Objectivism & Religion, Part 16

Religion and the underclass. One of the most witty and clever critics of organized religion is Voltaire, the most popular intellectual of the Enlightenment. At dinner parties Voltaire and his guests would routinely scoff at religion. One day, however, Voltaire’s servants were setting the table when his guests began making derisive remarks about religion. Voltaire immediately rose to his feet and ordered the servants out of the room. He then turned to his guests and admonished them, saying, “If you let these people hear that, they will become savage as lions. It’s all very well for us to say these things among ourselves, but if these people hear us scoffing at their religion, they won’t obey a word I tell them because religion is what makes them good.”

Now while I suspect that Voltaire over-stated the case for the moral effect of religion on the “lower” classes, there is still an element of truth in what he said. In any case, whether Voltaire was right or wrong, the underclass represents a growing problem in the West that secularists have not solved. The British underclass, which, in the last half century, has become completely secularized, presents a chilling example of this, particularly as limned in Dr. Theodore Dalrymple’s series of sobering essays entitled Life at the Bottom. In an essay entitled “Tough Love,” Dalrymple describes the effects of sexual liberation on the underclass:

Today’s disastrous insouciance about so serious a matter as the relationship between the sexes is surely something new in history: even thirty years ago, people showed vastly more circumspection in the formation of liaisons than they do now. The change represents, of course, the fulfillment of the sexual revolution. The prophets of that revolution wished to empty the relationship between the sexes of all moral significance and destroy the customs and institutions that governed it…. [They] believed that if sexual relations could be liberated from artificial social inhibitions and legal restrictions, something beautiful would emerge: a life in which no desire need be frustrated, a life in which human pettiness would melt away like snow in spring…. The grounds for such petty bourgeois emotions as jealousy and envy would vanish: in a world of perfect fulfillment, each person would be as happy as the next.

The program of the sexual revolutionaries has more or less been carried out, especially in the lower reaches of society, but the results have been vastly different from those so foolishly anticipated. The revolution foundered on the rock of an unacknowledged reality: that women are more vulnerable to abuse than men by virtue of biology alone, and that the desire for the exclusive sexual possession of another has remained just as strong as ever. This desire is incompatible, of course, with the equally powerful desire—eternal in the human breast but hitherto controlled by social and legal inhibitions—for complete sexual freedom. Because of these biological and psychological realities, the harvest of the sexual revolution has not been a brave new world of human happiness but rather an enormous increase in violence between the sexes…

[T]he reality of this increase meets angry denial from those with a vested ideological interest… Still, the fact remains that a hospital such as mine has experienced in the last two decades a huge increase in the number of injuries to women, most of them the result of domestic violence…. About one in five of the women aged sixteen to fifty living in my hospital’s area attends the emergency department during the year as a result of injuries sustained during a quarrel with a boyfriend or husband… In the last two years I have treated at least two thousand men who have been violent to their wives, girlfriends, lovers, and concubines. It seems to me that violence on such a vast scale could not easily have been overlooked in the past—including by me.

Dalrymple summarizes the condition of the underclass in the following terms:

Here the whole gamut of folly, wickedness, and misery may be perused at leisure—in conditions, be it remembered, of unprecedented prosperity. Here are abortions procured by abdominal kung fu; children who have children, in numbers unknown before the advent of chemical contraception and sex education; women abandoned by the father of their child a month before or a month after delivery; insensate jealousy, the reverse of the coin of general promiscuity, that results in the most hideous oppression and violence; serial stepfatherhood that leads to sexual and physical abuse of children on a mass scale; and every kind of loosening of the distinction between the sexually permissible and the impermissible.

The connection between this loosening and the misery of my patients is so obvious that it requires considerable intellectual sophistication (and dishonesty) to be able to deny it.

What role, if any, has secularization played in the social disintegration of the British underclass? To answer this question, we turn to French historian Elie Halevy, author of an important history of England during the 19th century. Halevy wanted to explain how Britain, despite profound contradictions, was spared a violent revolution during the 19th century. Halevy maintained that the stability of the British order came about through the stabilizing influence of evangelical religion, particularly Methodism, which enabled Great Britian to establish itself as a country of freedom, “of voluntary obedience, of an organization freely initiated and freely accepted.” The key concept here is “voluntary obedience.” In every society, there exists a class of individuals incapable of governing themselves. “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere,” warned Edmund Burke, “and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

How, then, is society to deal with with those individuals of “intemperate mind” who cannot control their appetites. As usual, there is no perfect solution, but of the imperfect remedies at our disposal, voluntary religion of traditional, Christianized is as good as any, and may be better than most. After all, it worked a lot better in 19th Century Britain than secularism has worked in contemporary Great Britain. In 1815, despite difficult economic conditions, Great Britain managed to maintain a commendable degree of order despite lacking a police force, a welfare state, or any kind of bureaucratic government management. Social order in 1815 was maintained voluntarily. Yet, despite this voluntarism, there were far fewer crimes either against persons or property. What would happen today either in the inner cities of the United States or the United Kingdom if there were no police force and extensive judicial system, with its concomitant prisons and jails, probation officers and court psychiatrists?

In the last year, several houses in my neighborhood have been burglarized. A few months ago I forgot to lock my vehicle and several hundred dollars of stuff was immediately filched from it. According to statistics, ninety-nine percent of Americans will be victims of theft at least once in their lives. Eight-seven percent will have property stolen from them three or more times. This level of thievery did not exist 100 years ago, when this country was considerably more religious. While there are other factors involved in this massive demoralization of society other than religion, it would be naive to believe that religion has played no role in it at all. When Marx called religion the opium of the masses, he meant it as an attack. But perhaps Marx was right in a way he would have been loathe to imagine. Perhaps the drug-like qualities of religion are a necessary tool for maintaining a tolerable degree of social order among the underclass. In any case, secularists have not come up with anything better. Nor did Rand have anything to offer on this issue, besides the naive conviction that, since people have free will, everyone can be rational. Poppycock, however, grinds no flour. The fact remains: some people are not capable of being rational. Refuting Kant will not change this fact. What, then, are we to do with these people? Evading the problem will not make it go away.

