Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical
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As the mixed economy careens from one crisis to another, warfare between and within pressure groups intensifies. In this social context of wild uncertainty, each group attempts to deal with perceived threats to its efficacy by relying on the state. State action provides an illusory sense of control, since in the long run, political intervention necessarily undermines the stability and efficacy of every social group and every individual.93 Rand was adamant in this regard: she maintained that every discernable group was affected by statist intervention, not just every economic interest. Every differentiating characteristic among human beings becomes a tool for pressure-group jockeying: age, sex, sexual orientation, social status, religion, nationality, and race. Statism splinters society “into warring tribes.”94 The statist legal machinery pits “ethnic minorities against the majority, the young against the old, the old against the middle, women against men, welfare-recipient against the self-supporting.”95
RACISM
In Rand’s view, racism is the most vicious form of social fragmentation perpetuated by modern statism. Racism is not a mere by-product of state intervention; it is a constituent element of statism.
Rand’s critique of racism is a good illustration of her three-level analysis. On Level 1, she examined racism in terms of its psycho-epistemological and ethical implications. On Level 2, she explored the linguistic and conceptual subversion that institutional racism requires. On Level 3, she linked her discussion to the broader, structural context of contemporary statism. Each level is a precondition and reciprocal implication of the other.
Nathaniel Branden claims that despite Rand’s antagonism toward racism, she was reluctant to write on the subject because it had been monopolized by the left. But Branden (1989, 335) persuaded Rand to contribute her first essay on racism in the September 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter. Rand argued initially from a psycho-epistemological and ethical standpoint. She wrote: “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” It negated the uniqueness of the individual, his reason, choice, and values by “ascribing moral, social or political significance” to his “genetic lineage.” It judged each individual solely on the basis of “his internal body chemistry … not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.” Psychologically, it emerged from the “racist’s sense of his own inferiority.” It was “a quest for the unearned,” “a quest for automatic knowledge,” and “a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).” In evaluating people by a racial criterion, racists attempt to by-pass the need to rationally judge the facts of a person’s character. They seek moral distinction not in their own actions, but in the actions and beliefs of their forebears.96 They struggle “to induce racial guilt,” by punishing people for the sins—real or illusory—committed by their ancestors.97
The racist has an associational, perceptual psycho-epistemology that stores concrete memories and emotional estimates of isolated incidences. Such a mentality is incapable of thinking in terms of principles or abstractions (Rand, quoted in B. Branden 1962T, lecture 6). Racism, in all of its forms, was a “manifestation of the anti-conceptual mentality.” The fear of foreigners (xenophobia), the group loyalty of the guild, the ancestor worship of the family, the blood ties of the criminal gang, and the chauvinism of the nationalist were all examples of anti-conceptual tribalism. Tribalism was “a reciprocally reinforcing cause and result” of the various caste systems throughout history.98
Rand argued: “Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism.” Though some people denigrate the efficacy of reason, they cannot dispense with the need for a comprehensive view of their own existence. They cannot dispense with the need for self-efficacy and self-worth. Such people will seek an illusory efficacy and worth by latching on to any group that provides them with a frame of reference. The group seems to possess a kind of “knowledge” the individual lacks, a “knowledge” acquired by an effort-less, ineffable process. People find that the easiest group to join is that to which they belong by virtue of birth—their race.99
Moving toward Level 2 of her analysis, Rand recognized that the individual’s awareness of himself in racial terms was not always a cause for concern in the multicultural, contemporary society. Rand did not object to the need of individuals to take pleasure in their familial or ancestral backgrounds. Commenting on Alex Haley’s Roots, for instance, Rand (1977T) recognized that African Americans had been robbed of a historical past. Having been tom forcibly from their culture, they needed to project “moral heroes.” Haley’s book, in Rand’s view, created a useful mythology, an exalted, “enormously compelling and very beautiful” image of how people in despair could preserve their human dignity.
