Objectivism and Sources by Neil Parille

One of the things I’ve noticed having followed the Objectivist movement for close to thirty years is the extreme reliance of Objectivist authors on secondary (and often outdated) sources and the constant use of previous Objectivist writings in place of original research. As a result, Objectivists tend to fall for urban legends at a rate higher than any group I can think of. I’ll present some examples and give a few potential explanations.

The Fountainhead: Leonard Peikoff

The first book by an Objectivist philosopher (other than Ayn Rand) was Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels in 1982.  This book, which was heavily edited by Rand, claimed to show that Nazism was caused by Kantian philosophy and that the influence of Kantian-inspired philosophy in the United States was leading to similar results. Say what you want about the thesis of the book, one of Peikoff’s main sources for Hitler’s thought was the work Hitler Speaks (also known as The Voice of Destruction) by Hermann Rauschning, a Nazi leader in Danzig who later left the Nazi Party and moved to the US. While Rauschning may have met Hitler a time or two, it’s unlikely he had any private conversations with him much less enough to fill a book. The Hitler quotes Peikoff used portray Hitler at his nihilistic best, e. g., “the Age of Reason is over.” A friend told me that when he first read Peikoff’s book that he thought the quotes were “too good to be true.” I can’t blame Peikoff for using the book because it wasn’t known at the time that it was spurious, but it was known around 2000 that the book was largely, if not completely, fraudulent. Unfortunately, Objectivist author Craig Biddle quoted from the book in his 2002 Loving Life (a summary of Objectivist ethics) and Andrew Bernstein in his 2005, The Capitalist Manifesto.

A while ago, I wrote a post on urban legends concerning religion and Christianity that Objectivists generally have fallen for. The majority, best I can tell, first entered the Objectivist bag of tricks following Peikoff (that being said, some were in wide circulation prior to Peikoff, for example that the United States Founders were Deists).

To some extent, prior to the rise of the internet it could be harder to check claims. However, things have changed a lot since then. To take an example, every year when Christmas rolls around Objectivists such as Yaron Brook repeat the (likely) urban legend that Christians settled on December 25 as Jesus’s birth because it coincided with the Winter Solstice (December 25 under the Julian Calendar). There is no direct evidence for this claim and minimal indirect evidence. Granted, “Google University” has its flaws, but checking claims nowadays is a lot easier than going to your local public library pre-internet.*

Ayn Rand Institute thinkers Don Watkins and Onkar Ghate have a new book, Profit Without Apology: The Need to Stand Up For Business. David Gordon of the Mises Institute reviewed it.

Though the book has much to teach us, I found some of the claims in it, especially those in Dr. Ghate’s long essay on the philosophy of the American Founding, to be exaggerated and sometimes downright false, though Ghate writes with great rhetorical force, sometimes approaching that of Rand herself. He holds that, “as students of the Enlightenment, of Europe’s Age of Reason, the Founding Fathers believed in the perfectibility of man.” I hope they did not, and do not believe that they in fact did so. (Tom Paine may be an exception, but his weird cult of theophilanthropy (not atheism as Objectivists preach) attracted little attention in America. No doubt we should strive to be as good as we can, but to think that we can actually become perfect is not the conclusion of reason but rather the expression of Romantic longings; and to reject perfectibility by no means commits one to acceptance of “radical evil” in Kant’s sense but rather exemplifies a robust sense of reality.

In this chapter, Ghate (the ARI’s Chief Philosophy Officer) goes on for pages saying what the United States Founders allegedly believed without any citations (except mentioning Jefferson’s version of the New Testament, which removed the miraculous). I suspect Ghate got his claim that the Founders believed in human perfectibility from the Peikoff essay in the collection, A New Textbook of Americanism.

Case Study: Aristotle Versus Religion by Andrew Bernstein

Long time Objectivist writer Andrew Bernstein recently published a collection of essays Aristotle Versus Religion. Bernstein’s main source for the history of Europe is Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization (1945-1975). Bernstein cites it 64 times. As an atheist and Objectivist, Bernstein isn’t a fan of Christianity. Fair enough, yet many of his claims about Christianity are second-hand and often unsourced. The atheist historian Tim O’Neill has a website that refutes the numerous urban and semi-urban legends that Bernstein has accepted uncritically.

Here is an example of Bernstein’s “scholarship”:

The Apostle Paul, for example, wrote: “The more they [the Greeks] called themselves philosophers, the more stupid they grew . . . they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened.”  

