to have any influence, it has to take the form of a “myth.” To restate in that language an observation that we have many times made, we may say that the social value of a doctrine, or of the sentiments which it expresses, is not to be judged extrinsically by the mythical form that it assumes (they assume), which is only its means (their means) of action, but intrinsically by the results that it achieves (they achieve)….

In other words, it is not what people say or believe that is of the most importance, it is what they do, how they act, what they accomplish. If they can accomplish useful ends through irrational means, this refutes the Randian prejudice against non-logical action. Pareto continues:

If we consider history as a whole it is at once apparent that … acts which have ideal goals, T, or are performed as if they had, must also in many cases achieve results that show a gain in individual and social utility… In point of fact, non-logical actions are still very numerous and still very important in our time; and they were far more so in times past. The impellent of many such actions, the ideal, T, at which they aim, is stated in theological, metaphysical, and like derivations; while the practical purpose of human beings is the welfare and prosperity of themselves and their societies. If the two goals were antithetical, if the person aiming at the ideal, T, never attained practical benefits, it would never have been possible for societies that have made such great efforts to attain T to subsist and prosper…. If, in almost all cases, things had gone [badly], if, that is, in striving for T people had always reached [a worse position], human societies would have to show a continuous decline. That has not been the case, and the hypothesis must therefore be abandoned. [∞1868, ∞1874]

In other words, people aiming at imaginary goals have frequently attained real advantages. If this were not so, it would be impossible for any society holding imaginary goals to have advanced. And, as future posts will demonstrate, that clearly has not been the case. Societies have advanced despite holding imaginary goals—sometimes, even, because of those imaginary goals.

Now the Objectivist argument against religion, if reduced to the broadest essentials, goes something like the following:

(1) A man’s convictions determine his behavior.
(2) Irrational convictions inevitably lead to harmful behavior.
(3) Religious convictions are irrational.
(4) Therefore religious convictions lead to harmful behavior.

Even if 3 is correct, the conclusion doesn’t follow, because 1 and 2 are false. If, instead of worrying about whether our views accord with those of Rand and her orthodox followers, we concentrate on the evidence of history, the above argument should be reformulated as follows:

(1) There exists no necessary logical connection between a man’s convictions and his behavior.
(2) Non-rational action sometimes lead to beneficial consequences.
(3) Religious convictions that are non-rational sometimes (though not always!) lead to functionally rational (i.e. beneficial) ends.
(4) Therefore religious convictions don’t always lead to harmful behavior.

The key notion behind this analysis is the idea of the importance of non-logical action. I have often contended that Rand’s view of human nature constitutes her greatest error. An important component to Rand’s view is her simple-minded notion that, since reason is man’s only means of survival, non-logical action (that is, conduct based on non-rational convictions) will generally be harmful to individuals and society. This Objectivist view, however, does not accord with the facts as they have been gathered by anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. The majority of human beings are not, nor can they be, fully rational. Nor is a man’s conduct a logical extension of his ideas. Christian conduct is not a logical extension of Christian doctrine. Why should anyone assume such a thing? The very fact that an individual would choose non-rational doctrines should put us on guard against assuming that he’s going to guide his conduct from logical inferences from those non-rational premises. Hence the need for a new way of explaining the relationship between doctrine and conduct: a way that accords with what we actually find in reality, rather than in the assumptions of speculative philosophy. The theory of myth recognizes that human beings are not, in the main “logical,” and that to motivate them to engage in the action necessary for their own and their society's survival and well-being one must sometimes appeal, not to their reason, which is weak and unreliable, but to their sentiments, their emotions, their psychological states. Hence the utility of myth.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 3

“One of the greatest distortions [of social analysis] views [historical phenomenon] as the consequences of certain logical interpretations of scripture or other reasonings of the kind.”

—Vilfredo Pareto

Influence of religious doctrine on conduct. All kinds of contradictory behavior find justifications in religious ideas, often even from the same religion. There are Christian pacifists and Christian warriors (e.g., Cromwell’s ironsides); there are Christian apologists for slavery and Christian abolitionists; there are Christian socialists and Christians for the free market. And it is not merely the case that people who identify themselves as Christians fall on either side of these questions; that their Christianity, in other words, is entirely fortuitous. Not at all; they all justify their positions by claiming that they arrived at it by reading scripture. Slave owners claimed that slavery is defended in the Bible; abolitionists claimed that, since each individual is made in the image of God, Christianity demands the end of slavery. It is truly amazing how every position under the sun can be justified by the New or Old Testament. Even entirely contradictory positions!

