Who’s afraid of Ayn Rand?

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is seen by some as a dangerous influence: an amoral wolf disguised as a philosophic chain-smoking grandmother, whose melodramatic pulp fiction draws in generations of young, naïve little Red Reading Hoods who wonder at what big premises she has. By others she is seen as the High Priestess of individual liberty who rose, Venus-like, fully formed out of the revolutionary swamps of Russia and whose writing soars inspirationally above the cesspit of collectivism, Marxism and religious dogma. Both extremes are wrong in my view. Read on for what I hope is a balanced introduction to some of Rand’s ideas and why you should read her.

“Look into my eyes!”

On Rand the philosopher

In my view it is a mistake to see Ayn Rand as a philosopher first who wrote books to illustrate her ideas; I believe she should be seen primarily as a novelist and secondarily as a thinker who worked hard to define the values that informed the fictional universes she created. Her philosophical system, Objectivism, was after all only really developed after the publication of her breakthrough novel The Fountainhead (1943) and never went through the usual cut and thrust of academic work through which knowledge is usually forged, as Jonathan Rauch argues in The Constitution of Knowledge (reviewed here), because Rand for the most part chose to stand aloof from her contemporary professional philosophers.

One reason she gave for not wanting to engage with contemporary academic philosophy was that she believed their fundamental premises, their axioms and basic assumptions about the reality of existence, the nature of reality and of knowledge (metaphysics, ontology and epistemology), meant they had very little meaningful to contribute to the discussion of right and wrong (ethics). As a 17-year old she had been introduced to Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and was deeply influenced by his criticism of Christian altruistic morals (Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the world she made, p. 42), although later she became critical of what she saw as Nietzsche’s approval of subjective whim: the “superman” has no more right to sacrifice others to himself than they, the masses, have to sacrifice him to their, she came to believe (Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, (1961).

In her biography of Rand, Goddess of the Market (2009), historian Jennifer Burns discusses correspondence between Rand and Isabel Paterson, a conservative novelist and thinker who was an important influence early on in Rand’s writing career. Although Rand had studied philosophy at St. Petersburg, Paterson was concerned that Rand’s foray into philosophy did not have a strong enough foundation in knowledge of what had gone before her. But Rand “…rejected Paterson’s comparison of her to other philosophers, insisting, ‘I have not adopted any philosophy. I have created my own. I do not care to be tagged with anyone else’s labels.'” (P. 127).

Isabel Paterson – a critical friend of Rand

She had some interaction with academic philosophers – not least the great classically liberal thinkers Ludwig Mises and Friedrich Hayek, but rejected the latter for his willingness to contemplate limited government programmes and the former for his acceptance of altruism, which she saw as spiritual cannibalism (Burns 105-106); the thin end of the moral wedge with which collectivists prise open one concession to big government after another.

In the spring of 1960 she struck up a friendship with a college professor of philosophy, John Hospers (Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Anne C. Heller, p. 129). They had long and deep discussions, and Hospers, who went on to become the first presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1972, said she had helped him clarify his thinking on politics and capitalism. But as Heller writes,

“He wasn’t always able to make clear to her how her ideas fit in a historical context or introduce her to new concepts. At that period, ‘she read almost no philosophy at all,‘ he said […]” (Heller, page 330).

Spurred on by her interaction with Hospers, Rand also had discussions with other professional philosophers, such as Martin Lean, a Wittgenstein expert and chair of the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College. After a reportedly rowdy debate with him he wrote to her saying, “‘For my part I cannot recall having argued with anyone as intellectually dynamic, challenging, and skilled as you since my … Fullbright year at Oxford’ […] ‘It is academic philosophy’s loss that you did not choose this as the field of your concentration‘.” (Burns, pages 186-187).

But these interactions were short-lived, and due to her lack of engagement and reading of other thinkers, Rand’s value as a critic of other philosophers and philosophies is somewhat limited. This, however, does not mean that her contributions in other areas are not valuable, in particular her insistence on the importance of metaphysics and the possibility, indeed necessity, of objective reality and therefore objective truth, as well as her ethical theory.

Moreover, her literary achievement, creating a moral universe based on her own vision, is a massive one – whether one agrees with it or not.

Objective Reality

Apart from the content of her thinking and writing, the fact that she has kindled in thousands of people an interest in philosophy, or at least a philosophical approach to the big (and small) issues of life, is also one of Rand’s great achievements. Her criticism of the tendency within her contemporary culture and philosophy to reject objective reality, something she traced back to Kant’s work, not least his notion of the difference between the thing as it is in itself and the thing as it appears to me (more about that here), is all the more relevant today, as we see not only sandal-clad obscure academics but even celebrities and others talk of “my truth” rather than “the truth”; we see the objective reality of biological sex being undermined by subjective notions of “gender identity”; and we see free speech, textbooks, literature as well as historical figures and much else besides, routinely assessed in terms of how they make certain people feel (especially feeling unsafe or some emotional “harm”, often meaning being made to feel uncomfortable, as discussed in The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff).

In the essay “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-made“, Rand writes, “The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward.” (Published in the essay collection Philosophy; Who Needs It, 1984).

