I almost
never talked about Ayn Rand in grad school, mostly because her ideas are stupid
and derivative (anything that’s any good she stole from Nietzsche or the
Austrian school). Once, however, a
professor lamented how many otherwise smart and tasteful undergrads loved Ayn
Rand. He couldn’t figure out why, until he realized that these young men (as
they usually were) felt unappreciated for their raw brilliance, an experience that
Yale (where your average kid is pretty dang sharp) only intensifies. These
kids know who John Galt is: it's them! The many young Randians I’ve met match the
demographic: despite getting into really good schools, they might not have
gotten into the best schools, or might not have won the best awards, or in some
other way were not able to succeed in every possible way imaginable. They are
not appreciated! Their genius is not recognized! And yet these other people are
getting things they deserve! It's not fair! We must have a strike of geniuses!
(By the way, I’ve got nothing against Yale undergrads, many of whom I really admired--especially the sociology majors, who I got to know very well, but lots of other folks as well. The vast majority of Yale kids I met were well aware of the gift of their education, and while they had worked incredibly hard, very few told me they "earned" their spot. They knew they were lucky.)
I have neither
the time nor the desire for a full-scale critique of Randians for the
empirically untenable and morally poisonous world they describe. Most
intellectuals just think Rand is ridiculous and don't bother to engage her. But
this leaves an empty, untended pool that fills with vipers. Something's gotta
be done, so here’s something.
It seems stunningly obvious to me that any success any of us have (while hard work certainly has much to do with it) is ultimately contingent and mostly unearned. Ayn Rand, John Galt, and any of the rest of us are lucky to be alive, to know how to read, and not to have died of malaria. Sure, fine, yes, hard work matters. Sure, fine, yes, there are lazy people who want a free ride. Sure, fine, yes, talents are not distributed equally at birth. And sure, fine, yes, some people have had to work a ton harder than others. There are folks who taught themselves to read, who struggled unimaginably to succeed. And some of those folks might well like Ayn Rand, but most of them—in my experience (meeting such folks, not being one—I've had a pretty easy ride)—know their success was contingent and sympathize with all those takers. I have never met an Ayn Rand fan who was a real-live self-taught bootstrapper (despite whatever they claimed on their admission essays): they had taken social capital and language skills from their parents and schools, and they went on taking all the opportunities that come from growing up among the elite (and if you’re middle class in America, you’re in the global elite). The makers just keep taking.
Enter the Republicans’ anger at Obama's infelicitous insistence that "you didn't build that." Even if the righteous rage didn’t get Romney elected, it did reveal something important about the American myth of self-creation, a myth that might explain Rand’s popularity. If you ignore the parents that raised you, the schools that educated you, the roads that carry you, the government that protects you, then, sure, yes, you are the carrier of your own life. But that's a lot to ignore. We are all, all of us, within communities that are greater than the sum of their parts.
If you’re
reading this and think I’m arguing against the market, then you’re totally
misunderstanding both me and the market.
The invisible hand is often plenty effective, and I think it’s usually a
better bet than a state solution. But even the market is greater than the sum
of its parts, and it’s only able to work with a state that keeps it on track
and citizens who are committed to a certain ethical vision that’s bigger than
themselves. In fact, all of this comes
to a lesson that’s so crushingly obvious I’m embarrassed to write it, yet it
seems necessary to repeat: any human success is only possible because of
communities in both the present and the past. Even a guy living in a cave
who takes care of himself on his own—if he wants to think about the experience
meaningfully—must depend upon a language, which, like old Ludwig W. argued, can
never be private. We're all in this together, and that's true whether
that "together" is the work of the state or the interactions of the
market (which is not just "you" either). None of us builds anything alone.
A lot of
folks have criticized Christian Randians for ignoring Jesus's call to serve the
poor. It’s an important criticism, but it misses something much deeper:
Rand's vision of the human person is fundamentally asocial and self-directed,
both of which are radically different from any Christianity I’ve ever
encountered.
The
Christian God's very self is social (look at all the brilliant theological work
on the trinity), and Christian anthropology is fundamentally communal (such
communitarianism motivates Christian critiques of liberalism’s individualist assumptions—see
Hauerwas, MacIntyre, Taylor, etc.) It is with others that creation is possible
(not as lone geniuses), and through others that we create Church, experience
grace, and prepare our salvation. Of course, there’s a certain Evangelical,
Pauline reading of Christian life that focuses only on an individual acceptance
of Jesus and then a smug satisfaction that all is done. Yet such a reading ignores that the Bible
through which these folks encounter Christ was written by others, that the
Bible itself documents others, and that the Bible was carried forward through
history by others. Even the most
Biblicist, individualist reading of Christian salvation is still incompatible
with Randian individualism. Not to
mention, first, that few if any Christians (including Evangelicals) actually
live like this, and second, that the Gospels are a huge “you’re so friggin’
wrong it’s unbelievable” to anyone who wants to ignore other people. There’s a reason conservative Christians lean
heavier on Paul than on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: Jesus was pretty clear that people need to be
in community and that they’ll be judged by how they’ve treated the least of
these.