Christianity is not alone among religions in having this curious power. Indeed, many belief systems, whether religious or secular, seem to share this kind of flexibility, as was noted by Vilfredo Pareto in his immensely fascinating Mind and Society. Pareto made a point of studying the extent to which explicit belief systems, whether religious or metaphysical or ethical in nature, actually determine conduct. Pareto, in his researches, could discover little if any causal connection between explicit belief systems and conduct. People engage in conduct and then use casuistry to defend this conduct on the basis of their stated convictions. After observing this, Pareto decided that it would be foolish to regard the conduct as being merely a logical consequence (or practical application) of the beliefs. Since the same conduct can spring from diametrically opposed beliefs, the beliefs can hardly be regarded as the cause of the conduct. Christianity hardly caused both slavery and the abolition of slavery! So some other causative agent or motivational complex must be at work here. Pareto believed that the primary cause of conduct was innate psychological states (sometimes referred to as “sentiments”) which he called “residues.” The belief systems which were used to justify these residues Pareto called “derivations.” Pareto contended that residues were the primary causes of conduct, particularly “non-logical” conduct, which he studied in great detail. Deriviations were, in comparison, much less important. As he wrote:

The main error in the thinking of the plain man, as well as in metaphysical thinking, lies not only in an inversion of terms in the relationship between derivations and human conduct—the derivation being taken, in general, as the cause of the conduct, whereas really, the conduct is the cause of the derivation—but also in ascribing objective existence to derivations proper and to the residues in which they originate. [1689]

Pareto did not deny that derivations can affect behavior as a secondary cause, by, for example, intensifying the underlying residues. But he would have regarded the Objectivist conviction that the social order is caused by philosophy as hopelessly naive.

In the light of the historical facts illustrated by Pareto’s theory, what are we to make of the actual, real world influence of a religion like Christianity in contemporary America? If we dislike Christianity, we will tend to focus every bad thing done by Christians or in the name of Christianity. If we like Christianity, we will tend to commit the opposite error of focusing on all the good things done by Christianity and Christians. Neither approach does complete justice to the facts, because neither attempts to separate that which is caused by the residues (i.e., religious sentiments) from that which is caused by the derivations (i.e., Christian doctrine).

The situation is rendered even more thorny and complex by the type of relationships that exist between Christian doctrine and Christian conduct, that is, between residues and derivations, sentiments and rationalizations. It is not simply one-to-one causation, but reciprocal causation, with influences running back and forth, springing forth a befuddling web of mutual interdependence. This makes it very difficult to determine precisely how much Christian doctrine actually influences conduct.

You might think this problem can be solved by comparing Christian behavior with, say, Islamic behavior. But this doesn’t work because all the other factors aren’t equal. Christians in the West are influenced by the secularization of the West, and are therefore a breed apart from Moslems, many of whom have not benefited at all from three hundred years of enlightened secularization in the West.

Now Rand and her orthodox followers make the mistake of assuming that Christian conduct follows Christian theory. That is one of the central themes of Leonard Peikoff’s “Religion Versus America.” Peikoff quotes several of the derivations made on behalf of religious sentiments and then makes the gratuitous assumption that religious conduct is merely a logical deduction from these derivations. Hence he quotes several incendiary statements about faith and then assumes religious people are going to derive all their conduct from beliefs gained “in the absence of evidence.” Now if this how religious people in fact determined their conduct in all aspects of life, they would long ago have disappeared from the earth. The fact that they are still around and flourishing suggests that their conduct is based on more substantial grounds.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 2

Man, the religious animal. “Man is by his constitution a religious animal,” averred Burke. This statement, if taken as a generalization, is hard to refute. Evidence for it confronts us on all sides. Most people throughout civilized human history have believed in the religion of their tribe or country. In recent centuries religion has waned among the educated classes; yet what we find is not so much a move from religion toward enlightenment as simply a move from theistic religions to non-theistic belief-systems that are religions in all but name. Thus intellectuals and other such delusional people have become acolytes of the religion of Democracy, the religion of Socialism, the religion of Humanitarianism, the religion of Marx, the religion of secular humanism. There is even, sad to say, a religion of science! I’m not referring here to real science, which involves experiments, empirical criticism, peer review, etc., but to irrational beliefs connected to science, such as the conviction that all (or most) human problems could be solves if everyone exchanged their religious views for “scientific” views.