What Rand objected to was the practice of those who sought to substitute their lineage for an authentic self-esteem. Self-efficacy and self-worth cannot be derived from others—past or present. In the twentieth century, the most notorious—and murderous—practitioners of such racial worship were the Nazis. Nazi ideology had obliterated the core of individualism by ascribing notions of good and evil to whole groups of people based upon their alleged blood ties (Peikoff 1982). Following Rand, Peikoff argued that nationalism was in essence a form of tribalism and racism. It was not a rationally patriotic loyalty to the principles on which a country was based. Rather, it extolled and defended the Volk, the nation, on the grounds of racial purity.100
Rand recognized that contemporary racist doctrines were frequently disguised as celebrations of “ethnicity.” In Rand’s view, “ethnicity” was an anti-concept that concealed the individual’s racism. The advocates of “ethnicity” conform to their ethnic groups’ traditions. They see language not as a conceptual tool but as “a mystic heritage.” Their “hysterical loyalty” to subtle differences of dialect and ritual provide them with an illusory sense of self-esteem derived from the blood collective to which they belong.101
Such tribalism had engulfed Europe for centuries. Rand argued that in such a tribalist atmosphere, not even collectivistic Marxism could succeed. For Rand, Marxism was false and corrupt, but “clean” in comparison to the tribalist anti-conceptual mentality:
Marxism is an intellectual construct; it is false, but it is an abstract theory—and it is too abstract for the tribalists’ concrete-bound, perceptual mentalities. It requires a significantly high level of abstraction to grasp the reality of “an international working class”—a level beyond the power of a consciousness that understands its own village, but has trouble treating the nearest town as fully real. (126)
Such ethnic tribalism seriously undermined the Soviets’ attempts to establish a communist hegemony.102
Perhaps it was Rand’s experiences in the Soviet Union that influenced her hostility toward quotas. Though Rand benefited from the abolition of educational restrictions on Jews and women students, she bore witness to the reinstatement of quotas by the Bolshevik regime. Just as the czars had practiced institutional racism, the Bolsheviks attempted to boost the participation of “proletarian” students through open admissions, relaxed educational standards, and a mass purge of “bourgeois” scholars and pupils. Unqualified students were advanced on the basis of their proletarian background. It was this experience perhaps that led Rand to see all “affirmative action” programs as humiliating and degrading to the individual’s talents and abilities.
Indeed, for Rand, the notion of “affirmative action,” was but another anti-concept to hide the reinstitutionalization of race as a criterion of judgment. Quotas embodied an internal contradiction. They attempted to use racism in order to combat racism. They categorized all members of a given racial group as identical. This stereotyped collectivization of all minority group members was achieved first in the eyes of those who did not gain from quotas and who resented the beneficiaries. But even those who benefited from quotas were humiliated by the stigma of helplessness and victimization.103
The imposition of quotas by the stat
e could only inspire more “blind, interracial hatred.”104 Just as the state’s financial inflation caused the debasement of the currency, so too did the state’s “moral inflation” cause the debasement of genuine morality. By multiplying countless forms of injustice, in the name of justice, the state ultimately enriched itself and its dependents (312). Rand argued that racism could not, therefore, be explained on the sole basis of the tribalists’ psycho-epistemology or on the basis of ideological utility. Racists had a vested interest in their biases (Rand, quoted in B. Branden 1962T, lecture 6). Moving toward Level 3 of her analysis, Rand recognized that tribalism, irrationalism, and collectivism had been present throughout history. She sought to explain their rebirth in the modern era, their historically specific manifestations in contemporary statism.
Rand argued that the relationship between statism and tribalism was reciprocal. The tribal premise was the ideological and existential root of statism. Statism had arisen out of “prehistorical tribal warfare.” Once established, it institutionalized its own racist subcategories and castes in order to sustain its rule.105 The perpetuation of racial hatred provided the state with a necessary tool for its political domination. Statists frequently scapegoated racial and ethnic groups in order to deflect popular disaffection with deteriorating social conditions.106 But if tribalism was a precondition of statism, statism was a reciprocally related cause. Racism had to be implemented politically before it could engulf an entire society: “The political cause of tribalism’s rebirth is the mixed economy—the transitional stage of the formerly civilized countries of the West on their way to the political level from which the rest of the world has never emerged: the level of permanent tribal warfare” (123).
In Rand’s view, the mixed economy had splintered the country into warring pressure groups. Under such conditions of social fragmentation, any individual who lacks a group affiliation is put at a disadvantage in the political process. Since race is the simplest category of collective association, most individuals are driven to racial identification out of self-defense. Just as the mixed economy manufactured pressure groups, so too did it manufacture racism.107
And just as the domestic mixed economy made racism inevitable, so too did the global spread of statism. Rand saw the world fracturing into hostile ethnic tribes with each group aiming to destroy its ethnic rivals in primitive conflicts over cultural, religious, and linguistic differences. Rand called the process one of “global balkanization.” In 1977, in a statement of prophetic significance, she observed that the situation in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia was symptomatic of the larger, global trend. The “Balkan tribes … never vanished,” Rand wrote, “they have been popping up in minor explosions all along, and a major one is possible at any time.”108
In her critique of racism, however, Rand focused most of her attention on American race relations. She argued that the utter devastation in the African American community was a historical product of statist brutality. Slavery was the complete negation of individual rights and dignity. In the United States, it predominated in the agrarian-feudal South. Rand agreed with those Marxist historians who argued that it was the capitalist North that destroyed the slavery of the noncapitalist South. For Rand, however, the destruction of slavery illustrated the virtue of the capitalist system, which left “no possibility for any man to serve his own interests by enslaving other men.” Only capitalism, with its free trade and free immigration, could squelch the rebirth of domestic and global tribalism.109
However, the post-slavery period in U.S. history did not eradicate the problem of racism. In Rand’s view, racism continued especially “among the poor white trash” of the South whose support of this apartheid was a reprehensible by-product of their own sense of inferiority.110 But Rand opposed forced segregation and forced integration. She argued that racism could not be forbidden or prescribed by law. And while she supported social ostracism and economic boycott as powerful weapons in the struggle for racial equality, she asserted that racism could not be defeated in the absence of a genuine philosophical, cultural, and political revolution.111
Rand and other Objectivists, such as George Reisman, traced the social disintegration in the African American community to persistent political intervention. Those African Americans who migrated north were victimized by zoning laws, rent control, public housing and education, urban renewal, municipal health and sanitation services, franchise and licensing laws.112 Each of these institutional mechanisms blocked their entry into the semi-competitive market and ghettoized their communities. Intergenerational welfare became the only recourse for a disproportionate number of African Americans, since their low wages were often competitive with welfare allowances. The welfare system, funded by grand-scale extortion of the taxpayer, severed “economic rewards from productive work.”113 This institutional duality between values and action, money and effort, had long-term deleterious psychological effects on the victims of welfare statism.