That
Christians’ obligations to the poor make their commitments incompatible with
objectivism is already well-traveled ground, not least by Rand, who recognized
her dissonance with Christianity better than some of her Christian devotees. The disconnect is more interesting to me for
revealing something important about how Christians should think about
themselves and the role of contingency in their lives. “Blessed are the poor”
is a hard nut, and one that can be used to justify all sorts of oppressive
economic systems. Yet one of its most
important lessons—at least for me—has been that the poor are better able to
recognize the contingency of success and inoculate themselves against the sin
of pride. If you know enough poor people,
you know they’re just as smart and talented and hard-working as rich people,
and once you know that, it’s hard to feel all that proud about being
successful. It’s hard to be anything but
grateful when you do wind up doing well, and indifferent when you don’t.
I’m not
arguing that material poverty is a good thing (it’s not). I don’t think Jesus was making that argument
either: in fact, human rights—including the right to fair wages, health care,
and good education—can be justified by the Abrahamic belief in the equality of
all humanity. (Of course, it should be obvious—even if it’s not for a lot of
folks—that there are plenty of non-Abrahamic, secular, and atheist ways to
justify human rights as well.) What I’m
instead arguing is that the experience of
poverty helps people to understand something deeply important about life,
something Rand’s philosophy just doesn’t get: success is utterly
contingent. Or, less abstractly, life
often sucks. And when our life does not
suck, we had a lot less to do with that lack-of-sucking than we might otherwise
believe.
Like
countless others before him, Augustine couldn’t figure out why an all-loving
God would make a world that sucked so much.
While his solution leaned a bit too much on predestination for my taste,
I appreciate his instance that what success we have is due much more to God’s
grace than our good works: as he said, there but for the grace of God go I.
Augustine encouraged Christians to cultivate humility and gratitude and
avoid the sort of pride that Rand’s self-created anthropology encourages. You don’t need God for this insight, either.
Lots of wise folks throughout history have realized what seems pretty clear: it
could have been a lot worse, and you’re a lucky bastard if it’s not.
And
that’s another place where the Randian vision of the person differs radically
from the Christian: it’s not just that she denies we have to serve the
poor. It’s that she denies they’re
actually people with rights. She’s most clearly Nietzschean in her
argument that there are basically two kinds of people, the worthless takers and
the necessary makers. Now, for a
Christian, no human is worthless, but that’s a problem with how Rand treats the
poor, which, again, lots of smart people have already written about. I’m more interested
in how this way of thinking affects the makers, as it forces them to think of
themselves as fundamentally different
from the rest of humanity, as superior, special, and exempt. It’s hard for such people to function in a
democracy because any bad things that happen to them must surely be the result
of some grand conspiracy. The sun should
always shine on makers, and when it doesn’t, it’s a cosmic injustice with some
clear person to blame. (Rand herself was just so covetous, deeply embittered by
her critics’ disregard, her romantic failures, her general lack of apotheosis.)
And so we return to the Yale undergrads who don’t understand why the world won’t
already worship them.
To divide
humanity into makers and takers creates a cruel indifference to billions of
lives, yet it also divorces certain self-styled makers from the most important
insight we’ve ever had about the human condition: life, for no good reason,
often sucks. Or, as the wise King put
it, “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor
the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men
of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth
to them all” (KJV Ecclesiastes 9:11). Ecclesiastes, Job, Oedipus, the Bhagadava-Gita, The Stoics, Candide, the
Brothers Karamazov: none of the great works of wisdom make sense to a maker,
because it can’t be the cruelty of fate that explains our suffering. We’re exempt! No, we need the strategies of a
grocery-store thriller to solve the real problem: those damn takers.
It might
be asking too much for our country to read the Stoics (though they’ll change
your life, they’re pretty easy to read, and they’re just about free on
Kindle). Yet there are other ways to
cultivate a sense of solidarity and an awareness of our own contingency. Richard Rorty says we should read novels,
which might work, though plenty of cruel people really like novels. We could
also read the Bible (especially the Gospels), though you run into the same
problems there (lots of slave-owners loved their Bible). The same is true for
any of those other holy books that preach solidarity. Assholes love scripture too.
We could
also try talking, really taking, to these so-called takers, who, it turns out, are
human, have not taken quite as much as we might have imagined, and do not always
and in all cases want to suck the government teat until all is dried and dead.
Yet what I’m describing here might be both the hardest and easiest of them all:
I’m asking Randians to think about what it means to be a human being, and if
Rand—whether describing makers or takers—really captures it. And maybe the problem is that when you’re 19,
or even 45, or maybe even 70—and every injustice you’ve experienced seems like
it can be blamed on someone taking something from you, then maybe Rand seems
right.
But once
your kid dies in a car accident, you’re left with a world that sucks for no
reason except that the world sucks.
You’re left with an awareness that the joy you had yesterday was the
pure dumb luck of fate’s cruelty not happening until today. You’re left recognizing that your dad could
have beat the hell out of you everyday, or that your government could have left
your water filthy and choleric, or that you could have been forced into war or
sex or both back when you were a kid. Or
maybe just that those people who actually did care about you might not have, or
might have cared just a little bit less. Or any other damn thing.
And the
rest of us—who are here watching you—are left, like the audience of an ancient
Greek tragedy, feeling pity for your suffering and relief it’s not us. And, I
hope, maybe a gratitude that makes us eager to help you, and then others like
you. Maybe a humility and a sense of awe
that the whole thing hasn’t already just fallen apart. Maybe a deepened appreciation for the beauty
that does exist, for the relationships that do work, for the bits of life that
do not suck at all, but that are actually quite lovely, thank you. Maybe a sense that life will always suck, but
it will suck less if we’re together. Or maybe we just blame Obama.