No one has explored this facet of human nature more exhaustively than the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto:

As various religions succeed one another in history, their forms may be as different as one please, but after all they are all expressions of religious sentiments that vary but slightly. The modern free thinker enforces, in the name of Science, Holy of Holies, a morality but slightly differing from the code that the God of the Israelites proclaimed for His people, or the code that the Christians received from their God; or the codes that now one, now another, of the ancient peoples received from gods or from lawgivers legendary or divine….

Similar uniformities are observable even in phenomena much less important. In ancient times people who were sick made pilgrimages to the temples of Aesculapius in order to regain their health. They were succeeded in the Middle Ages by devout Christians who prayed to their saints for health and visited shrines and relics. Nowadays they would recognize descendants in the throngs that flock to Lourdes, in the devotees of “Christian Science”…

To such are still to be added the practices of those many medical quacks whom Daudet happily dubbed “deathers.” In their regard the credulity of the ancients has its perfect counterpart in the credulity of the moderns. At no time in history have quacks flourished more abundantly on the money of simpletons than they do today [circa 1905]; and in many countries the law protects such priests of the goddess “Science” just as religiously as it protected priests of the pagan gods of old—sometimes even more so. Believers gather in droves in those clinics and sanitoria which are temples of the modern quack. Some of them get well, if Mother Nature chances to look upon them with a kindly eye; but all of them contribute to the collection box of the high-priests of the goddess “Science” and their acolytes—among whom, let us not fail to count the pharmacists who sell their drugs at 1000 per cent profit; and the inventors of those patent medicines which shoot across the sky of publicity like meteors, cure every conceivable illness for more or less extensive, and often very brief, periods of time, and then are gone; not without leaving huge fortunes in the pockets of certain traders on public credulity who exploit the poor in spirit under the kindly eye of the legislator. And there is no argument, no fact, however obvious, however striking, that can avail to open the eyes of the fools. (1695, 1697)

With the improvements in medicine, the situation has somewhat improved in the hundred years since Pareto wrote. But it has hardly been a complete improvement. Quackery still survives in many forms, and is often resorted to as a last resort, when conventional medicine fails. Quackery, of course, is one of the more negative elements of religion. However, it is not as negative as Pareto paints it; science now recognizes the existence of placebo effects. Now in medicine, it is generally better to supplement placebo effects with conventional medical treatment, since science-based treatment is considerably more efficacious than placebo effects. But that is not true in all venues in life. There may be areas of life dealing with psychology of motivation or one’s general attitude toward existence which might be best served by the “placebo-like” comforts of religion.

In any case, whether religion is positive or negative in its overall impact on an individual or on society as a whole, the evidence strongly suggests that it is here to stay. Most human beings are incorrigibly religious. Even when they turn secular, their basic religious orientation remains. So why, then, should we waste our time quixotically inveighing against it? A far wiser policy for the statesman or the social leader is to try to cultivate the positive and discourage the negative elements in religion. Trying to argue people out of religion is a complete waste of time. Debates may be instructional or entertaining, but they’re not going to change many peoples’ minds.

Arguing people out of religion, far from being a good thing, may actually be a bad thing. What happens when people stop being religious? They become secular. Their religion simply takes another form; but it's usually a worse form. Centuries of trial and error have purged the religions of the civilized West (mainly Christianity and Judaism) of many of their worst excesses. The secular equivalents of religion, on the other hand, being rather new developments, have not undergone this sifting process. That is why various secular equivalents of religion may prove harmful while a religion such as conventional Christianity may prove, in its overall effects, beneficial.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 1

Militant atheism. Does disbelief in God entail hostility toward religion? Militant atheists answer: Yes, it does, because God poisons everything. Objectivism is a species of militant atheism. Rand not only disbelieved in God, she regarded religion as irrational and malevolent. “A specter is haunting America—the specter of religion,” declared Rand’s intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff. Rand held that religion, even when it exercises “a good influence” or inculcates “proper principles,” rests on a “dangerous or malevolent base.” Religion is based on faith, which is “extremely detrimental to human life.”

