RANDY RYAN

Now that Mitt Romney has selected Paul Ryan as his running mate, it behooves bloviators with some philosophical training, among whom I count myself, to take a closer look at the thinker who is, by his own testimony, Ryan's inspiration.  I refer, of course, to Ayn Rand, the twentieth century Russian-American novelist and essayist whose fervent embrace of laisser-faire capitalism, given fictional voice in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, has inspired the political passions and wet dreams of several generations of American right-wingers.  Rand is, in some ways, an odd figure to be venerated by contemporary conservatives, inasmuch as she was a convinced atheist who rejected the use of force, but her detestation of anything having a whiff of "collectivism" about it sweeps away any doubts that a thoughtful reactionary might harbor.

My own engagement with Rand's writings has been rather episodic.  It began in the Fall of 1953, when, as a nineteen year old graduate student cramming for General Exams [called "Prelims" in the Harvard Philosophy Department], I began to have doubts about the career on which I was embarking.  Sitting alone in my basement room in William James Hall, I turned to large works of heroic fiction as a source of guidance.  After plowing through Moby Dick ["It's about this whale," to quote a famous movie line], I found my way to The Fountainhead. 

I am afraid I came to Rand too late to be inspired, or even intrigued.  Having already read deeply in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, and Kant, I found Rand pretty thin stuff.  So I pulled myself together, passed my exams, and did not look back.

That was pretty much it for me and Rand until 1968.  By then I was at Columbia, but that year I was visiting at Rutgers, in nearby New Brunswick.  After class one day in an undergraduate course on Ethics, a young, thin, rather timid student approached my desk and with an apologetic air, offered me a worn, obviously much read paperback.  "I will give this to you," he said hesitantly, "if you promise to read it."  There was obviously nothing to do but thank him profusely and promise to get right to it.  The book was The Virtue of Selfishness, a collection of essays by Rand and her epigone, Nathaniel Brandon.

Four years later I was at the University of Massachusetts, charged with teaching an Introduction to Philosophy for a hundred students.  I assigned Gabriel Kolko's Wealth and Power in America, some readings by Marx, Betty and Theodore Roszak's Masculine/Feminine, and Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful.  In an effort to maintain some semblance of objectivity [so to speak], I also assigned The Virtue of Selfishness.  This was the Sixties [everything came a little late to the Pioneer Valley], and I assumed that the students would all groove on the Marx, so I really busted my butt giving the most forceful, interesting, positive lectures on Rand I could manage.  Imagine my chagrin when the hour exams came in and I discovered that I was talking not to a horde of budding Marxian collectivists but to a raging mob of Objectivists!  I try to assure myself that my lectures were quite ineffectual and that the students had all come to UMass already enrolled in the Right Wing, but the small voice of conscience suggests that I may actually have had a hand in fostering what eventually became The Tea Party.  Oh well.

A few quotes from the lead essay of The Virtue of Selfishness, "The Objectivist Ethics," will convey accurately enough the line Rand is pushing.  "The Objectivist ethics," she writes, "proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness [italics in the original]. ... The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. ... The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material.  It is the principle of justice."  [all italics in the original.  She rather liked italics.]  All of this, Rand claims, quoting from a speech by the protagonist in her novel, Atlas Shrugged, derives from "the principle of identity -- A is A."  Kant would have been interested to learn that the fundamental principles of ethics are analytic! 

I want to spend most of my energies in this post discussing the political significance of Rand's theories, but since she herself treated her novels as occasions for immensely long declamatory speeches barely masquerading as plot elements, it might be appropriate to say just a word or two of a literary critical nature about her writings.  Atlas Shrugged  and The Fountainhead are both vast, gassy, romantic works perfectly designed to captivate an adolescent audience.  They might be described as what would have resulted if Jacqueline Susann had been bowled over by Nietzsche rather than Lady Chatterley's Lover.  

Rather oddly, when I think of Rand my mind turns to The Brothers Karamazov.   You will recall that Ivan, under the baleful influence of nineteenth century Western liberal thought, is given to saying that "all things are permitted."  Now Ivan has a good Russian soul, and does not, in his heart of hearts, believe that, but his bastard half brother Smerdyakov hears Ivan saying these things and takes them to heart, eventually [spoiler alert] killing their father, old man Karamazov.  Rand read some Hayek and, like Smerdyakov, took it to heart, with what turned out to be equally unfortunate results.

Rand's elevation of market exchange to the highest level of moral excellence is more or less what you could imagine an impressionable Russian emigrée would take away from a glancing acquaintance with Léon Walras' theory of tâtonnement.  In light of her Nietzschean novelistic celebration of the lonely creative genius [an architect, for example], her identification of the trader as the quintessential moral man [they are always men in Rand's writings] is rather odd, for the trader, qua trader, makes nothing.  He or she simply swaps something for something that someone else is offering in the marketplace.