Rand argued that in many circumstances, the civil rights leaders only perpetuated the problem by advocating enforced economic egalitarianism as a panacea. Since the psychology of victimization was “a precondition of the power to control a pressure group,” many of these leaders sought comfort in the notion that their own constituency was a “passive herd crying for help.” Many condemned the achievers in their own communities as “Uncle Tom’s.”114 They exploited the despair of their constituents by offering them jobs, subsidies, or expanded welfare privileges. Invariably, the only beneficiaries of such schemes were the group leaders, the welfare bureaucrats, and the politicians who derived electoral strength from blocks of ethnic support.115
The cultural predominance of the altruist morality and the educational system’s perpetuation of concrete-bound pedagogical methods served to reinforce intolerable African American repression. Children were raised in a social atmosphere that kept them in a state of mental inertia not all that different from the mentality of slaves.116 In an effort to escape from such conditions, many turn to drugs and crime as a way of life.117
For Rand and her followers, even though the plight of African Americans was historically unique, it was symptomatic of the larger illness affecting U.S. society and the world. Just as the mixed economy bred racial conflict between black and white, it perpetuated racism in nearly every cultural institution. The statist society required fragmentation, compartmentalization, and tribalism. It is within this context that Reisman has characterized the multicultural movement in education not as a paean to ethnic pride, but as a “racist road to barbarism.”118 The growing racial and ethnic strife in U.S. society has made the further fragmentation of the academy inevitable.
CONSERVATISM VERSUS LIBERALISM
Rand’s fundamental antipathy toward racism was a contributing factor in her rejection of political conservatism. She observed that many conservatives claimed to be defenders of freedom and capitalism even though they advocated racism at the same time.119 Such a combination was lethal, in Rand’s view, because it served to discredit capitalism. It was for this reason that Rand reserved her most vicious rhetoric for the conservative racists. In 1968, she characterized George Wallace’s American Independent Party as a crude, openly fascist movement that combined racism, primitive nationalism, militant, populist anti-intellectuality, welfare statism, and a reliance on state coercion as a means to the resolution of social problems.120
But Rand’s wrath toward conservatism extended equally to its representatives in the major political parties and in the media. She (1964b, 13–14) considered William Buckley’s “National Review the worst and most dangerous magazine in America,” and attacked the conservative alliance of capitalism with faith, tradition, and depravity.121 Strategically, Rand distanced herself from conservatives because she believed that it was dangerous to have political allies who shared some of her free-market and anticommunist opinions, but based these on irrational philosophical premises (in Peikoff 1976T, lecture 5). On the prospect of Ronald Reagan’s election, for instan
ce, Rand said that she was “glad to be old,” and wished for her own death if such a cataclysmic event took place (in lecture 7). Though she believed that Reagan was sincere in his “folksy sentimentality,” she argued that he was a moral monster. Reagan’s ties to the “militant mystics” of the Moral Majority and his opposition to abortion portended an “unconstitutional union of religion and politics.”122 Rand had even denounced Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, despite his heroic expose of the Gulag, for this same integration of religion and politics. She argued that Solzhenitsyn had rejected Marxism, not for its statist and anticapitalist character, but for its “western” atheistic focus. Rand derided Solzhenitsyn as a “Slavophile” and a “totalitarian collectivist” who would have merely substituted a Russian orthodox theocracy for the communist state (1976T). In Rand’s view, no inspiration was to be found “in the God-Family-Tradition swamp.”123
Rand maintained that the conservative obsession with the “Family” was at root, a vestige of tribalism: “The worship of the ‘Family’ is mini-racism, like a crudely primitive first installment on the worship of the tribe. It places the accident of birth above a man’s values, the unchosen physical ties of kinship above a man’s choices, and duty to the tribe above a man’s right to his own life.”124