Is Orthodox Objectivism a Religion?

As the ARCHNblog runs its lengthy series on Objectivism and religion, regular contributor Neil Parille asks the obvious question:

The claim that Objectivism is a religion goes back to Albert Ellis’s 1968 book Is Objectivism a Religion? Calling Objectivism a religion seems upon first glance quite odd, given its atheism and anti-supernaturalism. At the same time, many critics of Objectivism have noted quite a few “ominous parallels” between Rand’s writings and religion, and between the Objectivist movement and established religious bodies. I’ll review a few here, more in this spirit of provoking conversation than in coming to any definite conclusions. (My reference to Objectivism is limited to those Objectivists associated with Leonard Peikoff’s Ayn Rand Institute.)

1. Rand saw herself as something of a secular prophet. In the first edition of Anthem, published in 1936, she wrote, “I have broken the tables of my brothers, and my own tables do I now write with my own spirit.” Rand’s writing is frequently apocalyptic as well. She begins John Galt’s sermon in Atlas Shrugged with an Old Testament-like rebuke of a sinful world facing judgment. “I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the one who will now tell you . . . .”

2. Orthodox Objectivism has its official canon of scripture. As Harry Binswanger says to those who consider joining his email list:

"It is understood that Objectivism is limited to the philosophic principles expounded by Ayn Rand in the writings published during her lifetime plus those articles by other authors that she published in her own periodicals (e.g., The Objectivist) or included in her anthologies."

Pride of place goes to Atlas Shrugged, which Rand had the unfortunate tendency of quoting as if it were the Bible. Like a pastor using characters from the Bible, Rand and her followers constantly refer to characters in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead to draw moral lessons.

3. Like religions, Orthodox Objectivism has the tendency to turn disagreements about doctrine into moral issues. For example, Leonard Peikoff once said to Rand,

"You are suffering the fate of a genius trapped in a rotten culture," I would begin. 'My distinctive attribute," she would retort, "is not genius, but intellectual honesty." "That is part of it," I would concede, "but after all I am intellectually honest, too, and it doesn't make me the kind of epochal mind who can write Atlas Shrugged or discover Objectivism." "One can't look at oneself that way," she would answer me. "No one can say: 'Ah me! the genius of the ages.' My perspective as a creator has to be not 'How great I am' but 'How true this idea is and how clear, if only men were honest enough to face the truth.'" So, for understandable reasons, we reached an impasse. She kept hoping to meet an equal; I knew that she never would. For once, I felt, I had the broad historical perspective, the perspective on her, that in the nature of the case she could not have. (Peikoff, "My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir," The Objectivist Forum, 1987, pg. 12-13.)

4. As can be seen from the above quote, adulation of the group’s founder is paramount in Orthodox Objectivist circles. In particular, Rand’s sacred name is given great reverence by her followers. Rarely is she referred to as just “Rand.” She may be called “Ayn Rand,” “Miss Rand,” or “AR.” Leonard Peikoff is now commonly called “Leonard Peikoff” and “LP.”

5. Also, like many religious people, Orthodox Objectivists abhor the “backslider,” the person who appears to give assent to the truth but is working behind the scenes to circumvent it. Leonard Peikoff mentions the type of people Rand attracted in the above article:

"They absorbed the surface features of Ayn Rand's intellectual style and viewpoint as though by osmosis and then mimicked them. Often, because she was so open, they knew what she wanted them to say and they said it convincingly. Though uninterested in philosophy and even contemptuous of fundamentals, they could put on an expert act to the contrary, most often an act for themselves first of all. Ayn Rand was not the only person to be taken in by it. I knew most of these people well and, to be fair here, I must admit that I was even more deluded about them than she was."

6. Orthodox Objectivism has its official villains and heretics of the type described by Peikoff. The two most evil figures in this pantheon are, of course, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. There are lesser fallen angels, such as David Kelley.

7. Orthodox Objectivism has its official church, the Ayn Rand Institute, which proselytizes on behalf of Objectivism. Leonard Peikoff and his small college of cardinals (Harry Binswanger and Peter Schwartz) supervise the movement. Peikoff occasionally speaks ex cathedra, as he did at the time of the Kelley break.

"Now I wish to make a request to any unadmitted anti-Objectivists reading this piece, a request that I make as Ayn Rand's intellectual and legal heir. If you reject the concept of "objectivity" and the necessity of moral judgment, if you sunder fact and value, mind and body, concepts and percepts, if you agree with the Branden or Kelley viewpoint or anything resembling it — please drop out of our movement: drop Ayn Rand, leave Objectivism alone."

Unlike many religions, however, Objectivists are intent on charging high prices for their material, which would seem to run counter to their movement’s aim. Objectivist retreats, called "Objectivist Conferences,” are quite expensive to attend.

8. Those who are associated with the ARI must take care that they do not demonstrate their “worldliness” by fraternizing with Kelleyites and other deviationists.

No member of the Objectivist movement may associate with Kelley’s Atlas Center, for example. While an Objectivist might be permitted to publish in a mainstream philosophical journal (notwithstanding the fact that such journals routinely publish articles devoted to the destruction of man’s mind), no Objectivist may publish in Chris Sciabarra’s Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. No word yet on whether the lapsed may be restored to a state of grace.