Not all unbelievers are militant atheists. George Santayana was naturalist, materialist, and atheist, yet he thought well of religion. In an essay entitled “Whether Naturalism is Irreligious,” he defended his views of the matter as follows:

Materialism is not itself a theology, as are some forms of idealism. Its inspiration and temper are purely scientific and intellectual. But why should so pleasant a thing as science and so vital a thing as intelligence be angry with the world they explore? And they spoil their own work if, with a vehemence which is not naturalistic but political and moral, they inveigh against religion, in the manner of Lucretius or of modern anticlericals. The materialist in his ethics and politics should be a humanist, an anthropologist, and a philanthropist; and is it love of man that prompts the hatred of religion? No: it is insensibility to the plight of man and to all that which man most deeply loves. Modern materialists, I must confess, have usually had vulgar and jejune minds; but not so the ancients who were materialists by nature, and not foolishly hostile to popular religion or without religion in their hearts. And they were the only normal materialists, harbouring towards politics, morals, and religion the sentiments proper to a naturalist. They were not deceived by these human passions and inspirations, but understood them and knew the place and the need of images in the world; and when they were poets they sang the praises of the gods with a tender emotion.

So much benevolence may be shown to religion by the intelligent materialist; it is the same benevolence that he feels towards the senses, in both cases delighting in the image without mistaking it for a substance. The substance of both, in his view, will be ultimately the same: namely the Power that brings these images and feelings before the spirit in this order and with this irresistible force. So much he may consistently feel and say without transcending the natural sphere, but still taking the imagination only for a system of signs, to be interpreted as effects produced in the animal psyche by the revolutions of matter within and without that animal….

Now what materialists have always abhorred in religion is its pretense to be a practical art, its magic, its false miracles, its appeals to animal thrift, prudence, and fear. With the spiritual side of religion they have had little acquaintance. On the spiritual side religion is not a false science but an ideal affection. It does not misrepresent the facts but transcends them. Often where this question touches politics the materialist, being a realist, may feel a natural aversion from the waste, as he thinks it, of faith, sacrifice, and money in keeping up official religions. The natural limitations of human taste and faculty will probably hold him back from developing a religious life in himself. But there would be nothing inconsistent with his materialism if he became a poet, a musician, or a hermit; and his judgments upon existence and the direction of his affection and invention in the ideal sphere might be those of an ancient prophet, as they might be those of a pure artist, without any departure from materialism in his natural philosophy. He might live in moral harmony with the power, the order, and the spirit in the whole universe, and cherish nothing but friendliness towards the traditional religion prevailing in his time and country.

Any philosophy whose temper is purely scientific and unbiased will harbor sentiments similar to those of Santayana’s toward religion. To regard religion with hatred or contempt is to regard it without any depth or wisdom. The militant atheist is animated, not by a disinterested love for truth and wisdom, but by the fanaticism of party spirit. He attacks religion because he sees it as a rival to be destroyed, rather than as a phenomenon to be appreciated and understood. Objectivism, as will be made clear in the ensuing series of posts, has no real insight into religion. It has no idea what religion means in practical terms, nor does it have a clue about the role that religion plays in the lives of individuals or society at large. Objectivism does not view religion as a scientist or naturalist would view it; rather, it regards religion as one brand of fundamentalism regards all other fundamentalisms: with suspicion and hostility.

Monday Night Whim-Worshipping: The National

Keeping it moody and indie, herewith The National.

Rand's Ethics, Part 16

Post-Rational Morality. Objectivism presents itself as a rational system of ethics. Indeed, Rand goes so far as to suggest that her system is the only rational system ever devised. This is clearly an exaggeration. Systems of rational ethics go back to Socrates and Aristotle and have found modern exponents in Spinoza and Santayana.

Many ethical systems aren’t so much rational as they are “post-rational.” As Santayana explained:

Aversion to rational ideals does not ... come ... from moral incoherence or religious prejudice. It does not come from lack of speculative power. On the contrary, it may come from undue haste in speculation, from a too ready apprehension of the visible march of things. The obvious irrationality of nature as a whole, too painfully brought home to a musing mind, may make it forget or abdicate its own rationality. In a decadent age, the philosopher who surveys the world and sees that the end of it is even as the beginning, may not feel that the intervening episode, in which he and all he values after all figure, is worth consideration; and he may cry, in his contemplative spleen, that all is vanity…

Pessimism, and all the moralities founded on despair, are not pre-rational but post-rational. They are the work of men who more or less explicitly have conceived the Life of Reason, tried it at least imaginatively, and found it wanting. These systems are a refuge from an intolerable situation: they are experiments in redemption. As a matter of fact, animal instincts and natural standards of excellence are never eluded in them, for no moral experience has other terms; but the part of the natural ideal which remains active appears in opposition to all the rest and, by an intelligible illusion, seems to be no part of that natural ideal because, compared with the commoner passions on which it reacts, it represents some simpler or more attenuated hope—the appeal to some very humble or very much chastened satisfaction, or to an utter change in the conditions of life.