From this line of thinking follows what she says in another essay in the same collection, Philosophical Detection, dealing with the popular catch-phrase It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me (made extra relevant these days after Megan, duchess of Sussex, talked about “my truth” in an interview on an American talk-show):

“Truth is the recognition of reality. (This is known as the correspondence theory of truth.) The same thing cannot be true and untrue at the same time and in the same respect. That catch phrase, therefore, means: a. that the Law of Identity is invalid; b. that there is no objectively perceivable reality, only some indeterminate flux which is nothing in particular, i.e., that there is no reality (in which case, there can be no such thing as truth); or c. that the two debaters perceive two different universes (in which case, no debate is possible). (The purpose of the catch phrase is the destruction of objectivity.)“

There may be technical criticisms to make from the point of view of an academic philosopher, which I am not qualified to make, but I do think that Rand throws down the gauntlet to our own present time: if there is no objective truth, if we cannot perceive reality accurately, if there are only “truths” and “histories” rather than Truth and History, if subjective notions of identity and the perception of the world can be asserted merely on the basis of feeling, and if all language is primarily what some Post-Modern thinkers described as “power-relations”, rather than linguistic expressions of concepts that can be logically deduced and agreed upon, then do we even have the basis for thinking about our world and communicating with each other about it? Is debate even possible? As Steven Pinker says: “Each of us has a motive to prefer our truth, but together we’ve better off with the truth.” (Rationality (2021), p. 315).

Rand’s notion of selfishness (AKA rational self-interest)

This drawing by Edward Sorel perfectly illustrates Sorel’s ignorance of Rand’s philosophy

Rand’s advocacy of “selfishness” as virtue and “altruism” as evil is perhaps the best known and most wilfully misunderstood of her philosophical positions. What did she mean by it?

The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, in his article Altruism and Selfishness, writes about how Rand in many ways redefines “selfish” to mean also those benevolent things you do to others because you love them, but then criticises this usage of language, saying, “Learning to love your neighbour as yourself is learning to take pleasure in the things that please him, as a mother takes pleasure in the pleasures of her child. To call this “selfishness” is to abuse the language…”

Scruton is right to point out that to redefine a word (selfish) that is deeply engrained in our culture and language as meaning that which is bad and immoral, to meaning something which is good and virtuous, is very problematic; indeed it is in part the source of the lazy assumption that Rand saw as defensible those actions that we tend to call “selfish”. She did not necessarily do so. Rand was alive to this. In her working notes to The Fountainhead (so before she had systematised her philosophy) she wrote:

“I. The first purpose of the book is a defence of egoism in its real meaning, egoism as a new faith. Therefore – a new definition of egoism and its living example.” (Journals of Ayn Rand, p. 77).

Also, in the introduction to the essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness (1961), she writes, “The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that I hear once in a while: ‘Why do you use the word “selfishness” to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?’ To those who ask, my answer is: ‘For the reason that makes you afraid of it.'” (page vii).

She goes on to explain that the popular usage of the term is wrong because it equates looking after one’s own interest with evil and looking after someone else’s interest with good, i.e. that the nature of the beneficiary is the criterion; the self: bad, others: good. But, as she goes on to explain: “The evil of the robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues is own interest, but in what he regards as his own interest, not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value […]” (p. ix – my bolding).

It is also worth noting that “ethical egoism” is a term that exists in moral philosophy independent of Ayn Rand’s contribution to ethical theory. The key thing to understand from this theory is the difference between ethical egoism: that it is right to act in one’s own interest, and on the other hand empirical egoism: that people do in fact act according to their self-interest, whatever their professed beliefs or principles may be. Rand’s theory of ethics belong in the first category.

In the essay The Objectivist Ethics, Rand explains:

“The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness – which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man – which means: the values required for human survival […].“

By “human survival” Rand means life as rational (or thinking) creatures, i.e. with the freedom and need to think, speak and act, and not just for the preservation of biological existence, but also the enjoyment of art and beauty – it is important to stress that Rand did not see a rational person as a humanoid calculation machine, but rather one whose emotional responses to people and things would spring from his values, and that those values would have been carefully chosen or at least filtered. In Rationality Steven Pinker makes a similar point to Rand. He writes, “Rational choice is not a psychological theory of how human beings choose, or a normative theory of what they ought to choose, but a theory of what makes choices consistent with the chooser’s values and each other.” (P. 175).

And what are values? Rand explains that only a living – mortal and vulnerable – creature can have values, “[…] try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose […].” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 16). Just as Steven Pinker argues, Rand says that values are determined by goals: “‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept ‘value’ is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.”

And that is one reason why the use of force (including government force) is not only immoral but literally inhumane according to Rand: it removes the presence of alternatives that make values possible for a mortal creature – funnily, for someone as anti-religion as Rand was, this is what some Christian theologians argue was the reason why there was in Eden the possibility of sin: man’s obedience to God is worthless if it’s not a real choice.

So to be rationally self-interested, according to Rand, is not about being an unfeeling, Spock-like person who doesn’t care about others, but one who cares based on his defined values. In the essay The Ethics of Emergencies, Rand writes, “Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another“.

How do you arrive at what exactly you should value? Inspired, no doubt, by the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, Rand suggests that man’s happiness is his moral goal – which can sound like a licence to follow whatever whim that makes you happy, even if it hurts others. But two important qualifiers need to be taken into account here: 1. Rand condemns the indulging in whims: this is irrational and something that will lead to your destruction sooner or later, and 2. You are not to use other people as means to your happiness.

So if, for example, a great advantage for your business can be had by your tolerating unreasonably high risk levels for the general public (and you can get away with it), is that fine? After all, they are all strangers to you whereas your business may be your life’s work and what makes you happy. Can you sacrifice these strangers’ interest in favour of your own benefit? The answer to this lies in what Rand says in the The Objectivist Ethics:

“The basic social principle of Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others – and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.”

The key passage here is, “an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others“, a point echoing what Immanuel Kant said, namely that we should never act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. This means that you do not need to justify your existence in terms of how useful you are to others or to “society” (note the common defence for businesses and successful individuals: “we pay our taxes”); you are not merely a tool for other people’s happiness but also that you should not use others merely as means for your welfare or happiness – the respect for the integrity of the individual cuts both ways.