But what is truly odd, and in fact deeply self-contradictory, is the embrace of Rand by such American right-wingers as Paul Ryan.  The moral, economic, and political doctrine that Rand is unconsciously parodying is echt nineteenth century laisser-faire liberalism.  [For a truly brilliant, totally self-aware send-up of this philosophy from the left, see Paul Goodman's riotously funny novel, Empire City.]  The true laisser-faire liberal has no religion, no politics, no traditions, no sense at all of the situatedness of human existence.  To quote more or less Michael Oakeshott's great line, he strives to live each day as though it were his first, and thinks that to form a habit is to fail.  It would never cross the mind of a true laisser-faire liberal so much as to have an opinion about abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception, or prayer in schools, and he certainly would not undertake to legislate about such matters, for whatever position he took might cost him business.   Indeed, ostensibly serious libertarian economists with no grasp of historical fact have actually argued seriously that racial discrimination is impossible in a true free market, inasmuch as discrimination might drive up wages by limiting the pool of available workers.  [The truth, as anyone familiar with post Civil-War history knows, is that White workers struck devil's bargains with employers, accepting lower wages in exchange for the exclusion of the former slaves from the labor market.]

Paul Ryan is a Roman Catholic whose family made a good deal of money over half a century off of government contracts for building the interstate highway system.  To this day it feeds at the federal trough, getting defense-related dollars.  In every way conceivable, Ryan the man is totally in violation of the Objectivist ethical theories pushed by Rand.  It has become a central tenet of the consensus gentium in recent decades that American conservatives are deep thinkers who, in their think tanks, come up with new ideas to replace the tired habits of liberal pols.  Paul Ryan, we are told, is the intellectual leader of the Republican Party.  I think we should pause just a bit before embracing our very own Smerdyakov.

SUGGESTED INTERNET READING

While I am writing my blog post on Ayn Rand as promised, my son, Tobias Barrington Wolff, has posted an op ed on The Huffington Post about Romney, Ryan, and Rand.  Here is the url:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tobias-barrington-wolff/the-virtue-of-selfishness_b_1774931.html
Take a look at it.  The choice of Ryan is going to give the Democrats Florida, and possibly much more besides.  Palin redux.

A SUNDAY SERMON

It being Sunday, I have been spending a little time with the Good Book.  It has been a while since I re-read Genesis, so I started at the beginning.  As you will recall, it takes God a chapter to create the world, and another chapter to create Adam and Eve, but scarcely have we made our way two pages into the King James version when things start to go downhill.  The serpent shows up in chapter 3, and sex rears its ugly head in chapter 4, with the birth first of Cain [verse 1] and Abel [verse 2].  It is an old and ugly story.  The Lord prefers Abel's sacrifice of a sheep to Cain's offer of grain [this is long before the advent of vegetarianism], angering Cain so much that he up and slays Abel, whereupon the Lord curses Cain.  Cain is weighed down by the curse, and expresses to the Lord his fear that "every one that findeth me shall slay me," [chapter 4], so God, taking pity, I guess, puts upon him a mark [the mark of Cain, as it came to be called], "lest any finding him should kill him." 

It is just about here, barely three pages into a Book that, in my edition, runs to 918 pages [not War and Peace, to be sure, but not The Great Gatsby either], that I begin to have doubts about this being the inerrant Word of the Lord.  I mean, whom is Cain afraid of?  At this point, only four people have come into the world, two by divine creation and two by birth, and one of them is dead.  Although it requires us to engage in a soupҫon of lit crit, I think the text makes it pretty clear that Cain is not fearful of being killed by Adam or Eve. Besides, while we are still in chapter 4 [verses 16-17], Cain leaves Eden and sets up light housekeeping east of Eden in the land of Nod where he "knew his wife" who "conceived, and bare Enoch," so pleasing Cain that "he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch."

As Spencer Tracy asks Frederic March in the great courtroom scene from Inherit the Wind, where on earth did Cain's wife come from?  At this point, the only woman in the world, according to Inerrantist Fundamentalists, is Eve, and I think we have to assume that Cain did not "know" Eve, who was, after all, his mother, and is living in Eden, not Nod.

All right.  So much for the cheap shots.  There is nothing even faintly original in this snarking.  But look, in the United States today, we are routinely asked to take seriously grown men and women who believe this nonsense.  They control the choice of textbooks in Texas, and have taken to writing vicious anti-women laws in a score of states, all as an expression of their deep faith in The Word, which we atheists and agnostics and rational people are supposed to respect and treat with great courtesy.

Now I take a back seat to no man or woman in my love and admiration for the King James version as a great work of literary art.  I expect my students to read it, and as this post makes clear, I recur to it repeatedly.  But the time has come for all of us who are even halfway educated to just say, Enough!  Keep your childhood fantasies and bedtime stories to yourselves and don't try to foist them on the rest of us.

