Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (65 page)

In her critique of racism, however, Rand focused most of her attention on American race relations. She argued that the utter devastation in the African American community was a historical product of statist brutality.
Slavery
was the complete negation of individual rights and dignity. In the United States, it predominated in the agrarian-feudal South. Rand agreed with those Marxist historians who argued that it was the capitalist North that destroyed the slavery of the noncapitalist South. For Rand, however, the destruction of slavery illustrated the virtue of the capitalist system, which left “no possibility for any man to serve his own interests by enslaving other men.” Only
capitalism
, with its free trade and free immigration, could squelch the rebirth of domestic and global tribalism.
¹⁰⁹

However, the post-slavery period in U.S. history did not eradicate the problem of racism. In Rand’s view, racism continued especially “among the poor white trash” of the South whose support of this apartheid was a reprehensible by-product of their own sense of inferiority.
¹¹⁰
But Rand opposed forced segregation
and
forced integration. She argued that racism could not be forbidden or prescribed by
law
. And while she supported social ostracism and economic boycott as powerful weapons in the struggle for racial equality, she asserted that racism could not be defeated in the absence of a genuine philosophical, cultural, and political revolution.
¹¹¹

Rand and other Objectivists, such as
George Reisman
, traced the social disintegration in the African American community to persistent political intervention. Those African Americans who migrated north were victimized by zoning laws, rent control, public housing and education, urban renewal, municipal health and sanitation services, franchise and licensing laws.
¹¹²
Each of these institutional mechanisms blocked their entry into the semi-competitive market and ghettoized their communities. Intergenerational
welfare
became the only recourse for a disproportionate number of African Americans, since their low wages were often competitive with welfare allowances. The welfare system, funded by grand-scale extortion of the taxpayer, severed “
economic rewards from productive work.
”
¹¹³
This institutional duality between values and action, money and effort, had long-term deleterious psychological effects on the victims of welfare statism.

Rand argued that in many circumstances, the civil rights leaders only perpetuated the problem by advocating enforced economic
egalitarianism
as a panacea. Since the psychology of victimization was “a precondition of the power to control a pressure group,” many of these leaders sought comfort in the notion that their own constituency was a “passive herd crying for help.” Many condemned the achievers in their own communities as “Uncle Tom’s.”
¹¹⁴
They exploited the despair of their constituents by offering them jobs, subsidies, or expanded welfare privileges. Invariably, the only beneficiaries of such schemes were the group leaders, the welfare bureaucrats, and the politicians who derived electoral strength from blocks of ethnic support.
¹¹⁵

The cultural predominance of the altruist morality and the educational system’s perpetuation of concrete-bound pedagogical methods served to reinforce intolerable African American repression. Children were raised in a social atmosphere that kept them in a state of mental inertia not all that different from the mentality of slaves.
¹¹⁶
In an effort to escape from such conditions, many turn to drugs and crime as a way of life.
¹¹⁷

For Rand and her followers, even though the plight of African Americans was historically unique, it was symptomatic of the larger illness affecting U.S. society and the world. Just as the mixed economy bred racial conflict between black and white, it perpetuated racism in nearly every cultural institution. The statist society required fragmentation, compartmentalization, and tribalism. It is within this context that Reisman has characterized the multicultural movement in education not as a paean to ethnic pride, but as a “racist road to barbarism.”
¹¹⁸
The growing racial and ethnic strife in U.S. society has made the further fragmentation of the academy inevitable.

CONSERVATISM VERSUS
LIBERALISM

Rand’s fundamental antipathy toward
racism
was a contributing factor in her rejection of political
conservatism
. She observed that many conservatives claimed to be defenders of freedom and capitalism even though they advocated racism at the same time.
¹¹⁹
Such a combination was lethal, in Rand’s view, because it served to discredit capitalism. It was for this reason that Rand reserved her most vicious rhetoric for the conservative racists. In 1968, she characterized
George Wallace
’s American Independent Party as a crude, openly fascist movement that combined racism, primitive nationalism, militant, populist anti-intellectuality, welfare
statism
, and a reliance on state coercion as a means to the resolution of
social
problems.
¹²⁰

But Rand’s wrath toward conservatism extended equally to its representatives in the major political parties and in the media. She (1964b, 13–14) considered
William Buckley’s
“
National Review
the worst and most dangerous magazine in America,” and attacked the conservative alliance of capitalism with faith, tradition, and depravity.
¹²¹
Strategically, Rand distanced herself from conservatives because she believed that it was dangerous to have political allies who shared some of her free-market and anticommunist opinions, but based these on irrational philosophical premises (in Peikoff 1976T, lecture 5). On the prospect of
Ronald Reagan
’s election, for instance, Rand said that she was “glad to be old,” and wished for her own death if such a cataclysmic event took place (in lecture 7). Though she believed that Reagan was sincere in his “folksy sentimentality,” she argued that he was a moral monster. Reagan’s ties to the “militant mystics” of the Moral Majority and his opposition to
abortion
portended an “unconstitutional union of
religion
and politics.”
¹²²
Rand had even denounced
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
, despite his heroic expose of the Gulag, for this same integration of religion and politics. She argued that Solzhenitsyn had rejected Marxism, not for its statist and anticapitalist character, but for its “western” atheistic focus. Rand derided Solzhenitsyn as a “Slavophile” and a “totalitarian collectivist” who would have merely substituted a Russian orthodox theocracy for the communist state (1976T). In Rand’s view, no inspiration was to be found “in the God-Family-Tradition swamp.”
¹²³

Rand maintained that the conservative obsession with the
“
Family”
was at root, a vestige of tribalism: “The worship of the ‘Family’ is mini-racism, like a crudely primitive first installment on the worship of the tribe. It places the accident of birth above a man’s values, the unchosen physical ties of kinship above a man’s choices, and duty to the tribe above a man’s right to his own life.”
¹²⁴

Though Rand recognized the crucial importance of the parent-child relationship, she argued that the
Family
was a cultural institution that frequently undercut the individual’s independence and autonomy, breaking “a man’s or a woman’s spirit by means of unchosen obligations and unearned guilt.”
¹²⁵
Devotion to the Family was a con game in Rand’s view, in which the weaker and irresponsible family members are dependent on those who are stronger. Frequently, the relations within the family mirror those of
master and slave
. Just as the stronger members are exploited, they are also obeyed. For Rand, these family figures become “mini-dictator[s]” (in Walker 1992T).