Those with a cartoonish (mis-)understanding of Rand tend to think that she is favouring Nietzschean supermen trampling all over the weak and worthless common people. Although, as mentioned above, she did study Nietzsche and found his criticism of the Christian “slave morality” compelling, she also rejected his conclusion that the superman can trample over the “common man”. This is well presented in the story of The Fountainhead where ordinary working people who with pride and integrity go as far as their abilities take them, are portrayed in just as positive a light as the brilliant genius Howard Roark.

Right or wrong?

Rand’s stance on the objectivity of reality, the supremacy of reason and the morality of a value-driven self-interest, are every bit as relevant today as it was when she was alive. The usefulness of any theory is usually judged by its ability to tell us something about phenomena in the world, including the ability to make accurate predictions.

She was wrong to suggest that the only difference between the welfare states of Europe and Soviet Russia was time. But she was surely right to point out that technological advancement would be hampered by authoritarian rule, she was prescient in her warnings against the rise of the religious right in America (Burns, p. 191), and her extremely radical views in favour of a woman’s right to abortion has received new currency with the potential re-evaluation of the Roe vs. Wade ruling.

I also believe that she stressed the utter, almost atomised, independence of the individual too much. The father of British Conservatism, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), said in a criticism of the classically Liberal notion of a societal contract between the individual and the state, that it was more useful and true to look at society, not as a contract between those now living and the current state, but between those who went before us, those living now and those yet to be born. In other words: we who live now benefit from what has been handed down to us from our forefathers, and we in turn have the responsibility to hand it on the the next generation in at least as good a condition as we were given it. This is a perspective that speaks to many current issues, including the tearing down of statues and institutions in the name of “social justice”, and the environmental debate – our forefathers gave us this world, we need to pass it on to the younger generations without having messed it up too much.

Unfortunately, many young (and not so young) people today in the “social justice” movement think they have all the answers; they reject traditions and those that have gone before on the grounds of their imperfect views or lives, and they think they alone have the insight and wisdom to rebuild the world anew. This is in certain ways similar to some of Ayn Rand’s followers, who also believe they have all the answers, or at least in Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, the key to unlock all the answers. They also often don’t value tradition or the collective achievements of institutions, just as the left-wing revolutionaries.

The power of Burke’s formula is that it reflects more perfectly the real world experience of all of us: we benefit (unless we are unlucky) from what our parents gave us and in turn try to help our children. Scientists, in Newton’s famous image, stand on the shoulders of the giants that went before them, and established institutions contain within them the collective memory and wisdom of thousands of individuals and countless generations. We simply are not unmoored individuals floating about in a relationless universe. (Note that Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, is the only main character with no back story, no family, no history of friends, relations or dependants).

I think Rand as a person truly did not understand or see the value of established traditions and their importance in the maintenance of individual rights in England and the former English colony USA, where English Common Law was adopted. And the Common Law is the formalisation of tradition: as Hayek explains in his seminal work on justice, Law, Legislation and Liberty, a Common Law ruling is about discovering law, not inventing it; i.e. when looking at this specific situation before us, what is the most just solution based on what has gone before, established rights and duties, claims and counter-claims, similar rulings, etc. Law, Hayek argues, is older than legislation.

The Common Law tradition made English society stable, and gave stable property rights, something that many historians, not least Joyce Appelby, believe was crucial in England becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country in earth; the country now holding that position, the USA, has a version of the same legal system.

But all that is not to say that Rand’s individualism is without value, far from it. In a world where the state has the means to become extremely and terrifyingly powerful, as we saw in the inhumane Covid-lockdowns instituted after the model of the Communist regime of China, we need to constantly ask what is the purpose of the state, and what is the proper relationship between the individual and the collective. One does not need to agree with Rand to see that her principled approach, always arguing from first principles, always asking “what are your premises?”, still makes so much of her philosophical writing fresh, interesting and relevant, even decades after she penned them.

Rand’s Fiction Literature

I said at the start that Rand should be seen as a novelist first and philosopher second, and then went on to discuss her philosophy first. Well, that was for a reason: I wanted to dispel a couple of myths, firstly that it is impossible to be a critical friend of Rand; that one must either worship her or denounce her; instead I believe it is possible to find her interesting and to be inspired by the challenging and interesting questions her writing poses without necessarily swallowing whole all the answers she gave. Secondly I also wanted to clear up a common misunderstanding, namely that her defence of “selfishness” meant a defence of what is commonly understood as bad behaviour, which it didn’t and doesn’t.

But it is literature that is my area of competence and as I champion the view that Rand was a novelist first and foremost, I should mention the reasons why one should read her fictional works, and the order in which one should ideally read them:

1. We The Living – Rand’s first novel is a semi-autobiographical story set in post-revolution Russia. The main character is Kira, an independent-minded girl in her late teens who wants to study engineering against the wishes of her parents, but soon finds herself in difficulties due to her lack of party membership or interest in any form of politics. She falls in love with the mysterious Leo, and as they struggle to survive as non-party members, the book lays bare bare the soul-crushing dullness of life under Communism and the struggle of ordinary people to survive, sometimes heroic, sometimes pathetic.

WHY read it? It is a very different story in many ways to her later, more famous works, although some of the themes shine through on the pages. It is well-written, in that almost film-script like style that she would go on to perfect – the characters are interesting and some of them, like Kira’s once heroic uncle, whose great spirit we see slowly ground under the iron heel of Communism, is deeply moving. So is her portrayal of Andrej, the ardent Communist Party member that Kira befriends. His character is sympathetically drawn, it’s rounded in a way Rand’s characters seldom are, and Andrej’s development is one of the most profound of the entire book.

It makes sense to start with this because it gives a better understanding of what and where Rand came from: like her fictional heroine Kira, Rand was born and grew up in St. Petersburg (her given name was Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum), and her father had his business confiscated by the Communists. Rand said about the novel that it was her most autobiographical work and it is notable that the tone of the novel carries a sense of vulnerability that her later works do not.