9. It is unclear whether Orthodox Objectivism will develop an iconography of its departed saints, but at least one Objectivist artist has done so.

Former Objectivist Quote of the Day

"Whatever their source, there seemed to be rules of right and wrong for everything in Objectivism. There was more than just a right kind of politics and a right kind of moral code. There was also a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we could not buy, and right ones which we should. Wrong books were written by "immoral" people whom we didn't want to support through our purchase; right books never were. There were plays we should not see, records we should not listen to, and movies we should not pay to watch. There were right ways to behave at parties, and right people to invite to them. And there were, of course, right psychotherapists. And on everything, absolutely everything, one was constantly being judged, just as one was expected to be judging everything around him. And if one was not judging everything that was around him, one was judged on that, too. It was a perfect breeding ground for insecurity, fear, and paranoia." - Ellen Plasil, from her autobiography "Therapist"

Objectivism & Religion, Part 15

Christian morality versus Objectivist Morality. For the rational critic of religion, it is not belief in God and the afterlife that create the chief problems. It is, rather, the conviction of many religious people that God demands that people behave a certain way. Indeed, I would go farther: I would say that the main, vital point of disagreement between religious and anti-religious is over morality. Dislike of traditional religious morality is the primary motivation of most that passes for uncompromising or militant atheism.

Most attacks against religion are motivated by a kind hedonistic antinomianism. The main target is religious sex morality. Objectivism, in this respect, represents an improvement over most secular critiques. Rand was neither antinomian nor an apologist for hedonism. Her criticism of traditional Christian sex morality is, consequently, fairly reasonable—despite her tendency to over-generalize and draw inferences from Christian doctrines that only a handful of fanatics would ever embrace. Indeed, if there is besetting weakness in the Objectivist critique of religious morality, it is the tendency to assume that Christians routinely follow the letter of Christian precept. But that is not the way Christian precepts work. Christian morality tries to counteract potentially destructive traits in human nature by presenting the opposite extreme as the ideal. Men, particularly pre-modern men, tend to be over-obsessed with status and “face,” predisposed towards violence, and short in empathy for strangers. So Christianity tells them the last will be first, the meek shall inherit the earth, that one should turn the other cheek and love one’s neighbors as oneself. Most of these precepts would be dangerous if taken literally. But, aside from a few fanatics, they are never taken literally. So the extent that they have any affect at all, it will generally be a positive one. Violent and status obsessed people will tend to be less violent, less obsessed with status, and kinder to strangers.

The most problematical element of Christian morality have to do with questions regarding sex. To our modern sensibility, the obsession by many conservative Christians with sexual behavior is pathological. Why should the militant fundamentalist be obsessed with the sexual lives of other people? Why should he care one way or another? Here we confront one of the most unedifying aspects of modern conservative Christianity. Too much weight is given to questions of personal sexual conduct. The inflexibility, the misapplied absolutism, the moralism, the intolerance with which some Christian traditionalists approach these problems represents a black mark against religion.

However, as unappetizing as sexual puritanism, in its religious guise, may be to the contemporary mind, it would be a mistake to regard it as a complete tissue of irrationality and fanaticism. Liberated attitudes regarding sex mores are made possible, not by the greater moral wisdom of contemporary man, but merely by the wealth and improved technology of modern society. In poor societies lacking sophisticated birth control techniques and effective medicines for sexually transmitted diseases, sexual puritanism becomes a necessary evil. Sexual appetites have to be reigned in when the consequences of unbridled sexual activity are so dire. This is little appreciated in the age of penicillin, planned parenthood, and the pill.

So the real problem with Christian morals is not that they were irrational from the start, but that they have outlived their usefulness. However, even here, there may exist a possible exception to this general assessment. If we examine the underclass, we find an astonishing range of blatantly irrational and dysfunctional sex behavior. It is precisely when we begin examining those individuals who dwell on the left side of the intelligence bell curve that we discover problems for which Rand and her Objectivist apologists have no realistic answers. This issue, and its possible relation with religion, will be the subject of my next post.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 14

Evidence for religion. A widespread prejudice among the anti-religious is that no evidence exists for religious phenomena as miracles, God, and the after-life. This is a bit of an exaggeration. There are, as a matter of fact, evidentiary claims made on behalf of all religious phenomena. The religious, for instance, consider their scriptures to constitute evidence, arguing that such scriptures constitute the history of actual events as related by eyewitnesses. And it would be a mere semantic quibble to deny that such things are evidence. The question is whether they constitute valid or relevant evidence. In this light, scriptural evidence, once subjected to rigorous textual criticism, falls way short of the mark.

There are, to be sure, other types of evidence. In Patrick Glynn’s book, God: The Evidence we find a sample of some of the evidentary claims made on behalf of religious faith. First, there is the run through of the improbable universe evidence which, though greatly strengthens the case for agnosticism and gives a generous toehold to deism, hardly gets us to a legitimate position of actual religious faith, with all the concomitant theological bells and whistles. Glynn then offers us some intriguing though hardly conclusive evidence of the utility of religion as psychological therapy and medical placebo. But evidence of utility can hardly be equated with evidence of truth or existence. We know from Sorel and Pareto that false views, or “myths,” can be useful despite being false. So what, then, is Glynn left with? He presents, in his last chapter on evidence, one of the stranger and more confounding phenomena to confront human intelligence in recent years, so-called near death experiences (NDE), with their bizarre tunnels, “mystical” lights, out-of-body experiences and “life reviews.”