Post-rational morality is, then, the morality of a chastened experience, of disillusion and societal decadence. Santayana identifies not merely religious moralities as post-rational, but even such secular moralities as stoicism and Epicureanism. These are all moralities of despair. They are devised by philosophers who have found the eudaimonism of rational ethics unworkable. Happiness is ephemeral, vain, and impossible, these philosophers decided. Retrenchment in some other moral standard, such as the absence of pain (Epicureanism), indifference to fate (stoicism), comfort in the benevolence of the supernatural (Christianity), the embrace an "unworldly" “spiritual life” (Plotinus, Spinoza, Santayana), or the achievement of “nirvana” through ascetic or spiritual discipline (Schopenhauer, Buddhism) becomes the central focus of the moral philosopher.

When Santayana, in the first decade of the twentieth century, introduced his theory of post-rational morality, he was clearly on the side of rational ethics. But later in life, he slightly modified his view, supplementing his rational ethics with post-rational values. In 1940, he was criticized for this change by some American pragmatists, who, sympathizing with Santayana’s earlier views, regarded the Spanish-American philosopher’s increasing obsession with the “spiritual life” as a betrayal of The Life of Reason. In his “Apologia Pro Mente Sua,” Santayana responded by pointing out that rational ethics is itself based on pre-rational impulses. After all, there can no such thing as a rational end—as Hume demonstrated. “ Reason alone can be rational, but it does not follow that reason alone is good,” Santayana explained. “The criterion of worth remains always the voice of nature, truly consulted, in the person who speaks.”

Since the voice of nature speaks uniquely to each individual, secluded in the egotism of his personal perspective, what is to prevent morality from sinking into narrowness and provincialism? Santayana proposes, as a counter-measure to moral perspectivism, an “ulterior shift” to post-rational morality. Rational morality seeks to establish harmony within the human psyche and the human world. But an individual chastened by the ultimate vanity of human goals might wish to extend this harmony, “not merely within the human psyche or within the human world, but between this world and the psyche on the one hand and the universe, the truth, or God on the other.” This involves a passage “from morality to religion,” admitted Santayana; “but not so as to destroy morality, because religion itself only adds a fresh passion (reason raised to a higher power and taking a broader view) to the passions that reason undertakes to harmonize.” By “higher power” Santayana does not mean some type of religious entity, like a God or a spirititual power. The phrase is used here to suggest an expansion of reason from a mere method of determining the means to achieving ends to a species of wisdom that seeks to see truth under the aspect of eternity, as Aristotle and Spinoza, in their more grandiose moments, sought to see truth. In other words, we are talking about viewing truth for its own sake, rather than as means for attaining some naturalistic end. The chastened spirit, recognizing the ultimate vanity of rational ethics, seeks consolation in purely intellectual pursuits. “I see the perfect continuity of post-rational with rational and pre-rational morality,” explained Santayana. “We begin with the instinct of animals, sometimes ferocious, sometimes placid, sometimes industrious, always self-justified and self-repeating [i.e., we begin with pre-rational morality]; we proceed to a certain teachableness by experience to a certain tradition and progress in the arts [i.e., we proceed to rational ethics]; we proceed further to general reflection, to tragic discoveries, to transformed interests [i.e., we culminate in post-rational morality].” “To draw the sum total of our account, and ask what do we gain, what do we lose, is possible at any moment of reflection, whatever the wealth or paucity of our experience,” Santayana noted. “But it is the impulse to reflect, not the impulse to acquire or to venture, that is here at work; and reason, instead of looking for the means to achieving given ends, has become an autonomous interest capable of criticising those ends. To itself therefore it seems reason liberated rather than reason abandoned.” In other words, the shift to a post-rational attitude, although ultimately founded on pre-rational sentiment, is nevertheless in accordance with reason, and is therefore entirely consistent with rational ethics, even when it criticizes these ethics or finds them vain or comfortless.