Bernstein doesn’t even quote Paul directly but instead Charles Freeman’s 2002 book, The Closing of the Western Mind: 

“The more they [non-Christians] called themselves philosophers,” he tells the Romans (1.21-22), “the more stupid they grew . . . they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened.”  

For whatever reason, Freeman used the 1966 Jerusalem Bible (an English translation of a French translation). However, the most widely used English translation of the Bible in scholarly circles is the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), which says:

20 Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse;

21 for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools;

The use of the words “philosophers” instead of “wise,” and “logic” instead of “thinking” in the Jerusalem Bible is idiosyncratic. I can’t find a single English version that translates the Greek text that way. The revised New Jerusalem Bible (1985) translates Romans 1:21-22 similar to the NRSV.  In context, Paul seems to be referring to human beings as a result of the fall, not to Greek philosophy or logical reasoning.

Case Study: Creating Christ by James Valliant and Warren Fahy

In 2017, ARI supporters James Valliant and Warren Fahy published the book Creating Christ: How the Roman Emperors Invented Christianity. This book argued that, as the title suggests, the Roman Emperors directed the writing of the four Gospels. The emperors in question were the Flavian family (69-96 AD).  (It’s not clear why Valliant and Fahy think they created Christianity given that the Apostle Paul’s letters pre-date the Flavians.)  What I find surprising is that Objectivists with Ph.Ds in philosophy fell for such a silly book. The first interview that I can recall Valliant giving concerning the book was with Amy Peikoff, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy.  After listening to the interview, it was clear that she had never read the New Testament. I assume that Peikoff, to obtain her doctorate, must have taken a course or two in the philosophy of religion. Wouldn’t it have occurred to her that there might be some merit in reading the most influential book in Western Civilization? I guess not.

Andrew Bernstein, another Ph.D. in philosophy, favorably reviewed the book in the Objective Standard.  Bernstein writes that the New Testament should be read as a one long plea to support the Roman state, seemingly unaware that there is an entire book of the New Testament — the Revelation of John — which compares the Roman Empire to Babylon.**   Bernstein never mentions that the Roman Emperors persecuted Christians, for example Nero blamed the Fire of  Rome in 64 AD on Christians and tortured them (Tacitus, The Annals of Rome, Book 44).***

Conclusion

I’m not sure why Objectivists fall for so many urban legends and accept the conclusions of fellow Objectivists uncritically. Here are a few suggestions:

1.   Rand was not a big reader, and she wrote in broad terms, seldom mentioning secondary sources, much less primary sources. Many Objectivists see themselves as a Mini-Me of Rand. To get “into the weeds” and consider alternative readings of sources might get in the way.  As Nathaniel Branden once said, his speaking style was to “inflamminate and omnisciate.”

2.   Objectivism tends to have an official expert in any area of thought, and it seems that his lead is expected to be followed.  Objectivism also makes extreme claims that, if taken seriously,  implies that you can’t really understand something unless you are an Objectivist. Leonard Peikoff once said that people couldn’t think rationally until Rand. Perhaps then it’s only natural that Objectivists assume that their designated expert trumps the presumably irrational non-Objectivist expert. As noted above, Valliant has staked out (at least in his own mind) a role as the leading authority on Christianity. Maybe Amy Peikoff and Andrew Bernstein just assumed that he did his homework.

3.  The source for many of the urban legends is Leonard Peikoff. Granted, Peikoff has a Ph.D. in philosophy, but I’m not sure anyone would say he is an expert on the history of philosophy much less the history of ideas. Perhaps Objectivists assume that Rand properly vetted him to extend Objectivism into other fields.

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*In fairness to those who repeat the December 25/Christmas/Winter Solstice story, I heard this decades ago growing up in a conservative church. I recently Googled the topic and the first article that came up was a History Channel video that repeated the story.

**Revelation is highly symbolic and thus difficult to interpret, but most commentators agree that opposition to the Roman Empire is a prominent theme.  While there is dispute, most commentators believe it was written near the end of the reign of the Flavian Emperor Domitian (81-96 AD).   The author states (or at least implies) that he is in prison for being a Christian.

***While early Christian writers may have exaggerated the persecution by the Romans (it was probably not as constant and widespread as described) it was long standing in at least certain regions, see, e.g., the correspondence between Emperor Trajan and Pliny the Younger.  Bernstein’s favorite source on world history – Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization—accepts that the Romans persecuted Christians.