Tomorrow, if I have time after returning from Bennett College, I will have a few choice words to say about Ayn Rand, who is the inspiration not only for the Chairman of the Fed who gave us the present Depression but also for the newly anointed presumptive Republican nominee for the Vice-Presidency.

QVELLING

The Platform Commitee of the Democratic Party met yesterday in Detroit, to amend and then to adopt the Platform on which President Obama will run.  The proceedings were carried on C-Span, at this link:  http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/PlatformCommitte

At roughly the 1 hour 22 minute mark, or a bit later, when they are considering amendments, you will see and hear my son, Tobias Wolff, submit an amendment concerning the rights of LGBT immigrant families.  I don't think it will come as a surprise that I am very much the proud father.

ON THE ROAD

I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, one of a number of protected enclaves in America where liberals can relax and be themselves without running the risk of encountering a representative of the Republican base.  In Chapel Hill, the principal distinction in automobile bumper displays is between 2008 Obama stickers and 2012 Obama stickers.  So long as I stay well within the confines of Chapel Hill [and its funky appendage, Carrboro], I can go for two or three weeks without hearing an authentic Southern accent.

Recently, however, I have been driving to and from Greensboro, where Bennett College is located.  Along about the time when I start passing the Outlet Malls on I-85, my Chapel Hill radio stations begin to fade, and I must either drive in silence or hit the scan button on my car radio to find signals that come in strongly.  It will surprise no one that when I do that, I come across a good many Christian evangelical radio stations.  Yesterday, I was idly surfing the bandwidth, pausing at each station long enough to get the flavor of its offerings, when I began to notice something quite curious.

Now, I must back up to explain that as a Philosopher, I have spent a career of almost sixty years reading widely in the philosophical theology of the western tradition.  I can prove the existence of God four different ways without breaking a sweat, and I have at least a nodding acquaintance with the ancient disputes about the three-fold or unitary nature of God, salvation by works or by faith alone, and Predestination.  I am, I confess, rather fond of these old debates, even though, as my mother explained to me when I was twelve, I am the product of a mixed marriage.  "Your father is an agnostic and I am an atheist," she said.  I am something of a traditionalist when it comes to theology, if one can have preferences among alternatives all of which one considers nonsense.

But to my dismay, I discovered that on the religious stations I was listening to, there is little or no reference to anything I would recognize as theology.  Instead, the talk is filled with a sort of uplifting inspirational psychobabble of the sort I have come to associate with Alcoholics Anonymous.  Self-esteem seems to loom larger in these discourses than repentance.  Interpersonal relationships are featured more prominently than one's relationship to the Almighty.  There are ritual references to Bible passages, of course, and the name of Jesus is thrown around more freely than that of Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga, but very little of what is said would have struck Martin Luther or John Calvin Jonathan Edwards as religious.

I suppose I have simply not been paying attention, but Christianity seems to have been taken over by a bastardization of Freud.  I have always believed that a youthful engagement with the doctrinal disputes of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam is good practice for serious philosophical reflection.  Perhaps this new development in what passes for Evangelical Christianity in America explains the appallingly low intellectual level of discourse on the right.

Just to be fair, it is also true that a renewal of the serious study of the writings of Karl Marx would tone up popular liberal discourse considerably as well.  Paul Samuelson is no Emile Coue ["Every day in every way I am getting better and better."], but the neo-classical synthesis is a far cry from the insights to be found in Capital. 

NODDING IN

My apologies for being absent from this blog for several days.  The semester is about to begin at Bennett College [way too early, in my opinion, but there it is], and there are a host of administrative matters to which I must attend before the students arrive.  I spent much of yesterday on campus going from office to office, meeting the people with whom I have been corresponding by email.  This morning, at 8:30 a.m., when a "Faculty-Staff Institute" convenes for everyone at Bennett [except the students], I shall be there, listening and learning.  Greensboro is a mere one hour drive from my home, but although I regularly made an even longer commute between Boston and Amherst in the eighties, it seems I am older now and have, as they say in baseball, lost a step or two.  The story is told that when Joe DiMaggio was near the end of his career, he could not fire a rifle shot from the outfield to home plate with quite the ease of his younger years, so he would push himself, early in a game, to uncork a scorcher, just to warn the runners on the opposing team not to try to take an extra base on his aging arm.  I am pushing myself to show up for everything at the very beginning of the year, hoping that I can then ease off and coddle myself just a trifle.  As the United Negro College Fund did not say, but might have, "a body is a terrible thing to lose."

