Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (50 page)

Rand’s opposition to organic
collectivism
was a by-product of her
Russian
youth. In its thrust toward dialectical synthesis, the history of Russian
philosophy
centered on the conflict between the individual and society. But in contrast to the Western-Hobbesian view that people must be forced into a social whole to avoid the war of all against all, most Russian thinkers resolved the conflict through
mysticism
. Nearly every major Russian philosopher, from Solovyov to Lossky, embraced the theme of
sobornost
’
. This Russian concept accommodated the interests of the individual and of the collective through a mystical conciliarity. In their unity, each person was both the source and product of the whole. Each person reflected the organic social whole while being an inseparable constituent of it. This union was typically achieved through an ineffable, mystical process. Many Russian Marxists absorbed the collectivistic thrust of
sobornost
’, and sought to achieve unity through the coercive power of the state.

It is within this context that we can understand Rand’s hostility toward most things “social.” Outside of its analytical usefulness, the “social” became a euphemism for the subordination of the individual, the dissolving of the unique
human
personality into an undifferentiated mass. In all of Rand’s early writings, there is a sustained attack against this social determinism, whether of a religious or secular variety. By the 1940s and 1950s, Rand was swimming against the currents of modern Western sociology. She had unabashedly rejected what
Dennis Wrong
would call the “oversocialized conception of man.”

Wrong’s famous essay scolded contemporary sociologists for their “one-sided” view of man as a “disembodied, conscience-driven, status-seeking phantom.” Most sociologists projected an image of human beings as fully pliable, disciplined automatons whose chief goal was conformity and stability. Wrong (1961, 183, 190) argued that sociology had merely replaced one dualistic view of human being with another. In place of the hedonic, utilitarian calculus of bourgeois, economic man, sociology had created another undialectical, one-dimensional, “reified abstraction.” For Wrong, human sociality did not mean that human beings were entirely the product of socialization.

Rand anticipated Wrong’s thesis by many years. But she recalled a more classically oriented view of human sociality. Like Aristotle, Rand saw ethics and politics as mutually supplementary. For Aristotle, the good man and the good citizen are identical.
⁹
When Aristotle saw the individual as “by nature a political animal,” he was expressing the conviction that human beings lived naturally in a polity, or political community, and that these existential conditions were necessary for their personal flourishing.
¹⁰
Rand inherits this classical impulse. She sees human beings neither as solipsists nor as socialized automatons. As Nathaniel Branden (1980) emphasizes:

There are a thousand respects in which we are not alone.… As
human
beings, we are linked to all other members of the human
community. As living beings, we are linked to all other forms of life. As inhabitants of the universe, we are linked to everything that exists. We stand within an endless network of relationships. Separation and connectedness are polarities, with each entailing the other. (61)

In Rand’s thought, social existence enables us to actualize most fully our distinct potentialities. Rand stated, through a character in
Atlas Shrugged
, that “man
is
a social being, but not in the way the looters preach.”
¹¹
As social beings, we need to live in a rational social world, to bring our goals to fruition, to exchange the products of our effort, and to cooperate in a free association with one another. Our growth and creativity—our very survival—depend upon appropriate social and existential conditions that make such growth possible.
¹²
By extension, Rand argues that there are social practices and conditions that are inimical to our survival as
human
beings. For Rand, it is the initiation of physical
force
that is anathema to genuinely human existence.

FORCE

To fully appreciate Rand’s opposition to the initiation of physical force, it is necessary to reiterate some of her basic
epistemological
assumptions. She believed that we have free will. The essence of our free will is our ability to raise the level of our focal awareness by an act of cognitive
volition
. If
freedom
is an aspect of
consciousness
, it
must
also be an aspect of human existence. There is no mind-body duality.

Rand argued that the mind cannot work under compulsion or threat. If we are to grasp reality, we cannot subordinate our perceptions and knowledge to the orders, opinions, or wishes of another. The cognitive mechanism can be hampered or destroyed, but it cannot be forced to function in a way that compromises its basic nature.
¹³
In
Atlas Shrugged
, Rand enunciated this principle:

“To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying a man’s capacity to live.… Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.” (1023)

In Rand’s view, this is the basic contradiction at the root of nonobjective ethics. To impose an abstraction of the Good on our lives is to attack our cognitive and evaluative capacities, to invalidate and distort our very ability to be moral. An objective value is contextual; it must relate to an individual’s life and knowledge, specific needs and distinctive goals. A moral
action
is a chosen action. Outside of this context, action loses its ethical import.

Intrinsicism
and subjectivism each subvert the possibility of objective valuation. The religionist-intrinsicist, for instance, identifies a “higher” good and typically sanctions the use of
force
to compel people to accept their categorical duties. The secular-subjectivist properly denies the reality of such mystic values. But subjectivism is the credo of most contemporary collectivists, who substitute the “intersubjective” for the objective, divorcing values from their existential basis. Rand acknowledges that these opposing ethical orientations may originate with “mistaken conviction,” but that ultimately, “both serve as a rationalization of power-lust and of rule by brute force, unleashing the potential dictator and disarming his victims.”
¹⁴

Rand focused on the impact that the initiation of physical force has on human cognitive
efficacy
. She argued that in all historical periods, people have lived by projecting their goals and taking the requisite actions to actualize them. Such efficacious action takes place in a spatiotemporal dimension. People must operate on the conviction that their goals are capable of attainment. This is necessary whether they are primitive hunters and gatherers, farmers, or industrial producers. The need for efficacy is necessary for proper functioning as a conceptual being, regardless of the mode of production. Yet, progress in production techniques requires corresponding evolution in the integrative capacity of the mind. Rand explains: “
Agriculture
is the first step toward civilization, because it requires a significant advance in men’s conceptual development: it requires that they grasp two cardinal concepts which the perceptual, concrete-bound mentality of the hunters could not grasp fully:
time
and
savings
.”
¹⁵

Time and savings are the “stock seed” of all forms of production. Farmers save their seed to support themselves through bad harvests and to expand the scope of production. The maintenance and expansion of this
productive
capacity enables them to improve their material welfare and, inevitably, to trade with others. This advancement in production is marked by a further elevation of human conceptual abilities. It requires sustained cognitive effort, which some people seek to avoid. Predation, rather than production, becomes their modus operandi. Historically, such people have seized the products of others by the use of force. Protection against predation remains the fundamental social problem in human existence, and was the ultimate rationale for the establishment of tribal, feudal, and modern governing associations.
¹⁶

Defense against the initiation of force is not merely a material necessity. By interfering with a person’s material production and consumption, the initiation of force also cripples a person’s cognitive efficacy. By nullifying a person’s material efforts and threatening his or her body, the initiation of force achieves a corresponding nullification of the mind. It ruptures the connection between thought and action, ends and means, action and beneficiary, life and value. If our actions are not based on the judgments of our own minds, our survival is in jeopardy. And if, under the threat of force, we choose to act independently, we have also placed our survival at risk (Peikoff 1991b, 314). Force creates a lethal
cognitive
contradiction.

There is an inseparable link then, between rationality and
freedom
, just as there is an internal relation between
faith
(i.e.,
irrationality
) and force. For Rand, “
reason
and freedom—are corollaries, and their
relationship
is reciprocal.” Rand does not posit strict, one-way causality, or logical dependence here. Together, reason and freedom form an organic unity. Each is internal to or constitutive of the other. Rand views freedom as a direct consequence of reason, and reason as a natural result of freedom.
Consciousness
is volitional. So too, is the capacity for action. We must be able to attain our rational goals free from the interference of other people. Reason is free, conscious activity. Freedom is a condition of rational cognition. Existentially, freedom is also a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for human survival. Throughout
history
, “when men are rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins.”
¹⁷

Ironically, Rand projects a view that is similar, at least in some respects, to the Hegelian synthesis. While Hegel’s view of Reason cannot be disconnected from his exhaustive history of consciousness, there are some parallels between Rand and Hegel concerning the relationship between reason and freedom. In tracing the development of consciousness toward philosophy, or “Absolute Knowledge,” Hegel ([1807] 1977) states: “In thinking, I am
free
” (120). In Hegel’s philosophy, as
Marcuse
([1941] 1960) explains:

Reason presupposes freedom, the power to act in accordance with knowledge of the truth, the power to shape reality in line with its potentialities. The fulfillment of these ends belongs only to the subject who is master of his own development and who understands his own potentialities as well as those of the things around him. Freedom, in turn, presupposes reason, for it is comprehending knowledge, alone, that enables the subject to gain and to wield this power. (9)

Whereas Rand projected a corresponding connection between reason and freedom, she proposed that the relationship between irrationality and force
is also reciprocal. Faith and force “are corollaries.” Each is constitutive of the other. The initiation of force is a natural consequence of the reliance on faith. And the perpetuation of faith and irrationality is a direct by-product of the initiation of force. In Rand’s view, “every period of history dominated by mysticism was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.”
¹⁸
Force is irrational; it subverts the very capacity to be rational. It seeks legitimation in mystic creeds and collectivist ideologies. It fragments the requirements of
human
life, and is a crucial foundation for the proliferation of
social
dualism. Each of these themes is significant to Rand’s developed critique of statism and culture.

INDIVIDUAL
RIGHTS

Having traced the anticognitive effects of the use of physical force in human relations, Rand began her social
ethics
with a libertarian
nonaggression
principle: “No man may
initiate
the use of physical force against others.”
¹⁹
This principle is not an endorsement of pacifism. Rand fully recognized that people have the moral
right
to defend themselves, and to use force in retaliation against aggressors. She also acknowledged that force may not necessarily entail violence, and that fraud and extortion are subspecies of force, since they involve the appropriation of a person’s property under false pretenses or by coercive threats.

The nonaggression principle has immediate consequences, which Rand explored in her conception of
individual
rights
. The notion of “rights” has had a long intellectual history, emerging from the natural-law prescriptions of antiquity and reaching its apex in Lockean political philosophy.
²⁰
Criticism of individual rights has had an equally impressive intellectual history. From
Bentham
, who saw the doctrine as “nonsense upon stilts,” to Marx, who saw it as a peculiar manifestation of bourgeois economy, the individual-rights perspective has been greatly disparaged. So it is not surprising that Rand’s own contribution to this debate has incited several critical commentaries.
²¹

Rand’s approach, however, differs from the
rights
doctrines of classical liberalism because it is self-consciously derived from a broader theory of
ethics
. Whereas some libertarian thinkers, such as Rothbard,
begin
their defense of rights with an “axiom” of nonaggression, Rand’s theory is the
culmination
of a full-bodied system of thought. Rand approached her philosophical totality from a variety of vantage points. Since a social existence is necessary for the flourishing of the
individual
, Rand’s defense of rights is her consideration of this totality from the perspective of social relations.
Everything she wrote about being, knowing, ethics,
life
, survival, reason, and the integrated nature of human beings is internal to her concept of individual rights.