Objectivism, of course, would reject the very notion that such experiences could be evidence of anything other than a warped epistemology. The so-called “paranormal,” as Objectivists have told me, is a contradiction, and therefore can’t exist. It’s a claim that a person can sense things that don’t come from the senses—a palpable absurdity. This view, however, is based on a confusion regarding logic. Contradictions can only exist between two propositions. No single claim about a matter of fact, regardless of how strange or incongruous with normal experience, can ever be a contradiction. It can only be a contradiction in relation to another claim of truth; and it is only false if it contradicts a claim that is actually true. Hence what Objectivists are really saying is that the paranormal contradicts some principle of reality which the Objectivists regard as true. Yet in making that claim, the Objectivist is surreptitiously assuming the very point at issue, and is himself committing a logical fallacy.

The first prerequisite for attaining any kind of rational understanding of such strange phenomena as NDEs and the like is to overcome the modern assumption that such things are impossible. Such an assumption may be practical and prudent in everyday life. The historical evidence, however, when impartially collected, is, as the philosopher Santayana noted, “far from supporting it, and logically it is untenable. Logically everything is possible; and if a certain sequence of events happens not to be found in our experience, nothing proves that it may not occur beyond.”

With this in mind, let us examine the naturalistic explanation of NDE, known as the “dying brain hypothesis,” compliments of Susan Blackmore:

Severe stress, extreme fear and cerebral anoxia all cause cortical disinhibition and uncontrolled brain activity, and we already have most of the ideas needed to understand why this should cause NDEs. Tunnels and lights are frequently caused by disinhibition in visual cortex, and similar noises occur during sleep paralysis. OBEs [i.e., Out-of-Body-Experiences] and life reviews can be induced by temporal lobe stimulations… The visions of other worlds and spiritual beings might be real glimpses into another world, but against that hypothesis is evidence that people generally describe other worlds that fit their cultural upbringing. For example, Christians report seeing Jesus, angels and a door or gate to heaven, while Hindus are more likely to meet the king of the dead and his messengers, the Yamdoots.

For the most part, this is a respectable hypothesis—though it is only a hypothesis, as Blackmore herself has stated. I would merely quibble with the relevance of playing the temporal-lobe-stimulation card. Blackmore is not bringing up lobe stimulations merely to disprove that NDEs provide a glimpse into another world: she is also using them to reaffirm the epiphenomenal nature of consciuosness. The fact that specific characteristics of NDEs can be artificially stimulated allegedly proves that NDEs are brain events arising from physical processes. This is the steam-whistle theory of consciousness smuggled into the discussion on NDEs. It should raise alarms even among those who believe that NDEs are purely “natural” phenomenon.

What about the other side of the argument? Is there any possibility that these NDEs constitute a veritable intimation of immortality—a glimpse into the “undiscover’d country from whose bourne no traveller returns”? Those who regard NDEs as evidence for an after-life attempt to stress the difficulty of explaining them on materialistic or conventionally naturalistic grounds. Even Blackmore concedes that some phenomenon associated with NDEs could potentially raise problems for materialism. She relates the experience of a 44 year old man who, while still comatose, had his dentures removed by a nurse. When he saw the same nurse for the first time a week later, he said, “Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are.” (Supposedly, during his NDE, this individual had seen the nurse remove his dentures.) There are other reports of individuals having out-of-body experiences during NDEs and remembering seeing things they could not have possibly witnessed while comatose. One of the strangest episodes involves singer and songwriter Pam Reynolds, who was subjected to a desperate procedure to remove a grossly swollen blood in the brain stem in which her body temperature was lowered to sixty degrees. All her vital signs, including her EEG brain waves, flattened to silence. As the surgeon began cutting her skull, Reynold’s felt herself “pop” outside her body and hover above the operating table. She would later describe, with considerable accuracy for a person who knew nothing about surgical practice, the Midas Rex bone saw used to cut into her head. She also described the nurses in the operating room and listened to what they were saying. In short, a very strange experience all way around, very difficult to explain on materialistic grounds. “These cases are potentially important,” admits Blackmore, “because if they are true, then there is something seriously wrong with all materialist and functionalist theories of consciousness.”

Do such experiences constitute, not merely proof against materialism, but evidence for God and the after-life? That is difficult to say. While NDEs aren’t easily explicable on conventionally naturalistic grounds, perhaps its the narrowness of this conventional naturalism that is at fault. Nature, after all, may be as strange as she likes. Yet I can hardly blame those who have experienced NDEs for regarding them as a glimpse into the after-life and as evidence for their religious convictions. To be sure, whether they are or not, no one really knows. But it is not irrational or “mystical” to suspect they might be. We will all find out one way or the other at some point. Until then, we’re all just guessing.

The Determinists Strike Again

The Wall St Journal carries the intriguing story of neurological research that suggests many of our decisions are made before our consciousness is aware of them. "This doesn't rule out free will" says neuroscientist J D Haynes, "but it does make it implausible." This is the latest in a long line of results - largely since the introduction of MRI technology - that has seen this long standing debate move firmly in the determinist direction. As the article suggests:

Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for some choices we make are understood only by our cells. The findings lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut -- not by thinking about them too much.

Web Weirdness

The internets are a strange place. I give you the site of one Dave Michael Linehan, allegedly associated with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville yet apparently working from Thailand. Dave is shooting for something called the Atlantis Research Project, which is a synthesis of the environmental work of Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, and King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand with Noam Chomsky and "Dr" Ayn Rand.

We here at the ARCHNblog admit that we didn't see that one coming. But why do we care? Because as well as the Randian connection, oddly, if you click on the link "Enter the Discussion Area" he has for some unknown reason made the ARCHNblog said "Discussion Area". However we know nothing of Dave's work, which seems if nothing else at least highly original. Methinks some fat-fingers coding has gone on here, which Dave, should he be reading this, may care to correct at some point.

"Atlas Shrugged" Movie Denounced, Even Before It's Made

Despite some unconvincing attempts at hype, the "Atlas Shrugged" movie is - somewhat predictably - still faltering at the development stage, with director Vadim Perelman now gone from the project. Will this ever get made? The ARCHNblog thinks no, mainly as it will be impossible, as Cinematical's Kim Vonyer perceptively notes here, "trying to make a film that's going to please both the hardcore Objectivists (those who follow Rand's philosophy) and the average moviegoer who just wants to be entertained is, in my opinion, just an exercise in futility."

So true. And as if confirmation of Vonyer's prophecy were needed, we have this, the second nutty comment this month from ARI-flavoured Objectivist Ed Cline:

"As an Objectivist, I'm happy that Perelman has "shrugged" off any attempt to translate the novel to the screen. It would take a director and producer with minimal respect for the author and the novel to pull it off, and all I can see, given the esthetic and moral turpitude and hostility of Hollywood today, is a story so botched up that I would watch it only if I were bound and gagged and tied to a movie theater seat. I was never happy with the production of The Fountainhead; there's just too much great writing and storytelling and drama in that novel, and it deserved an extended production and length at least as long as one of the Godfather films."

And you thought the "Bonfire of the Vanities" anti-hype was bad...That should give "Atlas Shrugged"'s producers an idea of what they're in for. Funnily enough, Ed doesn't mention that arch enemy of the ARI, The Atlas Society's David Kelley, was script consultant on this production. We at the ARCHNblog suspect that the only way round this might be to have Leonard Peikoff writing, directing, and even playing John Galt. It's amazing what they can do with digital these days.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 13

Deism. In December of 2004, Anthony Flew, who for most of his career had championed atheism, announced his "conversion" to theism. Most theists were delighted by the news. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and a devout Christian, called Flew's book There is a God, in which Flew explicates his reasons for his change of mind, as "Towering and courageous." Atheists, as to be expected, were less pleased. Dawkins described Flew's embrace of deism as an "over-publicized tergiversation" and made reference to Flew's advanced age. To characterize Flew's abandonment of atheism as a "tergiversation," as well as to bring up his age (Flew was eighty when the "tergiversation" happened) suggests a strong degree of petulance on Dawkin's part. But in examining Flew's book, one wonders what the fuss is all about. Having read the slender tome, I find little in it that would offend the non-militant, fair-minded atheist; nor do I find much in it that would give comfort to the devoutly religious. The theism that Flew "converted" to is of an entirely non-religious nature. Flew accepts no specific religious creed. He continues to be a mortalist (that is, he doesn't believe in life after death). He has made it clear that he is deist who now believes that the argument of design provides a more convincing hypothesis for the universe than any of the rival theories put forth by atheists.

Not surprising, most of the arguments Flew presents for his deistic theism run along the typical "argument from design" paradigm. He notes, for example, the gross improbability of the universe, which has led to some rather fanciful attempts by atheistical scientists to assume the existence of multiple universes (i.e., the theory of multiverse). To what extent such design-probability arguments support theism is, of course, debatable. Flew doesn't discuss, for example, the classic arguments advanced by Hume against design theology. Yet, to be fair, Flew does manage to present one argument that, if not entirely convincing, nevertheless constitutes an immense challenge to the scientific pretensions of the new atheists. This involves the perplexing question of abiogenesis:

Most studies on the origin of life are carried out by scientists who rarely attend the philosophical dimension of their findings [writes Flew]. Philosophers, on the other hand, have said little on the nature and origin of life. The philosophical question that has not been answered in origin-of-life studies is this: How can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends, self-replication capabilities, and "coded chemistry"?

Paul Davies "observes that most theories of biogenesis have concentrated on the chemistry of life, but "life is more than just complex chemical reactions. The cell is also an information storing, processing and replicating system. We need to explain the origin of information, and the way in which the information processing machinery came to exist." [Davies] emphasizes the fact that the gene is nothing but a set of coded instructions with a precise recipe for manufacturing proteins. Most important, these genetic instructions are not the kind of information you find in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics; rather, they constitute semantic information. These instructions can be effective only in a molecular environment capable of interpreting the meaning in the genetic code. The origin question rises to the top at this point. "The problem of how meaningful or semantic information can emerge spontaneously from a collection of mindless molecules subject to blind and purposeless forces presents a deep conceptual challenge."

It is true that protobiologists do have theories of the evolution of the first living matter, but they are dealing with a different category of problem. They are dealing with the interaction of chemicals, whereas our questions have to do with how something can be intrinsically purpose-driven and how matter can be managed by symbol processing.

Whether this argument advances the case for theism, even of the minimal, deist sort, is open to question. But even if it doesn't advance the cause of theism, it does manage to provide a strong case against any version of militant atheism. Confronted with arguments such as this one, I cannot see how any Objectivist can continue to regard belief in God as patently irrational. Indeed, if you compare the claims of atheism with those of rational theism, it's not easy to determine which view is more rational. The rational theist argues that, because it's grossly implausible to assume that a coded chemistry could have emerged spontaneously from inorganic matter (see this article for greater explication of the point), it is not unreasonable to assume that life has its origin in some sort of intelligence or understanding that is beyond human comprehension. The atheist, on the other hand, argues that life emerges out of matter spontaneously, by "chance," as it were—that in other words, we all evolved from rocks. Is this really the more plausible view?

