Morality, Wall Street, & Capuchin Monkeys

In Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 epic, Charleston Heston descends from Mount Sinai to deliver morality from God to His people. The Ten Commandments  indicates that it comes from the top down, from the deity to us. We are told what to do and that is that. But does moral behavior depend on rules from on high?

Ayn Rand: Bankrupt Intellectually, Morally, & Artistically

"I consider Ayn Rand to be one of the most evil women of the twentieth century, completely morally bankrupt and fortunately unable to see any of her warped philosophy or economic theories gain any credence. If they had, the results would have been every bit as disasterous as Hitler or Stalin. To me, Atlas Shrugged is as despicable and dangerous a book as Mein Kampf." ( Found here.)

Unfortunately, her ideas and theories did gain credence, and in no less a person than Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Chief, once her disciple. More about Greenspan near the bottom of this piece.

Almost all American philosophers do not consider Ayn Rand a philosopher or a thinker worthy of studied attention. You will not find her works taught in philosophy departments, except as examples of thought gone astray. You also won’t find her discussed in any standard works on the history of philosophy — either in general or specifically American philosophy. There may be rare instances to prove an exception, but that's all they are.

She doesn’t appear to be in Grayling’s two volume introduction to philosophy, the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, or Kuklick’s history of American philosophy. Rand’s writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all.

By the time she died, at age 77 in 1982, Rand had delineated what she and her followers insisted was the most significant new philosophy since Aristotle (“objectivism,” which emphasized rationality as the defining characteristic of humanity) and was hailed as the godmother of small-government, pro-freedom libertarians (whom she dismissed as “hippies of the right”).

Ayn Rand was a self-declared “radical for capitalism” who praised the “virtue of selfishness” in Atlas Shrugged upon its publication in 1957. This 1,100-page, densely plotted tale, packed in equal measure with descriptions of rough sex and paeans to capitalist innovation, climaxes in a Castro-length radio address in which the protagonist, John Galt, lauds “the man at the top of the intellectual pyramid [who] contributes the most to all those below” and attacks “the man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude.”

She is typically written off as a writer whose basic appeal is to maladjusted adolescents, a sort of vaguely embarrassing starter author who is quickly outgrown by those who develop more sophisticated aesthetic and ideological tastes. There’s more than a small degree of truth to such a characterization.

Yet she has become iconic in some quarters. Alan Greenspan admits to having been a disciple, although he allows that he was grossly wrong about objectivism in that he smiled upon unregulated self-interest, which manipulated the financial markets into creatures such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. Recently Greenspan publicly admitted he was wrong about his views.

Recent books, Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Goddess of the Market provide a rounded portrait of a woman who, as one of the authors writes, “tried to nurture herself exclusively on ideas.” As Rand’s biography underscores, she failed miserably in that.

For more click here, as well as at this site and this one.

Who Is Ayn Rand?

I occasionally see T-shirts emblazoned with "Who Is John Galt? as if the wearer signals a secret code to other Ayn Rand admirers. I am not one of them. In fact, I find as pathetic her philosophy, if it can be called that. Her novels are long sermons with wooden characters divided against one another, some for the forces of good (adventurous, heroic capitalists who scorn government interference and public mediocrity), some for the forces of evil (just flip adventurous, etc., over). Hers is a Nietzschean view of the world and her heroes are Übermenschen.* Never mind that she plods along for page after page in strident praise of rationalism when in fact, her narrow understanding of the world reveals she is anything but rational. Hers is a belief, an ism, rather than a practice. All progress, all public good, she says, depends on the elite spirits in our midst, whom we should leave alone so they can make the unwashed masses prosper.

Still, she has a certain following among those who, faut de mieux, had their philosophy of life shaped by her sermons. There is a certain adolescent appeal in carving the world into those who are right and those who are wrong. They don't see that she is a Russian writing to Americans.

Her family a victim of the Revolution, she emigrated to the United States and wherever she looked in her adopted country she found a retort to Marx. Never mind that she didn't look too deeply or too widely. She lived through the Depression; she traveled through slums. Her experiences were bent to fit her thinking. Believers in the proletariat had usurped her middle-class family's place in the Russian status quo. So, then, she would extoll those who rise above the soup lines of proles.

Mind you, Rand was an intellectual force, and she gathered around herself quite a coterie, including Alan Greenspan--who seems to have fallen away from her ideas because of the recent financial house debacle on Wall Street. A woman not unsympathetic, Anne C. Heller has written a book about Rand as intellectual force. It is titled, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Note that: The World She Made. With Rand's thought-saving ideas and with her persuasive rhetoric, an entire political perspective has been shaped. Though fair to her subject, Heller is well aware of Rand's shortcomings.

Here is a review of the book.

*Bertrand Russell dismissed Nietzsche and his supermen as "mere power-phantasies of an invalid."

Adam Smith: Is The Age of The Free Market Over?

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." Today, given the disasters ripping Wall Street financial houses and toppling international economies, that passage might be rewritten thus: "it is not from the malice of the butcher, the brewer, or the banker that we expect to be deprived of our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

Ayn Rand made Atlas Shrugged a bible for many, as that novel turned self-interest into a gospel, the good news to be spread far and wide.

The only problem is that recent economic events have shown that self-interest can be far from enlightened and can degenerate into an ignorant greed that plunges an entire national economy down onto the brink of an abyss. In short, government is not all bad. Laws are needed. Even former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan, once a disciple of Rand, has publicly stated that he was wrong.

As for Adam Smith, he never would have agreed with the cartoonish ideology of Ayn Rand. A literate man, he would have found her characters stiff and wooden, merely vehicles for her ideas. He strongly believed "that infrastructure and education should *not* be left to the invisible hand, and one can easily imagine he would feel the same way about health care. (He also recognized that the position of the laborer was only good under conditions of market expansion -- exploitation ruled otherwise.) His enthusiasm for the market was a *tempered* enthusiasm, and so should be ours." More