2. Anthem – this is a short story, or novella, that she wrote as she was taking a break from writing The Fountainhead. WHY read it? After laying the foundation with We The Living, this is a nice aperitif to her more philosophically based writing. The story is clearly inspired by Yevgeni Zamyatin’s We (read a comparison here), and is set in a future world that is entirely collectivist. What is interestingly different from this story from almost any other futuristic dystopia, is that this society is not depicted as technologically advanced, quite the contrary: since the global revolution science has gone into reverse, and electricity as well as the use of the personal perpendicular pronoun, “I”, have been lost to humanity. The main character, known only by his number, rediscovers electricity and slowly but surely starts to rediscover his sense of self.

A rather too old Cary Grant as Howard Roark in the film version from 1949

3. The Fountainhead – Rand’s breakthrough novel about the architect Howard Roark, whose fierce independence sees him struggle to be employed as an architect because he refuses to build as his customers wish, unless they give him full creative freedom. He is also undermined by the villainous Ellsworth Toohey, who sees in Roark’s work an unwillingness to conform to a collectivist (low) standard, and therefore a threat to the power of people such as Toohey.

WHY read it? Well, for one it is – whatever one thinks of it – a modern classic. It is also the novel that perhaps best exemplify Rand’s philosophy in the characters and actions of the story. I once heard a philosopher who suggested that Rand was inconsistent because Roark did not follow the demands of the market and Rand was in favour of the market. He had clearly missed the point completely: what Roark exemplifies is both how the ideal person acts, namely guided by his values, not merely material expediency, even if this puts him at odds with society and the market place. Rand is in favour of the market precisely because you may withhold your labour if you don’t consent. Another person, Peter Keating, exemplifies the type who does conform to society’s expectations and the demands of the market whatever he himself may think or feel; he has material success doing this, but he also loses his soul in the process.

Then there is the wonderfully awful Dominique Francon, a dreadful woman who destroys museum pieces so the common man cannot defile them with his uncomprehending eyes. She decides to give Roark the same treatment – she wants do destroy him because she loves him. Keating and Francon represent two different takes on being overly concerned with other people’s opinions. Next is the wonderfully portrayed newspaper magnate Gail Wynand, apparently inspired by William Randolph Hearst and his use of “yellow journalism”, Wynand has many great qualities but his big character flaw is to be too concerned with the masses: he wants to control them, but in the process ends up being controlled by them.

The arch-villain of the book is the highly intelligent and utterly amoral Ellsworth Toohey, partly inspired by the British economist and political scientist Harold Laski. He believes that in order to exert control over the masses, one must undermine their belief in individual greatness and achievement, and Roark’s stubborn independence stands in the way of this project. It is all going very well according to Toohey’s plan, when an unforeseen thing happens: a couple of swindlers wanting a holiday-home property project to fail, hire Roark, believing based on what Toohey has written about him in Wynand’s newspaper, that he is a rotten architect and will create such ugly holiday homes that no-one will want to buy them.

On the pages of The Fountainhead Rand show-cases the script-writing skills she had developed whilst working in Hollywood for Cecil B. DeMille: the characters are larger than life, the surroundings brought to life through carefully scripted mise-en-scene, the dialogue is snappy, often with more than a hint of Bogartesque film-noir. If you only wanted to read one book by Ayn Rand this would have to be the one I would recommend: it sums up her philosophy – not least in the great court-room scene – and it is a cracking read

4. Atlas Shrugged – This is the big one that many quote as a decisive influence on their lives, on par almost with the Bible. It is around 1100 pages, depending on edition, and contains the famous, or infamous, speech that goes on for 60 pages. It was Rand’s final work of fiction and she saw it as her magnum opus, her full and complete statement containing all the main points of her by then developed philosophy, Objectivism.

WHY read it? Whether despite of or because of its philosophical inspiration and great length, the book is a very enjoyable and entertaining read. The basic premise of the story is that collectivism has taken so strongly hold in the USA that some of the greatest minds and talents have decided to withdraw their cooperation as they don’t wish to be under the thumb of lesser men who have wangled positions of power in the government – power that they are very happy to use. As these great minds are on strike, the US slowly descends into decay and chaos.

But not all able-minded people are on-board with the strike. Dagny Taggart, a woman every bit as independent-minded as Dominique Francon, but far more likeable as a character, tries to run her family-owned railway company together with her less able brother to the best of her abilities. This leads her to Hank Rearden, a genius industrialist who is still operating and who has invented a new type of metal that he calls Rearden metal: it is lighter and stronger than any other metal alloy, and Taggart wants to use it for her railway. Hank’s and Dagny’s storylines in the book are truly riveting (no pun intended) as they entwine on their route to the realisation of the evil of contributing to make the current system work.

Apart from the fascination of a story where the great industrialists and business executives are not seen as “robber barons” but creative geniuses who are the drivers and upholders of wealth creation in a free society, the novel is filmatic in its epic scope – in the storytelling Rand seems to have blazed a trail for a form of storytelling that is common these days in series on streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon: multiple characters and storylines woven together by a common thread that only reveals itself gradually as the story is unpacked episode by episode over sometimes several series often containing 15–25 episodes per series. Atlas Shrugged is made up three parts, the three series if you will, each containing ten chapters, or episodes, through which the various heroic characters, such as Francisco d’Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjöld and the mysterious John Galt emerge from the shadows against the backdrop of corruption and degeneration.

R.J. Bidinotto, in his article Atlas Shrugged as Literature, quotes Ayn Rand as saying, “My characters are never symbols, they are merely men in sharper focus than the audience can see with unaided sight […]” It is not only the men and women who are in sharper focus in Rand’s literature, but also the values that she saw as essential for our survival as rational humans beings – not just biological survival, but spiritual survival. The themes she lifts up to our attention are as universal and eternal as human civilization itself – they transcend grubby politics and have relevance whatever your philosophical outlook may be, or especially if you never thought much about it.