While I have been away from the blog, the Olympics have ground on.  Beach volleyball is a bit like a MacDonald's cheeseburger.  After you have watched enough of it, you begin to think that it tastes better than track and field.  But I am afraid I shall never develop a real fan's appreciation for doubles ping pong.  On the other hand, when Tirunesh Dibaba shot forward in the bell lap of the women's 10,000 and sprinted away from the field, I was genuinely thrilled.  During my entire life, running has been something that I have shunned, and even now, when I take my morning four mile walk, if I try to jog for just a few yards along the way I give it up and go back to walking.  So watching her performance was a revelation.

The political campaign grinds on, of course, and since I have taken it upon myself to comment on the passing scene, I feel that I must offer opinions about these political ephemera.  Fans of Monty Python and the Holy Grail will recall the encounter with a terrible killer rabbit, which was clearly a cinematic anticipation of Harry Reid.  Reid, for the three or four people in the world who have been too caught up in synchronized swimming to attend to important matters, is the U. S. Senate Majority Leader who claims to have been told by a well-placed source that Mitt Romney paid no taxes at all for ten years.  Romney's flat refusal to release his tax returns has reduced the Romney campaign to fulminating that Reid is a "dirty liar," a charge I particularly enjoy because Reid is the highest-ranked elected Mormon government official in American history.

There is an old saying -- when you go to a gun fight, don't bring a knife.  Liberal commentators, whose rule of thumb is that when you go to a knife fight, bring a folding fan, have tut-tutted about the impropriety of Reid making a charge based on an anonymous source.  Republicans, having spent the past two generations savaging their Democratic opponents with the dirtiest of dirty tricks, are apoplectic at the thought of someone doing unto them what they have routinely done unto others.  I freely confess that it has gladdened my declining years to see someone on my side finally decide that politics is war.  For those who seek a deeper, more intellectually satisfying analysis, I refer you to the discussion of Chapter One of Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia in my tutorial on Ideological critique, posted on box.net.

Just yesterday, Romney got it into his head, for reasons that passeth all understanding, to try to improve his standing with American Jews by taking a swipe at kibbutzim.  America, he said, is not a kibbutz.  We stand on our own feet as individuals.  Now, as anyone even fleetingly in touch with American social and political life knows, for the American Jews most deeply supportive of Israel, the kibbutz is a sacred icon, as revered [and misunderstood] as the Christ-like pictures of JFK that for generations have graced the front parlors of homes in Boston's Irish neighborhoods.  I cannot begin to fathom what went through Romney's brain as he delivered that gratuitous insult.

Well, it is time for me to begin my commute.  More anon.

OLYMPIAN MEDITATIONS

One of the oddities of the American presidential cycle is that it coincides with the cycle of modern Olympic Games.  As a consequence, every four years, political junkies like myself, who have by this point all but od-ed on polls and feverish speculation, are compelled to take a break for several weeks and watch superbly conditioned young men and women do manifestly impossible things.  This year, the Games also coincide with my post-operative regime, which consists of giving myself three different kinds of eye drops at five minute intervals four times a day.  I relieve the tedium of the eye drops by lying on my bed and watching snatches of the Olympics through drop-blurred, but now glasses-free eyes.

Herewith, some idle reflections prompted by the endless broadcasts of the London Games.

First of all, even though I am seventy-eight and a reasonably attentive spectator of the passing scene, there always turn out to be events whose existence I was not even aware of.  It reminds me of a letter I wrote home from college in 1950 as a first semester Freshman.  I told my father, excitedly, that I had just learned of something called Sociology, which I had never known existed.  [My father replied indignantly that he had most certainly informed me of the existence of Sociology.  He may have been right.]   This cycle, it is synchronized diving.  I had no idea that there was a sport called "synchronized diving."  Watching two young Chinese women do a complicated manoeuvre off the thirty meter board in perfect synchronization reminds me of other extraordinary things people can learn to do with enough practice [I have that same sense of wonder when I watch Alfred Brendel play a Beethoven sonata.]

The system employed for keeping track of the number of medals won by each country is clearly defective, although as I quite well know from my study of Utility Theory, there is really nothing to be done about it.  I mean, anyone can see that two Golds, four Silvers, and four Bronzes is not as good as eight Golds and two silvers, but both count as ten medals, making the countries with those scores tied in the overall tally. 

I think it was unfair to boot eight women badminton players from the Games for deliberately throwing games.  They were acting strategically, attempting to avoid being eliminated by the Chinese team before getting to the medal rounds.  Why is this not the equivalent of sacrificing a piece in chess, or laying down a sacrifice bunt to move a runner into scoring position?

Generally speaking, I am not Anglophiliac by inclination, but I really had to rethink my position after seeing the Opening Ceremony tribute to the National Health Service.

The US basketball team should have to play with only four men on the court at a time.  I mean, give everyone else a chance!

Beach Volleyball is not a competitive sport.  Correctly understood, it is a pre-coital mating ritual.  Bringing in sand to London to play volleyball is as absurd as bringing in grass to Dubai to play golf.