I'm not aware that any prominent Objectivist has said anything about abiogenesis. Perhaps it's too empirical subject for the typical orthodox Objectivist, given his unfortunate penchant for trying to determine matters of fact through logical, moral, and rhetorical constructions. Objectivists have, however, commented on deism and not with complete disfavor, either. It's not that they advocate the position; but they are not inclined to criticize it. Peikoff recognizes that it is not a religious position. Yet his view that deism is merely "the step between Christianity and outright atheism" is a bit of an exaggeration. That may have been true in the eighteenth century, but it isn't true any longer. Now the traffic tends to move in the opposite direction. Nor is it necessary to regard deism as way station between atheism and Christianity. Deism seems an entirely rational position in and of itself—perhaps the most plausible outside of agnosticism. In any case, there doesn't seem any strong reasons to object to it.

If, however, deism is not a religious doctrine (as even Peikoff admits), this raises questions as to the point of atheism, particularly of the uncompromising or militant type. What is objectionable in specific religions is not the belief in God per se, but the belief that God wants everyone to act in certain ways. If so, then the real point of issue is the morality put forth by the religious, not their belief in God. Why, then, bring up the issue of God at all?

Ayn Rand And The World She Made

Anne Heller's much awaited new biography is scheduled for February 09. For a flavour of Heller's style, which appears to be a refreshing change from the fervid toadying of likes of James Valliant, try this New York Observer piece.

(Hat tip to Neil Parille)

Old News

It's pretty old news now that the grandioise, heavily Objectivist-influenced education project Founders College has gone belly up. But given that we at the ARCHNblog were on its case fairly thoroughly from the git-go, we suppose we should note its passing even if belatedly. Our sympathies of course to the students.

In the miscellaneous commentary flying around, this very oddball remark from ARI-approved author Ed Cline stood out:

"I attended the formal opening of Founders. Intially, the opening was I guess standard, but then it began to take on a "religious" character that raised a few flags in my mind. Then the conductor, who was also scheduled to teach music at Founders, led the orchestra in a composition which I immediately dubbed "An Ode to Tylenol Headaches" (atonal, mind-splitting rubbish). I was seated in the rear next to Gary Hull. I heard him exclaim some expletives. I wasn't far off myself in that regard. He got up and walked out of sight to have a smoke. I joined him for a smoke, for I wasn't about to sit still and be assualted by the noise. Dr.Hull in so many words wondered where Fuller found the "creep." I sympathized. So, that whole event left a very bad taste in my mouth."

Why, obviously some non-Objectivist premises had mysteriously crept in to Founders...so no wonder it failed! Hilarious.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 12

Agnosticism. Peikoff has this to say of agnosticism:

[There is] a widespread approach to ideas which Objectivism repudiates altogether: agnosticism. I mean this term in a sense which applies to the question of God, but to many other issues also, such as extra-sensory perception or the claim that the stars influence man’s destiny. In regard to all such claims, the agnostic is the type who says, “I can’t prove these claims are true, but you can’t prove they are false, so the only proper conclusion is: I don’t know; no one knows; no one can know one way or the other.”

The agnostic viewpoint poses as fair, impartial, and balanced. See how many fallacies you can find in it. Here are a few obvious ones: First, the agnostic allows the arbitrary into the realm of human cognition. He treats arbitrary claims as ideas proper to consider, discuss, evaluate—and then he regretfully says, “I don’t know,” instead of dismissing the arbitrary out of hand. Second, the onus-of-proof issue: the agnostic demands proof of a negative in a context where there is no evidence for the positive. “It’s up to you,” he says, “to prove that the fourth moon of Jupiter did not cause your sex life and that it was not a result of your previous incarnation as the Pharaoh of Egypt.” Third, the agnostic says, “Maybe these things will one day be proved.” In other words, he asserts possibilities or hypotheses with no jot of evidential basis.

Peikoff here misrepresents agnosticism. He equates agnosticism with the creed of “I don’t know” and “Anything is possible." Is Peikoff right in his description of agnosticism? Perhaps we should turn to some actual agnostics to find out. And there is no better witness to call to the stand than the man who originally coined the term, Thomas Henry Huxley. Here is Huxley’s description of agnosticism:

Agnosticism … is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, "Try all things, hold fast by that which is good" it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him; it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.

Now many Objectivists will protest Huxley’s use of the word faith, but here it is important to understand that Huxley is not advocating a blind faith (he was scientist, after all) but a justified faith—justified by the fruits of experience. Huxley understands that you cannot prove your starting points; that you have to begin with faith and then see how it works out. If your faith is corroborated by experiential trials that you subject it to, you are justified in keeping fast to it. Otherwise, you try something else. Agnosticism, then, for Huxley is simply the critical method of thinking. It means always keeping an open mind to new evidence. As Huxley puts it: “The results of the working out of the agnostic principle will vary according to individual knowledge and capacity, and according to the general condition of science. That which is unproven today may be proven by the help of new discoveries to-morrow. The only negative fixed points will be those negations which flow from the demonstrable limitation of our faculties. And the only obligation accepted is to have the mind always open to conviction.”

“Do not block the path of inquiry!” insisted philosopher C. S. Peirce. This is the great danger for those who believe that knowledge, in order to be useful, must be "certain:" that they will close their minds to new evidence, because, after all, the debate is over, certainty has been achieved! The path to inquiry is blocked by the de facto dogmatism of all claims to certainty. All Huxley’s agnosticism is trying to insist upon is to keep the mind open, keep the path to inquiry clear.