An interesting difference to note between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, is that whereas the former is concerned with how one ought to live in the world and society as it is, the latter is concerned with how society ought to be. Both takes are interesting, but one could say the The Fountainhead has more of a practical value in showing what Rand’s values mean to those who live by them in the world as it is.

In a world where social media make us at once instantly connected and utterly isolated, where collectivism guides the expansion of the state to solve financial, health and environmental problems as well as dealing with the Coronavirus outbreak, and at the same time a form of barren individualism emerges in the online world, where people create their own little “realities” making debate in a shared reality almost impossible, we need Ayn Rand’s insistence on adherence to the Aristotelian notion that A=A: a shared reality exists; we have it in common and logic is the path to knowledge about it, as well as her assertion of the Kantian principle that you are not merely a means to other people’s (or the state’s) end, a cog in the societal machine, but neither should you use others as mere tools to your ends.

There is no reason to be afraid of Ayn Rand, unless you are afraid of thinking.

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol or: Buying Christmas

Charles Dickens is often called the inventor of the modern Christmas, not least with his perennial story of the miser Scrooge turned generous benefactor. But what is the real message that emanates through the pores of this story like the rich smell of a newly steamed Christmas pudding? The answer may surprise you.

Alastair Sim as Scrooge – perhaps surprised at my new interpretation

In the first televised debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the now ousted Labour leader was asked what he would leave for his opposite number under the Christmas tree. His answer was very telling – mostly of Mr. Corbyn’s simplistic world-view – because he chose A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, saying, ”…and he can then understand how nasty Scrooge was.” As we are in the season of revisiting this 1843 story, with the BBC’s 2019  dramatisation of the story being one of the more recent productions, perhaps it is time to reconsider what A Christmas Carol really is all about, because I think Corbyn, and many with him, has failed to understand that the story of Scrooge’s redemption, far from being a rebuke of private wealth, is in fact a celebration of a consumerist Christmas; a hymn to capitalism and spending money, and the happiness you gain from consumption rather than hoarding.

The story of A Christmas Carol is well known. Scrooge the miser is visited by four ghosts on Christmas Eve, three of whom show him Christmas past, present and future, and as a result, Scrooge is reformed from greedy, grabby miser to generous benefactor. 

We tend to emphasize the transition from meanness to liberality in Scrooge’s attitude to other people. We make it fit into a familiar complaint about Christmas: ‘oh, it’s all about consuming stuff, it’s all about buying things, it’s too materialistic, too focussed on spending, we are forgetting the REAL meaning of Christmas’. But what is the real meaning? In a secular age, the religious content is largely part of the aesthetic backdrop. Baby Jesus over here, Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus over there. 

What A Christmas Carol suggests, directly and indirectly, is that the consumption of goods and the happiness that can be had from it, is the real meaning of Christmas. The author spends 40 lines deliciously describing produce on offer in shops, then one feeble line stating that people went “to church and chapel”. The story certainly criticises miserliness, but it also, in Dickens’ masterly way, criticises the hypocrisy with which our society, steeped as it is in a derivative Christian morality of poverty as a virtue, sees the acquisition of wealth as evil, but the spending of wealth, ironically, as a great good (especially the spending of other people’s wealth, as in Corbyn’s case). 

This is beautifully expressed during the vision of the first didactic spirit, when the young Scrooge’s fiancé decides to break off the engagement because of his dedication to making money, referring to “a golden idol” having taken the place of his former love of her. 

Young Scrooge replies:

“‘This is the even-handed dealing of the world!’ he said. ‘There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!’”

It has been said of Microsoft founder Bill Gates that he was never so much celebrated for creating his business and making all that money, as he was for giving some of the money away. This is a modern echo of the Scrooge-story: the Old Scrooge is a miser, yes, but he is also a creator. Not only has he amassed a fortune, he has built a business that employs at least one man directly and perhaps many others indirectly by investments and financing. Mr. Cratchit, who in his toast to “the Founder of the Feast”, referring to Scrooge, shows an understanding of this. But this is not what the novella primarily celebrates, as Mrs. Cratchit’s acid response makes perfectly clear. 

A Victorian Christmas – extolling the joys of consumerism

Let’s look a little closer at exactly how A Christmas Carol makes consumerism the real meaning of Christmas:

The first scene of the story is set in Scrooge’s counting house, after an introduction that leaves the reader in no doubt as to what kind of man Scrooge was: “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!”. 

In the counting house there are two fires: a small one in Mr. Scrooge’s office and an even smaller one in the cell occupied by his clerk. The clerk is not allowed to replenish the fire on pain of unemployment. In other words, the first concrete example of the deficit of Scrooge’s character is his failure to consume more fossil fuels, thus reducing his company’s carbon footprint – perhaps old Scrooge should be a patron saint for our modern day puritans in the Extinction Rebellion movement.

His nephew enters to make the following feeble argument for Christmas: “‘…though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it’”. Scrooge naturally, as he should, rejects this argument with one of his many (in)famous “humbug!” ejaculations.

The next to make an argument for consuming more are two gentlemen, themselves portly embodiments of over-consumption. They implore Scrooge to part with the money he has made to buy meat and drink for the poor, because, as they put it, this is a time of year when, “‘Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.’” Old Scrooge, in another of his rather pointed remarks replies, “‘I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.’” In other words, consuming more could have made him merry – or happy – but he doesn’t go in for that. 

After this scene there is a whole paragraph describing how the festivities are being prepared across the city, with descriptions of glowing shop windows, of poulterers’ and grocers’ doing trade as a “glorious pageant”. The Lord Mayor orders his “fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should” whilst the humble tailor and his wife stir their pudding in happy anticipation. In other words, the trade and consumption of produce is creating the warm glow of happiness across an otherwise cold city. 

What Dickens might have had in mind if writing on an empty stomach

The contrast from the glowy happiness of consumer goods to the gloomy, dark house where Scrooge lives his ascetic, non-consumerist life, is stark and forms the backdrop for the visit of the first of the three didactic spirits – a strange light-emitting creature. And light is then cast upon Scrooge’s past, where his old employer, Mr. Fezziwig, as the first spirit puts it, “‘[…] has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money […]’,” to create a Christmas Eve feast of medieval proportions and abundant jollity. Then, in the next vision – one that most certainly is in breach of the General Data Protection Regulation – Scrooge is shown a scene of domestic bliss from the life of his former fiancé. Her husband, one who clearly must have worked at least as hard as Scrooge to maintain what appears to be a very large family in comfortable surroundings, enters “…laden with Christmas toys and presents.” More frivolous consumerism! 

The advent of the second spirit proves even more overtly consumeristic: this is where Dickens goes to town describing consumer goods on offer; the poultry, the game, the fish, the fruit, the “broad-girthed Spanish onions, the “great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen,” and so on and so forth for 40 consecutive, delicious lines. The depiction of eager customers “crashing their wicker baskets wildly” could have been from the Aldi Black Friday sales. The spirit shows him some humble Christmas gatherings, but the main scene of that vision is the house of aforementioned nephew Fred, where a solidly middle-class feast is held, with food and wine and furniture and a piano.

George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens from 1940, makes the point that Dickens seems to know very little about work. He says, “It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a Cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers.” And goes on to say, “Everything is seen from the consumer-angle”. This is certainly true in the vision of the second spirit. 

But the story then moves to the more austere vision of the third spirit, that of Christmas Future. The two main points from that part are of course poor Tiny Tim’s death, genuinely moving in that way only Dickens can do it – as Oscar Wilde said of another Dicken’s story, ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing’.  The other main point is the happiness caused by Scrooge’s own death. This clinches Scrooge’s conversion, and he wakes up on Christmas morning feeling happy, merry and giddy. His first act as the born-again Scrooge is to lean out the window and engage the nearest boy to tell the poulterer in the next street he wants to buy the largest prize turkey. The next act is to donate to the charity he rejected the day before, whose purpose was to buy food and drink for the poor to celebrate Christmas. He then attends his nephew’s dinner (more consumption of food and drink). The next day, he raises his clark’s salary (increasing the money supply and therefore consumption) and instructs Cratchit to “‘Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!’”. Need I say it? He is increasing his carbon footprint and destroying the lives of Swedish girls everywhere! How dare he? The story concludes with Tiny Tim surviving and Scrooge knowing “how to keep Christmas well”, and we all know what that means by now. He started spending money and it bought him happiness and friends, as even Jesus Christ said according to Luke, “…use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves.”

The reformed Scrooge makes new friends – after he starts spending money

Apparently Dickens’ inspiration for Scrooge came when walking through a cemetery in Edinburgh, where he chanced upon a headstone inscribed with “Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie – a meal man”. Old Scroggie had amassed a fortune dealing in corn, and was actually a generous benefactor, but Dickens misread it as “a mean man” and commented in his notebook on how tragic he thought this epitaph was. It is ironic that a story so widely misread and misunderstood as A Christmas Carol, was itself begot by a misunderstanding. Fake news is nothing new, it seems.

Again I will quote Orwell, who I think got Dickens just right, writing here about Hard Times: 

“…its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious. […] His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.”

But what is “decent”? Scroggie, the Scotsman whose tombstone inspired Dickens, is said to have done more good through his business than through his philanthropy. If you merely give away all your money without investing them, no new businesses or jobs will be created. The message for this, and any, Christmas, that I would like to take away from my reading of A Christmas Carol, is therefore that money can indeed buy happiness, and that it is a natural human response to abhor suffering in our fellow men. Therefore, as you spend your money to have a modern version of the pre-Christian mid-winter Yule-feast, do so with a healthy conscience: you are buying happiness for yourself, for those who receive the presents and hospitality, for those who work in the shops, who owns the shops, who work in the factories and farms producing the goods, and in addition, giving to a charity of choice buys you a nice, warm glow of self-satisfied virtue, if you need it.

Whatever rebellious crusties say, spending money, as Scrooge discovered, makes you and everyone else happy. A very Merry Consumer Christmas to you.

Charles Dickens feeling merry

[This article was printed in the Colchester Gazette on Monday 23rd December 2019]

The End of Free Speech

Is free speech losing its status as one of the pillars of  our supposedly free society? Are words so harmful they must be censored by a politically correct Thought Police before they are unleashed on a fragile populace who are living on the brink of being irreversibly triggered? The academics Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt seem to suggest that is the risk we are running if we don’t change the way universities, schools and even families are operating. 

You Can’t Say That!

When professional provocateurs like Milos Yannopoulos were shouted down or “disinvited” we perhaps did not find it particularly surprising or even troubling. But when an arch feminist like Germaine Greer cannot be tolerated at a literary festival and gets disinvited from a debate at Cardiff University, or a social scientist like Charles Murray is met with violent protests at campus, then something deep down grumbles troublingly. 

How about the creation of “safe spaces“, or the insertion of “trigger warnings” in academic material that deal with certain issues? Or what do you make of the Manchester students who chose to paint over the poem If by Rudyard Kipling, because they claimed he was a “racist“, or the Rhodes Must Fall campaign which has been trying to rewrite history, one cancelled statue at a time, and of course the free speech activist/hate speech enabler (depending on you point of view) Dr. Jordan Peterson who was disinvited by Cambridge University, apparently after having stood next to someone with an objectionable t-shirt?  (T-shirts should always be regarded objectionable, in my view). 

And perhaps most worryingly of all, a new study, published as I was writing this article, showed that fewer than half of students in Britain consistently support free speech.

In their book, published May 2018 but sadly even more current now, The Coddling of the American Mind (How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure), authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt give a worrying yet conditionally optimistic presentation of this ongoing trend in some American and British universities.

According to Lukianoff and Haidt, the situation on campus seems to be: oversensitivity to difficult subjects, including opinions that “[…] go against my dearly and closely held beliefs” as one student put it, (Lukianoff and Haidt, p. 28), overreaction to the use of certain words and phrases, resulting in a culture of “calling out” and “cancelling” of those who hold the “wrong” views or who use the incorrect terminology, engendering fear among the academic staff as well as students, which in turn leads to self-censorship and thus a stifling of free expression, free exploration of ideas and the open exchange of views. One need not be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this in the long (or even short) term will suffocate scientific work and academic achievements.

“Life in a call-out culture requires constant vigilance, fear, and self-censorship.”  (Haidt and Lukianoff, p. 72).

Lukianoff and Haidt have an interesting, if only half right, in my view, analysis of why these sorts of things are happening and thus what needs to be done about them. The book appears to suggest that because children have been overprotected, mollycoddled, refused free play and hothoused for passing exams, they suddenly cannot stand difficult opinions. They compare it to the rise in peanut allergy, which appears to have taken off during a time when parents and schools have over-protected children from exposure to this terrorist of the legume world.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt: friends of the peanut.

Many young people, mostly from middle class families, with little or no experience from the “real world” outside the educational institutions through which they have been processed as so much lean beef, seem to be more susceptible to a culture where they must call on authority figures to step in and sort out anything difficult. These youngsters have been over-protected, and enters – without ma and pa for the first time – an environment they have to manoeuvre on their own, with an insufficient amount of emotional resilience developed.

The authors are also right to consider the growth of university bureaucracy, with admin staff having a perverse incentive to create new roles for themselves, often in response to well-meaning but badly thought out equality legislation and other regulations from central government, combined with the fear of litigation. This, they argue convincingly, has contributed to a culture of “safetyism”, where universities appear to view students as fragile creatures who can be irrevocably damaged if they are confronted with even the whiff of a difficult utterance or situation. Lukianoff and Haidt argue contrary to this view that students, and all young people, are “anti-fragile” as they put it, able to learn from difficulties and grow stronger – if they are allowed to.

They write from experience and with empathy, yet their analysis has, in my view, a central weakness.

If susceptible students and a misguided bureaucracy is one side of the equation, the “demand side” if you wish, what this book skips over rather lightly is the other side of the equation: the “supply side”, or the ideas and ideologies that dominate academia and furnish the intellectual rotten wood from which these problematic attitudes are mushrooming like poisonous fungus.

 

Is postmodern leftism the real issue?

In his book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands the philosopher Roger Scruton exposes the dark hole in the universe of meaning that left-wing intellectual writing represents and how this ideologically founded gibberish risks sucking not only sound judgement but the ability to make reasoned judgements at all, into an ever heavier centre of gravity from which no light of truth and reason can emerge. About one of the most influential of the new-left intellectuals, Foucault, he says,

“The unifying thread in Foucault’s earlier and most influential work is the search for the secret structures of power. Behind every practice, every institution and behind language itself lies power […]”. (Scruton, p. 99).

The professor of philosophy at Rockford University, Stephen R. C. Hicks, in his entertaining anti-postmodernism polemic Explaining Postmodernism, provide a contribution to understanding what a great number of under-graduates find when bright-eyed and bushy tailed they enter the humanities departments:

“Many [postmodernists] deconstruct reason, truth, and reality because they believe that in the name of reason, truth, and reality Western civilization has wrought dominance, oppression, and destruction. “Reason and power are one and the same,” Jean-François Lyotard states. […] Postmodernism, Frank Lentricchia explains, “seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”” (Hicks, Stephen R. C.. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Ockham’s Razor Publishing / Scholargy. Kindle Edition).

 

He believed in sweet Foucault.

Unlike their postmodernist colleagues, Lukianoff and Haidt honourably do hold up truth and knowledge as the central values that should be guiding our institutions of learning and research. But they make only a passing attempt at discussing or criticising the intellectual movement of the 20th century that denies that there is such a thing as objective truth at all.

In chapter 3, entitled The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People, the authors come the closest to discussing this:

“In a 1965 essay titled “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse argued that tolerance and free speech confer benefits on society only under special conditions that almost never exist: absolute equality. He believed that when power differentials between groups exist, tolerance only empowers the already powerful and makes it easier for them to dominate institutions like education, the media, and most channels of communication.” (Haidt and Lukianoff, p. 65).

Perfect conditions for free speech, according to the postmodernists.

They go on to claim, plausibly I think, that this line of thinking has been perpetuated and indeed amplified in recent times by the concept of “intersectionalism”, created by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 and promulgated to a wider audience in her TED talk of 2016.

Intersectionism draws a horizontal line through which a number of intersecting lines are then drawn. Those above the horizontal line are “privileged” (whites, heterosexuals) who can do no right, and those under (women, gays) are “victims” who can do no wrong.

Haidt and Lukianoff believe that certain ways of interpreting intersectionality can risk to  “[…] teach people to see bipolar dimensions of privilege and oppression as ubiquitous in social interactions.” (Haidt and Lukianoff, p. 68). In other words, social interactions, such as debates and talks, become battlegrounds for the power struggle mentioned above, rather than opportunities for the exchange of ideas.

