Reconciling Rand and Jesus

Isaac:

I appreciate the sentiments behind your article. But they are sentiments rather than the rationality that Rand demanded at the expense of feelings and the love of God and neighbor with head as well as heart that Jesus demanded. After thirty years of working on Wall Street where Rand and Jesus are confued as clearly as on the Glenn Beck show, I’m terribly afraid that you favor the idealism, indeed the utopianism, of Rand to the hard realities of Jesus. Yes, Jesus commanded us to love as the ideal. But he also said that not a jot or tittle of the Law of Moses would ever be done away with. And that theocrat clearly made it Law for every “producer,” to use Rand’s word, must round the corner of the fields and leave the second picking of the grapes for the poor and sojourner. Jesus and his disciples were availing themselves of that welfare provision when challenged about plucking grain on the Sabbath by the Pharisees.

No there is no hypocrisy in being a fan of both Rand and Jesus if wants confesses that impossiblity.  The problem is far deeper. Hypocrisy is simply the homage vice pays to virtue. The real problem is that you suffer from syncretism, or the inability to know vice from virtue. That is most common in our totally confused post-modern culture of individual cafeteria-style philosophies. Both Rand and Jesus, in reflection of Old Testament prophets who railed against mixing Yahwah with Baal, taught  against syncretizing their teachings with that of other philosophers as no one, or nation, can serve two masters. Jesus promised harsh things for those who added to or took away from his teachings. Rand wrote that altruism [her word for all religions and Christianity in particular] and capitalism “cannot coexist in the same society or individual.”

You therefore must gloss over the reality that Rand was far more than “no fan of religion.” She wanted to be remembered as the greatest enemy of religion ever, basically to be the incarnation of Nietzsche’s anti-Christ, who we have been assured will fool many supposed believers. She did not teach that individualism is preferable to collectivism, by which I assume you mean statism rather than Christian community. She taught that individualism is the only way, or that we are not our brother’s keeper, thereby refuting the Great Commandment to love neighbor as self. As she clearly stated in The Virtue of Selfishness, you may save someone after a shipwreck if it does not endanger you, which would prevent those heroic firemen from entering the burning Trade Center Towers, but you have no obligations to any of the injured, hungry and so on once back on shore. It’s then every man and woman for his or her self again. That’s precisely why we joke the MBA’s of Wall Steet believe the initials stand for “me before anyone.” The irony is that Rand’s philosophy for laissez-faire capitalism may have been suitable for Adam Smith’s bakeries but is less than adequate for today’s financialized America, as her disciple Alan Greenspan has testifed before Congresss. Would you put your money with a Randian hedge fund manager who believes he owes you nothing? So no, I do not believe Christians have absolutely anything to learn from her teaching that we owe no one anything. Our faith clearly teaches us to bear one another’s burdens.  

Ironically, despite libertarians loving Rand, Rand was no fan of libertarians and refused to be indentified with such. She was an Objectivist and said “Objectivism, c’est moi.” Her philosohy, if you can call it that, depended on her whim of the moment, as clearly articulated in Nathaniel Branden’s book about her. You might also read Jennifer Burn’s biography of her. Both show she was sociopath, and probably a psychopath; hardly someone Christ, or his disciples, would want to be associated with. Anyway, Moses left plenty of cautions about big government and Christ told the Parable of the Talents. Why do we need to credit yet another aspiring anti-Christ (like Rand, Hitler was also a disciple of Nietzsche who the German Church thought it could syncretize with Christ) for those most rational, humane and realistic ideas?   

Gary,

I think you’re reading a bit much into the point I’m making.  I am not attempting to make a Christian-Randian synthesis.  It is not possible.  Indeed, Rand’s own philosophy runs into some problems with itself that I find impossible to square, let alone trying to reconcile it completely with any other philosophy.

My points are twofold:  First, that truth from any corner is still truth and that political philosophy is limited in it’s scope (Rand would strongly disagree of course, but I find it completely possible and common to take the thrust of her political philosophy and nothing else).

Second, that we deceive ourselves with what altruism and obligation actually are.  If you are not helping your neighbor out of free choice, then you are not doing anything really worth doing.  Rand is right that there is nothing wrong with self-interest – indeed, it is a tautology that all acts are self-interested in a strict sense, because we would not act if we did not perceive the act as getting us from where we want to be less to where we want to be more (see Human Action by Mises).  The struggle is to know what’s really in our long term self-interest, and not be slaves to fleeting desires.  Where Rand goes wrong on this issue is her insistence that she can know what’s in anyone else’s REAL interest besides herself.  You can’t.

I’ll stop there, but before I do it is worth mentioning that I broke a rule for you: never respond to someone who engages in “Reductio Ad Hitlerum”.  This is the second time someone has done that after reading this post.

“Her philosohy, if you can call it that, depended on her whim of the moment….Both show she was sociopath, and probably a psychopath.”  I don’t think Branden’s point was that at all. (Can’t speak for Burns.) Branden had a philosophical disagreement with Rand, questioning her judgement, which she took as an attack on her sense of rationality.  She reacted negatively.  But if you read her writings and listen to her speeches, she comes across as very rational.  If she had irrational or emotional reactions from time to time, it is because she is human and she had to defend herself as best she could.  Branden was her lover, and he initiated another affair while he was with her.  How would you expect her to react to a man she adored who betrayed her trust on multiple levels?

And, yes, she adamantly opposed Christianity, and all similar religions, and its culture of self-sacrifice.  The philosophies are fundamentally incompatible.

In my last post, I mis-characterized William Henckley. He was not a mass murderer. He was a psychopath who murded and dismembered a young girl, spreading her body parts over Los Angeles, as I remember, while writing ransom notes to her father promising her safety. He has been described as “the OJ Simpson of the 20′s.” Most papers thought him evil incarnate but Rand thought him heroic as he had cast off all traditional norms of morality. Surely that could only come from a fellow psychopath. The Brandens make it clear that beneath her public image, Rand actually had no affection for fellow human beings, which of course is the definition of a sociopath. It might therefore be of interest that Bloomberg/Businessweek published an article only last month suggesting many corporate CEO’s, who too often seem to worship Rand’s notion of pursuing a buck without concern for society, are likely sociopaths as well.

Gary Moore