“I should therefore ask [my critics] to admit post-rational sentiment into their life of reason as an element,” concluded Santayana, “and to coordinate it with all the other profound and perennial elements in human nature. If they refuse to do so, it seems to me that rational life in them would itself sink to the pre-rational level. They would be fighting for a closed circle of accidental interests, established by them as absolute and alone legitimate, and fighting in the pre-rational jungle, like cats and dogs, or like prophets crying anathema to all other prophets.” [The Philosophy of George Santayana,, 560-565)

There is every reason to believe that Rand would have despised the notion of a post-rational morality based on “tragic discoveries” and “transformed interests.” Rand’s view, as stated by intellectual heir Leonard Peikoff, is that, while “accidents and failures are possible, they are not ... the essence of human life. On the contrary, the achievement of values is the norm”—provided that the individual follows the Objectivist morality. There are a number of serious problems here. In the first place, Rand’s notion of the benevolent universe principle is fraught with mischievous implications. Achievement of values and the personal happiness that goes with it are, Rand declares, the norm for those who follow her morality. So what does this mean for the person who does not achieve their values, but who instead endures misery and hardship? What does Rand have to say to this individual? Only one of two things: (1) that this individual is an unlucky exception to the general rule; or (2) that this individual has not followed the Objectivist morality and therefore deserves his misfortune. I would suggest that neither of these answers is adequate to console the individual in the face of suffering and tragedy. Indeed, Rand's two responses verge toward mockery and denigration

There are also serious questions whether “achievement of values” really is the norm. In real life, people experience both achievement and disappointment, suffering and happiness. A philosophy with any depth or wisdom at its core will take account of both the good and the bad in human life. It won’t simply sweep the bad under some jejune “benevolent universe” premise. Nor will it moralize the issue by implying that unhappy people are immoral and deserve their unhappiness. Psychology has discovered that, at least for some people, the level of happiness they are capable of reaching is probably genetically determined. For this reason, a rational ethics, with its stress on eudaimonic values, cannot serve everyone’s needs. People cannot be happy all the time. One way or another, whether they like it or not, they will suffer. Achieving moral perfection, even on Objectivist terms, will not cure the ills of the human condition. A philosophy that merely tells people to be happy, or insists they would be happy if only they followed this or that code of ethics, is a philosophy addressed to only one aspect of existence. It’s a philosophy for those unserious, superficial thinkers afraid of tackling the really difficult issues confronting the human species.

Philosophy is chiefly concerned with tackling problems—the more difficult, the better. Happiness, benevolence, joy are not problems. Most people agree in finding them desirable. Suffering, pain, disappointment, tragedy constitute very serious problems. They do so even when they don’t represent the norm. The fact that they occur at all gives them a special importance that no serious thinker can ignore.

Post-rational moralities such as stoicism, epicureanism, Buhddism and Christianity have each, in their own way, tried to grapple with these darker issues. For this reason, if for no other, such systems have a leg up on Objectivism when it comes to dealing with the tragic side of existence; which is to say, there is much that can be learned from them. We can learn not merely from their successes, but from their failures as well. To approach these moral systems with contempt, merely because they are not fully “rational” (i.e., because they don’t agree with Objectivism), constitutes yet another lapse into superficiality and fatuousness.

Rand’s failure to appreciate and learn from other points of view is symptomatic of her general failure to take a broader point of view. Her ethical philosophy is indeed guilty of “fighting for a closed circle of accidental interests, established ... as absolute and alone legitimate.” Most of the virtues she extols are virtues that apply, if they apply at all, only to a small number of people—nor could they ever be extended to mankind in general without doing a great deal of mischief. Her moralizing contempt for people who disagree with her only serves to isolate herself more firmly within the pre-rational jungle. It also prevents her and her orthodox followers from ever incorporating post-rational sentiment into their philosophy. Yet without this post-rational incorporation, Objectivism can never be considered a complete philosophy addressed to the chief problems of human existence.

Rand's Ethics, Part 15

Randian virtues: pride. The worst and most fatuous of the Randian virtues, displaying an obtuseness to the human condition that is really lamentable to behold. Here’s how Rand initially justifies her choice:

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself—and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.

The first thing to note is that, in her description of pride, Rand unwittingly embraces relativism. “Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value,” Rand states. In other words, each person is their own highest value; which means the value of each person is relative to each individual. This would be all fine and good were it not for the fact that Rand insisted her values were “absolute.” (I realize her apologists at this point will counter-insist that her absolutes are “contextual”—whatever that means! I suspect she’s merely trying to have it both ways, and thinks she can get away with it by playing games with words!)

What is even more striking is the famous passage where Rand insists that man ought to be a “being of self-made soul.” Just as Rand embraced free will in its most extreme form, so she embrace a most uncompromising version of pride. We can be proud of ourselves not merely because it feels good to think that way; we can also be proud of ourselves because this self is our own creation! One can hardly imagine greater effrontery or arrogance as this.