Beginning with her rejection of conservatism, Rand became disillusioned with the two major alternatives in U.S. politics. Whereas the conservatives sought to perpetuate the tyranny of the Family, the liberals sought to make the nation one huge Family, dedicated to the exploitation of the producers for the benefit of the money-appropriators. As early as 1962, Rand suggested that U.S. electoral politics had offered the citizens two major political parties dedicated to the preservation of the status quo. Whereas the Democratic liberals sought to “leap” into the abyss of
statism
, the Republican conservatives preferred to crawl “into the same abyss.”
Elections
were contests in which voters casted their ballots not
for
a particular candidate or program, but merely
against
the politician or proposed policy changes that they feared most.
¹²⁶

It was this early observation on the futility of U. S. politics that led Rand to a more thorough consideration of the conservative-liberal distinction. Prompted by Supreme Court decisions on
censorship
and
pornography
, Rand’s dialectical analysis of the
dualism
in contemporary thought was a microcosm of her genuinely radical alternative.

Rand was a principled civil
libertarian
. Though she abhorred pornography, she opposed all legal and judicial attempts to censor it.
¹²⁷
And yet Rand believed that the censorship controversy revealed the essence of the conservative-liberal duality.
¹²⁸
In the nineteenth century, the classical liberal was an anti-authoritarian advocate of individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism, while the classical conservative had advocated state authority and tradition. Modern American politics achieved a near total inversion, offering “a choice between 20th century liberal statism and 19th century conservative statism.”
¹²⁹

The polarity between modern conservatives and liberals was based on their dualistic metaphysical assumptions. Both schools of thought embraced different sides of the same
mind-body dichotomy
. The conservatives tended to advocate freedom of action in the material realm of production and business, but favored government control of the spiritual realm
through state censorship and the imposition of religious values. The liberals tended to advocate freedom of action in the spiritual realm of ideas, the arts, and academia, but favored government control of the material realm in their adherence to economic regulation and welfare statism. Rand explains: “This is merely a paradox, not a contradiction:
each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom, only to the activities it despises
.”
¹³⁰

The conservatives are “
mystics
of spirit,” metaphysical idealists, seeking to use the power of the state to control the spiritual products of the human mind.
Epistemologically
, the conservatives are intrinsicists and advocates of faith. The liberals are “mystics of muscle,” metaphysical materialists seeking to use the power of the state to control the material products of the human mind. Epistemologically, the liberals are subjectivists and advocates of emotionalism. Each ideological group is united with its apparent opposite in rejecting reason, and the freedom that the mind requires (228–29).

As a child of
Russian culture
, Rand had seen this same political
dualism
before: in the opposition between the religious idealists and the Bolshevik materialists. The idealists, like modern-day conservatives, opposed Bolshevism with their own visions for a theocratic utopia. The Bolsheviks, like modern-day liberals, were thoroughgoing economic statists. Both sides had accepted different forms of the same collectivist tyranny.

Rand’s resolution was directed toward the union of the “homeless refugees” in contemporary politics: the nontotalitarian liberals and the nontraditional conservatives.
¹³¹
Her radical alternative aimed to transcend dualism in each of its personal, cultural, and structural manifestations.

13

HISTORY AND RESOLUTION

Ayn Rand’s philosophical project comprises successive negative and positive moments of inquiry. It began as a historically constituted critique of the
Russian
duality of religion and statism. It embraced a positive synthesis, seeking to transcend
false alternatives
by integrating categories traditionally kept separate and distinct. Given her critical view of
dualism
and her vision of the ideal individual and the ideal society, Rand was faced with the typical problem of all radical thinkers: how to move from theoretical prescription to practical implementation. Like most radical thinkers, Rand looked to
history
for instruction.

ATTILA VERSUS THE WITCH DOCTOR

Though her view of history was far more complex than some of her essays suggest, Rand’s popularized exposition projects an almost apocalyptic battle between
good
and
evil
. Rand’s conception reflects her Russian roots. In Russia, the two main philosophic fashions of the Silver Age proposed conflicts in similar apocalyptic terms. The mystical
Symbolists
warned of the impending doom of the old order; the
materialist
Bolsheviks posited a life-and-death struggle between communism and capitalism.

Rand’s apocalyptic imagery, however, is less a clash between good and evil than one between good and two interpenetrating versions of evil. Rand relied upon symbolic metaphors to dramatize the
historical
opposition and mutually beneficial support that mystics and materialists derived from
each other. Rand understood the value of symbolic figures as an “adjunct to philosophy.” She appreciated Nietzsche’s aesthetic distinction between
Apollo
and
Dionysus
because it enabled people “to integrate and bear in mind the essential meaning of complex issues.”
¹
Following Nietzsche, Rand’s symbols were designed to achieve the same clarity and integration. They encapsulate her repudiation of mysticism and statism, each of which requires the other in order to survive. They formalize the organic relationship between the “man of faith” and the “man of force”: