Ayn Rand—The Bad

Yesterday I said there was some good in Ayn Rand’s work. Today we look at the bad. This blog post is longer and more sobering given the issues involved.

• Rand was an atheist and as such she failed to take in the whole of reality (taking in the whole of reality is a tenant of Objectivism). That certainly confused her thinking but atheism will be the topic of future blogs so there’s no point in my discussing it specifically regarding Rand.
• Like the communists, Rand rejected the Bible’s teaching of “original sin” and declared that “men are born tabula rasa” or blank slates.¹ That was a crucial mistake.² Rand is rejecting the evidence. What follows is at least evidence to falsify a tabula rasa view which the Bible’s teaching on “original sin” would confirm.

First, in just the last 100 years humans have tortured and murdered each other at staggering rates. Conservatively, the USSR from 1917 to 1989 killed 20 to 26 million people³; Germany about 13 million (not including war dead), China between 26 to 30 million,⁴ and the United States has suctioned, scalded and scraped to death over 50 million unborn children.⁵ It is difficult to choose among all the historical examples of the depth of human depravity, but this one will suffice as evidence for how a tabula rasa view of human persons is disconnected from reality. In 1937 Japanese raped, tortured or murdered 300,000 in Nanking China. Iris Chang wrote about this (warning: graphic violence follows):

The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000–80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of “bestial machinery.”⁶

Second, in response to the Holocaust, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a study where he found that with little provocation 65% of men and women would torture people with electric shocks⁷; In a similar study David Mantell found even higher numbers.⁸

Third, even victims of mass atrocities like Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel and gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concluded that it is the average member of a society that commits such horrors.

Fourth, every genocide scholar I’ve read similarly concludes that it is the average, ordinary member of a population who commits atrocities. I could provide many examples but the words of historian George M. Kren and psychologist Leon Rappoport must suffice:

What remains is a central, deadening sense of despair over the human species. Where can one find an affirmative meaning in life if human beings can do such things? Along with this despair there may also come a desperate new feeling of vulnerability attached to the fact that one is human. If one keeps at the Holocaust long enough, then sooner or later the ultimate truth begins to reveal itself: one knows, finally, that one might either do it, or be done to. If it could happen on such a massive scale elsewhere, then it can happen anywhere; it is all with in the range of human possibility, and like it or not, Auschwitz expands the universe of consciousness no less than landings on the moon.⁹

Those who don’t see something desperately wrong with the human species haven’t looked hard enough—no animal is so intentionally, exquisitely cruel.¹⁰ Apparently we were all born Auschwitz enabled.

• Rand contorted selfishness into an ultimate good and even entitled a book The Virtue of Selfishness. “The proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one’s own rational self-interest and one’s own hierarchy of values: the time, the money or effort one gives or the risk one takes should be proportionate to the value of the person in relation to one’s own happiness.”¹¹ Thus you should only take the chance to save a drowning stranger “when the danger to your own life is minimal; when the danger is great, it would be immoral to attempt it: only a lack of self-esteem” could “permit” it.¹² But, by her logic, if there is any danger to your own life, why risk it?
• Rand’s rejection of God and her ignorance of human sinfulness ultimately led her to believe that man should be worshipped. “If anyone should ask me what it is that I have said to the glory of Man, I will answer only by paraphrasing Howard Roark: I will hold up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and say, ‘The explanation rests.’”¹³ “The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it…. those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth.”¹⁴
• It is no surprise that Rand would consider Jesus’ crucifixion a horrible waste: the “ideal” dying for the “non-ideal.” And, indeed, why should Jesus die for people who are, of themselves, glorious? As Rand put it in her interview with Playboy: “according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice.”¹⁵ Here Rand is right. Her problem was that she really didn’t think people vicious and so she didn’t see the reasonableness of sacrifice. If she had, and if she had known her own viciousness—the viciousness that led her to convince her husband and her lover’s wife that her affair with self-esteem guru Nathanial Branden should be tolerated—she might have welcomed the “man of perfect virtue” dying for her.

Romans 1:22-23: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man….”

Amen.

1. The Virtue of Selfishness, 54. [↩]
2. For a straightforward synopsis of my teaching in this area, please see my two hour lecture on Why God Allows Evil which includes a lengthy discussion on human evil. [↩]
3. The 20 million figure comes from Stéphane Courtois, “Introduction: The Crimes of Communism,” from Stéphane Courtois, et. al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, trans., (Cambridge, Harvard, 1999), 4 and Alexander N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Anthony Austin, trans. (New Haven: Yale, 2002), 234. [↩]
4. Jean-Louis Margolin “China: A long March into Night” in Courtois, et. al., The Black Book of Communism, 463-464. Margolin estimates that six to ten million were killed outright with another 20 million dying in the camps. [↩]
5. National Right to Life estimates that there have been 49,551,703 abortions since 1973. http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/facts/abortionstats.html. Accessed 7 November 2009. [↩]
6. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 6. [↩]
7. In one of the experiments Milgram records that at 330 volts the learner/actor responds: “(Intense and prolonged agonized scream.) Let me out of here. Let me out of here. My heart’s bothering me. Let me out, I tell you. Hysterically) Let me out of here. Let me out of here. You have no right to hold me here….” But, says Milgram, even the mention of a heart condition makes no difference in the shocks administered by the “teacher” (57). Milgram also found no difference between the sexes: 65% of females also administered the highest level of shock. Arthur G. Miller in his review of Milgram’s work comments: “One cannot fail to be impressed with the sheer scope of Milgram’s research effort. Approximately 1,000 individuals participated in the obedience research program…. These individuals were, in virtually all instances, observed on an individual basis! It is perhaps unmatched in the social sciences for a single investigator to obtain this kind of extensive data from one paradigm, within the relatively brief time frame (three years) in which the experiments took place. Whatever reservations the reader might have concerning one or another aspect of Milgram’s procedures or interpretations, there is, at least, an abundance of empirical evidence. One is thus not likely to be uncertain as to the reliability of his results….” Arthur G. Miller, The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of the Controversy in Social Science (New York: Praeger, 1986), 63. [↩]
8. David Mark Mantell, “The Potential for Violence in Germany,” Journal of Social Issues 27, 1970, vol. 4, 111. [↩]
9. George M. Kren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 126. [↩]
10. Ayn Rand Institute senior writer Robert Tracinski explained the Randian reason for the Holocaust and other atrocities resulted from, of all things, “self-sacrifice”: “From Cambodia in the 1970s to Rwanda and Kosovo in the 1990s, genocide has gone unabated and unchecked. This is because the usual analysis of these bloodbaths has focused on the effects and not the fundamental causes–the ethics of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice.” Robert Tracinski, “Self-Sacrifice, Not Selfishness, Caused the Holocaust,” Monday, May 1, 2000, http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7552&news_iv_ctrl=1221. You can read the full article here: http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/history/2728-why-the-holocaust-can-happen-again.html. I’ve done a tremendous amount of genocide studies and this may be the most convoluted, ridiculous explanation for torturous evil that I have ever read. [↩]
11. Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York, Signet, 1964), 52. [↩]
12. Ibid. [↩]
13. Anne C. Heller, “The Goal of my Writing” as quoted in Ayn Rand: And the World She Made (New York: Anchor, 2010), 270. [↩]
14. Ayn Rand, “Introduction to The Fountainhead,” The Objectivist, March 1968, 4, available at http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/man-worship.html, Accessed 8 April 2011. [↩]
15. Playboy interview, March, 1964. [↩]