According to both traditional authorities and the latest scientific evidence, Rand’s view of the self-created self has no empirical ground to stand on. Not only does there exist well documented genetic factors in personality, but there also exists a cognitive unconscious that quite literally has a will of its own. In other words, we don’t, nor can we, control everything about ourselves. Even worse, the extent that we can control ourselves depends, in crucial part, on taking countermeasures against our limitations. But how can these countermeasures take place when we refuse to accept the existence of these congenital limitations? How can we overcome the bad qualities in our cognitive unconscious when we deny, as Rand did, that a cognitive unconscious even exists? Throwing pride into the mixture only renders the situation worse, making it even less likely that the individual is going to face up to his limitations.

As is well known and has been demonstrated by hundreds of psychological experiments, there exists a human tendency toward self-deception. “Most people claim they are above average in any positive trait you name,” notes the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. In other words, the tendency to see ourselves better than we are is built-in. Why, then, does this tendency need encouragement? If people already tend to think better of themselves than is warranted by the facts, why would any psychologically astute person wish to encourage them to be proud? The better strategy, it would seem, would be to pump a bit for humility—if for no other reason than as a sort of countermeasure against the innate bias towards pride.

“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,” the Bible claims. Is this just mystical nonsense? Or is it one of those sayings that causes most people to regard the Bible as a repository of wisdom, since it backs what people have learned through hard-earned experience? Most traditions of folk wisdom contain warnings about the dangers of pride. Literature, from the Greek dramatists through Dante and Shakespeare to the great novelists of the last two centuries, repeatedly warns against the dangers of pride. Where did these warnings come from? Why do they continue to resonate with most people? Is it merely because most people are envious, or corrupted by religious teachings and Immanuel Kant? Or does the experience of the human race testify to a truth about human nature and the psychological dangers of encouraging people to think too well of themselves? And what about the effects of pride on Rand herself? Was it pride that encouraged her to begin an ill-advised affair with a man half her age—an affair, moreover, that turned out to have disastrous consequences to both her personal life and the intellectual movement devoted to her philosophy?

Rand's Ethics, Part 14

Randian virtues: productiveness. Finally, a virtue we can all agree on! Or is it? Leave it to Rand to screw up even the most obvious virtues by distorting them with false ideals. Here’s how Rand introduces productiveness:

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live—that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values—that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others—that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human—that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay—that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live—that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road—that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up—that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

Rand is here guilty of over-romanticizing her virtue. “All work,” she declares, “is creative work if done by a thinking mind.” Really? And even worse, Rand goes on to insist that “no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others.” So in other words, routinized work, doing as your told, is ruled out of hand. Such work is not virtuous; perhaps is even vicious.

Consider, in terms of contrast, Thomas Carlyle’s view of work:

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble: be that here said and asserted once more… A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man.

Carlyle also romanticizes work; but what a difference between his romanticization and Rand’s! Rand turns work into an adventure of creativity and self-actualization. But is that what most people find in work? Not at all. Plenty of uncreative work out there. Floors that need to be scrubbed; toilets that need to be cleaned; snow that needs to be shoveled; ditches that need to be dug; garbage that needs to be picked up. What has Rand to say to the those selected to do these unappetizing tasks? Nothing but a kind of mockery: be “creative” in them, she insists; don’t repeat a routine learned by others! There are two reasons why advice of this sort is bad to the point of cruelty. In the first place, most people who do menial work are not known for their creative intelligence; so that to urge them to think for themselves and work creatively will probably lead to trouble. And secondly, organized work requires hierarchy: bosses and managers telling workers and subordinates what to do. How much better, then, is Carlyle’s romanticization of productive work, since it includes work of all description, even of the meanest variety, and doesn’t romanticize independence and thinking for oneself!

Another possible mischief in Rand’s virtue of productivity is the implication that what is virtuous is not work per se, but the productivity of work, so that greater productivity is equivalent to greater virtue. But what constitutes greater productivity? Is Warren Buffett, the richest man in the world, more productive, and therefore more virtuous, than the Mexican field hand picking grapes from sun-up to sun-down for fifty dollars a day? What about the so-called “idle” rich? Not so many of such types any more, because of high tax rates; but they weren’t so uncommon a hundred years ago. Although most individuals who lived on their savings did not have regular jobs, they were not always completely idle. They may have had hobbies or pursued other interests. Could such hobbies or interests be consider productive even though they earned no income from them? Take, as one example, Arnold Bax, who lived in England during the first half of the twentieth century. Bax, due to his family, did not have earn a living. So he composed music—tone poems, symphonies, chamber works, songs, etc. Made very little money from his compositions, none of which ever became permanent fixtures in the standard repertoire. Can Bax be credited with practicing the virtue of productiveness? And if so, on what basis? What does it mean to be productive? Does it mean the production of market value? Or is it the production of anything, as long as it involves creativity? Or is it the “objective” quality of the thing produced that determines whether productiveness, and hence virtue, went into its making?