The culture of “calling out” and “cancelling” appears to be the reheated version of the cold dish of repudiation, which Roger Scruton points out in the chapter Extinguishing the Light, in his book A Political Philosophy. Scruton explains that the postmodern agenda is not to argue rationally in favour of certain positions, but to render such discussions impossible, and thus to render their refutation impossible. That is why Haidt’s and Lukianoff’s call for the reassertion of the Enlightenment values of free speech, objective truth and rational argumentation will most likely fall on barren ground. As Scruton says,

“The many ‘methods’ of the postmodernist curriculum have one thing in common, which is that they do not argue for their political posture but assume it […]. In this respect they are theological, rather than scientific, theories: theories designed not to establish some belief but to protect that belief from rational criticism.” (R. Scruton, A Political Philosophy, p. 53).

Debate is meaningless, because all that exists is power, so it is force against force until wrongs are righted and equality reigns supreme (who defines these terms and determines when we have arrived, is anyone’s guess).

The reason I believe postmodern leftism is important to consider, is that it helps to complete the analysis of what is going wrong at campus: if there is no truth, only subjective opinions and a power struggle, the behaviour of students and left-wing activists makes perfect perverse sense. 

Although Scruton and Hicks belong roughly on the right; Scruton is a traditional British conservative and Hicks a sort of American libertarian, this is emphatically not a traditional left vs. right issue. The authors themselves are of the centre left, and many others of the left have spoken out about this new postmodern leftism (as I call it), including the Marxist intellectual Slavoj Žižek, whose attacks on political correctness – for example in short videos such as this one entitled Political Correctness Is a More Dangerous Form of Totalitarianism – has earned him a cult status.

 

Can Nothing Be Done?

George Orwell wrote much about how language itself can become an ideological weapon, not least with the concept of Newspeak from his eponymous novel 1984. In the essay Politics and the English Language, he says: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

The power struggles of language, of utterances and of words (e.g. the use of pronouns) do have a kind of purpose. In my view it is not just to control and police the discourse, bad as that is, it is also to control and ultimately change the way you think. As Douglas Murray puts it in his recent book The Madness of Crowds: “[…] we are asked to agree to things which we cannot believe.” (P. 8). If you are not only “banned” from saying certain words, but forced – either legally or socially – to use certain words, you will in effect be forced to think only those thoughts that the permitted words give you expression of.

This is turn risks feeding an explosive backlash reaction that risks becoming a Trojan elephant in the room, filled with Alt-Right maggots that multiply into disease ridden flies that bursts out of the unmentionable animal and poison the atmosphere for debate even further.

Haidt and Lukianoff point out that the much maligned “millennials” actually aren’t as bad as often made out. It was the generation after them, the iGen or Generation Z, who really made the difference in the campus culture when they started arriving there in 2013 (Haidt and Lukianoff, p. 29). They say that unlike in the past, the current crop of students has a tendency to medicalise the reasons for their protests.

“The new thing appears to be the premise that students are fragile. Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection. There is no expectation that students will grow stronger from their encounters with speech or texts they label “triggering.”” (Haidt and Lukianoff, p. 7).

Based on this they turn their attention to how this generation was brought up differently than the millennials. The main difference is that they were brought up completely connected to the internet, but also, as alluded to above, they were even more over-protected and hothoused for passing exams, etc.

What did they do to deserve it?

The solution therefore, according to Haidt and Lukianoff, is to get parents to toughen up their kids, for young people to take a year out and work before they enter university (not a bad idea in itself) and for universities to commit to upholding a culture of free speech  and exploration of ideas. (Greg Lukianoff works with FIRE, an organisation that campaigns for freedom of speech and academic freedom on campuses).

All that is good and laudable, but I fear wholly inadequate. Postmodern leftism has crept into every aspect of academia, penetrated its very foundations like dry rot eating up the edifice from bottom to top, and also entered the real world of politics and business.

I do not think it is only about a generational shift (although that is doubtless a factor), rather it is about reaching critical mass.

The book discusses how universities have almost completely lost all conservative voices that until recently provided a counter balance to the dominant leftism on campus (the ratio of left-wing to conservative professors went from 2 to 1 in the 1990s to 5 to 1 in 2011, (Haidt and Lukianoff, p. 110), (a minority and diversity issue no-one seems too bothered about). Professors and academic staff today are either those who were young around 1968 – the baby-booming flower power generation, who are predominantly left-wing and influenced by the New Left’s postmodern and post-structuralists thinkers – or those taught by these. This has led to an ideological paradigm shift with a new dogma, where conversation is all but impossible outside the stifling restraints of political correctness.

The grave problem with this for our society, is that it has the potential to make meaningful exchanges of ideas impossible, something we have seen in the way political debate has deteriorated in the past few years, as former US president Barack Obama pointed out in his recent attack on the “call out culture”.

If language and discourse are seen as power struggles,  utterances become dangerous weapons or ideological shields; not instruments of open exchange and trust, but of fighting and defence, of virtue signalling or denunciation.

 

Appropriate reaction on hearing an opposing view.

The authors do try to finish on an optimistic note. They quote Steven Pinker from his  book Enlightenment Now, which I review in another place on these pages, where he says that things generally have been gradually getting better over time, despite certain temporary setbacks. Haidt and Lukianoff therefore allow themselves to believe that if the advice they give in their book is taken to heart by parents, kids and educational establishments, the wave can be turned and sanity can reign once more.

I genuinely and intensely hope they are right, but fear that the only solution might be a Henry VIII style dissolution of our current social sciences and humanities departments. 

This book is an important, valuable and highly readable contribution to the current debate, not least because the authors themselves self-identify (to coin a phrase) as left of centre. It is, however, somewhat inadequate in my view and should have had a stronger and more piercing criticism of what I suspect is the root cause of the problems they discuss: the pernicious influence of postmodern leftism in academia and beyond.