An interesting, moderate defense of Rand by Tibor Machan.
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Let’s Stop the Gossip and get to the Meat
[From The Free Radical, February/March 2005, p. 9]
Tibor R. Machan
After all these years of too much distracting gossip about Ayn Rand, it is time to stop it and have everyone get to the meat of her philosophy. It doesn’t matter how angry she tended to be at times, how she blew up at folks, how many people she slept with, how often she gave in to the temptation to make her own idiosyncratic tastes the stuff of universally great art. OK, Rand was, contrary to her own self-delusions, not perfect. It doesn’t matter. What matters is whether what she thought about various philosophical topics is true, as true as possible in philosophy. Her idea of human knowledge—it is a great improvement on what much of the history of epistemology gives us; her idea of causality is far better than what much of contemporary philosophy of science has produced; her theory of free will, albeit sketchy, is superb compared to what most defenders of the idea worked out; her notion of ethical egoism is a great success, compared to the various egoisms that get discussed in ethics texts; her idea of government is so much better than what even the best of classical liberals, not to mention so called anarchists, dish out, and her theory of art is a formidable contender in our age of a good deal of nonsense in aesthetics. And there are numerous details within all these broader areas that are extremely promising—Rand’s minimalist metaphysics which leaves to science much of what previous philosophy mistakenly thought was the province of ontology; her objectivist conception of definitions and the natures of things; her non-reductive naturalism, and her very intriguing account of human consciousness that avoids dualism without falling into the trap of materialism.
Rand may best be understood as a philosophical architect who spells out only some of the details of the edifice she has conceived—a wing of the building here and there, some of the infrastructure, a little of the mortar work. But in the end the edifice as she has broadly conceived of it has been sturdy, able to withstand a great deal of skepticism. Yes, to get it all right many who have found her broad design promising needed and continue to need to go to work on the details. But that is true of many of the most famous philosophers such as Nietzsche or Wittgenstein. And they didn’t really do much in the way of writing continually best selling novels!
Why isn’t Rand celebrated more? Because she often embarrassed mainstream intellectuals who professed altruism, collectivism and religiosity. And she hasn’t always been overly polite, especially to people who have stood by silently when major tyrants have wrought havoc across the globe. (Just look at how these same folks have treated Sidney Hook, one of their own, because he didn’t think Joe McCarthy was as bad as Joe Stalin!)
Also, consider the fact that those who are disdainful of Rand in our time are the leaders of the intellectual pack that is bringing our culture to ruin—the deconstructionists, the radical pragmatists, and so forth. Yes, when one wishes to assess Rand, consider the source of the disdain toward her!
I’ve been around a block a bit now, having lived in the community, writing, speaking, conferencing and so forth, in the midst of the very people who snubbed Rand or who disguise their admiration for her just to get along, to practice a kind of “prudence” that is shameful. There is a way to line up with her proudly, unapologetically, and quite productively, albeit not, perhaps, with the greatest of all prospects for career advancement. Yet what is that compared to championing the best of ideas that happen to be available in the intellectual market place? I’d say it’s a small price to pay.
Very early, when I was only 23, I annoyed Rand and she blackballed me good and hard, even though we had hit it off at first very nicely, thank you. She had no patience for folks who did this for her; she wouldn’t bother with them further, probably because she had work to do. OK, it might have been better for us both but given the context of her knowledge, I was but a punk while she knew others who seemed much more promising to her as allies.
It turned out to be very, very good for me to be cut loose on my own, not to be attached to “the collective” in any shape or form. If it had only happened to a lot more of the loyalists they would have grown up with a mind of their own, just as Rand had imagined of “the new intellectual.”
What she wrote to me in her early letter is never to abandon the principle that reason is an absolute, never to abnegate my mind, no matter how tempting it might be. I have tried to follow that advice because, well, I thought about it and it made very good sense.
If only her message could get to a lot more folks—we’d live in a much better world indeed.
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Machan is R. C. Hoiles Professor of business ethics at Chapman University, Orange, CA. He is research fellow at the Hoover Institution and advises Freedom Communications, Inc., on libertarian issues.