So many questions—yet all remain unanswered by Rand, shrouded in the ambiguities of her overheated rhetoric! Why could not Rand have contented herself with saying “Work is virtuous,” rather than creating this romantic ideal which few, if any, ever have a chance of reaching?

Does "Focus" Give a Truer Picture of Reality?

In Objectivism, much is made of "focussing" your mind as the basis of gaining a proper grip on reality. Dr Leonard Piekoff calls the choice to focus "man’s primary choice. Until a man is in focus his mental machinery is unable to think, judge or evaluate. The choice to throw the switch is thus the root choice on which all the other choices depend.” But how reliably does focusing your mind vouchsafe a true and undistorted view of reality? Here's a recent variation of a well-known psychological test. There are two teams, and your task is to try to count the number of passes the team in white makes in the confusing scenario. Get ready...and ...focus!

Rand's Ethics, Part 13

Randian virtues: justice. This is the most ambigious of Rand’s virtues. Justice means different things to different people. For some people, an unequal distribution of income is inherently unjust. For others, any attempt to redistribute income on the basis of egalitarian "justice" itself would be unjust. It is curious to note that Rand ignores this aspect of the question in her introduction of the virtue of justice in Galt’s speech:

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Note the emphasis Rand places on judging. You would think that Rand, when introducing justice, would want to state clearly her definitional notion of the concept. How does one distinguish between justice and injustice? Why are leftist notions of justice mistaken? What is wrong with the concept of distributive justice? Her treatment of justice does not address these problems, but merely assumes that her own notion of justice is right from the start and goes on to insist on the rigorous application of this view of justice, not just in the legal or political sphere, but in all of life. In short, Rand is insisting, in a particularly vehement manner, on the necessity of judging people and treating people exactly as they deserve.

It is important to understand the extent to which Rand, by her emphasis on moralizing, is challenging traditional norms of morality and judgment. Consider what Hamlet says on the subject in Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet is discussing with Polonius how to treat the actors that have come to give a play.

Hamlet: Good my Lord, will you see these players well bestowed? ...
Polonius: My Lord, I will use them according to their desert.
Hamlet: God’s bodikins, man, much better; use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.

Polonius is here stating Rand’s view of the matter; Hamlet is sticking up for the traditional view. Now it is important here not to misinterpret Hamlet’s views by taking too literally what he says. The traditional view does not hold that one ought to treat the worst sort of murderers and other criminals with greater consideration because of their viciousness. Hamlet’s stricture applies only to ordinary non-criminals, such as the players of the acting company. It is based on several assumptions about human nature that Rand either ignored or denied:

(1) Human nature is encumbered by “frailties” that render it impossible for any individual to be morally perfect.

(2) People don’t always intend to do bad things, yet end up doing bad things regardless of intention.

(3) Because of the unintended aspects of human behavior, it is impossible to determine the exact degree of moral culpability of other people.

(4) Because moral insight into the behavior of others is fraught with uncertainty, one should not be overly quick to judge others; on the contrary, one should be eager to cut others slack and temper justice with mercy. Moralizing and being excessively judgmental is a vice caused by arrogance and narrow-mindedness.

(6) Since most people are decent but flawed, treating them with kindness even when they seem to stray from the moral straight and narrow demonstrates a nobility of character and generosity of heart that is morally commendable.

The views summarized here are a product of aristocratic sensibilities tempered by Christian sentiment. In other words, they constitute the code of the gentleman, which is to say, the ideals of chivalry. Rand’s notion of justice sticks a dagger into the very heart of chivalric ideals. Justice, she insists, should never be tempered by mercy. Reason can determine exactly what people deserve—and that’s exactly what they should get! Everyone has the responsibility to be morally perfect and to demand from others moral perfection. Nothing less will do!

What is particularly mischievous in the Randian notion of justice is the combination of a moral perfection as defined by “reason” with an intransigent moralizing. Rand’s “reason” is a mere rationalization of artificial sentiments based on mere ideology. It denies not only the frailties of human nature, but even more critically, it disavows the traditional customs and habits that arose to deal with these frailties, such as the chivalric notions about treating people better than they deserve that Hamlet speaks up for in Shakespeare’s play.