Peikoff mischaracterizes agnosticism as insisting on the proof of negatives. But that’s not in the least true. Agnosticism is merely pointing out that lack of evidence does not constitute proof that something doesn’t exist. This is not the same thing as saying that the all things are possible. Nor is it claiming we can’t have any beliefs or suspicions about extra-empirical entities such as the God of the Bible. There is nothing contradictory in an agnostic saying he doesn’t believe in that sort of God. But he doesn’t regard this belief as “certain” and determined for all time. The agnostic remains a steadfast fallibilist. He remains open to any new evidence that might be brought forth on the question. And so, when the agnostic H. L. Mencken was asked what he would do if, following his earthly demise, he suddenly found himself confronted by the twelve apostles, he answered: “I would simply say, ‘Gentlemen, I was mistaken.’”

Philosophy and Conduct

Does belief in the relativity of truth lead to dishonesty? A fascinating article in the San Francisco Examiner looks into the differences between conservatives and liberals on the question of honesty. The empirical evidence on the question leads to some interesting questions regarding the relation between philosophical ideas and a commitment to honest dealing.

A number of studies have found that conservatives tend to place more emphasis on honesty than liberals. Far more liberals than conservatives are willing to condone dishonesty on taxes, welfare benefits, illegal downloads, academic tests, and in business. “A study in the Journal of Business Ethics involving 392 college students found that stronger beliefs toward “conservatism” translated into “higher levels of ethical values. ” Academics concluded in the Journal of Psychology that there was a link between ‘political liberalism’ and ‘lying in your own self-interest,’ based on a study involving 156 adults. Liberals were more willing to ‘let others take the blame’ for their own ethical lapses, ‘copy a published article’ and pass it off as their own, and were more accepting of ‘cheating on an exam,’ according to still another study in the Journal of Business Ethics."

How can we explain this dishonesty gap between right and left? Peter Schweitzer, the author of the Examiner article, advances the following thesis:

The honesty gap is ... not a result of “bad people” becoming liberals and “good people” becoming conservatives. In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.

Sixties organizer Saul Alinsky, who both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say inspired and influenced them, once said the effective political advocate “doesn’t have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing, everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”

Is the greater dishonesty among liberals a logical consequence of philosophical premises, as Schweitzer suggests? If so, what role, if any, does religion play in this? After all, conservatives tend to be more religious than liberals. Can religion make people more honest?

I personally find Schweitzer’s thesis to be somewhat implausible. In the first place, most people, whether they regard themselves as liberals or conservatives, right or left, aren’t sophisticated enough in their thinking to logical deduce dishonesty from the relativity of truth. Moreover, if you examine reasons people give to justify their dishonesty, it quickly becomes apparent that these reasons are mere rationalizations. Hence, illegal downloading is justified on the grounds that it only hurts big corporations. Evading taxes is justified on the grounds that the money will go to fund an “illegal war.” Cheating on an exam is justified on the grounds that “everybody does it.” These reasons for dishonesty are themselves crude and poorly thought out that they are obviously rationalizations. But what, specifically, are they rationalizations? They are rationalizing psychological complexes that lack strong moral sentiments in favor of honesty. In other words, these are people who suffer from a weak moral conscience. They may also lack the discipline required to keep to the “straight and narrow” demanded by honesty. Remaining honest can be difficult. It involves resisting temptations of immediate gratification. Dishonesty allows people to achieve goals and acquire things without earning them—that is, without doing the hard work necessary to pass an exam or purchase legal music online or pull of the rewarding business deal.

One way in which religion may actually help people be honest is through using community-based pressure to motivate people to do the right thing. One thing I have noticed examining studies of the relation between religion and conduct is that religious belief per se does not seem to make much difference: it is church attendance that is critical. Church attendance motives people to honest because they are afraid that if they lie or cheat, they will lose face with the other members of the church. Secularism has struggled to develop an institution that has the same motivational effect on people.

Objectivism & Religion, Part 11

Peikoff’s arguments against God. Peikoff, in his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, provides several arguments against the existence of God. The arguments are all “metaphysical” in the bad (i.e., Aristotelean) sense of the word; that is to say, they are all guilty of attempting to determine matters of fact by means of logical or moral or rhetorical constructions. The existence of God, however, is an entirely empirical question: either there’s convincing evidence for God’s existence or there isn’t. It is in respect to the evidence that we must judge the question. Metaphysical reasonings based on so-called “axioms” are cognitively useless.

Peikoff claims that all the arguments for God’s existence contradict the Objectivist axioms:

Is God the creator of the universe? Not if existence has primacy over consciousness.

Is God the designer of the universe? Not if A is A. The alternative to “design” is not “chance.” It is causality.

Is God omnipotent? Nothing and no one can alter the metaphysically given.

Is God infinite? “Infinite” does not mean large; it means larger than any specific quantity, i.e., of no specific quantity. An infinite quantity would be a quantity without identity. But A is A. Every entity, accordingly, is infinite.

Can God perform miracles? A “miracle” does not mean merely the unusual…. A miracle is an action not possible to the entities involved by their nature; it would be a violation of identity.

Is God purely spiritual? “Spiritual” means pertaining to consciousness, and consciousness is a faculty of certain living organisms…. A consciousness transcending nature would be a faculty transcending organism and object. So far from being all-knowing such a thing would have neither means nor content of perception; it would be nonconscious. [OPAR, 31-32]

These arguments against theism are even worse than the rationalistic arguments made on the theistic side, such as the wretched cosmological and ontological “proofs” for God’s existence. They all seek to leverage the scandalous vagueness of abstruse terms to reach conclusions that the premises cannot support.

Two of the three Objectivist axioms are tautologies. The problem with tautologies is not that they are false, but that they are trivial: nothing of any consequence can be derived from them. The tautology existence exists is logically consistent with every proposition about existence, including the proposition God exists.

Peikoff’s first argument makes uses of the one non-tautological axiom, the axiom of consciousness, which claims that “one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.” Rand believed that from this axiom (with assistance from the other two) sprung a further principle, known as the primacy of existence over consciousness. This is a rather incoherent distinction. Since consciousness (as Rand’s second axiom declares) exists, then consciousness must be part of existence. So what then does it mean to say that existence is primary over consciousness? What Rand is really asserting is the primacy of that portion of existence that is not conscious: that is, she is asserting the primacy of matter. Primacy in what sense? Well, here’s where we run into problems of ambiguity. Rand claims that those who deny the primacy of existence believe that existence is “created” by consciousness. Plato, Christianity, and German Idealism are all presented as advocates of this view. Unfortunately, no Objectivist has ever provided any evidence of a genuine platonist or Christian or German Idealist who actually holds that view. Idealists don’t believe consciousness creates existence. Nor do they believe in the primacy of consciousness. What they believe in is the primacy of the contents of consciousness—which is something different. Where those contents ultimately come from is a matter of debate between various idealist factions; but I’m not aware of any faction that declares that all of existence is “created” by consciousness.

When Peikoff declares that God can’t be the creator of existence because existence is primary, what has he established? He’s established nothing. No theist, Christian or otherwise, ever asserted that God created existence. God, it is claimed, created the “heavens and the earth” or the “universe”—which, again, is something different. Since God existed before the creation of the universe, any notion of God creating “existence” is absurd. Peikoff is here playing fast and loose with the term existence, trying to use it as if it were a precise synonym for universe or material world.

When Peikoff declares that God can’t be the designer of the universe, because that would violate A is A, he is once more trying to draw non-tautological rabbits from tautological hats. A is A merely asserts the identity of any specific symbol of consciousness to itself. Objectivists try to extend this self-evident but tautological notion of identity into a kind of declaration of the intelligibility of reality. Things must have identity, or else how could we ever come to know them? This implicit premise of Objectivism, masked by the often repeated mantra A is A, is problematic in several directions. While it is true that intelligibility is a precondition of knowledge, this does not mean that intelligibility is also a precondition of existence as well—not if we wish to be consistent with realism. Realism asserts that material objects have a place, movement, origin and destiny of their own, regardless of what the individual may think or fail to think about them. Embedded in this view is the possibility of both error and unintelligibility. Since the object of knowledge lays beyond the realm of consciousness, the possibility not only of error, but of partial unknowability cannot be ruled out of hand. As Santayana once noted: "There may be surds, there may be hard facts, there may be dark abysses before which intelligence must be silent, for fear of going mad." Although every existent must have a nature, that does not mean that every existent is identifiable to consciousness. Not every aspect of the universe exists for the convenience of our intellects. To think otherwise is to flounder into the morass of idealism.

While implicit notions of intelligibility indicate the essential incoherency of the third Objectivist axiom, even more serious is its lack of specificity. Objects, this axiom asserts, must have identity, but it may be any identity. Therefore no specific identity can be ruled out of hand. For this reason, Peikoff’s is wrong to assume that A is A contradicts the theistic premise of God as a designer. If the universe actually was “designed” by God, then that is the identity the universe manifests—end of issue.

Peikoff next asserts that God cannot be omnipotent because “no one can alter the metaphysically given.” But how does he know this? That statement cannot be deduced from any of the axioms, because the axioms don’t contain any empirical content. If God exists and is capable of altering the “metaphysically given,” then his existence and identity are included in these supposed facts. There is nothing in the Objectivist axioms, if taken in their self-evident sense, that would necessarily over-rule this.

Peikoff’s take on infinity is bizarre. “ An infinite quantity would be a quantity without identity,” he asserts. But here he commits the error pointed out earlier of confusing what is identifiable to the human mind with what exists in reality. On realist premises you cannot assume that everything that exists must be intelligible (i.e., identifiable) to the human mind. It is possible that some things may be unintelligible. Hence we cannot rule out the possible existence of infinity.

Nor do miracles violate the so-called “law of identity.” If nature of the universe is such that miracles are possible, then miracles are part of the identity of the universe. Again, it’s important to appreciate how useless metaphysical arguments are to ascertaining facts of reality.

The final objection that Peikoff raises to theism may be the silliest. If reduced to essentials, it would read as follows: God cannot be purely spiritual because a purely spiritual entities are impossible. And not only that, but since non-spiritual entities lack both the means and the content of perception, they can’t be all-knowing. Yet this all rests of the assumption that only physical bodies can be conscious. While this may be true, it doesn’t follow from the Objectivist axioms. As to Peikoff’s additional assertion—I don’t see what the point Peikoff is trying to make in raising it. On the (gratuitous) assumptions of his own argument, a non-physical spiritual entity cannot possibly exist. But if such an entity is impossible, why is he claiming that this impossible entity can’t also be all-knowing? If it can’t exist, questions about whether it is all-knowing are beside the point. So why bring it up?

Peikoff concludes with the following assertion: “At every point, the notion [of God] clashes with the facts of reality and with the precondition of thought.” For better or worse, Peikoff’s metaphysical arguments only address the second of these two problems, i.e., the preconditions of thought. He doesn’t make a factual case against God. Facts involve presenting evidence, and Peikoff provides no evidence, just rationalistic speculation. Even worse, his “precondition of thought” arguments rest on idealist premises. Reality cannot be solely judged on the basis of preconditions of thought—not unless you assume that all of reality is amenable to human thought. That is an assumption accepted by various forms of idealism. But a realist must recognize the possibility that some aspects reality might be unknowable; and this assumption defeats Peikoff’s “preconditions of thought” argumentation at its core.

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.